It needs to be looked at.

It's actually a very tiny percentage of scientists who don't believe man's contribution to climate change is significant. Just about every national science academy in the world is on board - are you suggesting it's some sort of global conspiracy?

Wrong. It might well be going through [ia[/i warming phase but not of the magnitude we are seeing now.

No there aren't. There are a relative handful and, oddly, a large number of them turn out to be funded by the carbon industries.

Aye. There's a plausible argument that people think there are as many because public broadcast news stories require 'balance', and the rest of the media is effectively for sale.

It's not just that TV requires "balance", it also demands a ridiculous degree of [ibrevity[/i. Despite there being more news programs spread across more news channels with unlimited, twenty-four-seven time it's a rarity indeed to find ANY issue given more than five minutes coverage. You don't need to be a genius to realise this automatically favours prevailing wisdom. Any scientist arguing against such simply doesn't have enough time to state his (often complex) argument and mostly ends up looking like some kind of crackpot.

mugwump - why muddy the issue by talking about disposal/storage of radioactive waste? If CO2 emissions are the great issue, then deal with that first. If you want to do anything about CO2 in the foreseeable future - i.e. within the next 25 years or so - you need nuclear power. If you believe the side-effects aren't worth the cost then sobeit - but you are then directly accepting that the UK cannot and will not reduce its carbon emissions in any meaningful way. You cannot have it both ways with current technology.

You also greatly overestimate the carbon emissions from mining uranium in places like Australia compared to the emissions generated in digging coal, getting gas out of the ground etc. Bottom line is that there is no fuel which can be currently utilised which in itself doesn't require the use of other fossil fuels to get it.

People can stick to the dogma of we 'must do something' if they want - all you'll do is add to everybody's cost of living without reducing global carbon emissions one iota. That position is quite obviously insane if you accept the fact that the US, Japan, China and India have all backed away from doing anything about emissions at all, and that without them any efforts elsewhere are meaningless.

I'm not advocating that position BTW. What needs to be done is to get the actual major economies (not second tier ones like the UK) to get on board. You won't do that by attempting to browbeat anybody. There is no economic threat that Europe can use which can't be dealt back in spades by the likes of the US. If they choose to see 'carbon pricing' as a tariff they'll penalise Europe in exactly the same way in reverse.

I'm arguing that people deserve to be told the real costs of carbon reduction. Not the costs today, with their zero impact on carbon, but what they will HAVE to be in as little as 5-10 years if they are to have any meaningful impact. Every single scheme so far in place - including the patently ridiculous European one - involves passing the buck down the track, with virtually exponential carbon pricing. The reason is obvious - nobody wants to tell people that their real standard of living MUST fall - in the western world quite significantly - with any meaningful attempt to cut carbon emissions.

Again, so long as people are told the truth about the costs of carbon reduction, I have no problem with it. So long as its wrapped in its current disguise, all you're likely to see is huge disappointment in carbon reduction, accompanied by fairly significant cost increases and some nice green entrepreneurs making millions in the process.

I'm not sure what issue I am muddying. Do you think the myriad problems associated with nuclear waste disposal and storage (many of which we still haven't solved, btw), plant decommissioning etc. [url=http://www.energybulletin.net/node/15345aren't dependent on C02 intensive processes?[/url



In order to lower CO2 we *NEED* to adopt an extremely dangerous method of energy production the waste products of which will still be LETHAL to organic life millions of years into the future? We *NEED* this?



I have no idea whether we can meet CO2 targets without nuclear. Neither do you.



I agree. But nuclear energy comes with a whole load of harmful baggage that other forms do not.

[url=http://www.stormsmith.nl/publications/Energy%20Security%20and%20Uranium%20Reserves-July%202006.pdf"Nuclear power emits CO2 and other GHGs. On a global scale its contribution to mitigating emissions of GHGs is negligible and will remain so"[/url

--Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen (Senior scientist & expert reviewer for IPCC).

That report is flawed in several ways. It excludes the high grade uranium in Australia currently under export moratorium (all of Queensland). Even then it doesn't deny a potential short-term CO2 benefit. That's all I'm arguing for anyway - I in no way see nuclear as a long-term solution.

Interestingly the report includes the following footnote:

"All energy systems produce an energy debt. Using this data it is possible to calculate the energy pay-back time – the time it takes for the energy system to produce as much energy as it comsumes over a full life-cycle. If we assume a nuclear power plant
operates for 40 years using today’s uranium ore grades (very favourable), the energy pay-back time is 6-14 years. For photovoltaics in the UK it is 4 years and for wind it is less than 1 year."

This is either deliberately disingenous or naive beyond belief. PV and wind have capacity factors of around 20% (the 20% figure for PV is in sunny Australia). The payback above assumes delivered energy only - i.e. based on at best availability of 5 hours a day. So if you're willing to only have electricity for 5 hours per day, that's the energy payback. Meanwhile, in the real world PV and wind are backed up by OCGT, which burn gas 50% less efficiently than CCGT. Add in the energy cost of constructing OCGT plants and the gas burnt in them and the 'energy payback' of PV/wind elongates massively. Again, what's annoying is the half-truth cloaked in the guise of unbiased opinion (although given the IPCC are the sponsors, its quite possible to make a case for obvious potential for bias).

Just on prices, the following is taken from the Australian Tresaury forecast: "The medium global action scenario assumes the world takes action to stabilise the greenhouse gas concentration level at 550 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e) by 2100".

That by the way is stabilisation at 550 ppm CO2, rather than the hoped-for more aggressive 450 ppm. Under this mild scenario, Australia will require a carbon price of $60/tonne by 2020, and $100/tonne by 2045 (real 2012 dollars). To put that in perspective, the initial carbon price of $23/tonne from July this year is already three times the current European carbon price. The $23/tonne figure will increase wholesale electricity costs by more than 50%.

That's with both a weaker target than was wanted (550 ppm vs 450 ppm), and the reality that even at that price, Australia is not forecasting a reduction in CO2 levels at all - the actual 'reduction' is via offsets purchased from other countries. In other words even with that cost impost, Australia itself delivers no carbon reduction per person at all.

That's my problem with these schemes as introduced. Nobody gets told (or in fact cares) about what will be required, so long as its not today. So the Government deliebrately back ends the targets and therefore price hikes, and is quite happy to glibly talk about 'offsets' instead of the changes to both standard of living and way of life required if Australia is to genuinely contribute to CO2 reduction.

At the end of the day we're just animals. Humans are really good at fixing broken things but not so good at fixing things that might break in 50 years time.
Whatever happens to golbal temperature and it's consequences the one thing I can gurantee is that we won't do anything about it until things start to go pear shaped for real - right infront of our face.

Anyway, oil is going to run out by 2052 (supposedly around 40 years left approx)? As petrol prices keep going up we'll all be priced out of using the stuff long before then. Working from home and cycling to the shops in 10 years.

I'm getting planning permission sorted for my wind farm and stockpiling the Duracells.

You'd better [url=http://www.utilityweek.co.uk/news/news_story.asp?id=196726&title=Eon+and+RWE+ditch+Horizon+nuclear+plansbecause e-ON and RWE won't be building any new nuclear plants here[/url

Nobody will be able to afford any projects to produce cleaner energy, global temperature rises, we all die. Bankers eventually destroy the world and Thatcher's master plan comes to fruition.

DHM - sadly I think your view on world action is what is most likely to happen. The evidence for global warming and its impacts are simply too vague for any government to risk annihilation by trying to do something meaningful about it. It won't be until the worst effects become unavoidable to everybody that anything meaningful will be done.

If you take that position, an interesting question is whether the government should in fact divert spending away from carbon reduction schemes and into schemes to offset the physical impacts of global warming.

As for oil running out, I'm not sure the 40 years is right BTW. There is plenty more fossil fuel available if you're willing to pay more and more to get it. Ten years ago shale oil would not have been included in reserves forecasts because at $70-$80/barrel to produce nobody would have dreamed of touching it when the market was around $35-50 (and on a genuine marginal cost basis the Saudis can produce oil for way less than that). Now it seems profitable - even though its environmentally destructive and hugely energy intensive to produce.

The evidence for global warming vague? I'd have said it was pretty compelling. I'd agree that we can't fully predict its impacts until they actually start to occur, but there's no doubt that global warming itself is a reality.

Quote ="BrisbaneRhino"DHM - sadly I think your view on world action is what is most likely to happen. The evidence for global warming and its impacts are simply too vague for any government to risk annihilation by trying to do something meaningful about it. It won't be until the worst effects become unavoidable to everybody that anything meaningful will be done. If you take that position, an interesting question is whether the government should in fact divert spending away from carbon reduction schemes and into schemes to offset the physical impacts of global warming. As for oil running out, I'm not sure the 40 years is right BTW. There is plenty more fossil fuel available if you're willing to pay more and more to get it. Ten years ago shale oil would not have been included in reserves forecasts because at $70-$80/barrel to produce nobody would have dreamed of touching it when the market was around $35-50 (and on a genuine marginal cost basis the Saudis can produce oil for way less than that). Now it seems profitable - even though its environmentally destructive and hugely energy intensive to produce.'" I just googled it, I'm no expert - I'm sure it's wrong. www.imeche.org/knowledge/themes/ ... il-run-out I guess that consumption is only going to go up (although once Jeremy Clarkson is 6 feet under that should give us an extra 5 years of petrol). There have been end of the world scenarios quite a few times since the war. I lived through the most realistic which was about the time the US decided to put cruise missiles within range of Moscow in the early 80's. That's the closest I'll ever get to the end of civilisation as we know it.

Quote ="BrisbaneRhino"DHM - sadly I think your view on world action is what is most likely to happen. The evidence for global warming and its impacts are simply too vague for any government to risk annihilation by trying to do something meaningful about it. It won't be until the worst effects become unavoidable to everybody that anything meaningful will be done. If you take that position, an interesting question is whether the government should in fact divert spending away from carbon reduction schemes and into schemes to offset the physical impacts of global warming. As for oil running out, I'm not sure the 40 years is right BTW. There is plenty more fossil fuel available if you're willing to pay more and more to get it. Ten years ago shale oil would not have been included in reserves forecasts because at $70-$80/barrel to produce nobody would have dreamed of touching it when the market was around $35-50 (and on a genuine marginal cost basis the Saudis can produce oil for way less than that). Now it seems profitable - even though its environmentally destructive and hugely energy intensive to produce.'" I just googled it, I'm no expert - I'm sure it's wrong. www.imeche.org/knowledge/themes/ ... il-run-out I guess that consumption is only going to go up (although once Jeremy Clarkson is 6 feet under that should give us an extra 5 years of petrol). There have been end of the world scenarios quite a few times since the war. I lived through the most realistic which was about the time the US decided to put cruise missiles within range of Moscow in the early 80's. That's the closest I'll ever get to the end of civilisation as we know it.

Rock God - that's exactly what I mean by vague. We cannot predict the extent of global warming (2 degrees, 3, 4?), the precise impact or how much humans need to do to stop/reverse it. People are sadly remarkably uninterested in future generations, and trying to get people to absorb serious costs today for something in the - for many people - distant future is always hard.

My only point for entering this thread was that to achieve anything I think we have to be as honest as possible about what is/isn't known, including abatement costs, which are in fact by far the easiset things to predict. I also think that scare-mongering tactics simply don't work. Another example of dubious scare-mongering is cited in The Australian this weekend about an environmental group trying to push the idea that climate change is causing more extreme global weather, despite the fact that the IPCC has said the evidence for this just isn't there yet. Like it or not, people pick up on these things and it tars all 'environmental scientists' with the same brush. Here in Australia the droughts which ended just over two years ago were being cited as direct evidence for global warming, and yet we've now had the wettest years on record. People aren't so dumb or permanently thinking about the environment for the blatant moving of the goalposts to not register.

In terms of panic stories, people got worried for a while and were willing to pay more taxes etc for a while, but once the sky didn't cave in, people moved onto the next thing and now the carbon tax is likely to bring down the Labor government at the next election. Its hard to get people to worry about something en masse for any period of time.

I personally think it ought to be couched in terms of a moral decision - and get people to look their own kids in the face before saying no to taking some pain on their behalf.

DHM - I remember being at school and being told all oil would run out in 30 years (that was sadly over 30 years ago). Oil will definitely run out at some stage. The only question is when, and don't be surprised to see humanity frantically trying to eke out the last few barrels of oil from currently unobtainable sources before we finally give up.

Given that he is attempting to crystallise precise conclusions from what is an enormously complex moral, political, social and scientific question I expect there are one or two flaws in his paper. Whether they bear any relation to the ones you raise I have no idea. What I do know is he is an accredited IPCC reviewer with a list of qualifications down to his shoelaces. Of course, arguments from authority can sometimes be fallacious but given that much of our current problem with global warming can be directly attributed to not trusting the experts until such time as your credentials match or exceed his I'm siding with him.

You talk about honesty being the key to finding a solution to the issue of Global Warming (provided we haven't already passed the point of no return). I agree entirely. Unfortunately, the words "nuclear energy" and "honesty" have, for the past fifty years, been kept so far apart you'd need a rocket ship to visit both in one day. Until such time when the public is granted full disclosure of the true costs in terms of money, the environment (current and future), health etc. we should treat it in precisely the same way we treat its lethal contaminants.