njlauren
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ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
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ORIGINAL: DomKen
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So ending our burning of fossil fuels would have no effect? The new industries developed would have no effect? No other country would be that tech to also free themselves on dependence on OPEC?
We will "free ourselves from dependence on opec" sometime around 2017. Not from "green" energy, however, but from fracking. We will surpass saudi arabia as the biggest producer sometime around 2020.
The technologies that exist now *cannot* be cost effective. Its like buying stock in horse and buggies.
Will alternate energy sources, in time, be developed. Yes. And if we leave it to free markets, by and large, they will be introduced when they are cost effective to do so. Nothing is gained by our current green focus other than massive fraud, and waste of resources.
Solyndra
Range Fuels
First Solar
Northern Turbine
Siemens
What was the michigan solar company that couldn't make enough to even pay the property taxes - let along wages, depreciation,
What was the big battery company a3? You know the one that took the pictures with Obama and Biden?
What you are leaving out, as most of the tea party droolers do, is that one of the reason alternative energy sources fail is because they are not competing on the free market, they are competing against fossil fuels that are heavily subsidized, and more importantly, are competing against oil and gas industries that write laws that make it hard to use renewables.
For example, you love Googling, try looking up how much of our defense budget is spend keeping oil flowing, you might be in for a shock, it may be as much as 40% of our defense spending and that is a lot of money. If we had to pay the true cost of oil, it would be so expensive other things would have taken over. Do you think it is a big coincidence that all the major wars the US has fought in the last 30 years have been in an area producing a lot of the world's oil? And that the US military and Navy especially spend a lot of time and money keeping oil flowing?
Did you also know that the oil and gas companies get huge subsidies from the government, and also are allowed to drill on federal lands while paying a pittance in fees and royalties?
The biggest problem alternative energy companies face is we have a third world power grid, and the GOP has refused to do anything about it. Power generation is regional, power comes from all over, but without a national smart grid there often is no way to get the power from where it is generated to where it is needed, so if someone puts up a wind farm in North Dakota, it is very hard to get that power to let's say Chicago or another area that needs it..and this was deliberate. Why? You do that, and suddenly local power producers are in trouble, we could start replacing those oil and coal fired power plants in the midwest and shut down a lot of older, inefficient plants that if they weren't the only game in town, couldn't compete. Shut down the power plants in the midwest that rely heavily on coal, and suddenly the rednecks in the red states that live off coal are in trouble.
The other problem is despite the wailing of people like Glenn Beck about failed alternative energy spending, the reality is we are spending less, in real dollars, than we were in the 1970's on alternative energy, and that is being cut, especially thanks to Tea Party know nothings.....
And need i add that most of the deniers are fed by the likes of the Koch Brothers, who also are the main backers of the tea party morons? To add more weight towards climate change happening, a major skeptic made global headlines when he turned around a couple of years ago, and said that he could no longer find any reason to deny that global warming was happening, and it was primarily man made.....(he was at one of the UC schools,maybe Berkeley?). The kicker was his study was funded by Charles Koch.......
The denier movement is like right wing attempts to deny evolution and other issues, it is full of outright lies, shit they make up, and twisting legitimate reports by citing them out of context (I would love for our friend to actually cite the NASA reports that say temperature has been flat, that emissions are way down and so forth, I don't want Glenn Beck quoting stuff, I don't want Faux News, I want the actual reports...wanna bet we don't see them).
Here are some of the 'facts' our friend cited that aren't true:
1)Warming is caused by "Solar Radiation"......status: False. Solar radiation has been studied extensively since the late 1950's, it was part of the international geophysical year, has been measured by Satellites through the 60's, solar probes, etc, and net result...radiation levels have in fact gone up, but a very small amount, and the effect of solar radiation on temperature has been worked out...and the amount of warming caused by radiation is a tiny fraction of 1%
2)"warming causes CO2 to be released, and this accounts for the excess CO2"......there is truth to this, as the earth warms and permafrost melts, CO2 from rotting vegetation once frozen is released. The problem is this is being released because of man made warming in the first place, it is accelerating the warming, but isn't the cause. 30 years ago the Northwest passage was frozen shut all months of the year, they are talking within 5-10 years of being able to open it up to shipping......
3)The US's levels of carbon are not going to stop warming if we drop them....true, which is why their need to be international protocols. That doesn't mean the US shouldn't drop co2 emissions, I don't know if China has beaten us as the title of putting out the most, but keep in mind china is 4 times the population of the US, so per capita, we are bad. On the other hand, how do you get other countries to do it if the US won't?
The other side is something that was mentioned, we also exported CO2 production to China and India where coals is still the dominant form of power production, so claiming 'it isn't our problem' when most of the crap we buy comes from China or India, is really a dodge.
4)warming is natural, it is the result of natural cycles....... false. It is in fact true the earth is warming due to natural cycles, we are in the latter stages of a warming period after an ice age, but what that leaves out is the cycle lasts 10,15, 20 thousand or more years, and the rise in temperature is spread relatively linearly over that time. It doesn't explain a jump in global temperature of 1 degree in 30 years or whatever timeframe if nature that would take many centuries.
What is really funny is when the deniers come up with 'scientists' and often the guys they bring up are geologists or in areas far removed from client science. It tells how stupid they are, because they have this idea there is some generic 'science' that means you are an expert in any area if you are a 'scientist', which is a hoot. Climatology is rooted in a very different type of science, it is fundamentally studying something that doesn't lend itself well to the kind of things science does in other areas, the biggest one is climate is non linear, chaotic, and change in climate revolves around myriad factors, like the infamous butterfly over topeka flapping its wings causing the weather to change in London. It uses different tools to quantity things, and a geologist for example is not likely to use the same tools.
The other thing the deniers love to do is show how climate scientists disagree (kind of like the creationist nutjobs who point out the holes in evolution..that no one denies exist.......). What they leave out is well over 90% of climate scientists agree that climate change is happening, it is rapid, and it is primarily man made, what they don't agree on is how much change is going to happen, and the timing of it, the impact, and what can be done, which isn't surprising. The models the science delinquents in the tea party make so much fun of, vary because modelling is complex, if they came to the same conclusions I would be shocked and know the data has been cooked,simply because climate is immense and any model makes assumptions. However, the odds that the models are wrong and no warming is happening, is tiny, the models disagree on outcomes, but within a range, the concept that change is happing not at all is at a probability close to zero.
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RE: Little fact about global warming for you - 
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