I agree it's fair to argue there is an incentive in science, fudge statistical methods so your findings are more significant and warrant publishing in a scientific journal. But this is an incentive across science, and it hasn't stopped scientific progress as by nature, the process is self correcting when contradictory studies come out especially in a busy area such as climate science. The cost of falsifying studies or having your study contradicted is also significant however.

If you want to talk incentives though, consider the benefits to spreading doubt about climate change by the fossil fuel industry. 7 out of 10 of the largest revenue generating companies in the world are in oil. The industry stands to lose some $30 trillion from climate change in the next 25 years. Paying a PR firm to promote an agenda, paying researchers to dummy up research with a pre-determined anti-climate change conclusion is chump change to them. The cost to them are negligible if they disguise the source of funding sufficiently (e.g. funnel it through a business lobby).

Meanwhile any impropriety on the part of some climate scientists has not shaken the 97% consensus on climate change.

http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

Nice...I hope he makes an electric version with solar panels. Many places this could be useful are lacking gas stations...and we don't really need a few million more people burning fossil fuels anyway.
*quality solution for many.
*promote

Or maybe the fossil fuel industry is employing the same fear, uncertainty and doubt that the cigarette industry used.

We will all enjoyed the freedom and comfort of fossil fuel since the industrial revolution. At some point, we all have to pay for the gigatons of mess that we're pumping in the air.

The smart money is on clean energy as oil bounces back above $40 per barrel after the global supply glut had it below $30. Coal investment has tanked since oil peaked in 2009 and solar plants and wind plants are often more cost effective over their lifetimes.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/average_crude_oil_spot_price
http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/coal/5-year/

Ingenious. Now try doing it without using fossil fuels.

I think corn would be doable, but the advantages would be less efficient compared to short plants.

At some level of efficiency, there is a break even point (which can also take into consideration shipping costs and fossil fuel usage to major metro areas). I'm pretty convinced that vertical farming could be a significantly good / efficient idea for those plants that it is best suited for, but I do think there would be some early-adoption issues that would make it less practical for tall stuff like corn. At least until it has been done enough to work out the kinks and economy of scale kicks in.

So at least for the time being, I think we'll see it first be applied to leafy plants and tuber / root plants. But I could definitely be a biased opinion since my family revolves around conventional corn farming on irrigated fields...

In first world countries....yes, or close to that much. Agreed. Not world wide.

Mechanized harvest is accepted in "natural" old school farming. Agreed, it would fall under the "industrial farming" methods, but is one of the least damaging.
>1000 acre farms do not count as "family farms" in my eyes, even if they are owned by a single family. So is Walmart, but it's not a mom and pop or family store.

Again, mechanization is not the same as industrialization, but does still do damage by over plowing, etc. I'm talking about monoculture crops, over application of man made fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Grain was farmed "by hand" since farming existed with few problems, but more work involved. The work it takes to rehab a river system because industrial farming runoff contaminated and killed it is FAR more work than the extra work involved in farming using old school methods (which does not mean everything is done with hands, tools and machines have been in use for eons).

Roundup doesn't "break down" completely, and doesn't break down at all if it's washed into river systems and out of the UV light.

Once again, machines aren't all of "industrial farming", they are one of the least damaging facets, and they are not unknown in old school, smaller farming techniques. BUT....overuse of heavy equipment either over packs the soil, making it produce far less, or over plows the soil, making it run off and blow away (see the dust bowl). If it was ONLY about machinery, and ONLY industrial farming used machines, you would have a point, but neither is true.

No, actually overproducing on a piece of land like that makes it unusable quickly and new farm land is needed to replace it while it recuperates (if it ever can). Chemical fertilizers add salts that kill beneficial bacteria, "killing" the soil, sometimes permanently. producing double or triple the amount of food on the same land is beneficial in the extreme short term, and disastrous in the barely long term. (See 'dust bowl')

Man power is far less damaging to the environment than fossil fuels for the same amount of energy. Also, the people would use no more resources because they're in the field than they would anywhere else, so there's NO net gain to the energy used or demand on the environment if they farm instead of sit at a desk, but machines don't use energy when idle, so there is a net loss to the energy required if you replace them with pre-existing people.

Yes, you quoted it directly, buy your characterization of what that meant was insane. You claim they said Monsanto worked on the project (and other things) because they're evil and want to do evil and harm. The video actually said they do these things without much care for the negative consequences to others, and that makes them evil. I hope you can comprehend the distinct difference in those statements, and that your portrayal of what they said is not honest.

Pretty much what @Mordhaus said.

There's no way to sustain the numbers we have today without changing 99% of people's habits, most effectively starting with breeding habits.
With the need for only 10% the power required today, you would never need to use nuclear power at all, or hydro. You could supply it on wind and solar with a small fossil fuel peak power generator system.
The planet MAY survive....but I don't count only extremophile bacteria as really 'alive'. Worst case scenario, we could be Venus 2.0, in my eyes, that's not alive.

*promote some good points.
It's a bit sad to me that he doesn't seem to know or care that overpopulation is the root cause of all these 'problems', because the earth can survive through all the different damages people have done to it if there was only less damage done. We can cut forests without damage, if we only cut as much as we replant AND grow, we can burn fossil fuels if we only burn as much as the forests can filter, etc. If we had <1/10 the number of people doing <1/10 the amount of damage, the planet would likely be fine.
Also...*commercial (since it's an advertisement for standfortrees.org)

Yeah, I think that's what the deniers don't get. When 97% of scientist agree that humans burning fossil fuels is the primary driving force behind climate change, they are talking about the increase from what would be natural, to what is happening now. Nobody is claiming 100% of all global warming is human caused, just like nobody is coming for their guns, but the conservative media sells both that way.

A generation or two ago I doubt that poor Guatemalans could get fat, regardless of culture, because they simply didn't have access to the surplus energy required. This surplus energy shows up in nitrate fertilizers used for agriculture, powered tools of all sorts, and manufactured goods, like used bicycles.

It comes, of course, from fossil fuels.

A bicycle may seem a simple and primitive device, but just try to build a bicycle chain in your home workshop and you will see that making safety bicycles is possible only in a modern industrial state. It's not surprising that the development of the safety bicycle only barely preceded that of the automobile and the airplane.

The bicimaquina raw material is discarded bicycles from richer people -- nothing wrong with that, it's good, frugal engineering. But it should be borne in mind when plotting the future that hardly used bicycles are not a renewable resource, and require energy and infrastructure to produce.

Bicycling does give one a good appreciation of the value of energy. For example, 125 Watts is a respectable output for a touring cyclist; keep that up for 8 solid hours, and you have one kilowatt-hour. One kW-hr is a day at hard labor. A typical household in the developed world uses the equivalent of the labor of three or four hard-laboring slaves every day.

Of course, those slaves aren't the most efficient. You'll notice that the machines shown all use a direct mechanical drive. They could generate electricity, but that would cost -- multiply a few 90% efficiencies together and pretty soon you're getting nothing done by leg power.

Bicycle drive does allow good power production from human beings, and multi-geared bicycles are adaptable to people of differing strength. Not as much fun as flipping a switch, but easier than turning a crank.

It's plain that cheap fossil fuels won't last forever, indeed they may not last for much longer, and probably will never be available to much of the world at the same level as we currently enjoy in the US or Australia. Will we find ourselves scouring garages and cellars for disused bicycles?

Fusion is well within our reach. It just doesn't have the funding (and therefore the fast research/development cycle) because the oligarchs are not done selling us fossil fuels yet.

No, my first paragraph attempts to spell out why solar PV is a dud for people who do it the worst way possible, by selling all the electricity produced at drastically reduced rates to the grid, then buying it back at exorbitant rates, you are wasting well over 75% of what you could be saving. Of course it looks bad when you waste that much.
I have no mechanism needed to make it financially viable, and the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous.
I didn't 'make time' for anything, it just so happened that my lifestyle was perfect for solar, since I already did my housework during the daytime.
I have what's called a 'time of use' meter, which means it splits the day into 3 time zones, and keeps track of what I produce vs what I use from the grid. That means I essentially do get 1:1 for my production, which never reaches the point where they owe me money, but does offset almost all the juice I use (during the daytime) At night, we use normal grid power at normal grid rates. Too bad Australia doesn't do it that way.

yes, there are costs to an array, but they are one time costs, and FAR less than what's saved. That part is simple math. My system cost around $34K after rebates, maybe $40 without them, and it saves me around $5K per year in electric costs (based on 2007 rates, which have gone up). That includes production costs, installation cost, shipping cost, permit cost, etc.
Here in the US, daytime IS peak power use time. it's when business are using the most power, and when AC units are on, so the grid uses the power I feed in without problem. Industry uses WAY more power than homes. Solar offsets them using the hydro, gas turbines, and ramping up nuclear plants during the day, when they are used the most.
If my bill is lower, it means I used less fossil fuel generated electricity, so it IS working like a charm. How do you think otherwise? it's not perfect, and doesn't erase all other production, and is not a solution to ALL energy production problems, but it is a good part of the solution, unless it's done in the least productive manner possible.

What are you talking about, 2-3X the energy input? If you actually only count the costs, not the profit made at each stage in selling/installing panels, they probably come in more like 5-10 times the energy input, with little or no carbon footprint (many factories make the panels using power produced by other panels...as in pure solar factories).
My calculations (verified by my bills) put it at <1/2 the cost of buying (mostly coal produced) electricity from the grid at 2007 prices (even without any rebates), so how do you figure coal power production is cheaper, even ignoring all the other costs/problems? Coal may give a 30 to 1 return if you ignore ALL the other costs involved in using coal. If you count them, it's more like 1 to 2, because the effects of coal are so incredibly expensive, as is the cost of digging it up, transporting it, storing it, burning it, and disposing/storing the toxic waste products.

The cost of restoring a river is far more than the value of 100% of the power generated by a dam during it's lifetime.

Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?

Because Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the rest... "CO2 is good for the Earth, it helps plants" (ignoring that most plants are absorbing about as much CO2 as they can already, and ignoring the bigger problem that very little of the Earth is green, and no walls or ceilings to keep the CO2 where plants are), "compact fluorescent bulbs are stupid, they have mercury in them!" (ignoring that the mercury in them and the mercury put into the air by the power plant is less than the mercury put into the air by the power plant to power regular bulbs). And the news media paints it as a debate, having one climate change scientist debate one climate change denier (though the media still refuses to call them deniers and paints them as skeptics) and this isn't just the right wing media, almost all the media in the US presents it as a debate. They don't present the fact that a 97% consensus exists.

Then there is religion. They talk how insane it is to assume that humans, made of God could destroy God's work. That we can't damage the Earth as God made it... of course they take the idea of destruction literal, and not in the way people actually mean when they say it's destroying the Earth. They also don't care about the repercussions of future generations as "Jesus is coming soon, well before any of this will matter"... more or less an actual quote. They believe also that God has granted mankind all authority over the Earth and not that it was stewardship over the Earth, so we can and should do whatever we want.

There's also ignorance. The media, especially the right wing media, portray the idea of climate change as presented is being presented as being only 100% caused by humans, they claim that the pro climate change scientists won't acknowledge any part of it might be natural. The media is playing it as an all or nothing scenario, either humans caused it all, or caused none of it. This isn't what any scientists are saying. They are just pointing out the natural uptick vs the uptick we are seeing is explained by human burning of fossil fuels, and that's what the 97% consensus is about, the uptick we are observing vs what would be expected naturally. But not understanding, and thinking science is ignoring all possible natural causes, they deny the whole thing.

Heck, just look at the media uproar over the supposed mini ice age that is coming in 2030 or so. Of course the actual paper never mentions an ice age or climate at all, and neither did the presentation. The problem was the press release for presentation mentioned the Maunder Minimum and linked to the Wikipedia article about it, and from there the media assumed that would mean a new mini ice age, even though the mini ice age during that time was started before the Maunder Minimum. Nobody in the climate change community is really calling for a mini ice age (just like it was never widely thought in the 70s that we were heading for global cooling, it was understood even then it was warming, the cooling thing came from an article in Time if I recall correctly, not exactly a peer reviewed science journal) come the 2030's, at best we may get a very small slow down of the warming, but CO2 levels are 40% higher than during the Maunder Minimum. Anyhow the media tends to mislead the public with things that wasn't actually said. The right wing media machines especially know that their audience won't vet their sources or information and will trust them and talk about conspiracies to hide the truth. Heck most of the media never even cleared the air over climategate emails, so most of the deniers still cite the climategate emails as a valid thing, even though in context and with scientific understanding none of the climategate claims are valid, and in fact still point to global warming... (http://www.iflscience.com/environment/mini-ice-age-hoopla-giant-failure-science-communication)

There's also the change from "global warming" to "climate change" which they don't understand to be an escalation of the term, and think instead it's toning it down.

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