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."
Remember the Simon-Ehrilich Wager (Score:2, Interesting)
ore supplies and reserves are *always* limited (Score:5, Interesting)
Who would pay for an exploration team to go around, looking for new sources of a material that was already abundant? Answer: no-one. As a consequence, a lot of "rare" minerals only have a known source that will last a couple of decades - or less. Until they become scare and the price rises, there's no profit in spending money looking for new reserves.
In the 70's the big scare was that there was only 15 years worth of (known) oil reserves left. Hey, we didn't run out. When the price went up, that incentivised people to go out and find new sources.
Same when I was doing electronics design in the early 80's - there was a scare that we'd run out of tantalum (for capacitors).
Scares aren't new and tend to have a way of working themselves out. Even if one metal did become to prices - i.e. scarce, no doubt processes will be invented to use a different material.
Re:Here's an idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there something wrong with turning down the thermostat and applying more insulation? To getting a more efficient means of transportation?
Don't be retarded.
Re:Better than wind (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Interesting)
Feel free to review the evidence yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
But we won't care, because he's not an expert on climate...
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but that's a bullshit answer.
I use about 150 gallons of gasoline a year for my 2 cars. Why? We ride bikes. Pretty much everywhere. The only time I actually drive is on road trips. And we do a lot of those.
There are a lot of ways you can save without being "more poor". You can save and "be richer".
My solar water heater gives me enough hot water for my family to take showers without running out of hot water - as we used to with only the electric heater. We have "always on" computers because I run multihead off the main server, saving the powerbill for individual computers. You want a computer? Turn the monitor on. No boot time, no waiting. I could go on and on. A little bit of care and though and you can save and be rich.
Re:Wind? (Score:1, Interesting)
Plants use solar, but very few natural things use wind or tidal power. Nature has had a very long time to try and fill these energy niches, so it is a safe guess that they can't produce enough energy to sustain a large population at a reasonable standard of living.
The productive renewable path is solar - and this article suggests we have quite a way to go for mass production there - or relying on difficult to access energy sources like coal or uranium, maybe geothermal - which the biosphere has difficulty getting to.
If tidal power was really an option, I would expect to see more coastal trees taking advantage of it. If wind was an option, there would be plants using it to survive. Both these things probably exist, but neither in the numbers to suggests they represent a better deal than solar power.
Mining off world (Score:2, Interesting)
These materials are scarce on Earth, but asteroids and other worlds would have these resources as well.
Real sustainable power available since decades (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, IRTFA. Sheesh, talk about using bazookas to swat flies. Is this anything more than FUD to scare people back to coal? Let me spell it out:
Solar-thermal plants using mirrors, steam turbines, and if you want 24/7, underground heat reservoirs. Completely buildable using some of the more common materials on the planet: sand, steel, concrete, copper, salt, etcetera. Who cares if they're inefficient compared to the super-fancy super-rare stuff in TFA, just build lots of them.
Maintenance? Bugger all in comparison to a coal plant, the bloody things run on sunshine. There's no toxic+radioactive coal dust/ash/soot getting into everything, no gas-guzzling trucks and trains leaving said dust billowing in their wake over nearby towns and farms as they go between mine and plant... blah blah bloody blah.
There are only three real reasons that the countries with plenty of sunshine (e.g. my own) haven't gone this route long ago: vested greed, common ignorance, short-term thinking.
Re:Wind? (Score:3, Interesting)
Plants use solar, but very few natural things use wind or tidal power. Nature has had a very long time to try and fill these energy niches, so it is a safe guess that they can't produce enough energy to sustain a large population at a reasonable standard of living.
It may not be true in some parts of the world but the US has plenty of potential wind energy. The Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States [nrel.gov] lists the potential of various places. For instance just as the Picken's Plan [pickensplan.com] covers, the Rocky Mountains alone have enough potential to supple the 48 continuous states with electricity. There are plenty of other places as well.
Falcon
a lot more platinum is coming... (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA is complete BS, at least in terms of platinum.
I work for a company which is in the process of adding several centuries' supply of PGEs (platinum group elements) to proven reserves. Platinum and fuel cells are going to get a lot cheaper, within 10 years.
We know where PGEs are, but it's often in politically unstable places, or those that are busy strangling their domestic exploration industry (e.g. Canada).
This global recession will likely help finally unjam a lot of political roadblocks. When people are hurting, they don't tolerate environmental protests as much, and aren't as willing to turn a blind eye to eco-terrorism, which has wracked the industry in the last decade. Even the first world is finding it harder to ignore potentially adding a hundred billion to one's GDP for decades.
they're less agreed on what to do about it (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreeing on the cause is one thing, and as you point out, there is pretty good agreement on it. There is much less agreement on the proposed solutions. What effects would lowering carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2009 have vs. not lowering them? And what amount would they have to be lowered by to have some particular desired outcome? Is lowering emissions going forward even a useful option at this stage, or do we need some sort of active reversal of existing damage in addition (or instead)? The answers to all those questions seem pretty up in the air.
I'd personally like to see an IPCCC-like document outlining proposed best practices, which currently available scientific evidence suggests would, if followed, have some desirable outcome or prevent some undesirable outcome. Or at least giving some odds on each of the major proposals. But we still seem to be a bit off from that.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:2, Interesting)
And the terrible lack of understanding of physics by many of the loudest proponents of 'Global Warming' doesn't likewise cause you to throw the whole postion??
I mean, come on.
Asteroids (Score:5, Interesting)
One small nickel-iron type asteroid will also yield plenty of platinum, iridium and similar metals. Heck, there's still some disagreement over what they're mining in Sudbury, Ontario, [wikipedia.org] is there because of magma upwelling after the original impact (circa 2bya) or remnants of the original impactor.
Separating them out can be done in space with a number of processes using large reflectors and solar heating. (Zone refining, fractional distillation, carbonyl extraction, etc..)
If we'd had the guts to start moving towards that when some people first started suggesting it seriously, we'd be there or nearly so by now.
Re:rtfa (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm no expert on the subject, but wouldn't these sort of magnets be necessary to construct any sort of conventional power plant as well?
(Similarly, every hard drive manufactured for the past ~20 yearas has contained two of these magnets each. That sort of quantity makes me think that the supply of these materials is not as scarce as the commenter in that article would have us believe)
Re:Why are there so few responses to the easy fixe (Score:3, Interesting)
they put their faith in technology that doesn't exist instead of getting their supersized butts out of their trucks.
That is because their super-sized buttocks will only fit in a large American car or truck. Have you ever seen the big guy in the sub-compact car? They don't want to be that guy. Not everyone can drive the Civic or the Prius even if they work great for you.
Re:Wind, waves and water (Score:3, Interesting)
I was just about to post something along those lines. You should have a score of 5 for pointing out the obvious to people who conveniently ignore such facts.
And concerning those scarce resources I have one more piece of advice. RECYCLE.
In time, though given your examples we would never need to, we could also develop equivalent technologies that do not rely on scarce resources.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Interesting)
They are NOT agreed.
Great, let's say they're not and move on to the next topic.
How about having a stream, river or lake in the US that hasn't been polluted in some way.
Is that too much to ask for? Can we stop fucking up our country to make a quick buck?
Re:Nothing is fully renewable that... (Score:2, Interesting)
As early as '94 we could have had the Integral Fast Reactor, which would have turned Yucca Mountain into a fuel reserve instead of a waste dump. John Kerry and Hazel O'Leary used scare tactics centered around proliferation fears and an unrelated breeder reactor project to get the funding for its research canceled. Perhaps the SSTAR will bear fruit without any unjustifiable governmental obstruction - here's hoping Steven Chu gets behind it. (Note that I said 'unjustifiable'. Some obstruction can be justified. The government can obstruct RNEP weapons all it wants as far as I'm concerned.)
Waste generated by fast neutron reactors would not be weapons grade material if the fuel cycle was closed. There are known, feasible closed loop fuel cycles now that can accomplish this. Yes, it would still be dangerous stuff. No, it would not explode, and most of these reactors would have to go completely offline for any weapons grade material to be extracted. Simply put, there are vastly better, cheaper ways of making Plutonium. The byproducts of a better reactor such as the IFR would only remain radioactive on the order of 400 years or less compared to figures in the tens of thousands due to its composition, and unlike transuranics such as Plutonium and Polonium, the wastes generated would have a much wider range of industrial applications on top of being much easier to store when time for dumping did come around. Simply put, better reactors and fuel recycling can feasibly solve a lot of nuclear power's present day problems. Safety has also improved, such as by using molten salt or molten metals in place of water as heat transfer media, making radioactive steam explosions like the one that befell Chernobyl impossible.
Yes, solar thermal, wind, and wave power are extremely promising energy sources - where they're applicable. Solar thermal averages 71 megawatts per square mile the last I checked. The hydraulic wave energy converters offered by Pelamis typically produce something around 20 megawatts a pop. Some locations - particularly the coasts - can get something on the order of several hundred watts per square meter from wind power. Are these practical for primary energy production everywhere? No. Where I live, with the exception of the Erie coast, these power sources are at best supplemental. Also, for the purposes of industry large amounts of readily available, reliable energy are needed at all times. We need an energy mix - why rely on just one silver bullet when you can take a magazine full of them?
I'm still trying to discern how you arrived at the grandparent's political affiliation when his post was apolitical in nature.
Re:Here's an idea (Score:3, Interesting)
We picked the town we live in for that reason. We picked the house we live in because there are 9 schools within walking distance and 2 universities within biking distance. Our kids may not have to drive until they're out of college.
You choose your lifestyle. You can choose a lifestyle that minimizes your impact on the earth and lets you do what you want.
Re:Here's an idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, you will be when your utility companies start raising rates because they aren't making enough money due to conversation and energy efficient hardware.
Actually, when that happens his cost savings from efficency increases will be even greater. If you don't understand why, do the math.
Add to that, that because of his lesser energy usage, he could far more easily move off the grid completly with solar cells. Especially if the power company tries to overcharge him.
You go ahead and keep thinking that you're saving the world and your wallet from the high cost of energy when the cocksuckers are raking you over the coals so they can continue to turn a profit. I love having exactly ONE option (mandated by the local municipality)
Well, if you live in soviet russia or another similar location, I can't help you.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Interesting)
"75 of 77 climate scientists who are active publishers on climate change said yes." Re-read that sentence. Read it again, carefully. One more time, please. Can you see now, that only certain select scientists are being held forth as an example of some "consensus"?
You do realize that there can be lots of people who earned a degree studying climate & meteorology, then moved on to be weatherman (or something) and stopped giving a crap about scientific research, right? Well, that's why you just ask the scientists are are publishing. Research and publishing go hand in hand. They're the ones that'll know the most. Did you major in any field of science? Because if so, you should have known that. Anyway, you appear to have not read the article you yourself cited.
In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change [...] Of these specialists, 96.2 % answered "risen" to question 1 and 97.4% answered yes to question 2.
The bold part there should have been a clue for you. Scientists who actively publish are doing real scientific research. If you're doing scientific research on something, you're gonna know more about that something than people who don't.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Interesting)
So right, which is why the constant stifling of technological advance drives me nuts. If people want to shut down coal burning plants, let's build some nuclear ones. But other people keep bringing up the straw men of nuclear waste or Three Mile Island. At some point in time, you have to choose the lady or the tiger. No technological change comes without some risk. Take the automobile; since 1975, there have been 1.5 million deaths in the US from car accidents. This is only slightly less than the total of all American military deaths since the War of 1812. I'm sure if you went back to 1950 (couldn't find the list), car deaths would overtake war deaths. But, while many people protest against war, I don't hear anyone protesting we should give up cars.
And, if there's been one constant trend with technologies of all kinds over the last 30 years, it's the rapidly decreasing time from a technology's introduction to the time when it's adopted by a significant percentage of the population. Great chart here: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_XJseql2u5l0/R7H6Ocva9AI/AAAAAAAAB5s/_HcTnkO8xPw/s1600-h/consumption_rates_technology.jpg [blogspot.com]
So if the Chinese electric car and the Chevy Volt are actually introduced in the next year or two, I think we'll see a massive changeover, especially by commuters, in just a few years. Why pay for gas at $2-3/gal, when you can charge your car overnight at off-peak rates? And here's a free one for government - you can encourage the changeover by letting single drivers in e-cars use the carpool lanes. Cost - zero, but incentive to people to buy e-cars - huge.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Interesting)
The mass of the atmosphere is 5.148E18 kg. The mass of 100 million barrels of oil is (roughly) 140 kg (actually ranges from 125 to 154 kg, I just used the median of those two). The amount of carbon dioxide produced from burning that is (again, roughly, assuming an average of 19.9 metric tonnes per TJ, gives 12E-2 metric tonnes CO2 per barrel of oil. By 100 million barrels is 1.2 E7 metric tonnes of CO2, or 1E-10% increase by mass per diem.
Now assuming 100 million barrels per day over the last 50 years, i.e. 18,250 days (an overestimate of past consumption obviously) this gives 2.2E11 metric tonnes cumulative released, or 50E-6% increase by mass.
As CO2 is roughly 1.5 times the mass of N2 and O2, this comes to a concentration increase of 33 parts per million (roughly).
Now, was that much harder than your childish vitriol and namecalling?
Granted, I used a number of gross simplifying assumptions, (spherical cow type stuff), but I left out all sorts of other potential sources besides your 100 million barrels. Deforestation, coal, etc. Moreover, compared to ice cores from 1832, we see a 100 ppm increase in CO2 levels, roughly 3 times my estimate, and since 1960 the rise has been about 70 ppm (double my rough estimate).
What this suggests, as was your point but without any of your extraneous namecalling, is that at a minimum a significant portion of the CO2 increase is attributable to human activities. I've done nothing here that wasn't done much more thoroughly by actual climate scientists.
Now tell me, wouldn't you have been better served posting something like the above, rather than acting like a troll? Have I made my point yet, or shall I browbeat you some a second time?
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Interesting)
For those who may have missed it, Mars is not undergoing global warming [realclimate.org]. But why let a few pesky facts get in the way of good clean coal and oil industry lobbying?
--MarkusQ
Re:Here's an idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Interesting)
London get's the benefit of warm ocean currents, or it did before those currents weakened. If the UK turns into Minnesota, it wouldn't be able to support it's population.
Look at the whole picture (Score:1, Interesting)
1) We're currently in an ice age --- do your own research if you didn't know that. (Wikipedia isn't too far wrong on climatology, check it out). In other words, temperature has nowhere to go but up over the long term.
2) Within this current ice age, we're currently in an interglacial (a small warm patch). Do you know what that means? Yay, things are melting! Whoopeedo! It would be a jolly funny interglacial if they weren't. And within this interglacial, all the curves are bouncing around wildly, as they have always done.
3) Our CO2 levels are roughly where they have been over the last 50 million years (they're always rising and falling within a few 100ppm). The manmade CO2 influx of the last century seems quite large at first glance, but it isn't significantly more than natural processes inject quite regularly. The CO2 curves over millions of years are some of the most erratic processes known to science.
4) Over the past 200 years, we've utterly decimated biodiversity in the oceans. Those oceans are involved in the carbon cycle bigtime (the oceanic CO2 exchange is 10 times larger than manmade CO2 injection), and guess what process carries carbon to the depths and into subduction? Yeah, it's oceanic biota. Yet no GCM currently models our destruction of the carbon transport mechanism. I guess it's not sexy for the media and won't bring in research funds.
5) We were in the 200 ppm's of CO2 interval before the industrial age, and now we're in the 300 ppm's ... but we were at 1000 ppm just 100 million years ago, and temperature has not correlated with CO2 at all since then over long time scales.
6) Temperature correlates with CO2 over geologically short time spans of 100ky periodicity as shown in the Vostok cores, but which is cause and which is effect (if either) is far less certain. What is much clearer is that the Milankovitch cycles have a very clear causal role, since CO2 cannot possibly be affecting our orbital parameters, and therefore we *know* that temperature is strongly causal.
7) The paleoclimate record shows that CO2 levels are not in the slightest a primary determinant of average planetary temperature. At the end of the Ordovician Period some 400 or so million years ago, the Earth had CO2 levels of 4000 to 5000 ppm, well over 10 times our present value, yet guess what the mean temperature was? We were in the deepest ice age that the planet has ever experienced.
8) The only place in which we get good correlation between CO2 levels and temperature which we know to be causal is in a test tube. But the Earth is not a test tube. It doesn't behave as one at all because it has numerous extremely powerful feedbacks that mitigate the effect of CO2 change. CO2 is definitely important overall, but changes in atmospheric CO2 levels simply don't have the expected effect because other factors like cloud cover are vastly more important and they change too. And we can't model cloud cover at all well yet. :-(
9) Despite the clear orbital forcings, our climate models cannot even predict in a scientific manner the average glaciation parameters across our reasonably regular 100ky CO2 and temperature cycles. The error bands in the simulations are colossal, in many cases we do not even know the SIGN of the change. In other words, our science is not yet predictive in this area. Those professional scientists whom you see making personal interpretations of the data where the scientific models cannot make a valid prediction are simply not working as scientists, but as advocates with an agenda. (I think it's a very good agenda for the planet, but one should not take liberties with science.)
So you see, it's not as simple as the media portray it.
Of course the current poor state of the GCMs doesn't mean that we should continue to pollute our world. Only total morons spew crap all over their only home. We should stop immediately, but we don't need to base that decision on unjustified interpretations of scientific observations. We should base it on commonsense, despite the lack of predictive power at this early stage of climatology.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:2, Interesting)
Global warming may not be the worst culprit of water loss in the Great Lakes basin, but it's making a bad situation worse.
As someone who lives on and studies the world's largest freshwater lake (Lake Michigan-Huron), I can tell you that there is great concern over water levels.
Water levels are cyclical, but M-H is currently losing about 3cm/year beyond cyclical considerations, and accelerating. M-H is currently approaching peak of both its short and long cycles, yet is instead repeatedly testing historical lows. Impressively, the last decade has 7 of the 10 lowest years since data collection started in the 1860s.
The largest cause of Michigan-Huron's water losses is erosion of the St. Clair River bed following dredging of the Seaway in the 50s and again in the 90s. That loss is now 3.5 cubic kms a year. And because the lakes are glacial, that water isn't coming back. The damage is huge, with species loss on the margins of the lake particularly grim.
The increased flow out of the upper Great Lakes, by the way, is also why Erie and Ontario, which lie downstream of M-H, are higher than normal. This has more than offset the increased evaporation rates they have experienced due to decreased ice cover and other factors.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:2, Interesting)
Should they all believe that overpopulation is a problem, just like global warming?
I dunno man. The hardcore environmentalist movement is kind of running out of new material. The overpopulation scare turned out to be stupid scaremongering [wikipedia.org]. The Global Cooling crisis also turned out to be more stupid scaremongering [wikipedia.org]. I think they tried something about a "silent spring [forbes.com]" a little before that, but all that did was cause first-world nations to stop selling effective pesticides to the third-world nations who still needed them, which has caused the death of tens of millions of people. So maybe that was kind of a "half-win" for real hardcore environmentalists, who view humankind as a sort of plague anyways.
Despite the environmentalists cornucopia of dire warnings about the terrible consequences of our awful behavior over the last half-century, we didn't overpopulate the world, we didn't freeze it to death, and we didn't poison it to death (well, at least we didn't poison the birds and bees and mosquitoes. The tens of millions of humans who died of preventable malaria infections might be pissed about that). If the environmentalist movement's track record for predicting catastrophe is any indication, we're probably pretty safe from frying the world to death. So I guess my question is, if global warming turns out to be yet another one of their lame-ass chicken-little scenarios, what's left for the environmentalist scaremongers?
Maybe they could take on the epidemic of Global Hypocrisy. Oh wait, never mind. That would require the accusers to actually change their *own* behavior first, before lobbying to require that everyone do as they say (not as they do). Bono would *not* approve of that.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Interesting)
I know this wasn't your point, so don't take this the wrong way; your comment about aether reminded me of a talk I heard once about evolution, given at a church (!); to paraphrase one particularly fun segment: "science changes its mind all the time, so it's essentially always wrong; you should instead rely on the Bible, which never changes its mind." It's wrong on so many levels, I needn't go into it directly; I should however point out that the talk was given by someone who styled himself a scientist, collected dinosaur bones, and was asking for money from the church so he could go buy more dinosaur bones, so he could put them in a museum display intended to prove that evolution (and history in general) never actually happened.
Analyzing data is hard. Asking the right questions, with the right assumptions, arriving at the right conclusions, and communication all of this clearly and fully to anyone else ... is hard. And even then, we still get it wrong, at least for a while. Cherish your differences!
Don't assume that counter-data is a counter-argument: in mathematics, finding an exception to the rule is a sure sign that something's wrong; in applied sciences, it's only an exception to the rule if you meet all sorts of criteria about the circumstances of the event. Saying "CO2 has risen before" is not the same as saying any of:
a) it is not rising right now
b) this event has the same cause has previous events
c) this event will have the same effects
d) same effects at different points in time are equivalent
The end of oil was predicted *exactly*! (Score:3, Interesting)
It was not in the 70s and the predicted end wouldn't be in the 90s.
The future oil production was *very* accurately predicted by M. King Hubbert [wikipedia.org], in the 1950s. Compare this graph plotted in 2004 with [wikimedia.org]this one [wikimedia.org], which was created in 1956.
Considering all the variations both in consumption and in production, such accuracy in a prediction of 50 years in the future is truly remarkable.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Interesting)
are all deadzones acidifying?
Increase in the export of alkalinity from North America's largest river
That report [sciencemag.org] suggest that there's an increase in the export of alkalinity and alkalinity neutralizes acids, it doesn't cause an increase in acidity.
Falcon
deadzones (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm beginning to wonder just what IS in those deadzones.....
Little to no oxygen. Which I think is a more immediate problem than acidification.
If we have documentation about alkaline runoff - there ought to be more documentation about acid runoff.
It's not so much there would be acid runoff, not because of CO2 at least. CO2 is an acidic oxide [wikipedia.org], which water will absorb. On land though plants will use it to grow.
Oh, something I just recalled. You know how some people say "let's plant more trees"? While CO2 [sciencedaily.com] boosts the growth of some trees, it slows the growth of other trees [mongabay.com]. And guess what plant loves CO2? Poison ivy [nytimes.com]. It grows faster with higher CO2 levels.
Falcon
Re:Nothing is fully renewable that... (Score:2, Interesting)
Your numbers for solar thermal I'm guessing are for peak output from trough fields. I actually work in the field of solar thermal, and did some quick calcs on the system I am working on at work, and I would say that it would be about 70MW per square mile continuous.
Anyway there are many square miles of arid land around that can be used, so the amount of land is not something I would focus on.
Your point taken about the silver bullet, however there are some bullets that are looking particularly non shiny, non aerodynamic, and likely to disable the firearm which are best discarded.
Political affilition - I must have gleaned from : "money than the democrats want to steal from the people of the US" - sorry I shouldn't assume so much.
Sustainable power is always not sustainable. (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if these people make a sustainable power source of some sort using solar or wind or waves, ultimately it's not sustainable due to population growth.
Ever more people will demand ever more power, until we curb the people count we're stuffed.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Interesting)
Ever heard of Bjørn Lomborg [wikipedia.org]? He is a nutcase who published a book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he (who has only one peer-reviewed publication in an unrelated field) said that all environmental scientist were were wrong about pretty much everything.
So, what happened to his career? While he was denounced by Scientific American and Nature, he was defended by The Economist [economist.com], not exactly a climatology publication. The Danish government gave Lomborg the chair of a newly created "Environmental Assessment Institute", he published further books, and ended up in TIME's list of the 100 most influential people of 2004.
So, that's what happens when one is not in agreement with the scientific consensus, but says things that governments want to hear: lots of money, media attention, skyrocketing career. Lomborg was just a mediocre associate professor with only one peer-reviewed paper from 1996, who was looking at a very boring and uneventful career. By cherry-picking and fabricating data, he's a world star of climate-change denial now (note that last time I checked, he did not deny climate change outright, or even that it is anthropogenic, only that it is "inefficient" to do something about it, in practice reaching the same conclusion as deniers).
If anything, it amazes me that so few scientists do the same.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Interesting)
I must ask what made you focus on the Antarctic when the Artic lost 1 million square kilometers of ice two summers ago - or 1/4 of its summer minimum : Cryosphere Today [uiuc.edu]
Also FYI the arctic is cooling meme has expired : Real climate [realclimate.org]
FYI the 9 years of cooling : Real climate [realclimate.org]
Agreed - none of the lake, and island anecdotes are useful.
Re:Look at the whole picture (Score:3, Interesting)
Within this current ice age, we're currently in an interglacial (a small warm patch). Do you know what that means? Yay, things are melting! Whoopeedo! It would be a jolly funny interglacial if they weren't. And within this interglacial, all the curves are bouncing around wildly, as they have always done.
The concern is not over the current The manmade CO2 influx of the last century seems quite large at first glance, but it isn't significantly more than natural processes inject quite regularly.
The manmade CO2 flux is indeed quite large relative to the normal imbalance between natural sources and sinks, which is why CO2 levels haven't been as high as they are now in millions of years.
The CO2 curves over millions of years are some of the most erratic processes known to science.
They don't jump up 100 ppm in a hundred years.
Yet no GCM currently models our destruction of the carbon transport mechanism. I guess it's not sexy for the media and won't bring in research funds.
It certainly would bring in research funds, and it would probably also be sexy for the media ("we're even more screwed"). The problem is that nobody yet has a good handle on what humans are going to do to those ecosystems. There is some research, but nothing that's yet made its way into the GCMs (which are only now acquiring interactive carbon cycle modules in the first place).
We were in the 200 ppm's of CO2 interval before the industrial age, and now we're in the 300 ppm's ... but we were at 1000 ppm just 100 million years ago, and temperature has not correlated with CO2 at all since then over long time scales.
Temperature has correlated with CO2 over many long time scales; see Royer's climate sensitivity estimate, for example. It doesn't always correlate, but you don't expect it to, because CO2 isn't the only thing that influences climate. The fact is, you have to get down to details in each geological period to understand what's going on at that particular time.
Temperature correlates with CO2 over geologically short time spans of 100ky periodicity as shown in the Vostok cores, but which is cause and which is effect (if either) is far less certain.
It's pretty well certain that CO2 has an effect on temperature, or else you can't explain the magnitude of the ice age cycle.
The paleoclimate record shows that CO2 levels are not in the slightest a primary determinant of average planetary temperature.
Nonsense. The paleoclimate record strongly supports the influence of CO2 on climate over many periods in the Earth's history.
At the end of the Ordovician Period some 400 or so million years ago, the Earth had CO2 levels of 4000 to 5000 ppm, well over 10 times our present value, yet guess what the mean temperature was? We were in the deepest ice age that the planet has ever experienced.
That doesn't mean that CO2 doesn't have any influence on the climate. Absolute CO2 levels aren't that informative, because the baseline climate is modulated by lots of other things, such as the positions of the continents and their effect on the atmospheric-ocean circulation, or the intensity of the Sun (which was weaker in the distant past). More relevant is changes in CO2 levels (although they are also not wholly predictive, because you have to consider what other drivers may be counterbalancing them). Indeed, although the Late Ordovician glaciation is not yet understood, there have been a number of papers which attribute it partially to a drop in CO2 levels. Some relevant papers are by Herrmann, Poussart, and Saltzman; search under "Ordovician".
But the Earth is not a test tube. It doesn't behave as one at all because it has numerous extremely powerful feedbacks that mitigate the effect of CO2 change.
It also has numerous powerful
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:3, Interesting)
You've stumbled into a fully fledged logical fallacy.
It's called the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
Read up on it, and you'll realise that whatever the merits of your argument, you can't use this one to say that there's consensus on global warming.
Re:Nothing is fully renewable that... (Score:1, Interesting)
Making a reactor containment building impact resistant gets easier as its size decreases, which bodes well for 'nuclear battery' driven power stations, which could be encased in vaulted spheres of composite reinforced concrete or other impact resistant materials. Tamper detection also becomes much easier as the area that must be monitored decreases. Wiring the whole thing to detect perforations and other failures of the shield and its vaulting mechanisms would tip off authorities to an attack right away. In reference to a prior comment regarding different heat transfer media, if the reactor itself isn't under pressure from radioactive steam, the reactor's ability to actually do damage if containment is lost diminishes tremendously since there's little to carry radioactive material away from the reactor, much less blow it out every which way. Finally, many newer reactor designs will, upon reaching a certain temperature or losing containment, fail to sustain critical mass due to a variety of safety features, most being passive and rather clockwork in nature. This would cause radioactivity and the temperature of the fuel to quickly decrease.
In an absolute worst case scenario where a power station's missile shield is successfully perforated, or the reactor is actually sabotaged, a molten salt reactor or liquid metal reactor would spill its heat transfer media into the containment building where it would cool and solidify while the core goes sub-critical. The shield and containment building would serve as a radiation shield while everything cools down. To cause a nuclear disaster with one of these things would require that you at least perforate the missile shield, containment building, and probably no small amount of dirt overhead, and then obliterate the reactor from inside and cause it to eject vaporized radioactive material. Needless to say, that might be difficult.
Layers of automated, human, and passive security would make getting into these things a lot more difficult as well, especially if the reactor itself employs a great deal of tamper resistance. For instance, if it's surrounded with liquid sodium you won't much want to drill into it to get the pyrophoric, multiple-thousand-degrees hot core out without some kind of machinery to do that for you, unless you have a means by which you can shut the reactor down for the hours to days it would take it to cool. Obviously, someone will inevitably notice the blackout.
As for waste, most nuclear waste isn't waste at all. It's discarded fuel that the reactor can't safely use. This applies largely to water-based reactors that have strict temperature requirements and aren't designed as breeder reactors. More modern reactor designs can actually use that discarded fuel to its fullest. The IFR's fuel cycle (which, as I understand it, is being incorporated into other reactors now) would and could consume all transuranics and actinides, leaving only fission products of either negligible radioactivty or very short half lives. Many of those fission products, as I said, are in demand in other industries or could have industrial significance in the future. Due to the much less 'refined palette' of this fuel cycle, fuel element reprocessing becomes much simpler and doesn't require the extraction of materials like Plutonium or Californium. (The stuff would plausibly never have to leave the plant until it's truly spent and ready to be shipped elsewhere.) Hence my comment that there are easier ways to get bomb-making fuel; these reactors wouldn't need to make it any easier for you and would actually be consuming those