Friday, January 30, 2009

Plumbers needed

The Greenhouse Effect and the Bathtub Effect

"The erroneous belief that stabilizing emissions would quickly stabilize the climate supports wait-and-see policies but violates basic laws of physics," Dr. Sterman concluded.


[. . .]

Without greater understanding of the nature of the problem, he says, it will be hard to convince the public of the need for big, prompt, costly changes to the energy system, even when the worst impacts are projected to come later in the century.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm just glad that the discussion is finally "on the table". I don't care if it takes them a decade to figure out what to do so long as they are engaged in the process of doing something about it.

-Denny

Mac said...

Agreed. Our backs are against the wall, but we're not feeling it yet.

Anonymous said...

Denial always seems to be the “best way” to deal with the problems we face as a society and a culture. Leadership, if that’s what it can be called, excels in that field. We were told the economy was fundamentally sound right up to the moment it collapsed. We were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which of course completely ignored the evidence to the contrary and leadership in the U.S. has continued to deny the climatic issue up to this day. Ignorance may be bliss, but as we have seen, it can be a very costly bliss.

Perhaps the convergence of multiple catastrophic events will finally drive the point home that management is the most important issue facing the human race. The problems created by our industrialized revolution are exacerbated by the failure of the “management class” from the top to the bottom. The mismanagement of everything has become a free for all of corruption and failure on a worldwide basis. This phenomena is nothing new, only the impact and consequences are greater now than they have ever been.

Everyone says they would like to see change, but when it comes right down to it, they mean change for others, but not for themselves. Without fundamental realignment of our thought processes and value systems we will continue to make the same mistakes until the consequences become so dire that we are forced to change by the changes that occur around us and those changes will most likely lead to some very hard times for a very large number of people. It didn’t have to be this way, but that’s the way it is for now.

Michael

Anonymous said...

Quote from the video:

"What happens as the production of these renewables increases? ... We know that as the demand and the production and the scale improve there's going to be greater R&D, more production experience and learning field experience, economies scale, public acceptance, institutional change that drive those costs down. ... That creates a reinforcing loop, a loop that says that if we produce more, we learn more, the costs will fall, the price will fall, the demand will rise even further, that is the feedback loop that we need to drive, that is the feedback loop of human ingenuity..."

Sure sounds hopeful, but I don't see this happening on a global scale or at a scale that will be enough.

Funny to see all these charts, plotting with increasing accuracy our own demise.

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