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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Can you explain in what way the American car, coal, and oil industries resemble free markets?

grist.org

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.

...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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

   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

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.

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

    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.

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.