Evidence of Global Cooling; Global Warming is not a Consensus.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (blackadder @ Mar 7 2008, 04:35 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>Denny;

There is solar thermal; A pioneering company in solar geothermal .

http://www.ausra.com/

I can't understand how Hydrogen is a bad idea especially when it virtually unlimited. If memeory serves you can split water to get the hydrogen.

Is the author from the corn belt or worked for the PR Dept of Archer Daniels Midland previously?

I have no problem with nuclear. It's coal that I am skeptical of.

If you have no problem w/ Yucca mountain glowing in the dark then have at it. Its kind of funny that Easterners have no qualms about shipping their biohazrd here yet also like to come to Moab & southern Utah to enjoy the natural beauty.</div>

I know all aobut ausra, and it's a scam. Vaporware.

Hydrogen is bound already in other molecules. You point out water, fine. To convert water to hydrogen and oxygen takes energy. Really, remember that you can't get more energy out than you put in (except nuclear). If they could make a perpetual motion machine, we'd have unlimited power, but they can't make a perpetual motion machine - it's one of those holy grails of science...

The Bush administration has pumped billions of dollars into solar cell research. May as well spend it there if you're doing it for political reasons (which he was). May as well pick any of these doomed technologies out of a hat, for that matter.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/15/zubrin.htm
<span style="font-size:18pt;line-height:100%">H</span>ydrogen is only a source of energy if it can be taken in its pure form and reacted with another chemical, such as oxygen. But all the hydrogen on Earth, except that in hydrocarbons, has already been oxidized, so none of it is available as fuel. If you want to get plentiful unbound hydrogen, the closest place it can be found is on the surface of the Sun; mining this hydrogen supply would be quite a trick. After the Sun, the next closest source of free hydrogen would be the atmosphere of Jupiter. Jupiter is surrounded by radiation belts so intense that they are deadly to humans and electronics. It also has a massive gravity field that would severely impair hydrogen export operations. These would also be complicated by the 2.5-year Jupiter-to-Earth flight transit time (during which any liquid hydrogen launched would probably boil away), and the fact that upon re-entry at Earth, the imagined hydrogen shipping capsule would face heat loads about eight times higher than those withstood by a space shuttle returning from orbit.

So if we put aside the spectacularly improbable prospect of fueling our planet with extraterrestrial hydrogen imports, the only way to get free hydrogen on Earth is to make it. The trouble is that making hydrogen requires more energy than the hydrogen so produced can provide. Hydrogen, therefore, is not a source of energy. It simply is a carrier of energy. And it is, as we shall see, an extremely poor one.

The spokesmen for the hydrogen hoax claim that hydrogen will be manufactured from water via electrolysis. It is certainly possible to make hydrogen this way, but it is very expensive—so much so, that only four percent of all hydrogen currently produced in the United States is produced in this manner. The rest is made by breaking down hydrocarbons, through processes like pyrolysis of natural gas or steam reforming of coal.

 

I'll explain my thoughts about nuclear.

The only reason it doesn't work well in the USA is due to regulation. Not that regulation is the evil, it is simply the specific regulations. I'll get to why shortly.

The French produce at least 70% of their power from nuclear. We don't hear horror stories about near accidents. Nor do we hear about their nuclear waste as a huge issue. In fact, people in France welcome nuclear plants nearby when they are announced.

Since the US hasn't built a nuclear plant in decades, the French are a couple of generations (at least) ahead of us. Here's what they do, it makes sense, we should follow suit.

First, they use a common blueprint for all their nuclear reactors. Our reactors have all been unique in design. The cost of building hundreds of plants using the same materials and plans is reduced because you get economies of scale. It's also prone to fewer errors in construction, since people are familiar with all that goes into construction.

Second, they reprocess their nuclear waste, several times. In the Carter administration, they created the DoE and one of the things they enacted was a regulation AGAINST reprocessing the nuclear waste. This is a real headscratcher to me, since Carter was an actual nuclear engineer. Anyhow, reprocessing means they extract the deadliest radioactive materials from the waste (that would be Uranium and Plutonium) and use them in the reactor again. The end result is waste that is far less a problem and you need about 60x less fuel in the long run.

See here for info regarding the 60x figure for reprocessing:
http://www.uic.com.au/nip75.htm

Third, they turn their waste into an indestructible form of glass via a process called vitrification. The glass has lead in it, which keeps any radioactivity from leaking. How indestructible is debatable, but I can say this much... I've seen film of these glass barrels being dropped from airplanes at 30,000 feet, put on trains in simulated train crashes, and even subjected to dynamite explosions and they don't break. I say debatable because you can't truly know (any more than you can say there's man made global warming) what environmental and geological process might do to it over eons of time. Let's put it this way, though, the French ship their waste on trains.

I love it here in Nevada and I wouldn't be for waste disposal at Yucca Mountain if I wasn't 100% convinced that it's safe, not a threat to the environment, and isn't going to be a danger to people. I don't fear shipping the waste to Yucca - I'm convinced that is safe. Yucca is ideal because we are talking about desert with near zero rainfall, no water table to seep into the storage areas, moderate climate, etc.

I'm also convinced that it doesn't take rocket scientists to run nuclear plants. Most anyone who's passed a freshman level physics course at a major university in the past 40 years is qualified.

Here's a PBS site about the French nuclear power program:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sh...ngs/french.html

 

A video of testing glass encased nuclear waste containers.

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One in english

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<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Dumpy @ Mar 7 2008, 06:15 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>Hydroelectric. Use global warming to help mankind!</div>

Huh? Hydroelectric is fine by me, though it really kills a lot of the environment. When you build a dam, it floods tens of thousands of acres behind it.

Maybe if the air temperature hits boiling point, global warming could help us

Or do you mean geothermal? If you tap into a hot volcano, you can use it's heat to make steam and drive turbines...

 

Where'd all the glaciers that made the great lakes go?

 

The auto manufacturers are going to make cars that are subsidized by the govt., and they're going to make SUVs (cars people want).

We're going to need SUVs just to get around after the sky falls due to global warming. Maybe even bigger SUVs than they have now

Cold Fusion. There's another Holy Grail. If they ever do figure it out, it'd mean your car would run FOREVER on a device about the size of a D battery. Your house would run forever on a device smaller than a furnace. Unlimited energy, and forever.

A big deal is infrastructure. Going hydrogen, for example, means massive retrofitting of our existing gas stations and pipelines and that kind of thing. $trillions, literally. If they could somehow make all the ethanol we need to replace oil without using 125% of all the land in the USA, it means a similar retrofitting.

Ethanol doesn't mix with water well, so you can't really ship it around long distances. Even a small amount of condensation inside a pipe or tanker truck ruins it. You'd need to process whatever into fuel within short distance of each gas station where it'd be pumped into vehicles.

I don't want to be sounding like I'm pooh-poohing these ideas for the sake of it. I'm just not seeing a profitable venture in any of them. If we find something worthwhile, $trillions of investment are reasonable.

Last time I was at the beach, I thought about some sort of device that worked based upon the tide. The waves keep coming in, consistently. Even on calm days, there's a reasonable amount of energy to be had. Thing is, these devices would get covered with barnacles real quick, and they'd probably be a pretty bad eyesore to boot.

 

Most of the USA's innovation in the past 2-3 decades has required more energy.

Homes used to have a TV. Then it was a TV and a VCR (more power). More than one TV. Then it was fax machines and 2nd phone lines. More power. Then it was a computer and a 3rd phone line (for many). Then there's the internet, which is entire buildings doing a lot of consumption of power (lots of servers). Now we have really awesome video game consoles to connect up to those servers

It's a trend that I don't think we want to change.

Lots of cheap energy would continue to fuel our growth, and it would also make it rather cheap to heat homes in winter and cool them in summer. It'd save lives, no doubt.

People whined about drilling in ANWR. "The oil won't even get to market for 10 years!" It's year 8, folks, and gas is going to be $4/gallon.

Yeah, I favored drilling there, and pretty much anywhere else we could. Not that I want to see us just continue to burn oil; it'd have bought us more time to figure out appropriate technologies.

Laugh about hybrids all you want. I own a Prius, myself. I'll be filling up once a month for about $30 at $4/gallon, while emitting near zero pollution. They're not THE answer, but they nicely do work with our existing infrastructure and conservation of energy is something people don't talk about enough.

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.d...mplate=printart

Article published Mar 14, 2008
Climate panel on the hot seat


March 14, 2008

By H. Sterling Burnett - More than 20 years ago, climate scientists began to raise alarms over the possibility global temperatures were rising due to human activities, such as deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels.

To better understand this potential threat, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to provide a "comprehensive, objective, scientific, technical and socioeconomic assessment of human-caused climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation."

IPCC reports have predicted average world temperatures will increase dramatically, leading to the spread of tropical diseases, severe drought, the rapid melting of the world's glaciers and ice caps, and rising sea levels. However, several assessments of the IPCC's work have shown the techniques and methods used to derive its climate predictions are fundamentally flawed.

In a 2001 report, the IPCC published an image commonly referred to as the "hockey stick." This graph showed relatively stable temperatures from A.D. 1000 to 1900, with temperatures rising steeply from 1900 to 2000. The IPCC and public figures, such as former Vice President Al Gore, have used the hockey stick to support the conclusion that human energy use over the last 100 years has caused unprecedented rise global warming.

However, several studies cast doubt on the accuracy of the hockey stick, and in 2006 Congress requested an independent analysis of it. A panel of statisticians chaired by Edward J. Wegman, of George Mason University, found significant problems with the methods of statistical analysis used by the researchers and with the IPCC's peer review process. For example, the researchers who created the hockey stick used the wrong time scale to establish the mean temperature to compare with recorded temperatures of the last century. Because the mean temperature was low, the recent temperature rise seemed unusual and dramatic. This error was not discovered in part because statisticians were never consulted.

Furthermore, the community of specialists in ancient climates from which the peer reviewers were drawn was small and many of them had ties to the original authors — 43 paleoclimatologists had previously coauthored papers with the lead researcher who constructed the hockey stick.

These problems led Mr. Wegman's team to conclude that the idea that the planet is experiencing unprecedented global warming "cannot be supported."

The IPCC published its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 predicting global warming will lead to widespread catastrophe if not mitigated, yet failed to provide the most basic requirement for effective climate policy: accurate temperature statistics. A number of weaknesses in the measurements include the fact temperatures aren't recorded from large areas of the Earth's surface and many weather stations once in undeveloped areas are now surrounded by buildings, parking lots and other heat-trapping structures resulting in an urban-heat-island effect.

Even using accurate temperature data, sound forecasting methods are required to predict climate change. Over time, forecasting researchers have compiled 140 principles that can be applied to a broad range of disciplines, including science, sociology, economics and politics.

In a recent NCPA study, Kesten Green and J. Scott Armstrong used these principles to audit the climate forecasts in the Fourth Assessment Report. Messrs. Green and Armstrong found the IPCC clearly violated 60 of the 127 principles relevant in assessing the IPCC predictions. Indeed, it could only be clearly established that the IPCC followed 17 of the more than 127 forecasting principles critical to making sound predictions.

A good example of a principle clearly violated is "Make sure forecasts are independent of politics." Politics shapes the IPCC from beginning to end. Legislators, policymakers and/or diplomatic appointees select (or approve) the scientists — at least the lead scientists — who make up the IPCC. In addition, the summary and the final draft of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report was written in collaboration with political appointees and subject to their approval.

Sadly, Mr. Green and Mr. Armstrong found no evidence the IPCC was even aware of the vast literature on scientific forecasting methods, much less applied the principles.

The IPCC and its defenders often argue that critics who are not climate scientists are unqualified to judge the validity of their work. However, climate predictions rely on methods, data and evidence from other fields of expertise, including statistical analysis and forecasting. Thus, the work of the IPCC is open to analysis and criticism from other disciplines.

The IPCC's policy recommendations are based on flawed statistical analyses and procedures that violate general forecasting principles. Policymakers should take this into account before enacting laws to counter global warming — which economists point out would have severe economic consequences.

H. Sterling Burnett is a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research institute in Dallas.

 

The prius is rated higher in the city than on the highway, but I get better mileage on the highway with it.

Most of my driving is city. 45MPG, not bad at all, but not the ~60 advertised.

I do not see why the Prius would be bad in cold weather or certain terrains. It's not a muscle car, but it does what I need it to - get me from here to there. It has a heater that works fine

As far as terrain goes, my commute in it over 2 years is uphill one way and downhill the other. No serious grades like the Calavaras grade in No. Cal. 50 MPG downhill (to work), 40 MPG the other way (home).