The Isaiah of Climate Change, Al Gore, is once again gazing at the moon. From Real Clear Politics:
Just as John F. Kennedy set his sights on the moon, Al Gore is challenging the nation to produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun and other Earth-friendly energy sources within 10 years, an audacious goal he hopes the next president will embrace.
Ok, let's think about this. A certain amount of sun hits the earth every year. Fossil fuels, coal, oil, and natural gas, contain solar energy stored over, well, millions of years. So how much of fossil fuel output can solar energy replace, given the most efficient technology? What's one divided by millions? Biofuels, by the way, are just another form of solar energy collection. Wind energy is solar energy plus the push from the earth's rotation. Only in some places does the wind blow hard and regular, more or less. Those places tend to be far away from the centers of energy demand. What is the total bounty from wind energy? Probably a lot less than the potential solar bounty. Add to that the geothermal energy Gore is talking about, and you could maybe keep the lights on in Las Vegas for a good holiday weekend. If anybody could get there.
The Register in England has a great article about the Cambridge physicist David J C MacKay. He is working on a book that adds up all the numbers. Renewable energy sources don't add up. The only energy source that can substantially add to our energy stocks is nuclear power. Fast breeder reactors may be the ticket. Gore isn't much interested in nuclear power, even though it creates no green house emissions.
Al Gore warns us about global warming, and gives us charts of Manhattan underwater to make his point. But it's worth while asking whether increased CO2 in the atmosphere might have some advantages. Gore and the global warming evangelists see CO2 as pollution, but that's not the way the plants see it. From Investor's Business Daily:
Even as the G-8 Summit announced plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, researchers at the Johann Heinrich von Theunen Institute in Germany find the rise in carbon dioxide levels may in fact be a boon to plant life on Earth.
The Theunen Institute, which has been monitoring the phenomenon since 1999, trained CO2 jets on plants, raising CO2 concentrations in the air around them to 550 parts per million (ppm), significantly higher than today's levels.
The researchers announced on Tuesday that such increased exposure to carbon dioxide appears to boost crop yields.
"Output increased by about 10% for barley, beets and wheat" when the plants were exposed to the higher levels, according to the Institute's Hans-Joachim Weigel.
That the Earth is getting greener due to higher CO2 levels was confirmed recently by satellite data analyzed by scientists Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA. They found that over a period of almost two decades, the earth's vegetation increased by a whopping 6.2%.
"Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger and to live in drier climates," explained Lawrence Solomon in a June 7 article on the Running/Nemani findings in Canada's Financial Post.
"Plants provide food for animals, which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century."
So global warming may be very bad if you own beach front property, but it might be very good for every voter with roots and leaves, or paws for that matter. It's nice to think that what's good for the Bay Area is good for the planet, but it ain't necessarily so. Maybe we need to think about all of this, and not just earnestly feel the right way.
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