I'm taking a Business class focusing on Global Warming, and we watched this film in class today.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7221788764767175476&q=global+warming+glenn&total=68&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3

It is pretty interesting and has a lot of information I had never came across before.

Several things I take issue with while watching this.

As far as Kyoto goes, they're right about that. Fossil fuels makes up the vast majority of our energy and will for the forseeable future, so controlling emissions is a hard thing to do indeed. Kyoto costs too much and doesn't do enough.

They brought in author/political scientist Bjorn Lumberg.

His top 5 list was the following:

1. HIV/AIDS
2. Malnutrition
3. Free Trade
4. Malaria
5. Agricultural Research

I'd say that whoever made that list has their priorities wrong.

The first issue should be population. Any way you slice it, it's the root cause of most of our problems. including the top 2 on his list there.

Secondly should be energy. Energy will be the defining issue of this century. With all our primary energy sources in decline and nothing that can even hope to make up more than a fraction of a percent of what we're now using set to take it's place, energy is going to become the biggest issue we've ever faced as a civilization. And again, it comes back to population. The more people you have using the more resources, the worse the energy situation becomes. Cut the population and you cut energy consumption as well.

Third should be natural resources that don't pertain to energy, which includes agricultural research which they had listed at #5. This includes freshwater. The problem we have right now is that modern agriculture is, in essence, the use of land to convert petroleum into food. With the peaking and decline of world oil production, we can already see the end of the oil. Which way do you think production of petroleum-dependent items is going to go as the resource becomes increasingly scarce? Just take a look at what happene in N. Korea after the fall of the USSR, which they were entirely dependent on for oil. They stopped getting it and massive starvation began. We're depleting the Ogallala aquifer at unsustainable rates (http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/WORMKA/). Couple that with climate-change induced droughts and it looks pretty damn bad.

Number 4 would have to be recognizing growth. Growth is what has got us into this mess in the first place. Endless, compounding, exponential growth. Growth in population, growth in consumption, economic growth, etc. It keeps on going, irrespective of limits. Growth is the cause of nearly all the problems of science and society we now experience today. Growth in population and/or consumption of resources cannot be sustained. There are 2 things that require endless growth in order to survive: Cancer, and our current economic system - which brings me to the last item on my list - the economy.

At number 5 would be the economy. The Federal Reserve/fiat currencies/fractional reserve banking have totally fucked up the economies of the world and have set the stage for the next great depression. Doug Casey in his essay, "The Greater Depression" at DailyReckoning.com writes:

"We've had the longest expansion - and the strongest expansion - in world history. But we're at the end of a 25-year boom. It's gone on more than a full generation now. And I'll tell you how it's going to end: It's going to end with a depression, and not just a depression; not just another Great Depression; it's going to be the Greater Depression."

He goes on to ask:

"What's a depression, incidentally?".

He defines a depression as:

"...a period of time when distortions and misallocations of capital are liquidated; that's called a depression.".

The use of the word liquidated makes me think of how the movies had old-style commies, Nazis and various unsavory other bad guys going around "liquidating" people, and that's pretty depressing, so I can see how capital being liquidated would classify as a depression, as your portfolio, your house, your retirement accounts, your "collectibles" and damned near everything you own goes to squat, including your job and your life, which may be what prompted him to say:

"Another general definition of a depression is this: a period of time when most people's standard of living goes down significantly".

And I already knew that people's level of anger about having to "make do with less" changes in reciprocal lockstep with the fall in the standard of living, more and more, year after year, until some tipping point is reached and one day people are so angry and so miserable that things suddenly explode, and history has another huge discontinuity, and then after awhile they will be so miserable that they will try to break into the Fabulous Magneto Bunker (FMB) in search of items to relieve their suffering, which turns it into tragedy before they even got close. That's how you define "depression."

But I digress. Moving on, we see them mention 2 scientific consensus': Eugenics and global cooling. The only concensus' achieved in eugenics was that the division of the human species into unequal races is unjustifiable, which is an idealogical one and not scientific; and as far as the alleged concensus on global cooling goes, there never was one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling).

"Global cooling in general can refer to a cooling of the Earth. More specifically, it refers to a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere along with a posited commencement of glaciation. This hypothesis never had significant scientific support, but gained temporary popular attention due to press reports..."

It was all media hype. Which explains why they had to resort to quoting media headlines instead of science literature.

They show a CBS excerpt that says:

"Seas are rising, hurricanes will be more powerful like Katrina, and polar bears may be headed toward extinction.".

They follow it with a clip from some talking head saying:

"We don't see that happening. Tornadoes are not increasing. The frequency of hurricanes are not increasing..."

...as if it is some kind of response, and then it cuts out.

For starters, the CBS excerpt didn't say anything about frequency, but magnitude. Global warming increases the magnitude of hurricanes by warming the Gulf waters, making them more severe. For every 1 degree of temperature increase in the water, a hurricane gains an extra 5mph of speed. The warmer the waters, the more severe the hurricanes are. I don't seem to recall any large heaters being dumped into the Gulf, so that leaves climate as the obvious culprit.

As far as the polar bears are concerned, they are dying left and right from drowning due to the ice melting. They use the floating ice chunks to get out of the water when they go fishing since they can't swim long distances, but those ice platforms are melting which is resulting in polar bears drowning in their own natural habitat.

They go on to show a clip from anothe guy who says:

"I'm gonna tell you something about the media on global warming that you don't hear real often: It's not all your fault."

He's right. It's not all mankind's fault. However if we're talking about recent anthropogenic global warming, it's mostly our fault (but not entirely - rendering his statement still technically true). Climate shifts happen naturally to the tune of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. What we've seen since the dawn of industry is completely unprecedented and comes from a direct result from our practices.

Some people like to challenge the premise that there is a direct link between CO2 and temperature levels, so let's first get that bit of nonsense out of the way with 400 thousand years of positive correlation between CO2 levels and temperatures:

http://www.climatecrisiscoalition.org/images/CO2_and_Temp2.gif

To determine something that's been happening in the last 200 years, we need to look at a smaller graph:

http://zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/zFacts-CO2-Temp.gif

The drops in 1900 and 1940 could be due to solar radiation decreasing or other factors. At that time, there weren't enough factories, cars, etc. to cause the CO2 levels needed to affect climate, but now there is (you can see the CO2 line start to curve greatly during the 1950's). This coincides with the rapid industrialization that occurred in the US, Europe, and Asia during and after WW2.

They then go on to mention the Medieval Warming Period (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_warm_period#Other_regions) (MWP).

"An ice core from the eastern Bransfield Basin, Antarctic Peninsula, clearly identifies events of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period. The core clearly shows a distinctly cold period about AD 1000–1100, neatly illustrating the fact that "MWP" is a moveable term, and that during the "warm" period there were, regionally, periods of both warmth and cold."

So the MWP argument is an inconsistent one at best.

They then go on to address the graph I posted and claim that temperature influences CO2 and not the other way around, which is idiotic and maddeningly frustrating as I've had this same exact debate before.

Carbon dixoide is a greenhouse gas. It's been proven to raise temperatures. There's no amount of "logical" arguing on their part that will change that fact. They claim the ice core record shows the opposite and that increasing temperatures cause increased CO2 levels and cut to the end of the 400,000 year graph with the temperature increase that doesn't show any corresponding increase in CO2. It's because they're looking at a huge chart to analyze the last 200 years. As the smaller timeframe chart shows, they're wrong. I don't know if they're being deliberately dishonest or simply don't know any better, but I'd expect a Ph.D climatologist to know his shit. Either way you slice it, they're either ignorant or lying.

Next they start talking about sea level rise. It turns out that the IPCC actually understated the case and it's now estimated to be worse than was calulated previously (http://environment.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526141.600). They're talking about 5 meters now, which is 16.4 feet, only a few feet short of what they say Gore was predicting.

Ok, now they're starting to talk about energy technology. They start off with nuclear.

They say we get 20% of our energy from nuclear, but that's wrong:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/rea_data/h1_0713_small.gif

All objections to the construction of nuclear as an aside (environmentalism, terrorism, etc.), let's examine what would happen to the resource if there were no restructions to it's use.

At current use (not current growth in consumption, but current use), uranium is estimated to last somewhere up around 40 years. It can only last that long if growth in consumption stops dead and we use the exact same amount year after year with no increase. Growth in the consumption of natural resources is the law, not the exception. The more of it we use, the higher the growth rate, and faster it will go. France is already around 90% nuclear for it's electrical production. India and China are trying to expand their nuclear capabilities as well and make it their primary source of electricity. China especially since all their coal burning is wrecking their environment, buildings, and crops. So it's obvious that there is going to be some considerable growth in consumption of the resource an it won't last as long as the 40-year estimate with zero growth figured.

Since uranium production is nearing the halfway point (http://www.worldenergy.org/wec-geis/publications/reports/ser/uranium/uranium.asp) and current uranium demand almost twice production (http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/powers/2004/0601.html), there's obviously going to be some complications to this strategy.

http://www.uic.com.au/graphics/UprodWorld.gif

We're already consuming twice as much uranium as we are producing. The only thing keeping us going are the stocks. Ok so some of this can be put down to problems with mines in various countries and a glut in uranium prices up to a few years ago slowing down production, but to that scale is massive. Production is around 65 - 70 million pounds a year while use is at 150+ million pounds a year. Thats a massive deficit.

Whether production will pick up is debatable but we are going to see a squeeze for uranium fuel in the coming years, which has already started with increases in prices.

So people say that we'll follow India's lead and use thorium reactors insted of uranium. This sounds good, until you realize why it is exactly that India chosed to pursue thorium:

"The Advanced Heavy Water Reactor is one of the few proposed large-scale uses of thorium. As of 2006 only India is developing this technology. Indian interest is motivated by their substantial thorium reserves; almost a third of the world's thorium reserves are in India, which in contrast has less than 1% of the world's uranium."

-source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#The_thermal_breeder_reactor)

So they're trying to reduce their dependence on foreign energy since they don't have much uranium domestically while perusing their significant thorium reserves

The U.S. has 104 nuclear reactors. All of which were built after 1970. No more have been built since some time in the 90's. All of these reactors have a lifespan of approx 30 years, so many of these will need to be decomissioned at around the same time.

Some of them are actually over their 30 year lifespan and are kept running because there has been nothing built to take it's place. This is going to cause problems, as the materials used to build a nuclear facility become brittle after 30 years and increase the risk of a nuclear incident, even if they are triple redundant.

In any case, nuclear production of electricity will not be a solution to the petrochemical shortage/liquid fuels shortfall that will be the immediate problem, as the Hirsch Report (http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf) pointed out, specifically. So it's not going to help our dependence on foreign oil as they suggest. They say they don't want Iran to have it, but they are entittled to it in the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and we would be in material breach if we tried to stop them from developing nuclear energy. Iran peaked as an oil province back in the 70's, so they're trying to lessen their dependence on their own depleting substances. I wouldn't trust them not to try to develop some kind of weapon though, which is what they inspectors are for - which they have fully agreed to comply with.

Next they talk about the Tesla - the electric sports car. The manufacturer chose a sport car model for a reason - it helps mask the limitations of electric car technology (vehicle weight, towing capacity, performance in cold environments, etc.). It's not affordable for normal people like you and me. It's just some plaything for rich, environmentally conscious people.

So there you have it. I've went through and debunked every major argument in that entire segment with the exception of Kyoto, which I agree is insufficient at addressing the issue. What they're saying just doesn't jive with the available data, and if you look into the issue like I have, you'll find out the same as well.

So if you want your business class to have a more balanced look, which the program, at the hosts own admission in the beginning, didn't even pretend to be; then go ahead and present them with some of the information I've cited here.

awesome post, sums up everything thats wrong and that needs to be addressed