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But if the climate scientists are right...

LOL!!! OK, stop reading now. We all know that the "climate scientists" are paid by governments to come up with results "proving" human caused Global Warming® (since rebranded Climate Change® since rebranded CO2 Pollution®). These "climate scientists" have recently revealed that they will break the law in order to hide data from peers, will block papers from being peer reviewed, and will outright lie in order to "make their point."

I'm sorry but drastically higher taxes, massive growth in government bureaucracies, and extreme loss of freedom are not the answers to Earth's constantly changing climate.

Remember the below, startling, "science" revealed in the pages of Newsweek in 1975? Thirty five years later these two articles are taking the same track! Although one about the horrors of Global Warming®, the other about the horrors of Global Cooling. And the only solution is... wait for it... wait... LARGER government!

"Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality."

Science! LOL!!!

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Robert, It's good to see that you made your post from Haiti! How is it going in Haiti? I'm glad that you walk the walk by being one of the wealthy, heading there to help the natural disaster victims in order to avoid their wrath.

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Simple calculations will show that there is not enough land area and fresh water to supply biomass sufficient for the liquid energy demands for the world; forget about the food needed as well. The oceans have already been over fished for food.

After traveling 93 million miles, solar energy is mostly too dilute to be used cost effectively for industrial energy no matter how much hits the earth. Please notice how many govenments finance their operations by extracting gold from the oceans even though there is a great deal of it.

Hyperion is developing a nuclear reactor small enough and cheap enough so that every factory could have one of its own for heat and electricity.

Potassium on the earth has always been radio-active, so all live things, including humans, have always been and will always be radioactive. Live cells have learned to survive small amounts of nuclear energy as many have learned to survive the toxic deadly chemical OXYGEN.

Several CANDU nuclear power stations can be built quickly in the Haiti area for all of the local islands and supported with a grid of undersea direct current cables. Eventually the US should use an electrical grid of buried highvoltage direct current cables. CANDU reactors do not need the heavy forged tanks required by other reactors that are in short supply, and they can be built quickly in large numbers.

France has proven the economic and environmental advantages of nuclear reactors. Eventually net energy fusion reactors will be developed, as there are already devices that use fusion to produce neutrons, but there is enough Uranium and Thorium on the earth and in the ocean to supply present and future energy needs until the sun blows up a few billion years from now. We may as well use the Uranium and Thorium because it is destroying itself.

CANDU reactors are like other reactors and nearly impervious to hurricanes and earthquakes because of their already heavy construction. Such reactors could built on US islands near Florida and the power sold throughout the Caribian.

The Rubbia Reactor, otherwise known as the Accelerator Driven Reactor, can use any kind of nuclear fuel, including thorium and can be built in small sizes, but the existing CANDU reactors with chemical reprocessing of fuels can already operate with only thorium and the Uranium produced from the thorium during the reaction. The stockpiles of, so called, transuranic wastes can be used mixed with thorium to initiate this operation that only needs thorium afterwards.

The use of thorium produces almost no transuranics and they can be consumed anyway by the reactor if just put back in. In fact, the way to get rid of all transuranic elements is just to put them back into reactors and get the energy out of them quickly instead of slowly. Plutonium is not produced in Thorium reactors in substantial quantities and is destroyed by the reaction as well.

The processing of thorium CANDU fuel elements only requires the removal of a substantial part of the fission products and no separations of uranium, plutonium or transuranics needs to be done. Such processing might even be done mostly by just heating the fuel to very high temperatures to vaporize the contaminants.

Conventional reprocessing in France and the UK is well done and useful in the face of high price inflation due to speculators in the uranium market.

The zirconium tubes used in fuel elements can be annealed, repaired and recycled. Automatic machinery and robots can do most of the work on the now highly radioactive parts. A recent article about replacement limbs for amputees in the National Geographic indicates how a very versatile robotic worker could be created if necessary. The present CANDU fuel elements can be delivered by taxi they are so low in radio-activity, very few trips a day would be required.

Heavy water costs a lot of money but it keeps its value, like gold, forever and only needs repurification at times. The cost of the Thorium in such a CANDU operation is less than a tenth of the price of the delivered electricity.

Peak oil can never be reached because oil can be made economically from recycled CO2 and water and nuclear energy. France has already begun such a project that produces hydrogen for fuels from suplus power.

A total electric Hummer, with an emergency tiny range extender of course, can be built with ZEBRA batteries with enough electric range to get Governors to and from work and a hundred miles beyond. A school bus has been running on ZEBRA batteries in California for many years.

Haiti and the rest of the area islands can use electrical energy. ..HG..

To the Goracle,

Get back to work. Those burgers aren't going to flip themselves.

Once again, another daily post that has nothing to do with cars, transportation, or anything automotive. From Green C A R Congress.

FOCUS, people. FOCUS.

G-R-E-E-Ncarcongress seems to invite 'green' comments..

Peter:

Contraception is very effective. In the early 1960's thru mid 1990's our birth rate went down from 3.05 to 1.25 per couple and we had the import people from all continents to try to compensate.

In the mid 1990's our politicians needed more votes and our teaching staff needed more children to keep their jobs etc. A natality boosting program was voted in with up to $7000 bonus per newborn + very generous family allowances + $5/day (day care) services + 9 to 12 months paid leave for ladies and 6 weeks for the genitors + increased tax credits for every child etc etc.

The birth rate has gone up to almost 2 per couple. Many recent arrivals with one wife and three or four productive maids (or female guests) have as many as 20 children and dont realy have to work anymore. Unwed mothers recieve more allowances (+ social benefits if they stay home) than married ladies.

Yes, we have gone a very long way to fight the over benefits of contraception.

How long can we afford the current extremely expensive family programs?
The day care services are now at a low $7/day and costing over $42/day per young child. Pregnancy leaves cost $Bilion a year and is very work desruptive. Training replacement personnel is very expensive. Our per capita productivity is going down with birth rate going up etc.

Ha ha ha! You really have to watch where you get your info from. The Daily Mail is a British daily tabloid newspaper, it's on a par with your National Enquirer.

Interesting climate videos:
http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610

Some conclusions from the interview with Phil Jones by BBC's Roger Harrabin:

# Neither the rate nor magnitude of recent warming is exceptional.
# There was no significant warming from 1998-2009. According to the IPCC we should have seen a global temperature increase of at least 0.2°C per decade.
# The IPCC models may have overestimated the climate sensitivity for greenhouse gases, underestimated natural variability, or both.
# This also suggests that there is a systematic upward bias in the impacts estimates based on these models just from this factor alone.
# The logic behind attribution of current warming to well-mixed man-made greenhouse gases is faulty.
# The science is not settled, however unsettling that might be.
# There is a tendency in the IPCC reports to leave out inconvenient findings, especially in the part(s) most likely to be read by policy makers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm

I see no farmers commented, so allow me, a retired farmer, to provide a little perspective.

The reason crop yields went down in Europe during the heat wave is that most grain crops grown there are C3 photosynthesis pathway plants, which respond positively to CO2 increase but negatively to heat. We see this all the time in North Dakota, where I farmed. The inverse relationship between yield and heat is well known.

A second effect of increased heat is increased evaporation, reducing the amount of water available to the plants. This is also well known. It takes 30 inches of rainfall in Texas to equal 20 inches in North Dakota. The hotter it is, the more rain you need just to stay in place.

C4 photosynthesis pathway plants, like corn, sorghum, switchgrass, or miscanthus do not respond to increased CO2 levels but do respond positively to heat, up to a point. Too much heat and they will also shut down.

Talking of farming in farther north regions now outside the farming belt is easier said than done. Those northern areas generally have thin, acidic soils. It's no one to one replacement. I farmed on deep prairie soils in North Dakota while living 300 miles away in boreal northern Minnesota. From a soils standpoint, there's no comparison whatsoever.

What hasn't been recognized in discussion of the production potential of the world's agriculture is that it is primarily based on an assumption that annual plant agriculture will continue unabated. There is another option.

Research on cellulosic biofuel could allow us to unlock the food value present in the vegetative parts of perennial grasses and legumes. In trials at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, perennial Miscanthus giganteus produced four times as much biomass as corn with no fertilizer or irrigation water input.

Note that the vegetative part of a grass is composed of 3/4ths cellulose, which is a long chain polymer of glucose, the sugar our bodies reduce food down to for use at the cellular level, and 1/4th lignin, a natural resin. Cows can access this food directly, humans can't. But if cellulose is unlocked for biofuel production, it is also unlocked for human food production.

G, are you as crazy as you seem to be or do you just have fun pretending absolutely totally insane?