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I think I'm just going to have to continue to focus on this, because either you're just so impossibly unclear that it seems like you're being inconsistent... or you're really really dedicated to being inconsistent.
I mean, I think the best interpretation of your current statement is whether we are investing anything on keeping something burning. So, like, if our ancestors had built an oil tap, and it was producing a flame, but we didn't have to do anything to keep that flame going; just the oil comes up itself with some pressures and such, and the flame keeps going, then we don't count the energy in the fuel?
Honestly, this seems really absurd and an incredibly hokey way of trying to carve out an answer to, "Do we count the energy in the fuel?" in a way that just happens to not count it for the fuel sources you like, but counts it for the fuel sources you don't like. It doesn't make any other sense whatsoever. At least when there was some chance that you legitimately just meant "we don't ever count the energy in the fuel; we just count the energy used to refine/whatever the fuel and make it usable", it was plausible. There are other plausible lines, but yours is just getting more and more strained and implausible.
Yeah, you didn't really discuss this. I like calories in a variety of ways, but I can't see why it's The Only Thing. Hell, climate alarmists were all up in a tizzy that, even though increasing CO2 increased caloric yields bigly, they slightly decreased the per-calorie content of certain micronutrients. So, should I care about that, like they tell me... or should I just care about calories? Why/why not?
Which is even debatable as "pollution". It certainly isn't the central case, and this major shift really takes a whole lot of rhetorical claims that the old predictions were actually good. Where was the spike of 'old' pollutants?! Why did we have to completely abandon the old predictions?
How can we tell the difference? What sort of test could falsify your theory?
Why do I care about "renewing itself"? I thought we were talking about how consumption rates come into play for timescales relevant to humans. How does that work?
I don't understand how communication has broken down so badly - I'll take the blame and assume it is just my communication skills failing here, because I've never seen anyone unable to grasp the concept of return on investment before. That's the line! If you are making decisions about energy usage, determining whether an activity or idea returns a net positive amount of energy or a net negative amount is extremely useful. Let's use a solar panel for example - you have to invest energy and work in order to transform a bunch of raw materials into a solar panel and then install it, so you count the cost of those inputs. While the solar panel is fuelled by the sun, you don't have to give a shit about the energy costs required to make the sun keep burning - those are entirely irrelevant. In contrast, if you set up a petroleum-based generator, you have to care not just about the costs of building the generator, but the cost of supplying it with fuel as well, because that fuel does not shine down out of the sky for free.
I just don't understand why this is so difficult to grasp or understand and at this point I'm giving up - this is my last post in this thread because this is just not productive. My line that you consider strained and implausible has been used by scientists for decades in multiple peer-reviewed papers and it is a widely accepted measure among anyone who takes the topic seriously. Your incredulity at this extremely common and well-understood concept just mystifies me.
Depends on what you're trying to do, but yes, you should care about calories - but you should care about nutrition as well. Having concerns about one thing shouldn't prevent you from having concerns about something related.
Look out the window - especially if you're near a coral reef. Were you aware that there are microplastics in your balls? In your brain? The biosphere is in crisis and there's vast quantities of trash and pollution that are degrading the environment and quality of life both. We didn't have to abandon those old predictions at all - but atmospheric carbon levels are a better proxy for that kind of activity than directly measuring all the regular pollution. You don't have to abandon that old prediction at all and you can keep studying it or verifying it if you want to - it's just that atmospheric carbon is a better measure, so we use that instead. If you want to go out and discover an actual method for accurately measuring harmful pollution, please do - it'd be a tremendous service to humanity.
You wait a bit and watch the trend-line on the graph. Alternatively, you find some explanation for those temporary shifts up and down - as an example, volcanic eruptions can have a significant impact on temperature levels across the globe, so if you can say "we're experiencing lower temperatures because this volcano erupted and filled the atmosphere with vog" that lets you work it out as well.
If you have a bank account with 5000 dollars in it and which will only be refreshed with another 5000 dollars in 10 years, there is a big difference between having a yearly expenditure of 1000 dollars as opposed to a yearly expenditure of 400 dollars.
Do you count the energy content of the fuel?
You didn't address this question.
Ok, interesting. So now, calories aren't the only metric. Seems like it's starting to get fuzzy and complicated...
...why don't those things show up in the data? Where are they in the figure?
We've been waiting for decades. At what point can one conclude that a theory has been falsified?
Right. This is precisely what I've been asking about. Presumably, consumption rates matter, but it's not clear how they're coming into play in your view. It's just calories, except for when it's fuzzy not-calories, on your view. And it's only calories in compared to calories out, but that doesn't really have any term in there for a consumption rate. Is it normalized by something? How does it work?
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