If nuclear plants had made real financial sense in the face of cheaper, faster to build and less risky coal plants and other non-nuclear energy sources more of them would have been built. I doubt the litigators and regulators would have been able to stand in the way. As it stands now they can't be built without government loan guarantees and government provided catastrophic insurance coverage.
The simplest way to implement a carbon tax is to impose it as it comes out of the ground at the mine or well head or at the import point and just let the cost move up the supply chain to the end user. And I think a little should be withheld to fund research into reducing carbon output, maybe 2 or 3%. Finally it should start out low, barely noticeable, and grow a little each year until in 25 or 30 years it becomes expensive to give time for the needed new infrastructure to be built.
If you think the reason few nuclear plants were built over the last 40 years was only because of liberal opposition you are wrong. A far stronger reason is that it was cheaper, faster and less risky to build coal plants or other energy sources. It's probably impossible to get a loan to build one without government guarantees. It's impossible to get private insurance for one leaving the government on the hook for any disasters. If nuclear energy had really made sense financially I doubt liberals would have been able to stand in the way.
The difference between CO2 and water vapor as greenhouse gases is that water vapor is a condensing GHG and CO2 is a non-condensing GHG. In the conditions that prevail on Earth water vapor condenses and falls out of the atmosphere but CO2 doesn't. The level of water vapor in the atmosphere is strictly controlled by temperature. That means that water vapor cannot drive temperature changes by itself but only as a feedback of other things like CO2 or changes to the state of the Milankovitch cycles that force temperature changes. If you removed all of the greenhouse gases other than water vapor from the atmosphere the temperature would start to drop reducing the level of water vapor causing more drop. Eventually the water vapor would reach a new balance in the atmosphere but probably not before the oceans froze over and we had a new snowball Earth.
The Hiroshima is a new unit of energy equivalent to the energy of the Little Boy bomb. The oceans are currently heating up at a rate of over 2 Hiroshima's per second. Ignoring the possibility of nuclear winter all the nuclear explosions we could produce wouldn't make a lick of difference.
You are right that droughts are caused by lack of precipitation when and where it would otherwise be expected but they can be exacerbated by heat waves. In a prolonged drought with high temperatures the water gets evaporated out of the soil faster and once the soil is dry it starts baking. Also, talking about 1 degree of temperature difference is kind of misleading. That is the average over the whole globe made up of many thousands of discrete observations. It doesn't mean every place is going to experience exactly that 1 degree. As Hansen points out it shifts the whole bell curve of temperatures toward the hot side making extreme hot spells more likely and extreme cold spells less likely.
As John Donne said, no man is an island. Your well being is dependent on the well being of those around you. As much as your own efforts got you where you are today you got a lot of help along the way and you are still dependent on the society around you to maintain and advance your lifestyle.
Economic cataclysm is only assured if we have no alternatives to the current economic paradigm. Clearly this is not the case. I've seen a number of economic studies that say it would only take about 3% of GDP to effectively respond the the threat of global warming. That doesn't sound cataclysmic to me.
That's what bothers me about all the politicians (mostly on the right side of the ledger) saying that government is the problem and can never be effective. If we then put them in office how can we expect they would even try to improve it rather than just trying to get as much personally as they can out of it?
The energy released by burning fossil fuels (and from nuclear reactions), commonly called waste heat, is so small compared to the energy the Sun radiates onto the Earth that it can be ignored for all practical purposes. The average insolation at the surface of the Earth is around 250 W/m^2. The average energy released by human activities is about 0.028 W/m^2 or about 1/9,000th as much energy as we get from the Sun. The forcing due to the greenhouse gases added by human activities in the past 250 years is currently about 2.9 W/m^2 or about 100 times as much as the waste heat. That puts waste heat near the bottom of the priority list.
Seriously, you don't understand models very well. It appears you think models are just an exercise in curve fitting, in other words statistical models. Climate models are physical models in that as much as possible they use the actual mathematics that describe the physical interactions they are trying to model. When the data (aka observations of the real climate) don't match the model's output they investigate the underlying physical reasons it doesn't match and try to improve their understanding. Try these FAQ's for better understanding of how climate models work:
I like your position but I'd like to point out something. You said:
Some people who are against abortion at any point don't even realize that regular birth control pills can cause a fertilized embryo to not implant in the uterus - technically causing an abortion by "the pill"
Medical science has found that even when birth control is not used some 60-70% of fertilized eggs either fail to implant or spontaneously abort in the first week or so. Because of that fact I don't consider what "the pill" does abortion in any way.
Abstinence is nice and idealistic and all that however it goes against the fundamental drive to reproduce that all animals including humans have. You could say that someone who successfully practices abstinence is one who is not normal.
There's a famous quote about that to the effect that all models are wrong but they may still be useful. Due to complexity it's unlikely we'll ever be able to make a perfect model of the climate but if the model is more accurate than other methods of prediction then it's useful as a tool to explore how what we think we know about climate matches reality.
He missed that the stratosphere would also cool due to thinning of the ozone layer...
I used to think that as well but it turns out that reduced ozone is at best a very minor component of stratospheric cooling. There is an explanation of what's going on with stratospheric cooling here.
That just shows you don't have a clue about what climate models do. Read the following and educate yourself if it's not too far above your reading level:
One more little tidbit. You mentioned the weak El Nino's but on the other side of ENSO La Nina's generally lead to somewhat cooler global temperatures but 2011 was the warmest La Nina year ever recorded.
My impression of Hansen is that he is someone who would just as soon not be in the limelight but as a leading scientist in the field he has decided the issue is far to important for him to remain silent.
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And most of those industries are owned and run by Republicans. I guess they put their plants there because they hate Democrats.
If nuclear plants had made real financial sense in the face of cheaper, faster to build and less risky coal plants and other non-nuclear energy sources more of them would have been built. I doubt the litigators and regulators would have been able to stand in the way. As it stands now they can't be built without government loan guarantees and government provided catastrophic insurance coverage.
The simplest way to implement a carbon tax is to impose it as it comes out of the ground at the mine or well head or at the import point and just let the cost move up the supply chain to the end user. And I think a little should be withheld to fund research into reducing carbon output, maybe 2 or 3%. Finally it should start out low, barely noticeable, and grow a little each year until in 25 or 30 years it becomes expensive to give time for the needed new infrastructure to be built.
If you think the reason few nuclear plants were built over the last 40 years was only because of liberal opposition you are wrong. A far stronger reason is that it was cheaper, faster and less risky to build coal plants or other energy sources. It's probably impossible to get a loan to build one without government guarantees. It's impossible to get private insurance for one leaving the government on the hook for any disasters. If nuclear energy had really made sense financially I doubt liberals would have been able to stand in the way.
The difference between CO2 and water vapor as greenhouse gases is that water vapor is a condensing GHG and CO2 is a non-condensing GHG. In the conditions that prevail on Earth water vapor condenses and falls out of the atmosphere but CO2 doesn't. The level of water vapor in the atmosphere is strictly controlled by temperature. That means that water vapor cannot drive temperature changes by itself but only as a feedback of other things like CO2 or changes to the state of the Milankovitch cycles that force temperature changes. If you removed all of the greenhouse gases other than water vapor from the atmosphere the temperature would start to drop reducing the level of water vapor causing more drop. Eventually the water vapor would reach a new balance in the atmosphere but probably not before the oceans froze over and we had a new snowball Earth.
The Hiroshima is a new unit of energy equivalent to the energy of the Little Boy bomb. The oceans are currently heating up at a rate of over 2 Hiroshima's per second. Ignoring the possibility of nuclear winter all the nuclear explosions we could produce wouldn't make a lick of difference.
I hope you're just trying to be funny. If not 1 degree C of temperature change is equivalent to 1.8 degrees F change.
Anyways, the climatologists and scientists need to work together and publish one big document.
Like this one?
You are right that droughts are caused by lack of precipitation when and where it would otherwise be expected but they can be exacerbated by heat waves. In a prolonged drought with high temperatures the water gets evaporated out of the soil faster and once the soil is dry it starts baking. Also, talking about 1 degree of temperature difference is kind of misleading. That is the average over the whole globe made up of many thousands of discrete observations. It doesn't mean every place is going to experience exactly that 1 degree. As Hansen points out it shifts the whole bell curve of temperatures toward the hot side making extreme hot spells more likely and extreme cold spells less likely.
As John Donne said, no man is an island. Your well being is dependent on the well being of those around you. As much as your own efforts got you where you are today you got a lot of help along the way and you are still dependent on the society around you to maintain and advance your lifestyle.
Economic cataclysm is only assured if we have no alternatives to the current economic paradigm. Clearly this is not the case. I've seen a number of economic studies that say it would only take about 3% of GDP to effectively respond the the threat of global warming. That doesn't sound cataclysmic to me.
Commonly known as The tragedy of the commons.
That's what bothers me about all the politicians (mostly on the right side of the ledger) saying that government is the problem and can never be effective. If we then put them in office how can we expect they would even try to improve it rather than just trying to get as much personally as they can out of it?
How is it then that Social Security and Medicare operate on less than 5% overhead? That's far better than most private entities.
The energy released by burning fossil fuels (and from nuclear reactions), commonly called waste heat, is so small compared to the energy the Sun radiates onto the Earth that it can be ignored for all practical purposes. The average insolation at the surface of the Earth is around 250 W/m^2. The average energy released by human activities is about 0.028 W/m^2 or about 1/9,000th as much energy as we get from the Sun. The forcing due to the greenhouse gases added by human activities in the past 250 years is currently about 2.9 W/m^2 or about 100 times as much as the waste heat. That puts waste heat near the bottom of the priority list.
Seriously, you don't understand models very well. It appears you think models are just an exercise in curve fitting, in other words statistical models. Climate models are physical models in that as much as possible they use the actual mathematics that describe the physical interactions they are trying to model. When the data (aka observations of the real climate) don't match the model's output they investigate the underlying physical reasons it doesn't match and try to improve their understanding. Try these FAQ's for better understanding of how climate models work:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/faq-on-climate-models/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/faq-on-climate-models-part-ii/
I like your position but I'd like to point out something. You said:
Some people who are against abortion at any point don't even realize that regular birth control pills can cause a fertilized embryo to not implant in the uterus - technically causing an abortion by "the pill"
Medical science has found that even when birth control is not used some 60-70% of fertilized eggs either fail to implant or spontaneously abort in the first week or so. Because of that fact I don't consider what "the pill" does abortion in any way.
Abstinence is nice and idealistic and all that however it goes against the fundamental drive to reproduce that all animals including humans have. You could say that someone who successfully practices abstinence is one who is not normal.
There's a famous quote about that to the effect that all models are wrong but they may still be useful. Due to complexity it's unlikely we'll ever be able to make a perfect model of the climate but if the model is more accurate than other methods of prediction then it's useful as a tool to explore how what we think we know about climate matches reality.
He missed that the stratosphere would also cool due to thinning of the ozone layer ...
I used to think that as well but it turns out that reduced ozone is at best a very minor component of stratospheric cooling. There is an explanation of what's going on with stratospheric cooling here.
That just shows you don't have a clue about what climate models do. Read the following and educate yourself if it's not too far above your reading level:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/faq-on-climate-models/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/faq-on-climate-models-part-ii/
The fact is that if the dew point gets as high as your body temperature for any length of time you're going to die. Better hope your AC keeps working.
One more little tidbit. You mentioned the weak El Nino's but on the other side of ENSO La Nina's generally lead to somewhat cooler global temperatures but 2011 was the warmest La Nina year ever recorded.
My impression of Hansen is that he is someone who would just as soon not be in the limelight but as a leading scientist in the field he has decided the issue is far to important for him to remain silent.
The guy in the 1850's was John Tyndall who quantified the absorption of IR by CO2 and the Swedish guy was Svante Arrhenius in 1896.