Friday, March 11, 2011

"If it's not profitable, it's not sustainable."

This is an outstanding 50 minute overview of the current state of climate science, from Berkeley's Richard Muller.  Unlike me, he's not a skeptic - he thinks that the planet is warming, and that we're partly responsible.

Actually, I'm not sure that he's wrong, but am pretty skeptical of the data that I've seen so far.  And as it turns out, so is Dr. Muller, who is leading a new Open Source effort to assemble a transparent global temperature record that you (and I, and anyone) can download via the Internet.  All data and code will be publicly available.

This is very interesting, especially the part late in the presentation about oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear.  His point is that CO2 from the developing world is a major problem, and that solutions to that will have to be low cost.  He says (quite rightly) China and India cannot afford expensive, feel-good "renewable" energy sources, and we can't afford to subsidize them at the level that would be required.

It's good to see one of the "warmists" pushing for transparency in the science and for sensibility in the solutions.

2 comments:

Terry said...

That was very interesting.

Lots of stuff I didn't know, a certain amount I suspected and mostly being left rather hopeful about the situation.

Now, having the political will to step away from the prejudices and easy sound bites and actually get things done right is another story.

Anonymous said...

Now, having the political will to step away from the prejudices and easy sound bites and actually get things done right is another story.

That's it, right there.

Jim