Oh, wow, now *that* is a thing of beauty! Let’s summarise the rules of the contest:

A) We bet that you can’t disprove these two hypotheses, which even we have to admit are so vaguely worded and subjective that your success will depend entirely on how that wording is interpreted.

B) We and we alone will interpret the wording, not a disinterested third party. So there is no way of winning this contest if we don’t want a winner.

C) Any entries must be entirely your work, specifically done for the contest. This stipulation is sufficiently vaguely worded that you can be disqualified for even referencing any of the existing body of scientific evidence. So, you have to prove everything to our satisfaction from very first principles, further stacking the odds against any possible success.

D) Having set up a contest that is basically impossible to win, we will then charge you for the privilege of entering it!

E) If you enter, then we own all your work!

The beauty of it is that when nobody signs over the rights to their work and pays to enter the competition that’s impossible to win, anti-science right-wingers who want to deny the mass of scientific evidence that human activity is causing climate change can say:

“Well, we offered a prize and nobody has won it yet. Ergo, there is no scientific evidence that we are affecting the climate at all.”

You’ve got to admire it for its purity.

It sounds like he’s missing the Vietnam Protests…

Being emotionally blackmailed into having a compost heap isn’t ‘a thrill’. Being ‘fined’ for not being rich enough to buy a new hybrid car is not ‘a compelling moral purpose’. Feeling guilty for buying tropical fruit during the winter months isn’t a ‘spiritual challenge’.

ENDING THIRD WORLD STARVATION is a ‘generational mission’. PROVIDING WATER FOR THE WHOLE WORLD is a ‘generational mission’. HALTING THE SPREAD OF AIDS IN AFRICA is a ‘generational mission’. INVESTING IN EDUCATION and INSPIRING SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS is a ‘generational mission’… ALL of those things will create a healthier, wealthier world which will have many, many more educated people all over the world who will be able to come up with solutions to our planetary problems.

As it stands, in order for ‘the West’ to assuage their guilt, we will have to prevent the developing world from developing any further. Keep people starving, ill and dying.

I, for one, am not happy with that choice.

I have no idea if any of my thoughts on this are actually “correct”, but I think it’s *extremely* important that we question these things.

In the developed world we have all been conditioned to believe that we should cut down on energy use, that we should stop flying in planes, stop our general progress and that we should all simply feel absolutely guilty for living.

In the developing world they are simply trying to *live*.

In 100 years’ time, looking back, will it have been a good idea to have spent billions upon billions of dollars trying to change the weather in order to save a bit of land loss in Holland and to try and keep rich Floridians’ homes from being ruined… or might it have been better to have spent that money on finding ways of providing clean water to the 20% of the world who don’t have access to it or to stop malnutrition and starvation around the world or to halt the spread of AIDS in Africa…

Seriously.

Exactly what is the aim of ‘Saving the Planet’?

The thing is, *I* am not saying that we shouldn’t lower CO2 emissions – it’s clear that thing will go very, very wrong if we don’t – it’s just that it’s not clear that the best course of action for the whole entire planet is to ‘live in teepees’ etc in order to attempt to do that.

As for ‘extreme weather’… no one has been able to say conclusively that the weather is getting more “extreme”. They *have* been able to say conclusively that the *cost* of fixing extreme weather damage has gone up dramatically…. That’s cos there are a) more people (twice as many on the planet than there were in the 60s) b) people are richer so have more stuff to lose.

Perhaps the money enviro-fundies are proposing we invest in their theories would be better spent on encouraging people to move away from coastal areas or at the very least, throw away all their stuff so that they don’t have much to lose.

I just found this yesterday…

However, we are not at present capable of constructing and populating a self-sustaining, long-term space colony. There are a lot of obstacles imposed by human physiology that must be overcome, and we don’t at present have the infrastructure (cheap, re-usable launch vehicles; orbital construction platforms; etc) to do the large-scale, heavy-duty construction required to build, say, a lunar outpost, that could be self-sustaining in a short period of time (~10 years). Yes, we have the ability to put a space station in orbit and man it on a rotating basis for short period of time. However, the crew must be rotated out frequently and EVERYTHING (O2, water, food) must be shipped from Earth to the space station.

Space colonies must be self-sustaining in order to be a viable alternative to an earth-bound existence, and they must also be able to support large numbers of people and/or high capacity industry, else these endeavors will do nothing to ease to crowding and resource crunch on Earth. I believe we *will* get to this point eventually and that we should devote a large chunk of our resources to getting to this point, but we cannot dig ourselves out of the current crisis we are in using the space program.

Moreover, a viable space program depends upon the economic health of the supporting country or countries. Economic health is critically-dependent on political and societal stability, which is, in turn, dependent on, among other things, the ability of that society to provide the necessities of life (food, potable water, shelter, safety) to the majority of its citizens for the majority of the time. When that ability is lost for whatever reason, chaos follows, and all of the ‘higher functions’ of that society–science, space exploration, construction of buildings and public works–fall by the wayside.

Gia, I too have studied Global Warming–extensively, in fact. GW threatens the very foundations of a technologically-advanced society *because* it threatens the ability of that society to provide for the basic needs of its citizens as outlined above. The predicted effects of GW (increased frequencies of droughts and flooding, rising sea levels, migration of tropical diseases to higher latitudes and altitudes, higher frequency of extreme weather events) threaten the the abilities of governments to provide for the basic needs of their citizens in many ways (disruption of agriculture, destruction or inundation of habitable land, increased disease burden, decreased potable water supplies, etc).

Increased ‘energy’ generation via nuclear fission or fusion power plants will do little to solve these crises, as people cannot eat or drink electricity. Moreover, I doubt that nuclear-powered desalination plants would have the capacity to provide sufficient potable water for drinking AND for agriculture AND for industrial uses for countries with large populations such as India or China. Should this generated energy go towards amelioration of the effects of anthropogenic CO2 on the climate or, preferably, towards *removal* of excess CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, then that will be energy well-generated and spent. However, we cannot just say ‘Piss on the environment’ and ‘generate’ our way out of this crisis. The climate instability we’ve induced via CO2 emissions must be either reversed or controlled–one way or the other. This is not only crucial to our ability to continue as a technologically-advanced civilization, it is vital to our survival. We are looking at extinction if we don’t get this thing under control.

As for Kyoto–*fuck* Kyoto. It doesn’t do enough to lower emissions, and the worst offenders (US, China, India) are taking a shit on the whole thing.

As for going back to living like the Indians (in tepees, bathing in streams, hunter-gatherer existence)–fuck that too. I don’t own a tent–and never will. And nobody had better mess with my laptop, my AC, my washer and dryer and dishwasher, my cable modem, my car, my motorcycle, my microwave oven, my lovely new cell phone that takes pix, my IPod Nano, or my ability to travel all over the world whenever I damn well feel like it. High technology and *green* technology are not mutually exclusive.

So, does all of the above blather make me an enviro-fundie? ;)

Think just maybe ITER might benefit from the UK spending that $10-40 billion on science education and “inspiration” rather than some hokey card scheme? On the one hand the UK could be a world leader in fusion research. On the other, the UK would, well, just be pretty much the same as it is now, except we’d all have another card to carry with us.

Investing in non-fossil fuel/Mid-Eastern oil based energy sources should be our priority… but no, the UK is tossing some change towards it and, instead, is under the impression that somehow *cards* will keep us all safe.

These are the kinds of things I mean… Our priorities are in the wrong place.

Also, re: nuclear… we need *something* to bridge the gap between the decommissioning of current coal and nuclear plants, and fusion reactors. Wind farms and solar panels just aren’t going to cut it.

Also, I doubt enviro-fundies *want* fusion reactors… what do they have in mind *after* everyone has moved onto wind and solar power? Stasis?

I also don’t think nuclear (at least, fission) is the answer unless we can reverse the trend we’ve had in that industry- unimaginative designs, inadequate thought, government capital projects (which inevitably go far astray). We need a generation of interesting, powerful technology development in this field, because just building more light-water reactors is not the answer.

I also strongly dislike the fact that we seem to have had the technical basis already chosen for us. Apparently we’re going to have American PWRs and BWRs, with all their attendant misfeatures, lack of facilities, massive capital costs, need for expensive servicing, etcetera. Why can’t we have Canadian CANDU reactors? There has never been a major incident at a CANDU reactor and the design is far closer to inherent safety than any of the modular PWR schemes I’ve seen.

As for the waste problem, well, we’re better off there than the Americans; we can reprocess our waste, which generally reduces the volume of really long-lived waste (since the reprocessed fuel does not contain the very high-activity elements from the waste, and the waste does not include the long-lived plutonium or uranium isotopes). I would still like to see more research into transmutation and fast breeder designs, though; just as the plot of Sunshine pointed out, fissile material is finite and it will run out eventually.

Hopefully ITER and DEMO will come up with the goods and in a century we’ll all wonder what the fuss was about.