The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.If you want more of this kind of thing, read Paul Davies' thoughts from awhile back, "The fight against global warming is lost" (click here and scroll down). Davies advocates that we adapt to global warming, but the problem with that is it sounds doable if you think that global temperatures rise ~2-4°C, but who says it stops there? I guess by that time we're supposed to have hydrogen cars and all, but the reality is that after petroleum production begins to decline we'll probably be using more coal than ever before. Even the IEA projects that--click here and scroll down and click on the first illustration link. And that only makes GW worse. So adaptation is a never-ending game where the temperature gets higher and higher and the problems get worse and worse....
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Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Back to Reality
Hope you had a good long holiday, and welcome back to the real world. Robert Samuelson does his part to shake you back to reality with this op-ed in the Washington Post that says the fight against global warming is exponentially tougher than it's being made out to be. He at least appears unready to give up the struggle:
John Fleck says -
ReplyDeleteI did a newspaper piece a few weeks back looking at all the different options for future transportation fuels. Given the ethanol problems you pointed out earlier this week, and the obvious but poorly understood fact that hydrogen is not an energy source, the most technically realistic solution seemed to be synfuels made from coal. This ignores the externality of climate change, but we seem to be perfectly comfortable ignoring that externality. And everyone's got lots of coal.