gizmo_2655 wrote on Mar 22^nd, 2012 at 12:47am:


Can you site an example of a decomissioned nuclear plant that was returned as residential or productive farm land ?

chicken_lipsforme wrote on Mar 21^st, 2012 at 2:06pm:


What do you think Business & Government is based on?

The best Guestimate!

Coping With Climate Change: 2 Texas Towns Struggle for Water

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The severity of change, will mean greater droughts in some areas, more severe rain events in others and an alternation between the two in some areas.

Whichever way it comes, it will have significant impacts on the Economy, both at local & Global levels!

U.S. heat 'unprecedented,' 7,000 records set or tied

(Reuters) - An "unprecedented" March heat wave in much of the continental United States has set or tied more than 7,000 high temperature records, and signals a warming climate, health and weather experts said on Friday.

While natural climate variability plays a major role, it is the addition of human-spurred climate change that makes this particular hot spell extraordinary, the scientists said in a telephone and web briefing.

"This heat wave is essentially unprecedented," said Heidi Cullen of the nonprofit science and communication organization Climate Central. "It's hard to grasp how massive and significant this is."

Since March 12, more than 7,000 high temperature records have been equaled or exceeded, Cullen said, citing figures from the U.S. National Climatic Data Center (here).

These records include daytime high temperatures and record-high low temperatures overnight, which in some cases are higher than previous record highs for the day, Cullen said.

"When low temperatures are breaking previous record highs, that's when you see this is incredibly special," she said.

"Most likely the weird weather arises from natural variation on top of a warming climate," said Michael Oppenheimer, a geoscientist at Princeton and a veteran participant in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "What we're seeing now is not surprising in the greenhouse world ... It's just the beginning of our experience with the new atmosphere."

Oppenheimer was a lead author of the panel's path-breaking 2007 report that analyzed research by hundreds of scientists and found there was a 90 percent probability that climate change is occurring and human activities contribute to it.

That report projected an increase in heat waves, droughts, floods, severe storms and extreme temperatures as a result of human-spurred global warming, caused in part by rising emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide emitted by fossil fuel burning.

Link -
http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/03/23/climate-heat-usa-idINDEE82M0NW20120323
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There's the good news AND there's the bad news.

The Good news is, Peak Fossil Energy will reduce GHG's over the next 20-30 years and that MAY mitigate the worst of the effects of Climate Change on the Global Environment?

The Bad news is, Peak Fossil Energy will ensure the Global Economy takes a massive hit over the next 20-30 years, as the COST OF ENERGY takes an increasing ratio of Global GDP, which will exacerbate a REDUCTION in DEMAND for GOODS & SERVICES, which are already set to head lower due to DEMOGRAPHIC ISSUES involving the Baby Boomer generation, who will first retire then leave us forever, in ever increasing numbers, also over the next 20-30 years!

Incomptinence wrote on Mar 25^th, 2012 at 3:16am:


That's a very fair comment. The problem is that what you describe is a very short sighted attitude, because in the long run it's going to cost a mint.

It's like a car owner saying that he'll save money by not servicing his car - ever.

Incomptinence wrote on Mar 25^th, 2012 at 3:16am:


I understand where that statement comes from and there is a segment of the Public, plus Politicians & vested interests who push that perspective, in an attempt to maintain the status quo.

Unfortunately, over time, maintaining the status quo is simply not possible!

In any event, there are costs & benefits involved, no matter what actions OR lack thereof are taken and over time the Economic losses involved of taking action to mitigate the worst effects of Climate Change, will be far less than the Economic losses involved by not taking mitigating actions!

Study: Global temperatures could rise 5 degrees by 2050

As the USA simmers through its hottest March on record — with more than 6,000 record high temperatures already set this month — a new study released Sunday shows that average global temperatures could climb 2.5 to 5.4 degrees by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated.

The study findings are based on the results of 10,000 computer model simulations of future weather overseen by researchers at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

"These are the first results to suggest that the higher warming scenario could be plausible," says study lead author Dan Rowlands of Oxford.

It is a faster rate of warming than most other models predict.

Most scientists say that increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal are causing the planet to warm to levels that cannot be explained by natural variability.

The study was published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience and backs up similar predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

According to Rowlands, the climate model was the most complex used to date, and addresses some of the uncertainties that previous forecasts, using simpler models, may have overlooked.

"It's only by running such a large number of simulations — with model versions deliberately chosen to display a range of behavior — that you can get a handle on the uncertainty present in a complex system such as our climate," says Rowlands.

The climate models used in the study accurately reproduced actual, observed temperature changes over the last 50 years: Assuming that models that simulate past warming realistically are the best candidates for future warming predictions, the authors conclude in the study that a warming of from 2.5 to 5.4 degrees by 2050, compared with the 1960-90 average, is in the "likely range" of climate warming.

The earth's average temperature during the decade of 2000-2010 was almost a full degree higher than the average from 1960-90, Rowlands says.

The project ran almost 10,000 climate simulations on volunteers' home computers, which was made possible because volunteers donated time to run the simulations on their home computers through climateprediction.net, as part of the BBC Climate Change Experiment.

"Perhaps the most ambitious effort to date, this work illustrates how the citizen science movement is making an important contribution to this field," says paper co-author Ben Booth, a senior climate scientist with the U.K. Met Office's Hadley Centre.

Link -
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2012/03/climate-change-...
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The following chart gives some indications of the likely Risks & Impacts involved, as temperatures increase and what this study suggests is that the time lag for the nastier outcomes, may be around 2050 rather than 2075-2100?