Green energy is the future if you consider the green in oceans of this planet.
Put CO2 emission trading politics aside and measure and assess ocean algae plant matter, including where ice in polar regions is reported melting more than usual.
Science is only now beginning to really understand.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-01/au-udm010515.php

How refreshing to read sensible comments on climate change. Does anyone have reports on the beneficial effects that excess CO2 rates have on growing plants. Even if the current "excess" is so microscopic that it cannot have any benefit then the corollary must hold and it cannot be any danger. Any increase is probably better than none

Nature dictates the amount of co2 in the atmosphere as a balance; Now c02 has been compromised to dangerous levels by human intervention.
With a govt; that states climate change is crap and with a spokesperson to advertise climate change is crap, nothing is about to change.
Australia is a country out of step with the rest of the world, and it's citizens.
The greatest achievement of 2014 was Abbott demolishing the carbon tax, for what reason only known to him and credlin.

Whereas I believe our atmospheric scientists when they tell us about the impact of CO2 on our measured rise in world temperature over the last century, I completely agree with Viv when he says "green" energy is taking us back 3 centuries.

There was a good reason why water wheels, windmills, horse power and burning wood couldn't deliver the standard of living we have today on their own. We needed high energy-dense materials such as coal (in the past) and now uranium or thorium to take us to the next level without polluting the air we breath - or increasing our sea and land temperatures excessively.

Watch what the Chinese are doing to address these issues. They are moving to replace their coal plants with nuclear as well as wind power and solar. Wind and solar cannot do it alone as the "Dark" Green advocates will eventually discover after spending billions of dollars unwisely.

Stuff and nonsense.
To solve all problems of global warming, smog, deficit of oil, deficit of food and water, just remove people.
There too many of them and that is the total cause of all problems.

The war is not so much on carbon dioxide as on the insulating effects carbon dioxide introduces into the atmosphere.

There are some arguments that are irrefutable. One is that the CO2 in that atmosphere has increased from 250 ppm to over 400ppm since the start of the industrial age and that the source of that increase is the combustion of the carbon in fossil fuels. The second irrefutable fact is that radiated heat leaving the earth is largely in a particular wave length range. The third is that CO2 impedes the escape of radiation of that wave length range. A fourth is that methane is an even more effective impediment to the escape of that radiation, by a factor of about 30.

There is significant evidence that the earth's surface, including its oceans, are gradually increasing in temperature. Significant evidence includes the well documented rise in ocean levels. Since the sixteen measuring sites were established around the Australian coast that rise has averaged well over 3mm per year on the eastern coast. Other evidence may be less reliable but it is surely statistically significant that so many of Australia's hottest years, since records were first collected, have occurred in the most recent two decades.

Scientists are saying that continuing the same practices are likely to increase the rate at which the more dangerous insulator, methane, is introduced to the atmosphere. Therefore we should ease back substantially.

Future generations need the carbon in fossil fuels for essential purposes other than power generation. For all the reasons above we Homo sapiens need to reduce our use of fossil carbon.

China appears to be leading the way in developing a fail safe nuclear option.

As Viv notes, CO2 is not actually a pollutant.. the stuff we notice is sulphates and particulates. But the really weird part is that the Chinese are setting up trial carbon trading schemes in response to citizen concerns about pollution, where those schemes supposedly affect the only part of the mix that doesn't add to local pollution. Wild stuff..

A statement saying billions of people dying from starvation going back in time. Going forward in time without change that surely will be the outcome.
We are in excess of 400 ppm of co2 never before recorded without massive change in global weather and extinction. Earlier rises in co2 can be volcanic action. Now it is human intervention.

Climate change is not a conspiracy, it is real and it is now. Nobody can dismiss co2 as not a major part of the problem. The more ocean temp rise the more release of co2 the more ice melt.

We have a problem and it is not going away without proper resolutions , and surely not statements of climate change as crap.
It’s not ground level pollution it’s the excess of co2 that rises into the upper atmosphere. We are producing more co2 than the world can absorb.

Abbott is finding a way of squirming out of his green army by hiring a climate change denier for propaganda pollution

oh dear another anti-science post on OLO.
Rephrasing climate scientist as "affluent urban alarmists" just shows what lengths some people will go to to protect their world view.
That fact that this guy links to Mockington says it all, no fact just fiction.

Far from being easy to refute, the claims that CO2 is a pollutant are impossible to refute. Indeed they are completely proven. CO2 is a pollutant in two separate ways: reducing the pH of seawater and rainwater, and absorbing a greater proportion of infrared energy than the atmosphere in general, then reradiating it causing warming. This is an observed, irrefutable phenomenon, and there is no evidence contradicting it. What we don't yet FULLY understand (though we understand it much much much beer than you do, and models are constantly improving) is how it interacts with water, which (UNLIKE CO2) does have a moderating effect. Water vapour is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 (which is a way of saying it absorbs and reemits much more infrared), and there is a strong positive feedback mechanism: the warming from the CO2 results in more water being in the vapour form, causing further warming.

Please take the time to understand the above, otherwise all you're doing when you write about it is spreading ignorance.

The people burning wood and briquetted paper in stoves and home heaters are the people who have solid fuel stoves and wood heaters. That does not correspond to "urban environmentalists" though it probably doesn't exclude all of them either.

You also misunderstand technology. Nobody wants to set us back to the past (though you yourself come close). Renewable energy technology now is way ahead of anything we had in the 20th century, let alone the 17th. Nearly all technologies continue to be developed, and an advantage a technology has over the competition at one time is unlikely to last for ever as both technology and requirements change. You remind me of those people who oppose high speed rail because "railways are a 19th century technology" (and considering how many roads were built by the ancient Romans, roads could be labelled a 1st century technology).

I don't think anyone opposes all hydroelectric power, but many rightly acknowledge that the environmental effects of some specific dams would be so severe as to exceed the benefits of building them.

579,

Hint: if you want to present a credible argument, don't over-egg it - slightly under-state it if anything, that gives you some room to manoeuvre.

e.g., billions of people starving ? Where and when ? over what time scale ?

CO2 levels like never before recorded ? Ask a geologist, they will tell you of times when the CO2 level was many times higher than now, hence massive vegetation growth in the Carboniferous.

Ruler-of-the-World Robert,

"To solve all problems of global warming, smog, deficit of oil, deficit of food and water, just remove people."

Your Majesty, how do you propose raking that fascist option ? You and whose army ?

Unleashing IS on the rest of the world - yes, that might do it.

Killing off all people over 60 ? Yeah, you could give that a go. At least, until YOU're sixty.

Slaughtering all new-born babies ? Didn't even work for Jesus.

The truth is, my poor idiot friend, developed countries have negative population growth rates. China's will fall precipitately in the next century. So who are you trying to target ?

Ah Africa, is that it ? Give it a chance and - if only we were around a hundred years from now - they will transform the continent: irrigation, electrification, road and rail and ports - it could be the powerhouse of the world, as well as bailing out elderly Europe, the US and Australia by emigrating care-workers. No, maybe not, why should they ?

And probably on nuclear energy, not idiotic wind or solar.

Please come back to Earth.

Joe

loudmonth, yes geologist (even better climate scientist can too) can tell that is the past C02 level have been much higher. There is however two very important points your leaving out.
1) The cause.
2) There were not any higher life forms on land at the time.

It's about as moronic as saying animals can live under water so why worry about floods.

"Ruler-of-the-World Robert,"

Ah; if only.

Viv Forbes is seriously confused. He allows himself to be side-tracked by inventing his own definition of ‘pollutant’ as a substance that must be visible to the human eye. He claims that carbon dioxide affects temperature only in ‘theoretical climate models’. And he somehow concludes that by rejecting renewable energy he can safely reject the science of climate change.

This kind of nonsense would be harmless except for one thing. The conflation of climate scepticism with renewable energy scepticism damages the considered and genuine case that modern renewable energy sources (not the timber, windmills, whale oil and beasts of burden of the past) might not be the effective replacement for fossil fuels that so many advocates claim. This is, I fear, the same logical trap that many conservative governments the world over have fallen into. On economic grounds they resist expensive measures to reduce emissions with solar and wind energy but then they fail to declare, forcefully as they should, that they fully accept the authoritative conclusions of international climate science.

Retaining some, or even much, doubt about the prospect of running an industrialised economy on renewable energy is sensible and logical. Rejecting the physics, chemistry and mathematics of climate science is not. We need to find workable ways of combating climate change or of learning to live with it. Ignoring it is dangerous

Another technically wrong post from Viv Forbes. This seems to be the trend on OLO, those who write about science are lawyers and retired geologists, not people with any expertise on the topic.

That might not matter except for the Dunning-Kruger bit where these writers think they are more expert than those who have spent the professional careers examining the topics.

Talking about lawyers, why haven't we had an article bashing the BOM today. They have after all just published an analysis stating 2014 was the third warmest year on record in Australia after 2013 and 2005.

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/annual/aus/

And then 2014 will probably come out as the warmest year on record. So there will have to be a new start to cherry picking. "Global temperatures haven't risen since 2014".

Nice sensible article Viv, but you sure have to give the greens one thing.

They are great at networking, & raising a noisy rabble, whenever logic & scientific analysis is applied to their favourite scam.

It would be interesting to know how many are actually dumb enough to believe the rubbish they push.

Aidan
you are redefining what is meant by pollutant.. or rather you are talking about a different type of pollutant.. Viv and I are talking about local pollutants.. the stuff that matters at local and regional levels.. you are talking about the supposed, long-term, world-wide implications of excess CO2.. extra CO2 has no local effect. They take CO2 plant greenhouse atmospheres up to 1000 ppm (more than double present levels) all the time with no problems to the plants. In fact its done so to improve plant growth.. local pollution will have a direct effect on the quality of life.. extra CO2 is supposed to have a long-term effect on earth temperatures, but has no local effect..

Courtesy of Loudmouth, we discover...

>>Slaughtering all new-born babies ? Didn't even work for Jesus.<<

Sheds a whole new light on "suffer little children..."

Then there's this, from the article:

"Wood was used for heating and cooking, charcoal for smelting and smithing, wind or water-power for pumps mills and ships, and whale oil for lamps."

Sounds like Vera Lynn was prophesying a return to these halcyon days, when she sang "Whale oil, meat again".

Curmudgeon,
'Tis not me who's redefining what is meant by pollutant (indeed I've seen at least one dictionary give carbon dioxide as an example of a pollutant).

Viv was restricting the definition to local pollutants because it suited his disengenuous argument to do so.

Your claim that "extra CO2 has no local effect" is also incorrect: in certain environments it does have an adverse local effect, such as in calcarious soils where the extra CO2 increases the solubility of calcium, adversely affecting the trees' uptake of iron.

The declining pH of the oceans, which adversely affects the shells of some marine creatures, is a local problem on a global scale, and its damage to the food chain could be catastrophic if CO2 levels get much higher.

You are generally correct when you say CO2 improves plant growth. However this doesn't always make plants more productive — sometimes it Results in them producing more toxins instead.

Hi Cobber,

57.9 asserted something, I knocked it back. I didn't say anything more, certainly not anything about whether or not we would have enjoyed it, about its causes or about what life-forms existed at the time. Simply that CO2 levels had, at some time in the past, been much higher than now. No more than that.

Robert,

Then thank Christ you're not.

Agronomist,

So 2005 was the hottest year ever ? otherwise why not say that 2013 was, and the last two years yadaa yada ? What happened in 2006-2012 ? A pause ?

Thank you, Pericles, I'm honoured. So Jesus probably had no same-age playmates ?

I was trying to suggest to King Robert that exponents of population-reduction never seem to spell out how they intend, once they become Ian McKellens of the World, they will go about it. Is it because the implications are too horrific, even for them, or is it that they are too closed-minded to think through those implications ? "Here's an idea. End of."

I confidently predict that in the next two or three hundred years, after 2060, world population will decline. By entirely natural processes, give or take the odd IS outburst this century.

Joe

Absolutely correct Loudmouth. There was a pause in the increase in temperatures in Australia between 2006 and 2012. There was another pause in 2014. Actually it has started cooling.

Some people see the doughnut. Others spend their time worrying about the hole.

As the Secretary General of the UN uttered yesterday.

Is is the richest trendies from suburbs surrounding Canberra's Capital Hill (Parliament House) who are the worlds greatest air polluters.

It is they - he went onto say - that feed wood into their trendy expensive SLOW COMBUSTION HEATERS - that results in a caustic cloud of smog around Capital Hill during cold Winter nights.

The Pope added that their oversize SUVs and frequent holidays by ozone destroying jets to whoring shores mark these Canberrans out as untermenschen. Make Ebola compulsory! He said.

"Shoot-em all, then sack-em" said Abbott.

My couzie-bro Leroy said "Dayz all Greenie Hoze"

There U have it Ye OLO Gentlemen (and Ladies all too rare ;-)

Why go against science, are they coludists. That is to easy. Religion comes in to the denialist way of thinking. As with Abbott religion plays a big part in his crap theory.
When the oceans start cooling you may have something until then you have nothing.

579 or Zero

With "coludists...denialist...religion"

Where are your arguments, your logic man?

The ice caps melting are doing wonders for Russian oil exploration and extraction. What's wrong with that?

Aidan
no, you'll have to do better than that.. high levels of CO2 are well known to be an overall benefit to plant life - and its known that additional CO2 quickly disperses around the world. Now that I think ab out it, additional CO2 in any one area, as opposed to any other area, would be very small indeed .. unlike sulphates and aerosols which hang around in one spot.. so the iron uptake thing would be a very minor effect if it exists at all.. you best go back and see what conditions they claimed for the effect to exist.. as for the dictionary definition if there are such definitions then they are clearly wrong, for the reasons outlined.
So remember - CO2 global, other pollutants local..

Curmudgeon
You miss the point: the combination of the CO2 level (which doesn't vary much globally, but varies a lot from what it used to be) and local factors (high calcium soils) creates a local iron uptake problem. Obviously the strength of the effect depends on the characteristics of both the soil and the trees, but it's easily corrected by human intervention (giving the trees iron supplements).

It's certainly a minor problem compared to the potentially much bigger problems of declining marine pH and glbal warming, but it shows global problems can have local effects.

The dictionary definition did not claim that CO2's effects as a pollutant were local.

Aidan, so refreshing to read someone who clearly understands science.
As for renewable energy, why limit ourselves to that as a solution, when we own enough thorium to power the world for 700 years, or our own competitive industries for thousands of years.

Mass produced and trucked in ready to produce power in just weeks, Thorium reactors > micro-grids, could possibly halve the cost of industrial energy.

And by several means.
One, limiting the usual and often costly transmission line losses, and indeed, ending the need to maintain the gold plated national grid.
And two, eliminating all the profit taking middle men; even more so, where and when the target enterprise owns and operates the adjacent power station.
And thirdly, given the very low fuel use for the life of the plant, which could be as little as a few tons over 25-50 years?

And the cost of that fuel falls into insignificance, when measured against coal and the transport of millions of annual tons of it, and at higher and higher rates.
And last but not least, the ability to mass produce and truck these things as very wide loads, brings the production and or decommissioning costs way way down!

Moreover, one could purchase the entire fuel needs for the entire life of a thorium plant, and transport it as a single truck load?

Other than thorium, we who always produce problematic biological waste, could chose to convert it to methane (bladder stored biogas) and then use that scrubbed to power all our domiciles on demand, 24/7.

Substituting the current stationary engines in the working examples with (80% energy coefficient) ceramic fuel cells, literally doubles the amount of energy created, given no moving parts to use up so much of it in the process.

Meaning, not only could we power all our homes with this whisper quiet combination, but create around a 50% salable surplus into the bargain, or just use the surplus to charge up the electric car.

New batteries currently in development, are said to double the current range of lithium ion.
Cheers, Rhrosty.

The Australian Government has an Inventory of Pollutants. This is compiled by the Department of Environment and has been around since 1995. Carbon Dioxide is not on the list. The only carbons listed are Carbon Disulfide and Carbon Monoxide - both worthy of inclusion. http://www.npi.gov.au/substances/substance-list-and-thresholds

Perhaps, maybe, a way to get past this seeming impasse would be to check out references under the topic A Buddhist Understanding of Global Warming.
One site asks how do we act guided by the principles of right action enunciated in the Noble Eightfold Path

Buddhists quite rightly teach that everything and everyone is in one way or another inter-connected. Co-dependent origination as distinct from the usual Western mis-understanding that the world is merely a collection of separate human beings and "things".

Rhosty, while it's certainly possible that Australia could rely on thorium fission for much of its future power, the combination of abundant renewable energy and low poulation density make it unlikely IMO. Remember the technology hasn't been commercialized yet, and if recent history is anything to go by, small nuclear reactors are less profitable than large ones. The fuel cost is low, but the building cost is high, the staffing cost is high and the waste management cost is high (albeit much lower than from fast and U235 reactors).

Ceramic fuel cells aren't as attractive as they first appear, as they only work at high temperatures and are expensive to produce.

Gas is already captured from organic waste of various kinds, including sewage.

As for transmission line losses, they're typically very small. 'Tis more likely that big grids will play an even greater role in the future; the challenge is to improve their ability to handle dispersed generation.

Is it too hard to go to the moon, eradicate smallpox or end apartheid? Is it too hard to build a computer that fits in your pocket? No? Then it's not too hard to build a clean energy future, either. http://clmtr.lt/c/R6Q0fz0c4z