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We Stopped At Two Nuclear Bombs; We Can Stop At Two Degrees.
Lasrick writes Dawn Stover writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that climate change is irreversible but not unstoppable. She describes the changes that are happening already and also those likely to happen, and compares what is coming to the climate of the Pliocene: 'Even if countries reduce emissions enough to keep temperatures from rising much above the internationally agreed-upon "danger" threshold of 2 degrees Celsius (which seems increasingly unlikely), we can still look forward to conditions similar to those of the mid-Pliocene epoch of 3 million years ago. At that time, the continents were in much the same positions that they are today, carbon dioxide levels ranged between 350 and 400 ppm, the global average temperature was 2 to 3 degrees Celsius higher than it is today (but up to 20 degrees higher than today at the northernmost latitudes), the global sea level was about 25 meters higher, and most of today's North American forests were grasslands and savanna.' Stover agrees with two scientists published in Nature Geoscience that 'Future warming is therefore driven by socio-economic inertia," and points the way toward changing a Pliocene future.
I never would have guessed. The nuclear power industry which funds the entire fraudulent "global warming" faux-science scam, would like to tell you there's still time, if you act now.
Give me a break.
Considering there have been over 2000 nuclear tests
and "we" can do the stopping? George Carlin reference here.
We didn't stop at 2 nuclear bombs. We exploded them and exploded them like they were goddamn tic-tacs. We didn't even do that safely -- we exploded them near our own civilian populations, telling the people that it was harmless and not to worry about that fallout. Judging from our track record with the things, some politician in Washington had read too many comic books and was hoping that some of the civilians would develop super powers. Instead, they just got lymphoma and birth defects. We made those goddamn things and put them in the hands of the least responsible people on the planet and stopped only after irreparable harm was done to thousands of lives. So yeah, you can draw that analogy if you want to but I don't think it points to as rosy a future as you might think it does.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
2?? We have had at least 1500 nuke test detonations.
This is so badly flawed even a slashdot editor should be able to see its complete horse sh1t
Ok, so if we up it to Three Degrees it will be a "Melting Pot" with a lot less "Ebb Tide"?
Hey, you know what didn't cause the Pliocene extinction event? High global temperatures.
Know what hasn't caused any extinction event in the history of the world? High global temperatures.
So why is there so much doom and gloom around higher global temperatures?
Some individuals are sensitive to CO2 levels as low as 600 ppm.
It's clear there too much political indifference to reduce emissions, so instead of trying to force skeptics/deniers/unbelievers into towing the line, why not a contract with them. You're choose to be on the bus and help reduce the problem, or stick to your guns and face consequences if it turns out the science was right. I imagine you'd start by laying down a set of climate benchmarks, agree on what is an acceptable variation under normal conditions, then should the averages begin to venture beyond those on the regular basis, and cause significant economic damage, the public (govt) confiscates all the assets of the entity, the directors, the board, and any previous board members/directors and anyone they gifted or passe don wealth to, from now on. Seems like a fair way to deal with the problem, since if you firmly believe things won't change you have nothing to lose. Sure we end up in the shit, but it's clear we end up in the shit anyway, at least this way we eventually there's some risk to be taken on-board and we save all the pointless arguments. Right now the carbon industry has nothing to lose by blocking their ears, and this is this problem
we can still look forward to conditions similar to those of the mid-Pliocene epoch of 3 million years ago. At that time, the continents were in much the same positions that they are today, carbon dioxide levels ranged between 350 and 400 ppm, the global average temperature was 2 to 3 degrees Celsius higher than it is today (but up to 20 degrees higher than today at the northernmost latitudes), the global sea level was about 25 meters higher, and most of today's North American forests were grasslands and savanna.'
And much of the now-occupied hinterlands of Europe and the USA were underwater... not so bad.
up to 20 degrees higher than today at the northernmost latitudes... the global sea level was about 25 meters higher
I bet some inland Canadians/Scandinavian countries wouldn't mind, and they're not the only ones. There's lots of money to be made by letting climate change create havoc: insurance companies get more business when there's uncertainty; uncertainty gives speculators more volatility to work with; defense contractors have more food riots to quell; politicians get to make more promises to solve the new problems; and corporations get more grants, bailouts and subsidies to help solve them. First-world politicians get to use FUD to gain a bit more control over the populace, and the harsher climates help them avoid that dreaded post-scarcity economy just a little bit longer. Break enough windows and people won't be able to buy a society that no longer 'needs' the robber barons and demagogues.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
No? Then how do you know high temperatures caused no extinctions?
Buncha rich folks want it to be 'future peoples' problem.
Just like everything else.
We're going to ignore what we KNOW will be a problem.
Until it's a huge serious immediate problem.
THEN we'll do something.
... I call BS on your report.
Increased CO2 emissions are actually greening the planet.
...because the temperature is NOT going up.
If you look at the data you will find we have been flat for the last 20 years. And that's after the Warmists tried every trick in the book to 'adjust' the earlier temperatures downwards in a vain effort to pretend that there was still a problem. The satellite readings, which can't be fiddled with, show a constant fall.
So it looks as if continuing to do what we're already doing - pumping CO2 out - causes temperatures to fall. Isn't that nice?
Of course it could be that all of this is just natural variation, and that human output is too small to affect things one way or the other. You may think this, I couldn't possibly comment... :)
Frankly, what are people so concerned about? Climate's gonna change, people gonna die or relocate, society will have to adapt, animals will die out... But nature will adapt qnd so will we. It's gonna suck a lot but it's not gonna be a tangible end to anything.
It's about time I got my metapsychic powers and ramapithecus servants.
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Go take your conspiracy nonsense somewhere else.
"come on guise i'm super cereal climate change is real so pass all these regulations to help my constituent industries"
"the science is real even if we paid off the 'scientists'"
"look we fixed it, aren't we great, vote for us"
Considering there have been over 2000 nuclear tests.
1. Unnecessarily and inappropriately pedantic.
2. Oblivious to, and not applicable to, her point.
3. Unsuccessful at sabotaging the 2/2 dramatic reference she was making for effect.
Really. I can't help but laugh every time there's a climate change bickering here on /.
It's absolutely stunningly awesome. You have two sides, zealous in their quest to convince everyone and their dog that they're right. Both sides have various "studies", produced more likely than not in a dark, rather warm but also quite smelly place and pulled out of there with little ceremony. Both sides accusing the other side of shilling, resorting to name calling and whatnot.
And neither side has any idea what to DO if they're right.
That's the actual joke here. Let's say, just for argument's sake, that there is global warming and that the whole sky-is-falling scenario will happen (which, I will freely admit, I think actually will happen). What now? Does anyone where really think there will be anything REMOTELY close to global consent on laws to lower the impact? Seriously? Fuck, we can't even get international consensus on stuff that presents an immediate and direct danger rather than a maybe-kinda-could-be-sorta danger in half a century. Even if we DID know for a fact, no doubt about it, 100% sure, proven FACT, that in 50 years life on earth as we know it would be impossible, you would NOT get any kind of international law going. No chance, no way.
But hey, keep talking. If nothing else, it's entertaining.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The CO2 levels on the earth just 100,000 years ago are 3x what they are now... And there was no global warming.... Matter of fact, there was an ICE AGE going on at the time... Climate change is bullshit, with JUNK SCIENCE backing it up. The climate Changes ALL THE TIME... The tree rings tell us the climate for the last several million years. ANY of THOSE scientists, will tell you this is nothing new, and has happened HUNDREDS of times in the past.
The summary is written as if human co2 emissions are the ONLY thing that influence climate change.
I am getting really tired of this shit. A 4 year old understands that no one variable will end up dominating a system with billions of variables.
thanks.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I think we should use the remaining nuclear weapon stockpiles to nuke the polar icecaps. That way we get rid of the danger of these weapons, and at the same time prove scientifically that polar icecap melting has no effect on sea level and hence global warming is no threat whatsoever.
Kidding aside, remember the old leftist religious scams of "OMFG HOLE IN THE OZONE LAYER" and "OMFG THERE WILL BE NO RAINFOREST LEFT IN 5 YEARS" from back in the 80's ? I do. They used to scream that shit in our faces in grade school. That and the "YOU KIDS HAVE NO FUTURE, THERE WILL BE NO GASOLINE OR OIL BY 1990!!!1111!!" Yeah, leftist fascist psychopaths like that have no business around children at all. They should be arrested and prosecuted for abusing children and then made to turn big rocks into small ones for 50 years.
The idea (that because we stopped at two bombs for self-survival we will stop at two degrees for the same reason) is flawed.
There was no great profit to anyone in more nuclear attacks. There is great short term profit for billions of people in burning coal, flying, consuming etc Stopping nuclear war is in everyone's interests today whereas only future generations, or poorer people, will have to worry about climate change.
just yet, but I'm resound as fiiting world-spanning Preferrably with an took precedence and distraction 4erforming.' Even documents like a here, but what is
Leela: Actually, it did. But thank God nuclear winter canceled it out.
In the last 12,000 years sea level has risen nearly 10m. That warming has led to the ascent of man. Life has reached its greatest diversity in geological periods of warming. More warming is a good thing.
an ill wind that blows no good
Not only (as others have pointed out) did we not stop at two, but setting off nuclear bombs is just a thing you can decide not to do. We may well be past the point of climate runaway, and if that's so then we would have to engage in concerted effort to prevent the imminent demise of the relative condition of biostasis we've enjoyed all the time.
Or hell, maybe the next ice age cycle will solve the problem, through some as-yet-unimagined mechanism. The question then becomes whether we'll survive that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
most of today's North American forests were grasslands and savanna
We can get giant cows and other mammals, filling the most Texan appetite imaginable if we just ensure that the conditions are right for mega-development. Ginordelicious!
since stopping global warming costs way too much, let us nuke a few more cities!
"The polar bears will be fine" - Freeman Dyson
"What I’m convinced of is that we don’t understand climate." - Freeman Dyson
As a general rule, if Freeman Dyson doesn't understand something, you don't, either. And yes, Dawn Stover, I am talking to you.
Far left continues to blame the west while ignoring the fact that china's production is more than the entire west. see for yourself.
As long as everybody points elsewhere and screams about per capita while ignoring the bulk of CO2, we have no chance.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I just don't get the big rush. I understand that green house gases are rising temperatures. I understand the possible impacts of rising water levels, more chaotic weather, changing farm lands...
But lets be clear. This polluting has been going on for the industrial revolution. Over two hundred years.
We're already getting fairly competitive hybrid and electric cars. Most car companies have decent models. Revolutionary firms like Tesla are there. Who knows what Google and Apple will do.
We already have a fair amount of renewables and it is continuing to increase. Even coal and other polluting fuels can be improved with better technology.
Much of the world is industrializing and this has lifting millions and billions of out poverty. Better still, this means stabilizing or even declining birth rates. People like to think of the world is getting overpopulated. But the pattern has been pretty consistent with much of the world getting down to a fertility rate around 2. If this is the case, that alone should massively reduce green house consumption in the next 100-200 years or so.
We have the technology and skill to avert much of the impacts of global warming. We can build levies and other flood protection measures. Maybe some regions are moved. Maybe we start different form of controlled farming. Global supply chains can move goods around the world pretty rapidly. If one region suffers a drought, things can be brought it from elsewhere.
And I am really skeptical if our leaders, even the ones championing global warming, actually see it as a great thread, instead of a means of political power.
Simple case. Obama spent his terms pushing through ObamaCare. Maybe worthy on its on right. But if we were truly facing a global disaster of global warming that threatened our existence, maybe... just maybe... he should have used his political capital and resources on that instead of healthcare.
And it's not just Obama. How many politicians or even scientists are willing to sacrifice for the anti-global warming effort?
Much like war, we get pretty cynical when they don't appear to make any sacrifices or when they don't demand sacrifices of everyone. Hey Bush, why don't you send your daughters to war in Iraq or why didn't you volunteer to go into actual war. Yet you seem pretty giddy about going to war in Iraq and other places.
The public's reaction is no different when facing politicians/scientists/academics who push for more power/taxes for 'global warming'. Are they willing to take a 30% paycut that would go to anti-global warming efforts? No... can't have that! Matter of fact, they really want to have increased funding!
Again, I'm not saying it is wrong. I am talking about perception here. Much like to win a war, maybe you need to pay your military contractors good money so they make really good weapons. But let's not pretend it doesn't create a high degree of cynicism about the true motivations.
In the end, maybe I'm just a bit positive, but I see the Earth warming a bit. We get through this. The technology is there. Our capabilities to fight the bad affects are there.
Maybe some parts of the world are hurt by it. But is global warming really the top concern for every part of the world. Turn on the news people. Thousands upon thousands are dying every day in a brutal civil war in Syria and the ME. Problems like this happen throughout the world.
If you think America developed atomic bombs and dropped two of those on Japan, you are badly mistaken. Jews developed the nukes, mostly italian, german and hungarian expatriate jews and the jewish bankerkind financed it, out of american taxpayer coffers. Eventually they exploited american junior engineers and blue-collar workers to build those nukes.
The jews then decided to drop the A-bombs on the two most christian japanese cities, Nagasaki (seat of mostly dutch-influenced protestantism) and Hiroshima (seat of roman catholicism), effectively ending the cult of Jesus in Japan by simply exterminating the cities' population. Jews knew that to bring very negative effect on japanese morals in the decades that followed, because shinto and buddhism are both prone to sexual perversions. Because of the excessive sexual perversion still prevalent in Japan, including "manga" child fetish exploitation, Japan remains a pariah, mostly isolated in international relations. Had christiandom survived and strived post-WW2, current-day Japan would have become a much more modest place and the so-called lost two decades, with the low birth rate problem and the hikikomori and suicide phenomenon would have never happened.
(On the other hand, when a bunch of young liberal, christian american occupation administrators arrived in Japan in the autumn of 1945, they were horrified by the sight of all that material and personnel destruction, inflicted upon the island nation on jewish Sanhedrin's orders. They woved to help re-create Japan as a better place. They were partially successful: the democratic constitution and the new system of government that exploited the natural cohesion of japanese people has been working well ever since, despite their artifically imposed nature. Yet, japanese christianity could not regain its popularity in the post-Nagasaki era.)
To this day, jews dare not set foot in Japan, the single hebrew cemetery in Japan has had less than 50 tombstones total, since the 1600s. They know fully well that japanese people, not just the imperial dynasty, are descended from the sun godess Amaterasu-omikami, thus falsifying the jewish claim of being the singular chosen nation of God. Yet, jews in their infinite greed and never-ending, utmost hatred of Christ Redeemer, almost managed to destroy Japan wholesale in WW2. One day in the future, they will be held responsible for their vile acts. One can only hope that their american minions, who possibly may not have realized that they were assembling nukes specifically to exterminate christianity in Japan, will be forgiven or receive lessened punishment for the ending acts of WW2.)
Future warming is not driven by therefore driven by socio-economic inertia! It is driven by the petroleum industry and the ills of capitalism that are unable to restrain powerful economic interests that subvert the public good. Carbon trading won't work either and is just another corrupting influence in the politics of money. It is anticipated to not contribute more than 3% toward a solution. The base driver is overpopulation. We had a sustainable population and a more or less stable carbon cycle only a hundred years ago. Cover terrain with huge solar and wind projects is going to severely impact what little intact ecosystems we have left.
Luckily, though not for us, nature has a solution to these problems.
It's hard to take the "facts" seriously when there appears to be obvious fraud involved. Climategate continues as temperature data seem to be systematically falsified:
https://notalotofpeopleknowtha... (Yes, it's a wordpress site, but data is from nasa.)
How can you take scientists seriously when being "right" becomes the agenda instead of pursuit of the truth? Critiques should be embraced to ensure we didn't miss something instead of being quickly dismissed as ignorant "deniers". Present ALL the facts transparently and truthfully - including funding - and let the scientific community draw the conclusions. Chips and heads fall where they may.
Fear of losing credibility, reputation, and funding is corrupting scientists and ruining science.
We didn't stop at 2 nuclear bombs, we stopped at 2053. If you haven't seen it yet this video illustrates the history of atomic bomb detonations perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Presumably, they are trying to separate dropping nukes on people from dropping them elsewhere. The key difference here is that for every kiloton of carbon released into the air there is a quantifiable economic benefit, and that same carbon "hits" everyone with its negative effects as it circulates through the atmosphere for many years later. I will agree that both are discussed as human actions that could harm the entire world. Beyond that, the differences in time scales, deployment scale, costs, and benefits of releasing compounds that cause climate change versus detonating nuclear bombs and are so dramatic that the comment isn't useful at any level beyond a nice sounding catch phrase.
There is no stopping the next ice age
The difference between nukes and fossil fuels is, nobody realistically gains anything by setting off a nuke. Fossil fuels trade short-term gains against long-term losses; with nukes, everybody loses: the only hope is that your enemy might lose more than you.
And Star Wars is a religion....
Clutching at straws, man.
Even when you cherry pick, it's still warming.
Tell me, is the IPCC prediction proven false?
NO.
Why? Because that cherry pick is far too small to show any reliable information.
Your figure is not reliable.
Because no matter HOW FRIKKING INSANE you make a post lampooning a climate denier,there's deniers by the bucket load willing to go even more batshit insane.
They had SUVs 300 million years ago???
"We stopped at two nuclear bombs"
That is the most optimistic thing I've read all week. It hasn't been a century yet, the time for the third bomb is coming.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If a technological change in our way of life can release the carbon, then why does everyone insist that there is not technological change which can reduce the carbon? And I don't mean stop the release through alternative energy sources. I mean reduce. Mind you, I am not accepting or denying the premise of AGW. I am asking a different question.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
A Whoosh? There was supposed to be a KABOOM! An Earth-shattering KABOOM!
Ignoring alll the test bombs is ridiculous. We're still dealing with the fallout from all those open-air bomb tests. Plutonium tends to stick around for a long time.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Liers, which say "there is 8000 ppm of co2 in your lungs" (in fact there is ~400 ... ~8000, and noone known if that "fresh air after opening the window" is not really sensing the minimum), or "the space heater radiates heat as well" (but not at the frequency, which destroys at a much smaller quantity).
Why do they lie? Are they paid industry puppets?
Same BS just change the terms.. My ears no longer hear the yammering of those whose only motive is to steal more money from us with some new scheme called "global warming" or "climate change".
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Nuclear attacks are single decisions made by people who have no doubt what the outcome will be. The president says "fire the missiles" and the missiles will be fired. Global warming is caused by everyone, every day, little by little. There's no point at which a particular person realizes that if drives to work then it's going to tip the CO2 balance into inevitable warming, which is why no one ever feels sufficiently responsible to really change their behavior, and where all the free-riding game theory stuff that's so depressing comes in. And that's not to mention all of the propaganda telling them their actions have literally no effect, or the cases in which they've had so little schooling that they don't know what CO2 is, let alone how the climate models work.
He never said that "people suffer ailments from as low as 600ppm CO2". Why discussions about global warming attract so many liars?
For example, the 30 meter sea rise,
http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=24.8540,54.5951&zoom=9&m=30
http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=40.7121,-73.9266&zoom=11&m=30
Other than that a new mid Pliocene seems like a nice place to evolve hominins.
We stopped at 2 lol. Oh if only they were as good at research as they are at FUD.
...then we must stop passing more regulations that can only be enacted by those countries which contribute the smallest amount to global pollution already.
The lion's share of global pollution comes from third world countries that are struggling to find a place in the global market. Their choices are simple: pollute or starve. They cannot afford advanced production technologies which reduce pollution, so they just pollute with reckless abandon. A few re-used plastic bottles in America are *nothing* compared to all the crud pumped into the air by these barely-industrial countries.
If we are serious about wanting to stop the pollution-induced climate change, we must do something more radically un-american than anything we have ever done before: we must give these countries free tech.
If they had the means to thrive without polluting, they would. But they don't. And no amount of self-regulation on our part will change that. We either give them what they need, or we watch climate change continue unabated.
I fully expect that the latter will be the winning option.
There are more nuclear armed nations now than ever before, and The Obama administration is proving that nuclear arms control cannot work:
1. Obama has doubled-down on GWB's ineffectiveness at stoping N Korea's bomb program
2. Obama has added active support for Iranian nuclear activities (asserting their right to process uranium in centrifuges) to Bush's incompetent efforts to stop Iran and the unwillingness of the Europeans to fully sanction Iran.
3. The Iranians, unlike most other nations, have repeatedly announced their desire and intent to destory other nations with nuclear weapons - and when the prime minister of one of those nations, a strong ally of the US, is coming to the US to speak, Mr Obama (who campaigned saying he believed in talking to anybody and has used that policy to justify speaking with Iran and Cuba) is unwilling to meet with him as he asserts his concerns over the Iranian program.
If the world cannot bring itself to stop the nation that has supported most of the Terrorism on Earth in the past 30 years from building nuclear weapons, then there is NO validity to ANY assertion that any nuclear arms treaty can actually be enforced - which makes all such treaties as binding as Mr. Chamberain's "piece of paper"
Nuclear weapons WILL be used at some point. "WE" have not stopped, "we" are apparently incapable of stopping.
Seriously, folks, how much more reality must people be faced with before the "global warming" myth is debunked?
I've said it before, I'll say it again...
All this talk is just a bunch of hot air going back and fourth... unless you get the whole planet on board, nothing we do will make any difference...
Oil and coal are easy to move around, if we don't burn them, someone else will... the US could cut all emissions to nothing tomorrow, it would make no difference.
China, India, Russian, and Brazil will replace everything the US produces today within 20 years...
Unless we plan to go to war over this, we as a human race are going to burn all of it, that's all there is to it.
Everything else is just happy, happy talk.
In addition to evidence of more tactical nukes being used in combat elsewhere and much later in history than WW2, there were also more than a thousand tests of nuclear bombs, some done underwater and leaving their highly radioactive byproducts in the sea. If we only take our information from video games, we can see that nuclear detonations cause global warming. (Sid Meyer's Civilization 2). If we examine it with careful thought and actual science, we can see that the nuclear bomb releases heat and greenhouse gases orders of magnitude higher than most anything else on the planet, excepting perhaps volcanoes, the other elephant in the room with regards to global warming. So. Before we start talking about goals and fantasies where we reverse global warming and recycle every plastic bag that comes with our shiny new computer components, let's think about whether those two degrees are because of nuclear testing and detonations.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
If by that you mean "made up the idea about AGW", then since AGW is a consequence of perfectly natural processes that have operated in the past when it wasn't human's producing excess CO2 that will inevitably take place now humans are producing excess CO2.
It's rather obvious that she's talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not Bikini Atoll.
How daft is this author? Panama and South America joined between 3 to 2.5 million years ago and stopped the circulation of the Pacific into the Atlantic. The continents are in the same positions but a huge part of ocean circulation is different. That is what caused us to be in an ice age for the last 3 to 2.5 million years.
Stop the CO2 nonsense. Current scientific evidence show a 0.7 to 1.5 degree increase from doubling CO2 from 300 to 600 PPM. So we've already accomplished it without even trying. Wonderful.
A question for everyone who thinks that CO2 controls the climate. How long with rising CO2 and flat or falling temperatures before you admit
your theory is wrong? 20 years? 30? Never?
All 5 of the major datasets (RSS, UAH, HadCRUT4, GISS, NCDC) show no warming for between 14 and almost 18 years. In that time CO2 has risen
8-10%.
First of all, "reducing" carbon emissions by political means - a carbon tax, etc, won't work. You just get more expensive fuel, with more widespread poverty amongst those that can't afford the more expensive fuel, and you get a marginal reduction built upon the bodies of the poor that die in subzero weather trying to sleep under a bridge, or the bodies of the kids whose parents can't afford to take them to the doctor for some preventive care.
No, the strategy that works is to give the world's manufacturing back to the USA. We can now do all our manufacturing power including heating with natural gas, which is 80% of the vaunted "hydrogen economy" since methane, the main ingredient of natural gas, is 4 parts hydrogen and 1 part carbon which we burn very, very cleanly.
And to get the world's manufacturing back to the USA, the USA must pass the Fair Tax. Understanding this requires understanding that the US income taxes are what have been sabotaging US business for decades. They are the reason that manufacturing shuts down in the USA and pops up in Canada, Mexico, Southeast Asia, Russia, anywhere but the USA.
The Fair Tax abolishes absolutely all the income taxes, as well as the IRS, and does not tax business at all. Bill Archer, a former head of the House Ways and Means committee, commissioned a survey of 500 foreign CEO's and asked them, "What would you do if the USA passed the Fair Tax?" 400 of them said that they would build their next factory in the USA. The other 100 said that they would move their company's headquarters to the USA.
Doing the world's manufacturing in the USA would go a long way toward combatting the injection of further CO2 into the atmosphere.
Other than that, we need to get some smart physicists who know electrochemistry to invent for us the magic (cheap, high capacity, cheap, lightweight, cheap, physically small, and cheap) battery so that we can use it in electric cars and power our transportation. It does no go to generate TeraWattHours of electricity with natural gas, wind, solar, and so forth if we can't use it to get from point A to point B via cars, trucks, ships, boats, and airplanes. Converting transportation to electricity is the next big challenge. Do that, and the reason for whining about a global warming crisis will disappear. Whether it is real or it is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated upon mankind, achieving electric cars and natural gas fired electricity with as much wind and solar as we can afford to build, and taking manufacturing away from everyone else that can't do it as cleanly (virtually everyone) will be the ultimate solution.
I'm talking about converting desert into productive Hydroponics farms.
Today the most critical aspect is producing freshwater to get it done.
The most interesting way to do it is high temperature nuclear.
The heat cycle to generate electricity with high temp source involves cooling down water from well over boiling point down to temps lower than boiling. That means free heat to boil water in huge scale, no penalty for doing so. The cooling is needed anyways.
But the vast majority of current nuclear operates at 350C coolant temps, not high temperature.
Several proposed reactors run anywhere from 450C to 700C, all of them able to dessalinate sea water.
High temp nuclear is also got enough to make hydrogen, amonia, even synthetic methane (natural gas).
When will we study nuclear facts and understand that nuclear kills / hurts orders of magnitude less people than coal, natural gas or oil.
Deepwater horizon killed dozens of people and took the livelyhood of millions of fisherman and tourist industry professionals. Still nuclear gets the bad rap, while oil/gas drilling still allowed.
Coal is estimated to kill about 200k yearly worldwide and 13k yearly in the USA alone.
Natural gas and oil each is estimated to kill over 10k people yearly worldwide.
The whole nuclear power supply chain killed one person in the last few decades, with total cummulative nuclear deaths for all nuclear related accidents of just a few hundred people, while coal is allowed to kill 13000 people EVERY YEAR.
If coal power stations were regulated for their radioactivity emissions like nuclear reactors, they would all be shutdown imediately.
The coal lobby was very forceful to keep its freedom to release deadly toxics and radioactivity almost freely, while nuclear reactors are burdened with insane regulatory costs.
Nuclear doesn't have to be too expensive. It was made too expensive to prevent it from destroying the coal/gas industry.
...
The line losses would be tremendous...most of the power would be lost to heat and RF emissions.
Can you prove that with math instead of just assuming abstract losses? How much real power line looses per 1000km for example? Soviet Union moved electricity around its vast spaces, using its non-high-tech united electric grid. Without any superconductors.
It is far more efficient to have highly distributed generation AND storage than to have an intercontinental power grid of supersized transmission lines.
Yes, it is. But it's much more expensive than global transmission grid.
Anyway, my point was not that we must concentrate on single solution, but rather that solutions exist in many ways, I just suggestged simpliest one (except that political fantasy part of couse).
Per the logic in this article headline, humanity is DOOMED!!!
The article stipulates that we stopped at 2 bombs, we can stop at 2 degrees.
Well, we didn't...in fact humans have droped 2,119 bombs (+ or - a few)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
By this logic, expect the average global temperature to go from a cozy cool 57.2F to a sunlike 2,176.2 degrees (+ or - a degree or two) ;-)