Friday, July 18, 2008

More links

Thank you, Al!
Planet Gore readers owe Al Gore a big thank you. The scale of Gore’s project would make even the Pharoahs blush, and executing his plan would require a literal Energy Czar. Never before has the global warming movement’s ambition to control and dictate and commander been so prominently on display. Never before has the movement’s flight from reality been more open to public view.
Fact Checking Obama on Alternative Energy
We also point out that even over the long term there can be no guarantee that just spending more for research will produce the sort of new fuels, vehicles or other breakthroughs that would actually reverse the growth of oil imports. Keep in mind that the U.S. imported the equivalent of 13.4 million barrels of oil per day last year, up nearly 17 percent from just five years earlier and 32 percent higher than in 1997. This is a huge problem that has been getting worse for a long time. Reversing it will not be "fast" or painless.
Climate Skeptic: A Reminder
So if climate change is in fact somehow "accelerating," then it cannot possibly be due to CO2. I believe that they are trying to create the impression that somehow CO2 is directly causing extreme weather, which it does not, under any mechanism anyone has ever suggested.
Climate Skeptic: Antarctic Sea Ice

Climate Skeptic: The Cost of the Insurance Policy Matters
I think everyone's numbers are low, because they don't include the cost of storage (technology unknown) or alternative capacity when it is a) dark and/or b) not windy.

A while back I took on Gore's suggestion that all of America's electricity needs could be met with current Solar technology with a 90 mile x 90 mile tract of solar. Forgetting the fact that Al's environmental friends would never allow us to cover 8100 square miles of the desert in silicon, I got a total installation cost of $21 trillion dollars. And that did not include the electrical distribution systems necessary for the whole country to take power from this one spot, nor any kind of storage technology for using electricity at night (it was hard to cost one out when no technology exist for storing America's total energy needs for 12 hours). Suffice it to say that a full solution with storage and distribution would easily cost north of $30 trillion dollars.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A new study examines the basis for the belief that greenhouse gases can only result in atmospheric warming and concludes that that assumption is incorrect.

This new paper might throw a few spanners in the works, just from the title alone, but it's behind a green wall. Anyone got any access to it?

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/sectio ... =713240928