Almost all energy consumed by households is avoidable waste:
* think about the way you fry eggs. 99% of the heat from the burner is going into the air, not into the eggs. This should be solved by using small device that is well insulated on all sides and has an internal heating coil.
* Ovens have a high heat capacity and shitty insulation. More energy is wasted on heating up the oven itself than actually goes into the food. This could be solved by lining the inside of the oven with silica aerogel instead of metal. If an oven is properly insulated it will not feel very warm to the touch on the outside, even after being on for an hour.
* Most of your heating and cooling energy leaks out the windows -- if their inside surface feels significantly above or below ambient during extreme weather, your heating and cooling energy is being wasted and hemorrhaging out the windows. It would literally save energy to have a webcam on the roof and display that image on an LCD inside instead of having windows, if you live in a climate with extreme temperatures (especially in cold climates, as the energy used for the LCD would contribute to heating the house). All ventilation needs can be accomplished through a small portal with a fan (and a heat exchanger, of course).
* Hot water is produced very wastefully by just dumping energy into it instead of using a thermodynamic cycle to transfer heat and produce something cold as a byproduct. Hot water could be co-produced with cold water for AC / Refrigeration much more efficiently than doing them all separately.
* Hot water goes down the drain. This should at least go through a heat exchanger, which would dramatically lessen the amount of work that has to be done to heat up new hot water. A 7 Liter per minute showerhead putting water 30 degrees F above ambient down the drain is wasting over 8135 watts as long as it is running. However, I don't know of any houses yet designed with a heat exchanger between the shower drain water and the intake of the water heater.
* Fluorescent lights. Duh. Incandescent bulbs should be banned.
* Freezers built with the door on the top will waste much less energy to the convection of air when opened, for obvious reasons.

Here ends the lifestyle-neutral list of suggestions. The following would involve sacrificing something:

* Reduce excessive lighting -- if people wouldn't fuck up their retinas by driving just after sunrise or just before sunset, or seeing specular reflections of the sun on shiny cars and buildings outdoors, they wouldn't need such bright lights indoors. A 1 watt LED is plenty for reading. Sunlight could be used in the daytime instead of artificial lights.

I doubt any of us here are climatologists, but we are people. As people, we can expect people doing science on climate to not be entirely dissimilar to us. While they my process possess information regarding a particular area, they are not immune to the culture they live and work in. Quine talked about this a lot. That science doesn't evolve like the romantic picture that is painted. Rather, like pop culture, science shifts its entire focus from one foundational theory to another. Einstein doesn't extend Newton, it replaces it. Why do we not, rather, adapt the math of Newtonian physics to incorporate the data of relativity and keep the same mindset of forces instead of space time warps? Quines answer is that, like pop culture, a mans theory only lasts as long as he is around to extend it. Eventually, no matter if your theoretical construct was correct, if you aren't around to sort out the sometimes minor technicalities...your out. The people after you will eventually supplant your theory with something else more trendy. That science is subject to the same rules of the schoolyard as anything else. Peer review is more of a contest of popularity and not overall truth value.

As such, the very act of peer review is subject to the cultural perspective of the day. The moral and political climate of the day speaks volumes to what peer evaluated papers support or don't. Peer review is the best we have in science to approximate how we experience the universe, but it is not without its short comings. Let us not fall into the fallacy of authority, and majority in stating x group of people are more correct than y group opposed. Instead, judge things on merit of the argument.

To that end, I find that I am undecided on the whole debate. Moreover, I hesitate to put government in control of saving the environment...such was already their responsibility in the gulf. I don't want to live in a world of wrappers and smog, and to that end, I am motivated for cleaner technologies. Being wasteful has always felt somewhat despicable. To me, I remain skeptical of mans prowess of weather prediction. Year after year there is tail of "the worst hurricane season in history" that fails to show itself. If you say it enough I guess eventually it will be right, but that takes some of the wind out of the sails(har har har).

Furthermore, where is the data to support that global warming would even be bad? The only fact to the end that I am even familiar with is more extreme weather, and that dried up lake in Africa. I have lived next to lots dried up lakes and rivers...so that seems like more of a social disaster than an environmental one.

In the end, I feel like there is some snake oil salesmanship over the whole ordeal. I think we want to believe that we are the next greatest disaster. We will entwine any evidence into the web of belief . And ostracize anyone that deviates. We have always been at war with Eurasia, after all.

edited: grammar and spelling

I remain cautiously agnostic for several reasons. I think mostly, though, is that it has never been sufficiency shown to my liking that warming temperatures are bad. Now, no one wants to become like Venus and have rivers of molten lead coursing by the house. But then again, what if 30% of the Russian permafrost melted and provided a farming area the size of 2 United States for the world? It seems more like a fear of change then a fear of anything rational. For example, the year after Katrina, they predicted no less than 4 category 5 hurricanes for the season. We didn't even have one category 4 that year. I think that was one of the main fear that I have heard about global warming is more extreme weather pattens, but I don't believe there is really any good evidence of this. Even when you look to the heavens at Jupiter and Neptune, you see extreme weather, but you see a very consistent pattern. So the argument is 2 fold for me. First I remain unconvinced that global climate has ever been truly stable, and second, that warmer temperatures are even bad.

With that said, I find pollution disgusting in its own right. Who likes smog, really! Who like finding wrappers (I misspelled this and almost left it rappers, lol) all over their town? Who likes getting sunburned because they punched a whole through the ozone? Pollution and general filth still concern me and I think we as individuals should try as best we can to change what we can. I think if you want rapid adoption of new clean technology, keep government out of it. Right now they are, once again, pushing pet programs like ethanol that are crazy ineffectual but have the backing of the corn lobby.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
Here is the Maddow/Warmer position, if I were to plot it out as an argument...
1. Earth's climate has changed in the past.
2. Past climate changes are science.
3. Anthropogenic C02 emissions caused recent climate changes (AGW).
4. Those who disagree with AGW are therefore arguing against 1 & 2.

Actually the argument is:

1. By studying climate changes in the past, scientists have determined that the two big factors affecting global temperature levels are insolation (the amount of energy falling to Earth from the sun) and the infrared transparency of the atmosphere, which is governed by the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
   
2. Solar radiation rises and falls in predictable, 11-year cycles, and we have lots of historical data on it, and it's been stable for more than a century
   
3. The makeup of the atmosphere can also be measured, and we have lots of historical data on that as well
   
4. Since the industrial revolution, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been going up at a rate that roughly matches the rate at which humans have increased their output of CO2
   
5. We've been having record high temperatures at the nadir of the 11-year solar cycle
   
6. We've been seeing changes in weather patterns that are affecting crop yields, as well as an uptick in the number of extreme weather events, confirming the predictions of the theory
   
7. Therefore, we should do something to curtail our CO2 emissions, the way the nice people who study this stuff for a living say we should.
   

The counterarguments that I've seen presented are to rattle off some factually incorrect silliness they heard somewhere, and then declare it a liberal plot to destroy capitalism.

Your response fits the mold nicely.

oops, sometimes I forget to do that

In reply to this comment by Zifnab:
But no upvote?

In reply to this comment by GeeSussFreeK:
*Spoiler*

Beware of children playing tag football made me laugh enough to wake up my roomy.

But no upvote?

In reply to this comment by GeeSussFreeK:
*Spoiler*

Beware of children playing tag football made me laugh enough to wake up my roomy.

To each their own I guess, its very easy to ignore if you wish, but the only scientists who are denying climate change are those who are being paid by those who profit from reaping the planet of the resources.

The pollution we put in the water is killing reefs, life and changing the currents of the ocean.

The pollution we put in the air is changing the environment and melting glaciers that have been around for longer then us.

Extreme weather has always been around, its just now we have proof that what we are doing is helping create more extreme weather. Katrina for example would not have been as powerful if the ocean hadn't warmed up in the past few decades. Warmner equals more evaporation etc... I'm not a science teacher or anything but the facts are very easy for any educated human to read.

Sure.. It could be a big scam or ploy brewed up by the world leaders and conspired on by global scientists...But at the rate we are going at we'll have no clean lakes, no tropical rainforest's and no coral reefs during my lifetime oh, and a garbage dump in the pacific ocean the size of texas.

I've always said, who cares about the Global Warming/climate change debate its more about doing whats best to keep this planet (and its citizens) healthy.

If a simple change to Clean energy will clean the air. Why not?
If a simple change to making corporations responsible for their pollution will clean the oceans and save the reefs. Why Not?
If a simple change to our diet will save the tropical rainforest. Why not?

or are we a point of no return, where we best spend the rest of our days fighting for power of the remaining natural resources and consuming them as fast as possible...because at the rate we are going at today, we're pretty fucked.

Global Warming can be argued, easily argued especially by people who know nothing about science (like myself) but I grew up in Ontario, and in the last 10 years we have been introduced to "Smog" its an unpleasant haze that hangs above the city making it near impossible to breath on a hot summer day. If we can fix that by simply changing our auto motors to emit no pollution? Why Not?

Ohh GoogleFu!

On CATO Insitute:

The Institute's work on global warming has been a particular source of controversy. The Institute has held a number of briefings on global warming with global warming skeptics as panelists. In December 2003, panelists included Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling and John Christy. Balling and Christy have since made statements indicating that global warming is, in fact, related at least some degree to anthropogenic activity:

No known mechanism can stop global warming in the near term. International agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, would have no detectable effect on average temperature within any reasonable policy time frame (i.e., 50 years or so), even with full compliance.

In response to the World Watch Report in May 2003 that linked climate change and severe weather events, Jerry Taylor said:

It's false. There is absolutely no evidence that extreme weather events are on the increase. None. The argument that more and more dollar damages accrue is a reflection of the greater amount of wealth we've created."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute#On_environmental_policy

On Kyoto's CBA:

"Economists have been trying to analyze the overall net benefit of Kyoto Protocol through cost-benefit analysis. There is disagreement due to large uncertainties in economic variables. Some of the estimates indicate either that observing the Kyoto Protocol is more expensive than not observing the Kyoto Protocol or that the Kyoto Protocol has a marginal net benefit which exceeds the cost of simply adjusting to global warming.[citation needed] However, a study in Nature found that "accounting only for local external costs, together with production costs, to identify energy strategies, compliance with the Kyoto Protocol would imply lower, not higher, overall costs."

The recent Copenhagen consensus project found that the Kyoto Protocol would slow down the process of global warming, but have a superficial overall benefit. Defenders of the Kyoto Protocol argue, however, that while the initial greenhouse gas cuts may have little effect, they set the political precedent for bigger (and more effective) cuts in the future. They also advocate commitment to the precautionary principle. Critics point out that additional higher curbs on carbon emission are likely to cause significantly higher increase in cost, making such defense moot. Moreover, the precautionary principle could apply to any political, social, economic or environmental consequence, which might have equally devastating effect in terms of poverty and environment, making the precautionary argument irrelevant. The Stern Review (a UK government sponsored report into the economic impacts of climate change) concluded that one percent of global GDP is required to be invested in order to mitigate the effects of climate change, and that failure to do so could risk a recession worth up to twenty percent of global GDP."

Curbing climate change is going to incur costs, however production costs increasing is a short term goal that is recoverable over the longer term. Our planet and climate is not recoverable if the extremes are met.

I mean the argument is like saying there is no point to quit smoking or even say you are planning to quit smoking because the cots of me being more nervous and edgy is too much.

Kyoto represents political commitment, something that we can hold governments to and build on to more issues. Saying its going to incur costs is a moot point. Of course it will cost, what do you expect? You can have something for nothing. But yeah I would pay more to have a normal weather system.

choggie and gorgonheap, what are your beefs with climate science?

Solar cycle forcings are only 10-15% as large as CO2 forcings. I'd be happy to give references for this claim.

The only scientific dishonesty I've seen in this trailer or in Al Gore's movie is the connection of specific, recent extreme weather events to climate change. On this matter the scientific case is not very strong right now (only about 70% chance that these events are correlated, which is not normally considered high enough to be statistically significant).

reminds me of this chilly video!!! brrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!

where are his gloves and hat in -45°F!?!?!