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The Forum > Article Comments > The real threat of global warming > Comments

The real threat of global warming : Comments

By Walter Starck, published 27/8/2007

A global warming catastrophe will become a self-fulfilling prophesy if it leads us to do nothing to prepare for coming fuel shortages.

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Australia's role in combatting global warming or whatever term you use to describe it has been nil since John Howard came to power. He is still stuck on carbon based energy except for his uranium mines in every street ideas. Slight exaggeration there but give him time.

What I really wanted to say is that while Liberals and Labor argue the toss about every issue pending an election nothing at all is being done. Nothing. Zilch. Zero.

In Howard's case he won't do anything for 2 reasons. One is that he doesn't believe in it and 2 is that even if he did win the coming election any promises made would be non core and suddenly irrelevant as he would press the accelerator on coal and uranium.

So while these idots argue and avoid the climate continues heading where it is heading.

In Rudd's case he can't do anything now and won't when he gets in as he will have a settling in period won't he. Like about 3 years?

It's like the water problem. It can be best handled, politically, by ignoring it and hoping it rains, or the world starts to cool down.

An aside to Jimoctec. What economy would there be Jim if global warming continued to it's extreme? Would you be happy to protect your little pile of assets now and ensure your descendantrs have none or don't ever get born? Really, does money have to rule (ruin) everything?

Next they'll build churches to worship money. Oops, they already have. And many varied money religions too. There's banks first, casinos, Tab, lotteries, loan sharks, mortgage finders. You name it we have endless organisations dedicated to lending money. All equally committed to social polcies and helping us out at every turn. NOT.
Posted by pegasus, Monday, 27 August 2007 1:42:22 PM
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Curmudgeon et al, your continued global-warming skepticism in the face of overwhelming evidence is admirable, but for stoic pig-headedness rather than intellectual clarity.

Nicholas Stern said global warming was a massive market failure, because CO2 emissions are an uncosted externality. The same does not hold for petroleum, for which we have always paid. The soaring price of liquid fuels, indeed, may be a greater driver of technological adaptation than any public-policy action has ever been.

No government response is required to the liquid fuel crisis. The free market can take care of its own. As businesses and people find themselves paying over the odds for fuel, they will learn to use it less profligately and explore better ways of obtaining energy.

If a pork-barrelling government were to "pick a winner" and subsidise a costly supply-side "solution" like coal gas or biofuel, it would merely prevent the market from operating efficiently.

Meg1, you are right, within limits, to extol the benefits of ethanol. But your dismissal of electric power for transport is astonishingly short-sighted. Most car trips in Australia are well within the range of a battery-electric vehicle; some cars never leave the suburbs. Even on longer trips it is completely unnecessary to stop long enough for a recharge; all that's required is to change a discharged battery pack for a fresh one.

Short trips aside, most of the fuel consumed for long-distance transportation is burned by trucks doing heavy haulage. While trucks can be made vastly more efficient than they are, there is still a lot to be said for railway freight, which is easily adaptable to electric power.

There are many technologies in the offing which can substantially boost the energy efficiency of transport and/or the efficiency with which we burn our valuable liquid fuels.

Biofuels will certainly play a big part in our energy future, but biofuel technology based on food and other crops is iniquitous compared with techniques like cellulolysis, algaculture and biomass gasification.

We must especially not blind ourselves to the human cost of letting demand for energy compete with food supplies and biodiversity.
Posted by xoddam, Monday, 27 August 2007 3:28:03 PM
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Meg
here's a surprise..I actually use about 50% biodiesel already in my restrained car travel. I also have cut my use of electricity drastically (eg by only cooking by microwave or wood stove) so as to cover my daily kwh by solar panels on the roof. It is clear to be me these things only help on the fringes and will struggle to go mainstream. Alas I fear that some think they know it all without the benefit of personal experience. I may be dead wrong believing that global warming is real and that coal is mainly driving it, but please don't accuse me of hypocrisy when you don't know the facts.
Posted by Taswegian, Monday, 27 August 2007 4:44:07 PM
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xoddam and others - I think like many others you have become confused over what, exactly, is being denied. The overwhelming evidence you speak of concerns climate change to date. The skepticism is about the FORECASTS. You can't have overwhelming evidence for forecasts, by definition. There have been groups claiming 90 per cent accuracy for aspects of the forecasts, but that is their problem. Anyone who claims certainty about a forecast seriously have no idea what they are doing - and it does not matter how many computers they have or how impressively credentialled they are. If they claim certainty about forecasts of warming, then laugh and buy winter wollies. Its going to get cold.
Posted by Curmudgeon, Monday, 27 August 2007 4:52:46 PM
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Conceded: no-one has claimed overwhelming in favour of any particular forecast. Chaotic systems have never been susceptible to accurate prediction.

Nevertheless this doesn't stop various government agencies doing their jobs and offering various potential scenarios: attempting to second-guess the weather and say, for instance, where rainfall might increase and where it will become less reliable. No great confidence is claimed for such prognostications; not least because they are very much dependent on political action or lack of it.

Given the inherent non-linearity of the climate, I think at least the best-publicised scenarios envisioned by climate scientists have been modest, well-supported and well borne out by experience as the years pass:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-projections/
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2006/2006_Hansen_etal_1.pdf

I'm glad that you personally are questioning merely "forecasts" and not the basic physics of climate science. Until very recently it was quite popular amongst posters here to claim strange physical behaviours like "saturation" of infra-red absorbtion bands and to suggest that water vapour was somehow not accounted for in climate models. Or, failing to dispute the physics, simply asserting baldly that global warming is not happening. All in capital letters, of course.

There *is* overwhelming evidence that greenhouse gases act to trap energy close to the earth's surface and that increasing greenhouse gas levels act to raise temperatures. While some things might prevent or delay the expected temperature increase -- a sudden drop in solar radiation, a massive cut in greenhouse emissions or a sudden change in the way clouds are formed -- none of these are considered very likely.

So, given that the basic physics are beyond dispute, and irrespective of any particular climate change scenarios, I repeat and emphasise:

There is overwhelming evidence that greenhouse gas emissions are increasing surface temperatures on Earth. There is a great risk of ecological disaster as a result. Now is not the time to preach complacency, but to adopt efficient and clean technologies.

Conversion of coal to liquid fuel is neither efficient nor clean.
Posted by xoddam, Monday, 27 August 2007 5:52:32 PM
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Apparently the NASA scientists have got their stats on global warming slightly wrong and the media have ignored it because it does not make our hearts miss a beat.

It seems that the 1930's is still the hottest decade on record and we are all in total panic about the changes we are experiencing now.Remain skeptical because all is not what the panic merchants want us to perceive.
Posted by Arjay, Monday, 27 August 2007 7:52:30 PM
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