Fingerprinting is a nice analogy, Buttle. How can we be sure that all that pollution, CO2 levels, nitric oxide levels and cow farts are A) our fault, and B) actually causing changes in climate?

We cant be sure unless we predict, and then wait a few decades and keep measuring, can we? So we have to say, along with the man falling from the skyscraper, everything OK so far!

So the hysteria about nuclear weapons was a bit silly, beacause we would not all die in an all-out nuclear war. Because people high on hillsides on the far side of New Zealand with food and water and seeds and medical supplies for a couple of years would make it fine. They would not freeze, it now turns out.

Then maybe climate change will be OK too.

If you read my other reply two posts up, it's clear that I'm not left leaning.

Your linked slaughter statistics are for the USA alone, and as far as I know GLOBAL warming affects the whole globe....so we should count the global amount of farmed animals.

Your statistics also only count slaughtered animals, and not farmed animals like dairy cows, which there are more of at any one time. Around 9 billion dairy cows in the USA. So already in the US alone we have 13.9 billion farmed animals(4.9b slaughtered + 9b dairy cows). It's not hard to see worldwide that figure reaching 50 billion.
And that's still not counting a bunch of animals (read the small print of your link).

The thing with methane too, it traps over 29 times more heat that co2....and most trees don't absorb methane. So even if we had enough trees to absorb co2 (which we don't) then all of methane from farmed animals would remain up there anyway.


80% of tree's aren't gone, 80 % of forests are gone:
https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=how%20much%20of%20the%20world%27s%20forests%20have%20been%20destroyed


How much renewable energy tax do you pay BTW? Where I live I pay $0. But the government does give some $4 billion of our tax money to the coal industry. So if anything the big tax scheme is from non-renewable.


EDIT:
Oh I forgot the most important bit. Scientists can tell between natural co2 and man-made co2. They have differing amounts of carbon. So it's actually really easy to tell between how much carbon dioxide humans have put into the atmosphere vs naturally occurring carbon dioxide.


Also lions and bears are going to live in nature regardless of human activity - we've added 50 billion large, methane producing animals to the world that wouldn't be there otherwise. Granted the destruction of habitats might have reduced the lion and bear populations, but not by 50 billion. Perhaps a few million at most.

Are you sure that 50 billion farm animals releasing methane would have no affect on the planet?

Are you sure that cutting down 80% of forests (trees absorb co2) would not have an effect?

You don't need know anything about maths or science to see that these huge numbers are significant regardless of what the sun is doing.

Just to make sure you can appreciate how much 50 billion is - it would take you 31 years to count 50 billion.

Human activity in the last 100 years (especially in the last 50) has drastically changed the earth.

The great scientist Al Gore C02 correlation is is wrong min 22

The Sun is the driving force of global change. min 36

False Co2 correlation was driven by politics min 39

Interplanetary Climate Change NASA's Hottest Secret

Would be interested to see the total life cycle efficiency of these.

One of the problems with wind turbines is the energy cost of the foundations. Most large wind turbines require a lot of concrete to be mounted on. Concrete is a horrible material in terms of CO2 production, so a wind turbine actually has to operate for several years before it becomes carbon neutral.

This looks like it might solve that problem, but on the other hand, I'm unsure if it would scale well.

I dunno, I'm not an engineer, so happy to listen to someone more knowledgeable on this.

Solution, no. Semi-mitigation....possibly if it could be done, but there would be tradeoffs, it wouldn't be a simple 'now it's only CO2' solution....as if that was a solution, there's still too much CO2 too.

I'm intrigued by the engineered bacteria idea...at this point it couldn't be much worse than just releasing all the methane (OK, it could), but it's like that one time I went to the lake to bone my girlfriend, but the mosquitos were going crazy and she said there is no way. By the time people decided it was worth the risk and started developing them, it would be too late anyway, but we might mitigate the extinction event for the insects....who knows?

Um....uninhabitable for 100 years? How do you figure? It's likely that when the ocean temps rise enough, and are acidic enough, most sea life dies, sinks, rots, and releases massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide killing anything that's left.
(WIKI-Kump, Pavlov and Arthur (2005) have proposed that during the Permian–Triassic extinction event the warming also upset the oceanic balance between photosynthesising plankton and deep-water sulfate-reducing bacteria, causing massive emissions of hydrogen sulfide which poisoned life on both land and sea and severely weakened the ozone layer, exposing much of the life that still remained to fatal levels of UV radiation.)
Along with all the other damages of climate change, and the apocalypse that >7 billion people will cause on the way out, it's going to be way longer than 100 years before humans can live off nature if ever....way way longer.

We are hard to kill, but we aren't extremophiles. We'll die, or become mole people, but some other life will continue.

So Newtboy, would attempting to burn all this methane as it is released(converting to CO2) be a possible solution, assuming it was possible from an engineering point of view? Apart from that, maybe bioengineered organisms designed to eat the methane could make an impact.

I'm not hopeful, but I'm pretty sure there are enough ultra-rich people with the resources to save a small portion of humanity while the earth in uninhabitable for 100 years, that humans will not die out. Viruses are hard to kill(according to Agent Smith)

These methane clathrate (methane hydrate/hydromethane) deposits have been releasing both under the ocean and from permafrost melt for years now...with the rate of their melt release increasing exponentially.
Pound for pound, the comparative impact of CH4 on climate change is more than 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.
For those of you who are religious....this is the 'burning seas' you would expect from the apocalypse, because the pockets of gas coming from the ocean are highly flammable, even explosive.
This is why I have said for over a decade that there's absolutely no chance to avoid human extinction along with a world wide extinction of most of life. Once the methane started bubbling up from the sea floor, any chance of stopping the change was gone, and that was a while ago and we've done absolutely nothing but increase the amount of greenhouse gasses we produce. The ocean responds quite slowly to climate change, so there's nothing that can be done now that it's warm enough to release the methane, even if we stopped producing all greenhouse gasses today.

This is game over, people, game over. A massive methane release will have almost immediate effects and could double the entire temperature rise since the industrial revolution almost overnight. When (not if) that happens, say goodbye to nature both on land and in the seas.
The above number, 80% of life on earth vanished, is misleading. 80% of species were lost completely forever, 98% of all biomass died, so of the 20% of species that were left, only 10% of their population survived. Humanity won't.
*doublepromote
*quality

What's hilariously terrible is, the 'dirty smoke' that coal use produces is the only mitigating factor of coals environmental destruction. The sulfur dioxide it produces goes into the upper atmosphere and reflects sunlight, actually COOLING the atmosphere. IF they ever actually perfected "clean coal" technology, it would be more damaging to the planet than "dirty coal" is, because at least dirty coal produces global dimming effects that have mitigated as much as 1/2 of the temperature rise due to excess CO2. Without that dimming, we'll suddenly see a HUGE rise in temperatures worldwide, and all the associated damage.

Good idea, terrible execution.
My brother had a kegger for his 16th birthday party and we heated the pool up to 105 deg, then threw 30-40 lbs of dry ice in. That was much better than this try on an infinity pool. The pool we had was an in ground pool, and the yard had a wood fence, so the fog stuck around and built up to 2-3ft deep. Lots of people went swimming while it boiled, I suppose we're lucky we didn't have any issues from too much CO2. Good times, good times.

Sadly I'm right there with you.
When the international climate agreement was made public recently and I saw that what they were pleased and proud of was an agreement to somehow (they didn't say how) stop the rise in CO2 at almost exactly the level that's agreed on is the point of no return/the level that they think will start all the feedback loops making mitigation or survival impossible, which somehow no one seems to understand means they agreed to do NOTHING besides drive us directly over the cliff. If that's the best we can hope for, a non binding agreement to wait until it's too late to do anything that might save the species/planet, we might as well just say screw it and enjoy the little time we have left. How much comfort will driving a Prius give you when the clouds of Hydrogen Sulfide rise from the ocean?
This is from a guy with an expensive solar system who grows most of my own food.

'Too early to start drinking?' Never! I understand all those words, but not when you string them together like that....and I don't drink.

Methane being so much worse than CO2, maybe someone should light a match and help minimize the problem...

Works with farts...

Self *promote because HOLY CRAP!!! This hasn't even made the news here in N California, and it certainly should have.

Methane is 25 times more damaging to the atmosphere than CO2 over a 100 year period, even though it's quite short lived compared to CO2. I don't think that is taken into account when claiming 2.3% of the carbon footprint, they're just measuring the carbon by the ton. If you want to measure the damage over the next 100 years, you need to multiply tonnage of CO2 by 1, and tonnage of CH4 by 25.
CH4 makes up about 10% of greenhouse emissions in the US, making it FAR more damaging than all the CO2 we produce. An extra 21% CH4 (2.1% of all greenhouse emissions) should cause the same damage as adding something like >50% more CO2...which everyone agrees would be disastrous.
Why is this not front page, leading story news? Cover up, or just terrible and irresponsible reporting all around?

EDIT: Thanks to @eric3579 for the heads up on this story.

So wait...the agreement is to 'limit' temperature rise to 3.6F, the exact temperature rise they have said is the point at which feedback loops become engaged and make CO2 the least of our problems? Then...at some future point...they agree to limit CO2 production to levels that natural processes can absorb, with no time limit for that, and until then we'll continue to add to the already out of balance levels of CO2, adding to the already unsolvable problem? How on earth can they expect to do the former without first going well beyond the latter? There's no way to limit temperature rise from CO2 without lowering the amount in the atmosphere...and this plan NEVER goes that far, it only agrees to, at some point, balance the amount we add with the amount being removed...that keeps the levels at above current levels, it does not lower them. That keeps the temperature rise in effect, only lowering the speed at which it's rise accelerates, not lowering the speed it rises.
From what I can grasp of this 'agreement', it's beyond worthless and does nothing to solve the problem, only agrees to limit the speed at which we make it worse. It seemingly ignores the fact that what we do today takes 50-100 years to effect the climate and pretends that slowing (not stopping) the RISE in CO2 production is in any way meaningful. If we stopped ALL human CO2 production tomorrow, we still will see the 3.6F rise, the acidification of the ocean, and the myriad of issues that come from those and other disrupted natural cycles.

Also, if we stopped all CO2 production tomorrow, that would mean shutting down coal power plants, and that (while necessary) brings with it the problem of stopping global dimming. Global dimming occurs when aerosols block sunlight in the upper atmosphere, and has directly counteracted some effects of global warming. If we stop putting the pollution up there, we get a few more degrees of temperature rise from that alone.
Unexpected feedbacks like this make solving the problem an issue that requires thorough knowledge of all the processes involved, a near impossibility, meaning anyone who's not a professional climatologist who's offering solutions or opinions is really just spouting hot air....kind of like I just did.

What part of "do not have a choice" do I not understand? How about the subject of the 'choice' you are denied. Now that you have clarified that you don't have a choice about how the electric company pays you, or how solar works, I'll reiterate, you still DO have a choice about how to use the power you generate. Making better use of that choice would serve you well, but you seem intent on claiming it's all out of your control (and that you're forced 'at gunpoint' to sell all your production cheap and buy it back expensive rather than find a way to use it directly). I'm intent on making the best use of the choices available to me (and I bet to you) in order to make intelligent choices about my energy, choices that have saved me thousands to date, and should save me tens of thousands in the long run, and save uncounted tons of CO2 from being produced. You have instead invested in a system that now serves your needs terribly, and now want to tell others how solar is not economically viable or green, both of which are absolutely backwards from my experience and research.

You were not kidnapped, you walked into that guys home and put his gun to your own head. I wonder if you've even investigated 'net metering' in your area, it could make your system work for even you.

OK, so energy cost VS energy produced is ALL you want to compare. Then you MUST include all energy costs to be reasonable, including the energy cost of cleanup of coal waste failures (that right there already totally tips any scale against coal, it can't come close to making the energy that cleanup takes), the energy used in upkeep of coal waste storage for centuries, the energy costs of habitat destruction/reconstruction by coal mining itself, the mining itself, transportation of the coal, power plant operation (construction, upgrading, and maintenance), and the cost of mitigating the 20-40 times the amount of CO2 pollution, health issues, loss of sunlight (solar dimming is real), etc. The list of energy costs goes on and on for coal, while the list for the energy cost of solar panel production and use in some cases is damn near zero (where it's made with leftover chip wafers in solar powered factories it barely takes any extra energy at all, but I do understand that most aren't made that way now).

Double return VS coal, because you get twice as many KWH per dollar with solar PV, or better.

Again with the 'spend more energy to produce one KWH of PV than with coal', show me some data. Everything I can find shows you're 100% wrong if you look at the lifespan of panels which become energy neutral in well under 3 years on average (some much sooner) and last 20-30 years, while coal continues to need more energy to produce more (filthy) energy. Perhaps in the extremely short term you have a point about cost/production, but any time period over 3 years puts PV ahead of coal in energy costs/energy produced, and in their 20-30 year lifetime they do much better.

Coal made power is NOT cheaper than solar made power. If it was, I would not save money with a solar system. I have already saved money with solar VS buying the same amount of coal produced power, therefore solar PV is cheaper than coal. Period. If it wasn't, our electric companies would not be 'farming solar' here as fast as possible, they would be building more coal plants.

Some people support coal because they have been misinformed about alternatives. That's why I have continued our discussion here, because your information is wrong based on my personal experience and research, and I fear you might convince someone to not even look into solar enough to see how wrong you are, how much money they could save (if they do it properly), and how much pollution they could not create.

Um...I DO grow my own vegetables in my backyard too. It's cheaper, and I get far better produce with zero carbon footprint. Another statement you've made that I take personal exception with. It's not a HUGE effort, but is some effort, but the returns are great and totally worth it. I think many people stopped subsistence farming because they're lazy, overworked, and/or live without any place to farm. I've been doing it since I was 12 and ate my first self grown corn, and I've never had reason to question that decision. I've read about people spending $50 to grow $5 in tomatoes...I'm not one of them. I spend $50 on manure to grow >$1000 in produce yearly, and have enough to give >1/2 of it away.

Not a single one of your examples are 'more viable' than PV in every situation, and private owned home solar doesn't take public dollars away from public power projects. I looked into wind-it's way more expensive for the same generation power along with numerous other issues, nuke-also far more expensive with other long term major issues, solar thermal-hardly working as hoped yet in the few, hyper expensive plants in existence, wave-not yet but fingers crossed, hydro-DISTEROUS for the environment and short lived. (You left out geothermal, which is excellent where it's possible.)
Also, most of your examples are not viable for residential use (what we're talking about here), as you said are more expensive (so are bad economic choices), and/or have other serious ecological issues that PV does not.

Money is the only reason to stick with coal or nuclear, and that's only because the companies that use it get away with not paying for most of the true long term costs, and even with that it's now FAR more expensive to buy that coal/nuke power than it is to make your own with PV, leaving NO real reason to stick with coal or nuclear....so what are you talking about?