Invest In Turning Deserts Green As Alternative Response To Climate Cha

[Dennis Tate]

I am 52 and yes, we are indeed amazingly good at denying how what we think of as a good and ethical decision is partly flawed and selfish. A carbon tax or cap and trade system will probably not work quickly enough to actually do much to reduce the insulation effect of all that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but.....we are somewhat influenced by elitist ideas and it seems that many of our most educated people don't want to see heavy investment in producing food, even in the desert, because they have bought into the falsehood that this earth can only sustain about five hundred million people anyway! That is not true and if we would turn to our Creator with our whole hearts God certainly has the power to give us vastly better sources of energy!



http://www.near-death.com/experiences/storm03.html
[quote]

[font="Arial"][color="#000000"]Science, technology, and other benefits, they told me, had been gifts bestowed on humanity by them – through inspiration. People had literally been led to those discoveries, many of which had later been perverted by humanity to use for its own destruction. We could do too much damage to the planet. And by the planet, they meant all of God's creation. Not just the people, but the animals, the trees, the birds, the insects, everything.[/color][/font]
[font="Arial"][color="#000000"]They explained to me that their concern was for all the people of the world. They weren't interested in one group getting ahead of other groups. They want every person to consider every other person greater than their own flesh. They want everyone to love everyone else, completely; more, even, than they love themselves. If someone, someplace else in the world hurts, than we should hurt we should feel their pain. And we should help them.[/color][/font]
[font="Arial"][color="#000000"]Our planet has evolved to the point, for the first time in our history, that we have the power to do that. We are globally linked. And we could become one people.[/color][/font]
[font="Arial"][color="#000000"]The people that they gave the privilege of leading the world into a better age, blew it. That was us, in the United States.[/color][/font]
[font="Arial"][color="#000000"]When I spoke with them about the future, and this might sound like a cop-out on my part, they made clear to me that we have free will.[/color][/font]
[font="Arial"][color="#000000"]If we change the way we are, then we can change the future which they showed me. They showed me a view of the future, at the time of my experience, based upon how we in the United States were behaving at that time. It was a future in which a massive worldwide depression would occur. If we were to change our behavior, however, then the future would be different.[/color][/font]
[/quote]

Edited February 5, 2012 by Dennis Tate

[Groo the Wanderer]

sooo......

why dont we just accelerate global warming so the ice caps melt entirely. number of benefits i see

san fran and hollywood get the noah treatment.
we would have more water to greenify the deserts
penguins would migrate north so i could have one as a pet

[Groo the Wanderer]

[quote name='Dennis Tate' timestamp='1328374333' post='2380870']
Roughly one hundred million people in Bangladesh will become climate change refugees if ocean levels raise merely ONE METER!
[/quote]

[4588686]

[quote name='Groo the Wanderer' timestamp='1328453145' post='2381447']

[/quote]

Well. You're accidentally right. The figure is actually about 20 million.

[url="http://climatelab.org/Bangladesh"]http://climatelab.org/Bangladesh[/url]

[i][color=#333333][font=Georgia,] A one meter rise in sea level would inundate 30,000 km[/font][/color][sup]2[/sup][color=#333333][font=Georgia,], displacing 20 million people--equivalent to the population of Australia. [/font][/color][sup][url="http://climatelab.org/Bangladesh#ref_8"]8[/url][/sup][color=#333333][font=Georgia,] [/font][/color][sup][url="http://climatelab.org/Bangladesh#ref_9"]9[/url][/sup][color=#333333][font=Georgia,] Higher sea levels would also make more people vulnerable to cyclonic surges, and inland freshwater lakes, ponds and aquifers would be at risk of being affected by saline and brackish-water intrusion. The increased salinity in surface and ground water could threaten drinking and irrigation water. [/font][/color][sup][url="http://climatelab.org/Bangladesh#ref_10"]10[/url][/sup][/i]

[4588686]

Maybe Groo or Goo or whatever the hell his name is would like to scientifically smack the link down. Since he's tired of all the global warming hippie just intellectually shut the topic down once and for all.

[Groo the Wanderer]

[4588686]

[quote name='Groo the Wanderer' timestamp='1328582712' post='2382788']

[/quote]

Of course. You'll probably live to see your children having their future prospects diminished by your political irresponsibility. I hope it will still be funny then.

[arfink]

My suggestion? Stop dinking around with stupid hippie dreams and get with the 21st century. We have access to a viable solution to the problem of energy consumption that's been ignored for decades, first because of the Cold War and then because of hippies who are scared of technology.

I mean, lets look at the two most popular "green" options for energy production: wind and solar. Both are extremely expensive to implement, but this isn't a problem because all baseline power production is expensive. But wind and solar aren't reliable to provide baseline power, but cost significantly more than any other baseline power option besides nuclear.

Wind farms are massive, unsightly, confuse birds, airplane pilots, and radar, and produce electricity only when the wind is blowing. They are also very inefficient: there is not enough surface area on the earth to provide for global power consumption entirely from wind sources.

Solar has similar problems, but has the added disadvantages of being extremely high maintenance (a layer of dust invisible to the human eye reduces efficiency by nearly 20%), virtually useless in high latitudes, even more expensive per kilowatt than wind, and extremely damaging to the environment to produce.

No, we can't expect the world to have billions of people and also require people to forsake the use of electricity. It's not going to happen. Sure, we have alot of wasted energy in our society, but correcting the abuses of individuals would require a level of regulation and enforcement that would prove to be more costly in the long run than solutions for simply producing more power. And there is one viable solution, IMO.

It's called thorium, and I believe that if it gets developed in a timely fashion it will solve our energy problems. Liquid-salt thorium nuclear reactors are truly fail safe in the passive sense, as opposed to modern moderated fission reactors, which require active fail safes. Thorium reactors consume one half of the fuel of regular reactors per gigawatt, and produce roughly one tenth the "hot" radiation per year without reprocessing, and significantly less with reprocessing. As an added bonus, some of the byproducts or the reaction process are extremely valuable for nuclear medicine or manufacturing and are otherwise very costly and energy intensive to make. It's also impossible to use these reactors for making bomb materials, since the wrong products come out. Lastly, the really "hot" waste the reactors produce is not a highly toxic actinide (like plutonium) and also has a waaaay shorter half life too. Storage would be more like 200 years instead of 200 thousand.

And thorum is insanely common, so common it's treated as a useless waste product in every mining operation in the world. It's more common than lead and less toxic besides. Conservative estimates place the world's known, currently mined thorium supplies at nearly 100,000 years of fuel for global consumption.

And the strangest thing is, they built one of these thorium reactors in the 1960's and it worked. It worked so well, and so reliably that it hardly drew any attention at all. But there was a problem- running it didn't produce plutonium and depleted uranium that we could use for bombs, so Nixon shuttered the project. Now the few scientists who study it can't get it off the ground because people are so afraid of nuclear they won't give new technology a chance.

[arfink]

[img]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Lwrvslftr2.png[/img]

[arfink]

For those interested in the technical side of thorium reactor design, read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor

If you'd rather watch a documentary about thorium, watch this:
http://www.motherboard.tv/2011/11/9/motherboard-tv-the-thorium-dream

[Ice_nine]

In conjunction with all these ideas we could try consuming less too

maybe


maybe?




I guess that's the biggest hippie dream of all unfortunately.


Why the hell is global warming a religious issue?


questions I have

[Groo the Wanderer]

[quote name='Ice_nine' timestamp='1328599020' post='2382921']
In conjunction with all these ideas we could try consuming less too

maybe


maybe?







Why the hell is global warming a religious issue?



[/quote]



it aint. thats part of my point.

the other part is, if the hippies want to convince someone...stop lying to them. tell the truth, get rid of all the junk science, stop shutting down dissenting viewpoints, and have a valid discussion with the facts, not the hype and hysteria

[Groo the Wanderer]

[quote name='Hasan' timestamp='1328588842' post='2382890']
Of course. You'll probably live to see your children having their future prospects diminished by your political irresponsibility. I hope it will still be funny then.




[/quote]

[Laudate_Dominum]

We need to switch to cat & toast generators. As Palpatine once said, Unlimited Power!!

[Hubertus]

To Dennis Tate: The idea of turning the deserts green does intrigue me, but what would be the negative side effects of such a project? (Other than the expense)