Need to know????

[Jason1]

Originally Posted by mlarson

Which fact would you like to discuss?

Do you understand the difference between real facts(proven and repeatable) and consensus "facts"(majority opinion)?

Go ahead pick one to discuss and we can have a conversation.

See the IPCC report. All kinds of facts in there.

But of course, you will say they don't mean anything because of politics blah blah blah.

We are spinning our wheels here.

[Michael Larson]

Originally Posted by Jason1

See the IPCC report. All kinds of facts in there.

You seem convinced that the IPCC is the final word and are willing to accept everthing they say. Is that evidence of a closed mind or just and uneducated one? You have a chance here to show us the veracity of any facts you want to cite. You do have certain facts you hang your hat on, don't you?

Originally Posted by Jason1

But of course, you will say they don't mean anything because of politics blah blah blah.

Please don't put words in my mouth. I speak for myself. How about you?

Originally Posted by Jason1

We are spinning our wheels here.

I said you could stop posting anytime and yet you persist.

[Vern Mitchinson, CMI]

It seems to me that as home inspsectors we are in a prime position to profit from the globel warming situtation. Wheather or not the planet is getting warmer the cost of energy is going up.
If we expand our service to include energy audits to help our clientele to retrofit their homes to become more energy efficient that is to our benifit, increased business, and the public's benifit reduced heating and cooling costs. That's a win win for all of us. Right?

[Roy D. Cooke, Sr]

Silence on geothermal deafening TheStar.com - columnists - Silence on geothermal deafening
May 07, 2007
Tyler Hamilton

Three months ago, the Toronto Star ran a lengthy story about an oil-industry consortium that is quietly exploring the use of geothermal heat as an alternative to using natural gas in the oil sands.
Today, natural gas is burned to produce the hot steam that's needed to extract bitumen from the tar sands. Alberta's world-famous sands are already the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gases in the country, and on the current growth path, emissions are expected to jump more than four-fold over the next 10 years.
Replacing much of this natural gas with clean, emission-free heat under the Earth's crust, a completely feasible option according to a recent research report out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, would go an enormous way toward achieving a halt, and eventually a decline, in Canada's carbon emissions.
The problem is, nobody is making noise about it. Not Ottawa. Not the provinces. Not even environmental groups.
When the Harper government released its much-anticipated "green plan" in late April, there was no mention of geothermal in the oil sands. Gary Lunn, federal minister of Natural Resources Canada, has never publicly touted the option.
The situation is perplexing, to say the least.
On the other hand, Lunn has been quite vocal in pushing nuclear power and its potential as a source of energy in the oil sands. The federal government has also been a big supporter, both financially and politically, of carbon capture and sequestration technologies. The idea here is that the oil sands operators can continue along their current path as long as they capture their carbon dioxide emissions and pump it underground into permanent storage.
But it would be, at best, eight years before a nuclear plant is built in Alberta. Similarly, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is years away and would require billions of dollars in research and development before meaningful commercial deployment.
How, in good conscience, can our political leaders be talking about nuclear or CCS without giving equal consideration to a less complex, and possibly more affordable, "clean" option like geothermal?
Not only is geothermal a baseload resource – meaning it can provide power or heat at a predictable level 24 hours a day – but it doesn't leave behind toxic nuclear waste or carry the risk of meltdown. It also doesn't come with the uncertainty associated with carbon storage and the long-term monitoring that's required to make sure CO{-2} doesn't leak out over time, or escape in a single suffocating burst.
A geothermal plant is also dead simple to operate, needing relatively few staff compared to a complicated beast like a nuclear generating station.
"The fact they haven't looked at geothermal and are looking at nuclear, it's very frustrating to me," says Craig Dunn, president of Calgary-based WellDunn Consulting, which works on geological and environmental projects throughout Alberta's oil patch. "The geothermal side of it, for the most part, has been missed."
Geothermal plants work by pumping water into deep wells and exposing it to hot rock below. The water absorbs the heat and is pumped back to the surface. Heat is then extracted from the water to produce steam that can be used on its own or, if hot enough, to generate electricity.
To tap extreme temperatures in the bedrock – somewhere between 150C to 200C – would require drilling five to eight kilometres deep. But many of the processes in the oil sands only require temperatures around 80C, meaning the job could be done at much shallower depths.
"We drill three- to four-kilometre wells in the foothills by the thousands," says Dunn. "It's not like we can't do this. The technology is there, it's available. It's not a cheap option, but when you're looking at it in terms of cost, time to build and energy compared to a nuclear plant, it looks attractive."
One Alberta politician is beginning to ask questions. Dan Backs, an MLA for the riding of Edmonton-Manning, tabled four articles last Thursday in the Alberta legislature to draw more attention to the geothermal option. One of those articles was the Star piece published in February.
He told me in an interview that nuclear power doesn't sit well with his riding, which has a large Ukrainian community. For many, memories of Chernobyl are still vivid and the idea of putting reactors in the oil sands raises a stiff eyebrow. "A lot of people get pretty antsy about that," he says.
Backs says geothermal should be a "slam dunk" and that he plans to nurture the idea in political and local industry circles. "I'll be making the rounds," he says. "I'll continue to push this issue."
Talk of putting nukes in the oil sands may, however, be overblown. Only a couple of oil sand developers, Husky Energy Inc. and France's Total SA, are exploring the option. Most of the noise is coming from Calgary-based Alberta Energy Corp., which in partnership with Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. wants to build a $5.5 billion nuclear plant in the oil sands by 2016.
In March, a natural resources parliamentary committee advised in a report that any decision to put a nuclear plant in the oil sands should be put on hold until the impact can be assessed and other options are studied.
Meanwhile, major players in the sands – Shell Canada, Suncor Energy and Nexen, to name a few – are doing just that. As members of the GeoPower In The Oil Sands consortium, they are doing their homework, consulting with geologists and engineers, analyzing the business case in a quiet effort to understand geothermal's potential.
One project underway in Fort MacMurray, in partnership with the Centre for Environmental Research in Minerals, Metals and Materials at the University of British Columbia, seeks to tap 80C temperatures two to five kilometres under the surface of the oil sands deposits.
"Although the capital costs to drill wells to that depth are high, the long-term impact on energy use can be substantial on a permanent basis," according to a description of the project.
In other words, like a nuclear plant, a geothermal setup would cost a lot upfront but would pay off over 20 or 30 years because of lower operating costs. The only difference is that geothermal doesn't require a fuel like uranium, which is skyrocketing in price.
Mory Ghomshei, a UBC professor leading the project, says another advantage of geothermal is that a number of smaller, medium-temperature plants can be scattered around the oil sands where low-quality heat is directly needed at well depths of just 3 kilometres. The heat from a big central nuclear plant, on the other hand, can only be transported 10 kilometres by pipeline before losing its energy.
"Geothermal can also be developed much faster than nuclear," says Ghomshei. "A comprehensive study, of course, is needed to evaluate and validate the application."
Another geothermal project in Alberta, which could add momentum to the cause, seeks to tap 100C-plus temperatures in old oil wells that have been abandoned – no digging required.
This is all good news. So why does nuclear keep capturing the headlines? Perhaps it's because the geothermal industry doesn't have a public relations machine behind it that's subsidized by the federal government. And, not surprisingly, the oil companies are historically and understandably reluctant to show their cards.
This leaves it to the public to make some noise, and with 2,000 scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calling for the stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2015, now is the time to bang the drum.
"Political acceptance comes out of public awareness," says Ghomshei.
Consider yourself aware.


Email Tyler Hamilton at thamilt@thestar.ca.

Roy Cooke

[Jason1]

Originally Posted by mlarson

You seem convinced that the IPCC is the final word and are willing to accept everthing they say. Is that evidence of a closed mind or just and uneducated one? You have a chance here to show us the veracity of any facts you want to cite.

Tell you what Mikey, provide some "facts" from an undisputed majority of scientists, like the IPCC, backing up your "stand" and I am willing to listen.

As long as you can only come up with a handful of people trying to make a name for themselves, then I will lean towards the educated opinions of our worlds top scientists.

You are trying to Captain a sinking ship, I am afraid.

Fortunately, my opinion is in the majority, while yours is in the minority.

The burden of proof lies with you, my friend.

What say thee......

[Michael Larson]

Originally Posted by Jason1

Fortunately, my opinion is in the majority, while yours is in the minority.....

Fornuate for who Jase ole boy?
Please name for me who will benifit from attacking the global climate change problem? Certainly not the third world who desperately want to modernize for example.

Majorities are quite often wrong. Ever heard of mob rule?

[Michael Larson]

Originally Posted by Jason1

Tell you what Mikey, provide some "facts" from an undisputed majority of scientists, like the IPCC, backing up your "stand" and I am willing to listen..

What does a majority of anything have to do with science?

Jason1, you persist in ignoring the cost effectiveness of spending money on conclusions drawn from unproven science.

[Michael Larson]

jason1 and anyone else: Please read the following and see if a reasoned approach to the problem is being proposed.
If you disagree with the article could you point out what you disagree with?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let us assume that the IPCC's predictions are valid. How should governments and societies respond?

Government regulations in the developed world to cap or reduce greenhouse gases are a lost cause and should be abandoned. Unless China, India, and other rapidly expanding economic centers in the developing world fully participate in greenhouse gas reduction efforts, regulatory schemes in the west will simply displace economic activity from the "clean" developed world to the "dirty" developing world, making the global greenhouse gas problem worse, not better. MORE

[Michael Larson]

The realities of "Consensus"

Political Economist Robert Higgs on Peer Reviews and Scientific Consensus

Posted by Noel Sheppard on May 7, 2007 - 17:40. How many times in the past year as global warming has become a headline issue have you heard a liberal media member or Hollywood elite talk about a consensus of peer reviewed scientists?
So much so that you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one, correct?
As an example, pop singer Sheryl Crow during her recent Stop Global Warming College tour would toss the term "peer-reviewed science" around to her audience like a frisbee, as if she had any idea what it actually meant.
With that in mind, a Senior Fellow in Political Economy for the Independent Institute, Dr. Robert Higgs, published an article at George Mason University’s History News Network Monday that should be required reading for folks like soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore and his followers (emphasis added throughout):

I have served as a peer reviewer for more than thirty professional journals and as a reviewer of research proposals for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and a number of large private foundations. I was the principal investigator of a major NSF-funded research project in the field of demography. So, I think I know something about how the system works.
It does not work as outsiders seem to think.

Tell us more, Doctor:

Peer review, on which lay people place great weight, varies from important, where the editors and the referees are competent and responsible, to a complete farce, where they are not. As a rule, not surprisingly, the process operates somewhere in the middle, being more than a joke but less than the nearly flawless system of Olympian scrutiny that outsiders imagine it to be. Any journal editor who desires, for whatever reason, to knock down a submission can easily do so by choosing referees he knows full well will knock it down; likewise, he can easily obtain favorable referee reports. As I have always counseled young people whose work was rejected, seemingly on improper or insufficient grounds, the system is a crap shoot. Personal vendettas, ideological conflicts, professional jealousies, methodological disagreements, sheer self-promotion and a great deal of plain incompetence and irresponsibility are no strangers to the scientific world; indeed, that world is rife with these all-too-human attributes. In no event can peer review ensure that research is correct in its procedures or its conclusions.

As for the other buzzword folks like Gore, Crow, and Laurie David like to throw around:

At any given time, consensus may exist about all sorts of matters in a particular science. In retrospect, however, that consensus is often seen to have been mistaken. As recently as the mid-1970s, for example, a scientific consensus existed among climatologists and scientists in related fields that the earth was about the [sic] enter a new ice age. Drastic proposals were made, such as exploding hydrogen bombs over the polar icecaps (to melt them) or damming the Bering Strait (to prevent cold Arctic water from entering the Pacific Ocean), to avert this impending disaster. Well-reputed scientists, not just uninformed wackos, made such proposals. How quickly we forget.
Researchers who employ unorthodox methods or theoretical frameworks have great difficulty under modern conditions in getting their findings published in the "best" journals or, at times, in any scientific journal. Scientific innovators or creative eccentrics always strike the great mass of practitioners as nut cases―until it becomes impossible to deny their findings, a time that often comes only after one generation's professional ring-masters have died off. Science is an odd undertaking: everybody strives to make the next breakthrough, yet when someone does, he is often greeted as if he were carrying the ebola virus. Too many people have too much invested in the reigning ideas; for those people an acknowledgment of their own idea's bankruptcy is tantamount to an admission that they have wasted their lives.

This makes it pretty obvious why those on one side of a scientific issue have to work to prevent opposing opinions from getting much attention. But that’s not all:

If your work, for whatever reason, does not appeal to the relevant funding agency's bureaucrats and academic review committees, you can forget about getting any money to carry out your proposal. Recall the human frailties I mentioned previously; they apply just as much in the funding context as in the publication context. Indeed, these two contexts are themselves tightly linked: if you don't get funding, you'll never produce publishable work, and if you don't land good publications, you won't continue to receive funding.
When your research implies a "need" for drastic government action to avert a looming disaster or to allay some dire existing problem, government bureaucrats and legislators (can you say "earmarks"?) are more likely to approve it. If the managers at the NSF, NIH, and other government funding agencies gave great amounts of money to scientists whose research implies that no disaster looms or no dire problem now exists or even that although a problem exists, no currently feasible government policy can do anything to solve it without creating even greater problems in the process, members of Congress would be much less inclined to throw money at the agency, with all the consequences that an appropriations cutback implies for bureaucratic thriving.

Interesting side to this debate that the media is loathe to share with the public, wouldn’t you agree?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's probably a good thing that we didn't listen to the "Scientific Consesus" view that was prevelant in the mid '70s.

[Jason1]

Originally Posted by mlarson

Please name for me who will benifit from attacking the global climate change problem?

You seem like a smart chap, I don't need to point.

[Jason1]

Originally Posted by mlarson

What does a majority of anything have to do with science?

Nothing, but I tend to believe a majority of educated scientists over a handful of name makers, how about you?

[Jason1]

Originally Posted by mlarson

jason1 and anyone else: Please read the following and see if a reasoned approach to the problem is being proposed.
If you disagree with the article could you point out what you disagree with?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let us assume that the IPCC's predictions are valid. How should governments and societies respond?

Government regulations in the developed world to cap or reduce greenhouse gases are a lost cause and should be abandoned. Unless China, India, and other rapidly expanding economic centers in the developing world fully participate in greenhouse gas reduction efforts, regulatory schemes in the west will simply displace economic activity from the "clean" developed world to the "dirty" developing world, making the global greenhouse gas problem worse, not better. MORE

So we agree it is a global problem that needs to be dealt with, I think you are closer then you imagine to seeing the light, Mikey.

[Jason1]

Originally Posted by mlarson

Jason1, you persist in ignoring the cost effectiveness of spending money on conclusions drawn from unproven science.

Right, so in yor eyes it is "cost effective" to find a treatment for Malaria that effects a small percentage of our population, yet something that effects 100% of us is out of the question?

To play to your side, whether man has an effect on it or not, clmate change is happening, and it is effecting ALL of us.

Not very smart math, Mike.

[Michael Larson]

Originally Posted by Jason1

You seem like a smart chap, I don't need to point.

I didn't think you would answer. I wonder why.

[Michael Larson]

Originally Posted by Jason1

Nothing, but I tend to believe a majority of educated scientists over a handful of name makers, how about you?

Though I am very skeptical that man has been the major reason for global warming I would have less trouble accepting the proposed solutions if I thought they would do any good for the greatest number of people.