1/150th of human consumption (best data I can find, correct me if you have better). At 30 GW year, solar could provide all the human energy (if we capped consumption at 2012 levels) needs (15 terrawatts, again, feel free to add your own data) in just a short 500 years.
You're thinking Linearly. Who even hinted that 30GW a year is a constant rate, when it's always risen exponentially since the invention of PV panels?
If you add together all of the "Green" energy types (There are more than a dozen large-scale techs now) and Nuclear too, then this problem is solveable in 5-10 years flat simply because we only have to replace Coal and Oil... Nothing else is causing this huge CO2 output. (And all we need to break the feedback loop is to bring the CO2 output levels back to pre-Coal & Oil days.)
I for one would regard the info coming out of China regarding their wind power generation on par with their falsely inflated economic data, especially considering the constant issues we've had with wind turbines stateside. My cousin climbs them and does maintenance (invest in those companies bros, they can't keep up and if Obama keeps subsidizing the industry, they'll only keep growing) on wind farms in California, the list of shit that goes wrong with them is impressive...
1. Wind is not the most promising of the bunch, frankly I like latest-gen Nuclear > PV Solar > Geothermal > wind.
2. Even still, Spain (yeah the entire country) now runs PRIMARILY on wind power. Just because your cousin's company isn't getting everything right doesn't mean wind is viable.
3. Just like Solar isn't progressing linearly, neither are these other techs. Pretty much all of them are doubling or more their GW output capacity every year.
Spain now PRIMARILY powered by Wind Energy - You're holding Spain up as a model for current policy?
Just showing that wind can go large-scale... See how Grindstone didn't seem to think it could?
German Town acheives 100% Energy Independance a hundred and fifty people, now that is progress to set policy on
Wind surpasses Nuclear in China That's sweet since China produces a tenth the atomic energy we do and is currently building its energy production from scratch not converting it.
101 Gigawatts is the Earth's new PV Energy output, up 30 GW in 2012 TIL the world is producing as much in pv as the us alone does in atomic.
These are all just examples to show Grindstone that progress is marching on. No one suggested that these very examples can solve the problems we have now.
Dude get a grip. Your precious stable of properly trained scientists are paid by the very parasites you identify as the purveyors of malfeasant solutions to the socalled problem. The mmgw crowd's largest single funding source is government money. It's billions and billions and billions to the proponents and peanuts to the skeptics. And the proponents still can't fake the data without getting caught.
Any global warming debate would make for an excellent grad student study in statistical manipulation.
Can you two hear yourselves talking?
Few around here spew as much conspiracy theory as I do, Amirite? But in this case you're crediting the conspirators with powers they just don't have.
Look, I have NO doubt whatsoever that some scientists, and by some I'm not talking about 2 or 3, have skewed AGW data for extra grant money.
None. I'm convinced a few have. Perhaps something like 5% or even 10%. These things happen.
However.................................. 97 freaking Percent?!??
Let's just think for a moment of all of the circumstances that must happen for the "97% liar phenomenon" to happen:
1. 97% of all climatologists, Worldwide, are being bribed in some way or another (usually grants) by a group or class of people who feel the AGW political agenda is worth them raising and paying all of this bribe money for.
2. 97% of all climatologists, Worldwide, have no integrity nor strong desire for the truth to prevail, and hence take the bribe. (This one says it all to me.)
3. Then there's the
vast amounts of data fudging it would take to make their false numbers fit together with the worldwide weather reporting, which we've taken extrememly indepth records of over the last 130 years... I'm not sure this could be done at all, much less in real time so no one can spot a real flaw like we haven't seen yet.
I don't have time to think of these all day but I'm sure I could come up with several more, such as the noted global extreme weather patterns that are intensifying, both in frequency and intensity from year to year lately.
Using Occam's Razor, I deduce that it's more likely for AGW to be real, since afterall, it is very well proven and testable that we are:
A) Dumping lots of CO2 into the atmosphere that didn't exist before 1830 or so, and
B) CO2 is a known greenhouse gas that traps heat energy inside the atmosphere.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that things can get warmer that way... But I guess it does take a Climatologist to prove and disprove that it's happening now.
Can one of you people please explain to me why you would expect global temperatures to remain constant, when they have never remained constant at any time in history? Temperatures go up and temperatures go down. Hummers and Escalades aren't what brought us out of the ice age - earths gonna earth. The planet has self-corrected for billions of years and it is going to continue to self-correct. Meanwhile, mother nature is lolling at your pitiful attempts to control it.
You really seem to be ignoring the data. I don't know why you keep arguing if you won't listen to what you're arguing against.
Here's the cliffs:
1. CO2 has always existed in the atmosphere, but our BEHAVIOR for almost 200 years now has put more of it up there than ever before in the existence of mankind. (Which is all you should care about, because you don't want a planet that can't support mankind.) This is proven in Ice core samples dating back at least 200,000 years, taken from around the world like at the poles and up on mountaintop glaciers.
2. CO2 is a very-well-proven greenhouse gas, which means that the more of it you put in the atmosphere, the more heat energy it traps in. See Venus for an extreme example of greenhouse gases.
3. The Earth does have the ability to remove extra CO2 at an impressive rate, which it has always had to do after volcano eruptions and so forth... But NEVER at the current rate of CO2 addition, which is CONSTANT and GROWING. We're just basically asking it to recycle too much.
4. Thermometors don't lie, and we can now directly track temperature variation worldwide and see a direct correlation to it for all kinds of events like volcano eruptions, solar flares and events like el nino. However when you remove the temperature change from all of these events, you STILL get a constant growth over the last century or more... A growth rate that has really picked up since the 1980's and even faster since the 2000's... It's at a really scary growth rate now, in fact.
5. Therefore all we gotta do is stop putting out so much CO2 to break this feedback loop. We can't trade it for other greenhouse gasses like Methane, however, that would be even worse... Luckily we've found over a dozen "Green" energy sources in the search for a solution. What makes them green is that they simply don't add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.
If you'll go look at those charts that Jcraig 83 added to this thread you'll see there is ample evidence taken in many different ways to measure the problem. They all agree, the problem exists and is speeding up. Nothing is remaining constant at all.
"scientists now believe" is a phrase I have read too many times in my life to think they're always correct. And when billions of dollars in grant money are at stake, I have to remain a little skeptical, especially since temperatures have always fluctuated without any help from us. Entire industries are built around climate change being a solvable problem, and like any industry experts will do what they have to do to stay in business.
There's just too much evidence now though. In 2000 I would have been arguing this exact point with you... But that was about a million Pro-AGW papers and orbital stacks of data fewer than we have today. It seems you stopped listening long ago and missed all the hardcore facts.
So every other time it was something else, and the earth recovered just fine, but now you think it's humans so...we're fucked?
Now we think it's much worse, do we're fucked.
Not the earth, it doesn't care... But WE can't survive a world 6 degrees hotter... Which could happen by 2100 if the temperature increase rate keeps increasing the way it has been.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8qmaAMK4cM"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8qmaAMK4cM[/ame]
