Why Sustainable Power Is Unsustainable 1108
Urchin writes "Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter, the most advanced 'renewable' technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources including indium and platinum —
resources that could dry up in 10-15 years if they were widely used in the renewable energy market."
Re:rtfa (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, no, it's not right in the article. It's in the comments. And we all know what comments are worth.
C'mon, at least try to be effective in your deliberate deception.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Informative)
They aren't gonna run out of metal (Score:2, Informative)
As even mentioned in the article, the prices of the resources used in the construction of these renewable energy systems have dramatically increased due to unexpected increases in demand.
As prices go up and up, manufacturers aren't gonna be entering bidding wars for the last few grams of silicon. They're going to try and find cheaper materials that do the same job, switch to systems that don't use materials of such increasingly scarce supply, or decrease the amount of rare materials that each unit needs. Solar panels, windmills, etc. aren't going to become impossible to produce in a few decades.
Why are there so few responses to the easy fixes? (Score:5, Informative)
We need research into different energy sources, it's true, but what boggles my mind is why people don't address the simple things in their own lives, if they're concerned about energy conservation. The funniest thing I can see in this particular arena is the moron who rails against the oil companies and middle eastern governments, terrorists, and whatever else, then gets in his Explorer to commute to work by himself, getting 3 mpg, while babbling on his phone about how bad the energy situation is. If you drive a truck (no, I don't use the euphemistic 'SUV'), then shut the F up- you're part of the problem.
There is so much BS going around about alternative energy sources, but we could make a big difference now. I haven't ever owned a car that got less than 25 MPG, and I work half of my time from home; when I don't, I often ride a train. I doubt there are many alternative energy advocates that are close to my carbon footprint, but they put their faith in technology that doesn't exist instead of getting their supersized butts out of their trucks. And people listen to them anyway.
Why the earth is hot (Score:2, Informative)
I'd agree with most of you post, but not the "young Earth" model behind this statement. The heat wasn't "trapped" (or at least what little "trapping" there was occurred billions of years ago, not thousands); it is being constantly procuded by radioactive decay [physorg.com].
--MarkusQ
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:2, Informative)
Scientists who study climate are in agreement. Some non-experts who study unrelated fields disagree. I'll stand with the people who know what they're talking about, and whose arguments I find sensible. Feel free to review the evidence yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
You moderators are truly pathetic, modding me flamebait for posting a polite reply. By the way, here's a paper which confirms exactly what I said [uic.edu], but I doubt you'll read it since you only care about silencing anyone who disagrees with you.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
Climate scientists are not in complete agreement. It is always possible to find a few scientists that disagree with consensus opinion. Sometimes these mavericks are even right. See and the continental drift hypothesis. [wikipedia.org]
However, many of the commenters above appear to be using some disagreement to deny climate change (forgive me if I'm reading too much into the comments. Attacking the consensus is a common tactic of deniers).
I would suggest that people look at the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [wikipedia.org]. This is a United Nations effort with a very large number of scientists involved. So many, from so many different countries, that I would suggest that the information represents consensus opinion and should be listened to very carefully.
Let me quote their latest major report from 2007 (taken from Wikipedia).
" * Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
* Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.
* Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the timescales associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized, although the likely amount of temperature and sea level rise varies greatly depending on the fossil intensity of human activity during the next century (pages 13 and 18).[34]
* The probability that this is caused by natural climatic processes alone is less than 5%.
* World temperatures could rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 ÂC (2.0 and 11.5 ÂF) during the 21st century (table 3) and that:
o Sea levels will probably rise by 18 to 59 cm (7.08 to 23.22 in) [table 3].
o There is a confidence level >90% that there will be more frequent warm spells, heat waves and heavy rainfall.
o There is a confidence level >66% that there will be an increase in droughts, tropical cyclones and extreme high tides.
* Both past and future anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium.
* Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values over the past 650,000 years
"
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it...." is regularly attributed to Joseph Goebbels. However, I have found no evidence that he said it. Everyone quotes everyone else, but no one ever gives a source. See: http://www.bytwerk.com/gpa/falsenaziquotations.htm [bytwerk.com].
"A lie told often enough becomes truth" Vladimir Lenin.
Re:indium (Score:3, Informative)
I wish there was more information in TFA on what "greater than 40%" is.
III-V material tandem multijunctions. At the moment, these would be a germanium bottom cell, a gallium arsenide middle cell, and a gallium-indium phosphide top cell, but to get over 40% they're going to tweak the materials materials, probably going to some sort of indium-gallium arsenide on the bottom, and very likely adding some more junctions. Nitride materials (e.g., gallium-indium arsenide nitride) are possibilities, too. You can substitute in small amounts of other group-III and group-V elements to tweak the materials properties somewhat.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
They are NOT agreed.
Yes. They. Are.
According to this recent study [uic.edu], 97% of specialists and 82% of scientists in general agree with anthropomorphic climate change.
So, what's your evidence that scientists do not agree? Put up or shut up.
Re:Here's an idea (Score:3, Informative)
It's an investment. I'll get the money back on my heating bills over the next few years, and those windows should last 20-30 years.
I don't have to dick around with storm windows in the fall/spring.
I don't have to run around every damn autumn morning wiping off condensation.
I don't have entire windows frosted over in the morning after a cold night.
It's hard to put a dollar value on those things, but fewer boring house maintenance chores == win.
Re:Here's an idea (Score:3, Informative)
Dunno about energy requirements, but fiberglass is melted sand so I think we're good for a while.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:1, Informative)
Dude, all attacks against religion are called for, and thus count.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:1, Informative)
You absolutely right. If someone said that global warming wasn't going to make it cold enough to snow, they were lying. Global warming doesn't make winters not cold. It just makes them a bit warmer than they were before. So far, the warming is not nearly enough to make it not snow where there has been snow before.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:1, Informative)
i think you have it back to front....
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:2, Informative)
What about this? [wordpress.com]
Or stuff like this? [americanthinker.com]
And what would life be like if I didn't mention this? (pdf wanting) [senate.gov]
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Informative)
The whole "Mars is warming" thing is crap. You are looking at a tiny amount of data, from a couple of spacecraft that aren't even really designed to measure that.
The data we have on the Earth presents a pretty good picture of warming, and the scientific consensus is that it's human caused. The trend in scientific consensus is also increasingly towards it being human caused.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Informative)
Here, try actually getting a clue before spouting the party line. You may want to believe that you are so important that you can start and stop climate change but no, You're not.
I know your next move will be to discredit and belittle the people that believe other than you do so I included all their names and credentials.
I know it's long, so try really hard to focus and concentrate and you might be able to make it through the whole letter.
The following is the Dec. 13th 07 letter to Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations on the UN Climate conference in Bali:
Dear Mr. Secretary-General,
Re: UN climate conference taking the World in entirely the wrong direction
It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC's conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions. On top of which, because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.
The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by Âgovernment Ârepresentatives. The great Âmajority of IPCC contributors and Âreviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.
Contrary to the impression left by the IPCC Summary reports:
 Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability.
 The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.
 Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today's computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.
In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is "settled," significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. But because IPCC working groups were generally instructed (see http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/wg1_time
As I debated with a Greenpeace person... (Score:3, Informative)
I got hit up by Greenpeace yesterday, pushing for support on legislation to reduce carbon emissions. Here's what I told them.
How many kids do you have/plan to have? Honestly, it doesn't matter. Do you have/plan to have any?
As a global society, we can't even manage to get everyone to sign up to stopping the increase in emissions. Even those countries that do sign up rarely show any interest in anything close to 50% reductions within a single generation (around 20 years).
Assuming we can't manage to drop at least 50% over each and every generation, and the population certainly isn't going down... Humanity is going to put out more carbon over your genetic line's lifetime, no matter what you do, than someone without kids will ever put out in their lifetime that politely ends and then stops stressing the environment.
You want to save the environment... Stop focusing your energy on nice-idea-but-ultimately-inconsequential carbon cuts and push for the real problem, humans, to stop breeding.
Humanity is, sadly, a plague on the global environment in just the same way locusts are in smaller areas - they massively produce in numbers too large for their environment to support.
The sad conclusion I've come to is that, able to keep draining the environment in new and creative ways that no other animal can do, short of choosing to conciously adopt a responsible breeding program, no amount of trying minor tweaks is going to make that dramatic a difference until we screw things up so badly nature forces it upon us.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Informative)
If I'm reading that study correctly, the list of potential respondents was drawn only from academic institutions and government agencies, and from that list, the actual respondents essentially self-selected.
And you think that's an accurate reflection of reality?
The argument all along has been that the scientists with the most to gain from government action -- through grants or regulation or whatever -- are the ones most likely to agree on anthropogenic climate change. In that much, the study seems right on target...
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Informative)
Ice core data tells us what the CO2 concentrations used to be. We can reconstruct atmospheric conditions for hundreds of thousands of years into the past. Lets consult the ice core data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png [wikipedia.org]
Gee... looks like the CO2 started to shoot up during the industrial revolution. I'm pretty sure industrial revolutions are man-made things, but double check me on that just to be sure. While Earth has had CO2/temperature/etc fluctuate throughout history, the recent rate of CO2 concentration has increased at a clearly unnatural rate. And this "it's caused by the sun" argument was been thoroughly dismantled. The solar-variance explanation predicts a warming of the stratosphere. Global warming predicts a cooling of the stratosphere. Guess what? The stratosphere has been cooling.
How much peer-reviewed scientific literature do you see published per year that contradicts the anthropogenic global-warming explanation?
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:2, Informative)
The data, collected by the Canadian Hydrographic Service, in conjunction with a similar US agency, show that, for example, the mean water level for Lake Superior in 1918 was 183.33 metres. In 2008, it was 183.21. (Since you're probably SI challenged, that's a difference of 4.7 inches on a 601 foot deep lake.) That's a difference of .000645%. ZOMFG - 6.5 ten thousandths of a percent! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Polar bear numbers are not decreasing. The numbers that suggest they are are compiled by aerial surveys. Inuit hunters on the ground, and the residents of Churchill, Manitoba have a different opinion http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1ea8233f-14da-4a44-b839-b71a9e5df868 [nationalpost.com]
I'd call you an f***ing idiot, but I seriously doubt you're smart enough to have ever had sex.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:2, Informative)
try 5 years (Score:4, Informative)
when indium dries up your going to have to coat your roof in cadnium.
When indium price rise then it will be economically feasible to mine it from places it is not feasible now, much like happened with oil.
i've said for years that PV is no good
PVs aren't the only way to generate power from the sun. At large scales solar concentrators [wikipedia.org] may be more efficient. And PV tech may improve.
Falcon
Re:Electricity cables? (Score:3, Informative)
But there's no easy and efficient means of stepping the power down. Add to that that AC High power lines can skip the return circuit and save money using an earth ground return. Oh and DC is cheap and easy to make from AC, but AC is expensive to create from from DC.
Nope, no ice age. [Re:Wrong Premise] (Score:5, Informative)
... these same climate experts were also spouting off that there would be an ice age not so long ago.
Citation needed.
Try this one: Study Debunks Global Cooling myth of the 90s [abcnews.com] (or here [usatoday.com])
"The supposed "global cooling" consensus among scientists in the 1970s -- frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can't make up their minds -- is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era....
But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends. The study reports, "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.
"A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales."
Nuclear power is the answer. (Score:3, Informative)
Nuclear power is cheap, clean, virtually unlimited, and SCALABLE.
None of the "renewable" sources are even close to being scalable.
The nuclear waste problem can be taken care of by using reactors that use up fuel as completely as possible. Even if such reactors are too expensive for now, the amount of radiation released is far less than that of coal and it contained very easily by comparison. Spent fuel can be buried and then dug back up when it is cost effective.
Wasting time and taxpayers money on non-scalable methods is stupid when we have an excellent workable solution already. Give people the permits to build the reactors and the market can take care of this efficiently!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor/ [wikipedia.org]
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html/ [pbs.org]
Re:Because you can't make a magnet without neodymi (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure you missed his point entirely. They aren't running "another business" but instead finding some temporary storage place for the excess electricity. That's why the GP said "over supply utilization system".
Melting salt sucks up power and then generates it when you use that trapped heat to make steam later. Running pumps lets you store power with gravity. Pump water up higher, it releases the potential energy when it comes back down. And there are many other methods.
baseload power (Score:3, Informative)
These supercapacitor we keep hearing about could conceivably be used as batteries, but I it is probably more realistic for nuclear plants to provide for the base load and have other technologies supplement during peak hours.
Geothermal can also be used as a baseload [pdf] [energy.gov].
Falcon
Re:indium (Score:4, Informative)
With that said, You missed Wind and Geo-thermal. In particular, geo-thermal is the only base-load type of AE out there. What has amazed me is how many fools there are do not realize that there is SHALLOW wells, and then there are DEEP wells [wikipedia.org]. The good news is that smart groups like Google, the state of CA and NM are investing heavily into geo-thermal and those that are making it cheap [potterdrilling.com].
Re:Nothing is fully renewable that... (Score:5, Informative)
WHERE THE HELL DO YOU PUT THE WASTE?
Nuclear waste isn't magically dangerous. There are nuclear materials that are super "hot", emitting scary amounts of radiation; these have a half-life that is very short. Given a few years, they radiate themselves down to about nothing. There are nuclear material that have a half-life of 10,000 years or so; and they are hardly radioactive at all, much less of a threat than the radioactivity that goes up the chimny stacks of a coal power plant every day. There are NO nuclear materials that are scary hot for tens of thousands of years. Its one or the other.
Various posters here on /. have made the claim that if we use "breeder" reactors, that we can re-use much of what is called "waste" now. We can re-use it over and over, and what is left will be a small amount of waste that isn't hard to manage.
Remember also that the best thing about nuclear power: you don't need very much fuel for the amount of power you get. With coal, you need tons and tons of the stuff every day, and that means tons of ash flying out of the chimny stacks (much of that ash radioactive). If you could filter out the ash, instead of putting it in the air, you would then have tons of ash waste to dispose of every day. The nuclear waste is comparatively nastier and harder to dispose of, but there is oh so much less of it.
31,000+ scientists sign petition denying AGW (Score:2, Informative)
> Although scientists are agreed ...
That's a lie.
There is no scientific consensus on AGW - over 31,000 American scientists (including more than 9,000 PhDs) have signed this petition [petitionproject.org] arguing that there is no convincing evidence supporting AGW theory.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:1, Informative)
There is no more evidence of that, than carbon emissions affecting pirate population.
Funny you should mention that, seeing as the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore. In the acceptance speech [nobelprize.org], the Nobel committee chairman stated that the increased carbon emissions and climate change is causing political unrest in Africa. It's logical to say that this will effect the pirate population.
A lot of us have been pointing this out for years (Score:1, Informative)
A lot of us have been pointing this out for years. I've been called "stupid" and "short-sighted" when I've brought it up
Really, short-sighted? It's pretty fucking obvious to me that short-sighted is just assuming men in white lab coats or the market are going to solve your problems. Too many humans consuming too many resources to maintain a lifestyle that is (in most places) too high.
You can switch and shuffle around your source of energy all you like, but you're always gonna hit the cap of the most limited resource to make that technology possible
Pretty fucking obvious
The only thing that looks remotely promising is Thorium-Fluoride reactors, but that won't really help with the water crisis, liquid-fuel crisis, food crisis, etc
Too many people, people. Malthus is back in style!
is Mars warming? (Score:5, Informative)
...Mars is also undergoing global warming...
Mars [realclimate.org] is not warming.
Falcon
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
When your pretty graph goes back "millions" of years, then you might have a point, but 400k out of 3.5 billion years, this is about as useful as grabbing a handful of random people from a barney the dinosaur concert and using them to stereotype the other 6.5 billion people on the planet.
You overestimate how far back you have to go to realize the rate of increasing CO2 is a problem (not so much the level of CO2 as much as the speed at which we get there). The fossil fuels come from ancient organic matter that's formed and been sequestered underground over many millions of years. It happened very very slowly. Humans have taken millions of years worth of coal and oil, and reintroduced all that ancient carbon back into the biosphere. We'll have returned all that ancient carbon into the environment within a mere couple hundred years. That's pretty damn abrupt in geologic time scales, and a shift in carbon levels will have never occurred that quickly before.
And yes while CO2 concentrations for millions of years ago are interesting (such data has been reconstructed for the Phanerozoic at least, that I know of) it describes a vastly different world. The more you shuffle the continents to where they used to be, the less like our world it is. A focus on the more recent half-million years is warranted over the last 500 million. For example, we want to know what melting glaciers will to THIS Earth's albedo, not the Triassic Earth.
Also, your CO2 graph is not the same as many others available in your average google search.
Cite them. I'm willing to bet they're simply in different units, use a different range or scale, or may even use a different proxy for CO2 concentrations than ice cores. Keep in mind, that graph was compiled from multiple sources of data (sources of data correspond to the color of the line). You don't need to use an ice core to tell you what the temperature was 20 years ago.
I don't disagree that humans are spewing shit in to the atmosphere, and common sense says this can't be good, but as others have pointed out, there is a whole lot more to this climate change than just CO2.
We also put out lots of methane and other greenhouse gases besides CO2 actually. CO2 just happens to be the primary cause of the warming because we put out so much more of it than other gasses.
Re:Wind? (Score:2, Informative)
.... Only nuclear is not from the sun...
Well, not our sun anyway.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
But, now we need to determine HOW MUCH he has contributed. For those who have missed it, Mars is also undergoing global warming.
Let me tell you something about the Mars climate change. Its cause is due to albedo changes due to dust on Mars, and has nothing to do with climate change on Earth.
I happen to know the gal who write that Mars global warming paper. In fact, she's one of my best friends. So I certainly didn't miss it. I also didn't miss it when she told me that people who hold up her paper to deny anthropogenic climate change on Earth are "clueless" and probably didn't read past her title, either.
The whole "Mars is warming" thing is crap. You are looking at a tiny amount of data, from a couple of spacecraft that aren't even really designed to measure that.
Sorry Charlie, it's not crap, either. Those couple (three actually... was four for a while until MGS died) of spacecraft are designed and used to measure surface temperature, albedo, and all kinds of other nifty properties. It's amazing what you can do with spectrometers, IR imagers, and bolometers. And the data we have on Mars isn't exactly tiny, either. But as I said above to the other guy, the reasons are albedo change due to dust patterns and have nothing (NOTHING!) to do with the Earth.
Almost, but not quite (Score:5, Informative)
As it happens, we have one (1) known occurrence of similarly abrupt increase in CO2 level. At the end of the Permian, a volcano system known as the "Siberian traps" set huge coal beds afire (think pacific "ring of fire" meets middle east oil fields). A large percentage of the worlds coal was burned in a geological eye-blink.
The was immediately followed by the Permian mass extinction, the largest mass extinction event in the worlds history, when pretty much every living thing on Earth died and only a handful of species (think things like cockroaches) had enough surviving members to struggle through.
--MarkusQ
Re:Global Warming and CO2 (Score:3, Informative)
Show me a working model of our planets' atmospheric interactions that supports the theory. There isn't one. Climatologists depend upon largely upon government funding. Their "consensus" is not based upon science but instead upon politics and self preservation. In my view that means you can no longer call them "scientists".
Re:Nothing is fully renewable that... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Because you can't make a magnet without neodymi (Score:3, Informative)
If it was profitable to do this, someone would already doing it. Hell, if it's such a simple idea you could start up a business yourself and melt salt when the electricity price is negative. Unfortunately, having a salt melting plant sitting idle for 99% of the time doesn't make up for the 1% of the time you can store energy.
On the other hand, with increasing amounts of uncontrollable energy sources and falling energy storage costs, it will be profitable at some stage. We're just not there yet.
Actually, there are a number of pumped storage [wikipedia.org] systems deployed. The power they produce is expensive, but they follow a strategy of buying when prices (and demand) are at their lowest and selling high. Classic economics. These molten salt plants will fit in the same category and, presumably, follow very similar commercial strategies, though I've not seen what the cost-profile of the technology is.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Informative)
The notion of "...there will be a time of trouble such as there has never been before nor will ever be again after that time..." is entirely arbitrary. If we can imagine things being worse, then it's obviously not what we're witnessing now.
As for the mark of the beast, it's easy. When I go clubbing they mark me on the hand, so that when I attempt to reenter, they can tell if I had already been there that night, and thus allowed to reenter without paying. A simple tattoo on the hand required in order to make legal purchases is just as qualifying for "mark of the beast" as anything else.
As well, the Bible doesn't specify that it is a number. It simply says "the mark of the Beast, who's number is 666". The number identifies the beast, not the mark.
The human mind is incredibly powerful at making these connections between arbitrary information. Why do you think people believe horoscopes, and other such prophetical text? Forer Effect. Look it up, and all prophecy that isn't specific and falsifiable is now worthless.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Informative)
Do you even read the links you post? Directly from the beginning of the Global Cooling [wikipedia.org] article, "This hypothesis never had significant scientific support, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of press reports that did not accurately reflect the scientific understanding of ice age cycles, and a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s."
Furthermore, the response to "Silent Spring" did not stop the sale of DDT to third-world nations, it just (mostly) stopped its use in agriculture. DDT is still widely used to control disease vectors, enough so that they're currently having problems with mosquitoes developing a resistance to it. [wikipedia.org] So there are no "tens of millions of humans who died of preventable malaria infections." That claim is made up by businesses with a vested interest in the production and use of DDT [wikipedia.org] as part of a smear campaign. Good job in helping spread the lies.
The "hardcore environmentalist movement" has done enough stupid things that you don't need to make stuff up. Misrepresenting what actually happened to support your criticism about them misrepresenting things would be, i don't know... part of an "epidemic of Global Hypocrisy" perhaps?