Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumBjorn Lomborg Apparently Still Alive; Says Something About Climate Or Politics Or Something
Controversial scientist (Ed. - sic) Bjorn Lomborg has defended the idea of a Climate Consensus Centre at an Adelaide university, saying climate change is real but renewables are not the answer.
Flinders University may host Dr Lomborg's controversial $4 million taxpayer-funded centre despite protests from students and staff who argue it will hurt Australia's standing in the academic world. However, no proposal has been put forward by academics keen to work with Dr Lomborg.
He has been widely criticised for his climate change views, but says while it's a real problem, renewable energies such as wind and solar power play a "trivial" part in lowering carbon emissions.
"Over the last 20 years, the world has basically tackled it (climate change) really, really badly," he told ABC radio on Thursday. (Ed. Yes, Bjorn, with a little help from your own publications, and the deep-pocketed PR whores who moved heaven and earth to pimp them). "The hard-headed economic point is simply to recognise that really, in the next couple of decades, solar and wind is going to make an almost trivial cut to CO2 (carbon dioxide)."
EDIT
https://au.news.yahoo.com/sa/a/29688761/renewables-to-fail-climate-change-lomborg/
MisterP
(23,730 posts)happyslug
(14,779 posts)You can NOT increase CO2 emissions if source of those emission no longer exists.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/peak-oil-may-keep-catastrophic-climate-change-in-check/
In reality, governments tend to overestimate their coal reserves, and much of these reserves will never be accessed, Rutledge said.
"There is little relationship between the RCPs and the actual historical experience of oil, gas and coal production," Rutledge said......
He said it is likely that the Bakken Shale oil play will peak in 2015 or 2016 and that the Eagle Ford Shale play, another significant U.S. oil production area, will peak soon after.
Paper pointing out it takes about 40 years for the carbon we burn today (or do NOT burn today) to affect the weather:
http://peakoilbarrel.com/are-we-headed-for-global-warming-collapse/
Report from 2004 on Climate Change and the Pentagon:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/041304_climate_change_pt1.html
2010 Paper pointing out conventional oil peaked in 2005, but due to the increase in the cost of oil, unconventional oil more then replaced any drop in conventional oil production, but that should peak between 2015 and 2020 (Please note it assumed Saudi Arabia oil would peak in 2010 but has increased since then, the issue is can Saudi Arabia keep this up and the consensus tends to be NO in the long term, but maybe for another year or two):
http://www.global.ucsb.edu/climateproject/publications/pdf/Morrigan_2010_Energy_CC4.pdf
New oil discoveries have been declining since then, and the new discoveries have been smaller and in harder to access areas (e.g., smaller deepwater reserves).
The volume of oil discovered has dropped far below the volume produced in the last two
decades.
In total, 507 fields are classified as giant, and account for 60% of conventional oil production.
The top 110 producing oilfields produce over 50% of the global oil supply.
The top 20 producing oilfields contribute 27%.
The most productive 10 fields contribute 20%.
Production from 16 of the top 20 producing fields was in terminal decline in 2007.
Paper on "Peak Coal" and that the US hit it, in terms of energy, in 1998 even through we are mining more coal by the ton today then in 1998.
http://energywatchgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/EWG_Report_Coal_10-07-2007ms1.pdf
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Peak-Coal-Will-the-US-Run-Out-of-Coal-in-200-Years-Or-20-Years
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Such as:
"Over the last 20 years, the world has basically tackled climate change really, really badly."
"in the next couple of decades, solar and wind is going to make an almost trivial cut to CO2 (carbon dioxide)."
But I do agree with those statements. IMO wind, solar, geothermal, even nuclear power - either individually or all together - won't impact CO2 emissions in any significant way over the next 20 years. Again IMO, neither will international protocols, local or even national policies, or moral hectoring about population and consumption growth or veganism.
It's very hard to admit that an asshole like Lomborg could be half-right. But for a more fulsome take on Lomborg and the rest of the ecomodernist movement, read Paul Kingsnorth's 2012 essay Dark Ecology.
Kareivas ideas are a good place to start in understanding them. He is an outspoken former conservationist who now believes that most of what the greens think they know is wrong. Nature, he says, is more resilient than fragile; science proves it. Humans degrade and destroy and crucify the natural environment, he says, and 80 per cent of the time it recovers pretty well. Wilderness does not exist; all of it has been influenced by humans at some time. Trying to protect large functioning ecosystems from human development is mostly futile; humans like development, and you cant stop them having it. Nature is tough and will adapt to this: today, coyotes roam downtown Chicago and peregrines astonish San Franciscans as they sweep down skyscraper canyons as we destroy habitats, we create new ones. Now that science has shown us that nothing is pristine and nature adapts, theres no reason to worry about many traditional greens goals such as, for example, protecting rainforest habitats. Is halting deforestation in the Amazon feasible? he asks. Is it even necessary? Somehow, you know what the answer is going to be before he gives it to you.
If this sounds like the kind of thing that a US Republican Presidential Candidate might come out with, thats because it is. But Kareiva is not alone. Variations on this line have recently been pushed by the US thinker Stewart Brand, the British writer and Brand protégé Mark Lynas, the Danish anti-green poster boy Bjorn Lomborg and the American writers Emma Marris, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger. They in turn are building on work done in the past by other self-declared green heretics like Richard D. North, Brian Clegg and Wilfred Beckerman.
Beyond the field of conservation, the neo-environmentalists are distinguished by their attitude to new technologies, which they almost uniformly see as positive. Civilisation, nature and people can only be saved by enthusiastically embracing biotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear power, geo-engineering and anything else with the prefix new that annoys Greenpeace. The traditional green focus on limits is dismissed as naive. We are now, in Brands words, as Gods, and we have to step up and accept our responsibility to manage the planet rationally through the use of new technology guided by enlightened science.
My final opinion is that the only thing that has the short-term possibility of cutting carbon emissions, along with slowing down a variety of other unfolding ecological catastrophes, is a global economic collapse. Until that happens, the global growth machine - the heat engine of industrial civilization - will keep on running.