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Thursday, April 12, 2007
Global Warming will eat your children!
Who would say that?why Dave Scot at Uncommon Descent of course.
Well, it started already. Shifting economic priorities from food production to reducing CO2 emission has already started causing significant problems. The environmentalist whackos are at it again. Evidently unsatisfied with derailing nuclear power plant construction in the United States 30 years ago, a whackjob by the whackos that has gotten us into the foreign oil dependency mess we're in today instead of getting most of our electricity from nuclear power like France, their latest stupid panic is going to lead to the starvation of hundreds of millions of people. I don't often laud the French but they at least got their ducks in a row with nuclear power and the U.S. could have too if we'd had the good sense to ignore the environmentalist whackos. Will we never learn? Yes, what a horrible thing we didn't ignore the environmentalists. Think about how much better we'd be without the clean water act, why, it's been years since we've had a nice beautiful fire on the Cuyahoga river. When was the last time? 1969? And that completely retarded clean air act? I liked leaded gasoline and acid rain, it gave buildings such character, and city air such an wonderful tinge of homey emissions. Besides being just an appeal to consequences (although not in a direct attack on the science), this is once again an example of the "environmentalists will eat your children" canard. If any other demand had caused a market to create a increase in the cost of food, that would just be capitalism. But when concern from the environment does it? It's a holocaust! Millions will die! Environmentalists will eat your children! What a load. Labels: Dave Scot, global warming denialism, uncommon descent |
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10 Comments:
Yep, not to mention the stupidity of his example. Nuclear power won't reduce the amount of oil we use by very much. Most electricity comes from coal (of which there are huge domestic supplies) not oil. Unless he's suggesting that Ford has a design for a fission-mobile...
That said, I tend to support nuclear power (over coal). Fission byproducts have a halflife of thousands of years, but carbon dioxide is forever.
April 12, 2007 10:00 AM,
I've worked with radiation too much to have any great fear of it. And from what I've read of the pebble-bed reactors, meltdowns would be pretty much impossible.
The environmental hostility towards nuclear power is something that irks me, people are so fearful of radiation that they lose all sense of proportion. Burning up all the coal on the planet would have far worse consequences for the entire globe and everyone on it, compared to say, losing a couple of hundred square miles of earth in the exceedingly unlikely event of a meltdown + fallout scenario, which only the Soviets, with their characteristic disregard for their citizens lives, managed. Those big mushroomy things around plants? Yeah, you need those.
April 12, 2007 10:07 AM,
The environmental hostility towards nuclear power is something that irks me, people are so fearful of radiation that they lose all sense of proportion.
Dude, be real. The environmental hostility to nuclear power is based a large part on the economic model in use and how it's carried out. This is the United States for crying out loud. Most people don't articulate that because it sounds Marxist and anti-capitalist when put into words, but we still have questions on the long term efficacy of capitalism as evidenced by the climate change discussion.
Are we prone to support nuclear energy as a government owned cartel -- with gross safety regulations unfettered by industry lobbyists, or as an exercise in free-market cost-cutting ( -- the way that the medicare bill went through)? Does best-of-breed and safety assume primacy in construction standards of people trying to provide a quarterly return?
I may not be a scientist, but lets pretend that I have a passing familiarity with safety violations of the for-profit go-co nuclear industry.
...compared to say, losing a couple of hundred square miles of earth in the exceedingly unlikely event of a meltdown...
Couple hundred square miles? I'd check into that...
The contaminated territories lie in the north of Ukraine, the south and east of Belarus and in the western border area between Russia and Belarus (1.2). International estimates suggest that a total of between 125,000 and 146,000 km2 in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine are contaminated with caesium-137 at levels exceeding 1 curie (Ci) or 3.7 x 1010 becquerel (Bq) per square kilometre (5.1). This is an area greater than that of the neighbouring countries of Latvia and Lithuania combined. At the time of the accident, about 7 million people lived in the contaminated territories, including 3 million children. About 350,400 people were resettled or left these areas. However, about 5.5 million people, including more than a million children, continue to live in the contaminated zones...
April 12, 2007 11:51 AM,
The article isn't about nuclear but about biofuels.
Now biofuels - corn at least - are a bad idea. See here for example.
They are also the sort of wacko environmental policy that the US government supports and environmentalists usually oppose.
Ah, you can't win.
April 12, 2007 12:10 PM,
Well Ted, I was thinking more of a 3-mile Island meltdown compared to Chernobyl. Like I say, those big mushroomy things around the reactors are very important.
All energy generation is dangerous though, it's not like coal-mining is a walk in the park, or drilling for oil doesn't routinely generate casualties (and wars).
That's why I say it's an issue of proportion. I don't think a Chernobyl-style incident is possible given the safety standards used on our older reactors. Further, our reactors do not rely on graphite rods to cool the reaction, and we don't do stupid things like removing all the rods at once to see what will happen. Finally, the big giant thing around the reactors? Yeah, it didn't have one of those, it was just an exposed building. So when it caught fire the radiation was free to contaminate pretty much all of Northern Europe (wasn't it the Swedes that first detected it in the west before the soviets even admitted it?).
It's all about proportion. The American nuclear safety is not comparable for a variety of reasons, and I think fuels that pollute the entire world and cause wars have equivalent drawbacks.
April 12, 2007 12:33 PM,
I think Mark is dead on with his characterization of people's unreasonable fear of radiation. I recall when gama irradiated milk was introduced. Folks were crying about some unknown residual that the gama rays might leave behind. I tried explaining to folks I knew that gama rays aren't much different from x-rays (at least conceptually) and they didn't worry about residual effects from clinical x-rays or x-ray machines at the airport. But this didn't work. Gama-milk would be a great boon in that stores could store it almost indefinitely on a room-temp shelf and potentially save on refrigeration costs.
As far as biofuels, while they may not be the magic bullet, I think they are atleast a step in the right direction. I would much rather see us take a couple of mis-steps like corn-ethanol than do nothing.
Personally, I will be really interested to see the results of Mercedes hydrogen car testing in Europe.
aw
April 12, 2007 1:07 PM,
There is a reason they dropped "Nuclear" out of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging and it's got nothing to do with science.
April 12, 2007 7:11 PM,
Well Ted, I was thinking more of a 3-mile Island meltdown compared to Chernobyl.
Your response was a lot more measured, and I appreciate that.
You could be irked but really I think that both the willingness to subscribe to the conspiracy things and the aversion to things nuclear are a symptom of class difference among people that have fewer choices.
I need to recalibrate. I mostly enjoy your posts and comments -- I've been reading here and on giveup, and let me take a SWAG. Upper middle class, professional parents - not blue collar anyway, and an upper tier college experience. Suburbia; maybe urban, but if urban, not tenement or row house. Maybe just a tad of private schooling.
Close or way off?
April 12, 2007 7:40 PM,
Strange request Ted.
Close. No private schooling. But I did grow up in Bethesda, a suburb of DC.
April 12, 2007 9:19 PM,
Close. No private schooling. But I did grow up in Bethesda, a suburb of DC.
Ain't that in the eighth richest county in the nation? Well, back in 2003 anyways.
I heard that Bethesda is allegedly the "Best Educated City in the Nation over 50,000"? That stat alone threw my private school radar akilter.
Not really a strange request, I was just wondering about the background of the professional point-outing. Everything has a syntax, subtext, pretext, and context. I was checking my calibration to see if I was off or needed adjusting.
I hope that ScienceBlogs offers you a berth on the mothership. It's like the freaking wilderness out here.
April 14, 2007 5:51 PM,
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