Energy security is another area I could go off one one about (I won't unless anyone wants me to!). Nuclear Fusion would be massive, and some of the latest science coming out of the National Ignition Facility (NIF, in the States) and the recent press releases from Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks division (which are particularly tantalising) is really promising. The majority of the hurdles left are technological rather than scientific, suggesting that with proper government attention (if we were to declare war on fossil fuels rather than somewhere in the Middle East for example), we'd stand a serious chance of cracking it relatively soon. Such a breakthrough would have vast implications for the economy and world politics.
The sad fact is that it wouldn't matter if the UK stopped all Co2 omissions overnight because the Indians and the Chinese are pumping so much **** into the atmosphere.
You can take that view, but surely you want to at least do your bit. But it is true it is a global issue and needs everyone to help out. There is also the point that while India/ China as you put it "are pumping so much **** into the atmosphere". They have lower emissions per person, plus lots of what they produce goes to Western markets.
Carpeting our beautiful countryside with useless Wind Turbines is nothing short of state sponsored vandalism in my opinion.
This is what really fecking irks me, we have stringent laws with regard to factory emissions etc., so much so that it is not cost effective to manufacture in this country. So what do we do ? We import cheap crap (and it is cheap crap believe me) from India and China where they don't give a **** ! Where's the logic in that ?
Not really, turbines are a stupid waste of money, it should go to research on long term projects. The next country that develops self sufficient non fossil or nuclear power will be set for years.
Like decreasing demand? More efficient buildings More efficient grid and infrastructure Lower watt lights Caps on consumption More efficient transport Educating people to use less Any number of things really. And that isnt even thinking about the supply side
A couple of things worth pointing out there JWM: -Regards "Climate-Gate", the scientists were cleared of scientific wrongdoing, and their publications found to be credible, by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, the independent Science Assessment Panel, Pennsylvania State University, an Independent Climate Change Review, the Inspector General of the US Department of Commerce, and the US National Science Foundation. I'm not going to hold them up as something scientists should aspire towards, but a certain amount of misrepresentation of those emails did occur, and none of the science in any of their publications was called into serious question. You get bad eggs in any profession (not that these were particularly bad), but even if you were to discount anything that was investigated, you won't be making a significant dent in the amount of work that supports Global Warming. -Your US temperature data is exactly the kind of interpretation I was warning against when I brought up Ocean temperatures. You're studying the change in a 3% contribution to Global Energy increase, and ignoring what the other 97% is doing. The second chart of heat waves from the EPA (having just chased the source up) is measuring the frequency of heat waves per year, but weighted by the number of states experiencing it. So yes, your chart shows that the 1930's were a period when the most US States had the most periods of hot weather, but firstly that's not an average temperature (which even then would still be misleading, if marginally better), and secondly as I explained with the El Nino stuff above, a few anomalous years do not take away from the overall trend. If we were debating whether Norwich's form this season was getting better or declining, your data is equivalent to cherry-picking games against teams beginning with the letter B: "Look we drew with Bournemouth, Brighton and Birmingham, and beat Blackpool, Brentford, Bolton - so everything's fine!" -The NASA/NOAA Data correction you've pointed out, did you ever stop to ask why the correction was made? If you look into press-releases from the organisations involved, it turns out that a known Climate-Change Skeptic questioned the graph, in particular the original jump around the year 2000. The graph you've shown is actually a composition of several data sets, which undergo corrections for issues like the time of day the measurement was taken. When combining two data sets, it was incorrectly assumed that the corrections had already been applied to both data sets, when actually one set was uncorrected. When the data was recalculated correctly, the differences in the graphs result. Sure the PR side of things weren't handled well, but the science behind the change is valid. The EPA data does not refute the NASA/NOAA data, seeing as they are different measurements, with the EPA data having the issue I've highlighted above making it unfair for a direct comparison. -Perhaps a touch unfair, but responding to Peer-Reviewed science with blogs and opinion pieces doesn't exactly add credibility to your argument. Chemistry, currently on a project working with things that have a tendency to spontaneously catch fire if they come into contact with uncommon things like, say, air. Which has made things interesting, I think I'm averaging a small fire every other day at the moment. You may have a point, but there's more to renewal/sustainable energy than wind turbines, in particular Nuclear fusion as mentioned by Carrabuh and myself. Wind Turbines are currently one of the better options available to the UK at the moment, as wind is a resource we're well-off for, even if it's not an ideal option. Transfer of technology to the developing industrial countries is also a lot faster than it was originally developed, so hopefully the countries you've mentioned will get through their "dirty phase" faster than western countries did. The fact India are very actively pursuing Thorium reactors is a good example of this.
We have so little data to work with that to claim that the sole cause is man-made is a gross over-statement. We do know that the Earth has been in continual change. What we don't know is if those changes have been cyclical. Perhaps the biggest problem that we face is being able to accurately predict what the effects of those changes will be in good enough time to take defensive measures. Along side that, I have become more and more suspicious of the continuing development of a Climate Change Industry which having escaped the lab and lecture hall is now running rampant through our economies.
Someone has to start the change somewhere, and as an already industrialised nation of wealth it's a might hypocritical to tell others; "would u mind turning off your power station dear boy, I want to walk my rather nice meat fed hound in the country, but gosh darn it, it's abit warm!" As well as cracking fusion, we should definitely be using tidal estuaries for power, much more reliable than wind turbines, which in my opinion are an utterly ineffective wealth transfer scheme to politicians buddies. OK tidal estuary power generation will upset some beardy weirdy sorts who wanna save a few plants and animals, that our country is more than capable of preserving. The irony that we as a species now classify as a mass extinction event and we won't help save the world with a tiny bit of localised pain! Bah!
In reality there must be a range of options to produce energy. Lack of diversity has got us in plenty of trouble as it is. Different areas suit different technologies. Wind, solar, hydro, tidal etc all have their place but no one is the answer. A massive breakthrough would actually be energy storage (batteries) and smart grids.
You actually got me thinking about just how much Climate science has been done. A pretty rough look at WebofScience (unfortunately a pay-walled service, which catalogues a huge amount of scientific research in 'proper' journals since 1900), gives the 241,995 research papers on the topic. That's not a small amount by any means, particularly when just shy of 235,000 of those would be expected to support climate change. Over the past 7 years it's thought to be the most heavily research scientific field. Your argument about cyclical changes is something I covered before. Yes, Earth's climate has changes cyclically in the past, and the cause and effect of this is pretty well understood. However the time scale is dramatically different to what we are currently experiencing and could not be invoked to explain current global trends. Whilst I'd like to believe that Climate science (in fact any science) would only be used to help inform decisions which are the best of the greatest number of people, I'm not naive to think there aren't people who (like with many things) will use it to make a quick profit to the detriment of others. I don't think Climate Science is something that should be ignored, even if it turns out that the whole field is false, however unlikely. If Anthropogenic Global Warming is a real thing, then the research will allow us to work out where will be hardest hit, act accordingly, and hopefully have solutions/preventions to the problems it would cause. But if it turns out that there's no such thing as Global Warming, then the money spent on research has employed and trained thousands of people, and that investment in science will have had positive impacts way beyond the research published. It's like NASA is reported to add ~$14 to the US economy for every $1 of government funding. Research funding is not a zero sum game. We're also going to need alternatives to fossil fuels sooner or later, so if Climate research helps to speed that work along, then that's far from a bad thing. I got a bit distracted on WebOfScience. Unfortunately there are no results for "Norwich City Football Club", but "Ipswich Town Football Club" did turn up a result: "THE SPATIAL EXTERNALITY EFFECTS OF FOOTBALL-MATCHES AND ROCK-CONCERTS - THE CASE OF PORTMAN-ROAD-STADIUM, IPSWICH, SUFFOLK". I've got to disagree with their conclusions though that Football games at Portman Road create nuisance up to 1km from the stadium, I'd argue they're a pain much further afield than that!
I do agree with a fair bit of this. Human influence is in my opinion a well documented factor. But, our understanding of the overall workings and cycle of the earth is still fairly poor. Are we accelerating things, almost definitely, can we reverse some possible problems we maybe causing, probably not, the developing world won't slow down enough with billions of mouths to feed. But climate change is big business, and where big bucks are concerned, there will always be vested interests, a good example being highly inefficient wind turbines that go up and make a number of people rich but barely ever produce and have a truly negligible positive effect when you consider the cost and energy to make them relative to their very limited life span. I'd rather burn coal, but work more on some of the carbon capture tech that is already in development. Bah!
Between $22 and $27 billion per year is put into the man made climate campaign. would you believe most of that goes to media... Al Gore's electricity and gas bill for a year is $30.000 Irony is built in to man made climate change it seems. The US just signed a deal with China which essentially says China can go as high as they like on emisions until 2030. China has pledged to "peak" emissions by 2030!!! in other words they have till 2030 to crank up the CO2 as high as they can and that will be their "peak" that it cannot surpass?! But I thought Climate change was happening NOW? That we needed to act now? Yet China, one of if not the world's worst polluter has been granted permission essentially to increase CO2 emissions for another 15+ years?!?!?!? That makes absolutely no logical sense given what the IPCC are saying. Meanwhile Fukushima.. leaking cesium for several years into the pacific is not even a footnote in any of this?! Everything I said is factual including the fact nature produces 20 to 40 times our worst case scenario. You see "Climate change" is the measure of Man's CO2 input into the system, they cleverly separated Man made and natural, because Natural CO2 emissions come under the description Climate viariables, not climate change. This essentially is a means to exclude natural sources, termites for example alone cause 10 times what we produce. Anyone remember Climate gate 1 and 2? Caught fudging the numbers and excluding data, caught red handed!! The 97% agree was a fabrication, cherry picked data. The minority report of over 700 scientists the libtards like to claim was Oil's influence? Well the truth was it was discounted because the Climatards claimed most of those were "not climate scientists" and did not claim they were corrupted. John Casey, formerly NASA JPL US Gov and now at Science and space dot com is a brilliant scientist with an impecable reputation (Al Gore called this guy a Pseudo scientist! - This is how the IPCC roll) and he and many others including many who have quit the IPCC or been pushed out for finding results to the contrary, are not claiming the IPCC are wrong, they are claiming and backing it up with sceince and geology, that the IPCC are actually perpetrating the biggest intentional fraud humanity has ever seen. The fact that 31000 scientists which include 9000 PhDs dissent is kept very quiet.
