Interesting topic for debate - Global Warming

[Dominic]

Start here:

https://climate.nasa.gov/

[Dominic]

And this is Al Gore's net worth, unless you know different:
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After his long career in politics, Gore built his net worth through numerous business pursuits. He co-founded Current TV, a cable news network, and raked in $100 million when the network was sold to Al Jazeera.

As a board member of Apple Inc., Gore has about $35 million in stock in the tech giant. In addition, he starred in the 2006 documentary on climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which pulled in over $24 million domestically.

Al Gore has a total net worth of $300 million as of May 2017, according to Celebrity Net Worth.

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https://www.bankrate.com/lifestyle/cele ... net-worth/

[kingfisher]

Considerable transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich as result of renewable energy policies.
Although written a couple of years ago, this article is interesting- e.g. I didn't know that wood burning accounts for half of renewable energy generation in EU.
https://www.investors.com/politics/comm ... on-scheme/

The highland clearances.[Scottish windfarms], Telegraph article:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews ... -boom.html

[Devil]

OK. Please satisfy my curiosity. How do you define Global Warming?

[Jimgward]

I have to say, the numbers and growth of cars, power-stations and other producers of pollution, will be having a huge affect. Agreed, that a volcanic eruption, such as the Icelandic one, a few years ago, will be massive, but there is no doubt that man is pollution mother earth, causing issues on the balance of nature, raising temperatures and heading towards issues in the not too distant future - beyond my lifetime!

There are more people alive now, than have ever lived on earth. That's a startling statistic. Famines and water shortages will cause massive migratory issues for countries - we are seeing it in the US at the moment. Trump's answer is to dam the river, rather than fix the pollution upstream. He is stopping financial support to Guatemala and others. That will exacerbate the issue. People nowadays, with smartphones, internet and broadcast media, can see what they are missing. Poverty is still massive around the earth and the differential huge. We are all part of the lucky couple of percent - but the majority will bite our arses (pardonais mois)

[Devil]

I don't define Global Warming; that's for others to do. But that was the term coined, and very widely used, at the turn of this century

Wrong! The term was coined not at the turn-of-the-century, but at the turn of the last century. It was Arrhenius in 1896 who determined that carbon dioxide was responsible for the global temperature of the earth to be about 14° C and he calculated that it would be about -18° C, without the presence of the carbon dioxide. It was he who likened it to having a greenhouse over our heads, although he may not have used it in those terms. He also calculated the effect of increases or decreases of the global carbon dioxide. In fact, the presence of just over 400 ppm of carbon dioxide today and the near-1° C global increase in temperature fits in neatly with the 19th-century calculations, compared to the preindustrial value of 280 ppm ± 20 ppm over the last 10,000 years and more up to the moment that we started howking and burning large amounts of coal, oil and natural gas out of the Earth's crust.

[Devil]

So, before the very recent advent of solar power and wind farms, how were people supposed to have heated their homes and workplaces?

If I may say so, that is a very stupid remark. Despite the predictions of a small number of scientists, we had no idea of the damage we were doing to the Earth's atmosphere. For this reason, fossil fuels were considered to be the Manna from heaven and were used indiscriminately. It is only in the last 30 years or so that we even started to think about the damage we were doing to our atmosphere. It has taken that length of time for it to start to enter into the public conscience. We now have to pay the price for our profligate living.

[Jimgward]

The biggest danger, is that developing countries have the greatest populations and the least money - so they need to respond to needs of their populaces, but cannot afford the best scrubbing technologies and will build power stations that will multiply the outputs worldwide 10 fold....

The developing nations will need to contribute - whether we like it or not....

We are all like fleas living on our own hairs, on a dog called Earth. We guard and protect our own hairs, but forget if the dog dies, we all do.... Some of us have prime position, as we got there first, like near the mouth, bottom or ears - lots to help us prosper - some are in poor positions and struggle to survive we don't care, as long as we are ok...

[Devil]

1) I think it is fair to say that at times of peak demand, the UK's power requirement is about 95% of current generating capacity. Given the government's foot-dragging on building new power stations (it desperately needs to as old ones are retired), where is the surplus capacity going to come from to power millions of cars on a daily basis?

I don't know about the UK reserves but I do know about Cyprus. This summer, the EAC had more than 10 to 15 percent of spare capacity, but not all of it was available everywhere on the island, as the TSO is also fairly backward in their technology. I estimate that a full car park of, say, 500,000 electric cars would require roughly doubling the EAC's production capacity, because everybody would want to charge in the evening, just at the time that everybody has switched on their air conditioning. Remember also that, in the evening, the solar panels are more than useless and the wind usually drops, so that all our famous renewable sources become zero sources. And don't start promoting gigantic batteries. Dammit, the government cannot even think about burning their mountains of rubbish to generate electricity and that would be a lot less costly, even profitable, than batteries.

Actually, what the world needs is many more nuclear power stations, such as in China with about 400 projected and even the large project in the UK which is in the first stages of being built and will provide (I think) 25 percent or thereabouts of the total anticipated demand.

[Jimgward]

My son works for a major media group and they have produced newspaper copy on this. He has met with the major electricity generators and they admit that they cant cope. That the grid also wouldn't cope and that the cables would be on fire if more than a handful of cars in a street were on charge - unless the system was changed....

[Dominic]

The biggest danger, is that developing countries have the greatest populations and the least money - so they need to respond to needs of their populaces, but cannot afford the best scrubbing technologies and will build power stations that will multiply the outputs worldwide 10 fold....

The developing nations will need to contribute - whether we like it or not....

We are all like fleas living on our own hairs, on a dog called Earth. We guard and protect our own hairs, but forget if the dog dies, we all do.... Some of us have prime position, as we got there first, like near the mouth, bottom or ears - lots to help us prosper - some are in poor positions and struggle to survive we don't care, as long as we are ok...

The dog doesn't die. It just finds a way of getting rid of the fleas. The only myth associated with climate change is that humanity is destroying the planet. It isn't, it is destroying itself. The planet will still be there long after we've driven our last car off a cliff.