G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert said:

Hansen says, “I have always been agnostic on nuclear power”

Someone who is really agnostic on nuclear power might say “I honestly don’t know whether there is a nuclear power or not and I don’t believe that it is possible to be conclusively certain if there is a nuclear power. I’m prone to think there is some kind of nuclear power but I don’t engage in any kind of activities to worship the nuclear power. Still, I sometimes feel hope that I can ask for guidance from the nuclear power. Perhaps when I die I will learn that there is indeed a nuclear power”

Someone like J.E. Hansen, maker of reasoned and correct warming predictions before the fact, is, like most other climate scientists, biting the hand that feeds, because it is the tax man’s hand. I think it was Sir David King who developed a technique of finding photos of politicians’ grandchildren on their desks and picking up said photos and saying, “Well, I hope you’re right about this”, reminding them that they care about things that will be around long after their career earnings have been spent.

Hansen says, “I have always been agnostic on nuclear power”, where “agnostic” means “ignorant”, except with a non-pejorative connotation because the stuff the speaker doesn’t know, supposedly no-one really knows; and in the state-funded, i.e. oil-and-gas-funded circles he moves in in his working hours, perhaps no-one does. But he’s a smart guy and willing to learn, as shown in the PDF above linked.

        Chuck said:

DV8:

You make a good point about sweeping statements. I apologise.

However, which “the sky is falling down” claim has proven to be horribly right? It may exist, but I can’t think of what it might be.

At least we can say that in my lifetime, the sky has never crashed into the ground. I am pretty sure I would have been picking up birds…

Google: warnings of disasters that were ignored

On the issue of pollution great strides have been made, and the experts were listened to in many affected areas. And of course it’s always a matter of perspective – if the volcano is erupting in your neighborhood, the sky is indeed falling for you.

However, we must keep in mind that often what is being said by the scientific community and how it is reported in the popular media are not the same thing. The press like to frame incipient problems with highly exaggerated spins, while those familiar with the facts cringe, and we can’t forget that science is driven as much these days by the search for funding as it is by curiosity, which is why ‘experts’ can usually be found on both sides of the extremes on these issues.

You make a good point about sweeping statements. I apologise.

However, which “the sky is falling down” claim has proven to be horribly right? It may exist, but I can’t think of what it might be.

At least we can say that in my lifetime, the sky has never crashed into the ground. I am pretty sure I would have been picking up birds…

        Chem Geek Gregor said:

The question is not about averting the end of the world. It’s a question of what is the most optimal situation.

Hey! Didn’t you ask me to marry you a while back? Sorry, man. I didn’t catch it until two months later.

I think most level-minded well-informed not-politically-influenced engineering/sciencey people would say the same thing, and it sounds like most of us agree that changes should be made. We can all do the math: increase CO2 production + decrease in oxygen producers = …trouble

Even my dad, who is one of those conservatives that didn’t believe in ‘global warming’ and still doesn’t (he even paid money to see an inconvenient truth and was still so very unconvinced), knows we need to be a little kinder to the environment. That to me says that some of the ‘non-believers’ are just skeptics–perhaps it *is* the fault of the name (it’s getting colder in Oklahoma!)–and are refusing to buy into any hype. It doesn’t mean they will refuse to help or that they think recycling is the work of Satan . . .

I’m excited to read the ‘climate change’ post when it comes out. Cheers!

        Stephen said:

OK, but is there evidence to show whether this will happen? And since the prescribed remedy is massively disruptive itself, shouldn’t we balance the potential disruption of the problem against the certain disruption of the solution?

The point is that even if the impacts of greenhouse gases to the climate have been overstated, there are other valid reasons to move away from technologies that produce them. There are health and local environmental damage cause by these technologies that are not under debate; there are issues of energy/economic security to consider. This was all covered in the lead article. If you ADD to these the potential of climate destabilization, (and clearly if nothing at all reduces the growth in these emissions, that is enviable) commonsense dictates that steps to mitigate the impacts be taken.

While horse-dung didn’t bury New York because of the advent of the automobile, that doesn’t prove that the concern was unfounded, and it’s plainly foolish to ignore potential problems by trusting in a fix coming out of nowhere.

That’s a rather bold statement, and patently untrue; in the majority of instances the experts have been correct, the cranks wrong. In many cases expert warnings have been acted upon, and major problems avoided, and there are examples when scientific evidence has been ignored only to be proven horribly right down the line. Sweeping statements like the one you made serve no useful purpose in this debate.

        Stephen said:

OK, but is there evidence to show whether this will happen? And since the prescribed remedy is massively disruptive itself, shouldn’t we balance the potential disruption of the problem against the certain disruption of the solution? I mean, there’s a reason why countries like Canada and the UK have loudly signed up to Kyoto and then failed to meet the targets by huge margins: it’s enormously expensive economically to reduce carbon, and Kyoto is anyway dismissed as too little by climate groups. How bad must the disruption from climate change be to justify a massive reduction in the wealth of everybody?

My point is exactly that in the absence of complete agreement or assurance of what the future holds, the best policy is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions especially from sources that are also the source of other damaging emissions or which have other underlying costs or issues which make them undesirable with or without the global warming issue. For example: Even if you remove the entire global warming problem there are still numerous reasons why coal fired electric generation is not desirable.

Also it’s entirely the point that there should not be massive reductions in wealth or quality of life.

Just a very few years ago, all the experts agreed that in the year 2000 all the computers were going to stop working and there would be chaos. I could give 10 more examples off the top of my head, many of them better, but this one is within recent memory.

A lot of people made a lot of money off that one. A lot of people are trying to make a lot of money off this one.

        DV82XL said:

IMHO the issue with greenhouse gases is not that they will promote climate change per se, because it is true that climate does change over time by its own accord, but that they will accelerate the process to the point where we will not be able to make the economy and population distributions compensate fast enough. This I believe is the real threat.

OK, but is there evidence to show whether this will happen? And since the prescribed remedy is massively disruptive itself, shouldn’t we balance the potential disruption of the problem against the certain disruption of the solution? I mean, there’s a reason why countries like Canada and the UK have loudly signed up to Kyoto and then failed to meet the targets by huge margins: it’s enormously expensive economically to reduce carbon, and Kyoto is anyway dismissed as too little by climate groups. How bad must the disruption from climate change be to justify a massive reduction in the wealth of everybody?

There are also the following questions to consider:

1. Previous predictions of disaster (such as widespread famine) failed to take account of new tech and new developments like the Green Revolution which hugely increased farming yields. Should we risk drastic action now when the problem could be solved easily by future improvements in technology, some of which will be funded by our current economic growth?

(New Yorkers of a century ago might have gotten it into their heads that continued growth in the then-current mode of transport (horses) would leave their city covered in horse ****: so they might have decided to cut back on horse usage, at great economic cost. This would have been a mistake, however, because the problem was solved by cars, something they could not have foreseen.)

2. Climate campaigners often say that action needs to be taken now, and that we shouldn’t put the burden of fixing this on future generations. But if the past is any guide, future generations will be far wealthier than us, and thus far better able to afford it, as a result of continued economic growth. On the other hand, if we handicap our economic growth now, they won’t be. They might not thank us for that!

        George Carty said:

If a warmer climate inevitably means catastrophic desertification, why did Islamic civilization (based in a rather arid part of the world) enjoy its Golden Age during the Medieval Warm Period?

A warmer average climate does not inevitably mean catastrophic desertification, that is just one posible local outcome in some regions, other regions could be effected differently by receiving more precipitation than current averages, different prevailing winds, or paradoxically lower average temperatures. Impacts of pumping more energy into the world’s climate engine are not that straightforward.

IMHO the issue with greenhouse gases is not that they will promote climate change per se, because it is true that climate does change over time by its own accord, but that they will accelerate the process to the point where we will not be able to make the economy and population distributions compensate fast enough. This I believe is the real threat.