Hi Malorn, I am not a climate scientist, but here is my take on this, based on casual science study. The cold weather this year is not unexpected based on a warming trend. In recent years warming has melted permafrost (especially in northern Asia) and ice in Greenland and the Artic ocean. You might remember the media splash about the North-west passage navigation this year. This great delivery of fresh water to the northern ocean from the melting has effected its salinity at the north end of the equatorial to artic currents (Gulf Stream, etc). The salinity reduction reduces the equatorial to artic current flow rates. Which reduces transport of equatorial heat to the mid latitudes (35 to 55 North). So, one would expect for the next years (decades?) very cold winters for people in the mid latitudes until all the ice in the artic is gone, and all the permafrost has thawed. At which point there will be no more desalination, and the currents will again flow fully. The ice may not melt as much this year, or the next. But eventually a similar melt that occured in recent years will recure, and the cycle of a cold mid-lattitude winter will repeat. Hot summers in the tropical latitudes generate hurricanes. If the heat is not transported by the Gulf Stream out of the equatorial Atlantic over the summer, then more huricanes may result. Especially in the second half of the summer. After the currents reestablish a full flow rate, the hurricane frequency would drop (my own conjecture). Possibly that is the confusion in the media over hurricane frequency? The real problem for warming will be in the mid-lattitudes once the northern ice is gone. It will mean many many more days in the 90's and 100's.
Malorn (and anyone else who wants to understand this subject): Most folks on PC know what a fan I am of The Teaching Company. If you really want to understand the science behind climate change and the influence of human activity on it, I very highly recommend the six-hour lecture series Earth's Changing Climate from The Teaching Company. It appears to be on sale again: $40 for two DVDs, or $25 for six audio CDs, or $20 for an audio download in your choice of either MP3 or iPod format. If you simply want to go on line and claim that GW is a scam, do not listen to this course! But if you want to learn about the actual science involved, and really understand the issues, this is extremely informative and well-presented.
I was under the impression that most hazardous "nuclear waste" product could be recycled back into fuel rods (with some modifications to existing infrastructure) and further processed into more innocuous byproduct. A combination approach with nuclear for sustained production and solar for peak seems to be the best approach.
There was a great R&D program back in the '90s that very successfully did just that (can't remember the name of the program at the moment). Unfortunately, Clinton killed it off.
The draw back is that you end up with a lot of plutonium, I believe. Breeder reacters can use the reprocessed uranium fuel, but you have that side effect. I know that there are designs that can use thorium instead of uranium but I don't know the pros and cons of it.
But you can burn plutonium, too... as I recall, a good chunk of our current fuel is cold-war relic plutonium.
True, I think the thing people don't like about breeder reactors though it that they create plutonium which could be used for purposes other than energy production, which makes it a political issue, not a technical one.
According to the graph, I wonder if the world thought in 1931 that they were experiencing global warming.
Hmm...dustbowl, grapes of wrath... they didn't have all the pieces then, but more heat in the atmosphere gives more energy, which produces longer swings in the jet stream, so you can get more intense periods of cold, although the average worldwide is more heat. Several midwestern states set both their record cold and hot temperatures in 1936. North Dakota for instance had a low of -60'F and about five months later they hit 120'F. Now that's a tough year! (My grandma told us stories that they would have weddings in the morning during the summer, because it was too hot later in the day, and still by the end of the service the candles were starting to melt (probably real beeswax candles then)). I can't say our future is as bad as Al Gore and some other vocal people say it will be, but I can't say it won't be either. I think it behooves us to play it safe, even if it means buying fewer big toys, not going on as many international trips, and increasing the tax on gasoline. I do some genealogy as a hobby, so I'm used to working in centuries. My grandmother raised her family in the Great Depression, her grandfather was in the Civil War, his grandfather was in the American Revolution, his great-grandfather was a settler who left Connecticut for the untamed wilds of Elizabeth Town (now a suburb of NYC). I don't want people 4 or 5 generations later thinking we were incredibly selfish not to leave them a decent climate when we could see the warning signs.
I'm sorry Tim but I do not agree with this statement. We still have terribly polluting industries here in the U.S. and the really bad sources of OUR pollution have simply been moved overseas yet it is still OUR pollution we have relocated. True some industries have been cleaned up but many have not and relocating ones pollution does not make you cleaner in any sense. Technology is no good unless you have an aware and ethical society to weild it.
When I stated "largely solved" that may have been a misnomer. But if you look at the EPA data you will see in the chart at the bottom of the linked page that nationally, there has been a 49% decline in six out of the six measured pollutants from 1980 to 2006. At the same time, energy consumption has gone up by 29%, population 32%, vehicle miles 101%, and GDP 121%. So while you are right, we haven't "solved" air pollution, we have made some very significant in-roads by applying technology. It is that which gives me reassurance that while we don't have all of the technological solutions for addressing nuclear waste storage today, they are not beyond our grasp in the near future. That was my point.
Your point certainly has an aspect of validity, but I would point out that all the mine trailings dumped in Colorado, Montana, and Utah have been sitting around for up to hundreds of years. No technological solutions have been applied to the heavy metal contamination in the water supplies of the respective states (even if those solutions exist in the lab). If we attack this pollution problem here and now, then I would pay more attention to other waste problems. But little has been done.
If you are only speaking of air pollution then I can agree that in some cases air pollution has gotten better but I would agrue that a lot of that has to do with moving industries have been overseas as well as technological advances. Like stated above, there are many other problems areas we are not addressing like mountain top mining, overdraw of aquifers, general water pollution, soil erosion and acidification, salinization, alkanization or desertification, reduction of biodiversity, urban sprawl etc etc. We have to look at the whole picture here and not reduce it to one or two aspects like the typical antiquated economist would.
