The Future of the Human Race.

[Der Fuhrer]

Maybe Nasa wants to get in on some of that global warming munnay.

[Mr. Blonde]

CSI | Disinformation about Global Warming

[Mr. Blonde]

Earth's overdraft notice: on August 21st, we exceed nature's budget :: EnergyPortal.eu

[Mr. Blonde]

Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium - Telegraph

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium

Thorium-fluoride reactors can operate at atmospheric temperature. "The plants would be much smaller and less expensive. You wouldn’t need those huge containment domes because there’s no pressurized water in the reactor. It’s close-fitting,"

[Ugly Bastard]

So... why aren't we already using this stuff? Seems too good to be true. There's gotta be a downside.

[Mr. Blonde]

Greedy nuclear companies in EU, Big Oil in US:

Brussels turned to its technical experts, who happened to be French because the French dominate the EU’s nuclear industry. "They didn’t want competition because they had made a huge investment in the old technology," he said.
Another decade was lost. It was a sad triumph of vested interests over scientific progress. "We have very little time to waste because the world is running out of fossil fuels. Renewables can’t replace them. Nuclear fusion is not going work for a century, if ever," he said.

The downside is that the current fossil fuel profiteers would lose a lot of money. Poor guys.

[Ugly Bastard]

Shit like this fires me up so much. I would take back everything bad I've ever said about Obama + vote for him in '12 in a snap if he made some huge push to use this technology. He probably won't, though. Despite his image and how much we'd all like to think otherwise, he is still a politician in bed with big money interests as much as anyone else.

[Mr. Blonde]

I sometimes wonder if we'll ever have a U.S. president who just does the right things, the best things for humanity, and still kicks ass most of the time. I mean, is that even possible, or have we just romanticized history? Would a Libertarian president push for something like this, or would he back down due to him infringing upon the liberty of oil industry workers?

I guess a libertarian pres probably wouldn't; they aren't for forced governmental intervention (even when it's in all of our best interests) -- that's a crazy thing about extreme libertarianism I just realized: in many cases what they're fighting so hard for is the freedom and uninterrupted right for humans to be ignorant and do what's worse for the majority, but financially beneficial for the few.

Republicans and Libertarians seem to be the least compassionate people, and most selfish. BUT IT'S DOG EAT DOG OUT THERE GUYS, AMIRITE?

[ninjaface]

[Mr. Blonde]

that is freakin hilarious.

[thekremlin]

I agree with UB's initial statement that this thorium story seems way too good to be true. And while blaming it on govts and lobbyists might go some of the way, if this stuff was really the bees' knees, you would expect a private company to pick it up, revolutionize the way we got energy, and made a shit-ton of money. Even if it is a massive project. I'm more inclined to believe that an article in the telegraph that doesn't explain the science at all is a bit of an exaggeration.

[Mr. Blonde]

Disadvantages of Thorium as a nuclear fuel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

just FWIW i'm stealing most of this shit from Reddit, but related SMBC comic (i'd post the image, but that's too much effort for the red-button)

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1984

[Mr. Blonde]

YouTube

YouTube

[Mr. Blonde]

[f3lix]

Obama is in bed with the same big oil that he said he would fight against. He would cite the loss of "jobs" as the reason we couldn't move to something so much more simple.

[Mr. Blonde]

U.N. eco-chief: 'We are destroying life on Earth' - World news - World environment - msnbc.com

[Mr. Blonde]

If there is any man in the last century who had a gift of forecasting the future of the human race, it was Carl Sagan. Some of his social and political commentary I recently heard in the audiobook version of his "Pale Blue Dot: A vision of the human future in space" in regard to the cold war, space race and nuclear disarmament is amazing.

Anyways, check out this segment of an interview I stumbled across while watching some vids of him on Youtube: Ted Turner asks Carl Sagan if he's a socialist. If I would like anyone to watch this, it's Der Fuhrer, F3lix and DJ FC. (Sorry it's not embedded, it's a long interview so I deep linked it.)

EDIT: Make sure you note how quickly he changes the subject to time travel.

YouTube - Ted Turner Interviews Carl Sagan (Part 3 of 5)

[Mr. Blonde]

Climate science: Climate scientists plan campaign against global warming skeptics - latimes.com

[Der Fuhrer]

This isn't a surprise. They're trying to snub out anyone who might threaten their livelihood. You know who did the same thing? The Nazis.

[Mr. Blonde]

Honestly it's good to see climate scientist fighting back en masse in the face of so much blatant ignorance. They adopted the term "skeptics" but are nothing of the sort--as almost every piece of actual evidence validates the belief that we're destroying the Earth.

[f3lix]

Just explain to me how in the 60s-70s the Earth was "cooling" and we were headed toward an "ice age" and now the Earth is heating up and we are causing that in a hyper-extreme opposite.

RE: Sagan, it's called the free market. We do what we wish with our money. If the majority of people wanted to spend their money on human causes, they would. There are plenty of people out there who are spending money on humanitarian issues. I have nothing against a government helping its people, if that is what their document entitles them to do. Ours does not. So I am against it in America.

[Mr. Blonde]

And that's why I'm better than you. End of discussion!

[f3lix]

Originally Posted by Mr. Blonde

And that's why I'm better than you. End of discussion!

I don't follow.

[Der Fuhrer]

Originally Posted by f3lix

Just explain to me how in the 60s-70s the Earth was "cooling" and we were headed toward an "ice age" and now the Earth is heating up and we are causing that in a hyper-extreme opposite.

If you go even further back in time, to say the 50s, the Earth was supposedly becoming vastly overpopulated. We were headed toward a "population explosion", which would leave the human race devastated by massive famine. In fact, one Paul Erhlich (total douchebag and global warming advocate, I'd imagine he was on board with the coming ice age scam as well) said that by 1980 over half the world's population would have died by starvation.

What you have here is a consistent pattern of people trying to scare us with an upcoming apocalypse.

[Mr. Blonde]

Predictive apocalypse timelines are mostly useless, but the principles behind them (environmental ones, anyways) are still valid. There is absolutely no doubt that eventually we are going to run out of resources. The Earth is finite.

Originally Posted by f3lix

Just explain to me how in the 60s-70s the Earth was "cooling" and we were headed toward an "ice age" and now the Earth is heating up and we are causing that in a hyper-extreme opposite.

Okay. Because on the vast scale of geological time, 40-50 years is NOTHING. We know a lot of stuff now we didn't know in the 70's, especially when it comes to environmental science. Secondly, most of what you just said is complete bullshit.

Some highlights:

"The video truly becomes meteorological malpractice when Bastardi compares today to the 1970s, utterly misleading viewers into thinking that a few days of cold weather over parts of the word somehow undoes the “unequivocal” warming of the Earth’s climate system that has been demonstrated through direct scientific observation in recent decades. In fact, “The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record,” said NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt. “Even if you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming” "

"There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then."

"The BAMS piece examines the scientific origins of the myth, the popular media of the 1970s who got the story slightly wrong, the deniers/delayers who perpetuate the myth today, and, most importantly, what real scientists actually said in real peer-reviewed journals at the time. Their literature survey, the most comprehensive ever done on the subject, found:

The survey identified only 7 articles indicating cooling compared to 44 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations."

"In this case, the panel concluded that the potential damage from greenhouse gases was real and should not be ignored. The potential for cooling, the threat of aerosols, or the possibility of an ice age shows up nowhere in the report. Warming from doubled CO2 of 1.5°–4.5°C was possible, the panel reported. While there were huge uncertainties, Verner Suomi, chairman of the National Research Council’s Climate Research Board, wrote in the report’s foreword that he believed there was enough evidence to support action: “A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late” (Charney et al. 1979). Clearly, if a national report in the 1970s advocates urgent action to address global warming, then the scientific consensus of the 1970s was not global cooling."

"On August 14, 1975, the New York Times ran, “Warming Trend Seen in Climate.” In this article, the New York Times discusses two scientific articles that focus on the overall climate patterns. It covers the debate over global cooling due to aerosols and global warming due to CO2 increases:

Dr. [Wally] Broecker’s argument is that the present cooling trend in the north will be reversed as more and more carbon dioxide is introduced into the atmosphere by the burning of fuels.

In the decades since, of course, scientists have come to the consensus that our continued burning of fossil fuels are tied to the warming of the planet."


In sum, you and DF need to shut the fuck up and read more about science instead of holing yourselves up in some financial ivory tower and assuming you know what the hell you're talking about. I cannot for the life of me understand why you're both so willing to disbelieve that the massive amount of pollution and environmental destruction we humans have caused might be destroying the environment.