If those who counsel inaction and delay succeed, billions of humans will suffer unimaginable misery and chaos while most other species will simply go extinct.
Maybe the best one line description of our current situation I have read is:
It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.
That's the final sentence in Elizabeth Kolbert's fine global warming book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, and as I'll show in this post, it is entirely accurate.
How can the traditional media cover a story that is almost "impossible to imagine"? I don't think they can. I'll be using a bunch of quotes, mostly from the NYT's Revkin, not because he is a bad reporter -- to the contrary, he is one of the best climate reporters -- but because now that he has a blog, he writes far more than any other journalist on this subject and shares his thinking. A new Revkin post, "The Never-Ending Story," underscores the media's central problem with this story:
I stayed up late examining the latest maneuver in the never-ending tussle between opponents of limits on greenhouse gases who are using holes in climate science as ammunition and those trying to raise public concern about a human influence on climate that an enormous body of research indicates, in the worst case, could greatly disrupt human affairs and ecosystems.
This sentence is not factually accurate (the boldface is mine). It would be much closer to accurate if the word "worst case" were replaced by "best case" or, as we'll see, "best case if the opponents of limits on GHGs fail and fail quickly." The worst case is beyond imagination. The word "holes" is misleading. And this isn't a "tussle" -- it is much closer to being a "struggle for the future of life as we know it." And all of us -- including Andy -- better pray that it ain't "never-ending. " Before elaborating, let me quote some more :
One of the unavoidable realities attending global warming -- a reality that makes it the perfect problem -- is that there is plenty of remaining uncertainty, even as the basics have grown ever firmer (my litany: more CO2 = warmer world = less ice = rising seas and lots of climate shifts).
Some skeptics have long tried to use the uncertainty as an excuse for maintaining the status quo. Campaigners for carbon dioxide curbs seem reluctant to acknowledge the gaps for fear that society will tune out. So the story migrates back to the edges: catastrophe, hoax. No doubt.
This last paragraph sums up the problem for the media. As an aside, I don't know what "gaps" or "holes" Revkin is talking about, but as I will try to make clear, they don't really exist in the sense that any typical reader would expect from the context.
The "story migrates back to the edges," not because that is inherent to the story, but because that is inherent to all modern media coverage of every big issue. Let me quote Newsweek editor Jon Meacham from last month:
I absolutely believe that the media is not ideologically driven, but conflict driven. If we have a bias it's not that people are socially liberal, fiscally conservative or vice versa. It is that we are engaged in the storytelling business. And if you tell the same story again and again and again - it's kind of boring.
The real story doesn't have much conflict: It is the growing scientific (and technological) understanding that if we don't sharply restrict greenhouse gas emissions soon, we face catastrophe -- that is the right word, the one Kolbert sticks in her title.
The conflict is actually a political one between those who believe in government-led solutions and those who don't. This is a central point. As Revkin himself notes about the Heartland denier/disinformer conference, "The one thing all the attendees seem to share is a deep dislike for mandatory restrictions on greenhouse gases." As I explain at length in my book, a central reason that conservatives and libertarians reject the scientific understanding of human-caused climate change is that they simply cannot stand the solution. So they attack both the solution and the science.
It simply is not accurate to say the real edges of this debate are "catastrophe" or "hoax." Revkin and every reasonable person knows that this is no "hoax," no conspiracy of the thousands of top scientists in the world to deceive the public -- that is laughable, pure disinformation from the conservatives who hate regulations. It is comparable in credibility to the claim that we never landed on the moon.
Revkin also knows, or he should know, that "catastrophe" is not the edge of the debate. Let me explain why.
The middle of the debate is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. That is the mainstream scientific view. That is the "consensus" among our top scientists (even though that is a terrible word, as I've noted). The language is signed off on by 180 governments. You certainly can't call that the "edge."
The middle of the debate forecasts that catastrophe is coming, especially if we actually listen to the deniers/disinformers and don't act to reduce emissions soon. This is the central point that the media either fails to understand or refuses to communicate.
Let me make two related arguments. First, Revkin writes that "a human influence on climate that an enormous body of research indicates, in the worst case, could greatly disrupt human affairs and ecosystems." That research, summarized by the IPCC (PDF), says, for instance:
Climate change is likely to lead to some irreversible impacts. There is medium confidence that approximately 20-30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5-2.5°C (relative to 1980-1999). As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5°C, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.
Now, wouldn't losing 40% to 70% of all species (a 3.5°C rise is a certainty if we lose the "tussle" to opponents of limits on GHGs) be a "catastrophe" by any reasonable definition of the word (without even bringing in the hundreds of millions of people whose lives will be ruined by sea level rise, drought, and water shortages)?
Let me go further. As I (and others, including the IPCC itself) have repeatedly explained, the "holes" or "gaps" in the IPCC work are almost exclusively omissions of hard-to-model things like carbon-cycle amplifying feedbacks and dynamic ice sheet destruction that would tend to make future impacts much worse than those in the IPCC models. And the actual observational record clearly shows that the climate is changing faster than the IPCC models project.
An even more important point, one that the media almost completely ignores, is that the other major source of "uncertainty" in the IPCC reports is that nobody knows for sure how much greenhouse gases humans will emit this century. So the IPCC models a wide range of emissions, including some very low emissions/concentrations scenarios with relatively modest, but still severe, impacts. But the longer we listen to the do-nothing crowd, the more certain that we will end up with very high emissions and concentrations whose brutal impacts are all too certain.
How high?
We are currently emitting 8 billion tons of carbon a year (8 GtC/yr) and rising more than 3% per year -- faster than the most pessimistic IPCC model. There is a little-reported bomb-shell buried in the footnote of the first IPCC report released last year:
Climate-carbon cycle coupling is expected to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as the climate system warms, but the magnitude of this feedback is uncertain. This increases the uncertainty in the trajectory of carbon dioxide emissions required to achieve a particular stabilisation level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Based on current understanding of climate carbon cycle feedback, model studies suggest that to stabilise at 450 ppm carbon dioxide, could require that cumulative emissions over the 21st century be reduced from an average of approximately 670 [630 to 710] GtC to approximately 490 [375 to 600] GtC. Similarly, to stabilise at 1000 ppm this feedback could require that cumulative emissions be reduced from a model average of approximately 1415 [1340 to 1490] GtC to approximately 1100 [980 to 1250] GtC.
The appropriate response to the final sentence, if you oppose greenhouse gas regulations -- or if you worry that those who do will maintain enough credibility/influence in the media and in Washington D.C. that they (continue to) succeed in stalling action -- or if you actually are a member of the media who treat those opponents as if they had a scientifically or morally defensible position -- is "Oh my dear God!"
On our current emissions pace, we will be at 11 GtC/yr around 2020 -- and still rising! That means, if the "other side" wins, or even if they just partially win, by limiting government controls to ones that lead to average emissions of 11 GtC/yr for the century, then the planet's carbon dioxide concentrations, feedbacks including, are headed to 1000 ppm!
Let me repeat, if the other side (as the media labels them) wins, we face 1000 ppm atmospheric concentration of CO2 -- a quadrupling from preindustrial levels -- if not higher. That is not the worst-case, that isn't even business as usual if the disinformers win -- stabilizing at 1000 ppm still requires a lot of government-led effort that conservatives almost universally disdain.
Scientists rarely even bother modeling the impacts of 1000 ppm because "catastrophe" doesn't begin to describe the impacts. We are talking average global temperatures some 10° to 14° C higher -- yes 18° to 25° F higher (and perhaps 50% higher than that on northern land masses like the continental U.S.) -- in any case, far higher than the last time the planet had no ice whatsoever and sea levels were more than 250 feet higher. The ocean would be rendered virtually lifeless. Deserts would engulf vast tracts of the planet. This is not "global warming" or "climate change," it is Hell and High Water. Few scientists have, perhaps until very recently, seriously considered that humanity would be so mindlessly self-destructive that 1000 ppm would be a possible outcome.
To repeat the bottom line: If those who council inaction and delay win, then there is no uncertainty about our future, no gaps, no holes, nothing but millennia of misery for billions and billions of humans and outright extinction for most other species.
I get that the media treats so-called alarmists with skepticism. I sort of understand why Revkin writes this weekend about the conference of skeptics "trying hard to prove that they had unraveled the established science showing that humans are warming the world in potentially disruptive ways," as opposed to more accurate statements like "in potentially catastrophic ways" or "in ways that will be catastrophic if we actually listen to the skeptics."
I understand that much of the traditional media either hasn't taken the trouble to figure out what's going to happen to humanity if the anti-government crowd win -- or, for those in the media who know, feel they just can't keep beating the public over the head with the painful truth. (I guess that's what blogs are for.) But every time they do a story with a different, blander spin, they undermine the urgent need for action. Every time they say there is a middle ground, they push us closer to the certain catastrophe of inaction. I think that qualifies as tragic irony.
So yes, it appears to me that the today's media simply can't cover humanity's self-destruction. When historians write about this time -- bitterly, no doubt, if we have forced them to suffer through Hell and High Water -- the media will get assigned plenty of blame for sins of omission, though obviously not as much blame as those who were actively working to spread disinformation and block action.
I will end with a quote about the journalism of my father's time -- he was an investigative journalist and then a newspaper editor for four decades -- from Edward R. Murrow, See It Now, March 9, 1954:
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.
Jeb Bush still skeptical about climate change
The new Senate global warming deniers
20 climate experts call for aggressive U.S. action
Comments View as Flat
davedenali Posted 11:15 pm
05 Mar 2008
Media & Global Warming
I agree. There's a media model out there that pulls many reporters towards a phony objectivity. There is no pro-Hitler side to the Holocaust story. There is no pro-tobacco industry story. The only good thing about coverage of global warming is that many reporters understand this problem now - that a handful of skeptics does not affect the fact of scientific consensus.
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benp Posted 11:24 pm
05 Mar 2008
This argument is extinct
"Climate change is likely to lead to some irreversible impacts. There is medium confidence that approximately 20-30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5-2.5°C (relative to 1980-1999). As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5°C, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe."
How many species were assessed, and how were they selected? How many studies?
This stat is trotted out a lot, as one of the IPCC's more alarming factoids. But it is meaningless and not quantified.
As far as I can tell, the statements refer to just one study. That's not enough to warrant the degree of alarmism that it has generated.
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JMG Posted 12:37 am
06 Mar 2008
Yeah, but Joe ...
VW is talking about a cool new diesel hybrid, and I heard about some Jatropha and stuff, and Virgin Air flew on biofuels, and the Volt will be here just any minute now, and the Super Bowl was carbon neutral, so wow, man, don't be such a buzzkill. We all wanna fly to take the NZ LOTR tour and then we get to go to Patagonia for our outdoor leadership school, and then we're going snowboarding ...
The state of scientific uncertainty is zero: we are certainly on track to destroy our selves and take a lot of species with us. But the shoddy job that the media elites do on this "story" merely reflects the difficulty they experience when the good guys wear the black hats -- when rich environmentalists obsess about keeping the private auto going and spend more time justifying jet travel as promoting cultural exchange, the media just can't find bad guys. As the hilarious column noted, "If only gays caused global warming."
Meanwhile, the pinhead conference of sold-out scientists and their papparazzi in NY only highlights that, except for their Tobacco science, they look just like the environmentalists jetting about to conferences where they discuss the prospects for plug-in hybrids ad nauseum.
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:13 am
06 Mar 2008
ideological problem about government...
Romm writes:
I think that this is a very important point that needs to be focused on more often. The overwhelming conventional wisdom, since Reagan, and even with (Bill) Clinton, is that government is bad. Part of the problem, intellectually, is that a decent case for government has not been made, while the case against government is at the very center of neoclassical economics.
Even for Romm, and most in the environmental community, "government-led solutions", as Romm puts it, are pretty much restricted to things like cap-and-whatever and carbon taxes, which are meant to use the government to reorient the market. As I keep writing, perhaps ad nauseum to some, in my posts, if this really is an emergency, then we should consider thinking outside the box and advocate a massive redirection of government spending to just build a carbon-free economy.
But aside from my predilections, we need to explain why government is important, or else, as Romm points out, we can't even get to government-led market-based solutions.
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Karen Street Posted 2:01 am
06 Mar 2008
I'm confused
How many times on Gristmill have I read let's try everything before we try nuclear power?
We also need to stop pretending that it won't cost money to address climate change (we need to figure out how to pay, not whether to pay) and that we can get there from here without finding ways to limit individual choices. Miracles may happen, and we may end up doing too much to address climate change, we should have had faith that technology change would be faster than anyone expected. But they may not, and if so, almost all paths are too little, too late.
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:05 am
06 Mar 2008
Karen --
It says in this NY Times article about solar thermal, "Turning glare into Watts", that it takes only two years to put up a solar thermal plant as opposed to over 10 years for a nuclear one...and my bet is that the materials required are much less as well -- a lot of aluminum, I believe, but not a lot of steel and other metals, which has been sinking a lot of coal and nuclear plant projects.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 2:07 am
06 Mar 2008
Reasons...
How many times on Gristmill have I read let's try everything before we try nuclear power?
There's are good reasons for that. Nuclear takes the most amount of planning, takes the longest to build, the longest to offset the emissions from initial construction, the most expensive to build, relys on constant mining of a finite resource, and still emits and produces various types of pollution.
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Karen Street Posted 2:36 am
06 Mar 2008
Fast and faster
Fast is important, which is why the UK will be fast-tracking new nuclear plants. 10 years? For the first couple US nuclear power plant, while NRC dots i's and crosses t's, then construction time is expected to fall to 4 - 6 years, as 4 years is the current timetable for new plants in parts of the world with experience. The Finnish plant, with its delays due to being one of the first, is expected to take 6 years. So between now and 2020, slow, afterwards fast.
The new solar thermal plant at 284 MW, 20% capacity factor, is about 1/25 as large as a new 1,500 MW nuclear power plant, 90% capacity factor. It is part of the solution, but with costs that will hopefully decrease to 10 cent/kWh, land requirements (and the effects of habitat destruction), and requirements for new grid infrastructure, it will not displace nuclear in the immediate future.
I read reports in the policy community, from InterAcademy Council, IEA, UNFCCC, IPCC, etc, etc. I do not try to create policy to be what I want. Solar will be an important part of the solution, but not for decades unless there is technology improvement. (Aside: we need to increase money for energy research by a factor of 3-4.)
Tasermons Partner, can you justify your assertions using a source we can all agree on? Lots of this stuff comes from anti-nuclear power sites, rather than the science or policy community, those who submit their analyses to their peers for review. For me, it's like reading on a parallel track--this community says evolution is happening, and that community says it can't possibly, look at the eye.
Also, does it make sense to oppose nuclear power and slow down its construction and then complain about construction time?
I personally support (almost) all low-GHG sources of energy, and ways to reduce energy use. I was disappointed by Borenstein's analysis showing it doesn't make sense to subsidize current generation photovoltaic (solar) panels, and not just because I have to change my slides. I want all choices to exist, to be cheap. But the reality of failure is grim, and we should not try to make the reality of policy choices fit our preferences.
Karen Street
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infp Posted 3:23 am
06 Mar 2008
Free market fundamentalists
Americans find it difficult to respond to global warming because our culture believes in the infallibility of the free market. It is inconceivable to most Americans that the wealthy car, coal, and oil industries could be leading us into a global catastrophe.
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David Roberts Posted 3:39 am
06 Mar 2008
infp
Can you explain in what way the American car, coal, and oil industries resemble free markets?
grist.org
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Tasermons Partner Posted 4:02 am
06 Mar 2008
New plants are still inferior...
The Finnish plant, with its delays due to being one of the first, is expected to take 6 years. So between now and 2020, slow, afterwards fast.
The Finnish plant will only produce 1,600 MW of energy, and take at least two years to offset the emissions that went into initial construction. That's 8 years before it starts to producea net gains of low-GHG energy (while still emitting other pollutants)
Meanwhile in just two years, America has put up nearly 5,000 MW of wind energy that has already offset the GHG that were a result of the initial construction.
Nearly three times the energy, a quarter of the time, and no pollutants.
And that doesn't include increased capacity from solar, geothermal, landfill gas, and (though currently tiny) wave power.
Nuclear is the least efficient and still takes the longest to produce. It's also the most complicated, and it still produces pollution. And it's also the most expensive.
That's why it's preferable to go with a portfolio of renewables instead.
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:16 am
06 Mar 2008
Karen --
In my post "Let buildings heat and cool themselves" I showed that you could eliminate all coal-generated electricity if buildings generated their own heating and cooling -- I mostly used geothermal heat pumps as an example, but other technologies could be used as well. I think that decentralized energy sources have been seriously underresearched (and for centralized ones, deep geothermal). That's why I'm cooling off (little energy joke there) to big centralized wind/solar, although they will hopefully be part of the mix (a commenter here also points out the problems the mojave could experience with such systems).
There seem to be a few studies that talk about centralized renewable, but I'm not aware of studies concerning decentralized -- are you?
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:19 am
06 Mar 2008
and one other thing...
...speaking of big projects and market philosophy, one of the main roles of government should be to actually build many different kinds of energy projects, so engineers get comfortable with the technologies. I think one of the reasons coal, and even nuclear, look good to utilities is simply that engineers are not as comfortable with renewable projects as these decades-old systems. If engineers were more comfortable with them (and the managers), we would have a much easier time arguing for renewables.
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Colin Wright Posted 4:19 am
06 Mar 2008
Intellectual laziness and the MSM
Joe, I think an important reason the MSM can't "cover humanity's self-destruction" is it is someplace most people don't want to go in their thinking. Most journalists don't have your science background, nor your intellectual honesty. (If they did, would they be welcome at the NYT?)
But I suspect it is for the classic psychological reasons of denial that people filter out the bad news they don't want to hear. As another example, we could be facing a global peak oil meltdown in just a few years. The MSM has had 10 years to scrutinize Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere's Scientific American claims. Yet for most journalists and editors, it is beyond the pale. Easier to rely on conventional wisdom that technology and the markets will always save us.
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Rutilus Semita Posted 6:32 am
06 Mar 2008
Epic Fail!
Jared Diamond's "Collapse: how complex societies choose to succeed or fail" is a great read on this topic. He shows historically and from a cross discipline perspective that societies can in fact march headlong into self-destruction. Some roll back or stop the decline process but that seems to be the exception to the norm. People are complacent and dislike bad news, especially when that bad news forces them to change substantially how they live. It's likely already too late and we won't see serious climate action until things get really, really bad. Hopefully I'm wrong and we'll reach a societal tipping point based on individual and group grass-roots decision making. Power elites will not change until their own profits or power are greatly threatened. Change has to go from the bottom up as a result, especially with the lag time in hitting the point of no return and seeing the climatic effects of having passed it. Governments won't react until it's too late.
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Hal 9000 Posted 6:35 am
06 Mar 2008
Collapse
It has been a while since I read Jared Diamond's Collapse, but recent posts by Joe Romm, Jon Rynn and others certainly support the notion that our political and cultural institutions, of which the media is a critical part, may ultimately fail us. I don't rely on the MSM extensively for environmental news, but there is at least some reasonably good in depth reporting on issues that are immediate, such as droughts, water supply, and wildfires. This makes sense because the immediate is news. I also agree with the premise that scientific predictions of critical events that may happen because of climate destabilization in 5, 10, 20, 30, 50 or 100 years are also news and should be reported as such. However, because predictions lack immediacy, the reporting treats the predictions as opinion. The reporting then balances puts scientific predictions on one side of the scale and a variety of contrary opinion on the other side of the scale without proper regard for the relative weight each is due.
Simplistically, we're not very good at predicting, understanding and addressing problems that result from our actions when the problems aren't immediate and obvious. Perhaps at least in part in recognition of this, some environmental and religious leaders such as Jim Wallis have promoted the addition of a specific moral or ethical component to decision-making (e.g., our governmental budgets should be viewed as moral documents, corporate law should be changed to permit the consideration of profitability over the long-term rather than quarter to quarter, we should consider the effects of our actions on future generations).
Interestingly, raising ethics and morals as one way to fill the gap that seems to prevent us from grappling with future problems effectively yields yet another delayer response. Beyond the simplistic denial of science or the patently obvious defense of near-term self-interests is the "ordered moral priorities" argument: "we will achieve more social good spending dollars now on immediate problem X than we can possibly hope to achieve by spending scarce dollars now to address uncertain future problem Y." This argument has been frequently discussed on Grist in other threads, but I think it underscores one of the fundamental problems of our media and politics. As Jon Rynn continues to argue, the science indicates that we need significant transformational change now in order to respond to climate destabilization in an effective and timely manner. "Collapse" demonstrates that cultural change isn't easy and that some societies will chose extinction over change. The delayers use our existing cultural norms to distract, confuse and ultimately to delay, minimize or prevent change. If we can't identify the denier/delayer response as outside of accepted cultural norms and if we're unwilling to consider necessary cultural change, we may well end up like the Vikings in Greenland.
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Pangolin Posted 7:21 am
06 Mar 2008
"Doomer" = Realist
Only the doomers are using realistic numbers. We can see the current figures reflecting ice melt, glacial mass loss and permafrost melting and understand the implications. The IPCC "consensus" demands better studies before they will acknowledge the acceleration of the rate of change. A rate that will accelerate still further in the near future. What happens when shell formation of trillions of sea creatures, calcium carbonate, reverses and become as carbon source instead of a sink?
While we debate climate change on our late-model laptops real people in other parts of the world are feeling the damage to croplands as grain prices go up and their bellies go empty. Singing "We are the World" doesn't make it rain on schedule; people die. Google:"food riots" and more than enough news comes up to turn your stomach.
Anybody who thinks that we can ride out climate change in "fortress AmeriKa" should think again. Easily half of all jobs are dependent upon cheap imported goods. Another large chunk of economic activity is in the automotive sector. Real estate and finance are already on the ropes partially because nobody has any idea how to value land in potential flood zones. The ripple effect tears through the economy as asset values vanish.
The Bush administration, congress and the major media news services are having fits trying to sugar-coat all the bad news coming down the wires but it leaks out the edges. We're screwed. Blackouts are commonplace, food prices are rising, whole towns disappear under tornadoes, fires rip through the suburbs and Atlanta needs something to drink.
We are so far beyond what changing our lightbulbs will fix it's silly. We need a door to door, retail overhaul of western civilization and there is no public voice willing to say that. We need to get to negative net emissions globally and that just isn't going to happen either. People think green is a brand instead of a lifeline on a sinking ship.
All the kings horses and all the kings men are off doing their damndest to make things worse so don't expect any help there. So eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow things are going to be worse.
Put the Carbon Back
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Karen Street Posted 9:31 am
06 Mar 2008
a MW is not a MW
There are more comments than I can respond to.
Tasermons Partner keeps saying that nuclear power plants have a long payback for the energy of building them. Source please, one we can all agree is respected.
I wish that energy sources had capacity factors attached,as well as capacity. 5,000 MW wind at 30% capacity factor produces about the same amount of electricity as the Finnish plant. So in two years, we put up as much wind as one nuclear power plant, and if we could build more than two nuclear plants at a time, we could put up nuclear faster.
Re Collapse, I often think of how Europeans in Greenland would not change their way of being when the climate changed, and they died, as did the culture they were trying to protect. Many find it difficult to change our way of living, and many find it difficult to change beliefs on how to supply electricity. It was one thing when opposing nuclear power just killed tens of thousands of Americans/year, hundreds of thousands of Chinese, through coal. Now the dangers are much greater.
Jon, pretty much all decentralized sources of electricity in the US are diesel generators. I don't think that many see decentralization as the way to go except for people who live far from the grid, whether an individual house or a small town. Locally, most PV are on houses well-connected to the grid. Lots of inefficiencies with decentralization, sort of like the GHG emissions from everyone using efficient cars vs everyone using the bus and train.
This is all I have time for now, sorry.
I do have a question for Jon--some questions from conflict resolution. What do you believe about nuclear power, and what could you learn, if you confirmed it to be true, that would change your mind about the need for nuclear power?
Karen Street
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JMG Posted 9:34 am
06 Mar 2008
Oh, and don't forget the obvious
Corporate-owned media is not in the business of running too many stories along the lines of "The following heavy advertisers are helping destroy the world your children will inherit: GM, Ford, Toyota, .... all airlines, all overseas tourism promoters, and the entire real estate lobby from top to bottom."
The list could (and in reality does) go on and on. But how long does the NY Times go on if those huge real estate, auto, and airline/tourism ads dry up?
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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christophersj Posted 11:17 am
06 Mar 2008
Karen, tell me about
Karen, tell me about wastes storage.
I'm a lay person here, not an engineer or scientist. Tell me in plain language about storage over very long periods of time.
-Christopher
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bookerly Posted 11:27 am
06 Mar 2008
The Money
Good post. I agree with JMG about the money. The MSM is conflicted because the folks who buy full page ads in their glossies and mucho tv and radio time don't want them to tell the truth. They claim this isn't ideological, but really, what else would they say? (Your honor, I don't know where the bag of money in my trunk came from, and not it didn't influence my votes at all!).
Meacham claims there are not enough stories?? Does anyone actually believe him? What a load!!! They can print endless stories about rock stars in rehab, but not about the species that are threatened and in danger? Not about the people suffering from Crack (err corn) Ethanol driving food prices higher? They could go from country to country and find millions of stories.
They think this is boring? I stopped reading their rags out of boredom and disgust long ago.
It is certainly true that people don't seem to be getting it. But a lot of that does have to do with the conflicted and confused messages folks are getting.
The average American struggles with their job, money worries, their family, and if they are lucky, a little bit of leisure time.
But the problem isn't only the media, it is the politics. There is no national mass campaign which has clear goals and can mobilize folks to put politicians feet to the fire.
Notice how both Clinton and Obama added class based economics to their messages when they needed the Edwards voters.
The environmental movement needs to move beyond the technicalities of stopping Global Warming, and focus on the politics. The technicians and scientists have many answers, but it is the political folks who will cause the paradigm to shift.
(Well, technically, the collapse of industrial society could cause the shift, but do we really want to go there?)
patrick in Beijing
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Karen Street Posted 11:43 am
06 Mar 2008
Nuclear waste
Christopher,
More on waste storage here, but the skinny is this:
- essentially no exposure to radioactivity to anyone for 10,000 years, then it begins to increase
- maximum exposure at 300,000 years is 260 mrem/year
- about the same as the radioactivity in a one cigarette/day habit, but radioactivity is not the main carcinogen in tobacco.
Coal will expose people to 4 times as much radioactivity as will nuclear over nuclear's complete life-cycle. You have a few parts per million radioactive atoms and use a million times as much fossil fuel as atomic fuel, and voila. But we ignore this amount of radioactivity because there are so many more important problems in fossil fuel pollution. Why do we pay attention to it for nuclear power?Fossil fuel plants require 100,000 - million times as much fuel and produce that much more waste than nuclear plants. Compare 20 pounds or so of carbon dioxide each day if we get our electricity from coal, half that for natural gas, to a soda can worth of nuclear waste over our lifetime.
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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Jon Rynn Posted 12:00 pm
06 Mar 2008
Karen --
I guess my response to the question, what would it take to find nuclear power acceptable, is in some ways the same as my response would be to so-called "doomers", that is, people who think that we can't recover from a fossil-fuel-less society: We need to have enough models and simulations of a renwable-energy based society that it becomes clear that there is a fatal flaw in the hypothesis that a renewable-energy based society is possible.
I know that generally it is up to the hypothesis maker to prove that the hypothesis is, at least, possible; and I would be thrilled if people, including me, did that. But basically, pro-nuclear energy (and doomer) advocates are putting forth a negative hypothesis: that a renewable-energy=based society is not possible (by renewable energy based, I mean 100% of energy).
If I ran the zoo, I would probably retire the nuclear plants only after all fossil fuels have been retired, including natural gas (you may be thrilled to know that that constitutes movement in my opinion of nuclear power). But it still seems to me that the resources for energy generation would be better spent on renewables, not nuclear.
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Karen Street Posted 12:39 pm
06 Mar 2008
importance of nuclear power
Jon,
Thank you very much for your response.
To make sure I understand, you place nuclear power as better than fossil fuels, but worse than renewables (all renewables??? or are there exceptions?)
If you learned that it were true that nuclear power is needed, you would stop trying to solve the problem without nuclear?
What you said confuses me. I would not assume that the people who are creating the reports to address climate change, the big reports, UNFCCC, InterAcademy Council, IEA, IPCC, and so on, are pro-nuclear. Some are, but the main emphasis seems to be to find ways to create affordable energy that don't do great harm to people and the Earth. They are not fussing over a fraction of a cent/kWh, but they are realistic about how decisions are made.
I discovered climate change in 1995, and people in great numbers were working at that time to try to find solutions.
Thank you again for your answer.
Karen Street
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amazingdrx Posted 12:40 pm
06 Mar 2008
Negative hypothesis
Yeah, that's it Jon. They simply deny that renewables and conservation can work.
And the gloss over evidence that they can work by claiming that since renewables and conservation are a small fraction of total power use now, they can't get to 100% replacement of fossil and nuclear power in time to reverse GHG disaster. And they will cost too much.
Then of course it comes down to that same old false dilemna we have pointed out to Karen over and over again. Coal or nuclear.
This has been replayed time and again, while nuclear advocates ignore evidence of lower cost solar and wind, economic stimulation from renewables, conservation using plugin hybrids and geo heat exchange, and smart grid techology that CAN make renewables and conservation work.
To win their argument they need to address the studies that say renewables and conservation can work. Otherwise the dilemna they pose is indeed a false one, between coal or nuclear power.
They have no proof that nuclear power is safe and cost effective now. only after new designs are developed and tested could they then make that claim. And only if these new reactors were successful. Present nuclear power is not.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Pompey Road Posted 1:08 am
07 Mar 2008
A Roaches Birthright
Hanging in space like a perfect jewel, a beautiful blue green orb the envy of the universe. Third planet from the sun, a little closer in, a little farther out and the miracle of life that gives this planet its singular uniqueness would not be a part of the universal consciousness. Mars hangs in the distance a reminder to humanity of Earths precarious place in the universe and its tenuous hold on life. Man now pines over a refuge on such an uninhabitable place because its getting hard to breath here, it never occurs to him to rejuvenate this garden paradise or to even stop the destruction of the earth. From the time man discovered fire he has used it to destroy the planet, adept in using either chemical combustion or nuclear fire, adept and eager to either burn or poison whatever he turns his mind to. From scratching in the ground with a stick to using gigantic earth machines to dig coal and scar the earth man has left a festering open wound on much of the land, destroying natural habitat and ruining the very essence of life, fresh water.
The best political system man could come up with is one where the few exploit the many and like parasites feed off the masses. The needs of the few are provided on the backs of the many and not only needs but also vulgar opulence that decry's the material waste and pollution it breeds. In the land of desert sand and scorpions poison is pumped from beneath the ground to feed the insatiable desires of capitalism and a radical religious fervor is burning like a torch ready to ignite it. Like a moth to a flame they run to it, mesmerized by it, addicted to it, they lie, cheat and kill for it. The nations of the world go whoring after it. They try feverishly to substitute it with more dead matter from the ground that poisons the air and wraps the planet in a death shroud. As with alchemy of old they try to turn coal into black gold. Smoke stack's pump death clouds into the air signaling to each other the end is near. The smoke forms clouds shaped like all the demons in hell and the sulfur adds a sense of realism that Dante could not pen with words.
As the last of the species dies without the ritual of chemical embalming those at least can now say they are in harmony with the earth. Something good may come of them yet. As the last hyenas in Africa tells the last human whom the joke was on and what they were laughing about the scorpions of the desert shake hands over the graves of the princes of Arabia. The cockroaches will come forth out of the darkness and claim their inheritance. They will party on the corpses of the last humans and rejoice in their demise.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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Hal 9000 Posted 3:47 am
07 Mar 2008
Coal v. Nuclear
Shouldn't the premise of the coal v. nuclear debate really be expanded beyond the United States? The reality is that nuclear is part of the energy supply mix globally now and will be for the foreseeable future. The UK, for example, appears ready to proceed with new nuclear plants. However, to the extent that nuclear must be part of the mix, from the climate's perspective, wouldn't it be better to focus on ways to substitute new nuclear in China for old and dirty coal there? From a timing perspective, and as our President has noted, it's a lot easier to get things done in a dictatorship.
Also in terms of cultural change and values, Bill McKibben's "Deep Economy" provides a very useful examination of the value of economic efficiency in our culture. Local systems may be less efficient than centralized ones. However, the values that local systems promote may ultimately be preferable to the values that centralized systems do.
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:37 am
07 Mar 2008
"What are you doing, Dave"?
I don't know if McKibben goes far enough in discussing efficiency --- here's an interesting article on the problems with efficiency -- I think we need to be talking about how we need to change the structure of the society. The problem is not so much that cars get a low mpg, the problem is that houses are spread out so far that you need to drive too many miles. In that sense, localized economies make sense, partly because they minimize transportation, partly because resilience is different than maximization; you might call resilience the optimization of the very-long-term.
Pompey Road, sounds like the lorax meets yertle the turtle, and I mean that in a flattering way.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 2:47 pm
07 Mar 2008
Nuclear still has big CO2 problems...
In 2001, professors Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith released a study which argued that, though nuclear plants don't produce any CO2 directly, the energy required for the rest of the nuclear fuel cycle (uranium mining, enrichment, transportation) and power plant life cycle (construction, maintenance, decommissioning) leads to significant carbon dioxide emissions, especially as usage of lower-grade uranium becomes necessary.
http://www.stormsmith.nl/report20050803/Chap_1.pdf
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JMG Posted 2:51 pm
07 Mar 2008
Media complicity
I just watched an AMAZING one-hour talk by historian Naomi Orestes on the American Denialism. Unbelievably good.
Not only does she do a terrific job recapping the science of climate change (with its much older roots than most people realize) but she also firmly locates the denialist position in the outcrop of the other great scientific fantasy of our time, the "Star Wars" missile defense boondoggle.
It goes fast, and you will be grateful for her careful, well-organized explanation of a crucial topic. If you have teens, make them watch it with you. Send it to everyone you know.
This is a fascinating, sobering talk, showing (among other things) just how the press failed to understand or to detect that even people with PhDs could intentionally attack science for political purposes and what that failure has cost us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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Colin Wright Posted 4:06 am
09 Mar 2008
Better dead than red?
JMG, Thanks for the link. The video does a good job of demonstrating that the denial of AGW is rooted in politics, not science. The political ideology of Cold Warriors like Fred Singer, who is widely quoted in the denialist literature, is that any form of government regulation is a sign of "creeping communism".
Thus Singer opposed regulation of CFC's, acid rain, and second-hand smoke as well as AGW with the strategy of raising doubt in the minds of the public about established science. As Naomi Oretses indicated, their libertarian philosophy draws on Barry Goldwater's famous edict, Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Thus, the ends justify the means, something Lenin and Mao would surely agree with.
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benp Posted 5:11 am
12 Mar 2008
Green is not red. Not green is not blue.
"The video does a good job of demonstrating that the denial of AGW is rooted in politics, not science."
It does far more to reveal Oreskes' own political motivation... http://www.climate-resistance.org/2008/03/pesky-oreskes.h ...
... And that's the biggest problem with claiming that "denial" is "ideological". Environmentalism is a political ideology. http://www.climate-resistance.org/2008/02/science-environ ...
Environmentalism is a political ideology which hides behind "science". If you challenge the politics, you get challenged on the science - "science says". If you challenge the "science", you get challenged on your politics. If you point out that the science doesn't say what the political argument says it says, you get accused of being funded by Exxon.
But there is no reason why anyone who is sceptical of environmentalism, or climate alarmism should naturally be aligned with the right.
Colin says "The political ideology of Cold Warriors like Fred Singer...". Fred Singer, if he is on an anti-communist mission, is not the only sceptic. He just happens to be your favourite. The problem is that your whole argument falls apart when we identify sceptics who are not of the right.
But of course, it's a convenient lie... So I expect it will be repeated, ad nauseam.
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Lugubrizione Posted 5:04 pm
21 Jun 2008
Politics & ideologies
We (humans) emit 27 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, of which 8 billion is a direct result of burning fossil fuels.
Benp, do you doubt these facts?
Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_ ...
Just the sharp rise in carbon dioxide content should be a warning: More than 30% increase since the 18th century, and at the same time we cut down the forests and in other ways reducing natures' ability to absorb the emissions.
A few more warnings:
Exxon have now cut funding to Marshal institute and several other so-called think tanks. The CEO of Shell admits that our way of life is affecting the climate in a bad way. Pentagon reports warn of increased instability making terrorist threats seem like peanuts.
I am probably what some call an environmentalist, since I want to stop "big business" from looting, pillaging and destroying our planet. I do not need ideology as political basis, I find my reasons in science. Cause and effect. It is pretty easy. :)
Global Climate Change is a political debate, since part of the solution is government control & regulations. The right-wing ideologies are of course opposed to this, since it could mean an end to their highly lucrative business.
We see it time and time again: Some poor country discover valuable natural resources, but instead of benefiting end up with dictators, corruption, pollution, poverty and ruined environment. It isn't even necessary to go outside US borders: look into strip mining and mountaintop removal.
Our consumerism and addiction to growth is ruining the planet.
I feel sorry for those unable to realize this.
The clock is ticking...
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