wolfger’s Recent Comments

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  Sorry, my last post was targeted at Tom Laskawy's article under related articles above.On The Copenhagen Conference on food security posted 1 week, 3 days ago 7 Responses

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  Amazing! On the same day at Grist, this article telling us there's no food problem for the 9 billion of us, if we just change our ways of agriculture and then the Lester Brown article "The Copenhagen Conference on food security" telling us that it's all about the glacial melt water, so important to irrigationl agriculture. Are we to believe a simulation that may not have included our diminishing water resources or are we to believe what we actually are seeing in glacial melting? Optimists vs. pessimists?On Feed the world sustainably by 2050? Yes, we can! posted 1 week, 3 days ago 5 Responses

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  Amazing! On the same day at Grist, this article telling us there's no food problem for the 9 billion of us, if we just change our ways of agriculture and then the Lester Brown article "The Copenhagen Conference on food security" telling us that it's all about the glacial melt water, so important to irrigationl agriculture. Are we to believe a simulation that may not have included our diminishing water resources or are we to believe what we actually are seeing in glacial melting? Optimists vs. pessimists?On The Copenhagen Conference on food security posted 1 week, 3 days ago 7 Responses

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  Interesting discussions so far but all limited to large scale generation by traditional methods. I believe that the future is in more local production as is currently being instituted in Germany with residential cogeneration. The latest approach is residential heating with waste heat from small scale in-house generators remotely controlled. Since both the generator's waste heat and the generated electricity are being used, efficiencies in the high 90 percentile are achievable. Natural gas is the primary energy source so far. http://reason.com/blog/2009/09/30/german-company-wants-to-genera http://www.lichtblick.de This approach seems to provide a great "base load" in winter but I don't know about summer when the hot water isn't needed as much. It could be a good transition approach.On Do we need nuclear and coal plants for baseload power? posted 1 week, 5 days ago 144 Responses

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  All the graphs shown strongly correlate with the very first one. Does anyone think that we would be having most of these problems if the human population were only 1 billion? Rather that dream up another technofix lets do a human numbers fix that works and is much cheaper. When considering supporting efforts to reduce CO2 production one should be aware that one can either support cleaner power sources or one could help reduce the future number of generators of CO2. Consider that of the 200 million annual births globally, that around 70 million are unwanted, which is close to the annual increase in global population. For every birth voluntarily prevented, the generation of around 1500 tons of CO2 are prevented in the developed world. In the less developed world around 20 tons of CO2 are prevented. Family planning education and ready availability of birth control have been shown to be the most effective ways to prevent unwanted births even in poor countries. The Optimum Population Trust estimates that "The $7 cost of abating a tonne of CO2 using family planning compares with $24 for wind power, $51 for solar, $57-83 for coal plants with carbon capture and storage, $92 for plug-in hybrid vehicles and $131 for electric vehicles." http://www.optimumpopulation.org/reducingemissions.pdf Supporting Planned Parenthood or similar international organizations will achieve this. One could also consider supporting educational organization such as the Population Media Center which creates very effective radio soap programs to achieve broadcast education of family planning in less developed countries. http://www.populationmedia.org/ Let's work the human dimension!On Why Branson and SuperFreakonomics are wrong, in pictures posted 1 month ago 33 Responses