Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread
- Thread starter Cdn Blackshirt
- Start date
Yes, emissions have dropped. I heard a long-form interview on Quirks and Quarks about this and it was pointed out that this is a positive sign because it is the first time emissions have dropped while the overall global economy grew. Previous drops usually coincided with downturns.Thucydides said:
What was made clear, however, was that while emissions dropped, there is still carbon being put into the atmosphere in huge amounts. While reduced emissions are a positive, unless there is zero emissions - or carbon is being captured at a greater rate than it is being produced, we're still in trouble. To only look at the reduction of emissions as an indicator is like being in a leaky rowboat and claiming you don't need to bail because the water is now coming in at a slightly smaller rate than it was a few minutes ago. Unless you fix the leaks or bail like crazy, you're going for a swim.
A major caveat being that, as third-world countries start to built an industrialized economy, inevitably they start with coal as a fuel source so the current drop may be relatively short-lived.
George Wallace
Army.ca Dinosaur
- Reaction score
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- Points
- 710
And the "Chicken Little" crowd will continue to claim that the end is near; no matter what is placed before them.
There have always been scares, both real and imagined.
AGW falls within the latter category. There is absolutely no substance to it. It is merely the crowning monument to the propagandist's twisted art, built upon nothing more than lies and reciprocal gullibility. Our climate has always fluctuated, and will continue to do so, with or without us. There have been warmer periods during human history, and civilization flourished during those.
Here is an example of a real environmental crisis in our recent past:
Climate crisis? Horse manure
By Lorrie Goldstein, Toronto Sun
First posted: Wednesday, December 23, 2015 06:28 PM EST | Updated: Wednesday, December 23, 2015 09:22 PM EST
Ever since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his gigantic delegation of Canadian politicians returned from the Paris climate conference they've been throwing around the idea of "decarbonizing" the Canadian and global economies.
To which one can only respond: "Oy, vey."
It's clear from the statements they're making they don't understand what they're talking about.
Wind and solar power are simply not ready to replace the use of coal, oil and natural gas to produce energy.
They aren't reliable or efficient enough to deliver the power required to fuel modern industrialized countries like our own, or developing nations that want to become part of the first world, like China and India.
The two technologies we have that can most effectively lower global greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change, while providing the necessary power, are non-emitting nuclear power and low-emitting natural gas, both of which should be used wherever possible to replace coal as a power source for electricity.
But there's another reason all those poobahs who were running around like chickens with their heads cut off in Paris, screaming that the seas will swallow us and the Arctic will melt if we don't decarbonize immediately were so absurd.
That is, their fear-mongering is based on the assumption that 100 years from now, we will be producing energy in the same way we do today.
To understand the absurdity of this, think of someone in 1900 trying to imagine the world in 2000.
Think of all the things they would know nothing about.
The first example of powered flight by the Wright brothers was still three years away, and space flight, to say nothing of nuclear power, was the stuff of science fiction.
In that context, the Chicken Littles at the Paris conference should remind us of another gathering of similar worthies at the world's first urban planning conference held in New York in 1898.
Back then, the delegates weren’t obsessed with fossil fuels but with horse manure. Literally.
In New York in 1898, 200,000 working horses each produced an average of 24 pounds of horse manure daily, meaning almost five million pounds of manure were being dumped on city streets every 24 hours.
As Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner recount in their best-seller, Superfreakonomics:
"In vacant lots, horse manure was piled as high as sixty feet. It lined city streets like banks of snow. In the summer time, it stank to the heavens; when the rains came, a soupy stream of horse manure flooded the crosswalks and seeped into people's basements ... All of this dung was terrifically unhealthy. It was a breeding ground for billions of flies that spread a host of deadly diseases. Rats and other vermin swarmed the mountains of manure to pick out undigested oats and other horse feed ... cities around the world were experiencing the same crisis."
Delegates to the conference concluded that given population growth, global cities would soon become uninhabitable, creating a massive refugee crisis as millions fled for their lives.
Except they failed to account for the rise of the electric streetcar and the mass use of the automobile which, ironically, was originally hailed as the environmental saviour of cities.
Just as we will survive the latest climate "crisis", not because of political scientists who call themselves environmentalists, but because of real scientists and engineers who are already hard at work inventing an energy future for us that we cannot possibly imagine today.
AGW falls within the latter category. There is absolutely no substance to it. It is merely the crowning monument to the propagandist's twisted art, built upon nothing more than lies and reciprocal gullibility. Our climate has always fluctuated, and will continue to do so, with or without us. There have been warmer periods during human history, and civilization flourished during those.
Here is an example of a real environmental crisis in our recent past:
Climate crisis? Horse manure
By Lorrie Goldstein, Toronto Sun
First posted: Wednesday, December 23, 2015 06:28 PM EST | Updated: Wednesday, December 23, 2015 09:22 PM EST
Ever since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his gigantic delegation of Canadian politicians returned from the Paris climate conference they've been throwing around the idea of "decarbonizing" the Canadian and global economies.
To which one can only respond: "Oy, vey."
It's clear from the statements they're making they don't understand what they're talking about.
Wind and solar power are simply not ready to replace the use of coal, oil and natural gas to produce energy.
They aren't reliable or efficient enough to deliver the power required to fuel modern industrialized countries like our own, or developing nations that want to become part of the first world, like China and India.
The two technologies we have that can most effectively lower global greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change, while providing the necessary power, are non-emitting nuclear power and low-emitting natural gas, both of which should be used wherever possible to replace coal as a power source for electricity.
But there's another reason all those poobahs who were running around like chickens with their heads cut off in Paris, screaming that the seas will swallow us and the Arctic will melt if we don't decarbonize immediately were so absurd.
That is, their fear-mongering is based on the assumption that 100 years from now, we will be producing energy in the same way we do today.
To understand the absurdity of this, think of someone in 1900 trying to imagine the world in 2000.
Think of all the things they would know nothing about.
The first example of powered flight by the Wright brothers was still three years away, and space flight, to say nothing of nuclear power, was the stuff of science fiction.
In that context, the Chicken Littles at the Paris conference should remind us of another gathering of similar worthies at the world's first urban planning conference held in New York in 1898.
Back then, the delegates weren’t obsessed with fossil fuels but with horse manure. Literally.
In New York in 1898, 200,000 working horses each produced an average of 24 pounds of horse manure daily, meaning almost five million pounds of manure were being dumped on city streets every 24 hours.
As Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner recount in their best-seller, Superfreakonomics:
"In vacant lots, horse manure was piled as high as sixty feet. It lined city streets like banks of snow. In the summer time, it stank to the heavens; when the rains came, a soupy stream of horse manure flooded the crosswalks and seeped into people's basements ... All of this dung was terrifically unhealthy. It was a breeding ground for billions of flies that spread a host of deadly diseases. Rats and other vermin swarmed the mountains of manure to pick out undigested oats and other horse feed ... cities around the world were experiencing the same crisis."
Delegates to the conference concluded that given population growth, global cities would soon become uninhabitable, creating a massive refugee crisis as millions fled for their lives.
Except they failed to account for the rise of the electric streetcar and the mass use of the automobile which, ironically, was originally hailed as the environmental saviour of cities.
Just as we will survive the latest climate "crisis", not because of political scientists who call themselves environmentalists, but because of real scientists and engineers who are already hard at work inventing an energy future for us that we cannot possibly imagine today.
- Reaction score
- 4,705
- Points
- 1,160
If all the money they spend promoting climate change actually went to research into making economically viable alternatives to fossil fuels, we'd probably be weaning off them right now. These "climatologists" simply don't know what they want. We could have gotten rid of coal by switching to nuclear and natural gas, but nuclear is "unsafe" and any fossil fuel is bad fuel. Meanwhile, they post on the internet all about the evils of carbon emissions from their new iPhone 6 built in a third world country powered solely by coal/oil power plants, and shipped to North America on giant container ships spewing carbon from the stacks.
The hypocrisy is astounding.
The hypocrisy is astounding.
- Reaction score
- 6,069
- Points
- 1,160
Clean burning coal plants in NA & Europe produce next to nothing in emissions. Even when they claim they are shutdown, they still have to keep the boilers fired at near normal capacity in case they have to bring them back on line for emergencies. McWynne lies again. :
George Wallace
Army.ca Dinosaur
- Reaction score
- 184
- Points
- 710
PuckChaser said:
You left out the fact that all those Windmills and Solar Farms are products of the Petroleum Industry. Without the Petroleum Industry there would be no plastics, not lubricants, etc. necessary to construct these "safe" means of energy production. Without the Petroleum Industry there would be means to produce those iPhone 6's, those 'faux furs', etc.; most of the items that these twits require in their daily lives.
PuckChaser said:
You understand that skeptics being paid by the fossil fuel industry are exactly the reason why this is still a "debate" right? This is exactly why people have to "promote" climate change. Because it's not good for certain people in certain industries. We've seen the report that Exxon itself realized climate change was a risk in the late 70s. THEY FUNDED THEIR OWN STUDIES. And promptly buried them and began a misinformation campaign because they knew what it meant for their business. Why are you guys still holding on?
- Reaction score
- 2,843
- Points
- 940
Because I rode my Harley on Christmas day. I WANT global warming; f*ck Florida sinking -- don't care. :nod:Kilo_302 said:
- Reaction score
- 6,469
- Points
- 1,360
http://www.torontosun.com/2015/12/26/how-to-cool-the-planet
By Lorrie Goldstein, Toronto Sun
First posted: Saturday, December 26, 2015 07:00 PM EST
TORONTO - Readers often ask me what I would do about anthropogenic, or man-made, climate change, since I’m always criticizing politicians for what they’re doing.
I typically answer it’s not my job to propose something that works.
Rather, it’s the job of governments to propose something that isn’t doomed to fail, such as imposing carbon taxes, cap-and-trade and expensive, unreliable and inefficient technologies like wind and solar power on the public.
Indeed, the foolish arrogance of politicians who claim they can fix the weather -- because they’re always confusing weather with climate -- through a carbon tax or a new stock market, which is all cap-and-trade is, is laughable.
Neither has been effective at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions linked to climate change, not Norway’s quarter century old carbon tax or Europe’s decade old cap-and-trade market, the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper was right -- carbon pricing today is not about reducing emissions, but about raising new revenues for governments desperate for cash.
While I have never denied the reality of man-made climate change, I don’t regard it as an imminent, existential threat to humanity, but rather one of many environmental problems we must address, such as air, water and land pollution and cleaning up toxic waste dumps.
From an environmental perspective, for example, we could do far more good for the health of Canadians simply by providing clean water to all aboriginal reserves.
This is something within our power to do now, with technologies that exist today.
That’s as opposed to our politicians running around like Chicken Littles, proclaiming the climate sky is falling, and wasting billions of our dollars on so-called solutions that don’t work and have never worked.
With those qualifiers, here’s what I would do:
1. Replace coal-fired electricity in Canada and globally with nuclear power and natural gas. Nuclear power does not emit GHG while natural gas emits carbon dioxide at half the rate of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. This is the single greatest initiative we could undertake to dramatically cut GHG emissions globally, instead of fighting ad nauseam over minuscule issues like the oil sands, which produce one one-thousandth of global emissions.
2. Abandon cap-and-trade and carbon taxes, replacing them with a system called carbon fee and dividend, in which every dollar raised from the public by raising sales taxes on carbon-intensive goods and services (meaning virtually all of them) is then returned in the form of lower income and business taxes. In Canada, the Greens are the only party to support a version of carbon fee and dividend, which is an attempt to use the taxation system to change human behaviour into consuming less (due to higher consumption taxes) while encouraging productivity and savings by letting people keep more of the money they earn through lower income taxes.
3. End all subsidies for all forms of energy generation -- including fossil fuels, wind, solar, biomass, hydro and nuclear power. Subsidies allow inefficient forms of power generation to survive when they should not. Exposing the energy sector to the actual costs of production will raise prices in the short term, but dramatically lower them in the long term, due to the necessity of finding new ways to decrease the costs of energy production, in order to capture a greater share of the energy market.
4. Veto any form of carbon pricing that hands over billions of public dollars to major industrial polluters to buy their political support for carbon pricing schemes, whose primary purpose is to raise revenues for governments. Both Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s cap-and-trade plan and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s carbon tax, will, when they start in 2017, take billions of dollars away from the public and hand it over as undeserved, windfall profits to major industrial emitters.
5. Finally, no program to reduce emissions can succeed if people in the developed world don’t change their consumer habits. The more we consume, the more fossil fuel energy it takes to provide us with the goods and services we demand, leading to the release of ever-increasing amounts of GHG emissions. One need not take a vow of poverty to be environmentally responsible, but people who say they are worried about climate change while buying McMansions and taking two foreign vacations a year, are the biggest climate hypocrites on Earth. Does that sound like anyone we know.
By Lorrie Goldstein, Toronto Sun
First posted: Saturday, December 26, 2015 07:00 PM EST
TORONTO - Readers often ask me what I would do about anthropogenic, or man-made, climate change, since I’m always criticizing politicians for what they’re doing.
I typically answer it’s not my job to propose something that works.
Rather, it’s the job of governments to propose something that isn’t doomed to fail, such as imposing carbon taxes, cap-and-trade and expensive, unreliable and inefficient technologies like wind and solar power on the public.
Indeed, the foolish arrogance of politicians who claim they can fix the weather -- because they’re always confusing weather with climate -- through a carbon tax or a new stock market, which is all cap-and-trade is, is laughable.
Neither has been effective at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions linked to climate change, not Norway’s quarter century old carbon tax or Europe’s decade old cap-and-trade market, the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper was right -- carbon pricing today is not about reducing emissions, but about raising new revenues for governments desperate for cash.
While I have never denied the reality of man-made climate change, I don’t regard it as an imminent, existential threat to humanity, but rather one of many environmental problems we must address, such as air, water and land pollution and cleaning up toxic waste dumps.
From an environmental perspective, for example, we could do far more good for the health of Canadians simply by providing clean water to all aboriginal reserves.
This is something within our power to do now, with technologies that exist today.
That’s as opposed to our politicians running around like Chicken Littles, proclaiming the climate sky is falling, and wasting billions of our dollars on so-called solutions that don’t work and have never worked.
With those qualifiers, here’s what I would do:
1. Replace coal-fired electricity in Canada and globally with nuclear power and natural gas. Nuclear power does not emit GHG while natural gas emits carbon dioxide at half the rate of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. This is the single greatest initiative we could undertake to dramatically cut GHG emissions globally, instead of fighting ad nauseam over minuscule issues like the oil sands, which produce one one-thousandth of global emissions.
2. Abandon cap-and-trade and carbon taxes, replacing them with a system called carbon fee and dividend, in which every dollar raised from the public by raising sales taxes on carbon-intensive goods and services (meaning virtually all of them) is then returned in the form of lower income and business taxes. In Canada, the Greens are the only party to support a version of carbon fee and dividend, which is an attempt to use the taxation system to change human behaviour into consuming less (due to higher consumption taxes) while encouraging productivity and savings by letting people keep more of the money they earn through lower income taxes.
3. End all subsidies for all forms of energy generation -- including fossil fuels, wind, solar, biomass, hydro and nuclear power. Subsidies allow inefficient forms of power generation to survive when they should not. Exposing the energy sector to the actual costs of production will raise prices in the short term, but dramatically lower them in the long term, due to the necessity of finding new ways to decrease the costs of energy production, in order to capture a greater share of the energy market.
4. Veto any form of carbon pricing that hands over billions of public dollars to major industrial polluters to buy their political support for carbon pricing schemes, whose primary purpose is to raise revenues for governments. Both Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s cap-and-trade plan and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s carbon tax, will, when they start in 2017, take billions of dollars away from the public and hand it over as undeserved, windfall profits to major industrial emitters.
5. Finally, no program to reduce emissions can succeed if people in the developed world don’t change their consumer habits. The more we consume, the more fossil fuel energy it takes to provide us with the goods and services we demand, leading to the release of ever-increasing amounts of GHG emissions. One need not take a vow of poverty to be environmentally responsible, but people who say they are worried about climate change while buying McMansions and taking two foreign vacations a year, are the biggest climate hypocrites on Earth. Does that sound like anyone we know.
- Reaction score
- 6,469
- Points
- 1,360
cld617 said:
Pharmaceuticals fund the deniers?
- Reaction score
- 35
- Points
- 560
Loachman said:
Governments mostly. I especially love government figures who fly jets to conferences all over the world to tell us not to emit carbon, and the hangers on and "public figures" who get buckets of government money to promote the message (and the "Climate scientists" who feed off government funds, and the "Green" businesses who taxpayers are forced to support via subsidies....)
Kilo is correct in understanding that the climate scam is worth trillions of dollars, he is just pointed 1800 from the target, which is too bad, since his pocket is being picked to pay for the scam.
There is where you lose me. What government would want to "promote" global climate change? What politician actually wants to tell voters "Hey look I know you've been used to cheap gas, travelling where ever and whenever you want, consuming all you want, but we're going to have to make major changes. And we're probably going to have to tax you more to do it."? I know you seem to think this is a conspiracy to justify more government, but no politician is willing to pay a political price for this. We're going to have mount a project akin to the space race to get ourselves off of fossil fuels. This is a daunting task. No one wants to do the work, and no one would invent something like this.
Isn't it more likely that politicians have been leery of acting on this, because they know it will cost them politically? And that inaction is convenient only to a point?
Just going to leave this here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/12/iceland-storm-melt-north-pole-climate-change/422166/
Isn't it more likely that politicians have been leery of acting on this, because they know it will cost them politically? And that inaction is convenient only to a point?
Just going to leave this here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/12/iceland-storm-melt-north-pole-climate-change/422166/
- Reaction score
- 6,469
- Points
- 1,360
Kilo_302 said:
Well.....I sure didn't know that Mother Earth could make storms we couldn't do anything about. Gee, thanks for that..... :
The last 2 years of record-breaking cold in Ontario was due to the effect of global warming........this years heat wave is due to the effect of global warming......frig, I know who killed Kennedy now.
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