Old Weird Ward
Unless otherwise noted, that which is posted here is opinion, which is protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. If you don't like my opinions, go somewhere else. Nobody is forcing you to actually read this drivel.
The presumption exists that you can read at all.
That may be a large assumption.
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Sunday, May 29, 2005
- - - - - Global Warming - - - - -
Jerry Pournelle has a good short essay on Global Warming HERE.... which ties in neatly with a newspaper story about nuclear power that I will comment on in the next section. Please note: If you're an "environmentalist", don't bother with either section - it'll just get you frothing at the mouth and going all irrational.
First issue: is Earth warming? Yes, of course it is; this is supported by all the evidence. Moreover, it has been warming since about 1800, and we all know it: measure growing seasons everywhere (look in old Almanacs if you like for planting dates and harvesting dates), thickness of the ice in North America (we all know that cannon were dragged across frozen rivers in 1776 in places where the ice no longer gets thick enough to walk on, or never forms at all now), retreat of glaciers all across the world and in both hemispheres. Yes. Earth is warming.
Second issue: is this due to human causes? Not very likely. The very trends that show warming since 1800 also show that the warming has been pretty uniform over that time, and modern industrialization didn't put enough CO2 into the atmosphere to matter until well into the 20th Century. Indeed, early coal burning probably put enough particulates into the upper atmosphere to have a cooling effect. Certainly the 1815 eruption of Tambura had a distinctly cooling effect (causing the notorious "year without a summer" which was so gloomy that Mary Shelley wrote the gothic novel Frankenstein because the Shelley's and Byron's weren't having any fun on Lake Geneva due to lousy weather). But despite a glitch in the trend during 1815 the warming has been pretty well linearly constant from around 1800 to 1960, at which point the warming continued but perhaps less rapidly. This is hard to determine because this was when we began better instrumentation, but that itself can cause ambiguities since we can measure temperature effect undoubtedly caused by humans -- cities for example -- which are highly local.
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Go read the whole thing, and follow the links to see the supporting evidence.
- - - - - Greenpeacies Supporting Nuclear Power? - - - - -
I may get the vapors, and swoon into a maidenly faint!
See the story HERE. Why this isn't being screamed across the front page is something I'll never know.
Clean, reliable power is the Holy Grail for our society. Without electricity, we're sitting in the dark, no better off than our ancestors were in 1850.
Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace, told a U.S. House committee that, "I believe the majority of environmental activists, including those at Greenpeace, have become so blinded by their extremist policies that they fail to consider the enormous and obvious benefits of harnessing nuclear power to meet and secure America's growing energy needs. These benefits far outweigh the risks. There is now a great deal of scientific evidence showing nuclear power to be an environmentally safe and sound choice."
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With current technology, such as pebble-bed reactors, and a safe way to dispose of waste, such as Yucca Mountain, we could get rid of coal-, gas- and oil-fired power generating systems that really do harm our environment. And, we'd be one step closer to telling OPEC to go take a running leap.
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