Is Global Warming becoming unstoppable?

[OzWaveGuy]

Yea, yea, my eyes have been blinded. All the scientists are in on it in a giant conspiracy and I have lost touch with reality (yawn).

Unbelievable - How quickly you jump to misrepresent the argument - who is saying all scientists? It's a select few (as the climategate emails demonstrate) with a majority pushing the AGW bandwagon being from political parties and NGOs (and of course online entities such as yourself).

You and Basilio have continued to deflect and misrepresent through many of these discussions and wonder why trying to "educate" folks on hysterical climate change isn't working.

Another example...When the facts and models don't agree - hide the facts...
You can put your dark sunglasses back on now knobby - nothing to see here.

 

[IFocus]

We have had to wear our sun glasses a lot more in Perth this year just had the hottest 11 months on record.


Native trees still dying like flies.

 

[OzWaveGuy]

We have had to wear our sun glasses a lot more in Perth this year just had the hottest 11 months on record.


Native trees still dying like flies.

And yet another misrepresentation that implies man has made this asserted heat record in a very specific location.

Yes IFocus, we all know the climate changes, now please show us how man's 3% co2 contribution has made this the "hottest record ever" or can't your sunglasses see that far?

 

[macca]

This is why thinking people delve past the hysteria of AGW, from the Sydney Telegraph today, why isn't this on the front page ? (Note the very clever placement of the paid advertisement prior to the text, unfortunately you and I are paying for that)

SENIOR bureaucrats in the state government's environment department have routinely stopped publishing scientific papers which challenge the federal government's claims of sea level rises threatening Australia's coastline, a former senior public servant said yesterday.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ne...abor-bureaucrats/story-e6freuzi-1226211748047

 

[Knobby22]

Scientists shocked by record rise in carbon emissions
AM By environment reporter Conor Duffy
Updated December 05, 2011 11:22:22


New research has found global carbon emissions surged by a record amount in 2010 after falling during the international financial crisis.

The Global Carbon Project published its yearly analysis of carbon dioxide emissions in the journal Nature Climate Change today.

It found global carbon dioxide emissions increased by a record 5.9 per cent in 2010.

The report says the overall atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in 800,000 years.

Mike Raupach from the CSIRO helped write this year's report and says he and other scientists were shocked by the findings.

"This was a very large number, an unexpectedly high increase, much greater than the average increase through the decade of the 2000s which has been about 3 per cent, and it cancels out a downturn in emissions the year before."

 

[Chasero]

Well, I can imagine 100 yrs from now what the world population is going to be like.

I wonder what the world population would be 500 yrs from now?

All the global warming sceptics are in for a rude shock if they haven't seen the exponential population growth bar over the past 100 years.

Billions and billions of humans not causing any damage at all? All those factories etc?

Nope, we don't do anything to the environment

 

[prawn_86]

Coldest start to summer in NSW for 50 years. Personally (not having lived in NSW all my life) i can't EVER remember a day in December with a max temp of 19 degrees.

Perhaps we're over the warming and global cooling has already started...

 

[Smurf1976]

Well, I can imagine 100 yrs from now what the world population is going to be like.

I wonder what the world population would be 500 yrs from now?

All the global warming sceptics are in for a rude shock if they haven't seen the exponential population growth bar over the past 100 years.

Billions and billions of humans not causing any damage at all? All those factories etc?

Nope, we don't do anything to the environment

One of the big problems is that fixing CO2 emissions comes with its own huge impact on the environment which, apart from CO2 itself, is arguably a greater impact than coal or oil. You would want to be pretty sure it was necessary before going about that extent of non-CO2 environmental destruction I would think...

 

[drsmith]

500 years from now, one would hope we've extended our civilisation well beyond the cradle.

 

[ghotib]

One of the big problems is that fixing CO2 emissions comes with its own huge impact on the environment which, apart from CO2 itself, is arguably a greater impact than coal or oil. You would want to be pretty sure it was necessary before going about that extent of non-CO2 environmental destruction I would think...

From previous posts I expect you're thinking of dams and their impacts. What other impacts do you mean?

At the risk of pre-empting your answer, do you see distributed power generation as changing the potential environmental impacts of renewable energy. I'm thinking particularly about regional generation, which seems to be building momentum in several centres such as the Victorian goldfields and the NSW New England. Hard to see a downside to this for anyone except the wholesale distributors?

Thanks,

Ghoti

 

[Smurf1976]

ALL power pollutes in some way. ALL of it.

If you exclude CO2 as an issue then nobody in their right mind would even consider building more uranium reactors given their inherent dangers (something I pointed out on this forum long before most had heard of Fukushima - there will always be some mode of failure that hasn't been foreseen, and accidents WILL happen).

Dams flood the wilderness. That debate has been done to death in the broader community 30 years ago so I won't revive it here other than to say that if the same debate were being held today then the pro-dams argument would be a LOT stronger on account of the CO2 issue that is for sure.

Wind turbines kill the birds, including engangered wedge tailed eagles and the like.

Solar panels require charcoal, which comes from native forests, in their manufacture...

Tidal is basically just a dam built on the coast.

Wood has a pretty big envrionmental impact and logging has had plenty of debate over the past 30 years so no need to repeat it here.

Geothermal causes earthquakes and/or land subsidence.

Against that backdrop the enormous amounts of power produced at Loy Yang (for example) make brown coal look like a pretty "green" option if you exclude CO2 as an issue. A hole in the ground and some steam certainly, but nothing much else in terms of major impacts and certainly no species wiped out, no scenic valleys flooded, nowhere evacuated because something went wrong, nothing that needs to be stored for the next 10,000 years and so on. Just a hole in the ground and a power station sitting next to it with steam and very little smoke coming out.

As for distributed generation it comes back to the same issue - waht is the primary energy source being used? In most cases all you end up doing is spreading the effects of generation over a wider area (versus a large power station) but burning gas or farming wind is burning gas or farming wind no matter where you do it.

 

[So_Cynical]

The Durban Platform for Enhanced Action

COP17 has delivered a great outcome, an outcome above the minimum that was hoped for, a deal to do a deal that is legally binding on all party's starting in 2015 and binding by 2020...America, India, China, Brazil, Great Britain the EU all on board.

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE7BA00220111211?pageNumber=3&virtualBrandChannel=0

And the deniers said it would never happen.
~

 

[Julia]

I'm not sure what you're celebrating, SC. The following is from your link:

"It's certainly not the deal the planet needs -- such a deal would have delivered much greater ambition on both emissions reductions and finance," said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"Producing a new treaty by 2015 that is both ambitious and fair will take a mix tough bargaining and a more collaborative spirit than we saw in the Durban conference centre these past two weeks."

Perhaps you could spell out in detail exactly what you believe has been achieved by the talk fest in Durban?

 

[ghotib]

ALL power pollutes in some way. ALL of it.

<SNIP>

As for distributed generation it comes back to the same issue - waht is the primary energy source being used? In most cases all you end up doing is spreading the effects of generation over a wider area (versus a large power station) but burning gas or farming wind is burning gas or farming wind no matter where you do it.

So it comes back to tradeoffs and optimisation, and it seems to me that spreading the effects of generation over a wider area can reduce those effects. Solar panels are an obvious example. A million solar panels on a million roofs that already exist or are going to be built anyway must mean a significant reduction in the need for single purpose generators such as a solar thermal installation.

I delayed answering your post because I knew that that the proceedings of a workshop on clean energy generation for the Southern Highlands area of NSW were due for publication. This page has a link to the proceedings, which include reports of regional renewable power generation projects at various stages of planning and execution.

I'm heartened to find that so much is going on, and that we're actually further along the road to renewable power than it might seem. We were lucky that we had so much fossil fuel when that was the best and cheapest generation method available. We're even luckier that we don't need it any more.

Cheers,

Ghoti

 

[Julia]

I'm heartened to find that so much is going on, and that we're actually further along the road to renewable power than it might seem. We were lucky that we had so much fossil fuel when that was the best and cheapest generation method available. We're even luckier that we don't need it any more.

Are you actually asserting that we no longer need any fossil fuel?

 

[So_Cynical]

I'm not sure what you're celebrating, SC. The following is from your link:



Perhaps you could spell out in detail exactly what you believe has been achieved by the talk fest in Durban?

Read on Julia...lets start with page one.

DURBAN (Reuters) - Climate negotiators agreed a pact on Sunday that would for the first time force all the biggest polluters to take action on greenhouse gas emissions

The package of accords extended the Kyoto Protocol, the only global pact that enforces carbon cuts, agreed the format of a fund to help poor countries tackle climate change and mapped out a path to a legally binding agreement on emissions reductions.

Its a deal to do a legally binding deal...The USA, China, Brazil, Britain, Europe Aust and India....a deal for the fist time ever....the world just got a lot dimmer for the deniers.

 

[ghotib]

Are you actually asserting that we no longer need any fossil fuel?

Not quite.

1. I was only talking about stationary power generation. I've read very little about the status of renewable power for transport, especially heavy freight.

2. Obviously there has to be a transition period.

But with those qualifications, I do indeed assert that we don't need fossil fuel, on the basis of reports such as the Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan prepared by Beyond Zero. The technology exists and is affordable.

Good news, isn't it.

Ghoti.

 

[bellenuit]

Perhaps you could spell out in detail exactly what you believe has been achieved by the talk fest in Durban?

ABC News hailed the agreement too, so I was wondering what the big breakthrough was.

Apparently all parties have entered into an agreement............. to start negotiating. Isn't that what they were doing in Durban in the first place - negotiating - and they failed to come to a conclusion to the negotiations, but just agreed to continue negotiating.

This is just a bs outcome so that the environment ministers of the various countries can go home claiming some sort of success, when in reality it was just a failure, same as Copenhagen.

 

[So_Cynical]

ABC News hailed the agreement too, so I was wondering what the big breakthrough was.

Apparently all parties have entered into an agreement............. to start negotiating. Isn't that what they were doing in Durban in the first place - negotiating - and they failed to come to a conclusion to the negotiations, but just agreed to continue negotiating.

This is just a bs outcome so that the environment ministers of the various countries can go home claiming some sort of success, when in reality it was just a failure, same as Copenhagen.

LOL same as Copenhagen its an agreement to negotiate a LEGALLY BINDING agreement...its the deniers worst nightmare come true.

I don't know how some of you guys can make money in the market...with such stead fast denial of not just inevitability, but probability....amazing.

 

[bellenuit]

LOL same as Copenhagen its an agreement to negotiate a LEGALLY BINDING agreement...its the deniers worst nightmare come true.

That is so amusing. If you think that legally binding is so important in the context of this agreement, then why isn't the agreement to negotiate a legally binding agreement legally binding in itself? The agreement just signed is not legally binding, so there is no legal obligation or penalties that can be applied if they do not come up with a legally binding agreement.

And if they do come up with a legally binding agreement, then it will only be an agreement if all parties agree to the Ts & Cs. This will only be achieved if they agree to the lowest common denominator in regards to action.

And how would they possible monitor any agreement when China, the biggest polluter, will not allow any independent monitoring.

I don't know how some of you guys can make money in the market...with such stead fast denial of not just inevitability, but probability....amazing.

I am not a denier that global warming is for real and is most likely anthropogenic. I just don't believe the carbon tax will do anything to solve the issue and even less likely believe that any international agreement will have any effect, considering most agreements to date are ignored by parties that don't think they are in their own interests.