And that’s it in a nutshell. The world isn’t going to end in a couple of years and many of the proposals are a literal waste of financial resources. My state mandated a number of tasks of our power generating companies. One of them was a task to reduce power consumption by consumers which was handled by promoting CFL bulbs. That was handled well and was a good use of financial resources. Another was a mandate to produce a certain percentage of electricity via alternate technology. The end result was a solar cell farm in my area that serves few people and was quite expensive. We have an aging electrical infrastructure that will require the replacement of major power plants and that money could have been used toward that goal.
Not a single way on how to implement all that was mentioned. Again, if it is private industry I can see many examples that give me hope, but there are many private organizations that are financing politicians that will do nothing to help that currently available technology be implemented.
And this is a planetary problem that is getting worse with time, not taxing emissions or doing other ways to assign the real cost of the needed adaptations that we will need in the future is really foolish.
The difference of not acting early and acting later is the very old “Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish” the reality is that there is already enough CO2 released that will increase the warming for decades.
It is that magnitude that will get worse the longer we wait to make changes.
And there you go supporting a denier that it is wrong. Usually you do sound more sensible the longer you get in discussions, but no such luck here. In any case, the issue is Mann and the reality that people that attempted to discredit him in the past are nowadays discredited now. (Wegman and his report)
Really? It’s getting worse? We’re using less energy with each passing day with cars that get better fuel economy and a transition to CFL bulbs. We progressing steadily toward a reduction in the cost of bio-fuels and we’ve already certified it for aircraft. It’s happening now without Al Gore’s hand in my pocket.
Name one technology that hasn’t radically changed in 20 years? How do you not see the massive changes taking place in front of us? We’re rapidly approaching battery technology that will change the way we drive cars. It’s not here today but it’s on the near horizon.
As the cite shows, we need to do better than that. Of course your insistence on this point is still contradictory when at the same time you support deniers like Bob Carter. If there is no AGW isn’t that effort by private industry stupid? And once gain, you have not offered a cite that emissions are less.
And most of that research is being made possible also thanks to government incentives, whatever failure you want to assign to the VOLT it is clear that progress is made in part thanks to what you are condemning now, government intervention.
Regulations and other incentives go a long way to make change possible with the help of private industry. This is in reality more related to what global warming proponents are suggesting as a solution, the sad reality is that no solution is the line offered nowadays by the republican party, after all, there is no problem and a big sector of private industry is paying a lot to make any concerted efforts impossible.
There is long-term correlation between CO2 and global temperature; other effects are short-term.
[QUOTE=Bob Carter]
“A mild warming of about 0.5 degrees Celsius (well within previous natural temperature variations) occurred between 1979 and 1998, and has been followed by slight global cooling over the past 10 years. Ergo, dangerous global warming is not occurring.”
27 June 2011 (Source)
[/QUOTE]
The last decade 2000-2009 was the hottest on record.
[QUOTE=Bob Carter]
“there is no demonstrated problem of “dangerous” global warming”
9 May 2011 (Source)
[/QUOTE]
Negative impacts of global warming on agriculture, health & environment far outweigh any positives.
[/QUOTE]
So why do you want to rely on an expert in Stratigraphy anyhow? He is already contradicting himself and his point is really that it is not much our problem and that we should do next to nothing.
There was no progress made with the Volt. It’s a Prius with more batteries. It’s a fail because the batteries aren’t quite there for general use. It’s pointless to encourage money losing ventures that don’t sell. If this car fails mechanically (as is GM’s track record) it will set back the perception of the technology for years.
I pointed out that they can make both good changes and bad changes with regulation.
Again, we are already progressing technologically toward a greener world. You act like nothing is getting done when it’s happening right in front of your nose. We don’t need to fix it all today yet the technology to do so is literally around the corner. I think it would make more sense to apply tax dollars directly toward stuff like solar sell research then to pay consumers to buy stuff that isn’t currently viable.
You are restating the previous argument, which as shown makes no sense. An existing and worsening problem (particularly one that bears serious danger of cascading complications) should not be deferred, it should be addressed right away. I already addressed the “bright future” scenario, but I would like to add that (just like investment funds) past performance in any discipline or field of inquiry is no guarantee of future performance.
And, very importantly, without market applications there is always substantially less impetus to improve technologies, which means the deferring strategy only slows down the development of solutions.
Computing power *today *is cheap because decades ago personal computers were introduced to the mass market as substantially high costs, after all. The only way costs will come down is when the technology is sufficiently widespread that economies of scale and the effects of competition can take place (supported by savvy tools like subsidies).
Specific examples can be misleading. Smarter use of **existing **technologies like wind, solar, nuclear, and thermal energy have been shown to work well. Energy conservation (fuel efficiency, smarter buildings, etc.) can take a chunk out of the carbon footprint too. But there is little political will, especially among Republicans, to spearhead these initiatives. It is instead much easier to throw money at “solutions” like corn for ethanol and oil exploration in fragile ecosystems.
Leaving aside specific examples, in your opinion then we are doing everything reasonable and possible at the moment to address the problem? Of course not. We are lazily and dishonestly deferring it to a future time yet again. And by “we” here I mean most of the world, not one specific country or political party.
So, exactly how does Al Gore propose to remove HIS “carbon footprint”?
Nice strawman you have set up.
Al’s last outburst was pretty funny too..I guess he’s upset over the collapse of his carbon trading scam “businesss”.:smack:
As this point is a part of the wiffle ball team, this one is really silly, you said that they act as if they “carry on as if their own enormous energy use is unimportant” that is the strawman, they have not said that it is not.
Pretty funny, but not as you think, it was the truth and in any case and he was not talking about the carbon trading business, but about the denial business.
And as anyone can notice, what Gore proposes on this carbon neutral point does not depend on business carbon trading.
As for calling it a scam, you are forgetting that before they where taken over by denier tea partiers Republicans understood cap and trade was a way to get the market involved in the solutions, now we are left with only regulation and mostly the ill will of corporations and their politicians to prevent even those regulations from being applied, forgetting that the market is a tool that needs to be used also.
"By the way, this CERN/CLOUD paper is already being touted by deniers in blog comments everywhere as the latest “bombshell” that “blows a hole” in the AGW “hoax”.
Oddly, not one of those comments that I have seen bothers to explain exactly what the supposed “bombshell” is.
Perhaps content-free “bombshells” are the latest weapon in the denier arsenal."
The point here is: Why it doesn’t give you any pause seeing so many absolutist points claiming to show that AGW is a hoax and all of them have been debunked or found to have no merit? Think a little about that, if the latest item demonstrates that AGW is not happening then there should be no need to make new half baked points that are many times contradictory to the past ones. If the point definitely demonstrated before (and there are hundreds from the deniers) that AGW was not there or not a problem, then the super majority of experts in the matter would had changed their tune already.
Unless you do think that indeed scientists are just lying to us. What do you think? Are the bloggessors more accurate than the scientists in your world?
I’ll post a couple of meaningless, content-free, arch-denier, anti-science cites before I go to cash my checks from Big Oil, the GOP and Hitler.
My personal favourite is where the head of CERN asks people not to interpret results.
Cite 1 Cite 2 Cite 3 Cite 4 Cite 5 Cite 6 Cite 7
Don’t read them, they are CO2 cheerleaders in the pocket of “emmissionists”, you can simply criticise them by looking at the domain and sayng “they aren’t climatologists”, “they’re paid”, “anti-science”.
Too funny, Gavin Smith (the scientist at RealClimate pointed already at one of them to make the point I already made here.
And that was for your cite #4.
Face it, it is not only a soft ball of a point, but it has already been shown how inadequate your blogessors are at interpreting science, they have to rely on lies to make their points.
When the source is telling you to not interpret the results to favor denialists he has already mentioned why, as the past has painfully show so many, many times before, deniers just cut and paste a sorry point and run away with it, they will confuse most people but the scientists look at that behavior and sigh.
I always thought, and taught, that science is about facts and that we should discuss the facts so that we can use them to help us.
I cannot imagine, in fact I called absolute brachiosaurusshit the possibiliy, that CERN guy saying “don’t politiceze the results” if the results had favoured AGWers.
