If you look back through Planet Gore for the last 6 months (and I would guess before that) you will see the following mix of posts: 100% pot shots, 0% solutions. The criticisms of programs would carry a bit more weight if any real ideas or solutions were offered as alternatives. Let's review:
Problem: majority of scientists believe our survival is threatened by climate change.
NRO solution: do nothing; hope scientists are wrong
Problem: we're looking at mass species extinction before our very eyes with half of all species expected to be extinct by the end of the century, destroying vast richness for tens of thousands of years to come and threatening our own survival.
NRO solution: do nothing
Problem: increased asthma from air pollution, increased nitrates and fertilizer in waterways, huge dead spots in our oceans, mercury and plastics throughout fish food chain, ocean acidification, soil erosion and depletion, massive forest die offs in western states, depleted aquifers
NRO solution: do nothing
So before criticizing this biofuel program could you perhaps tell us what your solutions are to the real problem of world resource constraints?
1st problem: Why should we propose solutions when we don't accept the premise that there is a problem? That is the whole point of the blog, to question the premise.
2nd Problem: Ok Nostradomus, Mayans, Crazy pastor in California, Branch Dividians, and every other doomsayer throughout history. Probably mispelled a few of those names, sorry.
And your last problem is full of descredited problems (huge dead spots in oceans, forests dying (tell me, how did we measure if there were dead spots in oceans in 1800, 1340, 200BC?)) problems that have nothing to do with global warming (mercury, plastics, asthma, soil erosion), and problems that conservatives want to eliminate too (mercury, plastics, depleted aquifers). Great example of a strawman argument.
You say "the whole point of the blog" is to challenge the notion that global warming is occurring, but almost none of the posts actually bring up scientific articles challenging global warming. Looking back through the last two weeks of posts not a single one offers any science that denies climate change. I could go back for weeks before I found one. I wish you were right but the whole point of the blog is to take shots at programs aimed to address the problem. Perhaps they avoid the issue because over 97% of scientific papers on climate change support the theory and the remaining are pretty lukewarm in hedging on it.
Regarding dead zones: "Dead zones are hypoxic (low-oxygen) areas in the world's oceans, the observed incidences of which have been increasing since oceanographers began noting them in the 1970s" wikipedia: External Link
You say conservatives want to address such problems as mercury, plastics in waterways, and depleted aquifers. What main strategies do they favor?
If you are accusing me of posting lies, please give me the courtesy of offering specifics. I take time to make sure the figures I post are supported with data from neutral sources (wikipedia, established mainstream sites, etc). Notice I quoted from wikipedia above and provided a link. In our several exchanges you have not once posted a link, much less to a neutral source. I won't say I've never posted an incorrect fact, but I do try to be reasonably careful for an informal setting, and I certainly post with honest intentions; I presume you do too actually.
There's plenty of oil and gas KT, we don't have to burn our food. Stopping the biofuel folly will also help with fertilizer runoff, aquifer depletion, and some of your other fears.
I happen to agree that biofuels so far seem like one of the less promising alternatives; but worth some investment to see what promise they hold and ultimately less destructive than fossil fuels even with their large land and resource demands. But my main gripe is: where are the Republican ideas for dealing with resource constraints? It's just: let's hoping everything works out on it's own...
The core conservative approach to resource constraints is to understand that free market price signals will take care of things far better than any government planning. As a resource becomes scarcer, it's price increases, which incentivizes both the finding and extraction of additional such resources and the development of competitive alternatives. It has worked like magic time and time again (witness, the US shale gas revolution).
If governments simply restrain themselves from trying to manage the issue (i.e., mucking up the market incentives), resource constraints are effectively a non-problem except for limited supply disruptions here and there due to wars (government again, of course) or similar short-term events.
If the main concern was peak oil, I'd be with you here. I think the price signals would move us quickly enough to alternatives to avoid any big disasters. But other problems don't respond so much to price signals -- unless we explicitly build those costs into the final price and let the marketplace solve on its own (my preferred solution: address real problems, but find marketplace solutions for them; yes to carbon tax, no to Solyndras.)
If polluting waterways is free, companies are incentivized to pollute to keep costs down as costs of polluting are past to others. Similar scenarios for carbon emissions, habitat loss, long term soil degradation (landowners do have an incentive to maintain high soil quality but the economics of being profitable farming these days force a short term focus; there is little such incentive when mining) etc. etc.
This experiment we are running of industrializing the entire globe is still in its early stages. We could be doing it much more safely, responsibly and focused on the long term. There is no prior history that says it works out as this is the first time its been tried at anything close to this scale. As the saying goes, there is no Planet B.
We need more CO2 in the atmospher, not less.
Life flourished abundantly when CO2 levels were in the 5000-7000 range. For plants, CO2 levels 280ppm are dangerously close to starvation levels.
There are no scientists, not a single one, who believes that our survival is threatened by global warming. Even the IPCC has been forced to admit that a doubling of CO2 would only cause 2C of warming. Nobody is going to die from that. (Actual scientists say that the warming from doubling will actually be 1C or less.)
There is not a single species that is being threatened by global warming. Zero, zilch, nada.
Air pollution is way down. So if there actually is an increase in asthma, it isn't being caused by this non-existant increase in pollution. Nitrates and fertilizer in the water ways is going down as well, by huge amounts. The dead spot in the gulf has been there as long as we have been keeping records. The ocean isn't acidifying, and there is no evidence that it would be a problem even if it were.
All you can do is lie about things that are easily checked, yet you wonder why nobody takes you seriously.
“There are no scientists, not a single one, who believes that our survival is threatened by global warming.” -- MarkW
Let’s see less than a month ago the IEA, a mild, normally uncontroversial institution that provides consulting to several industrialized countries on the overall energy sector, issued a report that targets 2017 as the point of no return on climate change. Their chief economist: "I am very worried – if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."
The very same day you made this post, Planet Gore posted the Onion article supposedly making fun of all the scientists and ICPP warnings that we are approaching the point of no return.
You’ve got 97% of climatologists that believe AGW is occurring; you have most reports putting 2C / 450ppm as the point of no return; you have the most sophisticated climate models from MIT saying “a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees”. (External Link); you have numerous books like “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity” from leading climate scientists; you have a study of former 4-star generals and admirals and the former Army Chief of Staff saying climate change is the number one national security threat we face and is as big a threat as the former Soviet Union was. (External Link) (And please don’t call the Army Chief of Staff a liar.) So I’m a bit surprised that you can say with a straight face that not a single scientist in the world believes our survival is threatened by global warming.
To reiterate your stance: no problem, no need for a solution.
Man, how many irrational delusions can one piece of furniture fit into a single post.
The IEA is not a group of scientists, they are a bunch of politicians who from time to time consult scientists. However when the scientists don't say what the politicians want to hear, they can and do ignore them.
There is not a scintilla of evidence to support the claim that these tipping points exist, much less the claim that we are approaching one. The mere fact that in the recent past the planet has been much warmer than it is today, and yet cooled down, is sufficient to prove that these tipping points don't exist.
Even if we were to hit one of these mythical tipping points, that does not prove your contention that life itself is in danger.
The Onion piece was posted well over a week before the posting of mine. Is calendars another thing you can't read accurately?
That the IPCC has issued warnings about coming catastrophes is hardly news worthy, nor is it evidence of anything other than the fact that the politicians who run that organization don't listen to the scientists either.
You can have all the reports that you want, but if there is no science backing up those reports, they are nothing more than fiction.
Recent studies have shown that a doubling of CO2 will only warm the earth by about 1.2C. Other reports hint that the actual number is much lower. So the claim that 450ppm will result in 2C of warming is once again not backed by science or fact.
Regardless, 2C warming is nothing. It is less than the warming experienced in the Mideval, Roman, and Minoan warm spells and way below the warming experienced during the Holocene Optimum. Not only did life not suffer during any of those periods, it flourished.
So what if 97% of scientists believe the planet is warming. I believe that too. You haven't shown that these scientists believe that man is 100% responsible for that warming, or that this warming is a problem, much less a threat to all life as you keep claiming.
A yes, another appeal to models. Please spend a few days studying up on the limitations and known problems with said models.
The fact is we do not know the climate system well enough to model it, and won't for another hundred years. Read up on the problems getting those same models to "predict" our current climate when fed historical data.
The models aren't science. They are at best a tool to help us find out what it is we don't know.
Now you are calling out works of fiction in order to support your fantasies. How typical.
I wasn't aware that the Arby Chief of Staff was a scientist? Why should I trust his political opinion more than the thousands of scientists who have produced papers showing that CO2 is not a problem.
I reiterate my earlier position. Not a single scientists claims that global warming is a threat to our existence.
Even the gospel of the global warming movement, the IPCC itself never said that.
Well if the money for research comes to you only if you research climate change then you may just say climate change exists. Kinda like the spotted owl research. And as for solutions.....ethanol was ramped up millions of dollars thrown at ethanol plants......... now everyone knows its a joke. At least it helped jack up food prices. Now thats a solution everyone can get behind.
Or if biofuels are widely and more readily available (cost less) than petroleum products. That won't happen anytime soon and most likely never. Biofuels will fall out of environmental favor and will be defeated by other technology developments both in extracting fossil fuels cleanly and in other comparatively efficient energy densities.
If Iran goes beserk, biofuels would probably get a temporary boost, but not by as much as one might think. But that's what the Candian pipeline and the strategic reserve were supposed to be for, not for attempts to influence elections and other partisan purposes.
Both you and the Wired headline writer and editors missed the palming of a card. The biofuel itself will cost almost 7 times as much as standard JP5. Only by blending it do they arrive at a commingled cost of 4 times as much as fossil fuel.
"This new purchase, at first, will cost just as much: $26 per gallon, or $1,092 per barrel. That biofuel will then be blended with an equal amount of fossil fuel, producing 900,000 gallons — and an effective price of about $15 per gallon for that 50/50 blend. It’s roughly half of what was paid in 2009,” according to Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy Tom Hicks, who serves as Mabus’ point man on energy issues.
But it is still far more than the Navy currently pays for its JP-5 jet fuel: $3.97 per gallon, or $167 per barrel."
Call the Democrats! Get the supercommittee back together! I think we may have found a place where Republicans can agree to cut military spending...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf you look back through Planet Gore for the last 6 months (and I would guess before that) you will see the following mix of posts: 100% pot shots, 0% solutions. The criticisms of programs would carry a bit more weight if any real ideas or solutions were offered as alternatives. Let's review:
Problem: majority of scientists believe our survival is threatened by climate change.
NRO solution: do nothing; hope scientists are wrong
Problem: we're looking at mass species extinction before our very eyes with half of all species expected to be extinct by the end of the century, destroying vast richness for tens of thousands of years to come and threatening our own survival.
NRO solution: do nothing
Problem: increased asthma from air pollution, increased nitrates and fertilizer in waterways, huge dead spots in our oceans, mercury and plastics throughout fish food chain, ocean acidification, soil erosion and depletion, massive forest die offs in western states, depleted aquifers
NRO solution: do nothing
So before criticizing this biofuel program could you perhaps tell us what your solutions are to the real problem of world resource constraints?
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse1st problem: Why should we propose solutions when we don't accept the premise that there is a problem? That is the whole point of the blog, to question the premise.
2nd Problem: Ok Nostradomus, Mayans, Crazy pastor in California, Branch Dividians, and every other doomsayer throughout history. Probably mispelled a few of those names, sorry.
And your last problem is full of descredited problems (huge dead spots in oceans, forests dying (tell me, how did we measure if there were dead spots in oceans in 1800, 1340, 200BC?)) problems that have nothing to do with global warming (mercury, plastics, asthma, soil erosion), and problems that conservatives want to eliminate too (mercury, plastics, depleted aquifers). Great example of a strawman argument.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou say "the whole point of the blog" is to challenge the notion that global warming is occurring, but almost none of the posts actually bring up scientific articles challenging global warming. Looking back through the last two weeks of posts not a single one offers any science that denies climate change. I could go back for weeks before I found one. I wish you were right but the whole point of the blog is to take shots at programs aimed to address the problem. Perhaps they avoid the issue because over 97% of scientific papers on climate change support the theory and the remaining are pretty lukewarm in hedging on it.
Regarding dead zones: "Dead zones are hypoxic (low-oxygen) areas in the world's oceans, the observed incidences of which have been increasing since oceanographers began noting them in the 1970s" wikipedia: External Link
You say conservatives want to address such problems as mercury, plastics in waterways, and depleted aquifers. What main strategies do they favor?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAgain with the lies, I provided links to many studies, I also provided links to web sites that list studies by the hundred.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf you are accusing me of posting lies, please give me the courtesy of offering specifics. I take time to make sure the figures I post are supported with data from neutral sources (wikipedia, established mainstream sites, etc). Notice I quoted from wikipedia above and provided a link. In our several exchanges you have not once posted a link, much less to a neutral source. I won't say I've never posted an incorrect fact, but I do try to be reasonably careful for an informal setting, and I certainly post with honest intentions; I presume you do too actually.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYour so called neutral sources aren't.
For the most part they are works of fiction or creations of the warmistas.
Everything you have posted has ranged from wrong, to out and out lie.
I'm sorry if it pains you so much to be introduced to reality, but you should try and get used to it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThere's plenty of oil and gas KT, we don't have to burn our food. Stopping the biofuel folly will also help with fertilizer runoff, aquifer depletion, and some of your other fears.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI happen to agree that biofuels so far seem like one of the less promising alternatives; but worth some investment to see what promise they hold and ultimately less destructive than fossil fuels even with their large land and resource demands. But my main gripe is: where are the Republican ideas for dealing with resource constraints? It's just: let's hoping everything works out on it's own...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe core conservative approach to resource constraints is to understand that free market price signals will take care of things far better than any government planning. As a resource becomes scarcer, it's price increases, which incentivizes both the finding and extraction of additional such resources and the development of competitive alternatives. It has worked like magic time and time again (witness, the US shale gas revolution).
If governments simply restrain themselves from trying to manage the issue (i.e., mucking up the market incentives), resource constraints are effectively a non-problem except for limited supply disruptions here and there due to wars (government again, of course) or similar short-term events.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf the main concern was peak oil, I'd be with you here. I think the price signals would move us quickly enough to alternatives to avoid any big disasters. But other problems don't respond so much to price signals -- unless we explicitly build those costs into the final price and let the marketplace solve on its own (my preferred solution: address real problems, but find marketplace solutions for them; yes to carbon tax, no to Solyndras.)
If polluting waterways is free, companies are incentivized to pollute to keep costs down as costs of polluting are past to others. Similar scenarios for carbon emissions, habitat loss, long term soil degradation (landowners do have an incentive to maintain high soil quality but the economics of being profitable farming these days force a short term focus; there is little such incentive when mining) etc. etc.
This experiment we are running of industrializing the entire globe is still in its early stages. We could be doing it much more safely, responsibly and focused on the long term. There is no prior history that says it works out as this is the first time its been tried at anything close to this scale. As the saying goes, there is no Planet B.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWe need more CO2 in the atmospher, not less.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseLife flourished abundantly when CO2 levels were in the 5000-7000 range. For plants, CO2 levels 280ppm are dangerously close to starvation levels.
When there is no problem, no solution is needed.
There are no scientists, not a single one, who believes that our survival is threatened by global warming. Even the IPCC has been forced to admit that a doubling of CO2 would only cause 2C of warming. Nobody is going to die from that. (Actual scientists say that the warming from doubling will actually be 1C or less.)
There is not a single species that is being threatened by global warming. Zero, zilch, nada.
Air pollution is way down. So if there actually is an increase in asthma, it isn't being caused by this non-existant increase in pollution. Nitrates and fertilizer in the water ways is going down as well, by huge amounts. The dead spot in the gulf has been there as long as we have been keeping records. The ocean isn't acidifying, and there is no evidence that it would be a problem even if it were.
All you can do is lie about things that are easily checked, yet you wonder why nobody takes you seriously.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse“There are no scientists, not a single one, who believes that our survival is threatened by global warming.” -- MarkW
); you have numerous books like “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity” from leading climate scientists; you have a study of former 4-star generals and admirals and the former Army Chief of Staff saying climate change is the number one national security threat we face and is as big a threat as the former Soviet Union was. (External Link 
) (And please don’t call the Army Chief of Staff a liar.) So I’m a bit surprised that you can say with a straight face that not a single scientist in the world believes our survival is threatened by global warming.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseLet’s see less than a month ago the IEA, a mild, normally uncontroversial institution that provides consulting to several industrialized countries on the overall energy sector, issued a report that targets 2017 as the point of no return on climate change. Their chief economist: "I am very worried – if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."
The very same day you made this post, Planet Gore posted the Onion article supposedly making fun of all the scientists and ICPP warnings that we are approaching the point of no return.
You’ve got 97% of climatologists that believe AGW is occurring; you have most reports putting 2C / 450ppm as the point of no return; you have the most sophisticated climate models from MIT saying “a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees”. (External Link
To reiterate your stance: no problem, no need for a solution.
Man, how many irrational delusions can one piece of furniture fit into a single post.
The IEA is not a group of scientists, they are a bunch of politicians who from time to time consult scientists. However when the scientists don't say what the politicians want to hear, they can and do ignore them.
There is not a scintilla of evidence to support the claim that these tipping points exist, much less the claim that we are approaching one. The mere fact that in the recent past the planet has been much warmer than it is today, and yet cooled down, is sufficient to prove that these tipping points don't exist.
Even if we were to hit one of these mythical tipping points, that does not prove your contention that life itself is in danger.
The Onion piece was posted well over a week before the posting of mine. Is calendars another thing you can't read accurately?
That the IPCC has issued warnings about coming catastrophes is hardly news worthy, nor is it evidence of anything other than the fact that the politicians who run that organization don't listen to the scientists either.
You can have all the reports that you want, but if there is no science backing up those reports, they are nothing more than fiction.
Recent studies have shown that a doubling of CO2 will only warm the earth by about 1.2C. Other reports hint that the actual number is much lower. So the claim that 450ppm will result in 2C of warming is once again not backed by science or fact.
Regardless, 2C warming is nothing. It is less than the warming experienced in the Mideval, Roman, and Minoan warm spells and way below the warming experienced during the Holocene Optimum. Not only did life not suffer during any of those periods, it flourished.
So what if 97% of scientists believe the planet is warming. I believe that too. You haven't shown that these scientists believe that man is 100% responsible for that warming, or that this warming is a problem, much less a threat to all life as you keep claiming.
A yes, another appeal to models. Please spend a few days studying up on the limitations and known problems with said models.
The fact is we do not know the climate system well enough to model it, and won't for another hundred years. Read up on the problems getting those same models to "predict" our current climate when fed historical data.
The models aren't science. They are at best a tool to help us find out what it is we don't know.
Now you are calling out works of fiction in order to support your fantasies. How typical.
I wasn't aware that the Arby Chief of Staff was a scientist? Why should I trust his political opinion more than the thousands of scientists who have produced papers showing that CO2 is not a problem.
I reiterate my earlier position. Not a single scientists claims that global warming is a threat to our existence.
Even the gospel of the global warming movement, the IPCC itself never said that.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell if the money for research comes to you only if you research climate change then you may just say climate change exists. Kinda like the spotted owl research. And as for solutions.....ethanol was ramped up millions of dollars thrown at ethanol plants......... now everyone knows its a joke. At least it helped jack up food prices. Now thats a solution everyone can get behind.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMight make sense -- if we ever come under an extended strategic bombing offensive; think Third Reich in 1944. Otherwise, not so much.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOr if biofuels are widely and more readily available (cost less) than petroleum products. That won't happen anytime soon and most likely never. Biofuels will fall out of environmental favor and will be defeated by other technology developments both in extracting fossil fuels cleanly and in other comparatively efficient energy densities.
If Iran goes beserk, biofuels would probably get a temporary boost, but not by as much as one might think. But that's what the Candian pipeline and the strategic reserve were supposed to be for, not for attempts to influence elections and other partisan purposes.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGo nuclear on ships rather than any type of oil.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBoth you and the Wired headline writer and editors missed the palming of a card. The biofuel itself will cost almost 7 times as much as standard JP5. Only by blending it do they arrive at a commingled cost of 4 times as much as fossil fuel.
"This new purchase, at first, will cost just as much: $26 per gallon, or $1,092 per barrel. That biofuel will then be blended with an equal amount of fossil fuel, producing 900,000 gallons — and an effective price of about $15 per gallon for that 50/50 blend. It’s roughly half of what was paid in 2009,” according to Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy Tom Hicks, who serves as Mabus’ point man on energy issues.
But it is still far more than the Navy currently pays for its JP-5 jet fuel: $3.97 per gallon, or $167 per barrel."
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse