Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Guardian has opened a new front in the green effort to bypass parental controls on what their kids experience, with the launch of “Climate Hope City” – a virtual city sited in the Minecraft virtual reality universe.
According to The Guardian;
On the rooftops, there are endless luscious gardens, so that the skyline of the city looks almost like the tree tops of a vast rain forest. Beneath them, lining the roads, are multi-storey farms, producing fruit and vegetables for the local populace. There are strange sail-shaped constructions that suck CO2 out of the air, and along the canals, hydrogen powered boats glide silently through crystal clear waters. This is Climate Hope City – and for now, it exists only in Minecraft.
When the Guardian launched its Keep it in the Ground campaign in March, editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, and other senior staff, spoke about the challenge of finding new ways to discuss and report on climate change – to break out of traditional journalism and explore fresh ideas.
“We carry on flogging a load of dead horses, in exactly the same way, with exactly the same whip,” wrote columnist and environmentalist George Monbiot. “We have to constantly be reinventing our storytelling capacity.”
One answer to that challenge is to envisage a future zero carbon city in Minecraft. The hugely successful block-building game allows players to construct complex and fascinating models of everything from medieval castles to giant space cruisers. Climate Hope City is not a fantasy world but a vision of a green urban environment which uses technologies that either already exist around the world or are at the prototype stage.
The first thing which struck me is the technical inconsistencies of their vision. The city boasts large wind turbines, adjacent to tall buildings. Wind shadow anyone? One of the main reasons wind turbines are located in lonely places or offshore is that wind turbines in cities are usually an utter embarrassment – the poor airflow in the bumpy urban environment usually causes the turbines to stand idle even more frequently than optimally sited turbines.
Then there are the large vertical farms. OK, vertical farms are a way of growing a lot of food in a compact area. But the one thing you can’t increase is the available sunlight footprint – you don’t get something for nothing, unless you pump in artificial light. If you plan to use artificial light, you need a lot of energy, somewhere around a 30 watts per square metre per tier of growing surface. Given a floor size of 50m x 50m = 2500m, thats 75 kilowatts per “floor” – not counting any additional energy which might be required for climate control and irrigation. You’re not going to get that kind of energy from a handful of mostly idle urban wind turbines.
The alternative, relying on sunlight alone – vertical farms powered by sunlight cast huge shadows, they can surely only work if they are not sited next to other vertical farms, or are not sited next to tall buildings, which prevent them from receiving sunlight.
Finally there is the guided tour around the virtual city (see below) – a very sunny virtual city. But how could such a city possibly be so sunny, when every scrap of available sunlight is being utilised by the vertical farms, solar panels, or being blocked by the shadows of the towering wind turbines? The street level of such a city, even if it was physically possible, would surely be more like the gloomy, shadowy dystopian visions of movies like Blade Runner or Johnny Mnemonic, rather than the sunny urban paradise portrayed by The Guardian.
The Minecraft virtual world is a fantastic place to explore your creative skills, it is very popular with children and many adults. As a technical geek, I’m a fan of virtual reality. But like all virtual realities, the Minecraft implementation of real world physics is somewhat incomplete. The Minecraft constructions are fantasies, nothing more.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Minecraft has its own physics. It is not advised to apply these “lego-like” rules to the real world.
For instance, it only has gravity on some things which doesn’t include trees or players so if you cut off the stump, the foliage floats in mid-air.
Seems a bit odd for The Guardian to be using a game called ‘Minecraft’ while simultaneously running their #keepitintheground campaign?:)
That’s why it is classified as a fantasy game. My kids at 8-12 yo English Class are going to love TG’s BS, AGW world…They didn’t call it MINEcraft for nothing…
Touche, let the kids tell TG in no uncertain terms, that they love to grief.
Regards
Climate Heretic
Isn’t it telling that the center of this fake world — where the “player” can turn everything on — is one huge temple?
Monbiot: “constantly be reinventing our…” Does he mean “constantly reinvent our…” This guy is a journalist? Aren’t they supposed to write good?
He’d NEVER pass The Economist’s entry exam for journalists. Guess that’s why he is scribbling for TG
No, it’s the sub-editors job to sort out the illogical, ungrammatical trash that the journalists turn in. They have their problems too…
Virtually no one lives there.
“We have to constantly be reinventing our storytelling capacity.” Thanks for finally admitting the global warming drama is just stories, aka lies, George.
hey Guardian
Let it GO.
I think you meant to say Everything is Awesome…? Lol
the humour of my comment was lost in transmission
They seem to have used a lot of concrete, the manufacture of which produces no small amount of carbon dioxide.
“Save the environment by punching trees.” Sounds legit.
There goes five minutes I’ll never get back.
So sad really. Today’s kids will grow up to experience what’s really coming. They will be very confused and VERY unhappy.
Disturbing. Using naked propaganda in a children’s game is akin to selling cigarettes to minors.
Well, heroin used to be over the counter.
The reason most liberals change to conservatives as they get older is that they learn that everything they were told by the left was a lie.
Agreed. I have to, sadly, admit that such is I. I really wanted to believe in what could be instead of what was. It finally dawned on me that life wouldn’t, and couldn’t, ever be perfect. In fact, it would be a nightmare if it were. Life teaches lessons.
Mr Worral, you are a master of understatement: the “implementation of physics is somewhat incomplete.” Which enables our six year old to create a cow circus with a 1500lb Holstein doing a full rotating double back-flip. Minecraft completely disables all the constraints of reality.
If they mechanically suck CO2 out of the air, what are their plants using for food?
Is this also a “Zero Carbon” city?
Wonder how that works?
No hydrocarbons, no sugars, no cellulose,no carbon based life forms?
I figure they should be given an area and a grant to build this Utophia.
With certain provisos, once you are in, you stay, all revenues to come from within.
Make each Eco-tophia a separate state, so these cities are unable to rape and pillage the countryside surrounding them.
Activate the camera drones, buy popcorn.. enjoy.
I would pay to see these progressive twits try to live as they demand we should.As long as there is no retreat for them.
“Is this also a “Zero Carbon” city?”
Yes, it’s a Zero Carbon city.
The carbon is emitted by giant coal power plants in the Hinterland, driving huge factories where all the gizmos for the zero carbon city are built by millions of underpaid migrant workers.
Life is carbon. How can life exist in a “Zero Carbon City”?
Someone should ask these idiots to look up organic in the dictionary.
I looked it up for you.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/organic
It is really worse than we thought. Newspeak is among us.
To be organic certified, the last time I checked meant:
No herbicides, no GMOs, no chemical fertilizers, no human waste.
human waste The use of human waste is a problem for organic growers because there is not enough aged manure to spread on the fields. I believe there are ways these people have of getting around this disgusting practice. They are beginning to come out of the closet and try to mainstream this outrageous practice. Human waste spreads disease and the Zarathustrians rightly considered it a profound sin before God and the angels to put human waste near well water, pools, streams, rivers, or in fields. They survived more outbreaks of disease than others according to their own accounts.
fungicides The use of fungicides is still allowed but there are of course black treachers/hippies in every country who will work with Maoists and UN activists to destroy this important crop input. Fungicides are basically sulfur and copper. Organic growers spray to kill pre- and post-harvest molds, mildews, etc. as many as seventeen times during the growing season just like other growers. Some blights kill entire mature apple orchards in one season. Some destroy the produce quickly after harvest. These can only be controlled by fungicides.
herbicides, Organic growers require hundreds of hours of bent over laborers to weed. So all this is designer food and designer cotton t-shirst which require more bent over workers. Organic growers should require very large, honest labeling for these hours of hand weeding.
herbicides Organic growers get waivers from minimum wage laws and from important bans on sawn-in-half-hoes for weeding.
human waste I have a growing concern in the back of my mind that all of this talk about human waste processing in California has to do with getting around fertilizer requirements for organic growers. Conventional growers have no need. N, K and P can be delivered and stored in neat tanks.
GMOs As for GMOs, the organic growers can and do use plants mutated with radiation. That is how they obtain genetically altered plants.
urederra—
Oh, that’s terrific, thanks for looking that up! Artificial chemicals. What’s worse than we thought is the education that our children have recieved.
Have made my youngest aware of this. Expect devastation any day now.
My 11 year old is on board too. Tally ho!
Setting up accounts for my kids as well! Will be great fun attempting to insert some logic into the crazy. But, what I think isthe most ironic thing is that kids KNOW that video games are fantasy…they are not REAL. Making a game out of climate change/ utopia automatically causes kids to compartmentalize the idea of a totally “green” society into the part of their brains where everything is imaginary, where fantasy rules instead of reality. It creates that ideal as a place to play in, rather than a place they could actually live in. The AGW’s constantly undermine their own end goals without even knowing that they are. I hope they never quit!
Well, when they are idle, they’re just ugly, expensive, dysfunctional mobile sculptures. The real trouble comes with high winds, when in spite of wind shadow, they start moving. That means in winter, under wrong weather conditions, they throw large chunks of ice, several pounds each to hundreds of meters, a somewhat life threatening occurrence in an urban environment. On top of that they emit extremely high levels of infrasound, down to 1 Hz and below, which may be inaudible in itself, but seriously interferes with hearing and perhaps with other bodily functions as well. This kind of sound can’t be excluded by any barrier, not even by walls from the interior of buildings. And then there’s flickering of light, which can be very annoying for people trying to do work nearby.
OMG, they’re confusing artwork with a technological solution, which it is definitely not. First of all it is an extremely inefficient and overexpensive way to generate a minute amount of electricity, investments can never be recovered. Then you need people to walk on it all the time, people, who can’t consume Hydrogen to do that work, but sugars instead, therefore they emit carbon dioxide. If you divide amount of carbon dioxide emitted by electricity generated, this ratio is much, much worse than for electricity generated by burning coal in the most inefficient, oldtimer power plant.
“The Minecraft virtual world is a fantastic place to explore your creative skills, it is very popular with children and many adults. As a technical geek, I’m a fan of virtual reality. But like all virtual realities, the Minecraft implementation of real world physics is somewhat incomplete. The Minecraft constructions are fantasies, nothing more.”
Perhaps it helps if some of us from earlier generations compare and contrast Minecraft with other video games. Standard video games are level based. The player must complete tasks and level up. Minecraft is classed as a sandbox game, because there are no predetermined or set goals, nor levels, nor tasks. The player enters the world, which is generated at that time, and begins to craft whatever he likes. At the minimum, he must create a shelter and a bed when nightfall comes.
It is a neat development. I think sandbox games great for the kids. My youngest immediately built an enormous statue of herself throwing a spear and lived inside of it. They mine for coal, chop trees, keep chickens and cattle, mine for other minerals such as cobalt and diamond, and build structures. They use a crafting table and farm also. The danger is that certain bad things spawn in dark places where there is no light, and these can come into your house and when their heads blow up, it destroys everything you built.
They are called Green Creepers. 🙂 My kids were disappointed when Notch sold to Microsoft.
Snuck up behind my youngest once and whispered “Creeper” in his ear.
Yes, I AM a horrible person…
But he has developed a fine sense of situational awareness.
This is a computer generated reality, kind’a like a climate model. So of course it is reality.
As the T-shirt says, “I reject your reality and substitute my own!”.
It is important to have Carbon Scrubbers in the city when you want to grow vegetables there at the same time. Otherwise, how would the poor plants be able to breathe.
My, those Fabians, aren’t they adorable.
Surely you meant “Fabulists.”
Same difference.
Interestingly the “Temple” at 3:00 in the video looks like a mixture of a Pantheon and a nuclear stack.
Every idea mentioned by the speaker in the video is completely idiotic. He nearly left out nothing that can’t work.
The driverless cars will work, but that’s not a Green technology.
The bicycle lanes won’t work because they built them with steps, and unpractical slopes.
Yeah, DirkH but driverless bicycles should be able to cope.
What is not widely known about Mr Monbiot, is that just a few years ago when Britain launched it’s absurd £450/MWh (i.e. 10 times the wholesale electricity price) “Feed-In-Tariff” subisdy for solar P.V. – Mr Monbiot was a rare voice of reason. He attempted to point out that spending money on absurdly expensive solar energy production was not the most effective use of other people’s money, even for those who wished to see their money spent on mitigation. He attempted to point out that a more reasonable policy would require us to identify where money could be spent most effectively to make the maximum reduction in GHG per £ spent.
This level of reasoned skepticism made him a number of significant enemies in the subsidy hungry alarmist world.
What I suppose that he has now learned, is that reason is not permitted in the world of CAGW and renewables.
It’s about narrative building and inducing an unquestioning idiotic gullibility in the public sphere.
Skepticism of any sort is certainly not going to be tolerated.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/mar/01/solar-panel-feed-in-tariff
Well, the Grauniad certainly bought the ‘unquestioning idiotic gullibility’!
Modern day ‘enviromentalists’ are shallow thinkers who have no concept of how the world works. They have no idea that in using hydrogen as a fuel you will never get back the energy you put into creating it in the first place. They have no idea how the technology and machines they propose to rely on in their utopian world cannot be created in that utopia. You do have to ‘take it out of the ground’ and use lots of energy in the process to support the utopia.
I suggest we build the environmentalists a little utopia somewhere for them to try out their ideas and see how they get on – kind of like Springfield in the large glass dome in the Simpsons movie.
Or those “Escape from” New York or LA movies?
“I suggest we build the environmentalists a little utopia somewhere for them to try out their ideas and see how they get on…”
I would love to see that, but for some strange reason I get the feeling that they would cheat. 🙂
They are already trying to build it. They call it ‘California’. And yes, they do cheat. They have to bring in everything from money to electricity from outside the state to keep the green dream propped up.
I recall an interview I heard with him on NPR where he pointed out that the most “green” energy source available on the planet was nuclear. To say his interviewers regarded him as an apostate would be an understatement.
Vertical farms are equivalent to growing vegetables in a flat in the city.
So they say that it is cost-efficient to do that. Say, in a cheap city, pay 300 bucks a month in rent for 500 square feet , farm stuff and you’re set.
I know one plant for which this actually pays the bills, a so called cash crop, but it’s frowned upon in most jurisdictures.
What they say in effect is that in the Green Future, renting an area to live in will be as cheap as renting farmland.
That’s great. I will get me a few ten thousand square feet of room then.
They are so mindboggingly crazy one really worries about their tiny little minds, can’t they connect even two facts? They probably can’t even explain WHY we live in cities. They’re SO helpless.
Of course, energy and transport cost are entirely negligible concerning that farming business compared to the land cost. But “Negligible” never stopped a Green genius from proclaiming something to be the greatest problem ever. Actually it’s their business model, find a non-problem, propose a ridiculously expensive solution, then demand the taxpayer be forced to finance it, and live off the proceeds.
The Greens are therefore only possible AFTER the invention of the state (which happened in the 17th century); they are a parasite of statism. (And drag statism down, in a Cloward-Piven-fashion)
(Warmunism is a huge parasitic growth hanging around the neck of the ultrastatist empire, strangling it)
I see them more as a septic growth on the wounds of civilization.
Green Gang-Emotional Extortionists-Gang Green-Gangrene.
There is no escaping this symbiosis of a large group of activists clogging up the works. A certain percentage of the human population are born wired this way and represent a huge tax on human enterprise. Their ideology has known nothing but abject failure time and again but logic isn’t a tool they employ or even recognize. It is only the rest of us that should be ashamed when we let them have such sway as they have been given in modern life. How do they circumvent having to vote on things that are inflicted on all. What is so attractive or compelling about them that they get to ravage the human enterprise.
I have come to think that Marx was a mutation that can’t be reasoned with and his numbers increase. Failure only encourages them to try harder. The UN, which in the beginning was solely a meeting place to avoid wars, was taken over by such ideologues and they patiently over the years set up a shadow government with all the requisite departments or ministries to finally step in as a world government. We funded it and signed what was put in front of us. When the numbers are right, holdouts can be handled by isolation from world trade and world courts.
How is that for a virtual reality.
“The UN, which in the beginning was solely a meeting place to avoid wars, was taken over by such ideologues ”
No, it was League Of Nations Vs 2, to become the world government; while it was founded *after* the fall of Nazi Germany, its charta from the beginning to this day designates Germany and Japan as Enemy Nations which any member of the UN can attack at any time without declaration of war. (That’s why Germany always tries to become a member of the Security Council.) Express purpose of the UN according to its Charta was and is to fight fascism (even though it was already over). (And they never fought Franco, talk about priorities there.)
There is a JFK speech from 1961 where he says that all nuclear weapons should be turned over to the UN to make it the only military power. UN is what the Fabians wanted for their Shape Of Things To Come (failed miserably but keeps on trying).
I know one plant for which this actually pays the bills, a so called cash crop, but it’s frowned upon in most jurisdictures.
Despite the misspelling I LOLed.
“The Minecraft constructions are fantasies, nothing more.”
Sounds like AGW in general.
Greenie thinking is so great because it is unencumbered by the laws of physics, by economics, or indeed the thought process. They truly do live in lala land.
Indeed. I live in a community which is basically new-age-ish and unthinkingly green. What astounds me is the scientific illiteracy and lack of analytical thought. At the moment there are fliers around for a “Zero Waste Day” – I’m dying to ask a proponent “So, you aren’t going to go to the lavatory at all?”
Let the kids build nether worlds in the overworld, that should be a lot of hell.
Regards
Climate Heretic
PS Hell is a Biome in Minecraft
It is wise to be careful about wishing hell on people. It is possible to get in trouble with the Government for that.