Obama Announces New Climate Plan

[edwest2]

I have read that spent rods can be reprocessed in such a way that reduces their volume to a fraction of what they are now. But the government won’t allow it or the uses to which the reprocessed fuel can be put…a holdover from the cold war when the government encouraged production of “new” uranium resources for weapon-making.

Because there’s money in that. Why build more tanks, bombs and hand grenades? So you can use them and build more. I lived through the bulk of the Cold War. This is all about money. Have you ever seen a desert boneyard for aircraft? That’s right, old hulks, stripped of their valuable and possibly classified, at least at the time, parts and just left to sit. Recycle them? There’s no money in that.

There are cases where the words ‘efficiency’ and ‘federal government’ don’t belong in the same sentence.

Peace,
Ed

 

[gracepoole]

While we’re arguing about whether climate change is legit, anyone have a plan to handle these folks? huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/22/environmental-refugees-50_n_826488.html

 

[lynnvinc]

A majority of meteorologists believe there is global warming going on. A majority believe human activities affect that. A small minority believes it will have any negative effects. The majority does not think it does or will.

A majority of dentists also have various opinions about brain surgery, but one wouldn’t want to follow those if one really needed brain surgery.

The problem is the order of magnitude. Meteorologists are pretty good for what they do – predict local weather on short timeframes. Thing of local, short-term weather as the trees and climate as the forest. Most meteorologists can’t see the forest for the trees. And they are not supposed to, so no blame on them. Just don’t go to them for climate information.

In fact I wouldn’t even go to regular climate scientist re biological impacts of climate change, but biologists who are steeped in climate change knowledge. And they say, acc, to recent studies that there will be a lot more harm to and extinction of species that they had thought…

 

[Holly3278]

With all due respect to your right to have an opinion, your statement assumes two things that are not certitudes: First, that there is manmade climate change, Second that these measures will reverse it.

The first is questionable, and the second is absolutely untrue, since they will have no effect on global warming if, indeed, there is global warming going on.

The thing wrong with it is that the burden of increased energy costs fall most heavily on those who are least able to afford it. It sometimes strikes me as amusing that most people (which might not include you) who favor programs that will increase energy costs are the same people who oppose a “flat tax” because it’s perceived as regressive. You couldn’t ask for a more regressive “tax” than artificially increasing energy costs.

Don’t the majority of scientists agree that the climate change we are going through has been caused by man?

Also, I agree with you that this thing will not reverse climate change. I don’t think anything can reverse climate change. However, maybe this new thing will help slow down climate change. That’s what I was trying to say with my original post.

 

[lynnvinc]

…In fact I wouldn’t even go to regular climate scientist re biological impacts of climate change, but biologists who are steeped in climate change knowledge. And they say, acc, to recent studies that there will be a lot more harm to and extinction of species that they had thought…

Forgot to include a link to that study: plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0065427

 

[lynnvinc]

…Also, I agree with you that this thing will not reverse climate change. I don’t think anything can reverse climate change. However, maybe this new thing will help slow down climate change. That’s what I was trying to say with my original post.

I also agree that the Obama plan, assuming it even gets implemented is not the total solution for climate change – even if he could get every other gov in the world to follow suit or better.

As JPII wisely said in 1990, climate change is everyone’s responsibility. The fed gov has its part, as do state and local governments, businesses, schools, churches, households, and individuals.

Sounds pretty helpless, if the skeptics are not even willing to lift a little finger to turn off lights not in use…and somehow they manage to win a large portion of humanity into a “do-nothing-about-it” mode.

My heart is very heavy with sorrow, for the loss of life we are promoting and the loss of souls. It’s been heavy with sorrow for the past 20 years, since I came to understand that the denialist industry had effectively stymied action, perhaps into the future, when sadly it will be too late to save many lives.

 

[lynnvinc]

…One very interesting scientist holds that most GW effects are actually due to desertification. Most desertification, he maintains, is due to poor management of grazing animals in vulnerable regions. It’s very interesting. One can actually experience it for himself. If, on a hot sunny day, one feels the air above a bare and dessicated bit of earth, one can feel a great deal of heat coming up from the ground that is not there if the ground is covered with grass. ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change.html

This guy is not a “denier” by any environmentalist’s standard. It’s interesting to watch his presentation, and I recommend it.

Mr. Savory is not at all impressed with governmental land management which, he believes, encourages desertification and prevents its reversal. What an irony it would be if the government itself was responsible for more GW than energy production, while the government goes after the second and ignores the first!

Just got around to looking into this. Very interesting and promising if it holds true. And being into grass-fed cattle, I can see how you would be into this.

There was also a poster here at CAF who kept insisting that reversing desertification was the way to solve CC, tho he didn’t have the good ideas that Savory has on how to do it.

However, this is just one piece of the puzzle, and we all need to do the needful – our own parts, what we can. And not rely solely on the gov or Obama or the ideas in that TED talk. We need all hands on deck.

I don’t think there is any silver bullet that some expert can fire and the problem gets solved.

 

[SamH]

. However, maybe this new thing will help slow down climate change. That’s what I was trying to say with my original post.

Any source/data that backs that claim?

 

[Monkey1976]

Have you ever seen a desert boneyard for aircraft? That’s right, old hulks, stripped of their valuable and possibly classified, at least at the time, parts and just left to sit. Recycle them? There’s no money in that.

Peace,
Ed

As someone who grew up next to THE “desert boneyard” (formally the Aircraft Maintenance and Regeneration Center - AMARC) at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, I have to correct you on this. Most of the aircraft there aren’t stripped - they’re stored. Why? Because Tucson houses the largest - by several times - air force on the planet. In the case of an extended conflict where the standing Air Force takes significant losses, every intact plane at AMARC can be returned to service within a few weeks.

 

[Monkey1976]

What you are missing is the money made from mining uranium. Who wants to burn something and make it safe? Let’s spend billions on searching for underground rock formations and more on encasing the stuff and more on monitoring equipment. There’s money in that. But do we have that up and running?

Son, I say, son, can’t make no money then why bother? Kids nowadays. They can’t understand makin’ more then a fella can know what ta do with.

Peace,
Ed

For power companies, reprocessing would be - pardon the expression - a massive boom. They can take something that is currently a massive money pit in terms of handling and storage and use it as free fuel. Uranium mining profits would be peanuts in comparison.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Just got around to looking into this. Very interesting and promising if it holds true. And being into grass-fed cattle, I can see how you would be into this.

There was also a poster here at CAF who kept insisting that reversing desertification was the way to solve CC, tho he didn’t have the good ideas that Savory has on how to do it.

However, this is just one piece of the puzzle, and we all need to do the needful – our own parts, what we can. And not rely solely on the gov or Obama or the ideas in that TED talk. We need all hands on deck.

I don’t think there is any silver bullet that some expert can fire and the problem gets solved.

Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to make life more expensive for Americans, particularly poor Americans by making energy bills “skyrocket” as Obama has promised to do, than it is to attempt to reverse desertification. It’s too bad because what America does in the way of energy suppression in this country will have no effect on MMGW if, indeed, MMGW is real and is due to energy generation with fossil fuels. All it will do is make life needlessly more expensive and turn this country into a fuel commodity producing nation for the rest of the world. That’s already happening, and it will get much worse.

On the other hand, attempting to reverse desertification could have a significant effect and will do the opposite of making life harder for the poor in this country and in the world. It’s the right thing to do even if it doesn’t reduce worldwide temperatures.

I have personally seen what Savory recommends actually work, by the way, and no rational person with any experience at all could deny that even temporary desertification causes hot “microclimates”. Now, whether millions of acres of “microclimate change” put together suffices to create “macroclimate change” is where Savory gets theoretical. But 90% of the earth’s land surface is a lot.

And it isn’t just pasture land. Our cities are tremendous “heat sinks” that are even worse than deserts when it comes to collecting solar radiation and expelling it into the atmosphere. And yet, nobody ever even considers the possibility that it might be smart to attempt remediation even though every urban dweller feels it on his own skin.

And why is that? Well, observing again that the political promoters of MMGW and oppressive energy politices as well as crony capitalistic grants to political friends for “alternative energy” do not live as if they believe in it, it’s impossible to conclude that they do. What they are really doing is collecting money from environmental groups that collect it from individuals they scare into giving them money with dire predictions of catastrophic climate change.

As soon as Obama, for instance, refrains from, e.g., employing dozens of ships and aircraft to take a vacation in Africa, or sending a 747 to St. Louis for a pizza, I might start imagining that he really believes in MMGW. Until then, I don’t think any rational person possibly can.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Don’t the majority of scientists agree that the climate change we are going through has been caused by man?

No. Only the majority of scientists who publish on it (a very small minority of all scientists) do.

 

[Ridgerunner]

A majority of dentists also have various opinions about brain surgery, but one wouldn’t want to follow those if one really needed brain surgery.

The problem is the order of magnitude. Meteorologists are pretty good for what they do – predict local weather on short timeframes. Thing of local, short-term weather as the trees and climate as the forest. Most meteorologists can’t see the forest for the trees. And they are not supposed to, so no blame on them. Just don’t go to them for climate information.

In fact I wouldn’t even go to regular climate scientist re biological impacts of climate change, but biologists who are steeped in climate change knowledge. And they say, acc, to recent studies that there will be a lot more harm to and extinction of species that they had thought…

I very much doubt most dentists have opinions about brain surgery.

Meterologists are the members of the only discipline that actually studies changes in temperature, rainfall, storms etc, and they do it worldwide, not just in your neighborhood. Geologists, for example, don’t have a clue what causes drought in northwest Kansas, yet some of them are among those who are touted as “climate scientists” who pass dire predictions about droughts in the future due to MMGW.

I’m not saying meteorologists are the founts of all wisdom, but if it’s dry in my fields, I will listen to their explanation of it long before I will listen to some guy who cracks rocks apart to guess what happened to the dinosaurs. Meteorologists are rewarded or punished professionally for the accuracy of their explanations. Geologists are rewarded only if they come up with the conclusion that rocks tell them we’re undergoing MMGW.

 

[Ridgerunner]

. Have you ever seen a desert boneyard for aircraft? That’s right, old hulks, stripped of their valuable and possibly classified, at least at the time, parts and just left to sit. Recycle them? There’s no money in that.

Peace,
Ed

There can be money in scrapping old military hardware. I knew a guy who went every summer to some test range in the southwest somewhere to collect scrap from shells, rockets and all kinds of ordinance. he explained to my surprise how valuable some of those alloys are. It was tricky, though. He was a retired military man and knew what was hazardous to try to harvest and what wasn’t.

 

[qui_est_ce]

{snip}

As soon as Obama, for instance, refrains from, e.g., employing dozens of ships and aircraft to take a vacation in Africa, or sending a 747 to St. Louis for a pizza, I might start imagining that he really believes in MMGW. Until then, I don’t think any rational person possibly can.

I’m with you on that.

Al Gore gets a pass for consuming mega energy due to “energy credits” he gave himself for buying a forest in South America.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I’m with you on that.

Al Gore gets a pass for consuming mega energy due to “energy credits” he gave himself for buying a forest in South America.

It has been a long time since I read this, but I understand he bought farm land, ran the peasant tenants off, and planted what I think are eucalyptus trees that don’t produce food or lumber, but do grow and eat some carbon.

 

[lynnvinc]

Any source/data that backs that claim?

I assume you are referring to reducing GHG emissions, and would it reduce global warming.

There is lots of paleoclimatological evidence that shows correlations between increased atmospheric GHGs and increased global average temps, and decreased GHGs with decreased temps. In some cases some other factor triggered the initial warming or cooling, and GHGs acted as a positive feedback. For example, the cooling caused more snow and ice cover, reflecting more heat away from earth, and weathering draws down CO2 (see dilu.bol.ucla.edu/home.html), but this is not balanced with GHG emissions, as the cooling reduces decomposition and traps methane in permafrost and ocean hydrates, reducing the atmospheric GHGs (methane stays in the atmosphere about 10 years & is a more potent GHG than CO2, but it degrades into CO2, which stays in the atmosphere a lot longer). The worst case of cooling was “Snowball Earth.”

The opposite occurs with warming. Whatever triggers initial warming (GHGs, or other factors), the warming melts the ice and snow, causing more heat to be absorbed, and also releasing methane from permafrost and hydrates, which cause more warming, causing more release, casusing more warming. Scientists cannot explain the extent of past great warming without including contributions of the greenhouse effect.

Some now say that the “methane shootgun” is more fully loaded than during the PETM great warming of 55 mill yrs ago, ready to respond to the initial warming we are causing; others point out it is not the methane, which only lasts 10 years, but the CO2 it degrades into which poses the more serious warming potential, some of which can last in the atmosphere up to 100,000 years.

So there is this correlation well into the past. And also a correlation with recent increased GHGs and the warming to date.

It might be good to start with a review of the discovery of the greenhouse effect nearly 200 years ago. At that time they came to realize that Earth was warmer than it should be, given its distance from the sun, and Venus a lot hotter, and Mars only slightly warmer, coming to understand it was due to the different levels of GHGs in their respective atmospheres. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fourier#Discovery_of_the_greenhouse_effect & en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect

Radiative physics explains how the GHGs create this heat imbalance, retaining more heat in our atmospher and earth systems. So it is more than just a correlation between GHGs and global temps, it is also based on the laws of physics.

Now you may be thinking there is no classical experiment which proves reducing GHGs will cause cooling (or stop the warming), and that is correct. We have to use the “natural experiements” as revealed by paleoclimatology for our understanding. We do not have two earths – on to emit extra GHGs, and one for the control. And it wouldn’t pass IRB approval to conduct such an experiment that endangers life on earth And it is morally wrong to do a pretest-post-test experiment one earth – emit the GHGs and see if it actually does

Here is a site listing many sites that will explain it better than I: realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/

 

[qui_est_ce]

It has been a long time since I read this, but I understand he bought farm land, ran the peasant tenants off, and planted what I think are eucalyptus trees that don’t produce food or lumber, but do grow and eat some carbon.

Is eucalyptus native to SA?

 

[lynnvinc]

Don’t the majority of scientists agree that the climate change we are going through has been caused by man?

Nearly ALL working/publishing climate scientist agree that the climate change we’re going thru is caused by our industrial GHG emissions, some 98% of them.

However, there are scientists in other fields who are not researching or publishing scholarly works in the area of climate change who are of the opinion that is not the case, but they don’t have any studies or works to back up their opinion. The problem is, as Al Gore suggested, it is “an inconvenient truth,” and people are misled by “motivated cognitions,” rather than scientific facts and findings.

The wife of David Archer, a U of Chicago climate scientist I know (specializes on greenhouse gases), came up with this cartoon:

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

 

[Ridgerunner]

Is eucalyptus native to SA?

Not sure, but i don’t think it is.