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Technology's Role In a Climate Solution (thebulletin.org)
Lasrick writes: If the world is to avoid severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts (PDF), carbon emissions must decrease quickly. Achieving such cuts, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, depends in part on the availability of "key technologies." But arguments abound against faith in technological solutions to the climate problem. Electricity grids may be ill equipped to accommodate renewable energy produced on a massive scale. Many technological innovations touted in the past have failed to achieve practical success. Even successful technologies will do little good if they mature too late to help avert climate disaster. In this debate in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, experts from India, the United States, and Bangladesh address the following questions: To what extent can the world depend on technological innovation to address climate change? And what promising technologies—in generating, storing, and saving energy, and in storing greenhouse gases or removing them from the atmosphere—show most potential to help the world come to terms with global warming?
>> Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, experts from India, the United States, and Bangladesh
No China? Well, then, enjoy your BS session.
Here is a quote direct from the "article":
"The United States and Canada must reduce their energy consumption by about 90 percent; Europe, Australasia, and Japan must do so by about 75 percent. Cities must shrink drastically and energy differentials between urban and rural areas must disappear. Localism must be prioritized and governance decentralized. Uniform risk and emissions standards must be implemented for everyone."
Is it any wonder no one sane takes you global warming nuts seriously at this point?
Use a super sophisticated algorithm to remove the "adjustments" that are introduced into satellite surface temperature datasets that artificially show exaggerated global warming..
All of this is surprisingly achievable by expanding electrical grid and moving to all-nuclear energy generation. Unfortunately, opposition from the green movement to nuclear doomed us to pursuit of ineffective solar and wind solutions.
Seriously, people just have a huge appetite for consuming junk. We've created a whole economic/social/political system predicated on consuming more and more junk. It keeps people under control as they slave away doing pointless stuff to get other pointless stuff. I don't see how you can break that system right now without risking massive social stability issues.
They are building hundreds of nuclear power plants...will the world follow?
The AGW crowd is like my ex; always complaining about a problem but always rejecting the solutions.
Hint: Higher taxes and killing economies are not the solution.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Actually, China is and has been taking action on climate change, and if you've ever "seen" the air in a major Chinese city, you understand why.
It's a myth that anything the US does to offset climate change will be offset by some other countries, other countries have smart people who understand the problem, too.
This is action on pollution, not climate change, as every industrializing nation eventually does. (And does so only after integrating the benefits of industrialization, smoke and all, and not before, and properly so, as polluted cities are better for your longevity than dirt floor existence, the precursor.)
If you call it "climate change action", you get bonus brownie points.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
They are building hundreds of nuclear power plants...will the world follow?
They're also building coal plants just as fast as they can. They're just building plants, period. They don't give a shit what the outputs are like, as usual.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's not enough nuclear fuel to do that. We have enough uranium for 200 years at CURRENT consumption rates. If you build 10 times the current number of nuclear plants, you'll only have 20 years worth of fuel.
http://www.scientificamerican....
It would require other mystical technological advancements for all-nuclear to be a viable option.
Future generations will marvel at the fact that we burned coal to illuminate empty highways at night. It will seem unconscionable that much of the power generated in the destruction of our environment allayed only the most trivial of concerns, if it served any useful purpose at all.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Climate change is going to be bad for the planet on average (especially food production) and the costs of adaptation would be worse than the costs of prevention. I encourage you to do your own research for a source, if you're interested in facts.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Aside from being unachievable, we should be asking ourselves as a species: is it even a good idea to try?
The amount of energy we "use" (ie. convert) today will register as noise relative to what we will be using in 1,000 years from now (should we survive). We've reached the age, as a species, where we need to be focusing on the long-term, as well as the short-term. If we're to survive past the next mass extinction event, we're going to have to keep the technology advancement train a'rollin. There is no going back, and there's no reason to go back.
We should each strive to reduce our impact on the planet, our resources, and each other. We should build efficient machines, and use them efficiently. We should stop burning coal, gas, and oil, and generate our electricity through a blend of hydro, nuclear fission, solar, wind, and geothermal. These are all short-term achievable, and healthy for our civilization.
But we should not be compromising our ability to convert enormous amounts of energy, nor the effort we put into developing this technology. For one day, we're gonna need it.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Also those who thinks roads are important for the economy but can't agree on how to fund them.
And that's why the USA's economy was dead between 1946 and 1964 when the top tax bracket was 91%.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
We are doomed because we are all cows.
Say, "Moo," cows. Moooooo...
We are ALL cows. The climate change deniers, stupidly repeating rhetoric and falacious logic. The ecologists, hoping beyond hope that regulations and social programs can save us. The technologists, egotistically believing their brainpower will find a fix powerful enough to overcome all the natural processes that are already in progress, and that fix will actually get implemented. The oligarchs, selfishly believing their manshions, safe rooms, private armies (which we euphemistically call police departments), and even their compounds in the southern hemisphere will protect them. ALL are cows, wandering blindly toward the slaughter. A slaughter of our own mutual creation.
Because we, as a species, did not have the wherewithal to collectively say, "Fuck That Shit!" when those with a little bit more power and bigger sticks told us to fight others to get more stuff for ourselves, unknowingly giving even more power to the top stick-haver... Because we let someone convince us that we even needed or wanted that stuff in the first place... we have facilitated the social and technological machinery that has inexorably brought us to where we are now: in a bizzarre, collective mix of all four stages of death at the same time.
But that death will come, regardless of what any of us want or believe or try. I hate to say it, but the only way out would be if 90% of the world population just died off. And we all know that isn't going to happen. So, the only thing left to do is to, as contentedly as we can muster, given the circumstances,...
Say, "Moooooo."