Cecil Moore wrote:
Mike Coslo wrote:
Does the past allow us to predict what is going to happen tomorrow?

The sun may not rise tomorrow, but I am willing to
bet my 401K that it will.

Of course, even if it were to blink out tonight, it'll still do the
sunrise thing. That's pretty certain.

The issue is those long term cycles. The can predict trends, but can't
do a very good job of predicting if it will be rainy today, or if it
will even be a cold year or a warm year.

One of my favorite moments is on a cold day, some wag will spout "So
much for global warming!" Just a public expression of ignorance, whether
GW exists or not.

Let's make no mistake, we are making this experiment whether we want to
or not. There is no way that we are ever going to get the new industrial
powers to cut down on CO2 emissions. All of this discussion is academic.
We aren't going to cut down our emissions.

One of the delicious ironies in all this is that the same people who
declare anyone who believes in GW as some sort of leftist have staunch
allies who are commies in fact. Go figure.

My guess is that now that we have reached the geometric population
growth phase, we will deplete our oil, then our coal reserves. At that
point, greenhouse emissions will naturally drop.

As we tap into the "final reserves" of fossil fuel, likely anything that
is in the way will fall. Endangered animals, land preserves, pollution
controls. It will be pretty quick. Wars will break out over the
remaining fossil fuels.

Only so much can be done to conserve. Even if each person uses less
energy, there will be plenty of new folks coming along to negate that
conservation.

I've seen the future, and it isn't too pretty.

Although there is an alternative:

LOTS more nuc power. Give up on the antiquated and dangerous supply
paradigm, in which we just have a few plants running their equipment at
about as much power as they can handle, in which any failure makes for
big problems. Many smaller and safer plants are in order.

Unless there is some sort of breakthrough, we're going to need to run
electric cars. We need a new infrastructure built to handle them.

Wind power is cool, as is solar, but we jest aren't ready to get the
huge amount of power needed from those sources.

- 73 de Mike N3LI -