RE: Data centres and electricity generation21 Jul 2019 04:02
What's this nonsense about us all dying in 15 years? Somebody's been listening to those scare stories they're using on the school kids. We're not going to die, we're going to incur some expenses. Whether we're in a position to pay them depends on the green loonie toons.
The climate is warming, that's reasonably well established. Anthropogenic CO2 is part of the problem, that's clear too. What isn't clear is the climate sensitivity to CO2 -- that's not known to within a factor of two. The likely effects of warming are twofold. First, excessive warming at high latitudes reduces the temperature gradient between the equator and poles, weakening and causing meanders in the jet stream, giving spells of blocking patterns in the jet and more extreme weather events of all sorts. Second, the melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice causes sea-level rise. There are implications for human health, for the food supply, and there are threats to coastal populations.
Now for the bits the greenies tend to leave out. We need robust economies to have any hope of mitigating climate change. If we crash the economy now in a fatalistic fit of green despair we will have no options. There world needs more energy -- MUCH more -- not less. Indians and Africans facing 45 degree temperatures don't want Brid Smith's pointless platitudes, they want air conditioning. And those developing countries *are* going to be powering up regardless. All of Ireland's GHG cuts for the last 16 years were offset by China's increase in coal burning in just the last month! Think about it, just the *increase* in one fuel, in one country, in one month. The problem with greenies like Brid is that they are innumerate. They don't understand how the economy works today, and they don't understand the scale of the problem they claim to be trying to fix.
We are totally, utterly, dependant on energy. Without it, literally billions would die -- and that's a guaranteed fact, not a hypothesis. Is that Brid's alternative to climate armageddon? No matter how serious you think climate change is -- and don't let anyone pretend there are not large uncertainties in the likely effects -- it has to be balanced against a guaranteed global disaster if we "power down". Things look different when you sanely consider the alternatives, instead of the schoolkid conspiracy story that "white middle aged men are trying to kill everyone for selfish gain".
So here are some possibilities. We need an utterly massive scaling up of investment in nuclear power . (That doesn't usually go down well with the greens). We need solar and wind power and transition fuels, especially NG, lots of it. We need to plant a trillion trees. We need to pump billions of gallons of water to inland desert Antarctica to offset ice loss. We need to build ocean defences, or strategically abandon some locations to the sea. There are many things we can do. All of them need lots of cheap energy, of course.
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