Further, renewable energy is not capable of putting even a dent in global CO2 emissions, as anyone with a rudimentary understanding of mathematics, economics and physics can readily determine.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, if you actually want to reduce CO2 in a meaningful way, try the following: (1) deploy large numbers of nuclear power plants, combined-cycle power plants, simple-cycle gas turbines and hydro-electric dams while reducing the numbers of coal plants; (2) increase the efficiency of energy used in the transportation sector; and (3) increase the efficiency of using energy for heating/cooling and to a lesser extent, lighting. All of the preceding are vastly more effective than renewable energy because the former directly reduce the CO2 when energy is actually needed. The intermittent and diffuse nature of renewable energy yields more of an indirect coupling to energy demand and that is inherently a less effective means to reduce CO2.

Personally, I would not put any particular emphasis on reducing CO2, concentrating instead on the cost effective production and use of energy by whatever technologies that yield reasonable costs for end users. Such a strategy is a major benefit to the economy and creates huge reductions in CO2, but as a secondary consideration.

While you and others may choose to ignore basic mathematical constructs, the difficulties of climate change theories remain.

Now if you and others wish to state that your best guess is that CO2 is causing climate change, you are certainly welcome to do so. However, kindly reframe from touting it as a fact, as it is most emphatically not. Nor can you, or anyone else, put any kind of probability on your guess.

You are referred to the website judithcurry.com , the Climate, Etc. series of postings for more information.

"we can get all of our energy from renewable energy are complete nonsense" -- again, error. Easily proven that a field of solar generating stations using present technology in the Sahara the size of two or three postage stamps on a map the size of a large atlas can supply the total energy presently used in the entire world. Perhaps you meant to add "at a price competitive with dirty coal generation, in which case I would agree only because the low volumes of equipment manufacturing hasn't yet provided the efficiencies needed and easily achievable. See Sargent and Lundy engineering study,

To your point concerning renewable energy:

I agree with you (w.r.t. cost as Len has mentioned) in a general sense, but when I look at one of my monthly electric bills, I see I'm paying $60 for 400 kWhr of electricity. That's 15 cents per kW-hr, as I see it.

It breaks down to something like 6-8 cents for the electricity, 6 or so cents for transmission (line maint,) and rest in the form of monthly connection fee.

Anyway, that works out to a heck of a lot more than 3 cents or 4 cents per kW-hr that coal or nuclear is supposed to cost. The retail cost passed to the residential consumer is much higher; a nominal 15 cents or so.

I'm sure a large factory or whatever would pay much less than that. But for residents, I could see going with wind/solar, especially now when solar can be had for $2 per Watt installed at this point, perhaps less. Use the solar as needed, but pay the connection charge and use the grid when needed.

I suppose some exploration using Excel is needed to determine at what sizes and other factors are needed for this to make sense. But I found it somewhat shocking that the numbers are close enough to even have these sorts of discussions at this point in time. Solar has just gotten very cheap, and to be honest, grid electricity (with all its taxes and connection fees) has gotten pricey for the residential consumer.

This leads to profoundly different policy choices. For example, energy efficiency (including during transmission) becomes much more important - and in the short term probably more important than arguing whether renewable vs coal vs nuclear. I have to admit I find waste heat a much more satisfactory explanation than CO2 - definitely favored by Occam's Razor. IN fact, I have seen calculations based on perturbation theory that "predicted" temperature rises (from 1930s to today) very much in line with what we've observed.

Michael is 100% correct on the fact that man-made global warming is STILL simply a theory. What Michael didn't get into is the non-sense in the article about floods, droughts, increased storms, and othe BS about weather. How old is planet Earth? 4 billion years old? How long have we humans been keeping weather data? 150 years? Yeah that sounds like a reasonable amount of time to determine that "this flood was the greatest of all time and must be due to GW" or "that last drought was the worst in the history of the planet and must be caused by GW." The REAL truth is --- We don't have a clue what the weather was 10,000 years ago in Arizona or 50,000 years ago in Russia, or 2.5 million years ago in Japan. And Len, please don't bring up ice core samples as proof of anything relating to weather.

Michael is also 100% correct about energy. With today's technology, renewables are not much more than a novelty act. Perhaps that will change in the next few decades, but it's reality today. It comes down to a few simply choices actually: either build more nucs and install more gas generation and hydro; OR be prepared for the lights to work only when the wind is blowing, uh, of course depending on where you are on the "energy priority list" of the future.

When I think about all the things that science and scientists have been wrong about over the course of human history, it makes me cringe to hear some of the BS they spew about "tipping points" "CO2 trapping heat" --- CO2 does not, never has, and never will TRAP heat (Trapping heat means there is no escape, which is 100% false). You know the real funny/sad thing is, that we know there will be another Ice Age in a very short period of time (perhaps only a few thousand years), which will kill tens of millions, perhaps billions, of people and create global havoc. It's happened many times before, and it will again. The fact is, as Michael pointed out, these models are only as good as the data programmed into them. And the simple truth is...WE DONT KNOW ALL THE DATA TO PUT IN!

Dennis Baker penticton bc canada V2A1P9 250-462-3796

dennisbaker2003@hotmail.com

Think globally, and this is a global idea. 7 Billion humans generate vast quantities of excrement. I believe this excrement is capable of providing all human electrical demands. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiolysis

Right now hydrogen is perceived as a negative by product, of Nuclear Energy, when it should be the product, as the Pentagon has considered.

reference info

Request for Information (RFI) on Deployable Reactor Technologies ... DARPA-SN-10-37@darpa.mil https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=d0792af88a6a4484b3aa9d0dfeaaf553&... Large scale conversions sites are intended to replace fossil fuel powered electrical facilities the Primary Source of Carbon Emissions.

In the real world, we cannot get all our energy from new renewable energy sources. The reason is quite simple. Solar power goes to nothing every night and wind power regularly decreases to nothing for days and, sometimes much longer than that. So, to get our energy from these sources, we need a technology that will store seriously large quantities of energy for days, weeks and months. There is no technology available–or even on the horizon–that can come anywhere near to doing this.

I am a hydropower engineer and experienced in pumped storage. Pumped storage schemes require a head difference of about 700 m, and an upper and lower lake. They normally store sufficient water for full load operation for between 6 and 10 hours. If they had to store water for months, the lakes would be huge and the evaporation losses would be very high indeed. It simply cannot be done in the practical world.

Then we have the problem that a solar farm has a capacity factor of less than 25%. So even if you could store the energy, you would still need about 3000 MW of solar farm for every 1000 MW of load.

Which ever way you look at it, it cannot work and it would be horribly expensive compared to the proven and safe alternative of nuclear power.

Perhaps.

http://www.prosefights.org/fplwind/nextera.htm#hello1

Regards, http://www.prosefights.org/whitmancrocker/whitmancrocker.htm#grabbe

2 - Think about it. The atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, 18% oxygen, around 1-2% water vapor, 1% trace gases not relevant to atmospheric physics and a mere 0.038% carbon dioxide and 0.00017% methane. It is awfully hard to see how a gas that makes up less than four one-hundredths percent of the atmosphere can have that great an impact on "global warming".

3 - As stated by the IPCC, "water vapour is the most abundant and important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere." It appears that the amount of water vapor in the air, which is nature driven, has a more significant impact on global warming than CO2 ever did. Why not outlaw "steam"?

What planet is the writer and his cohorts from? There is legitimate scientific debate about the severity and causes of global warming. Now that the table has been set, we need a great deal more pure scientific research free from politics and transparent in the scientific community. We need to fully embrace all cost effective forms of conservation and efficiency and work to transform cultures, practices, and product lines that respect conservation.

We need to move to greater utilization of natural gas as fuels and coal substitutes. We n eed to find economical ways that don't destroy our own economy by encouraging the development of mass transit inclding safe bicycle pathways. Knee jerk reactions historically wind up in additional costs, little gains in productivity and no life-improvements as programs die under the weight of beaurocracies who only plan and rarely execute or implement. Ever wonder why political scientist and economists always want to do good things for us with our money. Well wonder no more.

Drill baby drill and conserve baby conserve. It will work. David Hawk

Let’s do a little crude arithmetic. Humans eat food with a digestible calorific value of maybe 2000 Kcal/d. On a continuous basis and a100% e that’s 96.9 watts. (Pro rated, Americans use about 1500 continuous watts.) If we tried to live on cellulosic feed we would starve because we cannot digest cellulose. Even animals that live on grass do not do a very good job of converting cellulose to digestibles. Cattle must spend essentially all day eating and digesting. (A cursory examination of cattle manure indicates it differs little from what they eat. A dried cow pie will burn.) A dog can get all the nourishment he needs in a minute/day if his diet is composed of fat, carbohydrate and protein. So could we, and our excrement would have very little calorific value. For example 250 ml of vegetable oil or fat has 2000 Kcal and it oxidizes to CO2 and water – no calories out with the excrement.

As for hydrogen as fuel I thought that idea was buried a long time ago. There is no hydrogen on this planet. So if we want hydrogen we have to make it. The process is always an energy sink. We expend more energy, no matter the method, than we can recover, no matter the method. If this were not true we would have perpetual motion machines and there would be no need for any other energy sources.

Let's take the "water vapor" issue raised by Bob Vickery. Now, don't you think climate scientists would have thought of this? Even a 'liberal' one would jump at the chance to point out a problem with the current theory to advance their career. But instead of questioning this flawed arguments, people like Bob choose to simply blindly pass them forward.

What's wrong with this argument is that water vapor can quickly drop out of the atmosphere, in just a few days or so. So while it is true that water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, it is a volatile one that can appear and disappear suddenly. Not so with CO2. It stays in the atmosphere for 80 years or so. So it represents a much more persistent source of heating compared with water vapor. It's for this reason that CO2 is considered more of a "driver" of AGW, and water vapor is an "accelerant" or "multiplier" of the effects of other warming drivers.

This has been known and understood by the climate community for a long time. THINK people! Please!!!

A hundred years later the Concordia’s captain for trivial reasons ran his ship onto a rock off Italy.

As to CO2 we had even more warnings than the Titanic captain. World population has gone from 2 billion to 7 billion in my lifetime. But unlike the Titanic captain we didn’t have the simple solutions he had to avoid disaster. If he had been a better officer most of us would never have heard of the Titanic.

http://www.prosefights.org/whitmancrocker/whitmancrocker.htm#ballschmitz

1) You can’t win. 2) You cannot break even. 3) You cannot get out of the game.

I can’t give the physicist who said it credit because I don’t remember who it was. I wish I had said it.

The future is going to be nuclear plus renewables and alternatives. The problem is to figure out the proportions, plus a few other things. And by the way, in looking at the figure in this article I think that I know a little better why so many economies are going into the can. If that figure showed intentions, Sweden would be close to the top, but for all their faults, Swedes know better than to spend an excess of money on nonsense. Can you imagine a country like Spain, with their terrible unemployment, spending money on wind. I cant, but they do.

That is the reason why any sane individual would understand that if we are to maintain anything like our present standard of living or bring the worlds current population to that living standard the continued combustion of fossil fuels cannot and never will be the long term answer. Don Hirschberg has it right although many do not like what he has to say. There are 7 billion of us that aspire to the Paris Hilton lifestyle and that is simply mathematically impossible.

I believe in a precious discussion Don had done a calculation that we would need to build one nuclear plant every WEEK (or maybe every day - I cannot recall his conclusion) to meet the worlds energy demand even for the most BASIC of needs. Population growth is exponential and without enormous changes in energy policy there is no way we can meet that demand by using fossil fuels and it is really stretching the imagination to meet it with nuclear.

So the current path we are on - exponential increase in population - exponential increase in energy consumption is headed for the rocks. To even consider that demand can be met with fossil fuels is just plain ridiculous.

Malcolm