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Another Study Finds Earth's CO2 Emissions Have Flattened Over The Last Three Years (go.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:
Worldwide emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide have flattened out in the past three years, a new study showed Monday, raising hopes that the world is nearing a turning point in the fight against climate change. However, the authors of the study cautioned it's unclear whether the slowdown in CO2 emissions, mainly caused by declining coal use in China, is a permanent trend or a temporary blip...
The study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, says global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry is projected to grow by just 0.2 percent this year. That would mean emissions have leveled off at about 36 billion metric tons in the past three years even though the world economy has expanded, suggesting the historical bonds between economic gains and emissions growth may have been severed. "This could be the turning point we have hoped for," said David Ray, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved with the study. "To tackle climate change those bonds must be broken and here we have the first signs that they are at least starting to loosen."
Last week a study suggested earth's plant life is absorbing a greater percentage of global CO2 emissions -- although reductions in China could also be significant. According to the article, almost 30% of the world's carbon emissions come from China.
The study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, says global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry is projected to grow by just 0.2 percent this year. That would mean emissions have leveled off at about 36 billion metric tons in the past three years even though the world economy has expanded, suggesting the historical bonds between economic gains and emissions growth may have been severed. "This could be the turning point we have hoped for," said David Ray, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved with the study. "To tackle climate change those bonds must be broken and here we have the first signs that they are at least starting to loosen."
Last week a study suggested earth's plant life is absorbing a greater percentage of global CO2 emissions -- although reductions in China could also be significant. According to the article, almost 30% of the world's carbon emissions come from China.
That the rate increase is going down isn't good enough, alas. That means it's still increasing. We need a reversal, with less CO2 pumped out than what is absorbed, and we're nowhere near that yet.
Still, it's a good first sign, but we're still getting worse, not better.
So why did the UK & USA go to war in Iraq on the basis of chasing weapons of mass destruction that probably did not exist at a cost of some $1.1 trillion? Answer: because it suited other goals that politicians wanted. So: today politicians are chasing short term goals and keeping their eyes shut tight to the probable huge long term consequences of not dealing with climate change.
Is it? It has always been touted as being very,very cheap, but it never was.
And I am sure the nuclear industry didn't factor in the long-term costs of how to store away the nuclear waste safely, for generations. Or the costs of dismantling a plant. Or of course the costs when something bad happens. 100 billion $ total cost of Fukushima disaster.
CO2 in the atmosphere, and the world's CO2 output over a year, isn't the same thing. They're correlated, but with a long delay (in the order of decades or longer IIRC). The atmosphere itself, oceans, forests etc all act like buffers. So if the world (read: mankind's) CO2 output would drop to 0 instantly, CO2 in the atmosphere will stay high for a long time no matter what. Adding more CO2 just makes the problem worse. So a more accurate way is saying that the rate at which we're making the problem worse, has slowed down / flattened. We're still running, and still in the opposite direction of where we should be going, just our [running in the wrong direction] has slowed down.
Once atmospheric CO2 (and with that, average global temperatures) passes certain levels, all kinds of secondary effects may kick in: melting of permafrost areas, melting of oceanic methane ice (yeah I know not CO2 but still caused & contributing to same problem), forest fires due to extended droughts, etc, etc.
No you dont " ruins the site for a couple hundred years" here is a list of dissmantled nuclear powerplants and as you can see it did NOT take 100+ years to release the sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning
as for accidents, chernobyl will never happen again, fukushima contaminated a very small area (yes small) and the contamination will be gone in 30-40 years.
The fact is that nuclear power is magnitudes better than fosil fuels from a health point of view.
se:http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/lifetime-deaths-per-twh-from-energy.html
I would add that Gaddafi after seeing what happened in Iraqi decided to own up to a whole bunch of WMD that we basically didn't have a clue about and allowed them to be removed. It is highly unlikely this would have happened without the Iraqi invasion.
The problem with the invasion of Iraqi was not the invasion itself but the utter lack of post invasion planning by Bush and his fellow bunch of morons.
How much has Gore made so far?
"His name was James Damore."
It's fashionable to pretend that it was all based on bloodlust but for those of us who were alive at the time, it seemed like it was the right thing to do. The decision was made with the best information at the time and in retrospect it was a mistake.
I was alive at the time, and it was a transparently stupid thing to do. It never looked like the right thing to do, and it was obvious before we even went in that it would spiral out of control. The administration sold it on lies and misinformation, and a lot of people bought it.