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Is There Still a Ray of Hope On Climate Change?
Hugh Pickens writes "David Leonhardt writes in the NY Times that even as the U.S. endures its warmest year on record (the 13 warmest years for the entire planet have all occurred since 1998), the country seems to be moving further away from doing something about climate change, with the issue having all but fallen out of the national debate. But behind the scenes, a different story is emerging that offers reason for optimism: the world's largest economies may be in the process of creating a climate-change response that does not depend on the politically painful process of raising the price of dirty energy. Despite some high-profile flops, like ethanol and Solyndra, clean-energy investments seem to be succeeding more than they are failing. 'The price of solar and wind power have both fallen sharply in the last few years. This country's largest wind farm, sprawling across eastern Oregon, is scheduled to open next month. Already, the world uses vastly more alternative energy than experts predicted only a decade ago,' writes Leonhardt. Natural gas, the use of which has jumped 25 percent since 2008 while prices have fallen more than 80 percent, now generates as much electricity as coal in the United States, which would have been unthinkable not long ago. Thanks in part to earlier government investments, energy companies have been able to extract much more natural gas than once seemed possible which, while far from perfectly clean, is less carbon-intensive than coal use. The clean-energy push has been successful enough to leave many climate advocates believing it is the single best hope for preventing even hotter summers, concludes Leonhardt, adding that while a cap-and-trade program faces an uphill political battle, an investment program that aims to make alternative energy less expensive is more politically feasible. 'Our best hope,' says Benjamin H. Strauss, 'is some kind of disruptive technology that takes off on its own, the way the Internet and the fax took off.'"
What part of "warmest year on record" is unclear to you?
Perhaps the part where the year is not yet finished, and every single Warmist Chicken-Little alarmist such as yourself proclaiming weather is the same as climate (but not when winters are colder! No sir, then it means nothing).
It's exactly people like you that make me utterly ignore, and in fact work against when possible anyone of your dour faith.
After all, humanity as a whole has prospered when the overall climate has been warmer in the past, and all attempts to claim runaway behavior from existing climate change have been proved to be bunk - along with your high priests inability to predict anything about climate changes that actually happen going forward, why should we treat you and your disciples with anything but utter scorn and ridicule?
It all started when you claimed AGW was based on "science", a curious science that silenced detractors and ignored requests to review raw data... and you wonder why more reasonable heads fail to support you now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Never mind that 1/2 of Greenland just fell off last week
You were aware that glaciers calve ALL THE TIME?
Sigh. Such ignorance to display before the learned...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do you have reading comprehension problems? The quoted text says "on record".
Who exactly has reading comprehension problems? The sentence says this year is the warmest on record for the US. It says the past 13 are the warmest period for the whole planet, no mention of recorded or time at all. What it may have meant... actually isn't clear (do they mean the warmest in the past 100 years? Because that is pretty meaningless, really.)
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Obama
Consider looking at population through the prism of a world without fossil fuels and other natural resources.
They look a lot healthier.
These fossil fuels pretty much make modern agriculture what it is today.
Yes, toxic and destructive.
It is hard for us to picture a world in which human beings become less capable and have less technology because it is not something we have observed in our lifetimes.
No, it is not difficult. All we have to do to picture such a world is look at history.
However, it can happen, and currently we have no mitigating plan to deal with the dwindling availability of fossil fuels.
You are either a liar or grossly underinformed. We have numerous plans to deal with this situation, all of which have less environmental impact than using fossil fuels.
Once fossil fuels become too expensive for agriculture, we could all be in big trouble.
We could be, if we were very very stupid. As long as you avoid monocultures which are only necessary to enable machine cultivation, you can produce more food per acre using sustainable agricultual techniques such as actual organic farming, which doesn't just mean you use what's on the USDA Organic permitted list. It means (among other things) that agriculture is treated as the cyclical thing that it needs to be for sustainability. Currently the food is turned into fertilizer in our guts, and then we flush that down the toilet and to a "waste treatment plant" where feces is wasted. We don't even need to give up flush toilets, only sewage treatment plants as they are currently implemented.
As well, we have long since developed the technologies for sustainable biofuels to replace our transportation fuels, including biodiesel which could cost-effectively be made from algae today and butanol which BP and DuPont have been suppressing through their shell company Butamax, though they do not even own the complete technology (and though the technologies involved were developed at a public university, and partly funded with tax money.)
Further, we have long been able to produce viable solar panels. Taking PV solar alone, the panels can easily repay the energy cost of their production in just a couple years now, but even back in the seventies a crystalline panel that lasts 20-30 years could repay its energy cost in just seven years. That means that if we had built even PV-solar farms (let alone theoretically more efficient thermal plants) back when we first gained the technology to create them, they would have produced net power for at least 13 years, and maybe 23. And here I'm not even getting into hybrid solar panels which are both PV and water heaters, which not only convert substantially more solar energy into a useful form, but which also operate more efficiently and even have a longer life due to being cooled.
Solar power is not the only bulk generation technology available to us, either. The romans were using windmills to pump water into aqueducts using an Archimedes' screw and there's no reason we can't be using them today to produce far more of our power than they produce today. Indeed, we can combine them with elements of the petroleum technology that you love so well, and use the structures we normally use to site oil wells to place windmills offshore where they produce the most constant power. And then there's nuclear, which we could wrin
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Seems odd that a theory is able to be validate by any condition, the models predict everything happening.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The grandparent may have shot from the hip, but his main point stands.
There are many lunatic environmentalists that claim "civilization as we know it will be no more" because of global warming, unless we reduce global population by 90%, or mandate 20 years of zero economic growth for "rich countries", or something equally absurd. Some borderline sociopaths have even calculated the carbon footprint of African babies. Oh, and waging a campaign of hate against "deniers" does not help.
And as TFA explains, all this alarmism, lies and hatred are for nothing. The price of solar power is collapsing, and wind is going down too. It is predicted half the world will reach residential solar grid parity as early as *2015*; wind will reach grid parity by 2025. And there are even other options such as next-generation nuclear.
If the government still thinks the market is moving too slowly, I can accept some light intervention (by slightly subsidizing renewables and slightly overtaxing oil and coal, for example). But reducing human population, crippling the economy, or creating an oppressive UN environmental agency to erode national sovereignty, are all unthinkable.
See
1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/8165769/Cancun-climate-change-summit-scientists-call-for-rationing-in-developed-world.html
2. http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
3. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100058296/1010-who-are-you-going-to-kill-to-help-save-the-planet/
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity