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Global Warming Worse Than Thought
yulek writes "This AP article summarizes the IPCC report released today which states that global temperatures will rise as much as 5.8 degrees instead of the 3.5 degrees (C) originally estimated for the period between 1990 and 2100. The U.S. is still the primary culprit responsible for 25% of climate affecting pollution."
"When it gets warmer everywhere that's global warming. When it gets colder everywhere, that's global warming." Youz gotz ta be grokkin' dat leftist liberalz logic, man!
When you can explain what caused the last Ice Age or the warm period 65e7 years ago, I'll believe you can even guess at the next 100 years. But to predict weather changes over goelogic timer periods with a loust 70 years of worldwide weather data is like predicting the stock market 200 years from now based on today's Wall Street Journal. It's not just stupid. It's collosall fucking insanity.
If you're charging the batteries with your gasoline engine, that's the same as charging them with coal-produced electricity! It's just a bit more efficient because of the regenerative braking. Leave that out, and the car is a heavy, inefficient, unreliable, STUPID design.
Actually, no. Internal combustion engines run best (and cleanest) at constant load/rpm. Electric motors don't care. The idea is to keep the energy density and the lack of (electrical) transmission losses, but gain the efficiency of an engine running at constant speed.
With good design, the overall system may be simpler. After all, no more hydraulic transmission and no constant adjustment of engine parameters (by computer) to adjust for current loading and RPM. With a small booster battery (small reletive to electric only vehicles that is), the engine can be smaller since it no longer has to have enough power for quick acceleration (on acceleration, the battery drains and is replenished while cruising and during braking).
One more quick point: if the mixture of hydrocarbons has a octane number of X, then it has the same knocking characteristics of a mixture of X% of iso-octane and (100-X)% n-heptane (thus why those two are assigned 100 and , respectively).
But the key point I was trying to make is that when you do deep HDS, you will increasingly break down the branched alkanes and alkenes (with high octane numbers) to smaller straight-chained alkanes (with pitiful octane numbers) as you increase the sulfur removal level.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
A good example is the process of hydrodesulfurization (HDS). Sulfur is a natural component of crude oil; gas that is burnt with sulfur in it will produce sulfur dioxide, which, of course, is bad as it helps with smog creation. In addition, sulfur is what causes most cat converters to degrade, and if/when we go to fuel cells, sulfur will completely ruin the typical fuel cell catalyst (platinum based).
So the process of HDS removes sulfur from the crude oil to create hydrogen sulfide and clean hydrocarbons; in this form, it's easy to extract the hydrogen sulfide and convert it separately to a non-toxic/hazardous waste form. The problem is is that the sulfur is buried deep in the molecules of hydrocarbon, and to remove these sulfurs will generally destroy the hydrocarbon into smaller pieces.
Now we base our gasoline ratings on octane number, which is a combination of how large the hydrocarbons are and how many are olefins (double bonds) or not; a large number of long-chained hydrocarbons or olefins increases the octane number. If you try to remove all the sulfur before you distribute the gas, the octane number will drop terribly, and the gas will be worse than with the sulfur in it, as there's a better chance of CO production and reduced feul efficiency from low octane gas. So there's a practical balance between the effective sulfur removal levels, and the quality of gasoline that we get.
Mind you, as we head towards feul cells that can use methanol or ethanol as produced by bioproducts as opposed to crude, the amount of sulfur to start with will be much lower, and octane number will not be as great; you still need to deal with it, but you don't really have to worry that much about how much fragmentation of the hydrocarbon that you get.
Now, IMO, most of the problem with Global Warming is not a result of the last 20 years, but of the first 40 years of the 20th century with the unfettered industrial revolution and two wars that introduced aircraft to the world. Since at least 1960, we've been aware of environmental damage, and while it may have not been a consumer issue until the 1980s, we as scientists and engineers were already aware of it and layed the groundwork for what research is being done today to continually improve what we've got. I also think that we still don't have sufficient evidence to yet conclude if we are in a warming or cooling cycle for the planet, though I can't disagree that mankind has had a small effect.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The Satanic Gases. Lots of facts about global warming.
Through Green-Colored Glasses: Environmentalism Reconsidered.
Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet. And spare the criticism bias -- the same can be done for the U.N. organization that released the global warming alarm call.
The Ultimate Resource 2 Julian Simon's excellent work on population & global trends.
The State of Humanity
Note: I'm actually in favor of reducing greenhouse emissions. At the same time, I find it disconcertaining that a lot of environmental rhetoric has a tremendous amount of counter-cultural, anti-corporate, 'fuck the man'-type reasoning that I have a hard time taking seriously. I found these books to have moments of objectivity in them (and definte moments of bias at times, but who can really be free of it?)
If you were looking for scientific papers, sorry, I don't carry a library in my backyard.
-Stu
Do you really believe this ?
I can't tell whether you are a clever troll of just genuninely deluded.
USA has many (not terribly effective) local controls, but on a global scale is biggest polluter. Also, it is the country which managed to scupper the last two world environmental summits by refusing to sign up for lower emissions, and trying to get an exemption so that you wouldn't have to reduce your emissions to a level similar to rest of industrialised world. Your standards are the *worst* in the world for a major economy.
You're like the family that is always throwing garbage into the street, but says "but we're the cleanest household on the street, I clean my stove twice a day".
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Hybrids are a stopgap. They do not solve the problem, (global warming) longterm. They introduce needless mechanical complexity which is good for the automotive and automotive repair industry, but bad for the consumer. They still don't improve the crappy weight and aerodynamic trade-offs that have to be made to create an efficient vehicle. Long term, full-on electric (or fuel-cell) is the only answer. Hybrids only get us closer until real batteries are available.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I recently took a tour of California's Diablo Canyon nuclear plant.
The on site security force was quite impressive.
Armed guards, background checks, metal detectors and xrays.
The guards were armed with AR-15's, pistols, MP-5's, and they even had a shooting range on site.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
hm. cancer? or starvation and loss of standard of living?
:(
i'll take the cancer, I guess.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
electric cars are not necessarily a stupid idea ; according to Bill Nye. I watch his show, and he elucidated, to my 6 year old son, how electric cars are good because if you have a bunch of fossil-fuel burners spread out all over a city, generating smog, you can't easily do anything about it except ask people to curtail their driving.
But if those are electric cars, the polution is produced at a big plant, instead of spread out, so you can do things, like filter it, or improve the generation technology (using nuclear instead of coal, etc). Electricity is electricity, and eventually, I believe that is the way cars are going to go, but definately NOT with today's battery and generation technology. The trade-offs that have to be made for weight and aerodynamics make for a very undesireable car.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I've heard this argument (roughly: "mankind isn't causing global warming -- it's a normal, natural shift in the planet's temperature") several times.
The point is moot. Whatever the cause, it's going to cause problems for mankind (water levels rising, habitable permafrost melting away, places which were previously only tolerably hot becoming too warm to set foot in, blah blah blah).
We're faced with a choice: either adapt to it, or slow it down (or to me more realistic, a little of both).
However, the levels of CO2 in the air have shot up wildly in the last 2 centuries, and the mechanism by which this is said to cause warming seems pretty logical to me. I'll bet industrialisation and forest depletion is at least a contributary factor.
--
From the EPA's page " Most of these emissions, about 82%, are from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity and power our cars. The remaining emissions are from methane from wastes in our landfills, raising livestock, natural gas pipelines, and coal, as well as from industrial chemicals and other sources."
If the Carbon Dioxide is synthesized in an internal combustion engine, or in a coal burning powerplant, it is not "naturally" occurring. Don't blame a decaying swamp for the emmisions from your SUV. Besides, Carbon sinks are overrated. Rapidly growing forests absorb the most Carbon Dioxide, but many forests in the United States are essentially stable. Natural decay processes may also eventually rerelease CO2 into the atmosphere.
"I know some people will cry about Chernobyl, but that incident really just goes to show you the drawbacks of communism, not nuclear power."
That's not really a fair statement. Certainly the Russian communist system seems to have bred the kind of incompetence and laziness that led to Chernobyl, but you would be naive to think that these traits don't exist in spades under capitalism. Corporate culture is some ways similar to communism, in that it provides individuals all sorts of ways of abdicating personal responsibility.
I do agree that nuclear research should be pursued as an important counter-measure to global warming, but the problems with nuclear power generation are not limited to the potential for catastrophes such as Chernobyl. Modern reactor designs may be theoretically safer, but the process still produces (to my mind) an unacceptably large amount of toxic waste.
"I say the Ice Age is coming."
Don't joke about it. Here in Ireland, one of the most likely effects of global warming will be the diversion of the Gulf Stream - the warm air current which provides us with the temperate climate we enjoy here on the Western edge of Europe. If this current is disrupted, we will no longer be shielded from the extremes of low temperature experienced by areas on the same latitude, such as Newfoundland. The global increase in temperature will be more than offset by savage wintry conditions.
The only question is: will this happen before or after the island sinks beneath the waves of all that polar ice meltwater?
Folks, I won't even bother making fun of this. The "Greening Earth Society" is a joke of an astroturf campaing fronted by a coal mining cartel. Couple the link to obvious astroturf site with nonsense sentences like "Further, the technology developed to help handle global warming, such as more energy efficient devices, would be useful just in the context of on an expanding popular", and you've got a rather sad troll. But at least Mr. Alien54 is indirectly helping to spread the word of Greening Earth's astroturf status.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I think you're going to find that most of them were taken in the center of metripolitan areas.
What's present all over those areas?
Concrete and Asphalt.
These absorb heat and slowly, but slowly release it.
Measured temperatures are on the average 3-7 degrees colder on the outskirts of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex when compared with the inner cities or the measuring points at DFW International Airport, Love Field, or Meecham.
While I'm not saying they're wrong, I'm asking that they and everyone else happen to have more accurate data points before making statements.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Plus our major cities are spread out quite a ways:
Distance from Houston :-(
City Direction Miles Kilometers
Dallas North 239 384
Corpus Christi South 220 355
El Paso West 749 1202
Orange East 110 177
Tried to make this look nicer, but no HTML table's allowed
Orange and El Paso on on opposite sides of our state, 859 miles(1379 km) apart.
Another factor in the equation is the Houston area alone has about 60% of the nation's(not just Texas but the entire country!) petrochemical processing.
Interesting tradeoff - instead of worrying about Global Warming, the survivors of WW III (ie: you can bet you're ass we won't go down alone) will be worried about surviving a Nuclear Winter.
You don't find it the least bit odd that the octane rating has little to do with the presence of octane?
In the long term, do you think we'll be synthesizing gasoline? Perhaps wood alcohol, but that'll be a hell of a lot more expensive than the stuff we're currently pumping out of finite ground reserves, and I suspect battery/fuel cell improvements will make all-electric cars superior.
But, we have never had a disaster that has wiped out all higher life, although the Dinosaurs certainly took a hit, but it still didn't wipe out all the higher vertebrates. Doesn't this indicate that the earth has incredibly powerful equilibrium mechanisms that we probably don't fully understand, primarily because of our lack of historical perspective?
In case you're listening to doomsayers for your global warming news, let me bring things back into perspective. Nobody is worried that global warming will boil the oceans and wipe out all vertebrate life. Many people are worried that global warming will cause trillions of dollars worth of flooding damage, reduced crop production, etc. The other vertebrate species don't have billions of members living in difficult to abandon habitats in coastal regions, or dependent on high-yield agriculture; nor do they understand/care if drought-induced starvation cuts their population by a fraction.
Despite Mr. Bush's feverent wishes, all those plants could be turned back on and run at 100% capacity without violating any environmental regulations.
Therefore the regulations have absolutely nothing to do with the power shortage.
The current attitude towards nuclear power is ridiculous.
The truth is that nuclear power is much more expensive than oil, coal, or gas power. If nuclear power suddenly became cheaper than coal, I'm sure the NIMBY/enviro factor could be overcome.
It is my belief that over the next 50 years, there will not be a significant (inflation adusted) increase in the price of oil, and this will be a significant confounding factor to attempts to reduce CO2 emissions. Crude oil only costs $1-$2 per barrel to pump from middle east countries right now, so theoretically the price of refined oil could be as low as $5-$10 per barrel and still be profitable for them.
Our only hope is a fuel cell mechanism to extract energy from oil and that does not produce CO2 gas.
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This is what happens when you can't use nuclear fission to produce most of your power, thanks to the pseudo-environmentalists and NIMBYists and their shortsighted anti-everything stance.
So, those of you who are so deathly afraid of nuclear power, tell me: would you prefer to generate your power using "clean" natural gas which emits lots of CO2 and get an increase in the global temperature of 5 degC, or would you prefer to generate your power using "dangerous" nuclear power (not with the old RBMK technology that everyone loves to point to when they think of nuclear power, but with real modern nuclear designs like the Integral Fast Reactor) and deal with the "problem" of disposing of the comparatively little waste produced? Sorry, you don't get any other choices, because nothing else even comes close (coal and oil? Puhleeze. Solar? Yeah right...let me know when the production of a cell uses less power than the cell can generate over its lifetime. Hydro? How many ecosystems do you want to destroy in the process of building it? Wave? How many plants would you have to build to generate enough power, and what effect will it have on the coastline ecology?).
Bottom line: you're going to affect the world around you if you generate power. Conservation helps but it won't help nearly enough and, in any case, why do it when you can generate your power using something as clean as nuclear?
But, of course, nuclear power will never happen in this country thanks to the very people I'm talking about, so I guess we're all just going to have to deal with a hotter world (if the prediction referred to is correct).
--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
That approach, invented and pioneered by scientist John Martin, definitely shows promise.
I play Nerd-Folk!
-=-=-
How long will nuclear energy last?
These facts come from an article by Bernard Cohen.
Nuclear energy, assuming breeder reactors, will last for several billion years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life on earth.
Here are the basic facts.
There is plenty in the Conway granites of New England and in shales in Tennessee, but Cohen decided to concentrate on uranium extracted from seawater - presumably in order to keep the calculations simple and certain. Cohen (see the references in his article) considers it certain that uranium can be extracted from seawater at less than $1000 per pound and considers $200-400 per pound the best estimate.
In terms of fuel cost per million BTU, he gives (uranium at $400 per pound 1.1 cents , coal $1.25, OPEC oil $5.70, natural gas $3-4.)
Seawater contains 3.3x10^(-9) (3.3 parts per billion) of uranium, so the 1.4x10^18 tonne of seawater contains 4.6x10^9 tonne of uranium. All the world's electricity usage, 650GWe could therefore be supplied by the uranium in seawater for 7 million years.
Comments:
- Cohen neglects decay of the uranium. Since uranium has a half-life
of 4.46 billion years, about half will have decayed by his
postulated 5 billion years.
- He didn't mention thorium, also usable in breeders. There is 4 times
as much in the earth's crust as there is uranium.
- He did mention fusion, but remarks that it hasn't been developed yet.
He has certainly provided us plenty of time to develop it.
The main point to be derived from Cohen's article is that energy is not a problem even in the very long run. In particular, energy intensive solutions to other human problems are entirely acceptable.I play Nerd-Folk!
There has been talk of "urban heat islands" before, about how temperatures at many monitoring stations are significantly higher now than in the past due to urban expansion, but you seldom see any consideration of this except to sweep it under the rug. Of course, "the sky is falling" gets more grant funding.
A significant problem with sulfur dioxide emissions is the respiratory effect on people, especially children with asthma.
I guess exaggerating about it being worse is probably a good thing, means that governments will be under pressure to do something. The bigger issue should be scrapping the carbon credits crap. Currently a loophole exists that means that a company can do nothing about stopping emmissions, if it grows some trees. The real problem with this is that they can cut down trees and plant new ones to comply.
I don't know how good exaggeration is -- especially with the plans of some like Ocean Fisheries that wants to "seed" the oceans with iron oxide to increase algae, reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, and increase fish stocks -- such a plan is said to be capable of lowering global temperatures up to 4 degress C. If such a plan is approved on exaggerated global warming claims, I'm moving out of Canada fast (51 degrees N is where I am) because in 50 years there will be nothing but glaciers here.
I live in Canada, at least until recently one of the biggest exporters on nuclear reactors, and modern, safe reactors at that. I think in most other places (except France) research has stagnated, and focused on light water reactors, whereas here we have heavy water moderator reactors where the reaction is much easier to stop than the light water counterparts.
Many people don't realize this, but "ozone" depletion is what is normally considered at fault for increased UV. CO2 is normally considered at fault for increased temperature. This article is about warming, not UV.
Here's my global warming survival strategy.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The problem with electric cars is that you have to haul the extra deadweight that the battery, generator and traction motors are.
So, to do the SAME job, you have to burn more fossil fuel. And that, no matter how little emissions the engine gives out, that's still MORE carbon dioxyde spewed up in the atmosphere.
Face it, TRANSIT is the ONLY solution. The vast majority of trips always are the same, day in, day out, so there is no reason that people can't use transit at least on the more used portion of their trips.
What? No transit? That's no excuse. Demand transit and there it should be.
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> and the US starts to really work on reducing emissions.
But they are. School kids in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia have been painting green trees on inner-city houses for months now, and they will keep doing it until all the CO2 emissions have been neutralized.
There's this guy who's name I can't recall who's discovered that dumping iron into iron poor regions of the ocean causes massive plankton blooms. Most of these plankton die and sink to the bottom taking their carbon with them to turn into calcium carbonate rock.
The main problem I see with this is possible ramifications of messing with the ocean ecosystem. Since the iron poor regions tend not to support much of an ecosystem in the first place (no plankton, which is the bottom of the ocean food chain) I'm not sure this'll be a big problem. The other problem is that iron is not a renewable resource, and not very recoverable once it's sunk to the bottom of the ocean. It doesn't take enormous amounts of iron though, just a few tons for a fair sized bloom.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
that this supposedly accurate prediction was just drastically corrected. If it can change from 3.x to 5.8 degrees, then clearly these "brilliant" scientists' science is not that exact of a science. It seriously suggests that they could also be estimating too high, especially when taken in context of previously inflated and failed predictions.
I'm not saying there is _no_ danger, but for anyone to say they _know_ with absolute certainty is ridiculous. What's more, given the political, economic, and social implications of what the proponents of global warming advocate, I think we SHOULD scrutinize their predictions. Perhaps we DO need to take corrective action, but perhaps we DON'T. This matter needs further study.
What are you quoting from? I'm not sure I understand the koan as a "folk story", as that implies to me that it's not something real or practicable. But perhaps the quote means it's like an oral transmission, used to carry knowledge?
Which is how I'd sorta understood it -- something to do, an exercise.
Perhaps you can reconcile Enlightenment and Understanding based on personal realization.
Not been there. Not done that. No T-shirt. But say, boing boing, hows your interest in Zen and Buddhas formed?
> Have a look at JunkScience.com for more on this.
v ery.html#milloy">PR Watch article</a> for more about lobbyist Steve Milloy's news articles and his web sites JunkScience.com and Consumer Distorts.
...
> Perhaps some skepticism is in order.
Skepticism is always in order when something appears in JunkScience.com. JunkScience.com is a PR mouthpiece for anti-environmential propaganda by the biochemical, pesticide, fossil fuel, and nuclear power industries.
Have a look at this <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/prw_issues/1999-Q4/a
Nuclear plants absolutely make more energy
than they take to make! No utility would
ever CONSTRUCT one which didn't. I
mean, think about it: 30 years of continuous
1GW operation. Let's say $.02 per KW-hour.
(We pay $.11/KW-hour now retail).
That's $5G just to build a plant, on *top*
of all the other capital investment.
Now, with the burden of changing government
regulations on operating nuclear plants and
mid-construction design changes, it might well
*cost* more to build a nuclear plant then
you get out of it.
I live in northern germany and it has been 3-5C every day -with some exceptions. Also it was like 10C until almost xmas or so. Definitely strange weather. Is it global warming at work? Could be a fluke. But it makes you think.
Time to start work on off-Earth power sources - a good first step is lunar-based solar... see Criswell's plans for example. A cure for global warming, power plant pollution, and more. And no need for nuke's.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Oh yeah, that's an unbiased look at the science alright. 10 sentences on the "science", and pages and pages on the economic disaster the Kyoto treaty is foisting upon us! 68 cents/gallon higher gas taxes! 2.4 million American jobs lost! And a little "instant expert" page that tells you among other things, "the best strategy to pursue is one of 'no regrets.'" - doesn't that tell you something?
Have you tried reading the REAL sites on global warming, like
the EPA's site? They don't just TELL you everythings terrible (or OK, like the globalwarming site) - they show you in pages after page of graphs, numbers, and statistics. Read through that stuff, and then go back to the globalwarming.org site and decide which one looks more believable to you.
Energy: time to change the picture.
We have from this website:
Dec 2000 - a scientist claims that, while climate change is serious, more research is needed...
Nov 2000 - well it was too slow to load, so all I have are the search quotes, referring to the "stalled climate treaty", the Hague conference, etc. Doesn't look like much one way or the other there.
May 1999 Bush warms to global warming! - Even George Bush is quoted as saying: "I've had some briefings recently and I'm becoming more convinced that the science proves there's global warming."
All the remaining references I could find there date back 2 years or more - have they been having trouble recently finding any real scientists who agree with their position?
Energy: time to change the picture.
Nope, Celsius is perfectly linear - it's just Kelvins plus 273 degrees - of course since Kelvin's are absolute then for any absolute comparison (eg. today is 1% hotter than yesterday) you want Kelvin, but Celsius is fine for addition/subtraction purposes.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Nope - since when did Volcanos manufacture complex chloro-fluorocarbons? Pinatubo spewed lots of chlorine (and some fluorine) into the air, but it all got rained out within a year or two - quite different from the effects of man-made ozone-destroying chemicals. Of course this article was about CO2, not CFC's, so what's the story there? Pinatubo also didn't send up much CO2, but it did produce a lot of sulfur dioxide, resulting in airborne sulfuric acid droplets that likely cooled global temperatures by 1 degree for a year or so. But they got rained out too. The problem with CO2 (and CFC's) unlike what comes out of volcanos - they don't drop out of the air in rain, they just accumulate. Like a lot of other man-made pollutants.
Energy: time to change the picture.
> Will this end soon? Not likely. The reason for the rising temperatures is that many current technologies are not environmentally sound.
People might want to do a Web search on The Tragedy of the Commons. It's no new thing for short term economic interests to wreak havoc over the long term.
Of course, it's easy to say "Fuck 'em, I'll be dead and gone before it matters." At that point it becomes a moral issue rather than merely an issue of common sense.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> But the global warming has seem to become the favored theory of environmentalists, regardless of evidence.
As indicated by the "environmentalist" bashing your reply, GW-denial is a political movement.
Yes, GW is a hypothesis. But yes, we have evidence that we're changing the atmosphere, and we have science that tells what various mixtures of gases do to incoming and outgoing radiation. A hypothesis, but the best one you can build on theory+evidence right now.
Denying GW might be good for your stock portfolio, but it probably isn't good for your planet.
In a newsgroup full of Libertarians, it's no surprise to see a lot of GW-denial. (See, I can put a political spin on it too!)
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> I totally agree with you that nuclear is the way to go.
I could go the nuke route, but I'd like to see a requirement that power plants make prior arrangements for their waste disposal and plant decomissioning before a license is granted, and pre-pay for them before construction starts.
The main failure of nuclear power in the USA isn't Three Mile Island, but rather the "what do we do with the mess" situation that it has left us.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Ummm... that's what the US Nuclear Waste Policy Act was for. By law, electric utilities do not "own" the uranium they use in power plants, it is only leased from the Department of Energy. So in this circumstance, and again by law, final disposition of spent fuel must be performed by the federal government.
Thanks for the info.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
the latest cars that use electricity are hybrids: they use a gas and electric motor. The batteries are charged not only when the gas motor runs but also when you break. I don't think anyone is pushing electric-only anymore. Rather, I think people have realized that hybrids are the future.
Steve Milloy is an idiot:
http://skepdic.com/refuge/junkscience.html
has the specifics. He has a mind that automatically rejects any scientific study, real or false, which seems to threaten conservative, corporate interests as false by definition.
He rejects ALL studies against DDT while enthusiastically embracing pro-DDT stories. He rejects ALL studies supporting global warming, wrong or right, while accepting studies that are ambiguous or disagree with the Global Warming Theory. Why does he do this? Because he isn't interested in what's real and what isn't, he's just a conservative Rush Limbaugh type zealot who only sees what he wants to see.
I used to read his site, and for a while shared his simple-minded, market-oriented view of the world. But what we do affects others, whether it be second-hand smoking or supporting polluting companies. And regardless of his head-in-the-sand beliefs, we must be responsible to ourselves and our planet.
-Ben
When Mt. Pinitubo erupted, it spewed forth more CFC's and air contaminates than the entire human race has been able to produce in its entire history. I'm not advocating rampant excesses and environmental irresposibility, I'm just saying that I think global warming is a farce and a lousy reason to base any amount of conservationism on. Base it on preventing the extinction of rare species or even preserving natural beauty, just don't base your beliefs on highly suspect bogus science.
-------------
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
And why do you want to scrap carbon credits? If vegetation removes carbon, why ignore that? Remember that the Central Prairies had six feet of black dirt under the prairie grass? That's carbon rich soil -- how do you think it got there? Well, we have stopped letting the prairie burn every year and instead have megatons of crops and timber every year...
Oh, yeah...and why not cut down trees? They're a renewable resource and the new ones grow also. If your issue is favorite old growth, mention it.
What was significant about the Pinatubo eruption was the 17 Megatons of sulphur dioxide (which measurably increased ozone damage for at least two years), and the sulfates in the cloud of debris (5 cubic kilometers of stuff, with much of the heavier stuff landing nearby) in the upper atmosphere which shaded the Earth and decreased global temperatures.
Actually, Global Cooling was making headlines in the 1970s, when the 55 MPH energy-saving policy was adopted, so the science is more recent than 1920. Within five years Global Warming was in the headlines. And they've been tinkering with computer models for decades trying to prove the theory.
Gee, that's too bad. They're using bad data. Ocean temperatures are higher than air temps. Thus those studies which use air temperatures over land and ocean temperatures over ocean are using temps which are higher than true air temps.
First, the radioactivity from coal mines is in the form of radioactive rocks and gasses, radon or radium, or any variation of heavy metals that inhabit the earth. The fact coal plants do release these is rarely known, but worse is the fact that they are completely unregulated!
With Nuclear, at least the radioactivity levels are monitored at all times by an independent body.
It wasn't an issue of mismeasured reactants, it was an issue of blatantly ignoring the procedures for performing a procedure. By doing things in a rushed manner, materials came together in a way that yielded a nasty radiation dose for those doing the work, and not much else. (That'll teach you to follow directions ...) I don't have a link handy, but I think it was in Physics Today.
A scientist working for a corporation tends to lie to help the corporation.. Wouldn't a scientist who's funded by an environmental group also tend to lie to help that group?
Science in the U.S. is generally funded by public money and not by "environmental groups," unless you consider organizations like the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and NASA as being "environmental groups." The grants are obtained by applying for the money, and there is intense competition for each research dollar. A scientist who habitually lies about his or her results can expect that, eventually, the ruse will be discovered, and the scientist will lose all credibility in the eyes of his or her peers. The scientist will then be unable to secure research grants in the future. Let's "follow the money," as you say, and realize that credible studies are in most scientists' best interests; a scientist's currency is his or her reputation. You will find few who are reckless enough to risk that for a dubious immediate gain.
Has Paul Erhlik [sic. Ehrlich] a scientist ever admitted his mistaken predictions?
See a recent biographical article in Scientific American where Dr. Ehrlich indeed admits that many of his doomsday predictions did not come true. How is this relevant again?
Much of the evidence of global warming is in indicators; people who claim they can measure fractions of a degree in tree rings or atospheric gasses. That's something that makes me reluctant to trust them.
Please elaborate on the flaws in these lines of research and convince my why they shouldn't be taken any more seriously than, say, economic indicators that point to a recession on the horizon. Just why should I care about the CPI or the trade deficit or the number of new housing starts in a quarter? What relevance could these possibly have?
Face it. You are yourself biased because you do not wish to lose your beloved SUV or admit that your USA "consume and discard" lifestyle is at all damaging to the environment. You are eager to accuse those who have devoted their careers to answering the difficult questions of climate change of being as biased as you. You choose, instead of elevating yourself to their level by learning of the issues and debating the results of the studies, to dismiss all studies whose outcomes you don't like.
Rush Limbaugh claimed once on his radio show that global warming wouldn't matter anyway because (to paraphrase) ice melting in a glass of water doesn't change the level of the water.
I just got over reading Billions and Billions by Carl Sagan and in it he talks in great depth about global warming. [snip]
2) If at sea level, wholly intact, the ozone layer is about 3 mm thick or just slightly thicker than one's finger nail.
Oh, not this again... Global warming and ozone depletion are two separate, largely unrelated problems. I hope it was just you and not Carl Sagan who got confused. Furthermore, the ozone hole has shown signs of closing.
1) Even if we stopped production and useage of all greenhouse-effect causing gases, these gases would remain in the upper atmosphere doing harm for a little over a century.
Let me point out that the only way to completely stop producing greenhouse gases is to kill yourself (remember, you breathe out carbon dioxide and fart methane), and, even then, your rotting carcass would release more greenhouse gases.
The amount of confusion between global warming and the ozone hole is really disheartening. If nobody even knows what they're talking about, how can we possibly expect to get anywhere?
OK, first of all, the ozone hole and global warming are two separate, largely unrelated problems. Was it you or Carl Sagan who confused the two?
Second, saying "you can't do X. Read book Y for an argument I can't be bothered to summarize" is a lame debating tactic. I'd love to hear your (or Sagan's) explanation of why releasing particulate matter into the atmosphere won't work, so please post with more info if possible.
The real solution is to get our damn greenhouse emissions in order...
That would be the ideal solution, but it's just not going to happen. The negative economic impact would be too large, especially for developing countries that can't afford sophisticated pollution-control technologies. We have to look to solutions that can actually be realistically implemented.
Ozone only contributes a small amount to the greenhouse effect. Other gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, play a much more significant role in the greenhouse effect. I am aware of this, which is why I said "largely unrelated..."
Again, I note evidence suggesting that the ozone hole is now closing. If global warming and the ozone hole were really closely related, you'd think that that would shut people up about global warming.
Good points, but I was expecting that the "dust shield" would have to be continuously replenished. Expensive, yes, but cheaper than trying to meet the draconian restrictions proposed in the Kyoto Accord. I have no clue where you get your "10 cubic miles" figure from--this sounds way off-base to me. My own quick estimate, based on using particles with a 1-micrometer radius, is that around 7 x 10^6 cubic metres of particles would need to be used. That's around 14,000 tonnes, assuming a density twice that of water. Smaller particles would reduce the mass required... Yes, this is a lot, but it's not impossible, and it could be fuelled using nuclear or other clean energy sources... I do agree that our first priority should be replacing fossil fuel electricity plants with something cleaner (nuclear being my favourite candidate).
Yes, there's all the NIMBY opposition to a good permanent storage facility. Somebody should just get it over with and force Nevada to let them build the proposed storage facility.
Politics and science don't mix well...
Many countries around the world signed the Montreal Protocol which was a ban on CFCs - the leading cause of ozone depletion as speculated by scientists and perhaps proven so with the recent evidence you've provided
:-)
/. I appreciate you being civil, too.
Yes, good point. However, just because we had an effect on A does not automatically mean we have a significant effect on B. There are a lot of things which affect global climate, such as solar cycles, natural ecological change, etc. The ice ages were all natural, for instance... It's very difficult to isolate man-made environmental changes from natural ones.
I remember that a few years ago, the Wall Street Journal published a graph showing global mean temperatures, human CO2 emissions, and solar activity over the past 117 years or so. Solar activity correlated much better to temperature than did CO2 emissions. It sometimes strikes me as arrogant that we assume that humans have the power to destroy the planet. Remember, we're not the biggest polluters to inhabit Earth--that honor belongs to early photosynthetic bacteria that "polluted" the air with oxygen. That turned out real bad, didn't it?
OK well thanks for at least being rational about this.
No problem. The occasional funny troll aside, rational discussion is so much more interesting than a lot of what happens on
Paraphrasing from the book:
It's amazing what kind of weird shit I remember. In any case, people should know that even the existence of global warming is disputed.
Your reasoning is completely flawed, I have to say. Yes, computers cannot accurately predict short-term (1 to 5 etc.) weather trends, that is, they can't calculate how such and such ocean currents will affect meteorology.
However, in the long run these short-term events cancel out. Computers are capable, with a limited degree of accuracy, given chaos and the data available, to extrapolate on long-term trends. This is completely different than a 2-week or even 2-year weather forecast.
The climate is a chaotic system, meaning that the future becomes exponentially more difficult to predict the farther forward you look. While there are some trends that we can use to make predictions (i.e., it probably won't snow on July 4 in Texas), placing too much faith in these models is silly.
It's also worth noting that the models have, so far, been completely wrong in pretty much everything. For instance, predictions made in 1990 of warming by 2000 haven't happened. Aside from the El Nino blip, we haven't seen any warming. Check out this link.
Before people freak out completely, I'd like to make a few observations:
First of all, it's worth noting that this is a prediction based on a theory. Scientists are trying to explain why we haven't yet seen as much global warming as the models would suggest, and this is one possible explanation--not absolute fact. Remember, back in the '70s, global cooling was the environmental boogeyman. Second, the IPCC has done some shady things before, such as changing the executive summary of a report after it was peer reviewed (my source for this is a series of letters to the editor published in the Wall Street Journal several years ago). Finally, there is a significant amount of controversy in the scientific community surrounding global warming.
The point is, take the IPCC report with a large grain of salt. People on both sides of the issue have their continued grant funding depending on whether they find evidence for or against global warming, so the science has unfortunately become very distorted by politics.
That said, I'd like to suggest a simple technological solution to the potential global warming problem. Disperse sufficient fine particulate matter into the upper atmosphere to reflect about 1% of the sun's light. Volcanoes do this naturally, and there's plenty of data to show that it can cool the planet. The cost of doing this artificially, while expensive, is likely to be far, far cheaper than meeting the goals set out in the Kyoto Accord. I can't take credit for this idea--I heard it mentioned once somewhere else. Why, with all the concern about global warming, do you hear so little about using technology to directly fix the problem?
I totally agree with you that nuclear is the way to go. I know some people will cry about Chernobyl, but that incident really just goes to show you the drawbacks of communism, not nuclear power. An intelligent reactor design (such as Candu) operated by well-trained individuals would never suffer such a catastrophe.
In the Candu design, if the reactor core starts to overheat, the heavy water moderator boils away, and the reaction stops. Simple physics prevents meltdowns. There are plenty of other good designs that avoid the Chernobyl problem, but people just freak out when they hear nuclear.
Another thing worth noting is that electric cars are a stupid idea if the electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels. Finally, your average coal plant puts out more radioactivity than your average nuclear plant (due to radioactive isotopes in the coal).
I'm from Finland and I welcome some warming. 5-6 extra degrees would be lovely! What I'm worried about is how the heating affects the earth in a larger perspective. Extra heat means polar ice caps and other large perpetual ice-areas will melt. That would mean the seas rise, except that increased heat also means that more water is evaporated (probably not the correct techical term) and form clouds, which then means more rain... somewhere.. The end result could be that strong sea currents stop or reverse and that we actually get colder weather in parts of the world because of this. Dramatically colder in some cases. I'm pretty sure just about any part of the world (except maybe Singapore ;) could handle an extra 5 degrees of heat but can Scandinavia handle the end of the Golf current? What happens when it starts raining daily in the Sahara? What happens to Miami when hurricanes are a daily occurance? That's what *I* am worried about.
We're being asked to believe an assertion by some people. They are trying to prove something that can't be observed, because it hasn't happened yet, can't be reliably seen to be happening, and has been repeatedly exploited, exaggerated, lied about, and then coined into gold by political extremists. In determining whether to believe them and their assertions, their credentials matter.
The poster above was trying to prove exactly nothing. One need not have credentials to doubt, nor is a degree needed to believe one's own eyes.
Junkscience.com isn't a mouthpiece for anyone. It's a cheaply put together website that tries to add a note of realism to the many, many press-hyped pseudo-scientific proclamations.
Remember when you heard caffiene was bad for you? It's not. Remember when you heard breast implants cause illness? They don't.
Junkscience.com tells you whether the scientists and the press have done all their job. Most of the time, the answer is no.
I wonder if this makes me a mouthpiece for the caffiene and breast implant industries?
If it's free, then yes, let's hedge our bets all the way. If it costs money (or jobs, quality-of-life, freedom, or anything else of value), then a serious risk-analysis is in order. Then a cost-benefit analysis should be done for the proposed solutions.
Unfortunately, the people pushing this are the true believers. Their beliefs and plans have a fanatical religious quality. Fanaticism doesn't tend to lead to good decision making.
Doomsday predictions are a favorite tool of would-be leaders. If you don't accept them from David Koresh, why are you so anxious to accept them from Paul Erlich?
Yeah, but Millroy hasn't been editing the site for a while now. Find something to trash the guy who is.
It says on the site he's working on a book instead of the site for a while.
(I added the bold.)
Have a look at JunkScience.com for more on this.
My take is this:
We're being asked to believe an assertion by some people. They are trying to prove something that can't be observed, because it hasn't happened yet, can't be reliably seen to be happening, and has been repeatedly exploited, exaggerated, lied about, and then coined into gold by political extremists.
Perhaps some skepticism is in order.
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1999Q4/avery.html (the parent link seemed to get a bit mangled). I knew there was something weird about that JunkScience site.
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as well as Solar Power which feeds energy back into the electric grid (thereby, eliminating the need for nuclear energy by over 100% if everybody did it, and it was a government funded project).
Unfortunately, solar cells are currently extremely damaging to the environment. Essentially, they're manufactured in a similar way to computer chips--it requires immense amounts of power and large quantities of extremely toxic materials to create them. Yes, they're emission-free once they're in use, but getting them out the factory door involves huge expenditures of both power and toxic chemicals.
The truth is, new technology has not been tested as long as old technology; and in reality, new technology is always new, and never the technology being used everywhere; so it is not possible (in this case) to forgive the use of dangerous technology worldwide with a few examples of some new reactors running in a few small locations.
While your argument is sound, it's also inapplicable. CANDU reactors (and similar negative-coeffecient-of-moderation reactors) are not new technology. They're over fifty years old, if I recall. The RBMK-type (Chernobyl) reactor is actually of a newer type than the CANDU reactor.
Every design, whether it be of a car or a nuke plant, involves tradeoffs. If you want it to do X very well, you have to scale back on Y. The RBMK reactors did not have environmental safety as a design criteria--hell, the Russians cared so little about environmental safety they didn't even bother to put a containment dome on it. The CANDU reactors, and other similar negative-coefficient US reactors, have environmental and human safety as their first design goal.
The very nature of dependance and cost of Nuclear Technology makes it a dangerous thing.
According to whom? Different people have different ideas of what is and is not dangerous. "Danger" is a subjective term, and too often used as a defense for NIMBY and NIMBY's big brother, BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).
Instead of talking about "danger", try talking about historical risk. Define exactly what such terms as "nuclear meltdown" means--does it mean full-bore China Syndrome? Or is something like Three Mile Island, which has never been demonstrated to have had any environmental impact whatsoever even though there was a nuclear crisis there?
Once you come up with those rigid definitions, then look to history to come up with an assessment of risk. (Some people say to crunch numbers, but I don't--that's how we got to Challenger, after all.) Once you do that, then you'll be on solid ground if you want to claim that nuclear power is dangerous. But be warned, it's a hard thing to back up scientifically; by and large, anti-nuclear activists depend on the fear effect of the nuclear bogeyman to make people's knees jerk in the opposite direction from the nuke plant.
Should a problem be found in new reactor designs, or a problem occurs in the many tiny unique variables that effect nuclear power production at any facility; the technology is still going to be used for a long, long time.
If the design is that badly flawed, they won't be able to run the plant. That's one of the nice fringe benefits of living in a capitalist society; people get to choose who they work for. If someone wanted to hire me to work in an RBMK plant without a reactor dome, I'd say "buddy, I don't care what you're willing to pay me, the answer is no--especially since these other plants, whose designs aren't criminally insane, are willing to offer me an equal wage to work there."
[Y]ou will be very surprised by "Greenpeaces Guide To The Nuclear Age". Chernobyl was only one of many many disasters that have occured worldwide; many have occured in the US and Canada that nobody has even heard of, and they were very serious.
Wow. Let me get this straight. The same news media that hounded Clinton's every move--the same news media which is so effective that the CIA's number one source of intelligence is CNN--the same news media we all love to curse--the same news media which is predominantly left-learning and, thus, inclined to judge nuclear power even more harshly--this same news media is so incompetent they can't cover major nuclear disasters?
There's a disconnect of reality there. Either (a) the news media is so ferociously competent at exposing these things that major world governments can't keep things secret for them, or (b) the news media is so incompetent that when they see buildings glowing blue from Cerenkov radiation, they think it's just a new paint job.
Take your pick and stick with it.
The answer? Because the staff at the plant itself were actually designing, and building the controlling circuitry AT HOME, as it was needed!
Let me get this straight. If they were designing and building the controlling circuitry at the office, that'd be fine, no matter how lousy the design was; but since they worked at home, it doesn't matter how good the design was, it's still lousy?
Very smart people, whose HOBBIES were Electronics were doing this stuff
My hobby is cryptographic engineering. My day job is cryptographic engineering. Does that mean that, if it's between 9-to-5 on a weekday, that what I produce is automatically good because it's "professional work for pay", and anything I do on a weekend is "amateur-quality work"?
I don't trust any industry that has to make commercials saying, "Nuclear Energy is Safe!", but they can't explain why, even in simple terms.
That's because the best way to refute FUD--such as what you're spreading here--is with careful fact and analysis. Careful fact and analysis requires that people think, and I think it's already been established that ninety-five percent of America tries to avoid thinking whenever possible.
Hey, 25 percent ain't that much ... c'mon America, we just selected George Bush for President, it shouldn't take us more than four years to increase from our current level to at least 40 percent of all heat production and deforestation!
All we have to do is just make sure we buy more SUVs this year, take a few extra drives, leave the windows open, and use lots of forest products which we then burn in our nice fireplaces.
And, then, noone will challenge us. Because we are the USA, and we are Number 1!
Will in Seattle
And would be praised by amateur astronomers (and probably a few professionals as well):
Turn off a few (actually, many) of those damn lights in cities and towns!
I live on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, and the glow from the light in the city is INSANE. All night long, lights are on. Most of these are unneeded - security lights that don't really provide security, merely the illusion of it. Lights that point up onto billboards, instead of down from above. If these lights were installed and designed in a proper manner, fewer could be used to achieve the same desired result, at a savings of energy at night.
How about using LED lights for stop lights? How about designing homes for the environment (ie, small windows on the south/east/west sides - solar cooling, etc)? How about using more fluorescent lights and other energy efficient lights?
Really, the thing is to use less light, not more - we get all kinds of free light most days in most areas, yet we still light up the insides of offices with electricity! Does anyone remember the fiber optic light pipes used in Japan? From sun tracking collectors on the roof, sunlight could be piped into rooms via fiber. Solatubes work in a cruder, though less expensive, fashion.
I know this isn't the complete answer, and I don't want to do away with electric light. I am sure there are a bunch of other things that could be done, but using less electric lights would go a long way...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The climate is a chaotic system
I'd have to disagree a bit. *Weather* might be chaotic. But climate usually isn't. I mean, the equator isn't going to become an arctic climate over night. We can track trends over hundreds and thousands of years, accross ice ages, etc.
The bottom line is: 1) if we do nothing, we can get screwed pretty big 2) if we do *something*, the only risk is that we have "unnecessarily" forced ourselves to be less wasteful, more efficient, etc. How could that *possibly* be a bad thing?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
You got some credentials, pal? Some evidence? Some references? Or are you just running your mouth?
First of all, reducing C02 doesn't really lower greenhouse gases. The biggest greenhouse gas is water vapor, making up 98% of all greenhouse gases.
Yeah, and your heart is only two percent of your body mass. So I guess taking it out wouldn't really lower your functioning, eh?
during the 60s, people worried about a global cooldown.
Yeah, and the shining product of computer science in the 60s was COBOL. So what? In last 30 or 40 years, a lot of new work has been done and a lot of new data unearthed. Oh, and they now have these fancy thingies called computers for working with all of this data. It would be reasonable to think that climatology, like every other science over the last few decades, has improved some.
Third, global temperature depends on where you measure temperature.
This effect is known and can be corrected for. And it has no effect on other ways of measuring historical temperatures, like ice cores and tree rings.
Statistics lie, that's what they're good for.
Spoken like a guy who's never taken a stats class. Statistics, like any other tool, can be wielded wisely or foolishly.
Lastly, scientists don't agree on global warming.
And not all scientists agree on evolution. Does that mean we should just turn the schools over to the fundamentalists?
There was a similar conference earlier this year where scientists decided that they couldn't come up with a solid decision on global warming.
Really? I heard there was a conference earlier this year where scientists decided you were a dork. Talk is cheap, pal; if you want to be taken seriously, give links and references to support all of your assertions of alleged fact.
It's entirely true that complete, specific prediction of real-world "coupled non-linear chaotic system[s]" is not possible.
But look at US economy and the financial markets which are similarly complex, coupled, non-linear, and chaotic. We can make a few observations:
I agree that much more research is needed, but the notion that CO2 emissions could cause devestating climactic change is theoretically plausible, and a lot of reasonable scientists have concluded that it is happening.
In light of that, wouldn't it be at least reasonable to start hedging our bets?
Junkscience.com isn't a mouthpiece for anyone.
As another poster pointed out, the latter half of this article claims that the author of junkscience.com was a registered lobbyist for several large firms with dubious environmental records. And at the same time he has been running this website, he was executive director of a (now defunct) non-profit that had members including "Amoco, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Motors, [...] the National Pest Control Association, Occidental Petroleum, Philip Morris" and so on.
You can verify his lobbyist registration here.
Conveniently, the fact that large polluters have been paying his bills for the last several years isn't mentioned on the "about the author" section of his web site. Maybe he's an entirely disinterested scholar who just happens to be funded by a lot of people with a financial interest in opposing environmental regulation, but I'm not convinced.
Bad science sure does happen, but a guy with a financial interest in the outcome is not one I'll take very seriously on the topic.
Whatever, boss. The site is pretty clearly Milloy's project. And the whois record still lists him as the owner. So the fact that a number of big polluters pay his bills is still relevant, even if he isn't doing the day-to-day work.
And speaking of which, according to you, who is? And what's your evidence for claiming that Milloy's not in charge?
unfortunately, science is rarely fact. usually it's theory. While the theory may not be perfect, the results are clear enough and close enough to reality. See classical mechanics as a good example: ALL scientists know that classical mechanics are an approximation. Still the theory is widely used since it gives an undecently close approximation of reality. but it's not perfectly accurate.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I did double check to avoid such irony. And spell checkers don't catch these things.
You've exposed the sad truth, sir: I suck!
I thought I remembered reading that we're in an interglacial period.. IE, we're supposed to be covered by glaciers right now, and it's only chance we've had such good weather the last few 10 thousand years to set up a civilization.
Let's follow the money then. Let's assume that all scientists are automatically biased in the direction their paycheck comes from.
A scientist working for a corporation tends to lie to help the corporation.. Wouldn't a scientist who's funded by an environmental group also tend to lie to help that group?
Or would you claim that there's a double-standard. That scientists who work for corporations will lie, but those working for environmental groups, although they're in the same circumstances, wouldn't?
Take a clue. Everyone has biases, otherwise we would always have a consensus.. Has Paul Erhlik, a scientist ever admitted his mistaken predictions?
It is our job as the public to distinguish between the lies and biases to find the truth.
Much of the evidence of global warming is in indicators; people who claim they can measure fractions of a degree in tree rings or atospheric gasses. That's something that makes me reluctant to trust them.
Everyone knows this, There used to be a land bridge between asia and north america. There isn't one now.
Nor does it take more than an idiot to know that global climatological change would be incredibly economically disruptive.
I have a question for you. Can you tell me exactly who funds and who controls the funds for the global warming people? If people are biasable based on where their money comes from, I would like an understandable explanation of who controls the funding for the global warming crowd? I've never seen a comprehensible list.
Is the funding mostly controlled by those who believe in the hypothesis of global warming? Is it not? If the funding for the scientists writing the report comes from people who believe in global warming, am I supposed to believe they're unbiased too?
You're right. I should have researched what I said before looking like this much of a fool. I also error'ed because the site has been recently revamped and the information I meant to link to was no longer obvious. (BTW, the URL you gave at Pace university is dead.)
There seems to be quite a bit of a lack of sanity in the environmentalism circles. For curiosity, have you read http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.htm ? It's most entertaining. Specifically #14-19.
www.junkscience.com
There is a lot of junk science out there in all fields. But the global warming has seem to become the favored theory of environmentalists, regardless of evidence. Check out the website for another perspective. You don't have to agree with it, just read it and reflect.
I think you mean affected, but I could be wrong.
---- Yay! I have a sig!
Yes, He's a Nuclear Engineer, but that doesn't make his policy choices wise. He assumed that a once through fuel cycle was an acceptable alternative to recycling. The nuclear industry knew that public acceptance of nuclear power was dependent on a closed cycle, where the fuel is reused, and stays out of the waste stream. That is why nuclear plants have "cooling ponds" designed only as temporary storage for spent fuel, before it was to be taken away for reprocessing.
Carter figured that it was an unacceptable security risk to have civilian facilities reprocessing plutonium. While some may agree with his conclusion, I believe he was wrong. We've created a royal clusterf*ck by opening a loop that was designed to be closed. This change, which created a new artificial need to dispose of fuel instead of reusing it. Simultaneously the repercussions of this new waste removed any credible process for disposing of this otherwise reusable fuel.
We need to get our sh*t together, come up with a sane way to get value out of the fuel we have piling up, instead of treating it as waste, and get safety back into our overregulated into complacency nuclear power industry.
--Mike--
</sarcasm>
If hazard is the measure, the only sensible way to rate it is in mortality and morbidity per unit of energy. If you are rating only the radio-isotope exposure from a given source you'll miss things like environmental disruption and flooding hazards from dams, worker hazards from wind plants (working on towers isn't the safest thing to do even if there isn't heavy machinery at the top) and chemical hazards from the production of solar cells. Even within the limited category of radiation hazards you've got plenty of radon, uranium and thorium emissions from coal and a surprising amount of hot material (NORM, Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material) coming up out of the earth along with the hot brines used for geothermal power. Saying "Nuclear is bad because of radiation", then ignoring the same hazards from either conventional or "green" energy supplies is sheer hypocrisy.
So do contained chemical explosions, but people crank up their car engines in the morning and don't think twice about what's going on inside the cylinders... unless they don't fire. Besides, nuclear electricity does not involve explosions, contained or otherwise. Hard? We've been doing it on an industrial scale since 1944. Expensive? What's expensive is re-working things from the ground up when someone changes the requirements. Nuclear plants are not unique in this respect, as anyone who's managed a software development budget will tell you. Where do I get the water that's free of uranium, thorium, polonium and mercury from coal combustion? Wouldn't I be better off if the plants upwind split a few tons of atoms instead of burning millions of tons of black stuff?If you don't have the strength to defend what you laughably call "common sense", you have no business posting here. If the effort to respond leads you to an early grave, you can share it with the thousands dead and dying of the effluent of coal in Pittsburgh, London, the ex-Soviet Bloc, China....
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
You might also want to look at this abstract. It suggests, but does not state clearly, that all the trans-uranics (TRU) can be recovered from the salt bath using a liquid metal cathode. If that keeps them out of the waste stream until they've been converted to fission products, so much the better.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I live in a large town 30 minutes west of London, which has this giant sign outside the town hall which reads "Welcome to Slough - An Anti-Nuclear Town".
I find it a bit strange therefore that they situated the town hall quite some distance away from the huge great ugly coal burner on the industrial estate, which visibly pumps out thousands of tonnes of waste into the atmosphere each week.
Freaks. Having said that, the UK's attitude to nuclear power appears to be a lot more sensible than the US's, even to the extent that we take other countries' waste for processing, which is not something that I necessarily agree with.
Stuii!
and the US starts to really work on reducing emissions. We need to really work on fuel efficiency and more importantly we need to start research again on nuclear power. The current attitude towards nuclear power is ridiculous. It is the only currently viable high-energy source we have that doesn't pollute as badly as alternatives like coal. We also need to start working on retrofitting all coal-fired power plants in order to reduce emissions there. These things are common sense. Lets hope the new US leadership understands.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
Oh, I agree completely. Life in the US rocks, and everyone else would love to share the fun. I was narrowly criticizing the previous comment for sounding entirely too much like Marie Antoinette . People on the top often forget how rough the other 99% of the world has it.
If we don't do a whole lot more to reduce consumption, there are three possibilities:
Back in the good old days of the dinosours the earth was something like 15 degrees hotter then now on average.
The earth temp's has been fluctuating for as long as they been recording it. (Hey remember that ICEAGE?)
I watched a whole program on C-SPAN with a scientist yanking weather records from the mid 1800's, pointing to graphs, and spouting stats left and right. His basic point was there is NO solid evidence a 'greenhouse' effect is taking place what so ever. Only the normal shift of the tempurature cycle. Knowing the constant stream of bullshit coming out of this government I'd bet he's right.
'Diesel' Dave 'Kill a Cop' Cinege (Freezing my ass off in S. Florida! Global Warming? Ha!)
-- "Nobody will ever be safe until the last cop is dead." NH Rep. Tom Alciere - (My new Hero)
Global warming may or may not be happening, but climate simulations tell us absolutely nothing. In fact, it's worse than nothing because it is intentionally misleading.
Look, if there's even a small chance that Global warming is occuring, then we should do something about it, right now - because it takes time to fix the problem, and the consequences can be catastrophic.
Ok, so we start enacting controls that cost trillions of dollars on the basis of a small chance
I exaggerated when I said that the chance of global warming is small. There have been repeated warnings from credible scientists.
Even if you don't buy their story completely, if there's even a fair chance (say 20% chance) that global warming will occur, then spending trillions of dollars to avert it is well worth the expense. Think of it as insurance against a global catastrophe.
Reducing emissions, making industries more fuel efficient pays for itself in the long run - lower fuel costs, lower medical bills from pollution related illnesses. During the fuel crisis of the 70s, industries retooled themselves - as a result, oil consumption has actually decreased since its peak in the 70s.
Then in twenty years we find out that all the CO2 we've been dumping into the atmosphere has been the only thing between us and the next ice age and, whoops, we've stopped putting out so much.
Where's the data for this? In any case, it is easy to insert CO2 into the atmosphere if necessary.
The US should cut back on emissions, and so should every other country in the world. No matter about those industrializing countries, whose populations live way below the poverty level, and are desperately in need of modern infrastructure.
g lobal_warm.html
If you've bothered to read about the issue, you'll see that the problem is that the US is unwilling to cut back on its emissions - while industrializing countries that need development most are being asked to bear the cost of reducing emissions.
See http://www.thegully.com/essays/environment/001204
If you had any useful knowledge at all to share, you'd know that the global warming we're having now is a natural cycle of the earth. Cycling between thousands of years, problems with CO2 emmisions are pretty much exhaggerated. Not that pollution isn't a serious problem we should deal with the proper way, but it's hardly to blame for the total global warming we've been having.
Your solution with battling pollution with pollution, I think your perception of the fault is to blame. You perceieve global warming as the problem. I can assure you, it is not. By putting an extra factor into the equation, you're not solving anything, but making the equation more complex. What if the dust reflects radiation from the earth, or reacts with the Ozone layer? Not very likely I know, but you can never know what'll happen. There's always an unforeseen side-effect.
Your argument of finding the cheapest solution, is the one that truly disgusts me. Instead of adapting to the problem and finding the best solution we can live with, you propose a hack to the air we live and breathe in? Why, when we have so many better alternatives. What is wrong with your equation is that when you calculate cost, you don't include the environment in your calculation.
However, you're right that we shouldn't rush into things and panic.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
If you react without having a clue what is going on, you're part of the problem. It's pretty much like playing a chess-game. You may think you just made the most brilliant move, but get checkmated in 10-15 moves. My advice: Play chess! ;-)
Yes, we're in a cycle of global warming right now. Global warming and cooling has been happening on earth for millions and millions of years. It's natural, and I doubt we can interfere with it without bad side-effects. Now what is more important, is to reduce our own artificial factors from the equation by reducing our emission of pollutants like CO2. I fully agree on you on that.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
People who care for the environment and well being of others, know that nuclear power is inherently a bad choice. I don't believe we know everything about nuclear fission, and that we will discover what really is going on when we split atoms. Mod me down all you like for meaning this, but it's my opinion and my responsibility to express it.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Refresh my memory as to where the Exxon Valdez was coming from when it ran aground and dumped all its oil into a pristine environment? Oh yes, Alaska. My point is we need to move away from fossil fuel based resources towards nuclear, solar and other non polluting power sources.
I've also heard that it takes more energy to produce a nuclear plant then the plant produces in its lifetime (This is the fundamental rule of power generation -- a generator has to make more power in its lifetime then it takes to construct the generator itself). Can anyone substantiate / deny that ?
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
From this article:
Any problem can be solved with a clever hack. Er, right?
Well, not really. Nothing could be worse than thinking around here.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
As a Minnesotan, I'm trying to figure the downside to global warming. Winters will continue to be a little warmer: yeah! Summers warmer: spend more time at the lake, or reading slashdot at my air-conditioned workplace. Icecap melts; oceans rise; Wash. D.C., New York and other coastal cities, as well as all of Florida is flooded: less gov't, faster election results, and NYC is like Venice. Cool!
...that we (citizens of the US) produce 25% of the world's climate affecting pollution!
:)
I mean we DO produce 10-25% of the world's food....
Perhaps if the U.S. started (as was mentioned in the California Power Cut Story here ) to reflect the cost of environmental damage this might change at least in the U.S. What incentive is there really for U.S. citizens to drive socially responsible cars (i.e. small engines) when the cost of petrol is maintained at an extremely low level? With car sales in Ireland going through the roof reflecting the increased disposable income, we are not seeing people going for big powerful cars, we are seeing people buy new cars with reasonable engine sizes (1l -> 1.4l) to enjoy the economy of such cars (with petrol prices of £0.65 ~ $0.9 /litre ~ $3.3 / gallon, the miles per gallon or km per litre of a car is a big deal). Are you guys all driving at >120mph so you need big engined cars or is it just a phallic thing? Or am I out of touch and you are now excercising social responsiblity in your car purchasing?
The link isn't previewing so here it is plain ... http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/01/17/14121 1&cid=280
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
But would you if petrol cost $1 / litre or would you move closer to work and fly/train/coach and rent a car on holidays? You describe a symptom of the facts I describe, not a reason for them!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
If you look at a map of Europe and a map of the U.S. you cannot argue that America is a fundamentally different geography and hence requires cheap petrol. If your petrol costs were responsible, how many more train stations would be built to ensure that freight was more economical? Again you describe a symptom of the problem and not a cause. Do you really think that Europeans don't have to collect from trains and then transport by truck to get to more remote areas? The fact is though that IF they are going less than 100 miles (your suggested figure) it is because they have built a reasonable rail system as it is more economical!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
This is absolutely true. Furthermore, many of the rural weather stations in the world have been shut down over the last century, to be replaced by urban ones. Surprise surprise, evidence of increasing temperatures!
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
They are not completely unrelated although I should have done a better job at stating that ozone depletion is in fact another issue than the greenhouse effect. Ozone depletion allows in more U.V. rays. The earth reflects back less energy into space, and thus the overall temperature rises. With the greenhouse effect, much of the energy that the earth radiates into space is prevented from doing so, trapping in this heat. So before you go mouthing off about this, maybe you should think logically about the two problems which are quite related.
At this time, it looks like people did have an impact on at least the depletion of the ozone layer which is a contributing factor to global warming. And if us mere mortals can have an impact on the presence of the ozone layer, I'd say that given the evidence we shoule err on the side of caution: that is, accept the argument that humans do contribute to global warming.
I think the biggest problem from the environmentalists side, is the term "global warming". While it's true that the average temp. is getting warmer, as somebody has already pointed out, large dips in temperature and spikes in temperature are more characteristic of "global warming" and it should probably be called "climate volatility".
1) Even if we stopped production and useage of all greenhouse-effect causing gases, these gases would remain in the upper atmosphere doing harm for a little over a century.
2) If at sea level, wholly intact, the ozone layer is about 3 mm thick or just slightly thicker than one's finger nail. That puts things into perspective - there isn't much there to begin with and we're totally fscking with what's there!
3) There was a key "Conservative" in the U.S. (I'm assuming Republican...I'm not American) during some environmental negotiation who was of the opinion that we should all just wear hats to cover us from the extra U.V. rays. - that was his stated recommendation on the issue. Unfortunately, it was beyond their capability of comprehension that the phytoplankton at the very bottom of our fragile food chain cannot wear "hats". But regardless of party-lines, no politician wants to do anything about the issue because it takes much longer than a political term for the rewards of any proactive efforts to be reaped.
We can only point fingers at someone else for so long. It's time for us individuals to take small but significant steps to better our environment. I mean, do you really need a Ford Navigator to drive to and from work through bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic? Is it too much to buy things in bulk where practical (which would save packaging material and the energy wasted on recycling/throwing-out the packaging material)? Is it too much to get off our lazy a$$es and walk to the local mall or store when we're only going to shop for a few things?
We've really got to start accepting responsibility for our actions because everyone knows the politicians aren't going to do a damn thing until its way too late...and trust me, we're almost there!
So who was responsible for the ice age?!?! It must have been all of those industrialized countries back in pre-historic times? Are scientists aways this ignorant? If we have learned anything about history it is that the climate ALWAYS changes. No exceptions. I wonder what their logic is here: "Hmmm...the climate is changing so it must be because of man. It couldn't possibly be nature taking its course. Wow, I'm so damn smart I'll probably win a Nobel for this!"
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
global warming whatever. i know that we really need to think about "cleaning up" the environment and all, but hell....
i'll take a crap on a baby manatee, whipe my ass with non-biodegradable styrofoam, while spraying aqua-net into the ionosphere if it gets my heating bill below $225 a month. i mean fuck....I CAN FEED A CHILD FOR 10 CENTS A DAY BUT I CAN'T HEAT MY HOUSE FOR LESS THAN $5.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Secondly, during the 60s, people worried about a global cooldown. It was similar to the worry about global warming now, only the reverse. As we know now, this didn't happen.
Third, global temperature depends on where you measure temperature. If I measure temperature in the middle of the city, it will go way up as the city increases in size and population. If I measure it in the country, it's not going to increase. Statistics lie, that's what they're good for.
Lastly, scientists don't agree on global warming. There was a similar conference earlier this year where scientists decided that they couldn't come up with a solid decision on global warming.
Don't let allow bad science to impede your rights!
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
Yes, I love JunkScience.com. Makes me wish for the halycon days of my youth, before all this governmental regulation and labor rackateering. Days of child labor ... unlimited coal smoke ... even (dare I say it?) legal slavery. 'Tis a sad, sad thing when the lower classes conspire to rob industry of its well-earned profits.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
What you need most is a sense of scale.
...).
First, asking climate studies to be accurate on a scale of 3-4 years is stupid - pure chaos theory: noise. They're not talking about predicting whether a thunderstorm's going to hit your house today, but the average temperature of the globe. Ask someone to predict the position and velocity of a baseball and they'll do pretty well, because it's huge. An electron - no dice; too damn small (see, there was this guy called Heisenburg
Second, re: above, 5.8 degrees is a fucking huge difference. Again, not to you sitting in the heating/air-conditioning, and not on a yearly/seasonal scale. Averaged over the course of decades, though, such changes can wreak serious havok: melting ice caps, rising oceans.
Thirdly, you should really do some research on climate simulation. Here's a handy Google link to start you off If you really think climate simulation is bullshit, you're pitting yourself against some of the most hardcore and brilliant mathematical analysis ever done - WTF are your credentials?
Finally, let's be clear about what really matters here: Mother Earth is in absolutely no danger from us humans. Nothing we could do short of saturation-bombing the entire planet with nukes is going to "destroy the earth." She's been around 4 billion years and, on that scale, we're barely hiccups. The real danger is that we make our environment so toxic that we ourselves can't survive it. That's well within our power, even on such a short scale as 100 years.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
i am confused about this issue...i have heard this is just a bunch of BS made up by eco frauds wanting to keep their juicy government grants (they have to find something, right?)
OTOH, i have heard that major portions of the ice under the north pole has melted (from underneath) since initial measurements were made by the first nuclear subs.
the subs (from what i heard) took deep core samples, and found that the ice had been solid for millions of years. now that ice is gone -- not just in a small area, either -- major areas of undersea ice, after millions of years, are gone in just a few decades.
if anyone has links, or is otherwise familiar with the sub studies, please post about this. it seems like fairly definitive evidence, if it is really widespread.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I live in Florida. Its been below 32 for almost everynight this month. Ridiculous. I say the Ice Age is coming. Which is good for us overclockers.
1.Climate change is the real issue. the normal weather patterns which we have seen for years are changing. formerly inhabitable cold regions become more harsh and un-inhabitable, arable land is becoming dry desert. It remains to be seen what the full effect of our pollution revolution will be.
2.we've all heard that the scientists don't know what they're talking about and there's no way to predict the future of the climate. But why can't we at least acknowledge that what we do to our air will have some effect on our environment?
the fact that we don't know what is going to happen sounds like an excellent reason to be cautious with how much we change (pollute) our atmosphere. Yes, we could continue to be niave and say what we do will not matter; that would be easy. The developed world will cope with climate change but there are cultures won't. Like those who rely on subsistance farming in regions which are going through desertification. An article in the Jan/Feb issue of MotherJones describes the killer winter and famine being experienced by nomadic herders in Mongolia.
...and what do we do when, immeadeatly after launching particles into the atmosphere, a volcano erupts and blocks another % of light. There is so much chaos already in the system. Earth can metabolize the toxins we have fed it, lets quit smoking before this cancer becomes terminal.
-josh
fear is the mind killer
To be fair, the earth has experienced natual swings in climate due to mechanisms we are not completely sure of.
Here's the thing, and maybe you can give me a reasonable answer to this. Everyone seems to agree that a 5 degree swing is pretty significant as far as climate and livability is concerned. And 10-20 degrees probably even more so. On a percentage basis, however, that is really not much, which means that there is a relatively narrow band of average temperatures where life thrives relatively well.
Now, given this, one would imagine in 500 million years of high vertebrate life, we have seen pretty major upheavils from various natural disasters, huge volcanoes exploding, ice ages, continental drift, maybe even comets hitting the earth. The earth has clearly not been a peaceful place throughout its history.
But, we have never had a disaster that has wiped out all higher life, although the Dinosaurs certainly took a hit, but it still didn't wipe out all the higher vertebrates. Doesn't this indicate that the earth has incredibly powerful equilibrium mechanisms that we probably don't fully understand, primarily because of our lack of historical perspective? If the earth's ecological balance was all that fragile, it seems likely that higher life forms would be getting killed off over and over as the climate swung around every million years or so. Yet, life has been stable enough for the incredibly unlikely occurance of intelligent life to spring up (at least IMO it's unlikely, but that's another topic).
I don't doubt that we humans have an effect on climate, but I think it's likely that the earth's rejuvenative powers are radically underestimated and poorly understood in the current models.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
First it was 3.5, now it's 5.8. That's a difference of 2.3 degrees! So what happened with the original computer model? Are now to believe that "Oh, that original one was flawed, but this one is the real deal! AND GOOD GOD IT'S WORSE THAN EVER BEFORE!!"
The fact is, climate simulations are not even close to being able to predict patterns 1 year in the future, much less 100 bloody years. Not only is our understanding of climates at the stone knives and bearskin level (to quote Star Trek), but our computers are multiple orders of magnitude away from being able to do anything accurate. Proof? Give me a link to a study that was done, say, 3-4 years ago that correctly predicted the climate for this year. You can't, because it's all garbage.
This is not science, this is 1) pure politics, and 2) pure money raising. It's well known that the more dire the prediction, the more money you can ask for grants.
Global warming may or may not be happening, but climate simulations tell us absolutely nothing. In fact, it's worse than nothing because it is intentionally misleading.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Now understand, I do think that Global warming might be a problem. But I do think that there may see people fear-mongering for fun and profit. Just like some people would muddy the waters to protect their interests.
If there is no global warming, then there are just the usual problems of politics as usual. If there is global warming, then we will have a problem, in addition to all of the usual problems of politics as usual.
Further, the technology developed to help handle global warming, such as more energy efficient devices, would be useful just in the context of on an expanding popular.
So I see that it would be better in the long run to treat global warming as a real problem.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Both these sources of 'evidence' are flawed.
First, we shall look at why statistics is flawed: Over the past 100,000 years, during any 200-year period, the Earth's average annual temperature has varied within a 10 degree Farenheit range. This means that the Earth's climate varies greatly even during relatively local time periods. Thus, any statistical obvervations of the past 40 years (which is as far back as most scientists go when they issue their 'doomsday decrees') are statistically insignificant observations.
Certain simulations used to model the atmosphere given X ppm CO2 and Z ppm CO, etc, etc are the second source of evidence doom-sayers use to prove a global warming trend. Most of these simulations are oversimplified. They fail to take into account some major forces and phenomena in the environment. All of them neglect the dynamic nature of biological influences on the environment. They simply treat the amount of CO2 conversion (basically as a result of photosynthesis) as a constant, rather than as a function whose parameters would be something like average yearly temperature, CO2 content of the atmosphere, etc. This is one of the more glaring examples of oversimplification in certain atmospheric simulations.
Other scientists have modeled the earth differently (using more optimistic rules to model certain phenomena) and have obtained different results. But the fact of the matter is that crucial pieces of our knowledge about the Earth are missing. We just don't know how dynamic a system the Earth is and how easy or difficult it is to disrupt its equilibrium. We don't know what the true function is that biology plays and to what degree its slope varies. Most well-respected researchers are the first to admit this, and they refute the findings of the sensationalists on just these grounds.
Basically, doomsayers are bending the rules just slightly, with minor assumptions and simplifications, in order to get their agena across. Most of them simply want funding and are looking to do research that sounds groundbreaking in order to distinguish themselves. The fact that you get seemingly contradictory reports almost weekly on this topic, and many others, is an indication of junk science, human nature, and the sensationalist nature of much of the press.
There's a better article at NewScientist.com
One of the most common things one hears when discussing this stuff is that we should "conserve power", but one wonders just how far the average Westerner can manage to conserve. IE: if we went all out, what's the maximum percentage of our power needs that we could conserve. And I don't mean 'potentially', I mean realistically, considering all the idiots and regular fools on the continent.
With the enegery crisis in California I keep hearing about all these calls to Californians to conserve power and I read about tons of distributed computing enthusiasts turning off their computers to conserve power so the schools, hospitals, and traffic lights can get power. So if anyone has had a reason to do a good job of conserving power, it's Californians.
My question is, just how much of an effect has the call to Californians to conserve power been? Just how many Megawatts have Californians been able to 'conserve'? And what percentage of the total is it?
I see this as a real world test case for just how much (or how little) we (not you and me, the average people) could conserve if they 'had' to.
All rightie. I've finally found the answer to my own post.
A reporter on CNN had information from the California authorities that individual's conservation efforts have been *so* successful that it's basically allowing/would-allow 2 million homes to keep their power on. They're actually a bit afraid of telling the public that things have gotten that much better, as it might cause a negative feedback putting them right back where they started...
"Two South Pacific islands have disappeared beneath the waves, as climate change raises sea levels to new heights.
They are Tebua Tarawa and Abanuea - which ironically means "the beach which is long-lasting" - in the island state of Kiribati"
That's from the BBC
One thing I've found interesting is the level of disconnect between cause and effect in the US. The average American produces 70 times the level of pollution as the average person in a developing country, but most Americans I talk to never realise the damage they cause because they never see it . For instance, DDT is banned in the US as a toxic chemical, but it's exported for household use to developing nations.
If you only looked at the facts from an unbiased perspective, and actually had some contact with those who suffer the brunt of these damages, trust me, your opinion would be different.
Another thing I find interesting is that most Americans seem to get their opinion about scientific issues such as global warming and evolution from politicians and talk show hosts. The topmost post on this page is a guy quoting Rush Limbaugh on how volcanoes are more polluting than anything humans ever made (and it's been moderated up to 5). Guys....these people aren't educated enough to barely understand these topics, let alone form an opinion or explain it to others. Don't follow them like sheep. Columnists, politicians, left-wing and right-wing ideologues have agendas and try to sway your mind. Trust them as much as you would their expert knowledge on how to partition your HD for optimum seek times.
For issues on science, the best people to refer to are *scientists*. Yes, they are sometimes wrong, and they have competing theories, but they are heaps better and more reliable than anybody else, because they do it for a living and have to prove things more accurately and with greater impact on their lives than anybody else who talks about these things.
But then, judging by the wise posts in response to the article, what would scientists know....
I like to take the broader view of this whole situation. A dominant theory of Earth history says it has gone through cycles of "hotter than normal" and "colder than normal" for billions of years.
And you guys are worried about a measly century of global warming? As Carl Sagan said, if the history of the universe was described as a 12-month calendar, Earth's human race would have taken up less than ONE SECOND of that entire calendar year.
Kinda puts things in perspective, doesn't it?
Bring on the global warming! As George Carlin would say, "The planet is fine... the PEOPLE are fucked! Big difference!"
-thomas
"And like that
Developing nations are similarly not going to limit greenhouse-gas emissions since doing so would only increase the relative gap between them and the richer countries. Plus, they have the further moral argument that it's the rich countries that are polluting disproportionately.
I can see two ways out of this. One is to accept that emissions are simply going to happen, and find technological ways of mitigating them -- whether by increasing the earth's overall albedo or planting lots more trees to soak up CO2 (and combat deforestation to boot) or something else people much smarter than me might think up.
Furthermore, I think we must get real and acknowledge that people's behavior will change only if it's in their own perceived self-interest. There are two ways I see to accomplish that. One is a social way via peer pressure and so forth; you make it unacceptable to do things that contribute to global warming. But that's a little hard because, while you may be able to berate your friend because he bought a gas-guzzling SUV, you probably don't know what kind of insulation he has or whether he turns down the heaters at night. Basically, too many behaviors are hidden.
So my suggestion is to appeal to people's craven economic self-interest. Build models that account for the true long-term cost of the following activities, among others: Generating 1kWh of electricity by natural gas / nuclear / hydro / whatever; burning 1 gallon of gas in your car; and so on. By "true long-term cost" I mean you'd actually have to find a way to put numbers not just on the raw materials and the processing/operation, but on factors like long-term storage of nuclear by-products and risk of contimation of water tables; loss of fishing stock and biodiversity caused by dams; insurance losses caused by rising sea levels and medical costs incurred by rising malaria transmission if global warming comes to pass; and on and on and on. It's hard to define the cost of something as amorphous as damaging an ecosystem, but there are techniques that can be used to estimate how people value things in relative terms and then come up with a number. Similarly, we don't have a good idea how accurate our climate models are, but there are various types of Monte Carlo / game theory techniques that should allow differnet sorts of approximations to be taken into account.
Anyway, I'm not a mathematician or an economist, but my idea is that you get to a bottom line where you can say something like this: The true, fully-loaded cost of a gallon of gas is $8.45. The true, fully-loaded cost of a kilowatt-hour of electricity is $0.67 cents for hydro vs. $0.54 for nuclear, or whatever. You'll note that these numbers are, by and large, an order of magnitude larger than what we pay for these things today. I suspect that we are indeed underestimating costs by about that factor today because we don't consider the "total cost of ownership" for various technologies.
Now, charging people 5-10x their current power rates or gas prices is probably politically unfeasible. But imagine what would happen if we did: Wow, would people have an incentive to change their behavior. Is it really worth an extra $200 a month to cool your house to 68 degrees instead of 70 degrees? Is it really worth $5 of gas to drive down to the store so you can pick up a quart of milk? I'd sure think twice and consider alternatives (well, I already DO walk to the store, but that's primarily because I don't like the fact that I'm starting to feel my waistline slowly expanding each year and I could use the exercise :-)
I'm sure it's a pipe dream, but it seems like the logical solution to the problem to me...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Second, global warming does not simply mean "warmer winters". It means warmer average temperatures across the globe as a whole (most of which is water, remember), which could have dramatic effects to either warm or cool specific areas if ocean currents were to shift, for example. One possible scenario is that hotter years would be hotter and cooler years would be cooler -- i.e., that global warming spreads the extremes of climate at both the bottom and the top end.
Third, your analogy between weather forecasting and climate forecasting is incorrect. Your analogy to predicting the state of the stock market is actually an interesting one, as it's very hard to predict where the DJIA (or any individual stock) will close tomorrow or next week, but it's not unreasonable to make a prediction like this: In 200 years the DJIA will be at least 10x and perhaps as much as 100x what it is now. (I pulled those numbers out of my ass; they are probably way too low.) Your prediction could still be wrong, of course, but my point is that sometimes longer-term trends are easier to identify than short-term ones because the underlying drivers are not obscured by unpredictable short-term fluctuations.
As I mentioned in the beginning, we're on the same side of the argument here. I just think that you should choose the arguments that defend the anti-global-warming position a lot more accurately so you don't end up making us all look stupid.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
That's the number that we went through and calculated in my nuclear fuels class a few years ago for a typical PWR (pressurized water reactor), and a number that was corroborated by Argonne National Lab when speaking of their Integrated Fast Reactor project. In all of the spent fuel pools we have huge amounts of recyclable fuel just asking to be used.
BONUS: By recycling, not only do you reduce the waste to 3% of what's considered waste now, but the stuff that's left only has to be sealed away for about 300 years before it's radioactivity fades to background radiation levels! It's the Plutonium hiding in those fuel bundles that causes people to talk about hiding it for 10,000 years. Why not "burn" it and keep the blackout away?
Oh, and we should revive the IFR that Clinton and a jackass representative from my home state (az) pushed to kill years ago. *THAT* was an awesome concept: a reactor that you couldn't melt down in *any* scenario (liquid sodium cooled, metal fuel (so no mucking about with oxides), fast breeder reactor), a recycling building attached to the reactor building and using mostly electrolysis techniques as opposed to messy chemical processes to recycle the fuel, and as above a reduction in waste levels to 3% of what we're currently stuck with (thanks Jimmy) that even a semi-moron can design a storage cask to last 300 years.
"Global" [the subject of the sentence] is "warming" [the main verb] "worse" [not a comparative but a substantive adjective, referring to bad people] "then thought" [after that, Global is warming thought].
The article is about Global, a company in California that is providing free heat to cold convicts, but has so much extra power that they have decided to start "warming" cold smart people as well.
A First Post that is:
1) On-topic, and
2) Has no comments about Goats or Natalie Portman
Miracles Do Happen...
:)
What can global warming do? According to the widely accepted Rahmstorf bifurcation model of Atlantic thermohaline circulation, small increases above a threshold level in freshwater precipitation over the North Atlantic region can trigger a long-term Gulf Stream shutdown, a.k.a. an Ice Age.
A super-threshold increase in freshwater supply to the North Atlantic area is one of the most stable effects predicted in simulations by coupled ocean-atmosphere models of climate for any future increased levels of atmospheric CO2.
Would an ice age be so bad? Well, which of the two states below do you prefer?
A. Gulf Stream OFF image of US vegetation (Ice Age conditions)
or
B. Gulf Stream ON image of US vegetation (present day conditions)
What does an ice age do? On land, agricultural productivity in the major food producers like the US and N.Europe would collapse due to freezing temperatures. Reduced ocean circulation would also cut precipitation in other regions of the world, creating droughts. In the sea, the much reduced ocean circulation would be unable to replenish marine nutrients in vital high-latitude oceans, i.e., marine productivity and fishing harvests would also collapse.
Scroogle
Rahmstorf's bifurcation model of Atlantic thermohaline circulation is widely accepted by independent scientists, implying the Atlantic Ocean has only two stable modes of thermohaline circulation -- implications discussed here
Scroogle
Now take these fuel pellets, stack them in tubes to make fuel rods, rack up and then seal bundles of fuel rods inside a reactor, and start a controlled fission chain reaction and output a gigawatt continuously for a year and 1/2 or so. Then dismantle the reactor, remove the spent fuel rods, and store them in a 23 foot deep olympic sized pool. Then install new fuel rods, reassemble the reactor, and make another 1-1/2 gigawatt-years of electricity. (Assuming the plant doesn't break down constantly.)
After 10-20 years, remove the spent fuel rods from the pool, stuff them in huge white radiation proof kegs, and stack them outside in an abandoned plant contractor parking lot. Leave them there while waiting for a huge hole to be dug underneath a mountain, a final resting place for the kegs.
This is what is called an open-ended fuel cycle. Mine, use, dispose. But fuel rods can be recycled. They do it in Japan and France, among other countries. You see, not all the uranium in the fuel rods undergoes fission, in fact, less than 1% of the 1% enriched uranium is split. In fact, by a process called breeding, some of the U-238 absorbs a neutron and becomes Pu-238, which is even more desirable for the chain reaction. The overall effect is that the fuel rods are more potent when spent than when they were new. Unfortunately, what ultimately stops the chain reaction is fission by-products that absorb neutrons. A crude analogy would be burning one ton of coal, and getting back one ton of better coal, but it won't burn until 5 kg. of ash is sifted out.
While he was in office, Jimmy Carter signed legislation prohibiting the recycling of uranium fuel by the civilian nuclear power industry, based on fears that some of the recovered Pu-238 might be diverted to enemies wanting to make an atomic bomb. If only these fears could be laid to rest, we could recycle our fuel like other forward thinking countries, we wouldn't need a hole under a mountain, and we wouldn't need to strip mine for uranium ore as much as we do for coal.
as I recall, the whole problem with the US carbon sinks argument was that the effect of those carbon sinks that already exist must be factored into the current emissions variables.
The US used some good science about carbon sinks to justify a policy that is the equivalent of the fictitious budget surplus.
How can the United States claim it should have less of an emissions reduction burden because it has more forests? The US still is responsible for more pollution than any other country.
In terms of pollution credits, remember that that isn't a perfect model. Market allocation does not always work. For example, a lot of the power plants that shut down in California this summer for "maintenance" actually had run out of emissions credits and shut down instead of paying staggering fines.
By the way on the nuclear power question discussed in some posts I think we should explore it too, but let's make sure its safe and find a suitable way of disposing radioactive waste.
Goat sex free since 2001
Electric-only cars are a rather nifty Idea but they are not feasible with current technology. With our current load sensing technology we can run a diesel generator to an electric motor on a dynamic load and have it be 80% more efficient than a traditional engine. While we are many years away from large-scale consumer releases of this technology some large cities are using busses based on this technology.
Some fuel alternatives are just silly. The Fuel Cell, since it's creation by NASA, has been used more as a battery that anything else. It takes a lot of energy to get Hydrogen in the form that you need in a fuel cell. You'd be better off with Solar Cells, but like all other forms they do have there draw backs. While it is cheaper for consumers to operate traditional vehicles, they will most likely me faded out over the next 20 years. Who needs grammar?
There are alternatives such as fuel cells, solar, etc each of which has drawbacks. All we really need is an economic incentive for people to move to alternatives. As long as it's cheaper for consumers to operate traditional vehicles, we will never get to the next-gen technology.
I found a couple of articles in Scientific American that are interesting but a few years old.
http://www.sciam.com/1196issue/1196sperling.html
http://www.sciam.com/1097issue/1097wouk.html
Your post seems to be based on many assumptions. There is no reason to suppose that the Earth's climate is in any way unstable, and liable to self destruct at the slightest perturbation. I would hazard that it is in fact highly stable. This is why we have managed to live through massive asteroid impacts, volcanic explosions, and various other doomsday scenarious without becoming extinct.
Antother thing to bear in mind is that the climate is highly variable on its own. From the middle ages to about the 18th century, there was a little ice age, and temperature were inordinately cold. In the Xeventeenth century, the Thames in London froze over some 18 times, compared to very few in the twentieth (one or something). Temperature then were 4 or 5 degrees cooler than now.
Similarly, the early nineteenth century saw a cold snap, and it is thought that such an abrupt weather change may have brought down the Roman Empire. 2000 years ago it was possible to grow grapes in the north of England, a feat unimaginable today.
So, we have established that the climate is variable of its own accord. Why then is there the assumption that rising temperatures, still statistically insignificant, are the fault of Mankind? I would hazard that it is because we have become all to self absorbed and shallow, and grasp at principles as we see them whether they be right or wrong. People should stop trying to make others guilty, and stop feeling guilty themselves. We should deal with this in a rational manner, removed from unfounded ideals.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.
For all intents and purposes, this is completely true. Thankfully, the Emissions Protection Agency (aka EPA) is doing something about it -- see their page for more info. They even have a page about current impacts, though many more of course are expected to come soon. Global warming is a rather slow process if I say so myself.
It's not cool to use other peoples code... -
- The Greenhouse Hoax...Noel Mc Donald
- Global Warming: A Chilling Perspective
- Greenhouse Syndrome: Just Hot Air?
- Global Warming: A Political, Economic and Scientific Backgrounder
- A BRIEFING ON GLOBAL WARMING,
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY
- There are many questions
regarding Global Warming
- Global warming has failed experimental test.
- GLOBAL WARMING:
INVENTING AN APOCALYPSE
- Home Page of John Daly,
author of The Greenhouse Trap.
- John L. Daly
Profile of a Greenhouse `Dissenter'
Source, and many more links: Liberty Exposure: Global Warming.It's not cool to use other peoples code... -
The EPA recently launched their brand new global warming web site, complete with great facts about global warming. Apparently, naturally occuring carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide gases are causing more harm than artificial hydrofluorocarbons (HFC), perfluorocarbons (PFC), and sulfurhexafluorides (SF6). I'd say they need more sinks.
It's not cool to use other peoples code... -