Bullsh!t. Just because factories and generators are cleaner than they were 30 years ago doesn't make them clean. At the current rate the its going, it'll be a century before what I described can happen. Hell, Fusion reactors alone are estimated to be 15-20 years from breaking even and 50 years from commercial viability.
You want clean power?
Build nuke plants.
You want to get rid of nuke waste? Build breeder reactors.
You want to close dirty coal plants? Replace them with new cleaners ones.
You want energy effeciency? give tax breaks energy upgrades.
We have the tech today to greatly reduce pollution. The enviromentlist only need to get out of the way to let this stuff happen.
I kind of agree that the apprehension surrounding nuke plants is unreasonable. It's clean, efficient, and arguably safer than coal plants since nukes don't contantly produce noxious fumes that will choke entire communities day in and day out.
I agree 100%. Our environmental policy should definitely be written by industry and lobbyists b/c they never change their minds, they always look out for your best interests, and always speak the unvarnished truth.
My limited understanding is that general references to the "efficiency" of nuclea energy production assumes you ignore (or greatly underestimate) the cost of construction and permanent waste storage. Granted, if you get the estimates right and compare it to the true expense of burning coal . . . nuclear may be superior.
XZeroII
Lifer
- Jun 30, 2001
- 12,572
- 0
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Funny how you assume thats the only alternative.Originally posted by: BaliBabyDoc
I agree 100%. Our environmental policy should definitely be written by industry and lobbyists b/c they never change their minds, they always look out for your best interests, and always speak the unvarnished truth.
Exactly, when you're making Billions on an old Technology bleeding people (and the Environment) out of their Pockets into yours Vs having to spend money on a Technology that would actually decrease how much money you will get of out of peoples pockets, that ain't gonna happen.
Like I said, just because some coal plants are cleaner, doesn't mean they're clean. Yes nuclear reactors are a good idea (that alone would require a large scale project), but you're only looking at part of the picture. Tell me how we can clean up lakes, or the air?
Actually scrubbers already exist that remove most of the pollution from coal plants. Coal gasification is almost economically viable, which makes coal almost as clean as natural gas.
One could argue that solar is not a very clean technology because of the energy it takes to create a solar cells and the waste that is generated in the process.
We make our water cleaner, by continuing to do what we have been doing for the past 30 years.
Zebo
Elite Member
- Jul 29, 2001
- 39,398
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Ya ya sure. Include in your paper the National Academy of Science opinion too ummmkay. You know that obscure Org created in 1863 by the US Congress, in order to provide advice to the goverment in scientific and techinal issues. NAS presently has about 2200 members, elected on merit in science. (Check their member list and you will recognise many famous names from many fields.) Thus, the NAS is an expert organ, and is reflecting mainstream (as opposed to highly unusual or highly controversial) science. Since NAS is the official scientific organ advicing the US Government, it has presented several official statements about science in general. NAS has recommended the US government to curb greenhouse gases because there is indeed global warming.
Or the 30% reduction in O2 in the air since the 17th century. (we know this by taking samples of ice pockets)
Zebo
Elite Member
- Jul 29, 2001
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Science is a method for describing how the world works. It's a self revising process. If you're looking for everlasting truths, science can't help you. Static systems like religion are much better suited for that. Global warming is the current consensus in the scientific community
Have a link on this? I'm fairly certain I have read that the outdoor air oxygen concentration has not changed by more than 1-2% in the past 200 years...
Ummmkay, maybe you need to stop getting your news from the New York Times, ummkay......here is some further information from one of the 11 writers of the NAS report........
link
"Last week the National Academy of Sciences released a report on climate change, prepared in response to a request from the White House, that was depicted in the press as an implicit endorsement of the Kyoto Protocol. CNN's Michelle Mitchell was typical of the coverage when she declared that the report represented "a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room."
As one of 11 scientists who prepared the report, I can state that this is simply untrue. For starters, the NAS never asks that all participants agree to all elements of a report, but rather that the report represent the span of views. This the full report did, making clear that there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them. "
You are trying to make a concrete link between CO2 levels and global warming. That link does not exist. There is way too much uncertainty about the causes of global warming......The NAS report does not make a concrete link either, simply because we do not know if there is one.
"But--and I cannot stress this enough--we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions. "
That is what Dr. Lindzen is trying to get across in his explanation of the NAS report.
And as far as O2 levels dropping by 30%, wrong. The Earth's atmosphere has been pretty constant for the last billion years or so.
"But--and I cannot stress this enough--we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions. "
That is what Dr. Lindzen is trying to get across in his explanation of the NAS report.
And as far as O2 levels dropping by 30%, wrong. The Earth's atmosphere has been pretty constant for the last billion years or so.
Zebo
Elite Member
- Jul 29, 2001
- 39,398
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The link exists and he and every other reptable scientist says as much, please re-read what he said. Of course we can't predict furture climate anymore than we can predict evolutionary strides we might make genetically since we don't know what policies and levels of gas will be emitted the future. In addition he is speaking of only one GHG, CO2, there are many more including ozone depleteing CFC's which allows more radiation into the atmosphere. Combine this with GHG and you see rise in temps. Elementry science no one disputes. The big question is how much can we destroy the earths lungs (forests and ocean algae) and how much GHG and CFC's can we release into atmosphere before it becomes a serious problem? And what is a serious problem? Land mass disappearing? Alergies? etc.
LA County I can believe. The surrounding mountains restrict airflow through that area, and it kind of acts as a natural smog collection zone. LA area had smog problems back in the early 1800s, before the industrial revolution. A worldwide drop of more than a percent or 2 I don't believe.
You should put your own sources to the same level of scrutiny you place on the EPA and the IPCC.
Cato Institute: The peer edited scientific journal where Richard S. Lindzen's "The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus" is published in? Oh yeah, that's right, the Cato institute is not a scientific publication, but a conservative think tank.
Citizens for a sound economy: Looks like Dick Armey and Robert Novak's moutpiece. Totally unbiased...
As for Richard Lindzen, the poster boy of all anti-Kyoto / anti-doing-anything-about-global warming polititians, we've already discussed him in a previous thread. He's about the best anti-global warming source one can find in terms of credibility, but he doesn't have very many peers supporting his political views.
You failed to give the full context of one of Lindzen's quotes again. Have an agenda of your own to promote?
Your own source provides the concrete link between CO2 levels and global warming that you assert doesn't exist (see point 3). That Lindzen has a problem with the characterization of such findings as a consensus or as a scientific mandate for any particular policy does not invalidate the science itself, but is rather a disagreement on interpretation.
Do you have any quotes where Lindzen disagrees with his friends at the George C. Marshall Institute who qualify their objections to some global warming policies by saying:
P.S. It's good to see you've stopped trying to bring up the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine's petition as a credible refutation of modern climate science. Maybe as part of your paper writing process you could contribute a few CPU cycles to ClimatePrediction.net and participate in the science rather than find any excuse possible to discredit it.
The "butterfly in China" analogy doesn't apply as well to climate science. The reason why modelers are more confident (not totally confident, any reputable scientist will include things like margin of error and uncertainty levels in their publications) of climate model results many years in the future than a meteorologist's confidence in a weather prediction a week in the future is due to differences in the scale and nature of the processes involved in the fields. You don't need to know the exact weather patterns to model climate, having a rough estimate of cloud cover is a good start, and generally the errors in weather estimations average out over time.
Check out the Chaos, Ensembles and Probabilities section at climateprediction.net to see how chaos issues are addressed by those carrying out these simulations.
None of you have still answered any of my questions concerning this concrete link between CO2 levels and global warming. The middle ages were warmer than now because of what, medieval versions of SUVs? Higher CO2 levels between 1940 and 1970 led to increased temperatures? Where is that link?
You want some quotes from reputable scientists, I will give you some quotes.......
"As more-realistic computer simulations become available in the future, I believe we will learn that the runaway global warming scenarios predicted by the current Global Computer Model technology grossly overestimate the actual threat, and that the small surface warming trends observed in global surface temperature during the last 25 to 100 years, which have been so highly touted in the press, are primarily of natural origin and not due to human influences.?
Dr. William Gray of the Colorado State Department of Atmospheric Science
" We are looking to find all the causes of natural change of the climate of the Earth, the sun being one of them. That way we can subtract out the natural changes and look for the human signal. We see, essentially, no signal of human activity. "
Dr. Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
You want some quotes from reputable scientists, I will give you some quotes.......
"As more-realistic computer simulations become available in the future, I believe we will learn that the runaway global warming scenarios predicted by the current Global Computer Model technology grossly overestimate the actual threat, and that the small surface warming trends observed in global surface temperature during the last 25 to 100 years, which have been so highly touted in the press, are primarily of natural origin and not due to human influences.?
Dr. William Gray of the Colorado State Department of Atmospheric Science
" We are looking to find all the causes of natural change of the climate of the Earth, the sun being one of them. That way we can subtract out the natural changes and look for the human signal. We see, essentially, no signal of human activity. "
Dr. Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
So do 6 billion people exhaling.
I guess it is time to cap volcanoes and start thinning the population.
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