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Climate Scientist: Climate Engineering Might Be the Answer To Warming
Lasrick (2629253) writes "Tom Wigley is one of the world's top climate scientists, and in this interview he explains his outspoken support for both nuclear energy and research into climate engineering. Wigley was one of the first scientists to break the taboo on public discussion of climate engineering as a possible response to global warming; in a 2006 paper in the journal Science, he proposed a combined geoengineering-mitigation strategy that would address the problem of increasing ocean acidity, as well as the problem of climate change. In this interview, he argues that renewable energy alone will not be sufficient to address the climate challenge, because it cannot be scaled up quickly and cheaply enough, and that opposition to nuclear power 'threatens humanity's ability to avoid dangerous climate change.'"
good thing we didn't cover the poles with dark soot, like they were calling for in the 70's to stop the impending ice age.
had not be so busy getting a knobber, we might not have this problem:
Then again AlGore would not have a job being a global alarmist alarmist either...
"BAS: Are you surprised that so many environmental groups remain vehemently opposed to nuclear power?
Wigley: “Saddened” would be a better word. Often the main concern of those groups is proliferation—the use or theft of nuclear material to make weapons. I think that that is a misrepresented issue as well. One of the saddest things was when the Clinton administration shut down the program on fast reactors.1 Clinton, [Al] Gore, and John Kerry are to blame there. If that program had not been shut down, and fast reactors had continued to develop, within maybe three years we could have started building Integral Fast Reactor systems with the whole nuclear cycle on one site—reprocessing waste materials onsite and having very little residual waste to deal with. If that had happened, I don’t think we would have a global warming problem now at all. We could have started on a pathway of rapid introduction of fourth-generation nuclear technology, and we would have gained 20 years in solving the climate problem
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
The only thing you can't have is the smallpox.
...and slavery, and lack of medical care, the lack of a civilized global society...
Sure, you can go out into the woods and live 'off the grid', as it were, but you do so while being completely protected from invasion, wars, raids, and etc - about the only thing you have to worry about is the occasional criminal or two. You can also do so knowing that if you get an infection or suchlike, modern medical help help is not really that far away. Finally, you do it with a huge advantage in knowledge that the 200-years-gone man never had, or could have even if he wanted it.
It's a far cry from the life of a typical family trying to settle, say, Western Kentucky in 1814, where dying young (if you were lucky enough to make it to adulthood in the first place) was pretty damned common. ...they did get to see more stars at night, though.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
If you don't mind I will leave it to the experts who spend years studying it and then devote their lives to it.
As opposed...say...to people who live near the ocean....