Burn them all

Hot on the heels of my recent digest of Climate Skeptic’s post pointing that there probably isn’t any significant warming happening, let alone any human activity causing catastrophic climate change, there is a BBC Poll showing, once again, that people in general are ignorant sheep.

Most people say they are ready to make personal sacrifices to address climate change, according to a BBC poll of 22,000 people in 21 countries.

Four out of five people say they are prepared to change their lifestyle, even in the US and China, the world’s two biggest emitters of carbon dioxide.

Three quarters would back energy taxes if the cash was used to find new sources of energy, or boost efficiency.

Yeah, and what are the chances of that happening? The government takes more taxes to piss them up the wall—fucking great! Y’know, governments have such a wonderful track record in efficiency and innovation, don’t they? For fuck’s sake…

Look, people, there are new forms of energy coming but we have price and engineering problems to overcome first. In fact, Timmy highlights the progress that is being made in solar power at present.

I love this piece, I really do.

Take the member of the renewables/efficiency/conservation family, that I know best: solar. The manufacturing costs of solar photovoltaic cells are coming down at nearly 20% every time the global industry doubles in capacity, and that is happening every two years at present. Solar PV manufacturing costs are, in fact, cheaper today than retail electricity in some markets, and by 2010 will be cheaper than today’s electricity in most developed country markets even if the price of retail electricity grows only slightly.

OK, great. Solar is getting cheaper quickly. An excellent thing too. So we should all wait until 2011 or so and then we’ll all switch quite happily as it’ll be cheaper. Great.
…

But much, much more amusing that that is this. In the SRES, those economic models which then feed through into the IPCC scenarios for emissions, a basic assumption is that solar becomes cheaper by 30% per decade. Here we’re told it’s 20% every two years. Or 250%* per decade. So things are vastly better than the IPCC says: we’ll all be switching to solar in just a few years now, we don’t need Kyoto, we don’t need to restict anything. Just install the cheapest power systems from 2011 on and we’ll be fine.

And, of course, there is the LIMPET Wave Power generators, which are extremely efficient and which I have been banging on about for years. There are also, I happen to know, very good progress in a number of wave and tidal systems.

And, of course, there is the continued development of the zinc-oxide solar powerstations, which have been so successfully tested in Israel.

Plus, of course, we have had some decent advances in fusion, both through Dr Bussard’s Fusor process and the Sandia Labs Z Pinch facility.

The point is that these processes are all coming to fruition but we are overcoming engineering problems right now: taxing people more is not going to bring these products to market any more quickly. Mainly because governments are totally fucking shit at making decent and efficient use of money.

I mean, look at what we are developing and what is our government investing over a billion pounds a year of our money into? Fucking windmills, which are just about the most unreliable, useless, ugly and inefficient power-generation option open to us.

On top of this story, of course, is The Telegraph article by Booker and North on the deceit in global warming.

More serious, however, has been all the evidence accumulating to show that, despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels, global temperatures in the years since 1998 have no longer been rising and may soon even be falling.

It was a telling moment when, in August, Gore’s closest scientific ally, James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was forced to revise his influential record of US surface temperatures showing that the past decade has seen the hottest years on record. His graph now concedes that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934, and that four of the 10 warmest years in the past 100 were in the 1930s.

Furthermore, scientists and academics have recently been queuing up to point out that fluctuations in global temperatures correlate more consistently with patterns of radiation from the sun than with any rise in CO2 levels, and that after a century of high solar activity, the sun’s effect is now weakening, presaging a likely drop in temperatures.

If global warming does turn out to have been a scare like all the others, it will certainly represent as great a collective flight from reality as history has ever recorded. The evidence of the next 10 years will be very interesting.

Indeed it will, and I am looking forward to the day when all of those bastards on blogs and in real life who have accused your humble Devil of being an evil “climate change denier” come crawling back to apologise for being such stupid, lackwit fucktards.

Of course, it won’t happen: climate change is one of those open-ended threats that politicians can hold over us forever…

Labels: campaigning, energy, environmentalism, science, technology, waste