The Oxburgh report on the science done at the CRU has now been published and….. as in the first inquiry, they find no scientific misconduct, no impropriety and no tailoring of the results to a preconceived agenda, though they do suggest more statisticians should have been involved. They have also some choice words to describe the critics.
Carry on…
“and that is that humans have yet to put the reins on continued population growth,”
Well, unless you go around killing children and young (breeding) adults, you’re not going to get any appreciable change in population for 50-75 years.
Feel free to help out, though.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/energy-environment/31renew.html
Also note there:
“Renewable energy industries here are adding jobs rapidly, reaching 1.12 million in 2008 and climbing by 100,000 a year, according to the government-backed Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association.”
So I guess Gullible and Benny are against job creation.
“but purposely released in violation of his own rules.”
You mean like the unl;amented rules against unauthorised computer access?
http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/Computer+Misuse+Act
Which access has McKinnon facing 150 years on terrorism charges and extradition to the US…
1083, Completely Fed Up:
Where aren’t solar panels suitable? Well for a start, the further north you go in the northern hemisphere the shorter the hours of daylight in winter. Take Scotland, for instance, about six hours of weak sunlight (from a low sun) in midwinter just when the ground is covered with snow, and just when your energy needs are highest. North of the Arctic Circle you don’t get ANY sunlight in mid winter. So we can conclude that in winter solar power is inversely related to latitude whereas energy requirements are directly related to latitude. Pretty obvious, really, but it is amazing how many green energy enthusiasts forget about these little things! Of course you can hedge your bets with a wind turbine, but “when the wind doesn’t blow, the windmill won’t go!” Oddly enough, just when the wind power fails, the height of the waves drop, so wave power lets you down, too, and of course, this is bound to happen at neaps, so tidal power can’t be relied on, either!
Seattle, Rod? I believe the sun shines there.
If the sun didn’t work there, then the daytime would be as dark as the night.
I take it you’ve never been to Seattle. Or you’re blind ;-)
Yeah, it’s supposed to be revenue neutral. But are people convinced? A proper Fee&Dividend is not only demonstrably and transparently revenue neutral, the idea is to give back the whole amount to the people. The BC scheme does not do that. It’s supposed to fund tax cuts which is not the same thing. Worse, most of the revenues are supposed to fund corporate tax cuts!
John, now remember sea ice volume requires ice thickness. Now using the radar units on the ICE-sat measures ice height above some reference surface. If you have a chunk of ice floating in open sea, problems are simplified by using the radar sensed sea level. Where there a large areas of ice extending beyond the radar’s field of view, one must assume a sea geoid, or some geo positioning of the satellite at the radar pulse time. Now that you have the height above the “sea surface”, one has to estimate the lower surface, or thickness, by assuming ice density. Some of the best thickness profiles are from declassified US submarine sonar data. This was compared to ICE-sat data
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/seaice.html
Now ICE-sat, if I recall had some senor problems that may have resulted in under sampling of data. So we might have to wait a few months to see how CRYO-stat vehicle shows.
Here is a interesting comparison of sea ice concentration courtesy of Cryosphere Today
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/ct_compare_0303-0310.jpg
From what I can see, the concentrations are greater this year then 7 years ago. I guess that would be a plus for the earth.
One other thing John, the radar method used to reconstruct the ice height, was initially called “side looking radar”, before the SAR acronym. The SAR uses the evil Fourier Transform, I used for filtering temperature data, last year. Remember the reviews on the 50-60 year cycles that showed up then?
Add one that is not talked about enough…too volatile I suppose…and that is that humans have yet to put the reins on continued population growth, which will make all human-based solutions moot unless our own numbers are restrained. -Steve Missal
Why is this “not talked about enough” bullshit repeated by almost everyone who raises population issues? I must have seen it literally hundreds of times over the past couple of years. I suppose it’s supposed to show how brave the speaker/writer is, to raise a topic that no-one will talk about – except of course the legions of dittoheads who have made exactly the same claim before.
humans have yet to put the reins on continued population growth
Garbage. A second commonality among those who raise population in forums like this is that they almost invariably know nothing about the actual facts of global demography. The annual rate of global population growth has approximately halved (from about 2.4% to about 1.2%) since the early 1960s. Since the mid-90s, the annual absolute increase in population has declined slightly, so growth is now sublinear. Almost all countries with rapid population growth have programmes to reduce it, and in the vast majority of countries, it is in fact falling. This can confidently be expected to continue, as urbanisation is one of the main drivers of women having fewer children, and we couldn’t stop urbanisation even if we wanted to. Global population is expected to peak sometime around mid-century.
None of this means we should not try to speed the ongoing reduction in growth rate, and we know how to do so: improve the status and education of women, and make contraception and abortion readily available. However, intelligent discussion of the matter has to start from at least some understanding of the current situation.
> violation of his own rules
Citation needed and lacking.
Did you read that somewhere or just make it up? We never know your sources.
Look at the actual release: redactions done by the Senate Committee—per the rules.
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=324169
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2010/PSI.Exhibits.pdf
Frank Giger wrote: “So you’re saying that solar panels are not only free, but are suitable everywhere. Wow.”
That’s not what I said, and you know it.
You are making up stuff and pretending I said it, and ignoring what I actually said. Wow.
CFU @ 976:
No, I’m upset that PUBLICALLY FUNDED research is being kept from people by hiding it behind paywalls, then complaining that people aren’t educated or knowledgeable. And I’m complaining that in the context of people feeling the need to hack into research facilities to get information, it looks like more of the same — a willful act of keep people in the dark.
As for Springer-Verlag making money — hey, I’m a stark raving mad Capitalist. Money is good. Making lots of money is even better. But expecting =me= to =pay= a =private= company to read the results of research I already paid for once? Disgusting.
Ric @ 1040, Frank @ 1050:
I am an expert (more or less …) on renewable energy and most of the “It’s free!” and “It doesn’t work!” statements are about equally wrong.
The generating costs can be fairly low, on the order of $0.02 per KWh, for non-renewable energy, but that ignores the hidden costs. For renewable, it can be in the $0.08 to “the sky is just about the limit” (mine cost me $0.23 per KWh). However, there are still transmission and delivery expenses.
The reason renewables make sense is because the costs are falling (whereas fossil fuels costs are rising) and the hidden costs are much smaller (not so much on the pollution or need for a large military).
Having a miniscule electric bill doesn’t hurt either — assuming the monitoring software is reasonably accurate, my net consumption for the last billing period was about 44 KWh. At $0.145 per KWh that is something like $6.38 (plus a zillion dollars in fees ;) ). If you hate solar and want to pay lots of money for electricity (the fees are closer to $15 per month, so the electric bill should be close to $21), keep doing what you’re doing.
@Completely fed up: “Where aren’t solar panels suitable?
Well, some places are certainly better than others – take a look at the Global Solar Insolation Map
This is why I emphasize Regional Renewable Portfolio Standards – the American Southwest, for example, is the best place for solar. That’s why Peabody Coal’s coal mining projects in the Southwest should be canceled, and in their place, gigawatt-scale solar systems should be installed.
Now, if you compare that to the U.S. wind energy map, it becomes pretty clear that the Midwest is the best place to install turbines – along with offshore locations, which aren’t shown on that map, but which also have high consistent wind speeds. The Texas Gulf shore, for example, is a good resource.
Notice that a “fee-and-dividend” on fossil fuels will do nothing to encourage wind turbines, as the “fee” would simply be passed along to the end consumer. Neither would “cap-and-trade” play any role, because a wind turbine does not remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in a geologically stable form, and neither do solar panels – or nuclear power plants.
To eliminate the global rise in atmospheric CO2, you have to eliminate the combustion of fossil fuels – it’s pretty simple.
Sam says “Also, is there anyone else who sees a strange similarity between Climate Sensitivity and the famous Cosmological constant? The question is though, will climate scientists one day be forced to admit that CS was their “greatest blunder” like Einstein once – perhaps wrongly – admitted to?”
As others have noted, there is no historical analogy between the cosmologi8cal constant and climate sensitivity—except perhaps for Sam’s unsupported hope that climate scientists will one day confess that they were all wrong about the value of climate sensitivity.
But Sam also seems woefully ignorant of the actual history of the cosmological constant. Early on, DeSitter showed that a simple model of the universe obeying the rules of general relativity would expand or contract. Einstein, who thought, on the basis of what was then known, that the universe must be static, was forced to add a term to the basic equation of general relativity to keep the solution static. That is what was called the cosmological constant. Shortly thereafter, Hubble showed, on the basis of red shift measurments of distant galaxies that the universe was expanding, That appeared to eliminate the need for the cosmological constnat, and it is what prompted Einstein to call it his greatest blunder. However, more recently it was discovered that the expansion rate has been accelerating, so cosmologists have been forced to bring back the cosmological constant. In the intervening time, physics has progressed and quantum field theory suggests a mechanism, often called dark energy, to explain this phenomenon. Unfortunately, the predicted value for this dark energy is many, many orders of magnitude larger than what observations suggest. That is where matters now lie, and explaining just what is going on remains one of the fundamental problems of physics. In any event, our current knowledge does tell us that the cosmological constant is non-zero, and we know approximately what it must be, but we don’t yet know how to explain it.
As you see these are slim pickings indeed to build any analogy with the current estimates for climate sensitivity based on theoretical models and paleoclimatic data.
“I am an expert (more or less …) on renewable energy and most of the “It’s free!” and “It doesn’t work!” statements are about equally wrong.”
The energy is free with renewables.
The mechanism may not be (but have a look at photosynthesis), but then that’s a cost that any industrial energy extraction has. Except that fossil or nuclear power has the extra cost of having to pay for the energy source.
Sun falls down on us for free.
Uranium, not so much.
“No, I’m upset that PUBLICALLY FUNDED research is being kept from people by hiding it behind paywalls”
NO.
Do I have to remind you what YOU said?
Apparently.
Here you go:
https://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=3846#comment-171986
“As someone who actually runs, and pays to have run, web servers, I assure you that you’d likely save on those tax dollars if the data weren’t so closely guarded and those paywall sites weren’t, you know, making people pay.”
So you’re original complaint that you have failed to show and therefore by the magic of “forgetting what you said” have now changed the goalposts.
I don’t care if you have to pay for those papers.
Doesn’t come out of my tax packet.
“Did you read that somewhere or just make it up? We never know your sources.”
Given the likely source of his statements, I, for one, do not want to know. goatse.cx is bad enough…
Edward Greisch (#981) writes:
“967 Alan Millar: Here are some more “ludicrous alarmism comments” from peer reviewed literature or derived from peer reviewed literature:
The book “Six Degrees” by Mark Lynas says: “If the global warming is 6 degrees centigrade, we humans go extinct.”
See:
http://www.marklynas.org/2007/4/23/six-steps-to-hell-summary-of-six-degrees-as-published-in-the-guardian
I searched for that alleged quote in your link (which you appear to have copied and pasted from somewhere), and not surprisingly, I didn’t find it. Perhaps you should read your citations.
“Where aren’t solar panels suitable? Well for a start, the further north you go in the northern hemisphere the shorter the hours of daylight in winter.”
But longer hours of daylight in the summer.
“Take Scotland, for instance, ”
That has less than 1/5th the power requirements per capita of the US average…
I guess they insulate their homes.
“But expecting =me= to =pay= a =private= company to read the results of research I already paid for once?”
Did you really pay for the research? How can you tell? Nature takes papers from many countries. Do you pay tax in all of them?
Cool.
PS given I’ve paid taxes, can I have the blueprints for the F22?
Cheers.
#1085 Anonymous Coward
I believe it is stated quite clearly on the web site
http://www.climatelobby.com/fee-and-dividend/
—
A Climate Minute The Greenhouse Effect – History of Climate Science – Arctic Ice Melt
—
Our best chance for a better future ‘Fee & Dividend’
Understand the delay and costs of Cap and Trade
http://www.climatelobby.com/fee-and-dividend/
Sign the Petition!
http://www.climatelobby.com
“Yeah, it’s supposed to be revenue neutral. But are people convinced?”
I have no idea of the amount they collect in comparison to the quarterly checks I receive in the mail, nor have I compared the amount I get to the amount of carbon fee I pay, but I’d say it’s revenue neutral for me, and the portions of the total handed out are based on income [as stated on tax returns], which is why it’s considered a “tax cut”. In this one particular, I trust the independent govt auditor to keep them honest, the carbon tax isn’t going into general revenue, although I wouldn’t be suprised if they were using some of it to fund the [added] costs of the scheme.
#1094–not sure about this, but isn’t the BC carbon tax part of their efforts under the Western Climate Initiative?
http://www.westernclimateinitiative.org/
FWIW, most of Canada’s population falls under jurisdictions participating in WCI.
FCW, I’m still confused, I’m afraid.
You pay for the research to be done–whether it’s published or not.
Journals distribute it. They can’t do that free, and it’s quite expensive because (I presume) it’s high-touch, high-precision work with very low volumes.
I’d love to access all that information free, too, but at some point, somebody has to pay. As I understand it, tax dollars don’t currently fund the journals.
So, do we have a realistic reform proposal somewhere?
Kevin, yes I forgot about WCI as we don’t hear much new here on that front, originally begun by a handshake twixt our head politico and the Governator when they proposed a “hydrogen highway” stretching from here to there. More detail about the BC carbon tax found via BCs WCI site.
flxible (#1121),
Your link claims most of the revenues are planned to fund corporate tax cuts. The scheme benefits your wealthiest compatriots the most… as well as the foreign owners of many of the corporations affected by the giveaway. Evidently, it’s not transparent enough since you don’t seem to understand that. No wonder people don’t trust the scheme. It’s not so bad I suppose as long as the fees remain low but people will be pissed big time if large amounts of money are diverted from their gas bills and such are diverted to banks and the like.
True Fee&Dividend is paid back in full and in equal measure to every adult citizen (though provisions could be made for resident foreigners and children of course). That’s simple and easy to understand. And that would typically benefit most (potential) voters.
My #1106 was in response to #1094 by the way. Sorry for any confusion.
sam (1076) — Yes, those solid lower estimates show it will certainly become (uncomfortably) warm. What is actually worrying is the upper estimates; more than just uncomfortably warmer. Do read Mark Lynas’s “Six Degrees”.
Don’t you hate relying on spellcheckers.
“your” not “you’re”.
Sigh.
“Unfortunately, the predicted value for this dark energy is many, many orders of magnitude larger than what observations suggest.”
IIRC, 114 magnitudes too big.
Hence higher dimensions, to sweep the dark energy into so we don’t see it.
It’s REALLY interesting because there are so many ideas that aren’t quite able to have their consequences tested (unlike, for example, the quantum spreading of bound electrons, see Lamb Shift: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_shift).
Same with the Higgs and the Standard Model. Not quite able to rule it out yet, so it still sits with other ideas which can’t quite be ruled either out or in yet.
Compared to these, climate science is as the bedrock.
“@Completely fed up: “Where aren’t solar panels suitable?
Well, some places are certainly better than others”
Yup.
Some places are better than others.
But PV still works.
CFU : ““Renewable energy industries here are adding jobs rapidly, reaching 1.12 million in 2008 and climbing by 100,000 a year, according to the government-backed Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association.”
So I guess Gullible and Benny are against job creation.”
Following your source, electricity consumption is to increase by 15% a year, meaning a four-fold increase in a decade. Even if renewables reach 8 % of these value, coal will still represent 2/3 of power generation (for 85% now). So the increase of installed power will be in the ratio 4*2/3-0.85= 1,81 for coal compared with 4*0.08 = 0.32 for renewables, that is 6 times more new coal than renewables -admitting the figure for them is realistic. Still strange if “wind is cheaper”. Still stranger if you consider that they should abandon coal like the rest of the world in the next decades – why the hell do they build all these useless plants ?
but I do not claim it’s useless to build windmills – if I need to point it out again.
#1118
“I guess they insulate their homes.”
No need to guess. I live and work in Aberdeenshire and am looking for an ecofriendly house to buy.
You can get as a matter of course an Energy Performance Certificate for houses to sell.
Sign up to http://www.aspc.co.uk/ and read and weep. When I worked in Houston they had every electric gizmo in the flat and no pavements outside.
Such are the problems being hooked on the legacy of cheap oil. Looks like the “‘burbs” are so last century.
BC (1104): So we can conclude that in winter solar power is inversely related to latitude whereas energy requirements are directly related to latitude. Pretty obvious, really, but it is amazing how many green energy enthusiasts forget about these little things! Of course you can hedge your bets with a wind turbine, but “when the wind doesn’t blow, the windmill won’t go!” Oddly enough, just when the wind power fails, the height of the waves drop, so wave power lets you down, too, and of course, this is bound to happen at neaps, so tidal power can’t be relied on, either!
BPL: So you hook them all into a grid a thousand miles on a side, so you can reliably predict a minimum amount of available power. One windmill/PV plant/solar thermal plant/wave plant may be unreliable, but 10,000 spread over a huge area will not be.
1105 Completely Fed Up says:
27 April 2010 at 10:29 AM
“Seattle, Rod? I believe the sun shines there.
If the sun didn’t work there, then the daytime would be as dark as the night.
I take it you’ve never been to Seattle. Or you’re blind ;-)”
71 sunny days a year.
http://www.worldfactsandfigures.com/weatherfacts/numbersunny_city_desc.php
“71 sunny days a year.”
Beats Manchester, then.
“Following your source, electricity consumption is to increase by 15% a year, meaning a four-fold increase in a decade.”
Well duh.
The US is exporting all it’s manufacturing there so it can “cut carbon” by producing nothing more than Ban king Services and Movie Moguls, who want bla ckjack and hookers.
In fact, forget the CO2 cuts…
So, back to the original topic, what’s the RC consensus? Is it:
A) The CRU e-mails should not have been released, as they were illegally obtained. The perpetrators should have been and still should be brought to justice.
B) There was nothing in them – no misconduct, impropriety, tailoring or preconceived agenda. End of story, nothing to see here, please return to your homes.
C) The science stands and there should be no doubting any of it. Anyone who infers doubt from her own reading of the illegally obtained e-mails is a/an [insert appropriate pejorative here] and should rely instead on the unbiased Oxburgh report.
D) The only good that came of the episode was to discover how depraved are the[see above]s who stole them as well as those who see evidence of wrong-doing in them. That and to illustrate the plight of the scientists hounded by unreasonable requests by non-scientists for data transparency.
That about got it?
BPL @ 1132:
You realize that transmission lines are not capable of transmitting an infinite amount of power, right?
There are solutions, and some of them are rather clever and energy conserving, but a million square mile electric grid shuffling massive amounts of power is not one of them.
Don Shorr @ 1133:
So? Austin, TX has 115 sunny days a year and I make a pretty sizable fraction of the power I use — and we have a lot more A/C demand here than Seattle — with a 2.8KW DC solar array.
Hilo, HI has 36 sunny days, but manages to have 5.52 average “full sun” hours per day, which is greater than what I get here in Austin (about 5.1, when it isn’t a solar minimum … grrr). Seattle, WA with its 71 sunny days gets an average of 3.64 hours. So … clearly the number of sunny days isn’t exactly relevant. On the other paw, with 2-axis tracking, Seattle is back up to 4.74 average hours of sun, so maybe the answer is to properly design ones solar system?
1118 Completely Fed Up:
Congratulations, my friend, you’ve cracked it! All we have to do is generate all our power in summer when the sun is high and the days are long, and save it for the winter.
Next problem?
1132 BPL:
A thousand mile grid is superficially attractive (though a little difficult to achieve in the UK) but how much of that power will be lost in transporting it over such long distances? Of course, if somebody can come up with a room-temperature superconductor power distribution would become a doddle, but at present the shorter the distance you have to run your power lines from source to sink, the better.
Brian Carter (1138) — Modern HVDC lines lose about 1% for the conversion from and to AC and then only around 3–4% loss per 1000 km.
Plan on hooking up to a European + North Africa HVDC grid; doable.
AC@1125 – “MOST” of the revenues? I read that slightly over 50% goes to businesses, who I’d expect [being a “small business” myself] are paying well over half the tax collected, and I’d expect whoever pays in to be paid out, regardless if they’re individuals or businesses. I’m satisfied I understand it. And I hope that those that pay the most get the most back, “equal measure” as you say, as opposed to each resident adult collecting back more than they paid and business getting less or none, which certainly prevent any carbon tax being implemented.
“Since the carbon tax was introduced on July 1, 2008, some $306 million has been collected. However, the corresponding tax cuts have returned over $313 million to British Columbians.”
Sounds pretty neutral, although I’m not sure where the extra came from [not from me for sure]. I’m also expecting the annual increases to tick off folks more as they progress, but it’s nothing to do with corporate cuts, it’s because nobody wants anything to cost more, especially energy. The real corporate tax cuts here are coming out of the education, health care and municipal budgets.
But my original point was that – so far – the tax on carbon has not affected the continued increase of emissions in the province [up 1% a year]. Maybe partly due to it being small for starters, but as long as there are few [or only expensive] alternatives, I [we] have no choice but to pay the tax and keep on burnin’ along with minor efficiency and conservation measures.
To Gavin: SEEMS like a hilariously thin skin on that censor job if that was your work. APPEARS to be a giveaway that you would not allow it, it being purely on topic, but I will assume goodwill and that there was a good reason I’m not thinking of. Cheers, Walter
Here is the latest official word from the Norfolk Police about their investigation.
http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2010/04/norfolk-constabulary-continues-its.html
RE #1126 & 1076, for a cutting edge (not yet accepted by all climate scientists) much worse case scenario than 6C in Lynas’s SIX DEGREES, see Hansen’s 2008 AGU presentation, esp. pg. 24 of http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/AGUBjerknes_20081217.pdf
It’s about time environmentalists got out ahead of the climate scientists. The debate should not between scientists, who require 95% confidence before making claims and the fossil fuel industries who demand 99% or 101% confidence. Sane laypersons and policy makers should be striving to avoid the false negative (failing to mitigate a true problem), so on this one — permanent runaway warming and death to all life on earty — I’d say 5% (or even less) confidence would be more than enough to start drastically mitigating.
Furry (1138): You realize that transmission lines are not capable of transmitting an infinite amount of power, right?
BPL: And you can’t bench-press a trillion tons, either.
Your point?
1137 (Walter Manny),
Yes. Absolutely, without question, yes.
Realistically, as far as any influence on the course of events, yes. 50 years from now they are going to laugh at what a big deal deniers made about the e-mails, while WUWT, the Times Online, and a dozen other sources tell hordes of outright, laughable and easily dissected falsehoods that people willingly fall for.
This is your fun spin. The science does stand for anyone that bothers to actually learn it (and is equipped to do so), but people are more than welcome to question it, and are in fact encouraged to do so. It is by withstanding a torrent of questions and counter proposals that science is strengthened, not weakened. Sadly, to date, there have been zero (yes, zero) substantive knocks on the current scientific model of the climate and the future.
Zero.
Considering the amount of effort, emotion, and money that deniers have put into this, that’s pretty telling. The fact that you and many others don’t understand the science well enough to understand how true this is doesn’t make it a falsehood. Your inability or unwillingness to understand, unfortunately, is everyone’s loss, not just your own, because you and an army of others are working to resist doing something meaningful and important with your time, efforts and lives. You’d rather drive an SUV, watch a plasma TV, and vacation in Mexico and the Mediterranean than sacrifice a fraction of that to build a world with a sustainable future.
No, this is completely wrong, and again just a fun fairytale for a denier to indulge, because it seems ironic to you. The only good that will come of this is that five or ten years from now, when Arctic ice extent reaches even further summer lows, and global temperatures (as measured by satellite with the aid of “skeptic” Dr. Spencer) will have soared, and at that time people will be asking why they ever doubted the science, and they’ll look back on how easily they were fooled by people that were (a) very willing to twist words and the truth and (b) other people that were so ignorant and easily swayed that they willfully and foolishly added themselves to the ranks of the deniers, adding weight to an otherwise ridiculous position.
I really wish people such as your self would stop spending their time coming to sites like this with the haughty intention of taunting people that really know better, and instead use your time to better learn and understand the science. If, at the end of that path, you still believe climate change is a myth, so be it. Except you won’t. If you really bothered to learn, approaching the subject with a truly (not fashionably but laughably opposite of) skeptical eye, and an open mind, then you would come to understand what we do, which is that the human race is racing towards far bigger trouble than it can imagine.
There’s still plenty of time to change course, and that change in course would probably be beneficial to all societies, not harmful. The real alarmists are the ones that keep claiming it would “destroy the economy” and “take your hard earned money.” The reality is that a change over to renewables must happen anyway within the next twenty or thirty years, and there’s no reason it can’t be done soon and in a way that improves the quality of life of every person on this planet. No reason whatsoever.
Unless the tin foil hat fools get the keys to the asylum by convincing the world that black is white, the moon is made of cheese, and the scientists that know better are the ones that should never, ever be trusted.
Trust the rich fossil fuel fat cats. They have your best interests at heart.
FurryCatHerder wrote:
“No, I’m upset that PUBLICALLY FUNDED research is being kept from people by hiding it behind paywalls, then complaining that people aren’t educated or knowledgeable. And I’m complaining that in the context of people feeling the need to hack into research facilities to get information, it looks like more of the same — a willful act of keep people in the dark.”
If you’re blaming the scientists for this, you’re utterly clueless.
Scientists have been pushing for open online journal access for *years* — they’ve even founded journals of their own to show how it can be done
(http://www.plos.org/). U.S. government organizations have also pushed for free access — the NLM (National Library of Medicine) and its subsidiary the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information), which are both part of the major taxpayer-supported biomedical funding unit of the government, the NIH (National Institutes of Health), being among the most notable.
It’s the publishing companies that have resisted tooth and nail. It’s capitalism, baby. Take your beef up with them and it.
What do you think of http://www.climatestrategies.us ?
1145 Lynn Vincentnathan: “permanent runaway warming and death to all life on earty — I’d say 5% (or even less) confidence would be more than enough to start drastically mitigating.”
3 Cheers for Lynn Vincentnathan! I agree 1000% that any chance of Earth going Venus is just too risky. So count me as a risk aversive bureaucrat. I still say Lynn Vincentnathan is correct.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/AGUBjerknes_20081217.pdf
got re-routed to an advertisement
James Hansen’s highly distinguished resume is available at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/HansenCV_200912.pdf
Lynn, any such phrasing – “permanent runaway warming and death to all life on earth” – will be roundly condemned as hysterical overexaggeration and will actually do more harm than good in any public debate – that’s been seen before.
Ecologists and climatologists and glaciologists and oceanographers and so on should be the ones spelling out the plausible range of effects under business-as-usual scenarios as well as under the scenario of complete replacement of fossil energy sources with renewables. In fact, they’ve already done a fairly thorough job on this.
Environmentalists care about their surroundings, industrialists care about their systems, but scientists have to take both system and surroundings into account – and by doing so, one can come up with energy systems that do not undermine the surroundings – which we also rely on for survival (true, it can be a bit difficult getting certain industrialists to admit that they need air and water and other ‘ecosystem services’ – the problem seems to be too much ideological indoctrination, aka ‘economic brainwashing’).
In addition, the “environmentalists” often fail to see the big picture, or end up being used to assist in fossil fuel agendas – for example, many self-styled environmentalists have attacked offshore wind turbines and desert solar plants on ‘environmental’ grounds – while curiously ignoring the far, far more serious ecological damage done by offshore oil drilling and oil tanker traffic in coastal waters, as well as that done by uranium mining, coal mining, and coal-fired power plant emissions in desert areas (ever see the coal haze that settles over the Grand Canyon, for example?).
If only all environmentalists would drop the term, learn some more science, and start thinking of themselves as ‘ecologists’…