Title says it all:
Go for it people!
And for those who dont understand what I'm saying, read Hot, Flat, and Crowded by THomas Friedman.
Better to be reported than given Karma for it.
That is extremely idiotic.
Polar bears are at record high population levels because they are leaving the arctic due to melting ice and ravaging farms.
Its not just the polar bears. Tere are other animals in the arctic you know.
Polar bears are not irrelevant. All habitats are very important.
If the Earth really did warm up ten degrees, we'd double the sustainable population in return for a few swamps and sandbars being under water. When you turn a ten week growing season into a twenty week growing season, you take a climate from barely livable to really bloody useful. I fail to see the problem with that, and I'm walking around town in shorts during winter in Anchorage, Alaska. It's a nice and cozy -9 right about now.
That is extremely selfish.
Did you ever stop to to think, that the Pacific islands are sinking due to rising temperatures and sea levels? These people are homeless.
The Tuvulu government wants to send its people to Australia because their country is sinking. Tuvulu isnt the only country that is sinking. What about the Low Countries?
Rising temperatures arlso increases the range of tropical diseases like malaria.
People and animals in Siberia are already dying from the diseases brought by mosquitos.
Ok, People, Watch this. It explains quite well.
"The Global Warming Swindle"
Search on video site.
Globalization: To accelerate artificially global economic growth + Higher return for major investors/bankers
Overpopulation: Belief of "Kid as workforce" + Amelioration of food supply and health care augmented the infant survivability + lack of education at thrid world.
Our efforts would be detter directed at reducing our output of more harmful chemicals. Here is an interesting experiment I did for a science fair. I compared how fast snow melted under different conditions. A heat lamp doesn't mest snow as fast as adding some dirt will. The radation just bounced of the clean snow. Reducing dust in the atmosphere is help keep the planet cool to a much greater extent than reducing CO2 by, what, %0.006. At leat that's my take on it.
Oh and one more thing, who says that an extra 0.2 degrees is a bad thing. Thats like moving south 100 km or so. Canada will have more useable land, a longed growing season. It will be great up here!
http://needsofthemany.blogspot.com/2007/04/global-warming-melts-mars-polar-ice.html
Hmm. Hmm. I suppose we should alter the pressure and direction of our factories' smoke stacks, since they all seem to be aimed directly at Mars's polar ice caps. Why, it can't be solar activity at all! That would be irrational. Everyone knows humans have a far bigger capacity to alter the environment than the sun.
A more general article: http://needsofthemany.blogono.com/2008/03/04/global-warming-is-officially-over-suck-it-greenies/
Since we have apparently given up on any semblance to reality and devolved to jokes here's a good one. Enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_kODETmro8
Holy crap, Satan just threw a snowball at me!
But seriously, if anyone cares about global warming and lives more than 5 miles from their place of business, they should have "dumbass" branded on their forehead, then be permanently sterilized for the good of humanity. Case in point, a professor here at the university that is a serious nutjob about all things green, then drives his Prius 45 miles each way to work. I drive a 91 Buick, guess which one of us uses less gas?
all you guys who says that global warming happens because of increased sun irradiance, I'd really like to see your sources.
There is indeed a very strong correlation between global temperature and sun activity - til about 1970. see http://www.mps.mpg.de/dokumente/publikationen/solanki/c153.pdf
But after 1975 there is a sharp rise in temperature while the sun activity didn't increase in average til then. manmade global warming theories explain that rise, solar irridiance global warming theories fail to do so. (And before you argue that 33 Years is a too short time span, the sun activity and global temperature correlated for the last 1100 years at a significance level above 95% and stopped doing so after 1975 for the first time in that long time span)
But to address the energy concern which *is* a part of the global warming problem but in itself is in fact much a bigger problem then all three of the concerns listed in the OP combined, there really is only one realistic solution and it's one that is currently well within our technological capability but it would so shake up the current world power structure that it's a solution that really can't be considered by the Saudia Arabian hand puppets (i.e. Republicans).
All this alternative energy stuff is totally bogus. There is only one solution and it's actually pretty simple; Nuclear Power for the generation of electricity combined with a marginally efficient electric car. Yes there's a waste disposal problem but it's by no means insurmountable. It goes a long way towards addressing the carbon emmissions problem and it solves the energy problem in one fell swoop. With this in place I'm not even so sure we even have an over population problem at all merely a population distribution problem.
Globalization however is a much bigger issue for the developed world. Clearly industry has been chasing the lowest cost labor for decades. First was Japan and gradually the standard of living rose in Japan and they moved to Taiwan and the standard of living rose and they moved to Korea and the standard of living rose. It's clear that eventually the standard of living will rise sufficiently to equalize around the globe and then there's nowhere left to chase low cost labor. At that point the planet as a whole can make better strides to more evenly increase *everyone's* standard of living. The problem is that there are 1.3 billion Chinese, 1.1 billion Indians, 680 million Africans, etc. Clearly the globalization process is going to take quite some time.
To mitigate the effects of globilization we need *fair* trade. What we have is called *free* trade but in reality it's neither free nor fair and really this is our own stupid fault. Allowing the trade imbalance that we have with China to persist is criminal (so are Americans that don't buy American cars but that's just me).
In any case *fair* trade is where we have as unfettered access to our partners markets as they have to ours with "reasonable" controls on trade imbalances along with requiring that our trading partners are bound by similar pollution and working condition requirements.
Combine this with corporate tax incentives that reward companies for creating jobs in this country and punish companies that eliminate or outsource jobs and you pretty much have my view of the solution to the entirety of the worlds problems. Well all the problems except perhaps for the middle east but really once oil is not so critical there's nothing there that can't be solved with the tactical application of a few Neutron Bombs.
There, that should give folks plenty to talk about both pro and con.
It is too easy to focus on nuclear energy and forget about all the other measures to solve the energy problem. I agree with you, nuclear energy is part of the solution, and not for a small part either. However, as an example, the idea that electric cars are the solution, does not mean we should stop with fiscal measures to make energy efficient cars more attractive.
I disagree there is only one solution. As an example, an undersea power cable was constructed between my country, the Netherlands and Norway. It is safe to say that without the Kyoto protocol, it would never have been constructed, because there was considerable risk, it's the longest undersea cable in the world, it had never been done with direct current, and my country is full of natural gas, so constructing a few gas plants would have been much cheaper and lower risk. Nevertheless, within a few years, including delays because of technical problems that always occur in risky projects, we can run a few cities on Norwegian hydro power, which, turns out to be much cheaper than electricity from natural gas. Building a nuclear plant would have been much more costly and would have taken much longer (typical time from construction decision to production 20 years).
There are stacks of solutions to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels. Some will turn out to be more effective than the others. We just need to put a reduction policy in place and let the free market decide which alternative has the best papers.
I have no real clue how much more electricity we'd need to produce to accomplish this. Double our current level or perhaps triple is a reasonable guess. We could certainly leave all Hydro electric production in place, perhaps even all natural gas plants as well, but if you need to get rid of all oil and coal electric production on the planet while doubling or tripling the total electric current demand then this is definitely *not* coming from wind farms or other exotic energy sources. The only reasonable solution for 99% of all new power production is Nuclear.
The other factor about Nuclear power is that most of the costs involved are the "sunk" costs of initial construction and perhaps the cost of waste disposal. The actual per unit cost of fuel to power the plant itself, which is essentially the real cost once the sunk costs are amortized over the life of the plant, are about 1/3rd that of a coal fired plant and 1/5th that of a gas combined cycle plant (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html).
These ratios improve over time as efficienies of plant operation improve, as the useful lifetime of nuclear plants improve (allowing longer times over which construction costs are amortized) and most certainly as the cost of fossil fuels rise.
All in all it's a win-win-win situation. We get cleaner energy, we get cheaper enegry and we get a source of energy that is not held in a strangle hold by a handful of pissant countries run by crazy fanatics.
We could then reserve oil for it's more necessary role as the prime ingredient in plastics and for jet fuel (I have yet to hear about a commercially viable electric plane).
Very good argumentation on the side of Mumblefratz and very little energy on my side to get deep enough into the material to be able to proof the opposite. But it leaves my opinion, one should view these topics critically, because it has important political and economical impact and has the tendency to be strongly influenced by certain interests.
A recent article of importance with regards to this thread is here.
As far as nuclear power as I proposed above I do believe it to be a technologically achieveable solution, the real problem is that it's not yet a politically achieveable solution. Clearly replacing all oil/coal electricity generation with nuclear while simultaneously replacing all gas cars/trucks with electric equivilients will take long periods of time and require a world commitment to the long process. That's not really going to happen.
So in reality we'll just muddle along doing what is incrementally more efficient and perhaps in another 100 years we'll get somewhere close to what I proposed. But in the meantime we'll have to suffer through oil crisis after oil crisis as OPEC tries to keep the cost of oil as high as possible yet never expensive enough to make any realistic alternative economically feasible.
Also our children will get to find out which side is closer to the truth about global warming.
If you honestly compare the two motivations for having an ulterior motive for someone’s stance on global warming, I believe any reasonable person would conclude that there is far more vested interest that benefits by claiming that global warming is not a problem than there is that benefits by claiming that global warming is a problem. Therefore I am far more suspicious about someone’s ulterior motives for claiming that global warming is *not* a problem than I am someone that claims it is.
Still if you weigh all these options and opinions and come to the honest opinion that global warming is not really a problem then there’s really nothing much I can say. You are after all welcome to your own opinion and I (unlike many others) do not consider someone to be an idiot simply because their honest opinion differs from mine.
PS. I’m still waiting for someone to take off on my Neutron Bomb comment. After all even though the topic *is* indeed serious, it’s important to maintain a modicum of a sense of humor. If nothing else it keeps you from taking yourself too seriously and you’ll live longer for it.
There it is.
I'll say something about overpopulation, since global warming is the popular kid who gets all the attention.
Vasectomy. Best thing I ever did.
Mumble's been busy, I'll hit the high points
There are obviously exceptions, such as delivery drivers and the transiently employed. I'm talking about the people who have been in the same job for 5 years and are still doing this.
Nuclear power isn't the panacea it's cracked up to be. Fusion might be, but today's fission plants will run into the same problem oil is: the fuel supply can only be stretched so far. Currently economically viable sources are sufficient for maybe 200 years at current usage, not enough to support the massive increase you recommend. Breeder reactors or switching to another isotope is possible, but not in current use. Not to mention the proliferation issues inherent with widespread breeder reactor use.
A far more likely solution to the oil issue is this. Nature took a million years to make oil, we can probably cut that down a bit.
For vested interests, there's plenty on both sides. People are getting rich selling green crap that isn't (the whole ethanol bullshit, for one example), others are selling green as a means of attacking the vested oil interests instead of the invironmental issues (don't get me wrong, that's still a worthwhile goal - it's just the clouded motives that get me).
If you want my opinion, global warming is an issue, but probably not the 600 pound gorilla it's being made out to be. 20 years from now, we'll either be pissed at ourselves for not doing anything or laughing at ourselves for creating another tulip mania. I'm inclined to believe the latter.
Don't vote with your wallet, vote with your wang
And listen to your cat.
Wow, where are you pulling this from? Firstly, if the Earth warms up by 10 degrees (celsius? fahrenheit? either way 10 degrees is a crapload) the amount of dry land would dramatically decrease due to rising sea levels. All coastal cities would be flooded without massive man-made structures to keep the water at bay (the cost of which would be impossibly high except for the wealthiest cities of the wealthiest nations).
Raising global temperatures by 10 degrees would also in no way increase the growing season - it would in fact do the opposite (for the most part, though there would be exceptions). It would turn most currently arable land into desert, but the bigger problem is that it would dry up most of the fresh water on the planet. No matter how much arable land you have (and all models predict that a dramatic increase in temperature would drastically reduce it), you aren't going to grow jack without fresh water. Not to mention that water shortages are already a problem in the dryer parts of the world, such as in parts of African and the Middle East.
Another problem associated with such a big increase in temperatures is that insect-born diseases (the most prominent one probably being malaria) would become much more widespread. Say good-bye to Africa!
Someone else already pointed out that a trend of 'several years' is meaningless regarding geological and climatologic timeframes. The temperature has been cooling down for the past several years but it doesn't change the fact that over the past century there has been a clear trend of increasing temperatures. Now it is possible that it's all part of the natural cycle of the Earth's climate. But like it or not, for the past century humanity has been pouring all sorts of pollutants into the atmosphere and cutting down forests at extraordinarily high rates. So high in fact that we can actually measure significant changes in the levels of many chemicals, including CO2, methane, CFCs, and a whole lot more.
Chemicals like CFCs are artificial - they do not exist in nature unless we put it there. And yet, during the last century (less, even, they were invented in 1928 and were largely banned worldwide in 1994) we dumped so much into the atmosphere that we affected a noticeable decrease in ozone levels in exactly the places where most light-weight molecules are expected to end up (due to winds and the rotation of the earth). The fact is that we have affected the atmosphere by spewing chemicals into the air before; and the amount of CO2 emissions we've produced since the Industrial Revolution exceed those of any other chemical ever by leaps and bounds. And it just so happens that over the last century global temperatures have been rising faster than expected.
Arguing that us puny humans are incapable of affecting the Earth's climate are downright ignorant. We know we've affected the planet in significant ways (we've messed with the ozone layers, polluted pretty much all of the water on the planet and destroyed vast swaths of forests; we've converted millions of square miles of plains and other terrain into farmland, diverted rivers, build and blown up islands; we've even managed to light up the dark side of the earth! And most of these were small-scale achievements, made by single nations or even smaller groups; emitting pollution is one of the few things all nations have happily contributed to).
So we can chalk it up to coincidental simultaneity of the onset of the industrial revolution and the accelerated heating up of the planet - which so far has never been convincingly explained via natural phenomena. Or, we can take a hint, err on the side of caution and do what we can to mitigate the consequences of our carelessness. If we do our best to stop or reverse the effects of global climate change, and it turns out that it was never our fault to begin with and our actions achieve nothing, then all we've done is waste some time and effort (if you can call developing alternative energy and more energy efficient products a waste of time). But if we do nothing and it turns out that we really are responsible for the changing climate, and it really is as bad as a whole lot of researchers in the field believe, then we should all be arrested for negligent endangerment of generations of children.
We know that the climate is changing. It's already been shown pretty effectively (thank you Mumblefratz) that it's exceedingly difficult to find anyone qualified and without conflicts-of-interest arguing that the climate isn't changing. And there is clear evidence that we might be responsible for that change. There's a chance we aren't responsible for it, but IMO enough qualified people have run warning bells all over the world that it warrants serious consideration.
From the research I have done (and I have done considerable research into the topic and have had the opportunity to speak one-on-one with physicists and climatologists who have made this the research topic of their lives), I am convinced that there is a good chance that the effects will not only be undesirable, but catastrophic.
Based on the fact that the climate is changing and my opinion that the chances of disastrous consequences are high, I'd much rather we play it safe and do what we can to at the very least mitigate the damage. I mean, take the following example: the chances of you dying in a car crash whenever you pull out of your driveway are extraordinarily small. But I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of you buckle your seatbelts nearly everytime, anyways; because if you do get into an accident that seatbelt might just save your life. In this case, climate change is the accident that might happen (and I think the chances are higher than a car crash), and combating climate change via whatever means is your seatbelt. Except in this case, it's one big seatbelt for everybody on the planet including future generations. If not enough people are willing to bother with the mild inconvenience of helping to fasten that seatbelt and that car crash does happen, then everybody loses. On the other hand if everyone contributes, and the crash happens, we have a good chance of getting up and walking away from it unharmed. And even if it doesn't, all we've lost is the little bit of time and effort we contributed - much of which will have yielded useful advances anyways.
Very nice write-up pigeon.
OK I'll take it.
When is Peak Oil expected? Some say it may already have occured, others say it's a few years off. Admittedly others may argue for an even longer time. Also perhaps the current world recession will stave it off a few quarters, but 200 years? What could we discover/develop in another 200 years, cold fusion or something even better?
Certainly there are a lot of things that might prove to be promising and I'm all for investigating every single one of them. But none of these things are things we can do now, on a commerical scale that could provide the possible benefits that I outlined above. All that is required is the will to actually do it, the technology is established and proven, why in God's name aren't we using it? The only downside is the waste issue and concerns about safety, but both of these are also well within our current technological capabilities, we just need to "bite the bullet" and accept that this is what we can do now. In the meantime we can look for something better while still actually doing something productive.
@Pigeon! Nice retort. karma given.
200 years is more than enough time. Based on ITER timetables on their site, the first economoical fusion power plants are expected to start being built around 2080 as long as ITER works out as expected, which it almost surely will. Technology is increasing at a rate which is faster and faster as time goes by. Just think about 200 years ago. We had just barely figured out steam engines, and the lightbulb was still a few years off (the earliest forms anyway, Edison's bulb didn't come until 1880)... compare that to now. We have Spaceships and supercomputers able to compute the interactions between subatomic particles, only about 100 years after subatomic particles had been shown to even exist. A lot can and will happen in the next 200 years. I would be suprised if nuclear power was even needed 100 years from now.
To the OP: Friedman also has another good book which is primarily about globalization: 'The World is Flat: A History of 21st Century Economics'
One of the interesting things stated somewhat bluntly in his book is the fact that unskilled labor in developed countries is gonna be really screwed soon, but skilled labor (as long as it cannot be done by a machine) will actually have an increase in their living conditions.
IMO, Overpopulation is solved by Globalization. It has been shown time and time again that when standard of living increases, the number of offspring will decrease. Japan is a good example of this, and if I remember right their population is actually shrinking. As global standards of living increase, children produced worldwide will likely decrease. One of the things I find odd is how people seem to see globalization as a one way street. They see jobs leaving our country, but neglect to see how when those overseas populations' standards of living increase, they will want to buy goods. Sure, many of the goods will be coming fromt heir own country, but there will be many goods imported from all over the world including America. Sure, it hurts in the short term, but give it 20 or 30 years and overall we will start to see the benefits. Not to mention thats one less area for them to film those '$1 a day and you could help save this child's life' commercials...
@Always! Nice post. karma given.
I remember some years back in my particle physics class we calculated that there's only enough tappable fuel for nuclear fission to last for between 50-100 years at current usage levels. I can't speak for the validity of the estimation of tappable fuel, that was given to us by our professor. Nonetheless, whether there's fuel for maintaining 50 or 200 years of current levels of fission power, that's not a whole lot. Especially when you consider that fusion accounts for a very small percentage of total power generation in the world. Also, breeder reactors are used in some parts of the world. They're surprisingly efficient and also actually somewhat reduce radioactive waste.
Also, it takes decades to bring a fission power plant from the planning stages to completion. Really we (by which I largely mean the US) should've been building nuclear plants for the past several decades. Stupid, counterproductive green movement! Anyways, the solution has to be multipartite. Even if there's all of a sudden a huge movement to replace coal and gas plants with fission plants, it'd take something like 20 years to start seeing the first effects. The solution has to combine short term and long term components. Widespread use of fission would be a great medium-term goal, but we also need to do something now. Solar and wind, and hydro power where possible are 3 tried and true alternative, complimentary energy sources. Hybrid and electric cars, and even improved clean-coal technology would also be good in the short-term.
Obviously fusion power, like somebody said above, is the holy grail of energy production. The combination of fusion power with electric cars is -worthy.
how could a fusion be "cold" ?? or did i just misunderstood the 2 words of "cold fusion"?
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