Fair go

“…all manner of problems to electricity grids on the fourth rock out from the sol.”

The fourth rock?

Yes we’ve got a serious carbon addiction. Enormously serious. It is an addiction in the strongest sense of the word. It is one we CANNOT get off!! It is just tooo big to deal with.

It’s time to put our energies into how we live with it, and to stop wasting effort on trying to avoid it.

This effort even at its most successful would reduce the rate of greenhouse gas emissions a little bit, perhaps. Although it is much more likely to simply slow down the rate of increase a little.

It is quite likely that any stretching out of chronic CO2 emissions will actually have a worse effect. Being as profligate as we can now and thus reaching the peak in emissions quickly, may well have the best long term outcome for the climate… and for us stupid humans.

At any rate, peak oil will have a vastly greater effect on reducing CO2 production than any human effort.

Because the documentary is rubbish. Just because the media and commentators lead you to believe the debate is equally two-sided, doesn't mean it is. They may lead you to believe the documentary is credible also, but that would make them liars since they are neither experts, and the critique is very easy to come by. That liars are paid by the mainstream media is no surprise to me.

Enjoy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle#Reactions_from_scientists
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle#Disputing_a_scientific_consensus_supporting_anthropogenic_global_warming

Liam quotes William Kininmonth: "Greenhouse gases emit more radiation than they absorb and their direct impact is to cool the atmosphere." but, most unusually, fails to provide a link.
Here it is:
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/articles/kinin-fox.html

In reference to comments I made in my last post:

Before I get lambasted left, right and centre for apparently advocating unbridled profligacy, let me say…. I DON’T!

I advocate maximising our rate of conversion from fossil fuel dependency to renewable energy sources, and downsizing our consumption by way of changed practices and improved efficiencies.

But while these are the same things that we essentially need to do in order reduce greenhouse gas emissions, our motivation should be quite different – to smooth the transition that we will be forced to make when peak oil bites. The motivation is to maintain a viable economy and society in the face of radically changed economies due to greatly increased oil prices and availability.

My great fear is that peak oil will send our economy and society into a breakdown… and I don’t just mean a recession. In fact it may not take too much of a price rise to make that happen, because just about every aspect of our lives and economic system is so fundamentally dependent on oil… and dependent on it at somewhere near its current pricing structure.

Strife may come much quicker than we envisage. If the US decides it desperately needs some of Australia’s share of oil, then what would we do? If the Middle East decides that it is going to look after its future by preserving oil stocks and pulling back on production, it could trigger a panic situation which could see prices skyrocket and oil grabs undertaken by the most powerful countries.

This could all happen tomorrow. We are now sitting on a knife-edge.

We’d better accelerate our efforts to wean ourselves off oil…and for much more important reasons than climate change.

I agree with you Ludwig- I think the prospect of Peak Oil, whether it happens in either the very short term or the mid-term (some say out to about 2020) is enough to give us a very good incentive to get off our addiction to the black substance.

Oil companies say that we should not worry too much- technology for extracting oil and unexploited resources are available. However they would say that, wouldn’t they?

One of the main reasons we should diversify our energy resources is that of the risk of political blackmail from oil producers – we have seen in the 1970’s what they can do.

For this reason, we must conserve our own energy resources. In addition, we should develop as far as possible within economic rationality, the alternative energies, such as wind, solar tidal, geothermal etc.

The only possible large-scale base load power producer that is not a producer of large amounts of carbon emissions is nuclear. For this reason I really don’t understand why the anti-nuclear people are so set against it.

It has been working perfectly well in France for over 50 years – to name only one nation.

All the arguments raised against it are specious. They say that uranium resources are limited to a supply of fifty years- this is false. Nuclear waste is manageable, and included in the cost of nuclear energy from the outset. Modern reactor designs are extremely safe.

The only thing I can think of is that most of the anti-nuclear people have grown up believing that it is dangerous, and are now too old to change their minds.

Many ecologists support it- James Lovelock and Patrick Moore are just two of them. Please visit this web-site “Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy””

http://www.ecolo.org

True about ‘Peak Oil’, but don’t be short-sighted – it’s “Peak Hydrocarbons” (aka oil, gas and coal).

I would be interested in comments on this forum regarding David Rutledge’s webcast video talk on May 11 (55 mins to watch, listen and learn) at;

http://rutledge.caltech.edu/

It was posted on another forum and did not receive much comment. However, Rutledge says “there is an intense effort to predict the contribution to future climate change that will result from consuming ‘fossil fuels’. There has been surprisingly little effort to connect these two. Do we have a fossil-fuel supply problem? Do we have a climate-change problem? Do we have both? Which comes first? We will see that trends for future fossil-fuel production are less than any of the 40 UN scenarios considered in climate-change assessments.”

Humanity must live in a sustainable way.

I agree Froggie, “we should diversify our energy resources” and “develop as far as possible within economic rationality, the alternative energies, such as wind, solar, tidal, geothermal,” and I would add solar-thermal. The latter two of which can produce so called based load power.

I am not anti-nuclear, but we don’t need it here in Australia yet. There are too many issues to contend with, some expressed in this forum, some not.

Ludwig, I appreciate your views – hang in there.

As for climate change, there definitely is correlation to fossil fuel (mis)use.