Global Warming | Fact or Fiction?

[Alceste]

The problem is, our power grid is seriously lacking the ability to transfer energy from where the water and air moves to where the people need electricity.

Solar is great for small demands, but is still lacking on a larger scale.

Coal is cheap but mostly coal is our states livelihood.

All these folks will be out of work and their utility bills would be MUCH LARGER.

Besides the "you first" school yard B.S., there is some serious economic considerations of alternate renewable energy.

Right now, only the rich could afford it.

Solandra is the perfect example of why all these green jobs have not happened.

For one, we cannot compete globally and keep our middle class.

Secondly, the shrinking middle class cannot afford to go green.

Thirdly our nation is broke, so subsidizing green technology is not an option.

Like I have said before, I love the thought of more of us going green. I get excited thinking about it. It makes so much common sense.

The biggest barrier I see is that people in the future will be unwilling to reduce their carbon footprint. That means reusing a towel or removing your clothes dryer.

Have you ever noticed there is no energy star clothes dryers? It is an unnessessary appliance.

It definitely means no drive thru and dropping your kid off to school at the front door every day.

It is a life style thing. People are obsessed with sitting in an air conditioned barn to see the latest movie and riding air planes while shopping for the latest fashions.

Adjusting the thermostat will be a complete no-no.

I understand that for many people it will be a challenge to change their habits. Nobody wants to be a trailblazer. Everybody is more interested in keeping up with the Joneses. However, a the price of renewable energy drops and the price of hydrocarbons increases, simple economics will start to place transformative pressure on cultures that drag their feet. When the Joneses are micro-generating enough wind and solar to write off their electricity bill - even sell a bit of surplus back to the grid, everybody will want to do it.

Be careful about projecting your local culture across the entire Western world... where I live people tend to grow their own food and have composting toilets. You can hardly spit without hitting an eco-home. And our domestic electricity is hydro-power. Once a critical mass of pioneers are living under a new, green paradigm, the mainstream will change their ways out of pure herding instinct.

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

I didn't use the phrase "killing the planet,"

Really? I could have sworn you said this:

if that's not killing the planet, what is?

Maybe I misread it.

but I think it is an appropriate term to apply to what is now the present worse-case scenario of a 6C or 11F global average temperature increase by the end of this century. The changes in climate could last over 100,000 years. It could be the end of life that has a chance to recover and renew the Earth. If Planet Earth ends its days as an abode for one-celled animals, it might as well be dead!

*sigh* If Earth goes through an extinction event to the level where only microbes are left it would still return to a complex life sustaining world. It has before and will again. That is the point. The Earth will survive. The Earth doesn't care about us or our pitiful attempts to control our environment. Saying we're killing the planet is shear arrogance on our part. We are killing ourselves and the ecosystem that sustains us, not the planet. That's serious enough without exaggerating the danger to include the actual planet.

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

Nobody wants to be a trailblazer.

Actually, we have plenty of trailblazers, you yourself are one. What we lack are polititians willing to force millions of registered voters to change their lifestyle.

 

[Alceste]

Actually, we have plenty of trailblazers, you yourself are one. What we lack are polititians willing to force millions of registered voters to change their lifestyle.

Why should this be necessary? They only need to stop subsidizing the hydrocarbon industry with cheap extraction rights and low taxes and offer some incentive to go green, like a tax credit on low carbon construction or retro-fits. It all boils down to economic policy in the end. There its no need to legislate the behavior of individuals. If they're doing something unsustainable, tax the hell out of it. If they're doing something sustainable, give them a deal.

 

[Reverend Rick]

I understand that for many people it will be a challenge to change their habits. Nobody wants to be a trailblazer. Everybody is more interested in keeping up with the Joneses. However, a the price of renewable energy drops and the price of hydrocarbons increases, simple economics will start to place transformative pressure on cultures that drag their feet. When the Joneses are micro-generating enough wind and solar to write off their electricity bill - even sell a bit of surplus back to the grid, everybody will want to do it.

Be careful about projecting your local culture across the entire Western world... where I live people tend to grow their own food and have composting toilets. You can hardly spit without hitting an eco-home. And our domestic electricity is hydro-power. Once a critical mass of pioneers are living under a new, green paradigm, the mainstream will change their ways out of pure herding instinct.

Just about everything I eat I have grown myself. I still buy beer, flour, sugar, corn meal, dried beans, rice and such.

All my meat, vegetables, wine, fruits and jellies are home grown.

I have had a solar water heater for 30 years.

I have a grey water system in my home.

I have rain barrels

I have a geothermal heating system.

My home is energy star certified.

I have a hybrid car

I'm looking at electric cars, but the last time I went car shopping I came home with a 6 speed BMW.

I plant close to 1,000 trees every year.

I have always turned lights off in my home, there mostly LED now.

I have always kept the thermostat at a very reasonable level with judicial programming.

I don't make wasteful trips to the store.

I do have a wasteful hobby however, boating. When I drop anchor and hang out I'm not burning any fossil fuel though. I don't churn the water all day long but it is unnecessary energy consumption to get away from the dock and back.

Being green is expensive. Right now it is something not everyone can afford.

Hydro- electric has limits. You can't run the whole country on hydro. Too bad because it makes the most sense. It does kill fish however just like wind power kills birds.

Yes, solar is nice, but most people can't afford to save money.

Just like electric cars, there economical to run but not many can afford them.

When you raise the cost of dino dung energy it may make other energy choices look better, but I don't see wages going up to help the situation.

Your just taking cheap energy away from the common man and leaving him with no affordable option. I guess they will just do without. Not a great plan.

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

If they're doing something unsustainable, tax the hell out of it. If they're doing something sustainable, give them a deal.

Taxation shouldn't be used to modify behavior, that is an abuse of the system. It's done but it shouldn't be. Do it too much and you might have a revlolution on your hands.

 

[Revoltingest]

Taxation shouldn't be used to modify behavior, that is an abuse of the system. It's done but it shouldn't be. Do it too much and you might have a revlolution on your hands.

Given that tax policy will unavoidably modify behavior, it must be considered.
The question is what behavior do we want to encourage, & what do we want to discourage?
Example:
I favor a high liquid fossil fuel tax.
It reflects diffuse costs such as health care due to pollution.
It would cut usage, which would enhance our energy independence.
It would allow taxes to be reduced (or at least increased less) in areas which should be encouraged, eg, earning money.

 

[Alceste]

Rick, hydrocarbons are going to be taken away one way or another. True there is nothing so cheap, but people may one day decide that the cheapness of it its not worth causing terrible damage to the ecosystem that sustains us. Slavery was a pretty cheap source of energy too, but eventually our values overwhelmed our penny pinching.

It sounds like you are doing your best to minimize your impact (while having a little fun). That's great. Many of the things you are doing, anybody can do. A rain barrel, a vegetable garden, a few trees, a clothes line, energy efficient bulbs - these things might involve a bit of splashing out at first but pay for themselves over and over again over the course of their useful life. Not everybody is going to be able to buy a brand new Prius, but pretty much anyone can get a bike.

 

[Alceste]

Taxation shouldn't be used to modify behavior, that is an abuse of the system. It's done but it shouldn't be. Do it too much and you might have a revlolution on your hands.

Not in this country. We love our tax deductions.

 

[Alceste]

Given that tax policy will unavoidably modify behavior, it must be considered.
The question is what behavior do we want to encourage, & what do we want to discourage?
Example:
I favor a high liquid fossil fuel tax.
It reflects diffuse costs such as health care due to pollution.
It would cut usage, which would enhance our energy independence.
It would allow taxes to be reduced (or at least increased less) in areas which should be encouraged, eg, earning money.

Praise Jeebus, we agree on something!

 

[painted wolf]

*sigh* If Earth goes through an extinction event to the level where only microbes are left it would still return to a complex life sustaining world. It has before and will again. That is the point. The Earth will survive. The Earth doesn't care about us or our pitiful attempts to control our environment. Saying we're killing the planet is shear arrogance on our part. We are killing ourselves and the ecosystem that sustains us, not the planet. That's serious enough without exaggerating the danger to include the actual planet.

No... evolution doesn't work like that.
Just because conditions favored us complex multicellular eukaryotes once doesn't mean we were inevitable. Life chugged on for two billion years or more without us.

wa:do

 

[painted wolf]

Given that tax policy will unavoidably modify behavior, it must be considered.
The question is what behavior do we want to encourage, & what do we want to discourage?
Example:
I favor a high liquid fossil fuel tax.
It reflects diffuse costs such as health care due to pollution.
It would cut usage, which would enhance our energy independence.
It would allow taxes to be reduced (or at least increased less) in areas which should be encouraged, eg, earning money.

I agree... we have subsidized fossil fuels for far to long in this country.
We had one of the best infrastructures for public transportation in the world, but it was systematically dismantled to encourage more cars.

As for our energy infrastructure... that can and must be updated. The massive power outages we have seen in the past few years will only get larger and more frequent. There was no reason for millions of people to loose power during the October blizzard except that we have been content with a decrepit turn of the century before last power grid.

wa:do

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

No... evolution doesn't work like that.
Just because conditions favored us complex multicellular eukaryotes once doesn't mean we were inevitable. Life chugged on for two billion years or more without us.

wa:do

I didn't mean we would return, only that life would return. Even if it takes millions of billions of years. The planet would eventually stablilise. Isn't that what happened last time?

 

[Alceste]

I didn't mean we would return, only that life would return. Even if it takes millions of billions of years. The planet would eventually stablilise. Isn't that what happened last time?

Actually, Lovelock's climate models - AFAIK the only ones to incorporate simple positive feedback loops - suggest that climate may stabilize again at some higher temperature (maybe ten degrees?) However, that climate would not be particularly hospitable to the life forms currently in existence.

 

[painted wolf]

I didn't mean we would return, only that life would return. Even if it takes millions of billions of years. The planet would eventually stablilise. Isn't that what happened last time?

The planet will, yes. Life almost certainly will. But we can't predict what form that life will take. By "we" I meant multicellular Eukaryotes.
If "something drastic" happened and all multicellular life dies then there is nothing certain about it returning. (not that I think all mulitcellular life could be easily wiped out)

The Permian extinction wiped out 95% of marine and 70% of terrestrial life. And it did so in a very short time-frame... The total event was only about 200,000 years and most of the extinctions hapened over a 20,000 year peak.
Calibrating the End-Permian Mass Extinction

wa:do

 

[work in progress]

Really? I could have sworn you said this:



Maybe I misread it.

If you really are a UU....even one from the deep south...you should be aware of the concept of using metaphors as descriptive language. I said I agree with the phrase:"killing the planet" as an appropriate description for a headlong rush to oblivion, but it's not the particular phrase I use. What I find pedantic and objectionable is your preference to split hairs over environmentalists using that and similar phrases to describe the destruction of the natural environment!

If we use our potential to understand nature and the Universe instead to cause our own (and most other species) extinctions, then our presence on this Earth has been a wasted opportunity. Hopefully, any other planets that have allowed complex life to flourish, are able to develop at least one species that is led by its newly evolved cognitive abilities, and not by its baser primal instincts that it carried along with it from its more primitive ancestors! That way, there would be at least one intelligent life form in the Universe that is able to discover how a universe with a capacity for life comes about and maybe even why there is something instead of nothing. It would be nice if it was us....but that doesn't seem very likely any more!

*sigh* If Earth goes through an extinction event to the level where only microbes are left it would still return to a complex life sustaining world. It has before and will again. That is the point. The Earth will survive. The Earth doesn't care about us or our pitiful attempts to control our environment. Saying we're killing the planet is shear arrogance on our part. We are killing ourselves and the ecosystem that sustains us, not the planet. That's serious enough without exaggerating the danger to include the actual planet.

WRONG! I tried to point this out in the last post that habitable planets have a lifespan for supporting life, and the ones that have the right balance of temperature, protection from radiation, plate tectonics etc. have a limited time in the middle where they are able to support complex, multicellular life. Our planet started as a hot world with less diversity of life, and that's where it is heading back to. The only difference is that, instead of using our brains to restrain the natural geologic processes that will gradually make Earth uninhabitable, we are instead accelerating the process at breakneck speed, and possibly extinguishing life much earlier than it would have occurred naturally. Believe it or not, over the long term, the natural carbon sequestration process will (or would have) gradually reduced the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to below 150 ppm., a point where trees and most common vegetation are unable to support photosynthesis. Then, obviously, the animals who depend on plants for sustenance, die off as well.

At the same time, the slow evaporation of the world's oceans is speeded up by the gradual increase in energy of the Sun...that's been also going on now for billions of years. A hotter world, with little or no carbon in the atmosphere, and no oceans left, means that Earth will go back to it's original state prior to one and a half billion years ago, where it was only able to support microbes. According to most astrobiologists studying our home planet, this will occur somewhere between 500 million and a billion years from now. Recall, that it took 2 billion years just to get the Earth capable of supporting plants and animals, and your statement that "Earth will survive" is a joke. The odds are that an extinction on a scale to destroy complex life on Earth would be the permanent end of higher life on Earth for the remainder of its existence in the Solar System.

 

[work in progress]

Actually, Lovelock's climate models - AFAIK the only ones to incorporate simple positive feedback loops - suggest that climate may stabilize again at some higher temperature (maybe ten degrees?) However, that climate would not be particularly hospitable to the life forms currently in existence.

Speaking of James Lovelock....when I first read the International Energy Agency's alarming new report that the present trajectory of the world is towards a 6C/11F increase in global average temperature by the end of this century, I recall that James Lovelock once declared 6C as the likely "game over" number for us. I don't know how active he is right now...he's getting up there in years...but I wonder if he's had anything to say about these new reports lately:
IEA’s Bombshell Warning: We’re Headed Toward 11°F Global Warming and “Delaying Action Is a False Economy”

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

I said I agree with the phrase:"killing the planet" as an appropriate description for a headlong rush to oblivion,

And I have repeatedly said that exaggeration of the outcome of an event is a common propaganda technique and should be avoided. "Killing the Planet" is not a metaphor, its a statement and an inaccurate one at that. It is descriptive, it describes Venus, the Moon, Jupiter, etc. Those are dead planets, (well the moon is a dead moon), but even an extinction event will not "kill" our planet. If you condone such language that's fine, but I refuse to accept it as appropriate and defend my right to point out its inaccuracy.

You keep pointing out that I'm a UU from the South. What does that have to do with anything? Are you trying to say something nasty without coming out and saying something nasty? What's up with that?

 

[work in progress]

And I have repeatedly said that exaggeration of the outcome of an event is a common propaganda technique and should be avoided. "Killing the Planet" is not a metaphor, its a statement and an inaccurate one at that. It is descriptive, it describes Venus, the Moon, Jupiter, etc. Those are dead planets, (well the moon is a dead moon), but even an extinction event will not "kill" our planet. If you condone such language that's fine, but I refuse to accept it as appropriate and defend my right to point out its inaccuracy.

You also made the claim that life will rebuild and return to the state it was in before, and I have a lot of evidence now that this is false.

You keep pointing out that I'm a UU from the South. What does that have to do with anything? Are you trying to say something nasty without coming out and saying something nasty? What's up with that?

No, but apparently what I've been told that UU congregations vary greatly with location seems to be true. You would probably find the Unitarian Church in my hometown something equivalent to being at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration.

 

[javajo]

And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory. Rev.16:8-9