| Monthly Climate Science
& Energy Engineering Dinner |
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Purpose We meet monthly for dinner on the second Monday of the month to discuss climate science and zero-carbon energy engineering. We feel that you can't be of much use as an environmentalist unless you are technically well-informed. Environmental problems are scientific problems, and how to solve them is an engineering question. If you are not technically well-informed, you will make inaccurate statements about science that are an embarrassment to the environmental movement, and the solutions you advocate will be ill-advised and/or counter-productive. So the purpose of these dinners is to create a space for informative discussion of climate science and zero-carbon energy engineering. Environmentalists who are scientifically poorly-informed have an infamous track record of making predictions (often dire) that do not materialize as scheduled, and advocating solutions that are poor engineering choices. |
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We will meet on the second Monday of every month from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm at the Skylight Diner see (map) at the southwest corner of 9th Avenue and West 34th Street in Midtown Manhattan, within easy reach of the A/C/E & 7 subways, and a block away from LIRR and NJ Transit at Penn Station. The restaurant has a large menu with many cuisines and does separate checks for large groups, so everyone can pay with their own credit card. |
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Register
Click
here to sign up to get announcements or
send an email to "signup.climate.dinner@ccjj.info".
Register
for our next event on January 12th at 7:00 pm. |
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Other Events This Month:
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Well, 2025 was a disastrous year for climate progress. Trump has de-funded a lot of climate science, as well as other science in general, and shut down wind projects whenever possible. He has promoted infamous contrarian crackpots to provide leadership on the climate issue. So what should we do, for the time being? We can learn something from what the Heritage Foundation did when Biden was inaugurated in 2021. The wrote down a plan, "Project 2025", of what they would do if they acquired power again. Outreach to conservatives on climate is currently extremely difficult, because political polarization is so extreme that anything either end of the political spectrum wants, the opposite end will oppose, apparently just out of spite. So for this meeting we will discuss climate
strategy, what we will push for once the Democrats
take power, and possibly ways to reach out to
conservatives. One area where progress is possible is
nuclear energy. The
Republicans, including the administration, are
fully supportive of nuclear energy.
The soot pollution from coal
kills more people worldwide every four days
than have been killed by the nuclear industry
since the creation of nuclear power.
Next-gen nuclear plants cannot melt down like
Fukushima did, and it is possible that with more
R&D, next-gen nuclear will be cheaper, per
kWh, than fossil fuls, which is unlikely to happen
for renewals + storage. If a
non-intermittent energy source is discovered that
is cheaper than fossil fuels, that will solve
global warming right there. If you're interested in debating people to try to
change minds, there is a Facebook Group named Climate Change
Debate where people go to discuss
climate. Most of the replies one gets there
are ignorant snark from people who are
poorly-informed and uninterested in becoming
better-informed, but a substantial fraction of
them are interested in good faith, constructive
conversations. One tactic that one can use when debating climate
skeptics is to post links to the SkepticalScience
website, which is a Wiki with rebuttals to every
popular climate skeptic argument, usually with
rebuttals at the "Basic", "Intermediate", and
"Advanced" levels depending upon your appetite for
detail. |
Supporting Organizations (Thus Far)
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| Organizer:
Bill Chapman Cell: 212-810-0470 Email |