Absolute BS.
Bad math, no science. He's cherry picking data and extrapolating using partial worst case scenarios rather than actual measurements...that is not science, it's misleading propaganda.
The cost of moving away from fossil fuels is easily offset completely by the savings of the new technologies used, and likely the switch would be a gain to GDP, as it makes tens of thousands of new technology jobs and billions-trillions in additional GDP selling the tech, and once built many new techs have far lower operation costs, saving money. (That's how economies work, you sell stuff and make money...right?) It sure worked for my solar system, which you, Trance, would likely still try to talk people out of, claiming it's more expensive than it's worth, while reality is it paid for itself in less than 1/3 of it's expected lifespan AND has other benefits.
The cost of 'adapting to climate change' is infinite, as it's impossible. Plants, animals, and biota can't survive it...and people like to eat. Kind of hard to adapt if there's no food, far LESS farmable land, less or no natural food sources, etc.
Also, he ignores the facts that 1) it's almost certainly going to be MORE than 3 deg. by 2100 and 2)methane hydrates are already melting, and methane is (I think) something like 100 times more damaging to the atmosphere (as far as greenhouse effects), so even "just" 3 deg. suddenly becomes 8 deg...that's often ignored.
3 deg. means on average, but also means the spread gets larger. Winters are colder, summers are even hotter. 3 deg. doesn't sound like much by itself, but it really means 15-20 deg. hotter when it's hot, and 12-17deg. colder when it's cold.

Oh Bob. It's better to remain silent and let people think you an idiot than to open your mouth and prove it.
97% is not the same thing as 97. Also, the correct number is really closer to 99.9% of all published climatologists, if not higher. Those who know, know. Those who believe don't know jack.
There are many ways to differentiate human produced CO2 from naturally occurring CO2, and therefore prove the rise is due to man. This has been done repeatedly and conclusively. The simplest way is to simply look at the graph of the rise and compare it to our use of fossil fuels, they are exactly the same curve at exactly the same time, with exactly the same dips and bumps. It's certainly not the only method, but is a simple to understand one.
It's ridiculous to state that to live 'green' you must live as if in a 3rd world country. That is simply BS stated by unreasonable men without any knowledge (and usually with a financial incentive to be anti-green/pro-fossil fuel).
It's also ridiculously ignorant to state that being 'green' is not cost effective. As someone who has had a solar system for 7+ years, I can tell you it's paid for itself already (with an estimated 13 more years before needing serious upkeep), has kept me away from the 40-50% rate raises that have happened to others in that time, it heats my house, my shower, and my hot tub and keeps the lights, TV, washer/drier, dishwasher, and fridge on when the grid goes down. It's not at all the expensive, powerless, sacrifice forcing technology you seem to think it is. It saves money even in the short term, and significant amounts in the long term AND has many other benefits. You've been listening to the wrong people about this issue, people who either totally don't know what they're talking about or are bold faced liars. I speak from actual experience.
Cost effective 'green' technologies have existed for well over a decade. You are simply wrong about your estimations.

So there are 97 "scientists" that say unequivocally the sky is falling and you are buying it.

How many Climate Scientists are there in the world? Surly more than 100. What about the other 200 - 300 scientists? Do they agree?
This Carbon dioxide you claim to be the doom of man, how can you differentiate between man made and naturally made?

If you really care about this then ride a bicycle and eat only locally grown food and cut you electricity. Go live "3rd world" and leave reasonable men knowledge in peace.

I'm all for cutting fossil fuel and going "greener" but it has to be cost effective.

Who is going to buy a Chevy Volt at 60K when you can get a gas car for 30K.
Oh wait the Chevy volt was a financial disaster because it cost too much.

What happens when the coal fired electric plants stop producing electricity due to government "green" requirements that they can't meet and you electric bill goes up 30%? are you cool with that?


I think it will take 50 more years to get to cost effective "green" technologies.
Until then keep strong in your 3rd world hut..

I'll invite you over to my electric air conditioned house. I'll even pick you you in a gas power car.. Heck Ill even let you take a warm shower and do you laundry in that electric thing called a washer.




@lantern53

Revolutionize, probably not. Be an improved option over 'regular' internal combustion in (apparently) weight, size and efficiency, maybe. This seems to be a great option for a hybrid. Being smaller and lighter is what you want in an energy efficient vehicle, as is fuel efficiency. Since fossil fueled vehicles will be the norm for the foreseeable future, any step towards making them more efficient is a good thing (although not the end goal, true enough). This seemed to have many advantages of Wankel motors (rotaries) without the efficiency problem due to low compression/incomplete combustion. 14:1 on pump gas is INSANE! My offroad race motor is only 12:1 and it needs trick racing fuel.
Also, as far as simplicity, this had no valves and assorted crap, just inlet and outlet ports (from what I understood anyway) like Wankels. That's a HUGE jump in simplicity, with an entire system eliminated, so there's far less to break/wear out/need tuning. IF manufacturing cost can be reasonable, I see this as a great step forward possibly making hybrids more acceptable to many more people.

Because we can look at the type of carbon, and volcanic carbon is heavier than fossil fuel carbon. When measured, the heavier carbon barely makes a dent compared to the fossil fuel carbon.

It's called science. Learn it. Love it.

(We should also note, when lead was a popular anti-knock component of gasoline, a "scientist" who was funded by the gas companies said there was nothing to worry about. Turns out, he was grossly wrong. But he was getting paid to say it wasn't. Much like any junk scientist out there today. Hence why out of peer-reviewed articles, 100% agree that climate change is happening. Only 97% have come to the definitive conclusion it's man-made. Because the scientific method IS being used, this amazingly complex issue is slowly becoming clearer, and there will be ones who will try to find causes others haven't investigated, and if their studies bear out in the peer review cycle, then it's accepted and the theory is altered. Until those 3% come to the table with facts to support their hypothesis, their ideas won't be accepted. Again, it's called science, and this is how it works.)

You can demonstrate the effect of carbon dioxide on climate as easily as dropping a ball from your hand? People know that balls will drop because the see it for themselves, not because a former physicist and his dog say so.

In actual fact, the earth has not warmed in nearly 20 years, and the climate models do not help to explain this. They are useless for explaining or predicting changes on the scale of decades, and it's crazy to expect them to somehow predict changes much further in the future.

Warmism, from the start, has been based on obfuscation, concealment of data, dodgy statistics, and overcomplicated computer models that add very little to insight into the real physical phenomena.

Remember the hockey stick? That went the way of Carl Sagan's nuclear winter, which ought to provide a cautionary tale for Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Your child's future will have many problems, one of them being depletion of the fossil fuel supplies that we have come to rely upon for sustenance. Climate will change, as it always has, and some of that change will be caused by CO2.
Climate science could be helpful; it's a pity that it has been distorted into a completely political exercise, and a shame for science generally, which stands to lose a great deal of public trust.

Nuclear, when located away from population zones and areas of high seismic activity is a much better alternative to fracking. It doesn't carry any caveats in contaminating or draining aquifers and not being a fossil fuel it doesn't have the carbon emissions cost. Unfortunately Three Mile and now Fukushima have made that unlikely.

I do agree with Mikus that it needs to be put in perspective. The other point is that while not ideal, fracking is a much better alternative to coal in terms of emission cost.

@ChaosEngine

While long term, it is continuous, relatively easy to encourage (than directly constrain population growth) and historically effective.

As for resources consumption, see my posts about automatic adjustment, comparison to nuclear family, fallacy of fixed factors in an economy etc ... If you disagree with any of these, why?

@gorillaman

Which is politically infeasible, short of a dictatorial state like China.

At this point there are no significant physical resources that you have pointed out that are genuinely becoming scarce. If they were, we would see prices sky-rocket and an adjustment away to another type would take place.

I gave the example of labour resources becoming scarce and the adjustment to dual income households. That was a gradual adjustment.

But okay, suppose energy resources genuinely became scarce. Current alternative energy (nuclear/renewable) techniques are not as cost effective as coal/gas/oil. But if there were genuine scarcity in fossil fuels, they would be.

We would know about the coming scarcity for at least a decade ahead and would build out alternative capacity over that period. Even if the average cost were twice current energy costs, how would that be different to the change to dual income households? Society wouldn't like it, but we would adjust.

Perhaps there may be some unrest in borderline developing/poor countries, especially those dependant on energy exports. But there would be no incentive for inter-country wars. In fact, those with the most efficient renewable technology would have much to gain from trading and selling their technology to those who do not.

@gorillaman

Why would we need to quintuple resources by 2100 if population is only forecast to grow 50%? There is no shortage of potential arable land and more would be made room for if food prices were to rise (bringing them back down).

As I said before, I'm not debating environmental damage and climate change need to be addressed. But you address it directly, you don't attempt to reduce the world population to <1Bn ... somehow, like you propose.

No, corporations primarily do cause environmental harm, particularly climate change:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/20/90-companies-man-made-global-warming-emissions-climate-change

That's why changing their incentives directly through taxes or emission schemes is the best approach. I would almost say that attempting to reduce your carbon footprint at a individual level is an exercise in self masturbatory indulgence, which while gratifying is completely insignificant. It's the by-products of all the everyday products that you consume during the industrial process that create the vast majority or pollutants.

3rd paragraph - I've already addressed everything there several times here. You simply are not acknowledging the facts:

http://priceofoil.org/2013/11/26/new-analysis-shows-growing-fossil-reserves-shrinking-carbon-budget/
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/interactive/2013/nov/26/why-fossil-fuel-reserves-growing-oil-carbon

Does our current reliance on carbon based energy precipitate environmental issues with regards to global warming in the future? Obviously, but an international agreement on raising the cost of it, to reduce our reliance on it, is more likely than an agreement on enforced family size limits.

@RedSky

I'd like to know how you expect to quintuple the availability of every vital resource in the next 50-100 years while somehow reducing the environmental impact of that necessary increase to what you acknowledge needs to be less than the present level. This is supernatural thinking. Corporations don't pollute, incidentally, the fundamental structure of our global society pollutes; which would be no problem whatsoever if there were fewer of us.

It's fine if you'd prefer to just keep the majority of the world in mediaeval poverty, or alternatively impoverish everyone equally; colossally immoral, but by contrast actually physically possible.

Our success as an organism has been implicitly tied to energy availability for our entire history. The bubble of economic and technological advancement we've ridden since the industrial revolution is driven by unprecedented access to energy in the form of irreplaceable fossil fuels. It requires continual investment of energy to maintain. The practical exploitability of wind, solar, wave, geothermal and hydroelectric sources combined doesn't come close, not even close to the demand we'll place on them with population on the scale you're quite comfortable to allow. Fissile materials are limited and similarly irreplaceable; we've been steadily failing to develop fusion power for sixty years.

The innovation of new sources of energy is not guaranteed, unless you have some new breakthrough in physics you'd like to share? Efficiency gains are strictly limited.

If you think we'll have the ability to support billions of people on a sustainable basis at some time in the future, well great, LET'S WAIT UNTIL WE HAVE THAT ABILITY BEFORE WE BET EVERYTHING ON IT.

Great.. but they still use fossil fuels. 50% as much is awesome, but that might just be enough to keep the petroleum companies in control of the world for a few years longer.
...and I'm guessing that the claim they can use "solar" as fuel, means that they can use solar produced hydrogen, like any other fuel cell (not that this is neccesarilly a bad thing.. just not new).

The description rather misses the point. The electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen requires a good deal of electrical power. It's not free energy--you actually get a good deal less out of it than you put into it. The advantage to hydrogen fuel is that it is energy dense and theoretically storeable and transportable much as fossil fuels are.

The problem, though, is that it is extremely hard to store and transport because it escapes so easy (hydrogen being so tiny). I'd hazard that, left alone, all of the hydrogen would escape from that car's tanks in a matter of days.

There really is no easy solution. If you could effectively store and transport hydrogen, and use nuclear power to create it, that would solve a lot of problems. It would create new ones too.

This is, of course, not to belittle what this man has done. It is a fine engineering project, and it is people like this who will, little by little, refine the techniques and solve the problems that are necessary,

Sure, anything fossil fueled will do I was just kidding!

That's why it's so great to adhere to science. Science is just the combined efforts of anyone who is inclined to understand stuff better. It looks at things and with a lack of bias only the mathematical can provide says what the likelihood of something is.

It's how the facts are then "spun" where the bullshit creeps in.

We've known for years that burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment, it's not even in question any more. We know it's bad but we keep doing it. We have the money to change it but it sits in the corporate sector bank accounts because a few would rather be richer than creosote for the duration of their life than to spread richness upon the world for the lives of those to follow.

Those to follow are me, you, your kids perhaps.

("Creosote" is a pun that my grandma uses - 93 years old - and i've seen Terry Pratchett use it as well. Creosus was very rich, creosote is a rich black tarry substance)

They don't all agree with it, which is why it's not science. It isn't proven. You believe it because you are anti-fossil fuel or some such.
Consensus, I repeat, is not science. Science is provable.
But believe whatever you desire. You probably believe that if everyone sends the gov't a nickel, they can fix it, lol.