Amen!

But, the problem remains that the greenies are busy little beavers, working hard to impose a carbon tax/fuel tax/living tax on everyone so that they are their preferred friends can sup large off the taxpayer. Nevermind that their “cure” is most likely worse than the supposed “disease.” That won’t be obvious in the lifetime of the current crop; it will have a decided impact on the life style of their children and grandchildren…and a negative one at that. P

Climate Change (formerly known as AGW) isn’t at all about Climate. One cannot scare too many people by showing them a small uptick on downtick in some statistical anomaly concerning Co2, ocean acidity, or percipitation patterns across India. But, one can stir up the masses by blaming individual weather events (blizzards, tornadoes, droughts, floods, hurricanes) on “Climate Change”.

We are living in the final decade of the PDO optimum (warm North Pacific sea surface temperatures). But, 5 years ago North Pacific temps have been falling. Alaska is experiencing brutal winters the last 2-3 years. Snow cover there in the interior is lasting year round. China, East Asia, parts of Siberia and many places in the Southern Hemisphere are seeing falling temps. The planet warm and cools in fairly long periods. The North Pacific sea surface temps went into a warm mode in 1975, and it took almost 15 years to see global temps to significantly warm. In a decade, the term “Climate Change” will evolve into Global Cooling, which of course will be blamed on fossil fuels.
Eventually the money that subsidizes the Climate Change industry will dry up. It is too bad that many will suffer before that happens.

As one having an engineering degree (electrical), I believe in the science of nuclear energy, management, and waste disposal.

I’m less trusting of the power companies and their bed-fellow regulators.

The Indian Point plant just south of NYC is just one example. It sits on a major fault line; is fairly old; and was recently re-commissioned. I sorta like NYC (sorta), and my daughter teaches there. Indian Point is a clear and present danger to the city, IMO.

I don’t even think fusion will be here before 2100 and in general I agree with you. The most important thing we should be thinking about is not how to make less energy, more expensively. We should be thinking about how to make much more energy, much less expensively.

What a blessing it would be to have people in Hawaii wake up and not have to pay the highest electricity rates in the nation. Or think about it from a purely environmentalist perspective: recycling things is hard – it’s energetically costly. It takes tremendous amounts of energy to recycle things like automobiles. If you want people to continue to have new appliances and new refrigerators and new cars, the solution is not to make them last forever, the solution is to be able to make them cheaper to recycle. Toxic compounds, hazardous materials, so many of the things we need to use – but also need to get rid of and transmute – are very difficult because of the energy cost.

Look at how much energy it takes just to re-purify aluminum. Look at how much energy it takes just to shred aluminum! And that’s the first step.

http://www.ssiworld.com/watch/shred.htm

We need to decrease the cost of industrial energy by an order of magnitude or more. Then we can really start talking about how we’re going to maintain high standards of living for billions of people while also not destroying the environment. And billions of people deserve to have high standards of living, not starving to death. The answer is a lot more energy, a lot more cheaply.

Let’s assume, arguendo, that the earth has experienced “normal” average climate conditions over the period of human civilization (the last 10,000 years or so of 4.5 billion years of earth history).

That’s a heck of an assumption as it averages out several epochs of climate change more sever than what has been observed in the last 5 decades.

So the NYTimes committed a random act of journalism? I’m suprised they didn’t tell
everyone to hold their breath for 30 minutes to solve the so-called climate change
problem. Personally I like the different seasons when the climate changes. And why do the greenies approve of electric cars cause last time I checked, those cars have to plugged in and charged with electricity, duh. I guess it’s magic how electric cars are good and coal/oil/nat gas are bad, since they don’t cause greenhouse gases but not according to the EPA; electricity is bad too:

“Electricity is a significant source of energy in the United States and is used to power
homes, business, and industry. The combustion of fossil fuels to generate electricity is the largest single source of CO2 emissions in the nation, accounting for about 40% of total U.S. CO2 emissions and 33% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2009. The type of fossil fuel used to generate electricity will emit different amounts of CO2. To produce a given amount of electricity, burning coal will produce more CO2 than oil or natural gas.”
from: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.html

So hold your breath and turn out the lights since the EPA states electricity is the biggest cause of climate change in our country (you have to see the graph on the link above!). Then wouldn’t power outages be a good thing per the EPA? Then why all the pork to turn it back on after a storm??? I’m not being heartless for the Sandy victims or anyone else effected by huge hurricanes and storms in the past but merely pointing out the hypocrisy of the government. Let’s leave them in the dark and turn out the lights in D.C. proper until they change their climate ways.

Of course. See, the purpose of wind energy is so you can say you are doing something good. Mostly, companies pay for the energy so they can say they bought so much renewable energy, then warm worms with it, or drive them out of the ground.

Speaking of Fusion, I went to a new restaurant lately. They called their cuisine “Fusion” but I have my doubts. When I ordered Deuterium and Tritium, they acted like they’d never heard of them.

This issue will not split the Democrats, and their leading argument will be that the last thing we need is cheap abundant energy. This message will be sliced, diced and force fed to us by the media until the people “understand” it.

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy . . . would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” – Prof. of Entomology Paul Erlich, Stanford University. Author: The Population Bomb

The plan is not new.

If the Democrats remain in power for the rest of this decade, we will be living in a nation where every aspect of life is controlled by the Department of Energy and those parts that are not will be under the boot of the Department of Health and Wellness. Their leadership keeps a very tight leash on members and will not allow division or diversity of thought. . The statists who think they know what’s best for everyone will prevail, and DOE, Interior and EPA will become the hand that controls the spigot.

Start paying attention to state and local politics. Find out who’s who. Find out who is likely to run in the midterms. Find out who should run. We in the Republican base need to find and nominate and elect solid limited government conservatives now. The Party will be counterproductive on this going into 2014, since none of it is aligned with their interests. It is Now, and it is Us.

If all we’re doing is posting and preaching to the choir, nothing is accomplished.

At first glance, that sounded a little “black helicopter-ry” to me, but then I remembered that the primary objection liberals have to a flat tax isn’t that it would hurt the poor, or even that it might benefit the “rich”, but that the State would loose control over personal behavior without the market-distorting effects of taxation.

This is going to get a bit nerdy, but if it helps, just think of the poor art major I unloaded all of this on after he tried to tell me I shouldn’t laugh at AGW theory…

First, carbon dioxide is a truly bad greenhouse gas; there are a couple of narrow lines in the IR spectrum (I worked on a project where we had to optically detect live flame against a hot background, and those bands were what he had to look for). On top of that, the atmosphere was already about 80% opaque in those bands at the start of the industrial revolution, so any increase in CO2 level would have a diminishing effect. If CO2 alone was the only factor, then the whole theory would be laughable.

The mechanism that the AGW theory depends on is a coupling with cloud formation. Water vapor is the most prevalent and most efficient greenhouse gas in our atmosphere; it covers most of the IR band (though the CO2 lines fall into the so-called “water window”). So, the theory goes, a minor increase in temperature caused by CO2 results in more cloud formation, which in turn causes temperatures to go up even more. In control system theory, this is called a positive feedback channel. And, since water vapor has so much “control authority” over the system, it’s a very powerful positive feedback.

The problem with this theory is that there’s no proof that cloud formation is a positive feedback mechanism. This is an assumption that has been made without any real backing.

You might not understand the significance of this, but a system with net negative feedback is inherently stable; it will find a stable “set point” and will eventually return there in response to any input disturbance.

In contrast, a system with a net positive feedback is inherently UNstable, and any input disturbance will be amplified and returned endlessly. In engineering venacular, the system will “drive to the rails”, reaching the highest (or lowest) temperature possible, and it will stay there until something essentially “resets” the system.

To my knowledge, there’s no way a system with that kind of instability could have remained on the set point for millions (billions?) of years. The first big solar storm or volano to come along would have been enough to start the runaway process, and drive such a climate to the rails eaons ago. This is exactly what we see in the climate of Venus.

The bottom line is this: the alarmists have made an arbitrary assumption in thier computer models that resulted in an artifically unstable (and completely expected) nightmare scenario.

It’s my personal beleif that this was done intentionally and for political reasons, just as the “nuclear winter” team (TTAPS) intentionally “simplified” thier computer models in order to arrive at a politically desireable, pre-determined output. In other words, we already HAVE a precedent for a global scientific hoax executed for political reasons by highly respected scientists.

The only real difference between the two hoaxes is that no one stood to become rich from institutionalizing nuclear winter, but the AGW movement has been engineered to make sure that a lot of politically well-connected financiers and financially well-connected politicians stand to make a lot of money and assume a lot of power if we institutionalize AGW theory. In other words, they’ve created a political postivie-feedback channel of thier own.

You rarely hear any talk about global warming from geologists. Geology is the one science with an appreciation of the earth’s time scale. Temperatures, sea levels and atmospheric CO2 have varied wildly over 4.5 billion years, but climate scientists obsess over observable change over the course of a human lifetime.

At the end of the last ice age, ~12,500 years ago, the entire planet warmed dramatically – by 10 deg F or more in a very short time span. I have yet to hear an explanation of that in terms of modern climate science.

Doncha just love the artsy-fartsy phrasology of the NYT Commie/Greenies?: “An Antidote for Climate Contrarianism” Really now.

It sounds so erudite to “Juan Q. Peon”** (a hat tip to the old San Antionio Light of the ’50s) so the writer MUST know of what he is writing. Obviously not the case since this Cretan could recognize a ‘truth’ if he tripped over it. His paradigm from ‘journalist’ school is such that he couldn’t comprehend any ‘fact’ he is presented with, much less even read one.

Nuclear energy is the answer but the ‘Three Mile Island’ non-event and the concomitant and fortuitous Jane Fonda movie vehicle ‘The China Syndrome’ three days later was a manufactured ‘crisis’ not to be wasted. Then you had Chernobyl in the ’80s that blew up due to inept and shoddy building by an equal inept and shoddy USSR government.

These events did more to put the US behind the ’8 Ball,’ energy wise, that we have not been allowed to recover from by an inept and corrupt Federal government at ALL levels

**Juan Q. Peon = an Everyman, thinking thee and me

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan had a good five point plan that led with Energy independence. Hsd they made energy the main campaign issue more voters would have learned about all the potential in developing our resources right here is the USA.

Republicans always make a pitch for energy in presidential election years then shut up. We must make energy real to voters so much that they want an electricity bill from a nuke plant. Nuclear plants, natural gas, drilling oil, clean coal, fracking come to mind as agenda items to support as a movement for energy independence and just clean cheap fuel.
.

celador2,
I basically agree with you about the “election years then shut up.” My bigger picture thinking tells me to ignore the Greenies completely for the idiots and agenda pushing hypocrites they really are. In my mind they are irrelevant. Too bad the same can’t be said for the media duped public who live on sound bites and half-truths.
I still remember when Greenpeace dumped all their trash on at a French port illegally because of inconvenient things like permits and protocol (not to mention: it’s someone else’s problem now, WE are doing God’s work mentality).

And, the cheaper energy is to produce, the more the government will tax it. Every penny drop in the cost of making it will be another penny, or more, of tax upon it. Trust me. The government will not lose a chance to increase revenues, and then will increase their spending even more until real constitutional conservatives make up the great majority of our governments. And, even then, we will need to keep a close eye on them because power corrupts, and all that. We the People will still be in charge of making it work–even if everything were to magically become free. There will always be those who want to push other people around. Always!

People in Bangledesh are litterally freezing to death, and it actually snowed last week in Vietnamn. Both are in the tropics/subtropics. Mother nature unleashed a terrible surge of artic air into East Asia and Siberia the last 4 weeks, the likes of which haven’t been seen since Hitler and Stalin were buddies. North American was spared (Alaska was not, however) primairily due to a persistant ridge of High Pressure in the North Atlantic. A second bout of artic air will spill out of from an area bounded by Norther Sibera to Western Canada. Beginning in 10 days, the Central Plains will get hammered, as will Eastern Europe and Scandanavia. In the mean time, the Southern Hemisphere remains below average temp wise.

Don’t let the Alarmists fool you. While much of North America remains warm, most of the world is shivering

Dallas Texas was 34 degrees yesterday AM.
That Ain’t supposed to happen either.
Russia has a record cold winter so far.
Where is Gore?!

Oh, yeah, he is selling his T.V. station to one of the largest OIL (read that CO2) producers in the world.

HMMMMMM?

Follow the ENTIRE value of electric cars and it isn’t too wonderful at all.
Electricity isn’t free, recycling can be a bit of a bitch, battery life is terrible and performance doesn’t work well in northern climates, no real infrastructure, load capacity is questionable at best, etc. There was a very detailed study on this about 6 years ago (guessing on timeframe).

I know that baby steps are taken before strides can be made, but people acting like we’re ready to run right now is foolish.

Continued – to travel. They want to create zones where work will be allowed , where we will be relocated to. They have a very evil plan for the future of Americas , if they are not stopped. Rosa Koire – Behind The Green Mask is an excellent book on Agenda 21 . Freedomadvocates.com, Democratsagainstagenda21.com are two great websites . Agenda 21 is a United Nations agenda being implemented locally in our towns ,in our cities through our city councils by controlling land usage .

Are you saying Agenda 21 doesn’t exist or that it doesn’t have all the intended goals that the commentor said? Just curious as I happen to believe that it does exist and Clinton signed an executive order that mirrored it…just called it something different. The land grab from this admin is astonishing and well as the overreach of the EPA. Call it Agenda 21 or not, the desired results are the same.