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National Academy of Sciences: Now We're Cookin'
matroid writes: "Today the National Academy of Sciences released their review of the IPCC's global warming diatribe finding that, except for the tremendously alarmist language in the document, the report is accurate. "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." An article in the NYTimes is here. Maybe I shouldn't have bought that coal-based UPS after all ..."
So, the bottom line is that we need alternative energy sources and we need them now. Biofuels dont even come close (Literally all of the farmable land on the Earth would have to be deditcated to corn just to produce the current world energy need.) Solar, Wind and Geothermal just dont make enough juice. Fusion is too far out. What is left.
Well Nuclear stands a chance, but people are too much of a bunch of pussies to use it. So I'll tell you what the solution will be. Let the fucking sealevels rise. I want my car. I want my heat. I want my oil. We went to Kuwate with a couple of Aircraft carrieries and dropped more explosives on that psycho in Iraq than we used in all of WWII. Do you think we will just turn off our cars. Shut off the lights? No, we'll keep them on. And so will the Chineese. Millions will die as a result. But Millions would die if you shut the power off too. So either come up will a new source of power, or buy some land on a hilltop.
Someone you trust is one of us.
The only realistic solution that you are suggesting is cutting back on energy consumption drastically. Solar Panels simply can't meet the energy needs of the world. Gasoline is an amazing thing. It really is quite incredible. It contains an impressive amount of chemical energy for its weight. There is nothing to replace it. Sure battery powered cars (less efficient than gas turbines) could concentrate production to the power plants which burn 70% more efficient. However, that is only fraction of the emissions. You will still end up with the emissions. The Kyoto Agreement was a fraud. "Decrease Carbon Emissions for 1st world (only) countries to 5% below 1992 levels)." You think that will do anything to slow down emissions? It is a triffling. It doesnt address emerging nations, where the majority of the future coal and oil will be burned (China and India). The Global Effort should be "FIND A NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY THAT IS A GOOD REPLACEMENT FOR FOSSIL FUELS." I say go with fission until fusion is ready, but they can't even agree to cut greenhouse emissions by 5%, how will they agree to deal with nuclear waste?
Someone you trust is one of us.
The real problem is that we are incredibly dependant on fossil fuels. To claim, that conservation by restraint (or frankly even by efficeincy) will reverse the problem in the atmosphere is without basis (unless drastic, draconian measures were taken, i.e. 65-70% global reductions). Even with the Kyoto agreement, C02 levels would be expected to double the levels of 1995 between 2050-2070. Cars only produce 1/3 of the C02. Even if we could move all cars and trucks to electric-hybrids, the resulting CO2 levels would only be about 15%. That would still get us on track for a C02 doubling this century.
I agree with you that our leadership lacks the political balls to really address this issue. It would take a benevolant dictator I think to really address this issue. The first issue that needs to be addressed is the nuclear power issue. What is more dangerous? Radioactive Waste or a 10 foot sea level increase. Nuclear of course is no where close to a complete answer. It is expensive, and not appropriate for the third world. We need a massive (manhattan project + Apollo + WWII + Genome) international collition of scientists. Yank all of those engineers in Russia and the US working on the space program, all those engineers working on free software, all of the engineers working on whatever, and get them in a room to work this issue out. We spend 6% of the US government's budget on an orbiting vegitable garden (US international space station). The US gov spends less than 0.01% researching alternative energies. Time to let that bucket of useless crap fall into the ocean and put all of those people to work doing something productive (except for their budget managers who are fired).
Someone you trust is one of us.
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"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
Guess what? It's a million times neater than the sausage-grinding work of making law.
The National Academy of Sciences has essentially said that the question of what we should do is settled. Great. Who's going to say how we should do it? This is the messy, ugly issue. Dozens of different interest groups are going to get involved, from the western economic interests who make their money from coal mining to the environmentalists who want strip-mining and mountaintop removal ended, to the natural gas interests who are salivating over the increase in their potential market (because gas has so much less carbon per unit of energy than coal or even oil), to the social-justice types who don't want limits placed on the emissions of "developing nations" because that won't promote any transfer of wealth from the USA and Europe, to the electric utilities who are worried that all their coal-fired generators might be priced out of the market, to the nuclear plant operators who are looking at a huge surge in the value of their plants, to the auto companies and SUV drivers who like the status quo but won't be able to have it... it goes on and on.
What kind of mess is going to come out of these competing interests when they go into make the law that tries to limit greenhouse gas emissions?
This should be simple. There ought to be a straight tax on greenhouse-gas emissions, based on their heat-trapping efficiency. That will let the market sort things out in the most efficient manner possible (where there is a market to do the job). Instead what we are probably going to get is a set of caps, taxes, preference, exemptions, and more that makes an unholy legal and regulatory mess on top of the environmental mess; you can bet that it'll be chock-full of errors, oversights and perverse incentives. You can just hear the cash registers of the Washington lobbyists going CHA-CHING, and the accountants and regulators and lawyers for decades to come.
Ye gods, I hate it already. Why the hell can't we have the climate scientists and economists write the law, and get the pols and lobbyists the heck out of it? We would probably get a better result cheaper and with a lot less pain.
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Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Of all the alternatives to fossil fuels, I can't think of a single one that works most everywhere and doesn't require submerging lots of land, clear-cutting or repetitively mowing large tracts and taking most of their net biological productivity and burning it, or forcing you to deal with a very intermittent supply. Except nuclear, that is.
Solar and wind have their place, but there's a problem: we don't have the infrastructure and consuming patterns which can deal with large parts of the electrical generating capacity going off-line overnight or even for days at a time. We can promote these sources by making everyone buy electricity at the hour-by-hour spot rate, so that it becomes economically reasonable to charge your batteries or make ice when power is cheap and then consume the power or air-conditioning later. But:
- This won't happen until people are paying the true cost of the power they use according to exactly when they use it, and
- we'll still need base-load generating capacity to supply the things which cannot shut down.
Ergo, nuclear. Then why is the crisis aspect only affecting the part of the country which has had severe restrictions on additions to generating capacity for over a decade, and a drought? Not true. If we are going to meet even the tiny Kyoto CO2 reductions, we are going to have to make large cuts in coal consumption. The bulk of coal is used to make electricity, and the electric powerplant fuel which makes the least CO2 happens to be uranium.--
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Already in places like India it's cheaper to get a solar panel, a battery and a fluorescent lamp than it is to buy lamp oil. Conservation makes dollars-and-cents sense in more places and uses all the time. Greenhouse-emission taxes increase the incentives, and you can bet that the market will do things and find solutions under the profit motive that would be impossible for government mandates to accomplish.
The thing that bothers me is that I might have to buy land on a hilltop despite my best efforts to avoid the environmental problems, because there were no fiscal incentives for others to avoid doing the damage.
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Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
If there's anything to be learned from the furor in California, it's that you can't just take care of the majority. You have to supply everyone, or else all hell breaks loose. You also have to degrade gracefully; rolling blackouts are not graceful. Since the system is not designed to discriminate between priorities of uses, such as traffic lights, elevators and desk computers (priority 1), overhead lights (priority 2), climate control and air conditioning (priority 3) and water heating (priority 4), the only way to manage demand and avoid a grid collapse is to shut off blocks of users. That's a system design flaw that needs to be fixed, badly.
I'd pick your argument apart some more, but I've got someone waiting for me.
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Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist