Science very much disagrees with you.
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To be honest, saving energy and moving to use greener energy sources is a good thing but requiring elder people to invest into old house more money than it’s worth is just insane! Interestingly Finland seems to vote yes for everything inside the EU without caring about the cost. There have even been discussion about forbidding the use of wood as a heat source because of particles, insane!
We can all agree that conservation of the environment and reducing the impact of human activity on natural resources is a good thing and a goal. There are of course inadequate decisions which must be subjected to political and public scrutiny and discourse. Ruining elderly people’s finances isn’t a wise thing to do. And so isn’t using wood for heating houses in towns, because the quality of air will degrade. Nor problem with that on the countryside. We always need to take into account the context when looking for a solution.
Respectfully he did not get what is going on. It is simple. As more Co2 we have in our atmosphere as more it is warming up. So simple. And we can’t compare with Perm times. There it was much more warm. What ever. That is no question. People decide while it is form them more comfortable. They form their own truths. I know that phaenomena from many Software vendors and programmers hanging on a death end platform and don’t want to get away. What shall I say.
Short description: using the energy coming from wind and Sun is definitely the right way and should be the main energy source since hundreds of years. The chance behind: having 20 times of todays capacity we can produce hydrogen and build methane from it and store it in our methane storage’s without any problem and use in in the existing infrastructure without problems like natural gas. So why not?
They speak then always about the low efficiency and there is the dead end and all people running for storage in Batteries. Wow. Not working as we know. But at the end we will not do anything on it. They don’t like this thinking.
Covering all roofs with Solar Panels and all possible places with wind generators would give the chance to get out of the existing use of fossile energy. Then we would have no problem anymore. We can do that and we have the industries but not the governments which are getting that this is the only way with real sense.
It is painful to see that the people don’t want to sod any change. We could. But we wouldn’t.
Solarpanels are almost useless as a power source at winter and you need a really big wind mill to power anything at all. There is also the noise factor and how animals like birds are impacted.
This needs to be taken into account when looking for wind mill sites, for sure. So we do when setting drilling rigs → noise, pollution, destruction of habitat. We need balanced decisions based on facts and context, not based on personal beliefs and preferences.
Stacey Dooley made an excellent documentary on fast fashion and how cotton production is responsible for so much environmental damage.
I mention this here because this documentary also demonstrates in microcosm how human activity can affect the climate, how diverting water for cotton production reduced the Aral sea to a bowl of dust and how the loss of that vast body of water affected the local climate.
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Yeah that’s the other aspect of this. While most people who just have a daily commute charge at home off 117 volt AC and that works fine (see below), for road trips and to fully eliminate “range anxiety”, chargers are needed LITERALLY “everywhere”, on curbside where people park on the street, in every grocery or drug store parking lot, etc. Nothing less than level 2 and the faster the better. They can’t just be concentrated in shopping malls and parking garages, and half of them not in operating condition, as is often the case here in the US.
Here in NY state they have a program to increase the # of charging stations on major highways and that will help, but not enough.
There are supply chain problems also. During the pandemic I could not get anyone to install a level 2 charger at my house; they were not obtainable. I think the ChargePoint network was soaking up the entire supply at the time to expand their wimpy charging network, which, consisting as it does mostly of level 2 chargers, is a little more ubiquitous but still wimpy. Since a level 2 charger install at home was around $1K anyway I just let it go and have found level 1 “trickle charging” adequate for my needs; I don’t drive very many miles anyway so each Saturday night I’ll plug the EV in and take it from usually 70 to 75% charge to 100% in 8 or 9 hours, unplug it the next morning, and done. If I were doing a daily commute I might do that 2 or 3 times a week. Just requires a little planning, and if I have an unexpected longer trip I need to top off for, the car dealership offers a fast charger for free (though you might have to fight with someone else for use of it).
This is just another example of something that requires social and political will that we lack, so it gets done half-baked and doesn’t really work properly.
I agree with that… Although I am still working for the moment, I am in my late 60’s, and my house is a bit older than I am and has not been updated…
Putting a lot of money into the house for anything not absolutely needed, would be problematic for retirement savings. Given the timeline because of age it would not provide a good return on the investment…
Social security is modest to say the least, and medicare needs supplemental private insurance that is still not comprehensive, so in the US a comfortable retirement is EXPENSIVE!
Also I don’t have a garage nor the electrical infrastructure in the house to charge an electric car, and New England winters can be a bear.
What sounds good on paper has a lot of real world issues for older homes…
- Karen
Good to have reasoned, non aggressive debate. May I suggest you check out the following URLs?
http://www.thelightfootinstitute.ca/documents/A%20new%20look%20at%20current%20climate%20science%20and%20carbon%20dioxide%20Rev%203%20September%2012%202019.pdf
This is a typical appeal to authority fallacy. The man is a physicist. Doubtless intelligent, but he’s talking outside his area of expertise and mostly out of his arse.
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Time will tell. The temperature records for the planet over the centuries are of interest, as is the fact that CO2 lags behind temperature rises. There is no doubt the climate is changing. There is considerable doubt as to whether we can do anything about it. Focussing on a single component of the atmosphere is like coding everything in COBOL and complaining that nobody else knows how to code properly.
Then it’s a good thing that climate science doesn’t focus exclusively on CO2, isn’t it?
Even on a small scale it easy to test the hypothesis that CO2, and others like methane, act as green house gases
Clouds obviously play a role in the earth’s atmosphere energy balance. No scientific model describing a highly complex system like the earth’s climate can deliver predictions with a probability of occurrence of 1.
The article is an opinion piece published by other people than Mr. Clauser. The choice of words (i.e. “Very Dishonest Disinformation”) betrays an intent to sway public opinion rather than adding facts and value to the scientific discourse.
I concur with @bgrommes that Mr. Clauser’s reputation as a scientist is used to impress the public and to give credibility to the assumptions that are made on that website.
We cannot leave earth and depend on the planet’s resources. Using the fact that complex models cannot deliver predictions with a probability of occurrence of 1 to discredit the warnings about human-induced climate change as ‘dishonest’ is a political strategy, not scientific discourse.
May I suggest you check out the following URLs?
“The evidence is clear; the sun has always controlled the temperature of the Earth’s various climates.”
The assertion that the sun, sun spots, etc is responsible for the warming climate has been conclusively refuted decades ago. If you really want a “reasoned debate” then maybe look at facts and not opinion pieces.
Have a look at the temperature fluctuations over the last 20,000 years here (the time axis goes from top to bottom so scroll down):
and then explain what happens at the end. How does the sun suddenly and with only miniscule changes (like the sun spot cycle and all the other cycles, nothing out of the ordinary at all) have such a dramatic effect on the World?
It doesn’t.
As for “the fact that CO2 lags behind temperature rises”:
the warming is delayed due to the long timescales of ocean heat uptake. Initially, the ocean takes up a large amount of heat, but this heat uptake decreases over time, allowing the atmosphere to warm.
Which you would know if you had bothered to look at scientific facts and reputable publications.
Good write-up is here: Rising temperatures may cause a rise in carbon dioxide, but this does not refute human-caused climate change
There is ONLY ONE explanation that fits the available data - human industrialisation. Everything else is Trumpian-style misdirection.
To see how you’ve been duped and played read this quite good Wikipedia article on Climate Change denial
But then it is MUCH easier to fool someone than to convince them that they have been fooled, because as soon as people have “invested” into something (time, thought, emotion, money, etc) they are loath to “loose their investment”. That’s basic human psychology.
[Which brings us neatly to Xojo … but that’s another story]
You might also want to read up on the American Petroleum Institute that already pointed out in the 1960s that CO2 emissions are problematic and WILL lead to Climate Change … but then that research was buried (just like the tobacco industry buried their research on Cancer caused by Smoking and The Addictive Nature of Nicotine) and its mission was changed. Read more about it at
There is a difference between Science and pseudo-Science. You know how you can spot which is which?
Science follows and discusses FACTS, and comes up with theories and hypotheses - but every proposed explanation has to conform to the facts.
pseudo-Science does not play by the same rules - it’s free-wheeling, ignores facts that don’t fit their story, plays on paranoia and suspicion, on greed and unwillingness to change, tries to sow doubt about established facts, regurgitates long disproven theories (like “it’s all down to the sun”), cherry picks and misrepresents what others say, makes up stuff and outright lies if convenient etc … and if you nail it down on one point being wrong just jumps to another … which is why conspiracy theories are so successful.
Humans are much more Homo idioticus than Homo sapiens …
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Unfortunately this subject has become so tribal that it’s hard to get either side to be honest about what they do and don’t know as fact.
I once heard a climate scientist being interviewed and he admitted that they had so little understanding of the impact of cloud cover on the climate that it wasn’t in their model at all. He also admitted the increase in CO2 levels had caused a greening of the planet ( particularly from algae ) which had been observed from satellite imagery but that had not occurred in their model.
Scientists from the Norwegian Antarctic Survey also once stated in a paper that the analysis of historical data involved a “number of speculative assumptions”.
You never hear these kind of caveats anymore. The whole debate has become so toxic scientists have started to behave like preachers asserting their “truth” is absolute and should not be questioned.
From WHEN were these models? 1980s? You are aware that the models have been MUCH improved?
That being said models are still models and cannot take account of everything - which is why the models (which are run multiple times with a variety of parameters changed, eg what is the expected industrial growth etc) tend to err on the side of caution and give rather conservative predictions.
The actual data however show that the Climate Change is progressing MUCH FASTER than the models predicted - even faster than the more extreme models said. For example just google Antarctic Ice Sheet Melting
Which is why Human caused Climate Change is now considered a FACT in the scientific community.
But your post is a nice example of what I wrote above about how climate deniers work: Take old stuff and rehash it. Throw doubts on the Scientists. Don’t work with facts, work with emotion, suspicion and paranoia. Cherry-picking and selective quoting.
Thanks for making my point for me.
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That is why we need to fend off political interference in scientific research and debate.
Websites like the one @supcumps referred to are not helpful.
If you had read my post further up you’d know I am neither a doubter nor a denier. The irony is your hysterical response actually demonstrated my point rather than the other way around.