Exactly the point with AGW. It represents crapping in our nest more than any other issue. Very strange that someone environmentally oriented would argue against this largest of all environmental problems.

http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2175

New Zealand still seems on track to join the vacuous promises crowd. It seems to be the Western political disease.

The general public is wise to the fact that markets solve problems and governments only create problems. For political reasons some of us pretend to believe otherwise but when it comes to the crunch we know the facts of life.

The solutions will be a combination of economics, business and science.

I agree with the statement there is a lot of solar energy falling on us, the problem is the scale of collection to make it a viable alternative to our other forms of energy is mind blowing.
Solar hot water installations are all but FREE in Australia right now and they still have installed 2/5ths of bugger all on the roofs of the nation.

I get the impression the general public think a Utopian science breakthrough will fix it all… that is a lot of faith to solve a problem with BIG consequences if it turns pear shaped.

http://vpaa.unt.edu/OneBook/Energy-PresentandFuture%5B1%5D.pdf
http://www.questar.com/1OurCompany/newsreleases/2009_news/UVUSpeech.pdf

Re energy use, you said: “Our lifestyle is based on gross and large amounts of energy consumption with piss poor conservation of energy in use. This lifestyle is simply unsustainable at its present rate”

Then you quibble when I point out the superabundance of incoming solar energy still available for that consumption. Of course energy is “converted” in the process – sometimes into low-grade heat, sometimes into storage as potential energy or chemical energy. Its ultimate return to heat may or may not take a long time. The point is irrelevant. There is plenty of energy available to sustain and grow our current lifestyles.

Why does the US import oil? Price, that’s all. As the price rises many other sources become available and alternative conservation methods become economic. That will all happen naturally without any requirement for lunatic “green” policies.

The sunshine energy is indeed very large, in NZ it’s 1.6kW per metre squared. But that’s a RATE, not an accumulated total.

So? It is still, for all intents and purposes, infinite.

100 years of gas at present consumption (which I doubt BTW)

Who cares what you doubt, ask a geologist. The last one I spoke to told me we have a super abindance of fossil fuels.

And I am sorry but your grasp of solar energy use is inadequate … one does not USE solar energy, you convert it

wtf? Your grasp of the English language is inadequate

so solar energy collectors it will not cool down the planet as no energy will be destroyed or created, just translated into another form, which will ultimately return to heat.

How much energy does the earth dissipate into space every day?

If the solar collectors are any more reflective than the ground beneth them, then they will cool down the earth.

When we burn away a few billion years of energy stored in hydrocarbons there ain’t no more.

They haven’t gone anywhere. They are merely now in different forms upon the surface of the earth, such as in trees and cows. We don’t even need to wait for massive underground pressure to reuse them. A company L7 has opened factories wherein E Coli bacteria excrete crude oil. Their present technology would require a plant about the size of chicago to provide all the energy requirements for the US.

There is also issues aground transmission and application.

This is one of the reasons why hydrocarbons in the form of oil is just about the best storage of energy we have available to us today.

Nuclear energy won’t save us in its present form, all other ethics issues aside, is their isn’t enough Uranium.

There are other fuels (therium or something?), eject any overly toxic waste into space.

There is enough energy contained in a sock to power New York for a year. Technology, which requires wealth to advance, will eventually take us towards harnessing it to our needs.

Before you comment again beware knowledge of this sort of material is my profession.

My guess is you work in advertising or politics.

But as intelligent beings we have the ability to modify our behavior for the long term survival of our species. If we are eating too many fish and cutting down too many trees then we need to modify our behavior, not continue as unreasoning animals.
There is no point in the destruction of our environment unnecessarily, it is stupid irresponsible behavior that is in effect vandalism.
I think this carbon trading nonsense is political suicide, but there are still issues with the environment that need to be addressed with wisdom and common sense.
This ground should be, and needs to be taken back from the radical left.

So how is this going to happen? We are using stored energy at an irreplaceable rate. The sunshine energy is indeed very large, in NZ it’s 1.6kW per metre squared. But that’s a RATE, not an accumulated total.

Alan W..
100 years of gas at present consumption (which I doubt BTW) does not translate well to TOTAL hydrocarbon use. Running ALL cars and Planes etc on Gas wouldn’t last very long at all. A few years I would imagine.
Else why does the USA import so much oil, or go to war over maintaining it?
And I am sorry but your grasp of solar energy use is inadequate and is ignoring the laws of thermodynamics, one does not USE solar energy, you convert it, so solar energy collectors it will not cool down the planet as no energy will be destroyed or created, just translated into another form, which will ultimately return to heat.
There is also issues aground transmission and application.

AND this pearler… “There is simply no evidence for your beliefs”

You hold up a poor understanding of thermodynamics, a rumour about ‘spontaneous’ hydrocarbon production by rocks from Russians and incomplete fuel data as absolute proof of your correctness. WOW

Before you comment again beware knowledge of this sort of material is my profession.

While I have spent considerable effort arguing against anthropogenic global warming with greens on frog blog, the statement above pisses me off.

My point is the Earth is rugged, not fragile. It’s still beautiful. The truth is always more beautiful than the daydreams.

It is unfair and harsh to everthing on it, it is home to neverending death and disease. All life upon it exists by destroying other life. It is still beautiful though.

99.9% of species upon it become extinct. With or without humans, most of todays species would be heading for extinction. It is inevitable and natural that the success of our species or any other will hasten the demise of many more.

Humanity does not need to apologise for and deserves no criticism for it’s success and the imbalances that creates. We, and our endeavours, are one of natures beautiful creations. Most of the effects we have on the planet that we decide are problematic can be rapidly changed.

Pseudo-environmentalists try to propagate a self-loathing, cynical language of a fragile planet to satisfy their own sense of self-worth.

I do not wish to spend my time on the Earth with such a negative mindset, and I think a view more respectful of our own self-worth will lead to better outcomes for us.

Our lifestyle is based on gross and large amounts of energy consumption with piss poor conservation of energy in use. This lifestyle is simply unsustainable at its present rate, it’s great for now but make no mistake, it can’t carry on.
Some say this has already screwed the environment, others that they know better and it’s all a load of crap this GW.
It doesn’t matter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When we burn away a few billion years of energy stored in hydrocarbons there ain’t no more. The only viable alternative to replace the phenomenal energy stored in the oceans of hydrocarbon chemical bonds we have been burning is the sun’s energy but that will require a colossal undertaking and a drastic reduction in our energy intensive lifestyles.
Analysis of the alternatives such as biofuels, nuclear power etc etc etc all show it just won’t be enough to even scratch the surface of what we use now in hydrocarbon energy. Nuclear energy won’t save us in its present form, all other ethics issues aside, is their isn’t enough Uranium.

More energy hits the earth from the sun every week than humanity has used throught it’s entire existence. The planet is covered by 2/3 water, miles deep, encircled by a miles thick atmosphere, covered by a crust miles thick.

For human purposes we have infinite energy, infinite water, infinite air, and infinite minerals.

If the energy is stored in plants or clouds, or the water is salty, polluted, or in the wrong place, we have a technology problem, not a resource problem.

None of whats on the planet, other than the super-abundance of energy, ever leaves the surface of the planet. It just gets shifted around, and at various times our technology and practises are insufficient to utilise it or allow it to buildup in the wrong way.

Possibly not, but it certainly means it is stupid.”

Ok, replace “environmentalism” with Sustainable practice, is there anything wrong with limiting industry to what our planet can actually cope with?
Does it make sense to continue using farming practice that will ultimately ruin the land for farming?

Possibly not, but it certainly means it is stupid.

As I’ve said before, environmentalism is extraordinarily difficult to get right. Which is why evolution was invented.

Since no-one can know the right answers, the winning option is to experiment with all kinds of solutions and let the future choose which one it likes. The fun part comes when all the options are sharing the same planet of course, but there is nothing new in that.

While I have spent considerable effort arguing against anthropogenic global warming with greens on frog blog, the statement above pisses me off.
It is undeniable that the actions of human beings are in fact stuffing this planet that we live on, it is our home and we need to take better care of it.
I think the angle that world leaders are taking on climate change is crazy, it will result in political instability at the worst possible time. But I think expecting to maintain the current unsustainable use of world resources is equally stupid and short sighted.
Anyone that believes that crapping in your own nest is good thing is obviously deluded, or currently living at the “crap free” end of the nest.
It will catch up with us at some point.
Environmentalism has been hijacked by left wing extremists in many cases, but that doesn’t mean it is wrong.

We have enough coal to last us for many centuries. Australia has enough solar radiation to power half the world. Far from exhausting our incoming solar energy, the current claim is we are not using it fast enough so the world is heating up.

We have no idea of what resources are available deeper into the earth’s crust. The Russians even believe more hyrdrocarbons are being formed there. There are vast reserves of methane hydrate under the oceans.

There is simply no evidence for your beliefs.

In the mean time the best NZ can come up with is a bit of a 1/3 insulation subsidy. Bugger all in other words.
So why are we talking about reductions of emissions of 40%, 15% or even 4% over the next 10-20 years. It won’t happen; no one REALLY wants to give up their lifestyle to reduce emissions to save the planet let alone think about the future generations.

Great. We can make up the other 25% (to end up with the 40% reduction in net emissions that Greenpeace and others propose) by planting more trees.

Or are they talking about a 15% net decrease? In which case why are you misleading everyone AGAIN DPF?

The question exercising my mind is how the relatively few intelligent sceptics can take proper financial advantage of the myriads of gullible “warmers”.

Of course the most obvious way is to join the legions of “smart money” buying into rip-offs of taxpayers and consumers via the innumerable carbon-trading scams.

My preference would be to do it more honestly, for example by simple wagers against the temperature forecasts by our mad climate modelers or the efficacy of ETS methods in actually reducing CO2 levels by an amount great enough to make the slightest difference. Unfortunately the timescale of these is unprofitably distant.

Do you have any suggestions?

The world has warmed since 1850 according to current methodologies by about one degree but the uncertainty in this number using the same methodology is more than one degree thus given the data we have it could have actually cooled during this period!

Computer models are a joke – it was shown many years ago now that the type of computer models are so unstable with respect to the initial data that the results they produce do not differ markedly from results produced by a random number generator.

Of course natural selection occurs amongst the competing models with only those that produce alarming results being pursued.

Those that don’t are quietly dropped or tweaked until they do. Either way they do not provide information about the future in any meaningful sense.