The earth isn’t cooling. you are simply lying. And SUVs didn’t exist 14,000 years ago, making me suspect that you suffer from some form of mental disability.
Your cooling trend is nonexistent, but a slowdown in atmospheric warming has occurred in the last 15 years or so. Fortunately, I added that to this graph of global temperature over the last 2,000 years, so you can observe it in all its ‘significance’: http://tinyurl.com/lq7tvhl
(blue is ocean sediment data. green is tree ring data. red is modern thermometer and satellite data.)
The difficult thing with sea level rise is getting everyone not living near affected areas to care about those who do in advance of the crisis. Most people will think it’s not their problem. Some will be sympathetic afterwords, but that won’t help prevent it from happening in the first place.
Sea level rise is beginning to affect the South Pacific Islands of Kiribati, Tuvalu and regions of Fiji. It has also badly affected Kutubdia and other Islands in the bay of Bengal and it is anticipated that some Island will have to be abandoned completely in the foreseeable future. See level rise is visible, measurable and difficult to deny, but our local denier has of course put it all down to the Islands sinking and denies the NASA (and many others) measured evidence of sea level rise as a massive sinister conspiracy and scam (ignoring well established sea level rise engineering tables for sea bridge builders, satellite data and of course computer projections etc.). It seems that some people can not project into the future more than a few years and seem to have a fuzzy logic/blank spot when thinking 25 years or more ahead in time. The latest UN climate talks in Poland achieved practically nothing except that it agreed to reconvene in Paris 2015 to discuss possible changes for 2020. Again it reminds me of hypertension a condition which creeps up slowly unnoticed and eventually can result in great problems or even death. What does it take for our governments to admit AGW and take serious action for heaven sake.?
The audio levels on some of your speakers are quite low, and then the levels boom during your voiceovers and the music track. This is especially true of the bass.
I agree that this is one of your better ones—excellent choice of video clips and editing—-nice pacing. daveburton will prove that he is a bigger fool than we thought if he attempts to refute any of this “plio” evidence with his “tide gauges show over the past 80 years…” BS
And off the topic of the video, but very much on topic for the whole debate, Rod Adams has another “Smoking Gun” piece where he digs up assertions that Henry Kissinger helped to orchestrate both the OPEC oil price shocks and the astroturf effort to discredit nuclear energy, which was even then making inroads into the market for coal. This was in 1972, many years before Three Mile Island. He quotes author Engdahl:
The Stockholm 1972 conference created the necessary international organizational and publicity infrastructure such that by the time of the Kissinger oil shock of 1973-74, a massive anti-nuclear propaganda offensive could be launched, with the added assistance of millions of dollars readily available from the oil-linked channels of the Atlantic Richfield Company, the Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund, and other such elite Anglo-American establishment circles. Among the groups which were funded by these people in this time were organizations including the ultra-elitist World Wildlife Fund whose chairman was the Bilderberg’s Prince Bernhard and later Royal Dutch Shell’s John Loudon.
Indicative of the financial establishment’s overwhelming influence in the American and British media, is the fact that during this period, no public outcry was launched to investigate the probable conflict of interest involved in Robert O. Anderson’s well-financed anti-nuclear offensive, and the fact that his Atlantic Richfield Oil Co. was one of the major beneficiaries from the 1974 price increase of oil. Anderson’s ARCO had invested tens of millions of dollars into high-risk oil infrastructure in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay and Britain’s North Sea, together with British Petroleum, Shell, and the other Seven Sisters.
Had the 1974 oil shock not raised the market price of oil to $11.65/barrel or thereabouts, Anderson’s, as well as British Petroleum’s and Exxon’s and the others’ investments in the North Sea and Alaska would have brought financial ruin. To ensure a friendly press voice in Britain, Anderson at this time purchased ownership of the London Observer. Virtually no once asked if Anderson and his influential friends might have known in advance that Kissinger would create the conditions for a 400 percent oil price rise.
The Green movement has been played for suckers for going on 4 decades.
having been deeply involved in that movement, I can tell you it was grassroots from the get-go – literally starting out on kitchen tables, in our case.
And the fossil interests were able to buy movement people from just about the time they got wind of you. They bought the anti-nuclear position of the Sierra Club. David Gelbaum bought the Sierra Club’s position on immigration, turning it from ZPG to “no comment” even on the human flood of recent decades.
Read the Adams piece, and others under “Smoking Gun”. And listen a bit to Patrick Moore and James Lovelock.
I’ve met Patrick Moore. He’s an idiot. seriously.total bought into the goofiest denial memes – no critical thinking whatever. even his pro-nuke arguments are stale and shallow.
In 1979 when the Three-Mile-Island incident occurred, I was a local Sierra Club executive committee member in Nevada. I jumped in with both feet, and became the big anti-nuke spokesperson. I can’t say who or what influenced the Sierra Club leaders in San Francisco, I can only speak for myself, but I can say without doubt that the Club’s literature took on a very anti-nuke tone at the time, which also influenced me.
Anyway, as for my motives, I think I just enjoyed the ego trip of being an “expert.” I got interviewed by the press, I got on TV. Even some of the chicks started hanging out with me, because I was sort of famous.
In reality, I knew next to nothing. I had no expertise in nuclear energy. But I tried educating myself, and as I did I became more and more disillusioned with the anti-nuke movement. After about one year in the anti-nuke movement, I had a real wake-up call during a meeting when we discussed how the world might get rid of the huge amount of plutonium-239 that had accumulated as nuclear waste. My research in the matter led me to the conclusion that it could only be gotten rid of by being “burned” (not the most accurate term) in a breeder reactor. My fellow anti-nuke activists groaned, explaining to me that if we allowed that, it might make nuclear energy viable. Thus, it was proposed that we continue to do everything possible to make sure the nuclear waste continue to be kept in temporary storage, poisoning the environment for the next 250,000 years, just to make sure that nuclear energy would die and never be revived.
I dropped out of the movement. When the Cold War ended 10 years later, there was a revival of media interest in how to dispose of all the plutonium warheads that were no longer needed. Again, proposals were floated that it could only be gotten rid of by burning it in fast reactors, and again the Sierra Club leaped into action to oppose this, insisting that it be kept as unburied waste for the next 1/4 million years.
Meanwhile, I’ve learned much about 4th generation nuclear. And although I don’t consider it a panacea for solving AGW, I think it’s worth a shot. That doesn’t preclude using other green technologies like solar and wind, it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. I’m in favor of anything that reduces CO2 emissions.
Unfortunately, most of the “green” folks I know don’t think nuclear should be an option. They don’t even want to see research into 4th generation nukes continue. They just want to shutter the existing plants and leave the waste to leak into the environment, as a reminder that “nuclear is evil.”
Anti-nuke is something of a cult – that hasn’t changed. Meanwhile, it’s getting hotter. The earth burns while we fiddle.
some of us aren’t in this for the chicks. I was born into it, so kind of seriously involved long before TMI. I did notice that a lot of flakes got attracted about that time.
Not sure what you mean by “born into it.” Did your parents get you involved? Mine certainly didn’t.
Not sure I could be categorized as a “flake,” but that would be a matter of opinion. In any mass movement, the majority of participants are followers. Only a small percentage really take the time to stop and think their position through, and constantly question if they might be wrong about something. The easiest position is to think you must always be right, and try to silence your critics by calling them names. Having like-minded people surrounding you makes it easier to reinforce the position that you can never be wrong. Maybe you ought to sit down and listen to your opponents some time to see if they don’t have some valid points.
I think a lot of people don’t know why they’re into a mass movement. My opinion is that basically people have a need to join a group, to be accepted. That would include some reasonable folks, as well as the less reasonable such as the AGW deniers, Tea Partiers, Operation Rescuers, religious fundamentalists, etc. And for the few who emerge as a Group Leader, there is considerable prestige to be gained, great for one’s ego.
Now I am not the leader of anything, and the chicks aren’t swarming around me, but I do a lot more thinking than I did as a young man. Let me leave you with one thought: you just may be wrong. Question yourself, everyday.
I’m surprised Peter still lives in Michigan based on the following:
Repercussions[edit]
Dow Chemical is the largest employer in Midland, and her opposition to the high profile project considered important to Dow caused a backlash against Sinclair and her family. Their mailbox was blown up, they received threatening letters on their lawn, and were spat upon in public.[4] Her husband’s law practice was boycotted and the brake line on the family vehicle was cut. Still, Sinclair persevered. After the Midland reactor project was cancelled, a Consumers Power spokesperson commented, “I want to blame her but I don’t want to give her any credit.” [5]
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You were duped then and you are duped now. Nothing has changed.
Ad hominem. That’s a stretch. He admitted to being duped before. I expressed an opinion that he was being duped now. That is not correctly ad hominem, as calling him an idiot might be for example. You are too loose with that term. I can express an opinion that I believe his being duped without it being an ad hominem. As a fallacy, it is to produce an irrelevant fact, usually a trait, about the person presenting the claim. The fact that he had been duped before calls into question his thought practices and sound judgement and is quite relevant to a discussion of whether he might be duped again. Still, it points to the fact that I gave no argument, only opinion on being duped later. Since you poked, I will respond. He stated that he knew nothing, tried to educate himself, and became disillusioned after one year. It portrays the mind of shallow thought. He claims he discovered that waste could be burned in breeders. Never mind that breeders have been a complete financial failure. I guess he did not get to that part or were ever used to successfully process a significant amount of waste. Breeders must be used processing even when they “burn up” wastes. Reprocessing is a flop. See the west valley New York debacle for reference. I already referenced all this before at length. See daryan energy blog for some alternate thought to industry PR. Without further questioning or self education he came to a whole lot of other conclusions, which begin something like all ” green folks” are …. Something of a cult.. In other posts going as far as claiming they were dishonest, as a group. I would venture to call that a whole lot worse than ad hominem. I call it prejudice. Sorry, I won’t even begin to discuss the number of falsehoods in his post. It’s off topic anyway. It’s ironic. Posts are never on topic anymore. Feel free to discuss the topics and post. I much prefer accurate reliable referenced writing that inform and enlighten everyone.
He claims he discovered that waste could be burned in breeders. Never mind that breeders have been a complete financial failure.
The USA is willing to collect $37 billion in taxes earmarked for the disposal of used light-water reactor fuel (roughly 4% burnup), but won’t spend a couple of billion dollars for the plants and reactors to dispose of the transuranics permanently and at a massive energy profit. It seems that “profit” only matters when it counts against nuclear.
I guess he did not get to that part or were ever used to successfully process a significant amount of waste.
Pyroprocessing was just about to be tested at commercial scale when John Kerry helped zero the funding for all advanced nuclear research in 1994. Despite this, small amounts have been successfully processed in the years since, and all the technological details have been proven. South Korea is now moving to commercialize this technology.
Reprocessing is a flop.
A flop, compared to $37 billion for nothing beyond a hole in the ground in Nevada? The real problem is the anti-nukes who will not allow the “problem” to be “solved” until the industry has been killed. That is their goal.
See the west valley New York debacle for reference.
When regulations kept escalating the cost, the owners gave in to regulatory blackmail and shut down. You could shut down every wind farm in the USA by regulating infrasonics. There’s no mystery about this.
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For 4th Gen nuclear to be viable shouldn’t Congress be holding hearings now about how to allocate funding for research?
If an Apollo type program were launched now, when would the first commerically viable, safer, 4th Gen reactor be connected to existing U.S. power grids? Wouldn’t this be decades in the future?
There is no national discussion on research into pebble bed and molten salt LFT reactors as far as I know. My point is, after funds are allocated, we will still be decades away from safe nuclear power.
I’m not saying research funds shouldn’t be allocated. I’m just saying that in the U.S. Congress, the discussion hasn’t even started.
If an Apollo type program were launched now, when would the first commerically viable, safer, 4th Gen reactor be connected to existing U.S. power grids? Wouldn’t this be decades in the future?
GE-Hitachi is in negotiations with G. Britain to build TWO Gen IV fast-spectrum reactors (S-PRISMs) to eliminate the stockpile of reclaimed plutonium at Sellafield. There’s no reason the USA couldn’t build a bunch of them to eliminate the stockpile of ex-weapons plutonium we’ve got, instead of converting it to MOX. (Then of course, the US stockpile of spent LWR fuel could be put through “pyroprocessing” to separate U and Pu from the rest, and get rid of the fuel pools, dry casks and pretty much the whole rationale for Yucca Mountain in the bargain. To S-PRISM, it’s all good. The Pu becomes “driver fuel”, and the U, which does yield some fissions, is mostly “breeding blanket”. There’s decades of carbon-free grid power just in the spent fuel, let alone the depleted uranium piled up over 70 years.)
This almost happened in the USA, and if not for John Kerry’s key role in eliminating the entire US budget for nuclear power research in 1994, we’d probably be there already.
There is no national discussion on research into pebble bed and molten salt LFT reactors as far as I know. My point is, after funds are allocated, we will still be decades away from safe nuclear power.
The USA went from the first controlled atomic chain reaction on 2-Dec-1942 to criticality in the first commercial nuclear power plant on 2-Dec-1957, fifteen years to the day. Unlike 1942, we now have decades of experience with molten-salt, liquid-sodium and other types of reactors. An Apollo-level program, with the regulators subordinated to the engineers and scientists, should yield operating pilot plants in a handful of years at most. This is not done because powerful people do not WANT it done.
The one data point that really got my attention was the “1 meter of sea level rise every 20 years.” Everything else faded to black when I saw that. Yikes!
A great video, I see a body of eminent climate scientists clearly warning us of what is happening at each pole of the planet, with palaeoclimatology examples, and the grave consequences in the not so long term future. I live in a city of over 1.3 million, a local university had a free lecture a few evenings ago on sea level rise and other climate affects delivered by a very respectable local climate scientist. I doubt whether there were more than twenty people attending, and most of those were University staff themselves. Many people just don’t want to see or hear it. I am interested in other branches of science too, but why an Earth and how do so many people think they know better than educated climate experts and specialists, but keep so quiet in other scientific fields. ?
Yes, Wes. Deniers never point to the last post glacial 20,000 years as evidence of GW forcing sensitivity. See how they distract? If they did, they would see abrupt cataclysmic jumps in temperature. In fact, the last 2000 years before the industrial revolution are an anomaly of climate stability and equilibrium. I argue it allowed civilization to flourish. Don’t think that would have happened otherwise. Scientists are right to have trepidation about a sudden unanticipated climate shift. When deniers assess sensitivity, they reference the last 2000 years of relative equilibrium. When they dismiss anthropogenic causes, they cite the older record of wild swings. They want it both ways.
This all would be quite worrisome if the Earth wasn’t on a cooling trend.
BTW, who was driving SUV’s 14,000 years ago?
It can’t be possible for humans to change the climate, because the climate changed before! Yay, we’re all off the hook! Doh.
I know…I really know…
As the Earth continues to cool the mantra will simply move to Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Cooling!
as the earth comes to cool? that isn’t happening and seems very unlikely that it is going to happen.
OK, I’ll feed you. What cooling trend? There is none. Warming up less fast is not the same as cooling.
Do you actually know this? And if yes, why are you lying to your fellow human beings?
The earth isn’t cooling. you are simply lying. And SUVs didn’t exist 14,000 years ago, making me suspect that you suffer from some form of mental disability.
The earth is on a cooling trend? Really?
Tell us all about it, kingDUH—-I for one am dying to hear more!
Your moniker is all too appropriate. Pull your head out of MSNBC’s arse and look around.
and whose arse was your head up when you came to the demonstrably incorrect conclusion that the earth is cooling?
k-dube, Just guessing that dumboldguy has a good sense of humor and doesn’t learn about climate science on MSNBC. What should he be looking around at?
Your cooling trend is nonexistent, but a slowdown in atmospheric warming has occurred in the last 15 years or so. Fortunately, I added that to this graph of global temperature over the last 2,000 years, so you can observe it in all its ‘significance’: http://tinyurl.com/lq7tvhl
(blue is ocean sediment data. green is tree ring data. red is modern thermometer and satellite data.)
Please answer the question.
WHAT cooling trend?
“… if the Earth wasn’t on a cooling trend.”
and there is no gravity. The earth sucks!
The difficult thing with sea level rise is getting everyone not living near affected areas to care about those who do in advance of the crisis. Most people will think it’s not their problem. Some will be sympathetic afterwords, but that won’t help prevent it from happening in the first place.
Sea level rise is beginning to affect the South Pacific Islands of Kiribati, Tuvalu and regions of Fiji. It has also badly affected Kutubdia and other Islands in the bay of Bengal and it is anticipated that some Island will have to be abandoned completely in the foreseeable future. See level rise is visible, measurable and difficult to deny, but our local denier has of course put it all down to the Islands sinking and denies the NASA (and many others) measured evidence of sea level rise as a massive sinister conspiracy and scam (ignoring well established sea level rise engineering tables for sea bridge builders, satellite data and of course computer projections etc.). It seems that some people can not project into the future more than a few years and seem to have a fuzzy logic/blank spot when thinking 25 years or more ahead in time. The latest UN climate talks in Poland achieved practically nothing except that it agreed to reconvene in Paris 2015 to discuss possible changes for 2020. Again it reminds me of hypertension a condition which creeps up slowly unnoticed and eventually can result in great problems or even death. What does it take for our governments to admit AGW and take serious action for heaven sake.?
The audio levels on some of your speakers are quite low, and then the levels boom during your voiceovers and the music track. This is especially true of the bass.
I agree that this is one of your better ones—excellent choice of video clips and editing—-nice pacing. daveburton will prove that he is a bigger fool than we thought if he attempts to refute any of this “plio” evidence with his “tide gauges show over the past 80 years…” BS
And off the topic of the video, but very much on topic for the whole debate, Rod Adams has another “Smoking Gun” piece where he digs up assertions that Henry Kissinger helped to orchestrate both the OPEC oil price shocks and the astroturf effort to discredit nuclear energy, which was even then making inroads into the market for coal. This was in 1972, many years before Three Mile Island. He quotes author Engdahl:
The Green movement has been played for suckers for going on 4 decades.
having been deeply involved in that movement, I can tell you it was grassroots from the get-go – literally starting out on kitchen tables, in our case.
And the fossil interests were able to buy movement people from just about the time they got wind of you. They bought the anti-nuclear position of the Sierra Club. David Gelbaum bought the Sierra Club’s position on immigration, turning it from ZPG to “no comment” even on the human flood of recent decades.
Read the Adams piece, and others under “Smoking Gun”. And listen a bit to Patrick Moore and James Lovelock.
I’ve met Patrick Moore. He’s an idiot. seriously.total bought into the goofiest denial memes – no critical thinking whatever. even his pro-nuke arguments are stale and shallow.
Hmm… Ad hominem attack.
Sea level rise acceleration started about 1880s and continues today. See Peters video below. The most obvious connection between GW, CO2, and sea level rise is the increase in CO2 in the mid 1800s, followed by the change from sea level equilibrium, to a rate of sea level increase.
These curves show a correlation between CO2, GW, and sea level rise.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Carbon_Emission_by_Type.png
http://www.glaciology.net/Home/PDFs/Announcements/Recent-global-sea-level-acceleration-started-over-200-years-ago-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
I dont know what all the fuss is about. The curves are pretty cut and dry.
Lately, every topic is diverted to sea level rise.
Excellent source of sea level rise information:
http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/
Lest we over simplify the matter, post Industrial Revolution soot affected glacier melting and GW.
http://www.livescience.com/39388-soot-melts-alps.html
Here is an Abramson post in the Guardian UK, referencing Peter Sinclair and the Dark Snow Project.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/jun/12/greenland-darkening-ice-climate-science
Google global warming industrial revolution, you get a huge number of graph images.
Very insightful. Highly recommended. The fuss will melt away!)
Very nice video, Peter. I’ll re-post it on the ASIB tomorrow.
About what Engineer-Poet said…
In 1979 when the Three-Mile-Island incident occurred, I was a local Sierra Club executive committee member in Nevada. I jumped in with both feet, and became the big anti-nuke spokesperson. I can’t say who or what influenced the Sierra Club leaders in San Francisco, I can only speak for myself, but I can say without doubt that the Club’s literature took on a very anti-nuke tone at the time, which also influenced me.
Anyway, as for my motives, I think I just enjoyed the ego trip of being an “expert.” I got interviewed by the press, I got on TV. Even some of the chicks started hanging out with me, because I was sort of famous.
In reality, I knew next to nothing. I had no expertise in nuclear energy. But I tried educating myself, and as I did I became more and more disillusioned with the anti-nuke movement. After about one year in the anti-nuke movement, I had a real wake-up call during a meeting when we discussed how the world might get rid of the huge amount of plutonium-239 that had accumulated as nuclear waste. My research in the matter led me to the conclusion that it could only be gotten rid of by being “burned” (not the most accurate term) in a breeder reactor. My fellow anti-nuke activists groaned, explaining to me that if we allowed that, it might make nuclear energy viable. Thus, it was proposed that we continue to do everything possible to make sure the nuclear waste continue to be kept in temporary storage, poisoning the environment for the next 250,000 years, just to make sure that nuclear energy would die and never be revived.
I dropped out of the movement. When the Cold War ended 10 years later, there was a revival of media interest in how to dispose of all the plutonium warheads that were no longer needed. Again, proposals were floated that it could only be gotten rid of by burning it in fast reactors, and again the Sierra Club leaped into action to oppose this, insisting that it be kept as unburied waste for the next 1/4 million years.
Meanwhile, I’ve learned much about 4th generation nuclear. And although I don’t consider it a panacea for solving AGW, I think it’s worth a shot. That doesn’t preclude using other green technologies like solar and wind, it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. I’m in favor of anything that reduces CO2 emissions.
Unfortunately, most of the “green” folks I know don’t think nuclear should be an option. They don’t even want to see research into 4th generation nukes continue. They just want to shutter the existing plants and leave the waste to leak into the environment, as a reminder that “nuclear is evil.”
Anti-nuke is something of a cult – that hasn’t changed. Meanwhile, it’s getting hotter. The earth burns while we fiddle.
some of us aren’t in this for the chicks. I was born into it, so kind of seriously involved long before TMI. I did notice that a lot of flakes got attracted about that time.
Not sure what you mean by “born into it.” Did your parents get you involved? Mine certainly didn’t.
Not sure I could be categorized as a “flake,” but that would be a matter of opinion. In any mass movement, the majority of participants are followers. Only a small percentage really take the time to stop and think their position through, and constantly question if they might be wrong about something. The easiest position is to think you must always be right, and try to silence your critics by calling them names. Having like-minded people surrounding you makes it easier to reinforce the position that you can never be wrong. Maybe you ought to sit down and listen to your opponents some time to see if they don’t have some valid points.
I think a lot of people don’t know why they’re into a mass movement. My opinion is that basically people have a need to join a group, to be accepted. That would include some reasonable folks, as well as the less reasonable such as the AGW deniers, Tea Partiers, Operation Rescuers, religious fundamentalists, etc. And for the few who emerge as a Group Leader, there is considerable prestige to be gained, great for one’s ego.
Now I am not the leader of anything, and the chicks aren’t swarming around me, but I do a lot more thinking than I did as a young man. Let me leave you with one thought: you just may be wrong. Question yourself, everyday.
Practice what you preach.
“Not sure what you mean by “born into it.” Did your parents get you involved?”
Given that information about Mary Sinclair is public, I’ll post this as a starting point. Google will lead you to many more stories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_P._Sinclair
Very interesting – I had no idea.
I’m surprised Peter still lives in Michigan based on the following:
Repercussions[edit]
Dow Chemical is the largest employer in Midland, and her opposition to the high profile project considered important to Dow caused a backlash against Sinclair and her family. Their mailbox was blown up, they received threatening letters on their lawn, and were spat upon in public.[4] Her husband’s law practice was boycotted and the brake line on the family vehicle was cut. Still, Sinclair persevered. After the Midland reactor project was cancelled, a Consumers Power spokesperson commented, “I want to blame her but I don’t want to give her any credit.” [5]
You were duped then and you are duped now. Nothing has changed.
Another ad hom attack. You’re really changing hearts and minds with your great arguments.
Ad hominem. That’s a stretch. He admitted to being duped before. I expressed an opinion that he was being duped now. That is not correctly ad hominem, as calling him an idiot might be for example. You are too loose with that term. I can express an opinion that I believe his being duped without it being an ad hominem. As a fallacy, it is to produce an irrelevant fact, usually a trait, about the person presenting the claim. The fact that he had been duped before calls into question his thought practices and sound judgement and is quite relevant to a discussion of whether he might be duped again. Still, it points to the fact that I gave no argument, only opinion on being duped later. Since you poked, I will respond. He stated that he knew nothing, tried to educate himself, and became disillusioned after one year. It portrays the mind of shallow thought. He claims he discovered that waste could be burned in breeders. Never mind that breeders have been a complete financial failure. I guess he did not get to that part or were ever used to successfully process a significant amount of waste. Breeders must be used processing even when they “burn up” wastes. Reprocessing is a flop. See the west valley New York debacle for reference. I already referenced all this before at length. See daryan energy blog for some alternate thought to industry PR. Without further questioning or self education he came to a whole lot of other conclusions, which begin something like all ” green folks” are …. Something of a cult.. In other posts going as far as claiming they were dishonest, as a group. I would venture to call that a whole lot worse than ad hominem. I call it prejudice. Sorry, I won’t even begin to discuss the number of falsehoods in his post. It’s off topic anyway. It’s ironic. Posts are never on topic anymore. Feel free to discuss the topics and post. I much prefer accurate reliable referenced writing that inform and enlighten everyone.
The USA is willing to collect $37 billion in taxes earmarked for the disposal of used light-water reactor fuel (roughly 4% burnup), but won’t spend a couple of billion dollars for the plants and reactors to dispose of the transuranics permanently and at a massive energy profit. It seems that “profit” only matters when it counts against nuclear.
Pyroprocessing was just about to be tested at commercial scale when John Kerry helped zero the funding for all advanced nuclear research in 1994. Despite this, small amounts have been successfully processed in the years since, and all the technological details have been proven. South Korea is now moving to commercialize this technology.
A flop, compared to $37 billion for nothing beyond a hole in the ground in Nevada? The real problem is the anti-nukes who will not allow the “problem” to be “solved” until the industry has been killed. That is their goal.
When regulations kept escalating the cost, the owners gave in to regulatory blackmail and shut down. You could shut down every wind farm in the USA by regulating infrasonics. There’s no mystery about this.
For 4th Gen nuclear to be viable shouldn’t Congress be holding hearings now about how to allocate funding for research?
If an Apollo type program were launched now, when would the first commerically viable, safer, 4th Gen reactor be connected to existing U.S. power grids? Wouldn’t this be decades in the future?
There is no national discussion on research into pebble bed and molten salt LFT reactors as far as I know. My point is, after funds are allocated, we will still be decades away from safe nuclear power.
I’m not saying research funds shouldn’t be allocated. I’m just saying that in the U.S. Congress, the discussion hasn’t even started.
GE-Hitachi is in negotiations with G. Britain to build TWO Gen IV fast-spectrum reactors (S-PRISMs) to eliminate the stockpile of reclaimed plutonium at Sellafield. There’s no reason the USA couldn’t build a bunch of them to eliminate the stockpile of ex-weapons plutonium we’ve got, instead of converting it to MOX. (Then of course, the US stockpile of spent LWR fuel could be put through “pyroprocessing” to separate U and Pu from the rest, and get rid of the fuel pools, dry casks and pretty much the whole rationale for Yucca Mountain in the bargain. To S-PRISM, it’s all good. The Pu becomes “driver fuel”, and the U, which does yield some fissions, is mostly “breeding blanket”. There’s decades of carbon-free grid power just in the spent fuel, let alone the depleted uranium piled up over 70 years.)
This almost happened in the USA, and if not for John Kerry’s key role in eliminating the entire US budget for nuclear power research in 1994, we’d probably be there already.
The USA went from the first controlled atomic chain reaction on 2-Dec-1942 to criticality in the first commercial nuclear power plant on 2-Dec-1957, fifteen years to the day. Unlike 1942, we now have decades of experience with molten-salt, liquid-sodium and other types of reactors. An Apollo-level program, with the regulators subordinated to the engineers and scientists, should yield operating pilot plants in a handful of years at most. This is not done because powerful people do not WANT it done.
The one data point that really got my attention was the “1 meter of sea level rise every 20 years.” Everything else faded to black when I saw that. Yikes!
A great video, I see a body of eminent climate scientists clearly warning us of what is happening at each pole of the planet, with palaeoclimatology examples, and the grave consequences in the not so long term future. I live in a city of over 1.3 million, a local university had a free lecture a few evenings ago on sea level rise and other climate affects delivered by a very respectable local climate scientist. I doubt whether there were more than twenty people attending, and most of those were University staff themselves. Many people just don’t want to see or hear it. I am interested in other branches of science too, but why an Earth and how do so many people think they know better than educated climate experts and specialists, but keep so quiet in other scientific fields. ?
And that was a much slower change in forcing.
Yes, Wes. Deniers never point to the last post glacial 20,000 years as evidence of GW forcing sensitivity. See how they distract? If they did, they would see abrupt cataclysmic jumps in temperature. In fact, the last 2000 years before the industrial revolution are an anomaly of climate stability and equilibrium. I argue it allowed civilization to flourish. Don’t think that would have happened otherwise. Scientists are right to have trepidation about a sudden unanticipated climate shift. When deniers assess sensitivity, they reference the last 2000 years of relative equilibrium. When they dismiss anthropogenic causes, they cite the older record of wild swings. They want it both ways.
Thanks as always for the video, Peter.