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Re: Human vs. natural influences on the environment
All locked up and nowhere to go <cage@critech.com> wrote:
>Dan Evens <dan.evens@hydro.on.ca> wrote:
>>UHG! I can recommend NOT trusting any of these.
>
>Fine. What do YOU suggest people trust? I know that SciAm for some
>years was heavily pro-nuclear, and I factored that into my skepticism.
>Reading several publications is one way to learn their biases.
>
>One caveat: Don't read anything by Lyndon LaRouche, except for laughs.
I dunno. SciAm may have been pronuclear, but the papers they
publish and most of the news they post seem pretty legit to me,
as an interested lay person. I don't note wide discrepancies
between them and the other sci journals.
>>Sample: Sci. Am. published,
>>several times over the last couple years, a graph purporting to show the
>>rise in average global temp. over the last century. What they published
>>was a nice straight line with no error bars, and a rise of something like
>>1 degree C. They never mention that the year-to-year variation is vastly
>>larger than this 1 degree jump,
Says who? Yearly averages have been reported for a while now,
and I don't recall them being "vastly larger than . . . 1 degree."
Perhaps Dan Evens could be more specific about the temperature records
he is referring to?
>Over a century, what is the point in not doing e.g. a 10-year moving
>average? And what would be the point of leaving in effects of phenomena
>like the El Nino Southern Oscillation and the sunspot cycle, when
>discussing the overall climate?
Or, why do we even talk about yearly averages? Day-to-day variations
are far larger than the minor differences between yearly averages.
>>Nor was there ANY kind of ref, not even to previous Sci. Am. volumes,
>>about where this graph came from. There was not even an author's name.
>
>If that's the case, then how do you know...
I'd guess the editors are assuming people will know it is one of the
major temperature record sets, most likely the one from the Goddard
Institute for Space Studies.
<snip>
>I have the same sort of reaction to people (like Nudds) whose demand is
>that we scrap everything except solar and wind as rapidly as possible.
>We should be prudent, certainly, but that includes not recklessly
>abandoning technologies.
Hmmm, who, exactly, is suggesting "recklessly abandoning technologies?"
Let's take wind as a quick case study. At the moment, it costs about
50% more than gas, which is the cheapest conventional technology, and
it produces no CO2. 50% sounds like a lot, but it means that if we
magically replaced 10% of our generating capacity tomorrow with wind,
ratepayer bills would go up by about 2% (energy costs account for
somewhat less than half of electricity bills).
So, a program of reckless abandonment would seem to call for reckless
expansion of generating capacity from wind and other renewables. But
the largest, most ambitious goal I know of in the world is the
European Union's goal to increase wind to 2% of electric generation
by the year 2005. The U.S. does not even have a national goal.
With respect to climate change and altering our energy system in
response, I think we are still in danger of falling far short of
what is needed, rather than doing too much. Perhaps we could call
it the "Chicken Big syndrome"?
Anyway, if you know of someone who is advocating reckless
abandonment, please post a reference--I'd like to see it.
Tom Gray
Director of Communications
American Wind Energy Association
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Tom Gray <tomgray@econet.org>
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