Absolutly not - my money is on a technology driven solution and specifically solar in combination with advanced materials (does this mean we can tear down those ugly wind turbines?)and just in case we humans are that vain, we should remember that there is a reason Greenland is named Greenland.

There was an interesting paper published recently that concluded that the recent warming of the North Atlantic (from 1992 through 2005) was identical to what was observed during the period from the 1926 through 1939. The paper concludes: “We show that the recent warming is no more extreme than that experienced during the [early] 20th century.”

http://www.swan.ac.uk/bs/turtle/reprints/Hobson_DRS_2008.pdf

This result provides further evidence supporting the theory that the recent warming (and current cooling) is part of a natural cycle driven by the interaction of the sun, oceans and clouds. Dr. Plass and the IPCC have arguably made the same error: unwittingly attributing a cyclical temperature rise to anthropogenic CO2 because the full role of all natural forcings was not understood.

Tellingly, the New York Times piece quotes Dr. Plass as saying that confirmation of the “carbon dioxide theory” would require “another century of observation and measurement to confirm it.” We are halfway there, and I think as the current cooling persists (because of the shift in the PDO, the predicted shift of the AMO, and the potentially quiet sunspot cycle 24) and more research focuses on these natural forcings, anthropogenic CO2’s relatively minor role (say 1.4* C per century) will become broadly understood.

There have been a number of changes since 1956. First of all, we have burned our way through 52 years worth of oil, coal and gas. There is almost zero likelyhood that the Earth has even close to the same quantity of “cheap oil and coal” as it did in 1956.

The other thing that has changed is that nuclear fission power has worked out many kinks typical of new technologies. In 1956, there were no commercial nuclear power plants operating. The initial discovery of the self sustaining chain reaction was only 14 years old in 1956. The number of qualified and experienced nuclear plant designers and operators was also near zero.

The currently operating nuclear plants in the US produce about 33% more electricity each year than all of the generators on the entire grid did in 1956.

(Note: US EIA figures indicate a total US electrical production of 604 billion kilowatt hours in 1956. The 2007 nuclear electricity production level was more than 800 billion kilowatt hours according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.)

I call b***s*** on the NY Times article from 1956

Well the primary difference being, Back then it was a few astrophysists.
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Right Now, There isn’t a single scientific institution in the world which says manmade emissions aren’t a primary cause on the warming we’ve seen over the past few decades.
http://greyfalcon.net/whatwouldittake
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Pretty big difference if you ask me.
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As for a reply to Rod’s usual nuclear cheerleading. The usual response about how Nuclear would be a gigantic failure if it weren’t for near monopolistic federal support, and that the industry is in decline rather than resurgence.
thenation.com/doc/20080512/parenti
blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2007/08/24/help-wanted-in-the-nuclear-industry
greens-efa.org/cms/default/rubrik/7/7064.nuclear_not_a_solution@en.htm

“Right Now, There isn’t a single scientific institution in the world which says manmade emissions aren’t a primary cause on the warming we’ve seen over the past few decades.”

Wow. Thousands of scientists will be shocked to learn that they aren’t considered scientists any more.

Well I didn’t say “every single climate scientist”.
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As is we can’t even get every scientist to agree on the specifics behind gravity and lightning.
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Getting 100% is practically impossible.
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But as is we’re pretty damned close to it.
________________
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Heh, also when we’re talking scientists with relevant credentials, your list shrinks down to dozens, not thousands.
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And even further if you clip off those who are retired.

Heh! You find the same thing with the IPCC’s “list of 2500 scientists.” Just don’t look too closely, eh?

Heh, you’re forgetting the 21 National Academies of Sciences which also signed off on it.
http://greyfalcon.net/whatwouldittake
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If anything, the IPCC estimate is an underestimate.
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As it has proven to be historically with every other IPCC report.

David:

I am no cheerleader for the nuclear industry; I believe that the industry leaders have done a very poor job overall of exploiting the very solid technical advantages of atomic fission compared to fossil fuel combustion.

In many ways, they simply did not know any better; after all the technology is quite young and most of the designers of the first generation of plants were already adults before the very basic physical process of self sustained chain reactions was discovered.

In contrast, humans have known that there was power in the sun, wind, tides, and falling water for millennia.

One unconnected point - why would you want to dismiss the views of retired scientists? If you know much at all about how the world of big science is funded, you will know that active scientists are often very careful not to offend anyone. They are very dependent on the good graces of the people in governments and foundations that control the grant purse strings.

On the other hand, retired scientists are often very well educated and experienced and they have financial independence. This allows them a bit more freedom for expressing controversial - but often accurate - views about important topics.

Just out of curiosity, are you willing to publicly state your own sources of income?

(I am a full time Naval Officer with 22 years of active duty. I am the majority shareholder in a tiny company that produces blogs and podcasts and would one day like to build small atomic engines suitable for distributed generation. For a variety of reasons that dream has been in progress for 17 years with little more than paper and electrons to show for it.)

To tell the truth, you do have a point on the retired aspect.
If they had relevant scientific findings age wouldn’t make much of a difference.
However so often what happens is that you have someone only tangentially related to a relevant field.
Either way, without pairing down the list by retirees, it’s still pretty small.
Usually for instance you’ll see these same few scientists repeated over and over.
http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptics/skeptics.htm
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Currently I’m employed at Google doing some work involving satellite imagery.

Heh, and from that list Tim Ball, Michael Crichton, Bjorn Lomborg, Edward Wegmen aren’t even climate scientists.
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Even though they are quite vocal on the topic.

And neither is Kary Mullis, or Benny Peiser aren’t climate scientists.
Carter, he’s an ocean drilling geologist, who hasn’t even published a single paper on the subject of global climate science.
Zbignew Jaroworski isn’t a climate scientist either, he’s a radiation expert who once published a paper on a website run by that nutjob Lyndon Larouche.
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I need to get me a better list.

David-

Perhaps you could read these two articles:

http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v14n01_climate_of_belief.html

http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v14n01_human_induced_climate_change.html

My conclusion is that relying on climate models as proof of significant positive feedbacks is a mistake; they provide no scientific proof. What the IPCC, certain climate scientists and “scientific institutions” want to believe is their business, but claims that climate models have proven that most of the warming in the late 20th century is attributable to anthropogenic CO2 are factually wrong, and it doesn’t matter who is making such claims: they are still wrong.

BTW, one doesn’t need to be a “climate scientist” to know what is proven scientifically or not, so don’t bother with that line of attack.

Jeff

David:

As a Google employee, I am sure that you have a good mind. Why have you closed it so tightly against nuclear technology. Granted that the established industry has not done a stellar job with the technology so far, but in your industry there are plenty of examples of different groups of people having completely different levels of success depending on how they go about exploiting the very same technical concepts.

Fission is simply better than combustion and both are better than having no energy at all - which is what you get on a still, clear night in a wind and solar based economy. Those happen all too often for me to get very enthusiastic about depending on them for much of importance.

What Global Warming?

There isn’t any, and the question was answered sometime ago by the late Joh Daly. GO: http://www.John-Daly.com

Scroll down, click on “Station Temperature Data”.

There are a great many temperature-time plots that show no evidence of any global. e.g. Alice Springs, AU and Death Valley.

Read “What the Station Say” for his criteria for selecting the weather stations for his analyses.

In essence, if there is any hint of bias in the temperature data, e.g., from urban areas, don’t use it.

Most of the stations he examined are in rural areas, i.e., remote and far away from the activities of humans.
He is not “cherry-picking” these stations. he is just picking only the sqeaky clean ones.

-=-Harold Pierce Jr, B.Sc(Hon)., Ph.D.

The “science” supporting the theory that anthropogenic carbon emissions is entirely computer models that are themselves hypotheses. ALL of the experimental scientific research incorporating empirical data and facts are contrary to the AGW hypotheses. Every climate model is flawed and cannot deal with complex aspects of our climate system. The role played by the ocean, water vapor and clouds, solar and cosmic radiation have are not understood and cannot be modeled accurately.

When scientists believer that there is a consensus among themselves and no further research is necessary, it is time to purge them because they are no longer fit
to conduct research. Orthodoxy is not science, it is a belief system.

to R. Adams et al:

There’s one other thing that hasn’t changed since that earlier NYT piece; despite being the most heavily subsidized industry in the history of humans, there STILL remains no safe solution to the problem of high-level nuclear waste disposal. The fact that we, as a species, have gone ahead with power and weapons production w/o first solving this problem, all the while producing increasing volumes of this highly toxic and militarily dangerous substance highlights the lack of foresight we demonstrate on a daily basis.

Secondly, if I understand the global climate change naysayers correctly, you’re all saying that even though the concept of gases such as CO2 and methane leading to a rise in planetary (as opposed to just our planet - it’s a well-accepted phenomena in astronomy at work in other planets in our own solar system - see Mercury) temperatures is not disputed, and even though measurements of increased CO2 levels in earth’s atmosphere are not disputed, and even though earth’s temperatures have risen, both on land and at sea over the last several decades, reducing snow/ice cover, you’re still clinging to the belief that these changes are what, coincidental? Unrelated? Nice. That is why you are not scientists.

Finally, the point about retired scientists is not, out of hand, without value. However, the most important measure of scientific validity is not whether or not the scientist is retired, but rather, has he/she followed accepted scientific methodology, i.e. propose a theory, test it via experimentation, publish the findings IN A SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL FOR PEER REVIEW, and wait for others in the same field to repeat the procedures to confirm or dispute the results.

From what I’ve read, the vast majority of supposed papers throwing cold water on anthropocentric causes of global climate change have not followed this methodology, and several have been funded by such objective groups as the American Petroleum Institute.

One need only be open-minded to see where this sort of “science” leads.

On the subject of disposal of transuranic and uranic high level waste Mr. John J is grossly in error when he claims that there is no safe solution. In 1991 Los Alamos National Laboratory in conjunction with the French Nuclear Agency proposed an accelerated nuetron subcritical reactor which would, in essence, have taken all the worlds weapons grade plutonium and uranium and through the process of accelerated neutron bombardment decayed said long -half life materials into cesium and strontium (14.5 year half-life) end products. While in this accelerated decay process the heat released would have powered a 3.5 Gigawatt net extra energy power plant. This would have resulted in the need to contain radioactive cesium and strontium for 70 years in a repository like Yucca mountain which is very possible. Secretary of Energy, Hazel Leary, refused to consider this solution in 1991, and in fact banned any processing of transuranic material at this time, however the French have continued to fund and develop this technology.hose using the straw man arguement of being open minded very seldom are either open of mind or guilty of using mentation.

Those that believe that mankind is causing the slight amount of warming in the last century have to grapple with some critical issues:
1.) Why is it that warming a bad thing? ALL previous declines in society have occurred during cold periods, such as the Little Ice Age, when there were terrible famines. All “good times” for mankind have occurred during warm eras.
2.) It is well-established that there were periods in the past that were just as warm or warmer than currently, such as the Medieval Warming Period and the Roman Warm Period. This indicates that warming and cooling takes place without man’s intervention. How can we spearate this natural warming from a man-caused warming?
3. Temperatures have leveled off and may even have declined during the last 10 years. Why?
4. The only real demonstration that CO2 can cause warming is via Global Climate Models (computer models) that have hundreds of “parameterizations” to account for all the things that can’t be modeled or are not understood. The models all predict faster warming high in the atmosphere than on the ground, but the satellite data show this isn’t happening. This indicates the models have been falsified.
5.) Warming PRECEEDS increases in CO2, by about 800 years, as shown by the ice core data (look closely at Gore’s “famous” graph sometime–lay the curves on top of one another).
6.)It has not been demonstrated by first-principle physics that CO2 can cause a warming. The only way it can be demonstrated is via computer models, which have been falsified. The Climateaudit.org blog has been seeking this physical demonstration for over 2 years, and IPCC was asked by at least one Reviewer to include a physical demonstration, but it refused to do so (probably because it doesn’t exist).