http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World- ... 5968?f=rss



Er, does it? Or has the world had minor and major changes in climate all on it's own previously?

And looking into some of the groups and companies backing this survey, it's no bloody wonder they came up with the conclusions they did - carbon offsetting anyone? Yes, and especially if it's on the Alternative Investment Market

You mean the hunters in Greenland who are growing potatoes, because they can't go hunting on the ice, because it is too thin to hold them now?

Haven't heard about the report, just heard a couple of Arctic explorers talking on the radio last night, who were saying that they sailed right through the ice zone, where they needed to trek over ice time they visited at this time of year.

Has the world warmed up previously? Yes.

Has humankind increased its presence and does it produce more than its "fair share" of pollutants? Yes

Is there global warming or a climate change? It looks ever more likely, especially looking at the last 2 non-winters we've had here - the 3 months of sub-zero temperatures and 1.5M of snow have been replaced with about a week of sub-zero changes and less than 20cm of snow for a week...

Has humankind caused global warming / the climate change? Maybe, maybe not, does it really matter?

Is it possible we are accelerating the process and making it worse? Possibly.

Should we do our best to slow down the changes, so that we have time to come up with ways of surviving, once the temperatures rise too much? Yes, it makes sense to do anything we can.

What gets me is the developing world shouting about having to use alternate technologies, instead of oil and coal for generating electricity, for example. They are the ones in the best position to invest in alternate technologies, develop them further and then they can act as Best Practice examples and they can consult the "first" world on implementing and running it. They don't have the old, dirty technologies to get rid of.

If they invest in oil and coal now, they will have to re-invest in alternatives in a few years, so they will spend twice as much in the short term... They are the ones in a better position than us to change, but they want "in" on paying through the nose for coal and oil, because it is a proven (bad) technology.

They really should be looking at the opportunities and becoming leaders in the new technology - if they can build the technology locally, they will be in a perfect position to build it economically and sell it back to us!

Is there not something in the name of that land....?

Or is it some language influenced origin, rather than 'Green' as such.

* ponders *

Allegedly, Greenland is perhaps the earliest example of successful advertising.
Erik The Red was sent there as a punishment for murder, and named it Greenland to lure settlers.

Whatever, the truth appears to be the fact that Greenland has long ago been a mild, between 800 and 1300 AD, there was certainly farming activity, with both trees and livestock. Over the last 100,000 years, there has been several dramatic changes in the ice sheet on Greenland.

My problem with the whole GW debate is that everybody talks a good game and then we do absolutely nothing useful about it!

Couple that with the fact that the end of the world has been predicted so many times before (including the threat of a new ice age from some quarters!) and that it's been a revenue raiser for everyone from Flash Gordon to the people in charge of the nonsense of carbon offsetting...

That's before you get to the bloody churches preaching about it, since it suits them as an allegory for greed

There are remains of Viking farmsteads still beneath permafrost, in places far too frozen to grow potatoes today. So Greenland has definitely been warmer before than it is now within recorded history - unless they were farming icicles instead of wheat.


I'm afraid that's not very practical for several reasons. Firstly, what the developing world needs right now is plentiful, cheap, on-demand electricity. That rules out wind and solar power. The other likely contenders are therefore Nuclear and hydroelectric, neither of which has an unblemished environmental record. All of those options are highly capital intensive, which means massive up front investment is required to get them. This is far more capital than any developing economy can raise.

The fact is that fossil fueled power stations are comparatively cheap to construct, and in operation they more than pay for themselves.

It's also unlikely that any emerging economy will break into the renewables racket any time soon. All the relevant patents are held by the Euro/American/Japanese/Korean engineering behemoths who are deeply embedded in an R&D infrastructure that neophytes like China and Brazil cannot possibly hope to match for decades to come. So although those guys can provide a home for the factories to build wind turbines etc, the real money goes to the guys who license the designs to them.

But many of the developing lands have boundless expanses and lots of sun and wind, they are ideal candidates for this sort of technology... More so than us, where there are lots of built up areas, so less space to place them...

That's the one JJ. I see Wikipedia is still publishing the now discredited hockey stick graph though....

As for Big D's point. That does nothing to counteract the three major problems for an emerging economy to foot the bill for massive solar and wind projects.
1. Solar power doesn't work all that well at night, and wind power is thoroughly unreliable wherever you site the wind farm, so you need adequate proper power stations to make up for both deficiencies.
2. They both provide cheap electricity after the massive up front investment is paid off. If you include the massive up front investment - something which no emerging economy could support - then the electricity is not 'cheap' unless oil hits ~ $350 (depending on how you calculate it; taking into account the overall efficiency of wind / solar - some people would say oil would have to go higher still to make these sources pay)
3. If this isn't paid for by the rich countries, it operates as an energy tax on the 3rd world and inhibits their competitiveness. We get the benefit of cheap oils and coal, made cheaper by the falling demand from the 3rd world, they pay through the nose to support us in this luxury. worse still China and India use lots of cheap ass coal, and have nuclear power options too. Given that scenario, countries like Thailand, Morocco, Columbia etc would be mad to plough all their cash into renewables.

It can only be done in a joint venture with western companies, and would probably require huge subsidies from western govts, otherwise the numbers simply aren't there.

Which is why they are currently working on large capacitor type storage technologies to build-up reserves when the power is generated in surplus and releasing it when it is needed.

Putting up a windmill is under €1M per unit at the moment, you can put up a huge farm for the price of a power station and you don't have to buy oil or coal to power them... And that is for windmills built in Europe, if they build them locally, it builds a new industry for them and it will cost them less, because the labour costs will be significantly lower and they won't have to transport it so far.

But you get dick all power from your poxy 1M Euro windmill. You need thousands of them to match the output of a single, far far cheaper, fossil power station. But even more important than this, and a point which you seem not to understand, is that wind power requires MASSIVE up front investment. That's the problem, not the lifetime running costs. With wind power you have to pay in advance for all your electricity, and then wait decades for it to be delivered, which is why it will always be a [LIFTED] way to generate electricity.

Even if the cost of the fuel did make a coal powered station more expensive over a 25 year period (it doesn't, but let's pretend), that wouldn't matter. All that fuel cost would be covered by the value of the electricity sold, immediately, which makes it irrelevant cost. If a coal powered station had to be bought with it's 25 year lifetime supply of coal up front, poor countries wouldn't be able to afford coal OR wind. As it stands, they can afford coal, but they cannot possibly under any circumstances afford wind except if we in the rich world subsidise it for them.

This has a lot to do with the crappy way people look at projects and investments - just look at the fibre roll out in the UK.

The investors are looking for a return in the next quarter, maybe within 12 months. They should be looking at investing in projects for 50, 100 or more years. But people are selfish and only interested in what they can earn now, not what they can do to make a better world for themselves, let alone their children or grand children...

In the real world investors have to look for a return on their investment, it's called the profit motive, and it underpins the whole of our economic system. If you earn good money, and have a high standard of living, you owe all of it to that system. So it shouldn't be so flippantly dismissed, unless you are planning to jack in the house and the car and the TV and go live the ecological life, perhaps making windmills from scrap in Africa.

It's not even possible to invest in wind power for centuries anyway, the equipment will all wear out in a handful of decades at most. And it will all be obsolete long before the century is over. I don't know what we will be using to generate power in 2059, but very little of the stuff we are using today is likely to be involved. By then, maintenance costs for turn of the century kit is unlikely to be justified by the low energy returns.

The governments of developing countries have to do things that are going to help their people today. They need jobs, food healthcare, pensions, roads, schools. The duty of their governments is to drum up investment that supports these sorts of endeavors. If we in the west want them to use renewables instead of the cheap reliable fossil fuels we use, we are the ones who should be stumping up the cash, not the poor people who afford a fridge.