Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of ink & pixels used up on ‘Global Warming’. Recently, the BBC program Horizon highlighted the phenomenon of ‘Global Dimming’. Various organizations and reports, nowadays, regularly seem to issue warnings.
In short, what seems incontrovertible, is that global climate change is occuring.
I have the following questions
a) Is this change primarily anthropogenic?
b) If not, is human activity still a significant agent of change?
In any case, what change can be reliably said to be occuring?
Are there any predictions, preferably near-term, to select between theories that implicate human activity as primary agent and other models that don’t?
Again, in any case, what should be done, what can be done and by when?
I don’t know. It may be possible to try to correlate rising greenhouse gas concentrations with rising temperatures, but there may also be reasons that you wouldn’t expect that to work well. Climate modeling is apparently not the easiest business in the world.
Avoid multidecadal real estate investments in south Louisiana and Florida? No, seriously, my guesses would be: Reduce dependence on fossil fuels and increase use of solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and perhaps even nuclear power ASAP. Decentralize power generation for savings from transmission. Increase the use of mass transit, bicycles, and walking. Look into both short-term and long-term means of sequestering more carbon from the atmosphere. Reduce industrial production of some of the worst greenhouse gases. Figure out how developing nations can continue to develop without polluting the atmosphere as much as their predecessors. Arrange places for refugees from low-lying Pacific Islands and other areas. Examine how we might need to adjust agricultural practices.
While I wouldn’t argue that the sky is falling, many of these tasks are so daunting that beginning them ASAP promises the best results decades later.
By the way, this site seems to have a lot of links.
No-one knows. Read widely and form your own opinions. In particular read Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist which debunks a lot of the chicken-little stuff. Then read the debunkers of Lomborg.
Can I ask why you say ‘maybe’ nuclear? If the goal is to redcue greehouse gas emmissions wouldn’t the use of nuclear be a vital necessity rather than a maybe? After all the other energy sources you lost there can never replace more than half the current US energy needs and that at a cost of ploughing up 1/6 of the the land area of the US.
It seems odd that you say maybe nuclear but definitely nuclear and I’m wondeirng if there’s any reason for it.
It is incontrovertible that anthropogenic forcing has vastly increased the concentrations of greenhouse gases way of equilibrium in the last 150 years.
Every time this has happened in the past, temperatures have risen dramatically, and changed the climate radically and abruptly. It is clearly starting to happen again.
The scariest graph of all is this one. Our great grandchildren are already in for a world of shit. We are currently at 378 ppm of CO[sub]2[/sub], and rising at a record 3 ppm last year. If we get to 500 ppm, which could happen in the next few decades, the time-lagged effect might literally cause a mass extinction by releasing the methane from the sea bed: 550 ppm is considered to be the absolute maximum we can possibly ever allow.
Even cranks like Bjorn Lombourg accept this, they just advocate different ways to address the problem (by spending when it happens rather than spending to avert it, which I agree might be futile anyway). But we could keep below 500 ppm, starting right now, by by trying every trick in the book, from non-carbon sources (including nuclear) to energy efficiency. Our great grandchildren might read these very posts wondering why we didn’t even try.
As for ‘Global Dimming’, it’s possible that this could give us an extra few ppm leeway by offsetting some of those warming effects, but I’d suggest that this would be a very dangerous assumption to depend upon: we just don’t know its effect on the entire system - for all I know it could make it worse.
One goal would be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but that certainly shouldn’t be the only goal. Safety of the communities power plants are in will also be a large factor, as well as political feasability.
I wouldn’t object to some careful increase in the proportion of electricity generated by nuclear power, but I would object to a rapid, vast expansion in the number of plants because that would make maintaining good safety standards very difficult. There are lots of folks out there who would like to see nuclear completely off the table, and they’ve succeeded in many places, like Germany.
Whether nuclear is a good idea or not, there’s still major obstacles, and those obstacles are either safety-oriented or psychologically-oriented, depending on who you ask.
Well, let’s hope it’s not that drastic.
Even if the most severe global warming scenarios take place, we’re not going to switch off fossil fuels quickly. Replacing all energy sources immediately would be impractical, to say the least. I can’t claim to know the exact composition of future power generation, but I’d suspect there’s surprises out there for any of us. Who knows? Perhaps the best answers lie in changing patterns of energy use, or even in carbon sequestration. I think it’s safe to say no one alive knows what the answer will be, but hopefully we’ll try a bunch of methods and our descendants will be able to say we found one that works. There’s a lot of energy on and hitting this planet, and plenty to meet our needs if we can figure out how to use it without irretrievably altering the ecosystems we depend on for our livelihood.
I found this notice. A salient point: The Ministry finds that the DCSD judgment was not backed up by documentation, and was “completely void of argumentation” for the claims of dishonesty and lack of good scientific practice.. Which seems to mean that the original accusers simply asserted without backing up with reasoning. It does not seem to indicate that Lomborg’s arguments are indeed sound.
Thanks for the explanation wevets. I’m sure someone will be along shortly to tell you how safe nuclear is.
Which I linked to in another thread some months ago. I was actually directing my comment SentientMeat. This really isn’t the forum for debating whether a respected academic is a crank or not.
The International Panel on Climate Change embodies multiple sources: it is the combined output of the world’s leading climatologists. Calling it ‘one source’ is rather like calling talk.origins a single source for evolution. It is a summary of all the research on that subject from many different sources.
The charges of outright academic dishonesty were groundless, agreed. That does not by any means make him right, but I’ll retract my opinion of him being a crank and merely label him a dissenter who largely agrees with the IPCC findings but suggests retroactive rather than proactive measures.
