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Let's Call It 'Climate Disruption,' White House Science Adviser Suggests (Again)
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "First there was 'global warming.' Then many researchers suggested 'climate change' was a better term. Now, White House science adviser John Holdren is renewing his call for a new nomenclature to describe the end result of dumping vast quantities of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into Earth's atmosphere: 'global climate disruption.'"
He also promotes using nuclear energy as part of the solution.
Well, it is.
As much as we would all really love solar and wind to scale to a level necessary for global needs that is not going to happen with current technology. Its many decades off. Lots of science and engineering are needed to get solar there. We need something to bridge the gap between today and that future date where solar scales.
If not nuclear then its natural gas, oil and coal.
Even environmentalists are starting to realize this, including a co-founder of GreenPeace.
"Moore says that his views have changed since founding Greenpeace, and he now believes that using nuclear energy can help counteract catastrophic climate change from burning fossil fuels. Says Moore, "The 600-plus coal-fired plants emit nearly 2 billion tons of CO2 annually -- the equivalent of the exhaust from about 300 million automobiles." Moore also cites reports from the Clean Air Council that coal plants are responsible for 64 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, 26 percent of nitrous oxides and 33 percent of mercury emissions. "Meanwhile, the 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States effectively avoid the release of 700 million tons of CO2 emissions annually," says Moore. "Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely." Moore points out that the average cost of producing nuclear energy in the United States was less than two cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable with coal and hydroelectric. He predicts that advances in technology will bring the cost down further in the future. According to Moore, British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, also believes that nuclear energy is the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change. Concerns about past accidents in the nuclear industry were also mentioned, as he claims the Chernobyl nuclear disaster as example, calling it "an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up". He also recognized the difficulty of dealing with nuclear waste."
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Gr...
Regarding nuclear waste from current reactors. 4th generation reactors can use this waste as fuel. And the waste from 4th gen is short lived. Hundred of years rather than tens of thousands.
http://www.ga.com/energy-multi...
NASA also thinks nuclear has greatly improved the environment.
"Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000-7.04 million deaths and 80-240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces. By contrast, we assess that large-scale expansion of unconstrained natural gas use would not mitigate the climate problem and would cause far more deaths than expansion of nuclear power."
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/...
If you're going to mindlessly regurgitate debunked climate myth #11, at least get the decade right with respect to the canon...
The only scam here is the environmental exploiters funding junk science and junk social engineering so they can continue to profit from fouling the global commons without cost to themselves. Big Tobacco could have learned a trick or two from these guys.
Actually, it's the other way around-- the tactics used to spread confusion about climate science are ones that they learned from the tobacco industry's fight against health science, when the cigarette companies were trying to discredit the science that showed that cigarettes were bad for health.
It's not merely the same strategy that is being used for spreading the illusion of doubt, it's many of the same people doing it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Devil's Advocate here: Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't a professor.
Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't relevant in any way. It is only the climate change deniers that are interested in Al Gore-- but they seem to be completely obsessed with him. He's not a scientist, he hasn't written or contributed to any of the papers laying out the science behind anthropogenic climate change, he is not part of the scientific literature. If he didn't exist, the climate models, the analysis of climate data, and the conclusions would be unchanged.
If you're talking about Al Gore, you're really not talking about science. At best, he's a popularizer.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Precisely, and the summary is still propagating their bullshit. Researches did not change the terms, it was yet another false debate, both terms had been in use for decades, there was (and still is) a journal called "climatic change" that was established in the 70's, around the same time the term "global warming" started appearing in the literature to describe the current direction of change. The term "climatic change" goes way back, it was in the title of a 1950's paper and probably goes back further than that.
The entire "scientists changed the name" meme was the brain fart of a PR advisor to GWB ( Frank Luntz) who suggested in a memo to Bush that the government change the phrase in it's communications to the public in an attempt to "challenge the science" (ie: shameless propaganda)
From the link: In a 2002 memo to President George W. Bush titled "The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America", obtained by the Environmental Working Group, Luntz wrote: "The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.... Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field."
They did a similar thing to James Hansen, he gave a talk on his work and was told he couldn't talk about it in public without permission from NASA's political minders. Hansen went to the NYT and the courts to protest and get the censorship lifted, the government complied but then changed the wording of NASA's mission statement, removing the "to understand and protect the home planet" words that justified Hansen's budget.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.