Closer to Solar Power than we've been assuming?

Whether global warming is real or not doesn't matter all that much to me, truth be told. Either way I believe industrial society needs to be dismantled altogether or scaled back by a large degree. I take after Derrick Jensen on this. The fact of the matter is, we destroy our environment in countless ways and are essentially at constant odds with nature and other species, and we're not any happier to show for it. I don't think the world exists to be exploited and used by humankind. We in the West already use too much as it is, there's not enough physical stuff to have everybody have the lifestyles that we do, I think we would need 1.5 earths or something like that. We in the advanced countries need to enter into a more sustainable way of living that is more in harmony with nature and it's creatures whether or not global warming exists, period.

 

Yes it was. But thank you for acknowledging that.

I'm pretty sure you know that floods cause financial damage and, sadly, sometimes people die because of them.

That seems like an attempt to hide behind doubt and the word "definitively" here. A bit like asking someone to prove smoker & current cancer patent X would not have gotten cancer had he not smoked as a way of trying to let smoking off the hook.

Like I said before, Global Warming shoots up the odds of bad things (like floods) happening. People get cancer without smoking but smoking increases the odds of something bad (like cancer) happening.

And how many are related to the John Birch Society or like minded groups? I was referring to them and Fred Singer when I said paranoid cold war propagandists. Did you know then John Birch Society tried to claim Earth Day (when it was started years ago) was really a sneaky way of celebrating Lenin's birthday and thus communism? More than a little paranoid. Never mind that it was also St. Francis of Assisi's birthday or that birthdays in general weren't part of why that date was picked. But there was paranoia to push.

Now maybe I'm being a bit hard on the Birchers or making too much of them but they are associated with the first article you linked to in this thread.

Thanks for the (backhanded?) complement. If you are referring to subsidies renewable energy receives directly I would say cut them when the market gets balanced out by things like sending fossil fuel powered operations bills for Global Warming related damages.

I'm willing to give the "free market" a chance on this one so long as it is informed by the actual financial costs related to each and thus they are factored into price.

If you feel (and maybe you don't) markets reward efficiency then it makes sense not to hide the costs of fossil fuels (as seems to be the practice today) so they (markets) can have a chance to work.




Edit:

By no means a detailed summary of Global Warming effects but a nice map to have.

 

I know this will sound weak, but it's my bet that this is because of mismanagement; not because solar power is unprofitable.
Look at the accumulated rescue funds for the European Union: It's astronomical, and it's still not enough. Wherever there's subsidy to be had, there are crooks at the top milking the loopholes in the system.
Filing for bankruptcy is too profitable nowadays, for those in control. That's why subsidies fail so often.

 

The fact is market prices aren't going to stop the destruction of our life support systems. The market didn't stop when 90% of the large fish in the ocean disappeared. The market didn't stop when nearly half of America's lakes and rivers were too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life. It hasn't stopped with the mountains of E-waste in China. It hasn't stopped with blowing up mountains and poisoning the inhabitants. It hasn't stopped when nearly 80% of the worlds forests were destroyed. When did the market become more important than the life of the planet and everything on it? The problem with mainstream environmentalism, and these type of debates about solar panels and such, is that it takes industrial capitalism as a given when in fact it's at the very heart of the problem itself. We should stop concerning ourselves with market efficiency and instead concern ourselves with having a habitable planet for the generations to come.

 

My personal belief is that eventually - although probably not in our lifetimes - we will switch to alternative forms of energy like solar power. Currently, there is so much natural gas and coal (there are literally trillions of tons of coal in eastern Russia that is virtually untapped at this point) available that solar power isn't cost effective right now. And we have a supply of fossil fuels for power plants that will last a few centuries, even without finding more or improving the efficiency of our current power plants.

That is not to say that solar power will never be useful. As technology develops further, and solar panels become more efficient (which is at least as likely as improving the efficiency of fossil fuel use) the day may come that we get a lot of our power this way. It's just that this day isn't here. At least not yet.

 

Well, there's no direct evidence of that, but some of the observations made in recent years are self-evident. For example, there is plenty of evidence that a lot of arctic and antarctic ice sheets are melting in recent years. It is logical to assume that (regardless of what your stance is on anthropomorphic causes of global warming) the ice is melting because it's warmer now than it was in the past. I further logically follows that if you melt a lot of ice, sea levels will rise. A rise of even a couple of feet in sea level would (not could) greatly increase the risk of flooding in coastal areas.

I'm mostly with you BTA in that I don't believe in apocalyptic consequences of global warming, but it just seems that some effects are straight forward. To me, if I see a lot more ice melting than in the past, I tend to conclude it's most likely because it's warmer. If this melting trend continues, I conclude that sea levels will rise. If sea levels rise then the risk of flooding in coastal communities also rise. To me, it's a pretty straight forward if A, then B type of reasoning.

 

Well then why do you see news stories about an antarctic ice sheet the size of Rhode Island breaking off into the ocean if it happens all the time? And yes, obviously the amount of ice in the arctic and antarctic are seasonally cyclic. But I was under the impression that the NET amount of sea ice, i.e., year over year average was in decline.

OK, if it's been rising at a steady rate since the last ice age, does not that indicate that there is less ice (and thus more water) each year?

Hmmm... I never thought of it that way, but it makes sense. If I plunk a few ice cubes into a glass of water, the level of water in the glass doesn't go up when the ice melts. But not all the ice in the arctic is sea ice. There are glaciers in Canada, Russia, and Greenland. And of course a large amount of the antarctic ice sheets are on land.

 

What changes would you need to make in the face of global warming that you wouldn't need to make in light of the countless other ways industrial society is harming the planet?

 

This report seems to disagree with you.

The report was put out by these folks (Put out by these folks http://www.globalchange.gov/about)

It includes projections (which are guesses) and past records (less so).

For example the amount of rain that comes in/from heavy downpours has increased almost 20% from 1958-2007.

Now I think it is it reasonable to believe that inland flooding would be more likely to occur if a storm system dumps more water in an area within the same timespan (of a heavy storm).

Also..

your comment about people and the the media lends itself to the strawman you were bringing up with me before.

Specifically the implication that I supposedly thought the world was going to end due to Global Warming-an idea you brought up rather than me.


@damedog

While I may like wilderness areas and am not eager to see mass extinction events I would like to point out the you that PR some of the polluters hide behind seems to be support for the "free market".

But then they hypocritically leave some of their bills for others to cover.

This isn't something unheard of if you consider a few of the financial games that some businesses and people have attempted to play on each other.

Maybe an informed market actually won't work to deal with Global Warming. But up to this point it really hasn't been tried yet within the US and, possibly, the world as a whole.

The hypocrisy of such scams (right word?) and the point that an informed market hasn't been tried/put into place aren't exactly bad thoughts when arguing Global Warming should be taken more seriously.

 

Are you saying that somehow the amount of rainfall that comes with a heavy downpour has not increased by nearly 20%?

Has that happened? Yes or no?

While both the report I linked to and the website you posted a link to referred to the same "5% increase in overall precipitation in the US".

What the report does is go more into detail than this blogger's site to explain much of that precipitation increase has come in the form of even heavier heavy downpours (which I pointed to earlier as likely leading to more flooding).

What does this blogger's website do with that 5% increase? It uses it-without the added detail/explanation-to claim there aren't more severe droughts.

If you read through the report there both references and footnotes posted. That they didn't include a reference list & footnote section at the end of this pdf of their report. They should have and I'll fault them for it.

Though that doesn't mean they have no references (some are named both in the charts and by some of the statements in the report).

Actually..

It seems likely you were referring to end of the world type predictions. Referring to "every one for which the time horizon has passed" includes a list of supposed doomsdays put out by various religious sects. For example the organization JWs belong to predicted the apocalypse a few times already.

You seem to throw me in with them with..

Now you're wrong in that sometimes doomsayers are specific. The JWs listed which years the apocalypse was supposedly going to happen multiple times (they seemed to come up with a different year after one passed without an apocalypse for the world).

But the implication you made is that I'm among the "doomsayers".

According to you I was even going so far as to use some of their "weasel words".

Now if you don't actually mean doom you probably should stop using the word or words with "doom" in it.

I think it would be unfair to refer to someone who said smoking does bad things (and mentions some of them like it being related to the suffer and early deaths of many people) as a "doomsayer".






Now the first article you linked to this thread related to an opinion put in a publication associated with the John Birch Society-a group that has both an agenda has made statements which were flat out wrong.

The blogger whose website you most recently linked to is run by a man-Anthony Watts-who is associated with the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute (like the John Birch Society) not only has an agenda it is pushing but was one of the organizations that has tried to claim smoking isn't as harmful as reported.

So when you say..

It would be nice if those differing opinions came with more credibility than they seem to.

Now yes references were listed the Watts website. But if we went through all of the writings referred to I'm not sure they would support the arguments made.

Mr. Watts himself claimed the "U.S. temperature record is unreliable" because of placing sensors in bad spots. And an article in the Journal of Geophysical Research disagreed stating "we find no evidence that the CONUS average temperature trends are inflated due to poor station siting".



I suspect the peer review process was stronger for the latter publication.