Question 3: Do you acknowledge that nuclear power is necessary to address Question 2.
Anyone answering Yes, Yes, No believes in unicorn “emissions” as a power source.
Correction — Yes, No, No puts you in magical unicorn territory.
A shoddy article. Implicit assumption: climate change is caused by CO2, not by anything else. Fact not mentioned: the mean global air temperature (the only quantity directly affected by CO2 concentration) has hardly budged since Kyoto was signed, putting it among the most successful international treaties of all time. Corollary not mentioned: given that we don’t really understand the global climate, this does not bode well for geoengineering projects!
Stephen
The article doesn’t say that climate change is due to CO2, just that it could be, He specifically says that the climate models may be in error. My take on his position is that he thinks bthe unrestrained use of fossil fuels without some form of CO2 sequestration could be catastrophic. I concur. As Jerry Pournelle, no knee-jerk green, has said, we are running and uncontrolled experiment with the atmosphere. The possible outcomes range from benign to costly to catastrophic. We just don’t know.
Implicit in that warning, though, is that it is the experiment that is potentially harmful, and not the status quo. But, for all we know, that is totally wrong. With apologies to Geddy Lee, if you choose not to experiment, you still have made an experiment.
It’s also interesting that he talks about CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere since 1750. That was about 100 years before the end of the Little Ice Age. If that’s the starting point for climate change, then a bit of warming doesn’t exactly sound bad to me.
We’ve heard a lot about global warming causing the glaciers to recede. Funny thing, this has been going on for quite some time. From the National Park Service’s Glacier Bay National Park website:
Captain George Vancouver had sailed the area in 1794, and created a rough map that showed the bay filled with a single great glacier. Eighty-five years after Vancouver, naturalist/preservationist John Muir had visited the bay by canoe, and found the glacier receding as fast as a mile per year.
So, 85 years after 1794 was 1879. The Little Ice Age ended about 1850 and the glaciers started receding with nary an SUV or coal-powered power plant in sight. What caused that? Did the Industrial Age end the Little Ice Age, and if so, was that a bad thing?
The problem is the article doesn’t address natural warming, warming that will not be affected by flagellation. Nothing proposed so far would stop natural variation. Which brings us to geoengineering and a managed climate. Why would managing a complex chaotic system like climate be more effective than the managed economies and societies of the recent past?
Will the same people who can’t design a web site, who don’t understand the complexity of the insurance industry, or who don’t possess the knowledge to control all aspects of an economy really going to be able to manage our climate? No thanks. We really will need to escape off world if these people try and control the climate.
The author even seems to acknowledge that there will be some “bad luck” but the climate is always changing so we can’t hold unintended consequences against the central planners. But if climate changes are the reason for climate control and bad things happening because of those efforts not being a reason to not try controlling the climate, why not apply the same reasoning to nature’s actions?
X has grown 100% since YYYY. This could lead to the catastrophic result Z. Don’t just stand there, do something!
I think it’s no/no.
And agree it’s a shoddy article- but a vast improvement over most lefty idiocy.
So:
“Do you believe the risks of climate change merit serious action aimed at lessening them?”
Answer no.
The most significant climate change that occur over the few hundred centuries is marked be the end of the Little Ice Age which is usually recognized as occurring around 1850.
The ending of the Little Ice Age was and is good news. The end of LIA
was when Temperate Zone glaciers stopped advancing and began to retreat, and in period of 1850 to 1900 there was a rapid retreat of glaciers globally. And that was significant global climate change.
And from the 1900 to the present time, glaciers globally have continued in this trend of receding rather than advancing and, probably, this will continue beyond 2100. There was some worry that this trend was stopping in the 1970’s- with newspaper of the time splashing headlines of the coming ice age, but rather than the beginning of a ice age, the period of concern was merely a slight pause of a longer term trend of the global retreat of glaciers.
Many have predicted that glacial mass added during the LIA may be completely erased within 50 years, but some such predictions are were done over 30 years ago, and it’s seems unlikely to happen, but perhaps in the next 50 years this might occur. But it’s probably as likely as this will not happening in next 50 years or even within the next 100 years.
But whether all glacier ice added during the LIA, melts, it still seems resonable to assume that recovery from the LIA will continue for next 50 to 100 years.
Prior to the Little Ice Age was a period called the Medieval Warm Period. The entire Medieval Warm Period could be said to be a recovery from a cooler period before this which is associated with the Dark Ages [a period of cooler global and European weather].
The Medieval Warm period never reached the warmer temperature of
the Holocene Climatic Optimum which period of thousands of years at the beginning of our current interglacial period. Near the end of Holocene Climatic Optimum, the Sahara Desert became the desert we have today- and that was a major global climate change. Or compared to our current retreat of global glacier this was a far more significant global climate change- as ending civilization and transform vast grassy plain into sandy dunes and uninhabitable lands.
Other changes which occurred related to LIA was sea level stopped declining and began to rise again, and this began before glacier began retreating [well before end of LIA].
It seems a likely guess that the current warming period, like the Medieval Warm period, will not reach the temperatures which occurred
during Holocene Climatic Optimum as tread over the last several thousand years has be a slight amount of cooling.
As for the other question:
“Do you think that reducing an industrial economy’s carbon dioxide emissions to near zero is very hard?”
Which the answer is no. Or it will not be as hard as switching from horses to cars. But the idea of government being capable of doing this,
is just silly.
Or the governments of this world have spend about 1 trillion dollars worth of public wealth because they say they are attempting to change the climate. And it has not done anything to effect the climate or CO2 emissions. Any government is capable of becoming more oppressive- there is long history of this occurring without the excuse of climate change. So there is no doubt the governments have managed to rob wealth in their version of the legend of Robin Hood.
Governments can and do cause poverty, but a war on Climate, work no better than the War of Poverty. Or governmental policies have resulted in increases of CO2 emission in similar manner that the War on Poverty has caused more poverty [as compared to were there no such War on Poverty].
But were government to do things the public wants them to do- such as win wars and explore space, then we easily get to a place where there was “zero emission”.
+1
I also agree with a couple exceptions. Mitigating the effects of climate change can have merit depending on what policies are being proposed. Emergency management efforts to deal with flooding and other natural disasters would be beneficial even if the fear mongering is wrong because these are events that happen anyway. Sea level rise will happen with natural warming, so systems to protect costal cities would also be beneficial to mitigate natural variation. You can use your imagination to think of other similar sitcooling. Abundant energy, access to clean water, and ways to distribute them throughout the country immediately come to mind.
A civilization that wants to span thousands of years needs long term insurance against uncertain climate future. People need also need to accept the future is uncertain and we neither live in a climate optimum or a static climate.
You make some good assessments but it is interesting to note we just exited a really strange solar cycle with a double peak in sun spots, which was pretty much unheard of, and that we are heading into some sort of cycle of minimal solar activity. Rather than warming or a plateau of current temperatures, we could be headed for cooling but who knows?
“Wodun
January 11, 2016 at 12:54 PM
I also agree with a couple exceptions. Mitigating the effects of climate change can have merit depending on what policies are being proposed. Emergency management efforts to deal with flooding and other natural disasters would be beneficial even if the fear mongering is wrong because these are events that happen anyway. ”
The government should do such related to weather, but climate change policies have hindered “normal” govermental policy [related to such concerns]. This is because climate change policies are interonnected to “environmental issues”. An example of this is all the endless media related to saving the polar bear. Which if anything, is a hunting issue [mostly “native” hunting] but despite hunting polar bear populations have been increasing and it’s bonker crazy to imagine climate change will cause polar bears to die out.
But environmental issues related climate change extend much further than the matter of polar bear population- or the polar bear is merely a symbol/slogan of the cause.
The UK for example has suffered from flooding, mostly because governmental restriction and neglect to dreg rivers which caused by
climate change/ environmental concerns. Not to mention climate forecast indicating less rain in the future. And more famous is idea of less snow in the future.
So if endless going on about less rain and less snow, this tends to argue against getting more snow plow and and spending scare governmental resources or time dealing with such related matters.
And one has the UK MET office constantly wrongly forecasts the next seasons weather and these are the same characters predicting 50 to 100 years into the future [one is denier if one questions these oracles].
Another aspect would California’s management of water- there multiple climate change/environmental issues which is causes California to have water shortages. And it has nothing to do with the weather or climate and everything to do with governmental policy which caused by climate change/environmental policies.
The obsession with CO2 caused damage to climate science, in number of ways, but in simply terms it has been a governmental enforced denial of natural variability – as it’s distraction to the message.
Basically the Left is crazy and uneducated and that has and is going to cause many problems mitigating future weather effects. And a feature of climate change, is it device to shift blame. Government can their failure to govern is something cause the everyone rather than the fault of the governmental policies.
I notice that as of 22:10 PST on Sunday, the article’s comments section has stopped changing since at least early this afternoon. Any comment or reply to a comment is tagged as “pending”, before disappearing with the next reload of the article. Either Slate cannot pay someone on Sunday to moderate the article’s comments, or they don’t like the comments they are getting.
In my opinion, the real problem with warmists is not their belief that anthropogenic CO2 is a potentially catastrophic problem. The Pournelle quote above supports that. No. The real problem is that for most of them, the solution involves draconian controls on the generation of CO2 with the inevitably associated slowdown in economic growth.
There are many ways of getting CO2 out of the atmosphere or otherwise cooling down Earth, most of which are reversible (in the sense of turning them off) and also have side benefits in many cases. And there are many alternative ways of providing energy that haven’t been seriously tried; to name but two, OTEC and wave power both of which have side benefits.
Removing CO2? Well, try planting forests on currently bare uplands – which has had some publicity in the UK lately because the side benefit would be reduction in flooding. Or dumping a few hundred or thousand tons of iron filings in “wet desert” bits of the ocean, which would also mean more fish. Or OTEC, because the bottom water pulled up to the surface would promote phytoplankton growth as a side benefit.
It’s not about the climate; it never has been. It’s about control.
I’m a Yes/Yes.
Yes, mitigation of climate change risks is important, even vital. The planet changes naturally, and the watermelons would have us spend human energy on “fixing” a climate that is not “broken”, instead of acknowledging and acting on the obvious and ubiquitous occurrence of weather and climactic extremes. Build better structures, streamline emergency response teams, things like that. Essentially screaming into the hurricane “I’m sorry, Gaia, to have upset you! Please have mercy!” doesn’t seem to be working…
Yes, getting to an energy framework that doesn’t run, or include, fossil fuels will be incredibly difficult. For the very long-term future, it behooves us as a race to find some other source of energy that provides copious quantities for our need. But for the short term, say a century or two, we should continue to drive efficiency into our systems to conserve fossil fuels. However, that conservation should be focused on resource availability and not this quixotic nonsense from the AGCC religion.
Mitigation is important regardless of beliefs in AGW Apocalypse. That activists and politicians only think of stopping nature shows they really don’t take climate change seriously. It looks more like their policies are a defense mechanism to avoid the reality that the climate is always changing. If only we suffer in these five simple ways, mother Gaia will be happy and not punish us.
I know, it betrays a definite lack of logic. We are even told from some researcher groups that the ‘coming disaster’ is ‘unavoidable’, but still insist that we try to hold back the ‘unavoidable’ and pursue strategies that they think should have stopped the ‘coming disaster’ in the past. All the while refusing to consider mitigation.
If it truly a ‘coming disaster’ and also ‘unavoidable’, the only logical recourse is to mitigate, to find ways to endure and/or thrive in spite of the ‘unavoidable coming disaster’.
For so-called “scientists” they make little sense.
I have a better set of questions:
Do you think we can build cities on Mars?
Do you think the relatively minor climate change on Earth is a big problem?
If you answer Yes to both questions then there’s obvious something wrong with your brain (and you’re probably Elon Musk.)
–Trent Waddington
January 11, 2016 at 9:03 PM
I have a better set of questions:
Do you think we can build cities on Mars?
Do you think the relatively minor climate change on Earth is a big problem?
If you answer Yes to both questions then there’s obvious something wrong with your brain (and you’re probably Elon Musk.)–
I don’t think there is any earth government [or governments] which can or has any will to build towns of Mars, but I think we can and will build cities on Mars [and Venus].
If you have any understanding of space policy, Earth warming can’t be a problem- or today with a trillion dollars one can build a solar shade- assuming you wanted to cool Earth [which no one actually wants].
What climate activists want will cost tens of trillions and still not effect CO2 emission or global temperature or global climate.
Or governments have already spend about 1 trillion and done nothing, and activist imagine no money has been spent. Or US Cap and trade would have cost about 10 trillion and it would not have do anything to significantly reduce US emissions, and of course it probably would cost more than 10 trillion and that was for a couple decades- it would have to done to end of time [though if done to end of time- still would not have any measurable or detectable effect].
A summary of what 1 trillion dollars did, was move industry to China and per unit of energy used for industry, China emits more CO2- 80% of it’s electrical power is from burning coal. Though burning coal doesn’t emit as much CO2 as burning wood- which is subsided by Western climate change policy though the amount power from burning “bio-fuels” is has been and will be an insignificant amount- regardless of whether government can encourage it enough or not. Though bio-fuels have been and can be more significant than both solar and wind energy- which a large chunk of the trillion [or more] dollars have been squandered on.
The only serious way to reduce global CO2 emission is to use more nuclear energy- and both India and China are in process of attempting to do this [because they simply can continue using the amount/rate of coal they are using]. So that means that it looks like only countries which will reduce CO2 emission in next couple of decade will be India and China [in terms of current “plans”] and all governmental plans of the west will do nothing but waste wealth in futile and idiotic ideas [which include shutting down nuclear power plants].
Or spend that trillion shutting down the notion that there’s somehow a problem with Earth having a slightly different climate by demonstrating that people can live and thrive on a planet with a completely different climate. It’d be a bit hard to claim a 1 degree temperature change in the next 100 years is going to make a lick of difference when there’s people living on Mars, isn’t it?
Question 3: Do you acknowledge that nuclear power is necessary to address Question 2.
Anyone answering Yes, Yes, No believes in unicorn “emissions” as a power source.
Correction — Yes, No, No puts you in magical unicorn territory.
A shoddy article. Implicit assumption: climate change is caused by CO2, not by anything else. Fact not mentioned: the mean global air temperature (the only quantity directly affected by CO2 concentration) has hardly budged since Kyoto was signed, putting it among the most successful international treaties of all time. Corollary not mentioned: given that we don’t really understand the global climate, this does not bode well for geoengineering projects!
Stephen
The article doesn’t say that climate change is due to CO2, just that it could be, He specifically says that the climate models may be in error. My take on his position is that he thinks bthe unrestrained use of fossil fuels without some form of CO2 sequestration could be catastrophic. I concur. As Jerry Pournelle, no knee-jerk green, has said, we are running and uncontrolled experiment with the atmosphere. The possible outcomes range from benign to costly to catastrophic. We just don’t know.
Implicit in that warning, though, is that it is the experiment that is potentially harmful, and not the status quo. But, for all we know, that is totally wrong. With apologies to Geddy Lee, if you choose not to experiment, you still have made an experiment.
It’s also interesting that he talks about CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere since 1750. That was about 100 years before the end of the Little Ice Age. If that’s the starting point for climate change, then a bit of warming doesn’t exactly sound bad to me.
We’ve heard a lot about global warming causing the glaciers to recede. Funny thing, this has been going on for quite some time. From the National Park Service’s Glacier Bay National Park website:
Captain George Vancouver had sailed the area in 1794, and created a rough map that showed the bay filled with a single great glacier. Eighty-five years after Vancouver, naturalist/preservationist John Muir had visited the bay by canoe, and found the glacier receding as fast as a mile per year.
So, 85 years after 1794 was 1879. The Little Ice Age ended about 1850 and the glaciers started receding with nary an SUV or coal-powered power plant in sight. What caused that? Did the Industrial Age end the Little Ice Age, and if so, was that a bad thing?
The problem is the article doesn’t address natural warming, warming that will not be affected by flagellation. Nothing proposed so far would stop natural variation. Which brings us to geoengineering and a managed climate. Why would managing a complex chaotic system like climate be more effective than the managed economies and societies of the recent past?
Will the same people who can’t design a web site, who don’t understand the complexity of the insurance industry, or who don’t possess the knowledge to control all aspects of an economy really going to be able to manage our climate? No thanks. We really will need to escape off world if these people try and control the climate.
The author even seems to acknowledge that there will be some “bad luck” but the climate is always changing so we can’t hold unintended consequences against the central planners. But if climate changes are the reason for climate control and bad things happening because of those efforts not being a reason to not try controlling the climate, why not apply the same reasoning to nature’s actions?
X has grown 100% since YYYY. This could lead to the catastrophic result Z. Don’t just stand there, do something!
I think it’s no/no.
And agree it’s a shoddy article- but a vast improvement over most lefty idiocy.
So:
“Do you believe the risks of climate change merit serious action aimed at lessening them?”
Answer no.
The most significant climate change that occur over the few hundred centuries is marked be the end of the Little Ice Age which is usually recognized as occurring around 1850.
The ending of the Little Ice Age was and is good news. The end of LIA
was when Temperate Zone glaciers stopped advancing and began to retreat, and in period of 1850 to 1900 there was a rapid retreat of glaciers globally. And that was significant global climate change.
And from the 1900 to the present time, glaciers globally have continued in this trend of receding rather than advancing and, probably, this will continue beyond 2100. There was some worry that this trend was stopping in the 1970’s- with newspaper of the time splashing headlines of the coming ice age, but rather than the beginning of a ice age, the period of concern was merely a slight pause of a longer term trend of the global retreat of glaciers.
Many have predicted that glacial mass added during the LIA may be completely erased within 50 years, but some such predictions are were done over 30 years ago, and it’s seems unlikely to happen, but perhaps in the next 50 years this might occur. But it’s probably as likely as this will not happening in next 50 years or even within the next 100 years.
But whether all glacier ice added during the LIA, melts, it still seems resonable to assume that recovery from the LIA will continue for next 50 to 100 years.
Prior to the Little Ice Age was a period called the Medieval Warm Period. The entire Medieval Warm Period could be said to be a recovery from a cooler period before this which is associated with the Dark Ages [a period of cooler global and European weather].
The Medieval Warm period never reached the warmer temperature of
the Holocene Climatic Optimum which period of thousands of years at the beginning of our current interglacial period. Near the end of Holocene Climatic Optimum, the Sahara Desert became the desert we have today- and that was a major global climate change. Or compared to our current retreat of global glacier this was a far more significant global climate change- as ending civilization and transform vast grassy plain into sandy dunes and uninhabitable lands.
Other changes which occurred related to LIA was sea level stopped declining and began to rise again, and this began before glacier began retreating [well before end of LIA].
It seems a likely guess that the current warming period, like the Medieval Warm period, will not reach the temperatures which occurred
during Holocene Climatic Optimum as tread over the last several thousand years has be a slight amount of cooling.
As for the other question:
“Do you think that reducing an industrial economy’s carbon dioxide emissions to near zero is very hard?”
Which the answer is no. Or it will not be as hard as switching from horses to cars. But the idea of government being capable of doing this,
is just silly.
Or the governments of this world have spend about 1 trillion dollars worth of public wealth because they say they are attempting to change the climate. And it has not done anything to effect the climate or CO2 emissions. Any government is capable of becoming more oppressive- there is long history of this occurring without the excuse of climate change. So there is no doubt the governments have managed to rob wealth in their version of the legend of Robin Hood.
Governments can and do cause poverty, but a war on Climate, work no better than the War of Poverty. Or governmental policies have resulted in increases of CO2 emission in similar manner that the War on Poverty has caused more poverty [as compared to were there no such War on Poverty].
But were government to do things the public wants them to do- such as win wars and explore space, then we easily get to a place where there was “zero emission”.
+1
I also agree with a couple exceptions. Mitigating the effects of climate change can have merit depending on what policies are being proposed. Emergency management efforts to deal with flooding and other natural disasters would be beneficial even if the fear mongering is wrong because these are events that happen anyway. Sea level rise will happen with natural warming, so systems to protect costal cities would also be beneficial to mitigate natural variation. You can use your imagination to think of other similar sitcooling. Abundant energy, access to clean water, and ways to distribute them throughout the country immediately come to mind.
A civilization that wants to span thousands of years needs long term insurance against uncertain climate future. People need also need to accept the future is uncertain and we neither live in a climate optimum or a static climate.
You make some good assessments but it is interesting to note we just exited a really strange solar cycle with a double peak in sun spots, which was pretty much unheard of, and that we are heading into some sort of cycle of minimal solar activity. Rather than warming or a plateau of current temperatures, we could be headed for cooling but who knows?
“Wodun
January 11, 2016 at 12:54 PM
I also agree with a couple exceptions. Mitigating the effects of climate change can have merit depending on what policies are being proposed. Emergency management efforts to deal with flooding and other natural disasters would be beneficial even if the fear mongering is wrong because these are events that happen anyway. ”
The government should do such related to weather, but climate change policies have hindered “normal” govermental policy [related to such concerns]. This is because climate change policies are interonnected to “environmental issues”. An example of this is all the endless media related to saving the polar bear. Which if anything, is a hunting issue [mostly “native” hunting] but despite hunting polar bear populations have been increasing and it’s bonker crazy to imagine climate change will cause polar bears to die out.
But environmental issues related climate change extend much further than the matter of polar bear population- or the polar bear is merely a symbol/slogan of the cause.
The UK for example has suffered from flooding, mostly because governmental restriction and neglect to dreg rivers which caused by
climate change/ environmental concerns. Not to mention climate forecast indicating less rain in the future. And more famous is idea of less snow in the future.
So if endless going on about less rain and less snow, this tends to argue against getting more snow plow and and spending scare governmental resources or time dealing with such related matters.
And one has the UK MET office constantly wrongly forecasts the next seasons weather and these are the same characters predicting 50 to 100 years into the future [one is denier if one questions these oracles].
Another aspect would California’s management of water- there multiple climate change/environmental issues which is causes California to have water shortages. And it has nothing to do with the weather or climate and everything to do with governmental policy which caused by climate change/environmental policies.
The obsession with CO2 caused damage to climate science, in number of ways, but in simply terms it has been a governmental enforced denial of natural variability – as it’s distraction to the message.
Basically the Left is crazy and uneducated and that has and is going to cause many problems mitigating future weather effects. And a feature of climate change, is it device to shift blame. Government can their failure to govern is something cause the everyone rather than the fault of the governmental policies.
I notice that as of 22:10 PST on Sunday, the article’s comments section has stopped changing since at least early this afternoon. Any comment or reply to a comment is tagged as “pending”, before disappearing with the next reload of the article. Either Slate cannot pay someone on Sunday to moderate the article’s comments, or they don’t like the comments they are getting.
In my opinion, the real problem with warmists is not their belief that anthropogenic CO2 is a potentially catastrophic problem. The Pournelle quote above supports that. No. The real problem is that for most of them, the solution involves draconian controls on the generation of CO2 with the inevitably associated slowdown in economic growth.
There are many ways of getting CO2 out of the atmosphere or otherwise cooling down Earth, most of which are reversible (in the sense of turning them off) and also have side benefits in many cases. And there are many alternative ways of providing energy that haven’t been seriously tried; to name but two, OTEC and wave power both of which have side benefits.
Removing CO2? Well, try planting forests on currently bare uplands – which has had some publicity in the UK lately because the side benefit would be reduction in flooding. Or dumping a few hundred or thousand tons of iron filings in “wet desert” bits of the ocean, which would also mean more fish. Or OTEC, because the bottom water pulled up to the surface would promote phytoplankton growth as a side benefit.
It’s not about the climate; it never has been. It’s about control.
I’m a Yes/Yes.
Yes, mitigation of climate change risks is important, even vital. The planet changes naturally, and the watermelons would have us spend human energy on “fixing” a climate that is not “broken”, instead of acknowledging and acting on the obvious and ubiquitous occurrence of weather and climactic extremes. Build better structures, streamline emergency response teams, things like that. Essentially screaming into the hurricane “I’m sorry, Gaia, to have upset you! Please have mercy!” doesn’t seem to be working…
Yes, getting to an energy framework that doesn’t run, or include, fossil fuels will be incredibly difficult. For the very long-term future, it behooves us as a race to find some other source of energy that provides copious quantities for our need. But for the short term, say a century or two, we should continue to drive efficiency into our systems to conserve fossil fuels. However, that conservation should be focused on resource availability and not this quixotic nonsense from the AGCC religion.
Mitigation is important regardless of beliefs in AGW Apocalypse. That activists and politicians only think of stopping nature shows they really don’t take climate change seriously. It looks more like their policies are a defense mechanism to avoid the reality that the climate is always changing. If only we suffer in these five simple ways, mother Gaia will be happy and not punish us.
I know, it betrays a definite lack of logic. We are even told from some researcher groups that the ‘coming disaster’ is ‘unavoidable’, but still insist that we try to hold back the ‘unavoidable’ and pursue strategies that they think should have stopped the ‘coming disaster’ in the past. All the while refusing to consider mitigation.
If it truly a ‘coming disaster’ and also ‘unavoidable’, the only logical recourse is to mitigate, to find ways to endure and/or thrive in spite of the ‘unavoidable coming disaster’.
For so-called “scientists” they make little sense.
I have a better set of questions:
Do you think we can build cities on Mars?
Do you think the relatively minor climate change on Earth is a big problem?
If you answer Yes to both questions then there’s obvious something wrong with your brain (and you’re probably Elon Musk.)
–Trent Waddington
January 11, 2016 at 9:03 PM
I have a better set of questions:
Do you think we can build cities on Mars?
Do you think the relatively minor climate change on Earth is a big problem?
If you answer Yes to both questions then there’s obvious something wrong with your brain (and you’re probably Elon Musk.)–
I don’t think there is any earth government [or governments] which can or has any will to build towns of Mars, but I think we can and will build cities on Mars [and Venus].
If you have any understanding of space policy, Earth warming can’t be a problem- or today with a trillion dollars one can build a solar shade- assuming you wanted to cool Earth [which no one actually wants].
What climate activists want will cost tens of trillions and still not effect CO2 emission or global temperature or global climate.
Or governments have already spend about 1 trillion and done nothing, and activist imagine no money has been spent. Or US Cap and trade would have cost about 10 trillion and it would not have do anything to significantly reduce US emissions, and of course it probably would cost more than 10 trillion and that was for a couple decades- it would have to done to end of time [though if done to end of time- still would not have any measurable or detectable effect].
A summary of what 1 trillion dollars did, was move industry to China and per unit of energy used for industry, China emits more CO2- 80% of it’s electrical power is from burning coal. Though burning coal doesn’t emit as much CO2 as burning wood- which is subsided by Western climate change policy though the amount power from burning “bio-fuels” is has been and will be an insignificant amount- regardless of whether government can encourage it enough or not. Though bio-fuels have been and can be more significant than both solar and wind energy- which a large chunk of the trillion [or more] dollars have been squandered on.
The only serious way to reduce global CO2 emission is to use more nuclear energy- and both India and China are in process of attempting to do this [because they simply can continue using the amount/rate of coal they are using]. So that means that it looks like only countries which will reduce CO2 emission in next couple of decade will be India and China [in terms of current “plans”] and all governmental plans of the west will do nothing but waste wealth in futile and idiotic ideas [which include shutting down nuclear power plants].
Or spend that trillion shutting down the notion that there’s somehow a problem with Earth having a slightly different climate by demonstrating that people can live and thrive on a planet with a completely different climate. It’d be a bit hard to claim a 1 degree temperature change in the next 100 years is going to make a lick of difference when there’s people living on Mars, isn’t it?
THAT
Is an excellent point.