LOL no, it's not what you think! I watched "Before The Flood" on The National Geographic Channel and I am now a believer that humans are warming the planet to catastrophic levels. I'm not sure if this is reversible, but the effects are alarming. Even if the amount of co2 we release into our onion-peel layer of an atmosphere isn't warming the planet, I STILL believe it is inevitable we must move to renewable energy for our health alone, just so future generations don't drop dead at 40 from our dirty air. Not really interested in arguing about it, but if you want to object to my newfound conclusions at least watch the full doc first. Here it is, free online:
my simpleton opinion
scientists have told us the world's climate has been changing for 2 billion years, I believe that
they say we have a 20,000 year cycle of global warming (we're presently in year 17,000) followed by a 70,000 year cycle of global cooling
using simple math, there'e been 22,000 such cycles, but my argument applies even if there's been only 1,000 or 100 such cycles
when someone can tell me why that cycle is broken, the earth will never suffer from global cooling again, I'll listen
until then, I know the earth's climate is changing, everybody knows this, it's been changing for 2 billion years
I know we're in a warming cycle, it's been warming for 17,000 years
and I think mankind needs to research how we can survive the next catastrophic cycle of global cooling which is right around the corner
PS: I don't mind research to develop alternative energy sources, but let's not pretend that's going to stop climate change
scientists have told us the world's climate has been changing for 2 billion years, I believe that
they say we have a 20,000 year cycle of global warming (we're presently in year 17,000) followed by a 70,000 year cycle of global cooling
using simple math, there'e been 22,000 such cycles, but my argument applies even if there's been only 1,000 or 100 such cycles
when someone can tell me why that cycle is broken, the earth will never suffer from global cooling again, I'll listen
until then, I know the earth's climate is changing, everybody knows this, it's been changing for 2 billion years
I know we're in a warming cycle, it's been warming for 17,000 years
and I think mankind needs to research how we can survive the next catastrophic cycle of global cooling which is right around the corner
PS: I don't mind research to develop alternative energy sources, but let's not pretend that's going to stop climate change
Some of it is the natural cycle but if you look at the increase in CO2 since the industrial revolution, there is correlation with the increase in warming. It is tough to say how much that equals causation or how much you could prevent it but we should be working to decarbonize for obvious reasons anyway.
The excessive swings we've been seeing are probably not because mother nature is on her period.
The excessive swings we've been seeing are probably not because mother nature is on her period.
Climate Scientists Laugh at Global Warming Hysteria
Respected Australian scientists laugh at Julia Gillard, David Suzuki and other climate change drama queens.
Professor Bob Carter of James Cook University is a Marine Geologist.
Professor Peter Ridd of James Cook University is a Marine Physics specialist.
Respected Australian scientists laugh at Julia Gillard, David Suzuki and other climate change drama queens.
Professor Bob Carter of James Cook University is a Marine Geologist.
Professor Peter Ridd of James Cook University is a Marine Physics specialist.
did you really expect us to watch a video for 1 hr and 30 minutes?
does he tell us why the next cycle of global cooling is NOT coming?
No, don't invest the 1.5 hours. Instead just believe whatever you want. Could this dying man be wrong? Maybe so. Is he a liar? I highly doubt it!
https://www.inverse.com/article/23042-leonardo-dicaprio-climate-change-piers-sellers
https://www.inverse.com/article/23042-leonardo-dicaprio-climate-change-piers-sellers
I'm not even sure Scott watched it since his hero John Kerry is featured in this carbon tax infomercial.
Of course I watched it. Then I posted it. And got exactly what I expected from the two people I expected it from. But I posted the video anyway. As I said believe what you want. I've made my call.
Fair enough.
I watched it...okay, skimmed it. Interviews by Obama, Kerry and other political hacks.
OMG, WE NEED A CARBON TAX OR WE'RE DOOMED!
The left loves its martyrs to win over people emotionally, so they picked a guy with pancreatic cancer which nobody dares to attack to deliver his heart-wrenching deathbed plea.
I get it. I'm not questioning his motives or integrity, but you do know this area of NASA is about to be gutted (thank God!), right?
Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’
Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding as the president-elect seeks to shift focus away from home in favor of deep space exploration
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-earth-donald-trump-eliminate-climate-change-research
==================================================================================
Fly me to the moon
Let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like on
A-Jupiter and Mars
In other words, hold my hand
In other words, baby, kiss me
Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding as the president-elect seeks to shift focus away from home in favor of deep space exploration
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-earth-donald-trump-eliminate-climate-change-research
==================================================================================
Fly me to the moon
Let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like on
A-Jupiter and Mars
In other words, hold my hand
In other words, baby, kiss me
what can a "dying man" possibly prove? we're mortal? he saw God? (what religion is right?)
a man can be wrong, doesn't mean he's a liar. But now that I think about it, for some strange reason, man made global warming scientists have been caught in a lot of lies
their science (read their dots) doesn't (don't) always connect, so they make shit up
better figure out how to survive in Antarctica Scottstein, because the next ice age is almost a certainty. Just like death, it's still batting 1,000, it never lost
There isn't as much of a disagreement amongst politicians about man made global warming as people want to think. Once they don't have an office to run for anymore, most of the GOP politicians believe that some man-made change is occuring. They just don't want to choke off industry aggressively as collateral damage for trying to fix the problem. And then obviously some are just bought by those that don't want to strand trillions of assets.
The alarmist vs denier paradigm is coming to an end. Most of the disagreement centers around what the appropriate response to this problem should be.
I find all of this debate to be distracting and counterproductive because whether it is real or not it doesn't change the results that I believe we need. The world needs to move beyond the 20th century energy infrastructure. This should've happened a long time ago but because of special interests, regulation, fear-mongering and just sheer convenience it hasn't happened.
Necessity being the mother of invention needs to win out.
Really doesn't C&P well at all. Just click the link.
The New Atomic Age We Need
By PETER THIELNOV. 27, 2015
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
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Photo
CreditScript & SealTHIS past summer, the Group of 7 nations promised “urgent and concrete action” to limit climate change. What actions exactly? Activists hope for answers from the coming United Nations climate conference in Paris, which begins Monday. They should look instead to Washington today.
The single most important action we can take is thawing a nuclear energy policy that keeps our technology frozen in time. If we are serious about replacing fossil fuels, we are going to need nuclear power, so the choice is stark: We can keep on merely talking about a carbon-free world, or we can go ahead and create one.
We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. This is most obvious in poor countries, where billions dream of living like Americans. The easiest way to satisfy this demand for a better life has been to burn more coal: In the past decade alone, China added more coal-burning capacity than America has ever had. But even though average Indians and Chinese use less than 30 percent as much electricity as Americans, the air they breathe is far worse. They deserve a third option besides dire poverty or dirty skies.
In America, the left worries more about our five billion metric tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions and what it might do to Earth’s climate. On the right, even those who discount the environmental effects of fossil fuels can’t deny their contribution to economic volatility. We saw this in 2008 when a historic high oil price coincided with a historic financial crisis.
The need for energy alternatives was already clear to investors a decade ago, which is why they poured funding into clean technology during the early 2000s. But while the money was there, the technology wasn’t: The result was a series of bankruptcies and the scandal of Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer in California that went bankrupt in 2011 after receiving a federal guarantee of hundreds of millions of dollars. Wind and solar together provide less than 2 percent of the world’s energy, and they aren’t growing anywhere near fast enough to replace fossil fuels.
What’s especially strange about the failed push for renewables is that we already had a practical plan back in the 1960s to become fully carbon-free without any need of wind or solar: nuclear power. But after years of cost overruns, technical challenges and the bizarre coincidence of an accident at Three Mile Island and the 1979 release of the Hollywood horror movie “The China Syndrome,” about a hundred proposed reactors were canceled. If we had kept building, our power grid could have been carbon-free years ago.
Instead, we went in reverse. In 1984, Ohio’s nearly finished William H. Zimmer nuclear plant was abruptly converted into a coal-burning facility: a microcosm of the country’s lurch back toward carbon.
The 2011 Fukushima disaster seemed at first to confirm old fears: Nearly 16,000 people were killed by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. But nobody in Japan died from radiation, and in 2013 United Nations researchers predicted that “no discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected.”
Critics often point to the Chernobyl accident in the Soviet Union as an even more terrifying warning against nuclear power, but that accident was a direct result of both a faulty design and the operators’ incompetence. Fewer than 50 people were reported to have died at Chernobyl; by contrast, the American Lung Association estimates that smoke from coal-fired power plants kills about 13,000 people every year.
Only recently has climate anxiety challenged nuclear fear. Just as the impact of coal smoke dwarfs the effects of radiation from Fukushima, global warming is predicted to be far worse than mere pollution. The problem is so big that some prominent environmentalists have already declared defeat.
But not everyone has been paralyzed. While politicians prepare a grand bargain on emissions limits that future politicians are unlikely to obey, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost. Designs using molten salt, alternative fuels and small modular reactors have all attracted interest not just from academics but also from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists like me ready to put money behind nuclear power.
However, none of these new designs can benefit the real world without a path to regulatory approval, and today’s regulations are tailored for traditional reactors, making it almost impossible to commercialize new ones.
Fortunately, we have solved this problem before. In 1949 the federal government built a test facility at Idaho National Laboratory to study and evaluate new nuclear reactor designs. We owe our nuclear power industry to the foresight of those New Dealers, and we need their openness to innovation again today.
Earlier this year, the House of Representatives passed a bill calling for reform of our national laboratories; recently, the White House hosted a summit meeting to support nuclear energy. However, now that the speeches are over, we still lack a plan to fund and prototype the new reactors that we badly need.
Both the right’s fear of government and the left’s fear of technology have jointly stunted our nuclear energy policy, but on this issue liberals hold the balance of power. Speaking about climate change in 2013, President Obama said that our grandchildren will ask whether we did “all that we could when we had the chance to deal with this problem.”
So far, the answer would have to be no — unless he seizes this moment. Supporting nuclear power with more than words is the litmus test for seriousness about climate change. Like Nixon’s going to China, this is something only Mr. Obama can do. If this president clears the path for a new atomic age, American scientists are ready to build it.
Peter Thiel is a partner at Founders Fund, which invests in technology, including nuclear energy, and is the author of “Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future.”
The New Atomic Age We Need
By PETER THIELNOV. 27, 2015
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
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474
Photo
CreditScript & SealTHIS past summer, the Group of 7 nations promised “urgent and concrete action” to limit climate change. What actions exactly? Activists hope for answers from the coming United Nations climate conference in Paris, which begins Monday. They should look instead to Washington today.
The single most important action we can take is thawing a nuclear energy policy that keeps our technology frozen in time. If we are serious about replacing fossil fuels, we are going to need nuclear power, so the choice is stark: We can keep on merely talking about a carbon-free world, or we can go ahead and create one.
We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. This is most obvious in poor countries, where billions dream of living like Americans. The easiest way to satisfy this demand for a better life has been to burn more coal: In the past decade alone, China added more coal-burning capacity than America has ever had. But even though average Indians and Chinese use less than 30 percent as much electricity as Americans, the air they breathe is far worse. They deserve a third option besides dire poverty or dirty skies.
In America, the left worries more about our five billion metric tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions and what it might do to Earth’s climate. On the right, even those who discount the environmental effects of fossil fuels can’t deny their contribution to economic volatility. We saw this in 2008 when a historic high oil price coincided with a historic financial crisis.
The need for energy alternatives was already clear to investors a decade ago, which is why they poured funding into clean technology during the early 2000s. But while the money was there, the technology wasn’t: The result was a series of bankruptcies and the scandal of Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer in California that went bankrupt in 2011 after receiving a federal guarantee of hundreds of millions of dollars. Wind and solar together provide less than 2 percent of the world’s energy, and they aren’t growing anywhere near fast enough to replace fossil fuels.
What’s especially strange about the failed push for renewables is that we already had a practical plan back in the 1960s to become fully carbon-free without any need of wind or solar: nuclear power. But after years of cost overruns, technical challenges and the bizarre coincidence of an accident at Three Mile Island and the 1979 release of the Hollywood horror movie “The China Syndrome,” about a hundred proposed reactors were canceled. If we had kept building, our power grid could have been carbon-free years ago.
Instead, we went in reverse. In 1984, Ohio’s nearly finished William H. Zimmer nuclear plant was abruptly converted into a coal-burning facility: a microcosm of the country’s lurch back toward carbon.
The 2011 Fukushima disaster seemed at first to confirm old fears: Nearly 16,000 people were killed by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. But nobody in Japan died from radiation, and in 2013 United Nations researchers predicted that “no discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected.”
Critics often point to the Chernobyl accident in the Soviet Union as an even more terrifying warning against nuclear power, but that accident was a direct result of both a faulty design and the operators’ incompetence. Fewer than 50 people were reported to have died at Chernobyl; by contrast, the American Lung Association estimates that smoke from coal-fired power plants kills about 13,000 people every year.
Only recently has climate anxiety challenged nuclear fear. Just as the impact of coal smoke dwarfs the effects of radiation from Fukushima, global warming is predicted to be far worse than mere pollution. The problem is so big that some prominent environmentalists have already declared defeat.
But not everyone has been paralyzed. While politicians prepare a grand bargain on emissions limits that future politicians are unlikely to obey, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost. Designs using molten salt, alternative fuels and small modular reactors have all attracted interest not just from academics but also from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists like me ready to put money behind nuclear power.
However, none of these new designs can benefit the real world without a path to regulatory approval, and today’s regulations are tailored for traditional reactors, making it almost impossible to commercialize new ones.
Fortunately, we have solved this problem before. In 1949 the federal government built a test facility at Idaho National Laboratory to study and evaluate new nuclear reactor designs. We owe our nuclear power industry to the foresight of those New Dealers, and we need their openness to innovation again today.
Earlier this year, the House of Representatives passed a bill calling for reform of our national laboratories; recently, the White House hosted a summit meeting to support nuclear energy. However, now that the speeches are over, we still lack a plan to fund and prototype the new reactors that we badly need.
Both the right’s fear of government and the left’s fear of technology have jointly stunted our nuclear energy policy, but on this issue liberals hold the balance of power. Speaking about climate change in 2013, President Obama said that our grandchildren will ask whether we did “all that we could when we had the chance to deal with this problem.”
So far, the answer would have to be no — unless he seizes this moment. Supporting nuclear power with more than words is the litmus test for seriousness about climate change. Like Nixon’s going to China, this is something only Mr. Obama can do. If this president clears the path for a new atomic age, American scientists are ready to build it.
Peter Thiel is a partner at Founders Fund, which invests in technology, including nuclear energy, and is the author of “Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future.”
By the time the next global cooling cycle comes, we probably will be off of fossil fuels as an energy source (one way or another)
If fossil fuel use wasn't finite and you could just use it forever then I dunno what would happen but that isn't really possible.
This is from the MIT tech review...
But even that warming will not stave off the eventual return of huge glaciers, because ice ages last for millennia and fossil fuels will not.In about 300 years, all available fossil fuels may well have been consumed.Over the following centuries, excess carbon dioxide will naturally dissolve into the oceans or get trapped by the formation of carbonate minerals. Such processes won’t be offset by the industrial emissions we see today, and atmospheric carbon dioxide will slowly decline toward preindustrial levels. In about 2,000 years, when the types of planetary motions that can induce polar cooling start to coincide again, the current warming trend will be a distant memory.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/416786/global-warming-vs-the-next-ice-age/
