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Why Sustainable Power Is Unsustainable
Urchin writes "Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter, the most advanced 'renewable' technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources including indium and platinum —
resources that could dry up in 10-15 years if they were widely used in the renewable energy market."
For things like solar, sure. But I don't see wind or tidal power generation needing anything more advanced than fiberglass.
Scientists who study climate are in agreement. Some non-experts who study unrelated fields disagree. I'll stand with the people who know what they're talking about, and whose arguments I find sensible.
Feel free to review the evidence yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
I came here for a good argument
I disagree categorically with the article title. Sustainable energy is the only sane way to exist and make tradition upon. If in the short term, we find we can't implement some energy catching machine because of a scarity of an earthbound resource, someone will find another way. Human innovation is invincible.
No, I'm saying conspicuous consumers should cut down a little. If one commutes less distance or drives a more efficient vehicle, for example, is one therefore poorer?
And I'm also also that everyone can benefit from energy savings. That does not make us poorer... it makes us richer. What do you think the whole "Green IT" thing is about? Does big enterprise really care about environmentalism, or are they thrilled about cutting the huge energy costs for traditional data centers?
Maybe so, but here's a hypothetical situation to consider. A comet is crashing towards the area you live in. Scientists have a raging debate as to whether or not it will completely disintegrate before hitting your house. Do you stay in your house till they reach a "consensus" or get the hell out of there?
Whether global warming is true or not really doesn't matter much. We still need to take precautions to prevent pollution and switch to cleaner energy sources. It will benefit our own health and safety as well as be a matter of prudence.
Too bad we don't have any other way to make magenets...oh wait.
Don't you love the impartial scientific tone here? And the sheer illogic of this statement is staggering. If you know you are going to have large amount of episodic oversupply there are all sorts of useful things you can do with it. Make ice. Melt salt. Run pumps. I wouldn't be surprised if the "giant toaster" is some clever over supply utilization system being ridiculed by TFA's evidently clueless author.
--MarkusQ
aka "be more poor".
Righto.. Because this past year I bought a new fridge that uses 1/5 the energy of my old fridge and replaced all the bulbs in my house with CF ones. This year I'll insulate my home (it currently has very little).
So in your opinion I'm now "more poor" than I was before? That's a bit odd, because all those decisions were purely economic ones, and I expect the fridge to pay for itself in 5-6 years. The lights are harder to calculate, but they shouldn't be more than a couple years. The insulation will pay for itself in one winter. So in my case using less energy makes me LESS poor because it winds up costing me less money.
AccountKiller
Those that bother to look at the math instead of the politics, at the history instead of the hype, are agreed.
.. is suitable for realistically providing power for the typical modern life.
Nuclear is clean, safe and practically inexhaustible. The latest advances could provide small nuclear "batteries" the size of a hot tube that could provide power to an entire neighborhood decentralizing much of the power systems (and huge networks of wires) we've come to think of as unavoidable. Making our power systems virtually fool proof. For too long we've lived in the fear from the propaganda of the illiterate press. It's time to start using the miraculous energy source we uncovered and made practical nearly 3/4 of a century ago. It's there, it's understood, it's completely doable and for a hell of lot less money than the democrats want to steal from the people of the US right now.
Go nukes! Go nukes! Go nukes!
Desterification is happening in California, Africa, and Madagascar. Lake Chad drying up is directly attributable to human activity, though not necessarily due to CO2. It's a form of anthropogenic climate change, in any case. And it's also happening to Lake Superior.
Meanwhile, Oceans are acidifying all over (the chemistry involved is directly attributable to CO2). Polar caps are melting, putting pressure on the polar bear population. Being the alpha predator of the region, this will remove the ecosystem's ability to keep prey species in check, causing far-reaching problems elsewhere.
None of this is from some sketchy model formed up by some graduage student as a doomsday scenario. It's stuff we can go out and directly observe right now.
Not a typewriter
Of course the IPCC says that humans are the cause, it is their job to say that:
The IPCC's job is to study human-induced climate change, so their jobs depend upon finding human-induced climate change.
The WWW is the solution.
Wind, waves and water can be harnessed for renewable enegy without exotic metals.
The premis of the title is wrong as it makes the assumption that the only way to get good energy is through current solar cell technologies.
No exotic metals here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
Doesn't matter, if we keep repeating that Goebbels made that quote, then people will believe it.
Problem solved.
You may wish to double check those ice core data.
The ice core data is legit. You're not a climatologist. You're not a paleoclimatologist. They did their homework. Don't pretend that you somehow know more than they do unless you've got your own data and methods to publish.
At least twice in history, CO2 levels have shot up higher than they are today[...]
Not within the last 400,000 years covered by that chart it didn't. Before then, many millions upon millions of years ago it has, but that Earth is a very different Earth. You don't want Paleozoic CO2 levels imposed upon present day ecosystems in less time that it could have occurred naturally. It's bad in terms of evolution. Even IF CO2 didn't cause warming, it will cause other problems (ocean acidification, and many plants will likely have difficulty retaining water as elevated CO2 can cause the pores in the leaves to transpire more). Evolution works, but only so quickly.
CO2 levels have shot up higher than they are today, in very short periods of time.
Not in as-short periods of time as we've had present CO2 shoot up. The slope of that line is higher than any slope elsewhere. If you don't believe me, you can download CO2 concentrations from several places, throw them all into a spreadsheet, and calculate the delta-CO2 ppm. All the data is publicly available as txt files.
Something that isn't clear, is whether CO2 levels preceded temperature increases, or the other way around.
Oh not at all. It's quite clear. You just don't know what you're talking about. It's also abundantly clear you don't study climatology, environmental science or physics. You are actually entertaining the idea that the Earth first retains more heat than normal, THEN the heat-trapping gases follow. Please explain the physics that would allow for such a thing to be remotely plausible.
It is indisputable that our fossil fuels account for the increase in CO2, as the correlation with the industrial revolution is damning. We also know that CO2 is opaque to thermal radiation. We can take a thermal camera, put it behind a glass container of CO2, and not see heat through the camera. I'm pretty sure we've never magically seen thermal radiation get blocked by a tank of warming air, then seen the CO2 concentration in that air spike as a result. Admittedly, I could be wrong since magic, sorcery, and thermodynamic witchcraft aren't fields I research in.
And, no, solar activity has NOT been dismantled. It HAS been cast into disrepute by the "consensus". But, popular opinion does not make science.
Nobody here suggested popular opinion made the science.
The popular opinion of the scientific community makes the science (as established through years of peer-reviewed published literature). That's how science works. If you've got a more scientific approach to global warming than those people did, by all means, enlighten us.