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This is so idiotic I don't even know where to start. I genuinely wouldn't be against seeing this dude get shot on live television pour discourager les autres.
Just like how there is an upper limit to how much solar energy we can generate in a day on earth (surface area of planet *maximum amount of energy falling on each unit area per hour*24 hrs), there is an upper limit to how much tidal energy we can generate because we don't have any way to make the tides stronger (and thus pull energy from the earth's rotation into the movement of seawater). This upper limit doesn't give a shit about us needing to grow energy consumption at 2% per year. It is a physical fact, nothing to do with humanity or its needs. When we reach this limit we're straight up not going to be able to generate more energy via tidal methods and will have to switch to something else. What will it be? I don't know but so far humanity has a very good track record in finding alternatives when they become necessary. And this upper limit is so low that it will be many millions of years before there is even a slight impact on the length of a sidereal day.
As a result of this limit we can spend eons harvesting tidal energy and it won't make any significant difference to the earth's rotation. In fact, it's going to slow the earth's rotation just as much as if we harvested literally 0 tidal energy. This is because the earth loses rotational energy when it gets converted into the movement of water (as the tide goes up, water needs to move to that area), not when we harnass that water movement to create electricity. At the moment all this energy is being converted into heat and sound as the water of the tide comes in and rubs against the land/the aligned directional movement of the water molecules gets replaced with random movement though entropy, thereby increasing water temperature. Diverting a portion (any portion, up to 100%) of this energy into electricity is going to do literally nothing to how much the tides are slowing down the earth.
Tides are already slowing down the earth's rotation, harvesting tidal energy won't speed up or slow down this rate at all.
Got it, tides come in, tides go out, never a miscommunication.
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Let's not casually talk of violence when a writer hasn't thought as deeply about an issue as you.
It's the duty of a scientist to think deeply about the things he writes about. People will assume that, because he is a scientist, he has in fact thought deeply about the subjects of the papers he publishes. Scientists who don't think deeply about their areas of study need to be discouraged from being scientists, lest they use their institution's prestige to convince people of things that aren't true.
There are probably more humane and effective ways of discouraging someone from being a scientist other than a live televised broadcast of their firing squad.
Humane, sure. Effective? Hard to beat a bullet.
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