Greens who feared and climate skeptics who hoped that the rash of investigations following Climategate and Glaciergate and all the other problems would reveal some gaping obvious flaws in the science of climate change were watching the wrong thing. The Big Green Lie (or Delusion, to be charitable) isn’t so much that climate change is happening and that it is very likely caused or at least exacerbated by human activity. The Big Lie is that the green movement is a source of coherent or responsible counsel about what to do.
The greens claim to be diagnosticians and therapists: that they can both name the disease and heal it. They are wrong. The attitudes and political vision of a group of NGO pressure groups may work when it comes to harassing Japanese whale ships in the Antarctic; this vision and these people come up short when set against the challenge of moderating the impact of human industrial activity on the earth’s climate system.
They come up short in many areas.
I like the idea of post greenism. Where one pragmatically strives to have a sustainable and growing economy and an environment.
If the events portrayed on the “Whale Wars” show are any indication, the militant tree-huggers aren’t doing any too well in the Antarctic either. I watch once in awhile and root for the whalers.
I agree and have written about this a couple of times. If you buy into the meme that the climate scientists are the ones most competent to speak about climate because they have been professionally trained to do so, you cannot silmultaneously claim that they have the professional training to know what to do to fix it and maintain our civilization.
Just about ALL of their solutions are right out of “LImits to Growth”, and Gore’s “Earth in the Balance”.
It’s a good point. Even if they were right, their “solutions” are likely to be worse than the problem.
Umm.. there is a problem.. the problem is that we live with the whims of the environment, and the weather, rather than exerting control over it and bending it to our will. In effect: we’re still primitive apes pretending to be technologically sophisticated.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. I’ll take a world where the atmosphere is part of the biosphere’s control-loop rather than the whims of whatever-men-are-in-charge-this-decade. Seems to have worked well so far.
Titus, so did collecting berries until it didn’t. So did hunting antelope. Sooner or later you’ve gotta take control, otherwise your species ends up like the dolphins: adapted.
You know, Titus, there aren’t too many worlds like that. Hopefully one day the bulk of humanity will live in environments where the biosphere control-loop (and the centrifugal “gravity” and the radiation shielding and so on) are artificial.
Of course, the ability to steer a hurricane might be nice to have one day, too.
Like it or not, humanity has now, and has had to an increasing degree for at least ten thousand years, the ability to make major changes in the environment. (Yes, that long ago – there’s quite a lot of evidence that overgrazing by goats was a major factor in the formation of the Sahara, for example and it’s at least possible that several extinctions that long ago were attributable to us.)
We need to take account of that in our planning. However, I fully agree that the impulse to control other people is a major part of the reasons for the solutions that get adopted. Anyone looking at the situation rationally would have dismissed wind and ground solar out of hand, for example – except in very limited and specialised applications.
It has to mean something that James Lovelock, the author of the Gaia hypothesis, has come out in favour of nuclear power. There are all manner of possible solutions to increasing CO2 and very few have actually been seriously worked on. I’m not going to bore you all with a list, but a recent addition is thorium-based nuclear – which has one very great advantage; it can’t possibly be used to make bombs. U233 does not lead to plutonium, and is fissile but not in a way suitable for bombs.
Fletcher, I agree. Thorium is both plentiful and it has significant advantages over existing nuclear fuels. These advantages were well known in the 1950’s but the fears generated by the Cold War won the debate at that time on which fuel to use.
Here is a link to an older article that covers the advantages and disadvantages of thorium at a high level: http://www.power-technology.com/features/feature1141/
Actually, I’m wrong. But only sort of. U233 is bomb material. But unfortunately for would-be nuke makers, in practice it’s heavily contaminated with U232 – which emits high-energy gamma rays. And separating this from U233 is even more difficult than enriching natural uranium.
One more point is that thorium is actually quite common in assorted rocks and is quite widespread.
Indeed, Ed. All I’m saying is that there are, unfortunately, more problems than just solving the “how” — the greatest threat to men right now is not the weather, but other men.
An uncommented on facet of the climategate emails is that the “team” were the ones that edited the comments regarding what we had to do to “solve” the CO2 problem. They are singularly incompetent to do so.
Weather control is a frequent feature in science fiction. But one wonders what the reality would be like. Who would control the weather? If not one great weather authority (with the power to pummel its enemies with hurricanes and all the scariness that goes with centralized anything), would it be some sort of weird, globally coordinated effort, with rogue nations/entities refusing to play along? What would the goal of global weather control be, anyway?
We have “weather control” in some senses now – and it would work the same way.
Large slices of Washington and California get “artificial rainfall” (read:irrigation). Until its decided that too much water was being diverted from the river to sustain the proper ecosystem – so massive changes in irrigation planning.
In Washington, this had lead a fair number of farmers to rip up apple orchards and either move to a less water-intensive crop, or just move.
In California, it’s causing a dust bowl.
Any type of direct weather control would have the same people in charge.
There was a proposal some years ago to clean the air in southern California — and generate electrical power — by setting up very large towers, then spraying sea water into their tops. The water would partially evaporate, cooling the air and generating a downdraft. Pollution would be washed out by the unevaporated parts of the droplets. Wind turbines at the base would recover energy from the downdraft.
I’ve thought when seeing this that, if used on a large enough scale, these things would be weather modification machines, enhancing precipitation downwind.
Umm.. there is a problem.. the problem is that we live with the whims of the environment, and the weather, rather than exerting control over it and bending it to our will. In effect: we’re still primitive apes pretending to be technologically sophisticated.
I don’t get this. We don’t need to control the weather or the environment. For example, it doesn’t matter to me right now whether it rains or not. My current environment (inside a building with a roof) controls the weather sufficiently well for my purposes.
Titus, so did collecting berries until it didn’t. So did hunting antelope. Sooner or later you’ve gotta take control, otherwise your species ends up like the dolphins: adapted.
The dolphins aren’t an end state. They might die off or they might in turn figure out tool use (which would be an involved project given their current state). And adaptation happens to species, else they wouldn’t be species. Speaking of a non-adapting species is something of a non sequitur.
Also, what’s wrong with being technologically sophisticated, “primitive” apes? I don’t appreciate the many ways in which the human body breaks down and the weird psychological foibles are a pain to deal with, but it works otherwise.
Trent, your original claims just sounds like one of those notorious statements: “We have to do X first in order to do Y.” The problem is that even when X and Y are related, there are often other ways to get to Y. For example, if we lived underwater all our lives, we wouldn’t need to control the weather at all. So ability to control weather wouldn’t be a feature of a underwater, technologically sophisticated civilization.
Sounds like Fletcher just discovered Kirk’s site…
About the only thing I’d love to see more than a couple hundred LFTRs (or a couple thousand of the smaller, assembly-line versions) would be the same number of working polywells.
Stating that fissile material (U-233, U-235, Pu-239) is “bomb” material rather than potential nuclear fuel is about as accurate as saying that nitrates are “bomb” material rather than potential fertilizer.
Karl, the buildings won’t save you from a runaway greenhouse effect.. or hell, even another Katrina. Short sighted thinking at best.
Karl, the buildings won’t save you from a runaway greenhouse effect..
Air conditioning.
or hell, even another Katrina.
Don’t live below sea level or in a flood plain eliminates that danger, assuming you want the danger eliminated.
Short sighted thinking at best.
Long term thinking only works if you have a good enough guess about the future in order to justify it. If you don’t have enough of a clue, then you are just wasting your time and effort.
To elaborate on the last statement, I think most of the value of weather control is in weather knowledge. That is, if you know what the weather is going to do, far enough in advance, then you can mitigate, through decent planning, the worst weather events.
We already see such things in the examples you cite. Katrina could have been far worse, if no one had ample warning that it was coming and outsiders weren’t prepared to offer help.
We also know that a “runaway” greenhouse effect will be limited, simply because there isn’t that much greenhouse gasses present in a form that can be unlocked with a modest rise in temperature. Most CO2, for example, is locked in limestone and other carbonates.
So how much more expensive is it to control the weather than to forecast the weather? My take is that you’ll need to be able to shift around vast amounts of energy and matter. Perhaps a programmable orbital sunscreen (which could control the solar influx over most of the Earth’s surface) would give you sufficient control to justify a relatively low cost? I don’t know.
Kirk, not quite. Thorium-drived U233 is not suitable bomb material because it is contaminated with highly radioactive U232 that is highly hazardous for anyone making or handling the bombs. Plutonium is not suitable for certain types of bombs (gun-type) because it starts fissioning too fast and therefore would result in a fizzle if you tried it.
Generalising from this, I find it easy to imagine a nuclear fuel that can be used in reactors but is extremely difficult to use in a bomb. Indeed, thorium is such a fuel – it converts in situ into U233, which fissions, but thorium in itself will not readily fission. (The most practical thorium reactors so far designed require a proton accelerator as part of their workings.)
Big D – There is another potential approach that might even be better than polywell. Look up focus fusion. The advantage appears to be that if it works at all, it ought to be relatively easy to set it up to use the proton/B11 reaction which creates no neutrons.
The Big Lie is that the green movement is a source of coherent or responsible counsel about what to do.
This is a huge point that a good economist (good being a very important adjective here) should use at every opportunity to club the green-weenies with.
I’ll take a world where the atmosphere is part of the biosphere’s control-loop rather than…
Amen… perhaps one day the grown ups will be put in charge and we can move beyond that.
there’s quite a lot of evidence that overgrazing by goats was a major factor in the formation of the Sahara
If so, a good economist and some adults could have avoided that.
There is another potential approach…
With a vibrant economy you can afford to test many approaches. Federalism was suppose to allow states to test many approaches. We need to get rid of this current state of disaster (wackos greens telling us what we should do, politicians demagoguing the wrong solutions, regulating businesses, and their jobs, out of existence.)
The solutions are going to be a hard fought political battle, but it has to be done. We need to counter that big lie.
Actually there is a localized and relatively low cost way of controlling the world’s weather (temperature, sea level, rainfall, hurricanes, etc.), and that is via ocean currents.
1 kilowatt of ocean current power will transfer around 100,000 kilowatts of heat – this is a pretty good amplification ratio as climate control systems go. This is somewhat analogous to the power of a car water pump compared to the heat it transfers.
A couple billion dollars spent to dam ocean currents going into the arctic could largely pay for itself in electricity generated and would lower sea level faster than global warming is currently increasing it.
A couple billion dollars spent to dam ocean currents going into the arctic
I think you’re off by at least an order of magnitude, probably several more. But there might be less infrastructure intensive stuff that would do the job (pipes that redirect low salinity ice melt to deeper levels).