On 14 November 2013 16:47, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 11/13/2013 7:26 PM, LizR wrote: > > On 14 November 2013 16:18, Chris de Morsella <cdemorse...@yahoo.com>wrote: > >> But as Telmo points out we can't just wait till fossil fuel runs out >> and then switch. It takes energy to build nuclear power plants and solar >> panels and wind tubines. In principle they could bootstrap themselves, but >> not on the time scale we need to make the transition. >> > > Who's suggesting we wait and then switch? > > > A lot of the FUD campaign is to say the science is uncertain; we need to > wait until we're sure. We can't take action that will have negative > economic effects on the basis of imperfect climate models. > > Yes, of course they do, but that doesn't explain why Chris said the above in answer to me saying:
Obviously fossil fuel will run out anyway, so even without climate change > we'd have to do *something*. I think nuclear is a good short term > solution, for sure. Especially subcritical reactors. > This seems to be either misunderstanding what I was saying, or a straw man. Anyway, just to make my position clear... I think we should be switching to alternative power sources right now, to whatever extent we can, and *not* waiting until the oil runs out. Indeed if we wait for the oil to run out we will be bequeathing disasterous global warming AND a world without any readily available fossil fuel to our children. It would be nice to leave them some reserves of oil, coal etc, just in case they need them, as well as lowering the CO2 in the air, preferably before the oceans warm enough to melt the methane clathrate. I don't want to set the world on fire. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.