The question mark appears to be around one artifact produced by one particular method of data analysis, but this article http://profmandia.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/shooting-the-messenger-with-blanks/ highlights several other methods that have produced similar results.
No we're not. All your sources appear to be out of date. The BBC article I quoted is from 21st October 2011. It clearly states right at the beginning of the article the "The Berkeley Earth Project has used new methods and some new data, but finds the same warming trend seen by groups such as the UK Met Office and Nasa." So this isn't just a case of people running the same simulation. They've taken a fresh look at the problem and also used some new data as well. I don't see any mention of these new results anywhere in any of your sources. If I missed it. Please point it out.
But we both know there is no really accurate model, and there won't be for some considerable time to come. For even when someone comes up with a model that takes all the parameters and their inter-relationships into account it will have to undergo extensive field testing before we can rely on it with confidence. And that's going to take a long time. In the meantime we have to work with such models as are available. I wasn't familiar with the controversy about the hockey stick graph. Thanks for drawing my attention to it. I don't think it closes the debate on global warming at all, but it does demonstrate the dangers of inappropriately weighting your data. Sometimes I think we can be too clever in trying to bring meaning to data. Lies, damn lies and statistics! Mike
When I played Hockey it was field, and the stick curved back on itself, so this is confusing as hell for me. I only really lasted long enough to realise that just because I have a stick does not mean it's playtime... :hammer:
The problem is though that the models we have do not match what is actually happening. It makes it difficult to take them seriously. So, we know that the models we have our wrong, but the hockey stick makes for better publicity for an absolutely huge industry with a very obvious interest in enforcing more and more carbon restrictions and other 'green' measures, regardless of whether or not they have any effect. On the other hand we have other industries who produce carbon as a by-product, and would not be interested in such things. We have massive subsidies going to 'green' power generation which is both more expensive to build than other technologies, and much more expensive to maintain, as well as being unreliable. Without these subsidies it would become evident that current 'green' technologies are insufficient to make a difference, but the industries behind them are powerful enough to push their agenda and ensure they continue to get funding. I do believe we should use technologies which pollute less, as well as finding ways to reduce our energy consumption, but I don't think we have the technology to do so yet and trying to crowbar in overpriced, piecemeal solutions on the back of a man-caused global warming agenda is making it very, very hard to take the supposed science behind the whole thing seriously.
We do have the technology. However the issue is being treated too simplisticly. For example a reduction in demand for power would also help to reduce emissions. This can be done in a number of ways. Like overhauling agricultural practices, producing goods locally instead of shipping them all around the world, using smarter more efficient technologies and encouraging people to change their habits. Take the common power brick for example. Most people have one for their laptop or mobile phone at least. If you leave these plugged into a live wall socket, they continue to draw power. Which gets wasted if there's nothing being charged or feeding from the mains.
How much energy and investment do you think all of this would take to implement though? In this country alone we'd have to rebuild our manufacturing infrastructure, find a way to make it cost-effective for all goods consumed here to be produced here, apply the same to agriculture, and so forth. Nuclear power, on the other hand, could have been used to fix this quite easily if it weren't for the hippy outrage and panic which caused it to be relegated to the dustbin until now, when we urgently need it and are having to start practically from scratch. By cycling any journey less than eight miles (and longer ones when I have time) I'm preventing more emissions than any number of people turning their laptop bricks off. This is the problem, yes, technically all of these little things like turning off the lights, unplugging chargers and so on help, but frankly the impact is negligible compared to the lazy goit who hops in the car for a three-mile jaunt to the supermarket.
It's already being done in a cost effective way. There's a company for example that grows tomatoes in giant heated greenhouses all year round. They get the hot water for their heating system from a near by factory. Other farmers have recognised the most fertile ground for growing crops on their land is around the hedgerows. This is because that's were the birds live. The birds naturally "fertilise" the land with their droppings. So these farmers have in response learned from that and now grow their crops in wood land type settings with smaller clearings for live stock. Which means limited use of machinery. Which instantly cuts down on energy demands. Since the ground is naturally fertilised the farmers don't need to use fertilisers. Which again reduces the energy it takes to grow food and produce food. And yes cycling does help as does walking. Which I do almost every time I need to go somewhere.
Small scale prototype projects are not quite the same thing as scaling up to convert the national (and international) agriculture methodologies. I agree that there are some very forward-thinking companies out there - who happen to be in the right place at the right time to showcase these sorts of projects. Most, however, aren't in that place or time.
start a new thread guys. i wanna discuss eugenics. to start a new population, with no inbreeding leading to defective genetics and a good amount of diversity - what size and kind of founding population would you need? its linked to founders effect somehow
it's not eugenics. The current farming system we have in the UK is a relatively recent thing. Shouldn't be too hard to change it.
Incidentally: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/23/climategate_2_first_look/ This is why I'm skeptical about climate change doomsayers. There's just too much going on around it, and too many signs of truly bad science, to buy into it wholesale as the government want us to.
oh crap didnt realise i was on the wrong thread! ignoring climate change, humans are environmentally destructive. this is something republicans dont care for
Its taken me a few days to find enough time to come back to this properly. Maybe so, but the answer to that is to work on improving the models. There may be some truth in this, but in a later post you say: Do you really believe that the subsidies that green technologies receive in the UK can even remotely compare with the subsidies that nuclear power gets? The British public have been subsidising nuclear power since the first reactors in the 1950's. There aren't enough superlatives to describe the truly staggeringly enormous amount of taxpayers' money that's been thrown at nuclear power. The best I can come up with is ...supercalifragilisticexpialidocious... even though the sound of it is really quite atrocious. Why? Quite simply because the government was more interested its military application and fission power generation was a good way to produce military grade fissionable material. The subsidies go on, although they're perhaps less obvious, and they'll continue with the next generation of reactors. And as for 'industries being able to push their own agenda', well I find it hard to believe that wind farm advocates have been able to push their argument quite as successively as the military over the last 60 years. On the contrary, I think that investment and incentives can do a lot to drive technological development forwards. There are more examples of investment yielding results than you shake a stick at. What fool in the 1980's would have thought that mobile phones would have taken off? Sometimes investment/incentives provide just the spur to make things happen. One could argue that they're vital when there are issues of existing infrastructure to overcome. Of course, just pumping money into something cannot overcome the limitations imposed by the laws of physics. But there can be no doubt that pumping money into 'green R&D' will produce not only unexpected but also highly beneficial results. Mike
Absolutely - and not buying completely into models known to be flawed, where attempted intervention may not be doing any good, or may even be having a negative impact. If you try to fix something by throwing policy and money at it, without understanding the problem, it generally doesn't improve. Yep - however it's now a proven technology. Bear in mind that subsidies for green technologies are not just given directly by the government - approximately £6 of any household's energy bill a year is going to these, straight from their electricity bill. It's also worth noting that (with current technology) green technologies are substantially more expensive than nuclear power, and require more maintenance. There are some exceptions (wave power - some of the tidal barriers that've been proposed would provide huge amounts of power cheaply, sadly they've been scotched for environmental reasons). Nuclear power provides about 10% of our electricity. Green technologies have yet to hit even 1%, and even when they do it'll be intermittent. Absolutely - but lets subsidise something that gets cheaper rather than something that maintains it's expense. A windfarm needs to be replaced every twenty years. A nuclear power station once built, stays built. The military is a separate issue. To be honest if they're as determined to waste money as they seem to be, I'd prefer them doing it on power generation than on stealth fighters which can't fight. I agree. Investing in novel, cheap and effective renewable power generation technologies is a good idea. At some point I'm sure we'll develop some. The current ones we have don't meet these criteria. Quite a few. That's why it attracted investment. I agree. Pumping money into green R&D is a brilliant idea. Pumping money into trying to push poor technologies into production without that R&D, not such a good idea.
I can't argue with that. And it is a problem with green technologies (not unlike pretty much any aspect of government policy). But you talk as if all green R&D and all green policy were one homogeneous entity, which is a rather simplistic point of view surely? So about half the amount that some estimates reckon we'll be continuing to subsidise nuclear power by over the coming years then. I'm not going to claim to have a proper handle on all of the costs involved with either option so I don't want to just throw figures pointlessly backwards and forwards. Its a complex issue and the finances are not clear cut as far as I'm concerned. Yes, but as already discussed, in the long haul I'm not sure how valid a comparison that is, given that nuclear power has already had huge sums of money thrown at it. Until it needs decommissioning and then they can be a complete nightmare. Reactors have been built where no-one knows how they're going to be decommissioned - the decommissioning plan has been to put money aside to be invested on the stock market with the aim that at the end of the reactor's life enough money will have been generated to solve the problem then. Talk about leaving problems for our children's children to deal with. Something we can agree on then. To a degree I think the two go hand in hand. Once upon a time I worked in high-tech R&D, it taught me that it takes much more than good ideas and good research to bring viable products to the marketplace. I would prefer to see money spent wisely. Getting inefficient technologies up and running may not seem cost-effective, but I think it has a part to play in the long haul. It will create the infrastructure, economies of scale and attitudes that encourage good quality R&D. Then the chances of the right idea occurring at the right time in the right place are maximised. Mike
Anything self-labelled as 'green'is applying that tag to itself. The whole green thing is more an ideology than a science, so anything falling under that tag can be assumed to be part of the idealism, which means any publicity regarding it needs to be taken with a pinch of salt and viewed with a critical eye. Maybe - I'll have to look into nuclear subsidies - but there's an important difference even without that. Assuming what you say is true (I can't find any detailed figures on sites other than things like sayno2nuclear, which is obviously not a reliable source) nuclear power is then providing 10% of our electricity for £12/person/year, reliably and with no issues with surges or drops in supply dependent on weather. 'Green' energy on the other hand is providing less than 1%, with surges and drops which put more strain on existing stations, for £6 a year. Now assuming those costs stay linear, and that we're generous and say green energy is currently providing a full, reliable 1% of power, we get the following. 100% nuclear - £120/person/year 100% green - £600/person/year When you throw in the lifespan of a well-built nuclear power station, compared to the lifespan and maintenance costs of green energies, it gets even simpler. Solar panels need to be regularly cleaned, and replaced. Wind turbines need to be rebuilt every 20 years. The designed operational lifespan of a nuclear power plant is 30-40 years, however this is basically a limit slapped on by policy rather than by any physical constraints. There is no reason that a plant cannot be renovated and upgraded in order to continue functioning. It costs about £5bn to build a nuclear power plant, granted. But the cost per KWh of a nuclear power plant (even a high, generous cost) is about £2000/per KW when building the plant. Given that the plant will be designed to be in use for 40 years, you've for that 1 KW for forty years. A wind turbine costs about the same per KW (assuming it's build on land, in a convenient area for the national grid, and the land isn't too expensive - variance in any of these will drive costs up substantially), but will only provide that KW for 20 years. As such, even in ideal conditions a wind farm costs twice as much per unit supplied as a nuclear power plant. One day I'm sure decommissioning will make sense - but I still don't see why it's necessary. Refurbishment/renovation should be considered in order to extend the operational lifespan and improve efficiency as time goes on. It will also drain the investment. If it was a case of prototype or showcase projects then I'd understand, but that's not what is being discussed. Bleeding edge technologies are not suitable to provide a national energy solution and only politicians recklessly addicted to green publicity would consider them to be so.
