Science and Society

Hillary Clinton leads the way in support of policies that will create a Green economy in our future. This is a no-brainer way to go to head off global warming. I don't see anybody else doing or saying anything that helps us.

Rather than argue about how much it will cost, why don't we just DO it and find out for ourselves? The one thing we do know for sure is that it will cost us a lot more the longer we delay.

There are a great many people who have been working on ways to do this the smart way, so it is fair to everyone and has the best chance of helping our economy in the long run. We know how to do it; we just need the will.

Bla Bla Bla; Another day, another way to perpetuate the global warming myth.

jock59801

Doing anything without being fully informed could easily backfire on us as many of our past "good environmental intentions" have done. This may well be a very bad time to combat AGW.

That does seem like a decent site. Of course it mostly SUPPORTS AGW, so you'll have to be more specific on where it says we shouldn't be combatting it right now.

I'm also not sure which solutions you think might "backfire." If you mean the silly things like dumping iron in the ocean, I don't think anyone is taking that too seriously. But mostly we are talking about energy efficiency and alternative fuels, which are not likely to "backfire," at least if we do them right.

Global Warmimg is very definitely NOT a myth.

Ice sheets melting - Yes
Planetary Temperature rising - Yes
Has this happened before - Yes
Can it happen again - Yes
Has the planet experienced cooling before - Yes

Just a few facts, not enough to confuse even the most rabid fanatic.

The problem of Global Warming is a real example of what happens when a subject becomes politicised long before all the facts are known.

Mankind certainly is not helping but that's not the problem. The real problem is sorting out long term (several hundreds or thousands of years) trend data from the short term (decades) noise.

Do the science, separate it from the politics and lets all use less energy.
The only other thing we have to do is somehow relocate those that are displaced by the rise in sea level and perhaps protect some areas from inundation by the sea. Anything else is just posturing.

Bah, let them be inundated. We've got too many people on the planet then the planet can support. If we didn't, then we wouldn't have all the starving people in the third world countries. But that's a whole other topic.

As for global warming....well, I have come to the conclusion that it is a natural cycle of the planet. Have we affected it? Yea, but I don't think we've affected it to the extent most people think. Should we be better stewards of our planet? Yea, right now we are the ######### at it. How do we do it? Stop using fosil fuels and switch to Nuclear and Hydrogen. Store the Nuke waste somewhere, we may find a practical use for it in the future.

A worthless economy is what it will cost with the cap and trade. Our costs of gasoline and heating our homes will go through the roof, is what it will cost. Look at some of the proposed carbon taxes put on gasoline, heating fuel and electrisity. That alone will cripple the economy and most of the families just squeaking by now.

jock59801
In the answers to the comments. The site examines skepticism and attempts to provide answers. Very open and apparently honest. Also the links peovided in the comments are often well worth the read. The only problem is that it is in the UK so there is an overnight lag in responses.

peovided s/b provided - sorry.

Jock
Re: "energy efficiency and alternative fuels"

This is very relavent. The UK started and then stopped the rush to alternative fuels recently, realizing that it needs more study.

Personally I think that switchgrass is the answer that we want, both because it does not take away food and increase the cost of food in doing so and also because it can grow on land that can not be used for growing food crops. But then there are still emissions to think about. Have you ever visited a drag strip where they were running alcohol based fuels? The raw emissions are much worse than fossil fuel emissions. What new contaminants will be produced from their controlled emissions?

And we do have the time to investigate as nature is helping to negate the warming at this time and will probably give us a few years relief.

Andy Clark
My sentiments as well.

Ned
This time you hit the nail on the head.
Economics and mistrust of politicians are the main concerns of most skeptics.

Quietman-
What I am more concerned about is the mistrust of scientists, engendered by the PR firms of first the tobacco industry and now the oil industry (often the same PR firms). Much of the "science" that skeptics throw around was manufactured out of this industry. The anti-intellectualism it feeds into really scares me.

Quietman-
One thing most people seem to agree on is that there is no "one" answer. And also that corn-based ethanol probably does more harm than good. But energy efficiency is always a good idea, and we have a large portfolio of alternatives that need to be used in a smart way. Wind, solar, and biofuels all have their place. Cellulosic ethanol using switchgrass also has good promise but still needs work. Biodiesel from oil-producing algae has even more potential. The more we move the financial incentives over to these technologies the faster they will come online. And no, I don't think we can risk any delays.

The time to act is NOW. Personally, I favor a multi-pronged approach. Have one consortium look into solar, another into wind, another into nuclear, etc. Sooner or later, someone is going to come up with a viable answer. One thing for sure: Sitting on our respective thumbs and "studying" the problem is going to do nothing.

Jock59801,

Anti-intellectualism isn't new, it's just found a new voice in modern communications.

Go -- NUCLEAR

Mass electrical power in bulk, NO CO2.

Andy & Jock
The best possible solution with current technology is nuclear. Too bad most of the plans were scrapped because of fear.

Before anyone takes "the cost of climate change" seriously, we have to believe climate change is happening, and is caused by humans. Many people seem to doubt this, but there are several facts that are hard to ignore. In the past 150 years, human activity has released a tremendous amount of CO2 that had been locked away as oil for many thousands of years. Temperatures around the world, along with atmospheric CO2 measurements have been going up since the 1970s, with acceleration in the 1990s. The cause-and-effect relationship is well-known: CO2 absorbs infrared radiation emanating from the Earth and converts it to heat in the atmosphere. Increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases the amount of atmospheric heating.

Nuclear power has been suggested as a no-carbon energy source, but nuclear power is susceptible to climate change. Nuclear reactors require a tremendous amount of cooling capacity, often provided by rivers. To effectively cool the reactor, the adjacent river (or other cooling source) must provide a sufficient volume of water at a sufficiently low temperature. To date, this has been possible because most large rivers have had a relatively stable annual pattern of temperature and flow rate in recent history. Climate change will make it harder to find reliable sources of cooling for nuclear reactors, as demonstrated by the forced shutdown of an Alabama nuclear reactor in the summer of 2007. The shutdown occurred because the temperature of the river that cools the reactor had increased beyond the operational limits.

Having stated my previous doubts about nuclear power as a long-term solution, I recognize it may be necessary as a short-term solution, providing relatively clean power for a few decades as we develop other renewable energy sources. Nuclear power is not suitable as a permanent solution because we still do not have an effective means of disposing of the radioactive waste. While I like to limit my discussions to facts and science, I'll ask for a judgement by asking this question: Which human institution do you trust to effectively store radioactive waste for the tens of thousands of years it takes for the radiation to decay?

Well ilyon, like I said, we store it the way we store it now. In the future, we may actually find a use for it, or a better way to store it. Nuclear Fusion would be best as a long term. But we have yet to reach that point. In time though, it can come. And as for bio-fuels. Don't even bother with them, they still release CO2. Go hydrogen. Releases H2O, and last I checked, water isn't a pollutant.

I also agree that nuclear power may have to be part of the mix, at least initially. We will have to look at it more closely but we may decide we can't transition fast enough without it. It would be nice to avoid it if only because the startup costs are so massive. Not only the incredible expenxse of building power plants AND waste-disposal facilities, but the entire uranium mining and transport industry would need to be rebuilt, additional anti-terrorist safeguards argued over, and probably a whole new training program for students and engineers to get the expertise up to speed. That's a lot of investment for something we are not sure we really want to be a long-term solution.

Lawrence - I wouldn't dismiss biofuels quite so completely. There are many technologies being worked on that are not as costly to produce as corn-based ethanol. The climate-relevant carbon emissions are only from the energy needed to produce and transport the fuels. The carbon from burning the fuel itself is neutral because it came out of the atmosphere in the first place. Like any other solutions, biofuels can't be the ONLY answer, but they will have to be a substantial part of the mix.