Is this what normal people read all the time? I mean, they make statements like this with no clarification at all:
"Our emissions are boiling the planet, and most of our energy use is unnecessary."
What's "unnecessary"? Energy drives modern technology, from your desk to your home to your doctor's office. Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary.
And while most scientists think our emissions are going to cause an increase in mean global temperatures over the next few centuries, "boiling the planet" is a long way off.
That's just one example out of a dozen. Is Time an editorial magazine, or is it supposed to be some sort of objective journalism?
That's not entirely a rhetorical question, I honestly don't follow dead tree media and never got into it much as a kid.
"Our emissions are boiling the planet, and most of our energy use is unnecessary."
What's "unnecessary"? Energy drives modern technology, from your desk to your home to your doctor's office. Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary.
Really? This is your complaint? By 'unnecessary,' we can reasonably presume that the author means 'needlessly inefficient.' That much is evident to any sincere reader of the article who cares enough about the pursuit of knowledge to abide by the principle of charity: Put the best face on the argument before you refute it, otherwise you are not contributing.
The straw-man argument, "Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary," is wholly beside the point.
And while most scientists think our emissions are going to cause an increase in mean global temperatures over the next few centuries, "boiling the planet" is a long way off.
Again, this cannot be a serious complaint. The phrase 'boiling the planet' is clearly a metaphor. A surface reading would be that we're just raising the temperature of the planet to an unhealthy extreme. A more nuanced reading reveals that the author means that we are raising the temperature of the planet to such a high temperature that we are going to cause irreversible change, such as when one boils food and finds that no amount of refrigeration will bring it back to it's former state. More simply, we are doing something analogous to sterilizing the planet, though to a lesser degree, in that many species may ultimately be made extinct.
That's not entirely a rhetorical question, I honestly don't follow dead tree media and never got into it much as a kid.
This is evident from the shallowness of your misguided critique. More practice at reading, dead-tree media or otherwise, might have made you a skillful enough reader to have been able to follow the plot here.
There's no need to be so aggressive. And I think I made it clear that the example I excerpted was only one of many offending sentences. I could easily pull others, if I were motivated to use my time in such a way. The piece in question made a quantity of assumptions that I normally only associate with activist literature, and not supposedly objective journalism. I don't consider that to be a hallmark of quality news.
Yes, Time Magazine allows editorial writing throughout its content. I won't comment on what I think their biases are, but I'm pretty sure you can detect them on your own.
"we can reasonably presume that the author means 'needlessly inefficient.'"
Well, even that's wrong. If there was no need at all, then it wouldn't be done that way.
I do this stuff for movies I watch all the time: "Well, Morpheus didn't know any better about the humans-as-batteries, and didn't understand how computing power might be a more reasonable use," and "Equilibrium might be set farther in the future than it seems to be, which would explain how things could have gone this far." When you have to fix up what a columnist really meant, I think that's a sign that something is wrong, and I agree with the your parent poster that this columnist either doesn't understand what he's talking about or is writing for effect without regard to accuracy.
> The phrase 'boiling the planet' is clearly a metaphor.
Oh really?
> A more nuanced reading reveals that the author means that we are raising the temperature of the planet to such a high temperature that we are going to cause irreversible change, such as when one boils food and finds that no amount of refrigeration will bring it back to it's former state.
Then the author is babbling. None of the science-based estimates suggest anything like that.
If the author really thinks "sterilizing", "boiling" wasn't a metaphor but scare-mongering.
> More simply, we are doing something analogous to sterilizing the planet, though to a lesser degree, in that many species may ultimately be made extinct.
You must not read much mainstream media. Nearly every piece contains little nuggets like the one(s) you mention. It isn't just Time; they all do it. Not surprisingly, newspapers are struggling with their readers now leaving in droves.
Well, for example, a substantial fraction of our marketed energy use is devoted to heating and cooling (more than 50%); better building designs (like those from the Passivhaus program) essentially eliminate that, at a minimal additional construction cost. A lot of what's left is transportation; a switch from trucks to trains, plus bicycles and local electric public transit for short-distance people-moving, plus better streamlining and saner traffic control, would eliminate the majority of that. Your laptop uses maybe 15 watts; your car is maybe 300 000 watts at full power. It's not a matter of eliminating "modern technology" but rather developing and deploying truly modern technology that focuses on energy efficiency.
The idea is to keep the heat inside, not the air. Passive houses typically come with special ventilation systems that completely exchange the air once every 2-3 hours, while keeping >80% of the energy inside. This kind of design is becoming increasingly popular here in Germany.
Cool. I asked because there have been some problems with energy efficient houses in the Netherlands. People actually got health problems because the ventilation doesn't work well enough. Have there been independent studies of air quality for the houses in Germany?
I don't really know, and I don't speak from first-hand experience. But from what I've heard, the main concern is not air quality, but humidity. When you heat up air, its relative humidity goes down. So especially in winter, the ventilation system can blow very dry air into the building. There are simple technical solutions that artificially "humidify" the air, but it's definitely something to look out for. Low humidity can cause all sorts of health problems.
most of our energy use is unnecessary -- from the article
Saul Griffith via Long Now lays out a nice engineer's estimation of factor 7-9x required drop in personal energy use; mostly through deprival: we become vegetarians, travel little, etc. Let's hope that's unnecessary.
The article really mixes two messages: "behavioral economics works" and "Obama knows what's good for you". The second one is claimed without any evidence, so I chose to ignore it.
I stopped reading Time, Newsweek, USNWR, etc whan I was in High School. Later I read that these magazines were written for 8-9th grade level. That was in the late '70s so I'm sure they are dumbing-down to the 5th grade level by now. Bad strategy. Also, and I'm going out on a limb here, but the internet really changes everything. The reporters have not been objective for decades but they are learning that they cannot get away with slop now that the internet exists. Exciting times!
"Our emissions are boiling the planet, and most of our energy use is unnecessary."
What's "unnecessary"? Energy drives modern technology, from your desk to your home to your doctor's office. Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary.
And while most scientists think our emissions are going to cause an increase in mean global temperatures over the next few centuries, "boiling the planet" is a long way off.
That's just one example out of a dozen. Is Time an editorial magazine, or is it supposed to be some sort of objective journalism?
That's not entirely a rhetorical question, I honestly don't follow dead tree media and never got into it much as a kid.