My question is even if we knew that humans didn't cause climate change wouldnt we still be investing a ton of time/ money in green energy/technology anyways? I don't get why there is this huge debate over what is the causeof climate change when I don't think it should have much effect on what we do in the future.

I think some people believe that reducing greenhouse gas production will require sacrifices in terms of economic growth and standards of living. Businesses will have to spend money to retrofit "dirty" coal plants into "clean" ones, the government is going to take away my Hummer and force me to drive a Prius, etc.

If you believe that humans are causing climate change and that climate change will have negative consequences, then you might be willing to make these sacrifices. If, however you don't believe in climate change (or, perhaps you acknowledge that the climate is changing, but don't believe that humans can influence this change), then you won't be as willing to make those sacrifices.

Generally I agree and a bit more.

There's pretty much nothing we should do with evidence of climate change that we shouldn't do with no evidence (that's not the same as evidence of no change).

The exception is stuff like CFCs which no-one otherwise particularly cared about so we gain by understanding their impact.

Huh? How should it not have much effect? If greenhouse gas emissions did not have an effect on the climate, why should we try to reduce them? There would be no point! I mean this is so obvious, you must have some special angle in mind but I really don't know what that must be.

Until we find another planet that is habitable and a workable away to migrate our species to said planet, I feel Pascal's Wager can be applied making a few necessary changes.

The first step to solving a prolem is often to understand it first.

If there is an asteroid that is going to hit the earth, it doesn't do much good arguing about if humans caused the problem or not. Even if its 1% likely that humans caused this asteroid or 99% likely, that's only relevant after the problem is taken care of.

Working out were the astorid came from, might tell us what it is made of which might be of help.

Of course not. Large scale green energy using current and near future technology is inefficient and unreliable. Period. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar, or simply misinformed.

Well, I agree with you, but in the opposite way. Even if we're causing the degree of warming claimed/projected by some, wind and solar energy is STILL not a solution, given current and near future technology. We're throwing large sums of money down the toilet on these ones.

So your solution is to ignore the fact that fossil fuels are a finite resource and just hope that something magical happens when they are depleted? Or is it rather that you don't care, since you'll probably be dead by the time that happens?

No, my solution is not to use wishful thinking right now and waste money on stuff that doesn't work yet.

We already have all the power we'll ever need. Fossil fuels have a couple of hundred years left (notwithstanding the effects of peaking of the liquid fuels). There are 150 years of current proven coal reserves alone. That's a century more than we need to transition to nuclear. For nuclear, we have about 200 years worth of uranium, and a few million if we start extracting from sea water. If fusion becomes viable (quite likely, most consider it inevitable), there are 100 billion years worth of easily obtainable deuterium in the oceans. That's without considering asteroids, the moon, etc, which have large reserves.

We're never going to run out of energy, so developing technology that could never provide reliable large scale baseload power, or scale to our increasing power demand (insolation doesn't increase), is very, very dumb.

Where are you getting these numbers from? Also how can anything have more potential than solar power?( Not saying your wrong)

We need to stop fracturing our understanding of the oil economy by letting these unanswerable questions dominate the debate... the debate has to shift to what to do w/o oil.

As a rule of thumb, debating potential effects is idiotic, moronic, useless. It's infinitely better to accept known-unknowns than to stall over them. In the future you can bandage these kinds of problems or just steamroll through them.

Isn't ignoring the extent to which fossil fuels seem to promote global warming another kind of wishful thinking? And isn't it a pretty ridiculous leap from "green energy can't economically replace all fossil fuels using currently available technology" to "we shouldn't try to develop green energy technology"?

Yes, assuming that's being ignored.

Well, the first statement should read: "green energy can't replace even 30% of fossil/nuclear fuels given current technology, regardless of economics." In which case the point is that we're already pouring a couple of hundred billion a year into renewables and giving billions for basic research to get this stuff working. The time needed for research into the possible technologies to mature seems to be the bottleneck now. What more should we do?

This conversation highlights some of the problems with scaling up renewables to base load replacement level.

Time needed is the bottleneck? Hmm? If you pour more resources into a particular technology, then generally it will also be developed faster. It might not be 1:1 ratio, but it's far from zero. Nuclear bomb was basically developed in like 7 years. And renewables do earn back at least some of their cost.

That being said, I do agree with you that priorities should be carbon capture and storage and nuclear energy. Not just because they are more economically viable, but because I think they might quite possibly be more environmentally friendly than the so-called "green" technology. But as far as I know, the so-called "green" technology is still far better than burning oil or coal. I don't mind at all that they're being developed. Battery energy density seems to be improving at an accelerating pace:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RCGoYwj_cw...gy+Density.jpg

The 10x improvement in the next 15 years that you'd project from that graph, coupled with improvements in renewables, and I don't see why you are so utterly bleak about renewables. Maybe not the best solution, but not exactly "incredibly dumb". What would be incredibly dumb is to do nothing about global warming at all.

Just google them. Wikipedia is probably the best aggregate source (e.g. Coal) but the reports from various government departments of energy are a better read.


It's often not far from zero. Some problems involve new paradigms that only require engineering problems to be solved (i.e. atomic bombs), and others require gradually improving ecosystems that develop at their own pace regardless of pressure (i.e. computer processor transistor count). Each stage begets the next stage - and it's not viable to try to make it go faster. As an example, a smaller chip with double the transistors requires design, new atomic level lithography techniques, new error correction techniques, new materials testing and purity, and so on. What we learn at each step begets the next one and each stage is limited by time factors rather than money. That's why chips in their 50 year history have increased by Moore's law, and not via massive jumps, despite throwing money at various breakthroughs. It's just the nature of the engineering problem.

Batteries and solar panels fit into that category - they have multiple competing problems of reliability, availability of materials, cost per unit, mass production viability, miniaturization, etc, which is why, despite being around since 1880 (not a typo) and recently pouring hundreds of billions in, they're still improving fairly linearly rather than as a series of large jumps.

In 15 years I won't be so bleak about renewables, especially if we make meaningful breakthroughs in creating large scale photosynthesis. But renewables have one basic problem, which even very intelligent people fail to grasp: they are not, and never can be, something that civilization relies on for a majority of its power.

Renewables are fundamentally unreliable. Let's say solar power is running 50% of the USA, excess energy being stored. Well, too bad if you get a cloudy week over the continent. Your power is gone in two days, and civilization grinds to a halt until the sun shines again. And that's without getting into such things as the not infrequent volcanic winters. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, consider this: Humans use ~300 TWh of energy a day. The best batteries of today store approximately 100Wh/kg. So let's say we have 10x improvement in 15 years and they do 1000Wh/kg. Then we'd need 300x10^12Wh/1000Wh = 3*10^11 = 300 billion kgs of batteries to store a single day of power!

Each kWh currently requires 1.4kg of lithium. Assume 10x efficiency of lithium usage as well, we're left with 140g of lithium per kg of battery. So we'd need 42 billion kilograms of lithium to store a single day of world power.

World estimated recoverable reserves of lithium - which has many other uses - is 13 billion kilograms. So we can currently store 8 hours of world power needs if we used up every scrap of lithium to manufacture 100 billion kgs of batteries. Yay. And that's without considering losses in the system, or likelihood that greater efficiency in batteries will probably require much rarer materials than the fairly abundant lithium. Hopefully the scale of the problem is becoming clear. Renewables are just not a viable solution even with vastly more efficient batteries than today.

Basically, we're ****ed without a shift to nuclear, assuming you think global warming is a threat. Renewables aren't going to provide a susbtantial fraction of our power, and as long as even intelligent people fail to understand the reality of this (as evidenced in this thread), we'll never make the hard and unpopular choices we need to to transition to the only option we have for clean abundant energy, nuclear power.

Um, there are other options than just nuclear. Your entire post is quite the argument for why we need to utilize all available sources of non-hydrocarbon fuel sources. Redundancy begets stability/"failsafeness." This is now fairly well understood in natural biotic systems, and there's no reason to believe this shouldn't be an a priori assumption in energy systems.

I never said we aren't.

Simply I think we would be far more ****ed if we continued business as usual. Even if "green technology" reduces the speed of global warming by say 20-30%, that's quite the achievement.

Your comments about how the development of green technology doesn't speed up significantly if we pour more and more billions into it seems just odd to me. I see nothing special about the technology that would prevent increased financial support from increasing the speed at which it develops. It might apply in more abstract fields where success isn't easy to measure (maths? string theory?), but in this technological field, whether you are successful or not is so easy to detect, you simply show a solar panel or battery that works better and noone can argue or fail to understand the improvement.

But all these things will go faster if there are more money allocated to it! If you have lavish money for lab equipment, you can do these tests much quicker. It takes time, but if reward to the people who come up with the new designs will be bigger in the long run so that people can make career choices based on it, then there will be an increased flow of talented and hard-working people into these fields.

I'm only jumping in because of aggravation.

Finding a best-fit line and extending it into the future is stupid.



If I were extremely stupid, I would be working on the inevitable altitude sickness our progeny will need to worry about in the future should they decide to stand upright.

I can supply a graph that conclusively shows that the average american will weigh more than the earth eventually, but that actually seems somewhat likely.

Armageddonist repents. When will Al Gore repent similarly?

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news...te-change?lite

Stopped reading there.

Certainly does matter; for example if it turns out that warming is not affected by human CO2 output then the whole emissions trading setup is a farce (there are trillions of dollars invested in this crap already)

Regardless of CO2, the emissions trading scheme is a farce. But the joke is on us. Carbon credits are nothing more than a huge attempt to confiscate wealth and redistribute it to the backward, savage, "developing" (I love that term, like any of these countries are really moving out of the stone age and embracing western philosophy and capitalism) countries.

People really need to wake up about this. We're better off with flooding seas and tropical temperatures than the philosophical wreckage of leftist confiscation and redistribution.

Carbon credits have NOTHING to do with carbon.

This is not the politics nor the economics forum. Please stay on forum topics.

Goodness gracious.