David Attenborough disappointed with and sick of the USA's head in the sand attitude to global warming

[JFSOCC]

 

What's your problem with renewables?

Let me answer that as the rest of people here seems to have decided to do nothing first and then find justification.

I simply can't afford to pay for them.

 

the more we invest in renewables the cheaper it will become. it's expensive NOW, because it's small scale and as of yet relatively fringe. this is what government subsidies are supposed to be for. In Germany last year they managed to have a full third of their energy on their grid be "green". This did not lead to drastic pricing spikes.

[JFSOCC]

 

As for the topic of shale gas: It's only worthwhile to extract shale gas while fuel prices are high, because it's a terribly energy inefficient process, it takes a barrel to get 2 barrels, and that's just early on, after a while it becomes harder.

What's your source on this?, doesn't sound right, you are talking about hydraulic fracturing? Actually gas prices are quite low right now, mostly because of fracking.

 

Edit: Btw, the peak oil theory in your video has long been discredited, because it doesn't take shale oil into account.

 

So you've found three new bottles, what time is it? "we got shale gas coming out of our ears!"

Also US is using less oil, not more, there's no doubling like that guy is saying.

True for the US, meanwhile nations like China with 2 billion people, and India, with 1.3 billion people, are rapidly developing. Which means all the more families wanting the same amenities the western world has: refrigerators, cars, airconditioning, computers.

Do you want to say to those nations "**** you, you can't develop"? Because I imagine they'd laugh in your face. That's discounting the continent of Africa, or Brazil which is developing like crazy right now

 

And they'll all require energy as well.

And they'll all increase their pollution as well.

 

Peak oil is not discredited. the US reached Peak oil in 1971.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/US_Crude_Oil_Production_versus_Hubbert_Curve.png

It's just that because nations and companies tend to keep their record keeping opaque that we don't exactly know what can still be economically extracted. Shale gas is a stopgap measure, it will give a small spike of production for a short while, and at great expense to the environment, and after that, you're facing the same problems. It's much wiser to invest in renewables now.

Edited May 16, 2013 by JFSOCC

[JFSOCC]

 

apathy is death

 

But by all means, wallow in your ignorance, wear it like a shield. We'll see how well it shields you and your family.

Ahh smugness, heh. The alternative's not likely to protect him that much either, really.

 

While I fundamentally disagree, let's say you're right; does that mean you should no nothing and stick your head in the sand?

[JFSOCC]

We were talking about this last night over a very pleasant meal. I conceded a point which may be interesting.

 

My point is that the warmists assert we have to take radical action or we're apocalypse bound. Since I don't believe radical action is politically possible without a One World State, and I don't want a One World State then I am left with one conclusion: we're going to take expensive but ineffective action.

 

I don't want to take ineffective action at great expense.

We don't have a one state world, but we do have a United Nations. We have international trade agreements. And we have a serious issue facing all of us.

 

Did you know that the kingdom of the Seychelles has bought landmass in Somalia so that the people have somewhere to live while the ocean swallows their island archipelago? Rising sea levels (warmer seas) are already taking land.

Ask them if they're panicking war-ists or people facing a real catastrophe.

[Malcador]

While I fundamentally disagree, let's say you're right; does that mean you should no nothing and stick your head in the sand?

Well based on the set he has to defend from your snarky remark, depends on how much the measures have an effect on him and what kind of effect as well. So what would you want done, exactly ?

[JFSOCC]

What I think would be good:

• Admit we have a real problem
• Invest in renewable energy technology
• encourage family planning, don't try to have more than 2 children
• improve the position of women worldwide as educated women tend to have less children, and later
• Have strong and well enforced international regulation of fishing, especially of endangered fish stocks. As far as I'm concerned the Marine Stewardship Council could set the standards.
• Have strong and well enforced international regulation in forestry and farming: As little mono-culture as possible. And don't cut and burn wild lands to replace with intensive farming. As far as I'm concerned the Forest Stewardship Council could set the standards.
• As much as I hate to say it, because I love meat, we need to eat less meat. Even bringing it down to once or twice a week would have an impact. Prices of meat should go up, as they're currently sold for ridiculously low prices. We eat 37 billion chicken worldwide every year, about 5 per person per year. This leads to overcrowded chicken farms and avian diseases like Sars and Avian flu, but also all these chicken need feed, and the feed comes from farming intensively. this depletes soils and wastes farmland which could be used for feeding people. (who will destroy more wild lands to create more farmland to compensate)
• Don't eat fruit out of season, at least until we have changed our energy infrastructure.
• Don't drill in nature reserves. Nature reserves provide economical benefits like clean water and fresh air, and are also huge carbon storage sites
• Don't work ecologically frail, marginal lands.

I won't ask people to be more energy efficient or use less, because let's face it, we all enjoy our creature comforts. But there are things we CAN do, and admitting we have a problem is the very first step.

 

Furthermore it is my dream to see us reclaim the deserts in the world, which by now take up about 40% of the total land mass of the earth, and change them into grasslands or forests.

Edited May 16, 2013 by JFSOCC

[pmp10]

In Germany last year they managed to have a full third of their energy on their grid be "green". This did not lead to drastic pricing spikes.

 

No they did that by publishing results of a single hour and pretending it relates to entire year. And they still do that even as they come back to coal plants after the Fukushima scare killed their nuclear plants.

Germany is paying a lot for it's dalliance with green energy and much of that money finds it way into French nuclear and Polish coal plants. Even if they could do that 100% by 2050 plan it still won't cover direct fossil-fuel usage and will need other sources of power to stabilize the grid.

[JFSOCC]

Nuclear energy is relatively clean though, especially with new technologies. I'm not such a hippy that I'm against using nuclear, although the worlds reserves of radioactive fissile materials are also massively dwindling, not to mention the sources are largely in countries like Afghanistan.

[Monte Carlo]

What I think would be good:

• Admit we have a real problem
• Invest in renewable energy technology
• encourage family planning, don't try to have more than 2 children
• improve the position of women worldwide as educated women tend to have less children, and later
• Have strong and well enforced international regulation of fishing, especially of endangered fish stocks. As far as I'm concerned the Marine Stewardship Council could set the standards.
• Have strong and well enforced international regulation in forestry and farming: As little mono-culture as possible. And don't cut and burn wild lands to replace with intensive farming. As far as I'm concerned the Forest Stewardship Council could set the standards.
• As much as I hate to say it, because I love meat, we need to eat less meat. Even bringing it down to once or twice a week would have an impact. Prices of meat should go up, as they're currently sold for ridiculously low prices. We eat 37 billion chicken worldwide every year, about 5 per person per year. This leads to overcrowded chicken farms and avian diseases like Sars and Avian flu, but also all these chicken need feed, and the feed comes from farming intensively. this depletes soils and wastes farmland which could be used for feeding people. (who will destroy more wild lands to create more farmland to compensate)
• Don't eat fruit out of season, at least until we have changed our energy infrastructure.
• Don't drill in nature reserves. Nature reserves provide economical benefits like clean water and fresh air, and are also huge carbon storage sites
• Don't work ecologically frail, marginal lands.

I won't ask people to be more energy efficient or use less, because let's face it, we all enjoy our creature comforts. But there are things we CAN do, and admitting we have a problem is the very first step.

 

Furthermore it is my dream to see us reclaim the deserts in the world, which by now take up about 40% of the total land mass of the earth, and change them into grasslands or forests.

 

Which is where warmism breaks down. You can't 'nudge' or persuade people to do all these things. You will have to enforce them via a system of coercion and surveillance.

 

Like I said, no wonder the Left find it so appealing.

[Malcador]

Do you always try to come across like an editorial from a Right porn rag ?

Edited May 16, 2013 by Malcador

[JFSOCC]

Which is where warmism breaks down. You can't 'nudge' or persuade people to do all these things. You will have to enforce them via a system of coercion and surveillance.

 

Like I said, no wonder the Left find it so appealing.

You can educate, besides I happily "enforce" womens rights. My list is largely non-coercive. Edited May 16, 2013 by JFSOCC

[Monte Carlo]

I don't need to try. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but some hippy telling me how much steak I can eat in a week brings out the gun-toting libertarian in me.

[Monte Carlo]

 

Which is where warmism breaks down. You can't 'nudge' or persuade people to do all these things. You will have to enforce them via a system of coercion and surveillance.

 

Like I said, no wonder the Left find it so appealing.

You can educate.

 

 

Yes, the Khmer Rouge tried that too. Seriously, you are well-intentioned (of that I have no doubt) but woefully misguided.

 

The only way you will ever get these things to work is to make them profitable.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Do you always try to come across like an editorial from a Right porn rag ?

Not enough capitalization or series of exclamation points.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

 

 

Which is where warmism breaks down. You can't 'nudge' or persuade people to do all these things. You will have to enforce them via a system of coercion and surveillance.

 

Like I said, no wonder the Left find it so appealing.

 

You can educate.

Yes, the Khmer Rouge tried that too. Seriously, you are well-intentioned (of that I have no doubt) but woefully misguided.

 

The only way you will ever get these things to work is to make them profitable.

To be fair, having less children and having them later in life and building renewable energy infrastructure can be considered profitable. Edited May 16, 2013 by KaineParker

[JFSOCC]

 

 

Which is where warmism breaks down. You can't 'nudge' or persuade people to do all these things. You will have to enforce them via a system of coercion and surveillance.

 

Like I said, no wonder the Left find it so appealing.

You can educate.

 

 

Yes, the Khmer Rouge tried that too. Seriously, you are well-intentioned (of that I have no doubt) but woefully misguided.

 

The only way you will ever get these things to work is to make them profitable.

 

Khmer rouge? Did you just Godwin this thread? Seriously enough with the hyperbole. Khmer rouge, by the way, was all about destroying intellectualism. They sent teachers and artists to prison gulags or killed them outright, I'd say that's rather the OPPOSITE of education. Get your facts straight.

[Meshugger]

Maybe we should just cut the middleman and get to the root of the problem: Humans. There's too many of us; why let the animal kingdom or nature in general suffer? The only morally right thing to do is to discard some of us, oh wait...

[Gfted1]

 

That's totally fine. We just had a long winded discussion on that matter and it was determined that the morality of killing other people is acceptable as long as you really really need to save your own hide. And you feel bad afterwards.

 

Ok, I made up that last part.

[WDeranged]

 

The only way you will ever get these things to work is to make them profitable.

 

Yeah it needs to somehow be profitable for everyone, not just for governments and large businesses.  If the day comes where I can get clean energy as cheaply (ha) as the regular stuff I'll be the first to sign up, just as I'd be happy to buy products with less packaging.

 

Companies plaster products with any number of green awards and certificates but the bloody things need to be replaced within a few years.  An example I know well is washing machines, they used to last 10-15 years without serious problems, now you're lucky to get five years and then it ends up in a junkyard...not very green is it?

 

It's not like we have the option of "going green" without taking a big hit in the wallet, by western standards I'm almost poor, every day is a balancing act and as I get older the pressure increases.

 

I'd bet that my carbon footprint (uhg) is smaller than all but the most dedicated eco-drones and yet I don't feel the need to verbally harpoon people who live a more wasteful life than me, in my experience the quickest way to turn people away from an idea is to act like an extremist prick (I've been on both sides of that fence)...a bad messenger for a good message 

Edited May 16, 2013 by WDeranged

[Malcador]

What I think would be good:

• Admit we have a real problem
• Invest in renewable energy technology
• encourage family planning, don't try to have more than 2 children
• improve the position of women worldwide as educated women tend to have less children, and later
• Have strong and well enforced international regulation of fishing, especially of endangered fish stocks. As far as I'm concerned the Marine Stewardship Council could set the standards.
• Have strong and well enforced international regulation in forestry and farming: As little mono-culture as possible. And don't cut and burn wild lands to replace with intensive farming. As far as I'm concerned the Forest Stewardship Council could set the standards.
• As much as I hate to say it, because I love meat, we need to eat less meat. Even bringing it down to once or twice a week would have an impact. Prices of meat should go up, as they're currently sold for ridiculously low prices. We eat 37 billion chicken worldwide every year, about 5 per person per year. This leads to overcrowded chicken farms and avian diseases like Sars and Avian flu, but also all these chicken need feed, and the feed comes from farming intensively. this depletes soils and wastes farmland which could be used for feeding people. (who will destroy more wild lands to create more farmland to compensate)
• Don't eat fruit out of season, at least until we have changed our energy infrastructure.
• Don't drill in nature reserves. Nature reserves provide economical benefits like clean water and fresh air, and are also huge carbon storage sites
• Don't work ecologically frail, marginal lands.

I won't ask people to be more energy efficient or use less, because let's face it, we all enjoy our creature comforts. But there are things we CAN do, and admitting we have a problem is the very first step.

 

Furthermore it is my dream to see us reclaim the deserts in the world, which by now take up about 40% of the total land mass of the earth, and change them into grasslands or forests.

 

Well some of your list is fine, but I do find it funny you'd not push energy efficiency (that really should be easy for people to want - pay less for gas, power, etc.) yet have things on your list of what's ok to eat or how many kids to have.

 

But yeah, nothing like that'll get done in my lifetime.

[Zoraptor]

****ing leftist warmist communist maoist orientalist totalitarianist conformist/ nonconformist hipsterist anarchist scientists! I'll shoot it with my assault rifle or counter it with a video from that nice well informed Rush Limbaugh or a quote from the Bible (Leviticus, probably) or a study from Saudi Arabia hand picked to back up my views. Why it's enough to get me to write a Strongly Worded Letter to the Torygraph or go through my huge collection of Daily Fail back issues to make sure I'm still right and they're still wrong.

 

Scientific concensus is that anthropogenic climate change is reality, eg Yeah right, those communist scientists with their collectivist theory of relativity, hippy quantum theory etc etc, what will they come up with next in their quest for one world government, forced sterilisation and unremitting promotion of Justin Bieber. Thank the lord we have plucky little companies like Exxon/ BP/ Texaco to tell us the truth and save us from misinformation from those perfidious scientists and their hidden- but not to me of course- realityist agenda.

[Malcador]

****ing leftist warmist communist maoist orientalist totalitarianist conformist/ nonconformist hipsterist anarchist scientists! I'll shoot it with my assault rifle or counter it with a video from that nice well informed Rush Limbaugh or a quote from the Bible (Leviticus, probably) or a study from Saudi Arabia hand picked to back up my views. Why it's enough to get me to write a Strongly Worded Letter to the Torygraph or go through my huge collection of Daily Fail back issues to make sure I'm still right and they're still wrong.

 

Scientific concensus is that anthropogenic climate change is reality, eg Yeah right, those communist scientists with their collectivist theory of relativity, hippy quantum theory etc etc, what will they come up with next in their quest for one world government, forced sterilisation and unremitting promotion of Justin Bieber. Thank the lord we have plucky little companies like Exxon/ BP/ Texaco to tell us the truth and save us from misinformation from those perfidious scientists and their hidden- but not to me of course- realityist agenda.

 

Fail, you used too many big words.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

****ing leftist warmist communist maoist orientalist totalitarianist conformist/ nonconformist hipsterist anarchist scientists! I'll shoot it with my assault rifle or counter it with a video from that nice well informed Rush Limbaugh or a quote from the Bible (Leviticus, probably) or a study from Saudi Arabia hand picked to back up my views. Why it's enough to get me to write a Strongly Worded Letter to the Torygraph or go through my huge collection of Daily Fail back issues to make sure I'm still right and they're still wrong.

 

Scientific concensus is that anthropogenic climate change is reality, eg Yeah right, those communist scientists with their collectivist theory of relativity, hippy quantum theory etc etc, what will they come up with next in their quest for one world government, forced sterilisation and unremitting promotion of Justin Bieber. Thank the lord we have plucky little companies like Exxon/ BP/ Texaco to tell us the truth and save us from misinformation from those perfidious scientists and their hidden- but not to me of course- realityist agenda.

Scientific evidence has a well known liberal bias.

[Wrath of Dagon]

Peak oil is not discredited. the US reached Peak oil in 1971.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/US_Crude_Oil_Production_versus_Hubbert_Curve.png

It's just that because nations and companies tend to keep their record keeping opaque that we don't exactly know what can still be economically extracted. Shale gas is a stopgap measure, it will give a small spike of production for a short while, and at great expense to the environment, and after that, you're facing the same problems. It's much wiser to invest in renewables now.

You don't seem to understand what shale oil and gas mean. Shale is the source rock for oil. Before we could only get oil that seeped out of shale over millions of years and then got trapped in some other structure. Now we can actually go to the source and get it directly from there. There are vast, almost unlimited amounts of shale oil and gas all over the world. That is why the outdated curve you linked turned in the other direction, and US is now expected to be energy independent in just a few years, something I never thought would happen.

 

As far as nuclear power I'm for it too, but unfortunately I just read an article I can't find anymore that says that nuclear energy is just way too expensive compared to the cheap natural gas, so the prospects for it are once again grim. Whatever happened to all those modular designs that were supposed to revolutionize it?

 

As far as population growth, industrialized countries actually have a problem with shrinking population, not overpopulation. If anything Westerners should have more children, not fewer. More generally, you simply can not project in a straight line like that professor was doing. There are technological breakthroughs and cultural paradigm shifts which completely change the equations every few decades.

[alanschu]

 

Quantum Theory is unproven, or else it would be referred to as Quantum Law. It is impossible to prove it, the same applies with evolution. However, both have such evidence behind them that they are accepted as fact by the scientific community.

 

 

Incorrect.  Law's are not anymore proven than theories (they are usually equivalent, excepting that theories usually try to attempt to describe causal relationships, whereas Laws are just summaries of repeated observations).

 

Newton's Laws are actually less accurate than the Theory of Relativity.  They just work well enough for most of our cases, that we can ignore relativistic elements of motion.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law

 

 

In summary, however, Laws are as accurate as theories, in that they continue to be relevant until they are proven incorrect.  Which is what science is most interest in (trying to prove things wrong, since it's easier to do so).

 

Another, perhaps more readable explanation can be found here (which further summarizes that science community does not consider anything to be truly "provable."): http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistry101/a/lawtheory.htm

Edited May 17, 2013 by alanschu