Rare earth materials which is are used in turbines are a bottleneck for large scale implementation of wind power.
Also the rare earth materials and all the other components have a hidden environmental cost. Oil prices correlate with the cost of wind power because oil is required for mining materials, manufacturing and maintaining windmills.

btw China is the predominant supplier of rare earth elements

But isnt China the ones investing heavily in Solar Power also?

Solar power also uses rare earth elements, but its less dependant on them to be viable. The highest concentrations of rare earth elements are in China with an estimated 30% of world reserves and produce close to 90% of the world market for certain key elements so right now China controls the market.

My Question earlier

reply

I am curious why? You have a elected senior politician that believes climate change does not need to be worried about as God promised he would not wipe out the earth with another flood and more. Also all the majority of naysayers .......

Hey I live in a province that is accused of having the industry with the biggest effect on climate change.

Also why is Gasland 2 all crap? These people having methane in the water is Ok?

Probably gonna take the mother of all flamings for this, but:

Sort of. My opinion is that the whole debate has been so thoroughly politicized, that lay people will never know the truth. I don't believe or disbelieve that AMG is a real phenomenon or not. I've thrown up my hands and said "everybody involved is pushing an agenda with truth as a secondary (at most) consideration." It's not science anymore, if it ever was; it's politics (or maybe religion).

I wont flame you for that, I wish more people would give up.

This isn't intended as a flame, but what about scientific papers? Something like 97% of published papers agree that AGW is real. How can any amount of politicizing make that uncertain, without believing that all of the world's scientists are colluding in some sort of massive conspiracy?

I can see how anyone who only watched the news or read blogs could have an impossible time at judging this, but any amount of research into academic resources paints a very clear picture.

Maybe I'm worse off for this, but when it comes to matters of science, I'm perfectly willing to defer to the opinion of scientists. I see plenty of controversy on the issue in politics, industry, media, and among the general population, but not in the scientific community. Certainly there are finer points that aren't at all settled, yet what they're saying--overwhelmingly so--is that climate change is a thing.

And really, what's the downside even if the climate science of our age turns out to be wrong? That big oil and other industries take a hit? That more money gets spent developing more efficient and more sustainable sources of energy and materials? Are there some potentially catastrophic & irreversible dangers associated with making the Earth too clean?

Some seem to be arguing that where there is scientific uncertainty, you should give industry the benefit of the doubt. But we're not talking about a diet drug or MSG, we're taking about the planet's climate. That's what should get the benefit of the doubt, every time.

I am sure the poorest people on our planet would prefer to have an increased living standard 200 years from now compared to having a slightly colder earth. Especially if that difference in temperature has no other impact. And that is the choice we have to make unless we can switch to sustainable sources of energy without significant impact to developing economies.

And to determine what the right choice is we need more accurate models. If current temperatures were at the top of the prediction range then I hope we would have done more by now to combat AGW. But the temperatures are at the bottom of the prediction range and the most accurate models have had recent changes to them so their predictive value is still in doubt.

Because we have to switch to sustainable energy at some point anyway the only question is if we move that switch forward because of AGW or let it happen naturally because we run out.

But orthodoxy serves in place of a conspiracy equally well.

I'm 49 years old, and probably among the last group of people who were not taught the theory of continental drift in elementary school-- seafloor spreading was too new, only 20 or so years old, to have filtered down into our textbooks.

The point being that scientists have a long history of being unanimously wrong.

It's happening right now in archaeology--the "Clovis first" theory that held sway on the peopling of the Americas for about 100 years is just now being disproven.

Also: big bang theory and string theory.

Academia is one big feedback loop. A dude comes up with a plausible theory, it gains traction, his doctoral students who helped him become professors themselves and preach the new gospel and publish new papers, etc., etc. (yes, i am grossly oversimplifying, but I also taught in a university for several years, and am familiar with the feedback loop).

Unanimity is as likely to be evidence of nothing more than an entrenched orthodoxy as it is evidence that the orthodoxy is correct.

All of that assumes your 97% figure is accurate and tells the full story. My problem with the 97% figure is the same as anything else on the subject, though: it came from somebody I don't know, and have no reason to believe or disbelieve, and who is probably pushing an agenda of some sort.

So I just don't think it's possible for a layperson such as myself to have a truly informed opinion, given the politics, and given that the history of science is basically correcting the mistakes in previous theories ( that's not a knock on scientists, that's what they're supposed to do). In fact, it's pretty much a lock that the current theory IS wrong in ways they might already know, or won't figure out for another 100 years.

I could make a long post about this or a short one. Since I'm on my phone it will be short for now. The context with which you use the word "believe" is ridiculous.

Sure...if you want absolute certainty you aren't going to find it in science or math....or anything done by humans or machines.

Hopefully. You can tell the difference between stuff like this and global warming or continental drift.

Wat?

Sure....this is true of any modern science. You are unjustifiably trying to treat climate science different from all other modern science based on made up reasons and propaganda (zomg... It's so politicized cuz people like me who haven't bothered to learn the subject are against it for political reasons)

Are there sources of information that you trust at all? NASA? Universities? Research programs? Peer-reviewed, published science papers? If there is no source that you could find trustworthy then you are right, it is pointless to try. However, if there are any sources you could trust - you can find information from those sources to inform your opinion.

I agree what is the downside of playing it safe.


Reality is greed will never allow us to make changes Big Oil has bought Canada's government and bought Bush and sad to say bought Obama also. Sad thing is Obama has just been a clone of Bush on many things he said he would change. Though I realize he has a senate that will not allow much changes

My Point

Aren´t rare earth materials a bottleneck for most high tech? Better use them to build Windmills than to replace your iphone 3 with the iphone 4.

Ever heard the phrase "Learning from mistakes?"

Yes it´s true that many theories get falsified. But also knowing what is wrong is knowledge. Like Edison said" I found 100o ways how not to build a lightbulb." Some theories are just so evidently right that everyone who ignores them is just ingoring the reality. Like saying Evolution is just possibility. It´s not it is as real as breathing. Einstein might be wrong too with his theory about the speed of light, that doesnt mean we should rely on it as long as it works.


Getting to the point of global warming, that this is actually happening is a fact. we are at a point were winegrowers in central europe start to use different plants because those they used for decades cant handle to heat.
How big is our influence on the global warming? This point is up for discussion. But there is not a "if we have any influence" question to settle. We do have influence. We know how CO2 does work in the atmossphere and we know that we blow a lot of it in the air. If you sit in a paddle pool which the sun shines on and you take a piss in it, it is not up for question that you just increased the temperature, only question is how much influence does my urin have and how much is the sun.

And getting back to topic, it´s obvious that it is terrible idea to piss in the pool you sit in, of course there are also arguments for it, but since the pool we are pissing in is the earth it still seems like a bad idea.

And changeing thesource of energy from one that is based on limited resources which get more expensive year for year to one that is infinite and free like sun and wind shouldn´t even be much of a question even without the benefit of protecting our enviroment.

Really? You know there has been no warming since 1997 with CO2 up more than 8%, right?

And that Europe has had a whole string of dropping temperatures, right? It is not that hard to look up basic facts.

I think you and I would disagree on which example is most like the others. I would say that AGW and Clovis First are actually very similar, in that the interpretations applied to existing evidence follow the political ideology of the interpreters very closely. By contrast, the static continent model was relatively quickly overturned once sea floor spreading was documented, because you simply couldn't interpret the evidence in any other way.

(as for the big bang/string theory offhand remark: The big bang theory replaced the steady state model, and brane cosmology has propounded alternatives to the big bang theory such as that the big bang was actually not an expansion from a singularity, but a collision of membranes. Although not proven, brane cosmology seems to be mounting a serious challenge to the existing orthodox big bang theory view).

This isn't very good evidence to imply that there is a justifiable debate about the existence of climate change -- all this implies is that climate change models are imperfect, not the theory itself.

Keep in mind that climate models are the most ambitious undertaking the human race has ever attempted. The complexities of these programs are more emense than anythingout there. , you are taking in inputs from biology to geosciences to astrophysics.

What would you say were the political ideologies of these interpreters (and producers) of scientific works?

NASA

American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Chemical Society
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Biological Sciences
American Society of Agronomy
American Society of Plant Biologists
American Statistical Association
Association of Ecosystem Research Centers
Botanical Society of America
Crop Science Society of America
Ecological Society of America
Natural Science Collections Alliance
Organization of Biological Field Stations
Society for Industrtial and Applied Mathematics
Society of Systematic Biologists
Soil Science Society of America
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
(source, source, source),

American Medical Association
American Meteorological Society
American Physical Society
Geological Society of America
U.S. National Academy of Sciences

It might be hard to find, because those are not political groups. Those are the major scientific societies of the US. Do you believe them to be ideological bodies? Wouldn't scientists be the least ideological people in the world? They work with the scientific method, not party platforms or religious ideologies.

It isn't limited to American scientific societies, here is a long list of international ones that agree with current AGW thinking: (List)

As for the oft referenced 97% figure, I apologize for not sourcing it either. Here is a National Academy of Sciences' paper that supports that number: abstract, full paper

I encourage you to give it a read if you haven't truly given up on forming an informed opinion on the matter - which I suspect is true given the fact that you are taking the time to engage here.

It is only 3 pages long and it is mostly about their research methods and statistics - so it is accessible to someone without climate science knowledge (99% of us). A grounding in statistics helps, but the analysis is pretty clear even without it.

Regardless of anything else you say (which I'll admit I've quickly lost intrest in) that's simply not an accurate summary of what is going on in cosmology.

you are right that it isn't good evidence, just another failing model.

When looking at world temperatures, is there any reason to not look at the widest set of data? Meaning after the industrial revolution, when we started spewing a lot of stuff into the environment.



Looking at this chart two things are readily apparent:
1. There is a ton of variance year to year and even decade to decade.
2. Things have clearly gotten warmer.

People often times cite very short periods of cooling as if it counters the claim that the climate is warming. But there will always be decades of cooling during a warming period (and vice versa).

How convenient, you pick the NOAA adjusted temps, and you just happen to end it at 2000?

Do you consider a rise in global temperature of 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1880 to be significant?