I was being sarcastic.

“Victims of Saturday’s freak downpours were last night praying that more rain would not bring further flooding misery.

“Weather experts last night forecast more heavy rain to fall across the province before the completion of a massive clean-up operation to deal with thousands of households affected by flash flooding.”

Proving conclusively that God doesn’t heed prayers from Ulster people. I wonder if Sammy Wilson has a theory about why that is.

You might want to think a little more deeply about that. They are in a mess and how did they get there?

I just thought it was a strange thing to say. I mean there can’t be many people who think the solution to Africa’s problems is more fridges.

But what do I know? I haven’t worked there. And clearly those Europeans who have been there must know what they’re doing.

After all, if it wasn’t for European intervention, I’m sure Africa would be in a terrible mess.

[i]The plant efficiency is a problem I see being addressed by nuclear power, although one principal selling point with electric cars is that you leave them on charge overnight. If this happened on a large scale this would improve energy efficiency at the power plants. Isn’t that what they essentially try to achieve with economy 7 ?[/i]

As an electrical engineer I too believe that nuclear is the only medium term option going forward, but that ship has sailed. The Labour government has procrastinated to a point that we are going to see most of the UK’s current batch of nuclear power stations shut down over the next 15 years. It takes approximately 15 years to build a new one! This is a national disgrace IMO of the highest order.

The UK is going to be held to ransom by Russia for natural gas – currently over 40% of the UK’s energy is generated from gas turbine power plants, this trend will continue well into the future because we have not planned adequately enough for the future. Wind is also a non-starter. Where is the most wind potential in the UK? And where is the most sparsely populated region of the UK – both questions have the same answer: the NW of Scotland. It is precisely because no people live there that the electrical power grid in that area is very low grade, so in order to tap all of that potential wind energy we are going to have to dramatically reinforce the infrastructure in that area – something which is estimated to cost in the region of a few £100 billion (I kid you not) if we are to reach the admirable target of providing 10% of our energy from renewable sources.

Nuclear is not without its problems either. There are the obvious problems of toxic waste and terrorism but there’s also the question about how much energy is needed to extract uranium from the ground (most probably in Australia), to transport it to these shores (in shielded containers) and to enrich it so it is of reactor quality. I’m merely trying to demonstrate how there is no such thing as a free lunch here.

You talk about charging an electric car overnight. How efficient is that? How much energy will escape in heat alone from charging any battery? When it comes down to it electric cars are little better, in efficiency terms, than a normal car and you can’t even go as fast. The only difference you get is that all that pollution is created somewhere else – at the power plant, rather than in the city centre traffic jams. This does nothing to allay the problems of global warming.

[i]Rebuild the cities and build railway lines everywhere ? That’ll be cheap.[/i]

The point I’m trying to convey is that no option is cheap. I never said to build railway lines everywhere, but if more people were to use public transport, bicycles or their feet to move themselves from one place to another i.e. exercised a little bit of personal responsibility, then we might not be in such a pickle.

Of course another low carbon technology which they might develop would be nuclear but I do not see anyone either in the Green lobby or from Western governments proposing that (somewhat unsurprisingly).

I guess at one level one might regard the whole thing as hopeless. However, I do not think that we can morally in any way impede or slow poor countries’ development.

[i]““The ice-caps are melting at a faster rate than ever.”

I think you will find they melted a bit more at the end of the ice age but who knows. Men weren’t around then. [b] We have only known of their existence for about 400 years so how do you justify that? [/b] You are looking at a very small window of evidence in planetary terms…. perhaps only 150 yrs of reliable data”[/i]

The ice holds plenty of evidence about how screwed we are. In an earlier post I stated that “the warmest 10 years on record in the last 100,000 years have happened in the past 15 years” How do I know this? How do I know that CO2 levels, for instance, are currently the highest they have ever been in that time period too? Scientists are able to gather climatic data, from long periods ago by drilling 100s of metres into the Antarctic ice sheet, which accumulates a new layer of ice, and therefore a new layer of valuable information associated with it, every year over the past 100,000 years.

[i]First oil isn’t running out. We have at least 80 years of proven supplies and are almost certain to find more. [/i]

Are you for real? No significantly large oil field (i.e. Saudi Arabia like) has been found, or has been deemed economical to extract oil from in the past 20 years. The largest oil field in the world, Ghawaz, which also happens to be the largest oil field ever found, is set to hit peak oil production in the next few years. Some scientists even believe that this peak oil period has already passed. Once that happens the yearly supply from that field will dwindle, year on year, just as world demand is steadily increasing.

If you really don’t believe that oil is running out then I suggest you read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Long-Emergency-Converging-Catastrophes-Twenty-First/dp/0871138883/ref=cm_lmf_tit_3

I’ve read it. Now I will admit it can be a little bit melodramatic at times but the message is pretty clear I believe.

The problem we face is that any oil, which has already been extracted was the easy stuff to get at. Any new fields will require more energy to be used in extracting the oil from it because they are found in deeper and deeper pockets of the Earth’s crust. The law of diminishing returns will eventually set in – i.e. are you wasting more oil by extracting, refining and transporting new resources than what you will get in return?

[i]“The inhabitants of some Papuan New Guinean islands have been evacuated permanently due to rising sea levels flooding their homeland. “

Haven’t heard this one before so i would like to see the evidence.[/i]

They are the Carteret Islands to be precise: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article759319.ece

[i]I have no doubt that you are genuine in your belief on all this. Its just that you have been sold a pup. [/i]

This is where I take real issue with you. Where exactly are your credentials to criticise my views? I get my views on this subject from scientific research and fact, not Jeremy Clarkson. I haven’t been sold a pup, just an education. A 1st class Masters degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, at the risk of sounding pompous, to be exact. I currently work in the field too, have done so for a number of years and regularly read journals surrounding this particular issue too, so I think I’m pretty damn qualified to express an opinion here.

[i]There are over 1 billion people in China. They want the living standard we have. How do you say no to them?[/i]

I’m afraid that is what is going to have to happen. In fact there is more like 1.4 billion folk in China and we are seeing the emergence of India (1 billion people) and Brazil (a few 100 million) as economic powerhouses. The really scary thing here is that we in the West have had it good for so long that we cannot face the fact that our living standards have been so high, only because we have had to subjugate the rest of the world in order to achieve these levels of personal wealth. If the Chinese all want a more comfortable existence, then I’m afraid me and you will have to suffer as a consequence. The economics of opportunity cost come into play here, we can’t all have our demands sated because there are not enough resources available for that to be possible.

But, then, global warming has its desperate moves, equating those who have skepticism in their “science” — consensus is not science — Holocaust deniers.

No comment on the vaccines I see.

What have sanitation and sewerage systems got to do with fridges?

So yes boring things like fridges save lives as do proper water and sewerage. They are actually probably the most effective ways of stopping children dying.

If you meant to say “children are dying now for want of things like water and sewerage” why did you say “children are dying now for want of things like fridges”?

Was it just to imply that environmentalists were unreasonable?

Or do you really think these things are somehow very similar?

People dying is my main interest.

I think you are probably exaggerating here.

Malaria is also a major cause but not as bad as D+V.

So yes boring things like fridges save lives as do proper water and sewerage. They are actually probably the most effective ways of stopping children dying. Now if less children died people might have smaller numbers of children. That might help in the long term re development and the climate but is not my main interest in this issue. People dying is my main interest.

Are you serious?

From being so vocal and passionate you have gone very quiet when we asked for evidence?

The key phrase is “They are likely to feel.” Their children are dying now for want of things like fridges, things which require energy and which are likely to cause climate change. However, when it is their children doing the dying “likely to feel” is indeed a distant concern.

Turgon ‘Distant concerns like climate change are of no importance if your children face dying due to your lack of transport or infrastructure or lack of things like fridges.’

Actually Turgon, it is not a distant concern for people in developing countries. They are likely to feel the direct impact of climate change much sooner than we will.

For example, the desertification of most of north Africa and widespread flooding in places like Bangladesh and Burma.

Not much point in encouraging economic growth if they are going to be dead by starvation or drowning…

we could alternatively decide that some of the other Chicken Little scares that we seem to enjoy so much could do equally as well, Y2K bugs, new Ice Age, global AIDS holocaust, bird flu pandemics, perhaps.

I notice you didn’t list “nonexistent WMD” or “Muslims storming the West to establish Sharia law”.

My buttons get really pushed by the Y2K thing. The world seems to be full of people who know absolutely nothing about IT who reckon that the Y2K problem was a massive fake on the basis that a couple of fuckwits wrote a few books to exploit the problem, all of whom kept their mouths firmly shut during the year in the run up to 2000. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

The Y2K problem was very real and very serious. I was working in a major Irish financial institution at the time. It would never have resulted in planes falling out of the sky or stupid crap like that, but it could have caused a collapse in the banking system (banks, right now, run on computer installations which trace their origins to the 1960s) which would, on balance, have been substantially worse. Hundreds of software bugs were identified and corrected which would have been extremely serious had they not been caught. One bank having a computer problem isn’t a big deal, it happens from time to time, but if they all have them at the same time, on all of their installed computers, then it’s a different kettle of fish. Outside of the banks, failures in billing and invoicing systems (especially in business which rely on IT, but do not have a large core IT investment in the way that banks do) could have led to the economy coming to a standstill and the implications would have been impossible to predict. As it stands, there were a number of failures when the year rolled over anyway – Eircom had a minor billing system problem and a power station in Italy ran into difficulties of some kind.

Diluted energy:

And where do you get the energy for your electric car? The local power station, or more likely, if you happen to live in Britain or Ireland, a power station hundreds of miles away, linked by a DC cross channel link.

You build more nuclear power stations. I don’t see why this is a big deal.

So even if electric cars were 100% efficient, which they are no where near being,

Electric motors are as close as you can get and are substantially more efficient than combustion engines.

the fuel powering them is not 100% efficient. You’re probably talking 10% losses in the transmission cables alone, then there is the fuel that goes into the power station, which will most likely be natural gas or coal, so that’s about another 40 to 50% loss, at a minimum.

The plant efficiency is a problem I see being addressed by nuclear power, although one principal selling point with electric cars is that you leave them on charge overnight. If this happened on a large scale this would improve energy efficiency at the power plants. Isn’t that what they essentially try to achieve with economy 7 ?

You’ve then also got to think of the degradation in the rechargable capacity of the battery, which powers the car, itself, which will gradually wear down and have to be replaced.

I’ve not factored that in, but maintenance and wear and tear are to be expected over the life of any vehicle.

Electric cars are not the answer. The answers will come from humanity being forced en masse, by economics if nothing else, to address its care-free attitude to e.g. using the car to go the shops at the bottom of the road, or making a 30 mile round trip commute to work everyday, when taking the bus or train or living closer to work is the only sustainable solution.

Rebuild the cities and build railway lines everywhere ? That’ll be cheap.