Hi Plantagenet,

FYI

“Large wildfires in the western United States can pump as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in just a few weeks as cars do in those areas in an entire year, a new study suggests”
http://www.livescience.com/1981-wildfires-release-cars.html

Now factor in the huge fires that often burn across parts of Asia & Africa & South America:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wildfires

And the billions of little backyard fires –which up till now no one wanted to consider:
“Every winter, a thick cloud of brown smog settles over South Asia, stretching from southern China, across India and Pakistan, to the northern reaches of the Indian Ocean…Now researchers have analyzed the cloud’s composition, and found that two-thirds of the haze is produced by burning biomass, primarily the wood and dung burned to heat houses and cook food throughout the region”
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/01/23/asias-great-brown-cloud-is-spewed-by-millions-of-wood-burning-hearths/#.UP3t1Teguac

It makes the Kyoto protocol look like a sick joke –on us!

re nuclear - renewables, a few comments..

You can't mix nuclear and renewables, at least not without gas .. this is because nuclear plants are like brown coal plants in that they are best running at constant output .. powering a nuclear plant up or down is something you want to do slowly. They are base load plants in other words.

But renewables, by their nature, vary a great deal and are intermittent, so to bridge the gap between a nuclear plant and renewables you will need gas turbines and/or hydro if you can get it. In fact, you need nuclear and then gas/hydro sufficient to cover the bulk of all expected output. The planers may then allow some discount for the capacity they keep on hand if there are renewables on the system, but the discount is usually small.

so sorry, you gotta have fossil fuel plants, at least for the foreseeable future.

Curmudgeon
I know I know nothing, that’s why I can only ask questions.
If there is no peak oil why is it then that we try to squeeze oil out of the ground at places like 5 kilometres down in the sea and another two kilometres drilling through the seafloor?
And why do we (they in the US) cancel environment protection laws like Bush did 2005 so we can now get shale oil and gas while doing a lot of damage to the environment? The technology was there for decades, only no one dared to use it because of the damage.
Why did Ted Patzek, chairman of the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, and published in the August issue of Energy, predict that by mid-century, the world's coal mining will supply only half as much energy as today, see http://news.nationalgeographic.com.au/news/2010/09/100908-energy-peak-coal/
Why did the German coal reserve numbers have to be cut by over 95% when it became obvious that not much more is going to be produced? And why did the Government do everything to keep that report under cover?
JohnBennetts
Everybody can start with the possible today, and so do I. But if you look at the numbers it becomes obvious that running our lifestyle as a whole on renewables is just not possible. I have just returned from a stay in Germany, a country where a large number of roofs are covered with photovaltaics, and there is windpower everywhere. Still they generate over 50% of their electricity with coal. Australia is probably one of the few countries that could be run mainly on renewables but not much is happening

All this has Climate Change guff has only arisen again recently because of a local WEATHER event caused by the delay of the arrival monsoon trough which temporarily gave higher inland temperatures. All the doomsayers are out on the street again with their sandwich boards predicting the end is nigh. If people don't care anymore then the Climate Change lobby have got themselves to blame for their badly scripted blame oriented sales pitch, corruption and incessant and inaccurate predictions which have led to widespread skepticism.

Deniers simply keep restating nonsensical arguments that the scientific community has known to be wrong for a long time.
We can expect widespread denial when the enormity and nature of the problem are so unprecedented that people have no cultural mechanisms for accepting them
Denialism is the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none. These false arguments are used when one has few or no facts to support one's viewpoint against a scientific consensus or against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They are effective in distracting from actual useful debate using emotionally appealing, but ultimately empty and illogical assertions.
5 general tactics are used by denialists to sow confusion. They are conspiracy, selectivity (cherry-picking), fake experts, impossible expectations (also known as moving goalposts), and general fallacies of logic.

Part of understanding denialism is knowing that it's futile to argue with them. They also have the advantage of just being able to make things up and it takes forever to knock down each argument as they're only limited by their imagination while we're limited by things like logic and data.

Denialism is about tactics that are used to frustrate legitimate discussion.

Dear oh dear what must many of the Anglican believers think when they read this nonsense. No wonder people have left the 'church ' to join those who think rationally and actually believe the Scriptures. When you divrt from the gospel you end up with this new age mumbo jumbo. Fancy a Dean of the 'church ' praying to 'Dear Life/God/Mother Earth. ' Very sickening indeed. No wonder so many of the young are becoming me centred earth worshippers.