New West Energy Grok
Yes, Global Warming Can Be Stopped
By Richard Martin, 10-05-07
This week’s issue of Foreign Policy magazine features an article that could hardly be more depressing. Under the headline “Why Climate Change Can’t Be Stopped,” the authors – a pair of former Bush administration officials – argue that “Unfortunately, given the scale and complexity of modern economies and the time required for new technologies to displace older ones, only a stunning technological breakthrough will allow for reductions in emissions that are sufficiently deep to stop climate change.”
This conclusion echoes the one reached by Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson in an August column: “The overriding reality seems almost un-American: we simply don’t have a solution for this problem,” Samuelson declares. “We lack the technology to get from here to there.”
This is not only nonsense: it’s pernicious nonsense, because it helps impede the processes of technological and economic change that could ameliorate, if not solve, the global-warming crisis.
As I’ve demonstrated in this space over the last year, we certainly have the technologies to slow the rate of carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere and, eventually, reverse it. Among them: carbon sequestration, hydrogen fuel-cell automobile engines, new solar-panel materials and, yes, nuclear energy. The obstacles at this point are not scientific or technological: they are economic and social. And Americans have demonstrated more than once in the past that economic and social changes can happen surprisingly fast.
For an antidote to the negativism of non-experts like Samuelson and the pair of Foreign Policy authors, flip back to a piece in the Sept., 2006 issue of The Atlantic by Gregg Easterbrook. Carbon emissions are essentially an air pollution problem, and previous seemingly “unstoppable” air and water disasters, in the 1960s and ‘70s, “have been reduced faster and more cheaply than predicted, without economic harm,” Easterbrook writes. The “paralyzing negativism” exemplified by the two articles above “dominates global-warming politics.” In fact, global warming is a serious and potentially catastrophic crisis, but the solutions will almost certainly be less drastic than currently envisioned and will bring unforeseen positive consequences with them.
“Making the problem appear unsolvable encourages a sort of listless fatalism, blunting the drive to take first steps toward a solution,” Easterbrook adds. We’ve had enough nonsense of the pernicious sort in the long and wasteful debate over the causes and extent of global warming. Now it’s time to stop wringing our hands and roll up our sleeves.
In other energy news:
-- The return of uranium mining to the Western Slope was bound to be contentious, and now it’s closer than ever –the first license application for a new US nuclear energy plant in three decades was submitted last week. Leading the opposition, writes Jodi Peterson of High Country News, are newcomers to the West, some of whom have bought their dream property and discovered they are sitting on radioactive treasure. The American subsidiary of Canadian energy company Powertech Inc. “recently bought 5,760 acres of mineral rights near the high-tech mecca of Fort Collins. Powertech hopes to extract about 8 million pounds of uranium, worth nearly $700 million at current market prices.” The recently formed Coloradans Against Resource Destruction has collected 2000 signatures on a petition to force delay and further study on reopening the mines, reports Fort Collins Now, and to ban in situ leaching as the primary means of recovery.
-- Meanwhile in far western Colorado the argument over drilling for natural gas at the former Project Rulison nuclear blast site continues. “Rulison is essentially a hazardous waste site, except with nuclear materials,” hydro-geologist Robert Moran told the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission this week. A 1969 nuclear explosion intended to help gas production “created an underground glass cavity filled with radioactive materials,” according to the Grand Junction Sentinel.
-- The wind-power revolution is coming to Wyoming, and what do you know, some residents are upset. Voting 2-1, the Sweetwater County Commission this week approved a conditional use permit for Tasco Engineering to build a 36-turbine wind farm atop White Mountain, near Pilot Butte. Tasco points out that White Mountain is located conveniently close to existing power transmission lines. “The wind farm will destroy this natural resource,” one resident told the AP.
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Contact: Terah DeJong
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University of Southern California
Carbon dioxide did not end the last Ice Age
Deep-sea temperatures rose 1,300 years before atmospheric CO2, ruling out the greenhouse gas as driver of meltdown, says study in Science.
Carbon dioxide did not cause the end of the last ice age, a new study in Science suggests, contrary to past inferences from ice core records.
“There has been this continual reference to the correspondence between CO2 and climate change as reflected in ice core records as justification for the role of CO2 in climate change,” said USC geologist Lowell Stott, lead author of the study, slated for advance online publication Sept. 27 in Science Express.
“You can no longer argue that CO2 alone caused the end of the ice ages.”
Deep-sea temperatures warmed about 1,300 years before the tropical surface ocean and well before the rise in atmospheric CO2, the study found. The finding suggests the rise in greenhouse gas was likely a result of warming and may have accelerated the meltdown – but was not its main cause.
The study does not question the fact that CO2 plays a key role in climate.
“I don’t want anyone to leave thinking that this is evidence that CO2 doesn’t affect climate,” Stott cautioned. “It does, but the important point is that CO2 is not the beginning and end of climate change.”
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Al Gore understands what is needed to lead us and we need to convince him this month!!!
If Stott is correct about the lag effect of C02 following temperature rise, and if Dr. Svensmark is correct about the solar/cosmic climate connection, I am not sure what climate effect Richard will accomplish by diminsihing carbon dioxide.
Furthermore, the legislative efforts to spend billions to trillions of dollars on GHG mitigation will not turn C02 production down below present levels. See: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/downloads/s1766analysispart1.pdf
If there is climate change, it is definitely not man made. Not one meteoroligist will tell you they is global warming
Accepted theories about man causing global warming are "lies" claims a controversial new TV documentary.
'The Great Global Warming Swindle' - backed by eminent scientists - is set to rock the accepted consensus that climate change is being driven by humans.
if one looks at the climate changes through the Centuris one can easily see that the man made belief is false. one can also see warming taking place on Mars, venus, etc.
One major piece of evidence of CO2 causing global warming are ice core samples from Antarctica, which show that for hundreds of years, global warming has been accompanied by higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
In 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' Al Gore is shown claiming this proves the theory, but paleoclimatologist Professor Ian Clark claims in the documentary that it actually shows the opposite.
He has evidence showing that warmer spells in the Earth's history actually came an average of 800 years before the rise in CO2 levels.
While Prof Clark fully acknowledges that recent increases in atmospheric CO2 are anthropogenic, he just doesn't see any evidence that the man-made increases of CO2 are driving temperature change.
Scientists in the programme also raise another discrepancy with the official line, showing that most of the recent global warming occurred before 1940, when global temperatures then fell for four decades.
It was only in the late 1970s that the current trend of rising temperatures began.
This, claim the sceptics, is a flaw in the CO2 theory, because the post-war economic boom produced more CO2 and should, according to the consensus, have meant a rise in global temperatures.
The CO2 theory is further undermined by claims that billions of pounds is being provided by governments to fund greenhouse effect research, so thousands of scientists know their job depends on the theory continuing to be seen as fact.
The programme claims efforts to reduce CO2 are killing Africans, who have to burn fires inside their home, causing cancer and lung damage, because their Governments are being encouraged to use wind and solar panels that are not capable of supplying the continent with electricity, instead of coal and oil-burning power stations that could.
these theories are as ridiculas as saying that if everybody in say SLC Utah bar b qued on the same day and same hyour for one week, the towns temperature would go up. or if everybody jumped up and down at once we would change the orbit of the earth.
Montana and idaho and wyoming needs to be concerned with the rise in racism, bigotry, anti semitic groups and the lack of diversity created by mosdtly white liberals who drive suvs, own huge plaots of land in areas that were once roamed by wildlife, where a area once rich in native American History now has created lack of opportunities for native Americans and have stolen thier land.
Where many Rich Liberal Democrats shop in thier local co op and drink fair trade coffee out of slave made Chinese cups and wear made in China tee shirts and hats and shoes.
I agree with Cindy 100%, Gore should run for President, I would be ecstatic to see him get the Democratic nomination.
Of course we have to figure out what to do about the terrible hurricane seasons the last 2 years that have been brought on by global warming just like predicted. Meanwhile I have to go put quilts over my toamatoes and try to drag another day or two of ripening out of them and build the fire up.
But I do hope that pesky Al Gore isn't out there in your front lawn with a space heater!
I am more in favor of rationing gas than taxing it. People would be given permission to buy fuel that matched their needs for their work etc, and given a reasonable amount for recreation. Taxes hit the working poor and middle class while the idle rich continue on their merry wasting ways, that isn't right.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010699
It just seems improbably that you two could post so much tripe with out letting an original thought slide through once in a while.
Seriously, the Craig v Marion echo chamber you try to create on these pages is transparent right wing shillery and sort of creepy.
Tim, you seem to have come down with the affliction suffered by others that, when unable to discuss the issues, you resort to personal attacks. Take two aspirin and try again.
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Even if all greenhouse gases had somehow been stabilized back in the year 2000, we would still be committed to a warmer Earth and greater sea level rise in the present century, according to a new study performed by a team of climate modelers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo...
According to the report, the inevitability of climate change results from thermal inertia, mainly from the oceans, and the long lifetime of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Thermal inertia refers to the process by which water heats and cools more slowly than air because it is denser than air.
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Notice how this scientific report ties in with the recent work from USC which established that the Ice Age came to its end and the Earth began warming 1300 years before any rise in CO2. There appears to be feedback mechanisms that either amplify or retard the climate change supertanker, but this ship sets sail and charts its own course with great indifference to those mechanisms.