What about plastics polluting the world's oceans ? Many fish caught offshore are now contaminated. Is Trump denying that too ? It wouldn't surprise me. Buying more bombs etc. won't solve those sort of problems. The US used to be a world leader of sensible policies. Now it is just driven by greed for money and power.
https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/donald-trump-needs-a-date.318403/ On politicians: Perhaps, changes can be seen only when the politicians are paid extremely high salaries in order to attract high calibrate candidates, who instead of working in big corporations then, now would like to work for the country/nation as elected politicians. Alternatively, all politicians are volunteers without any salary, therefore only accomplished executives after earning enough savings would be interested in serving the country/nation , even without any salary. They would risk losing their long-time established goodwill and hard-earned credibility and they would simply resign willingly if not doing/performing well. lol
I actually don't want to convince you to become a liberal, I just want to make you think about why supporting and subsidizing fossil fuels while being anti-renewables should be a conservative position? I maintain that it shouldn't be, conservatives should be against the billions and trillions in implicit and explicit subsidies of dollars, lives, and missed work days that fossil fuels cause and support encouraging alternatives even if is occasionally means we end up pursuing a dead end that costs taxpayers 1% of what we paid out supporting dirty energy sources that year. Conservatives should be against monopoly electric utilities (what's more anti-conservative and anti-American than a monopoly!) and for distributed generation. What I'm saying is you've been had. The fossil fuel companies convinced you that this whole climate change thing is a liberal thing, must hate all liberal things, and in the end you chase the shiny object and end up supporting fossil fuel and denigrating anything that would challenge it's supremecy as somehow a true patriotic American conservative thing when it's anything but! You don't have to buy into any climate change to agree that the whole list of ill effects I listed from fossil fuel are real, the trillions in subsidies are real, and change your focus from attacking climate change to supporting clean energy. Don't be blinded by your ideology on this one my friend.
Again I want to compliment you on the thoughtfulness of your post and the thought you've put behind it. It's a lot to think about, and I'll be the first to admit that when it comes to a couple areas I'm far behind you in education. My questions are in the following areas: 1. We know how much CO2 the ocean absorbs, it actually captures the vast majority of the CO2 in the carbon cycle and we can measure that with some specificity. Ocean acidification is measurable, which indicates the oceans have absorbed in increasing amount of CO2. So while warmer water can't hold as much dissolved CO2, the acidification shows that the ocean clearly is holding more total CO2 than it was, so wouldn't that indicate that the increase in CO2 partial pressure is overcoming the decrease in solubility caused by increases in ocean temp? 1b. My whole issue with climate change skeptics, as you can probably tell, is that my view is that we're conducting a massive experiment with our atmosphere by significantly increasing CO2 in an extremely short (climate speaking) and it's a rational assumption that we don't know what the results of this experiment will be but the status quo is unlikely. One of many potential impacts of the experiment is the potential impact on global ocean currents, which would have dramatic impact on ocean carbon uptake. (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21068) 2. My understanding of the absorption effect of CO2 is not on the visible sunlight passing through but of the infrared radiation that is normally radiated into space. As such, CO2 being a clear gas wouldn't be relevant, what really matters is it's absorption in low, non-visible wavelengths? 3. The feedback loop discussion is, as you accurately guessed, the most interesting to me as an EE. I don't know that it's incompatible to say we have a current feedback loop but that it attenuates to zero at some point. For example, we know that there are massive amounts of methane trapped in permafrost. We know it will be liberated with a small increase in temperature, so there's a clear tipping point there. But that won't continue indefinitely, at some point all that methane will be liberated and that feedback loop ceases. Similar deal with ocean currents. Just like the squealing mic doesn't continue to feed back infinitely louder, just to a really uncomfortable level, the climate could well change to a level where we're really uncomfortable with 20m sea level rises but not be outside of the precedence of earth's geological history. I haven't had time to review Murry Salby's latest yet, so I'll withhold comment on that. You would have to admit that he's a voice in the wilderness among skeptics. I think my biggest argument is the skeptic's own argument. Skeptics, you included in your post, claim that there is much that's very complicated and huge amounts of uncertainty. I agree. You can't claim that level of uncertainty, and also claim to know that this massive experiment in GHG emissions won't have a detrimental impact, in fact it would have to be a very robust negative feedback loop for it not to have any impact. My assertion is that given the unknown impact of this unprecedented experiment with our climate and the potentially disastrous impact, plus all the massive disadvantages of fossil fuels, why the hell do we as a first world nation continue to subsidize it to the tune of billions a year and attempt to undercut renewables at every turn? Especially when an investment of a fraction of our GDP, much less than simply taxing fossil fuel until they reached 2007 levels and spending that money on clean energy deployment and R&D, for example, could allow us to largely avoid all those known and unknown impacts? Like you I'm a man of many and varied careers, and was a military pilot for some time. We spent much of our time talking about risk and risk mitigation, and the accepted metric was that risk was equal to probability times consequence. So the probability of a wing coming off was very low but the consequence so high we spent plenty of time doing NDT of center wing boxes and ensuring we didn't stress that area beyond what we knew it could handle from testing. I see climate change through this same lense; maybe the center wing box could take 7Gs, but we only tested it to 5 and the consequences are dire so let's not pull more than 4Gs unless there's no other alternative! Given your background, education, and intellectual curiosity I'd highly encourage you to take a deep dive into clean energy. Wind and solar prices have fallen exponentially over the past 10 years and are now routinely winning competitive large power RFPs against all energy sources without subsidy around the world. Contrary to the fossil fuel lobby scare mongering, wind and solar forecasting coupled with the low price to build and occasionally operate nat gas peakers and ability to use dispatchable hydro and geothermal means that we (and every third world country) could have renewables penetration far higher than we have today. MWH and capacity are already sold as separate resources in our ISOs and claiming variability makes renewables untenable is a failed argument. There is pretty much zero reason to ever build another coal plant in most of the world, let alone subsidize the ones we have in the U.S. Like I indicated to @triggertrader, you don't have to even buy into climate change to buy into taking some serious effort to dramatically reduce our fossil fuel use.
" Trump's infrastructure plan gets $2.5 trillion nudge from Australia " By Jason Scott and Brett Foley Updated22 February 2018
A question is why the US doesn't use already owned funds instead. Almost 9 times larger than Australia funds. http://www.oecd.org/daf/fin/private-pensions/Pension-funds-pre-data-2016.pdf
Climate scientists world wide are in agreement on this. The spike is attributed to the industrial revolution + population explosion. This image is from NASA. Cattle are a major contributor to this, another reason 2 B a vegetarian.
Still not as bad as millions of years ago. I'm not for or against the CO2 debate, but it makes me mad when people use partial statistics to lie. Also, why are we talking about CO2 now? I'm not for or against the CO2 debate, but it makes me mad when people use partial statistics to lie.