Current rollout of renewables is clearly not sufficient because carbon emissions continue to rise at the top end of IPCC projections. And new coal fired facilities are still being built (and not just in China).

The problems with wind and solar are that they are not base load. When the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine they don't produce power. Certainly if sufficient energy storage could be provided in the grid, things would be different, but it would be ruinously expensive to do so with current technology. There is no way that currently solar and wind could completely replace current baseload facilities - not even a little bit close. Not even with "smart grids" - it is not a trivial problem. Which is not to say that they have don't have a place - anything that helps get us off coal does.

I was referring to enhanced or engineered geothermal - EGS - (AKA hot rock geothermal) which theoretically has huge potential. It involves deep bores (4km +) into hot granite below sedimentary rock, injecting water, fracturing the granite and circulating superheated fluid to the surface to drive conventional steam turbines. The potential is vastly greater than the limited resources of existing geothermal, with some prospect of eventually providing a significant portion of baseload power worldwide.

To my knowledge the closest to getting EGS commercially operating is Geodynamics at their facility in the Cooper basin in Australia which was supposed to have 25MW pilot in 2013. After an accident in 2009, followed by massive flooding of central Australia their 1MW demo has been put back two years to 2012. It's going to be a while yet.

As to whether nuclear appeals to state planners or businesses, even if that assertion is true (which it may or may not be) who cares? What we want is the best decision.

We absolutely MUST replace coal fired electricity generation with low CO2 methods. Coal is the worst CO2 emitter.

I very much doubt that current renewable technologies are sufficient. The only stuff that is immediately deployable is wind and solar. Wind certainly can't provide baseload power. Solar is still problematic though solar thermal is promising. Wave power is still really experimental. Enhanced geothermal is very promising but there is still no commercial size power station.

If it comes to raising the planet's temperature by 5C or nuclear power, I'd have to say nuclear is the clear choice.

There are newer options in nuclear power generation that could be much superior to most of the current stuff in efficiency, safety, far lower production of high level waste and cost. These are the so called forth generation reactors.

One such is the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) which

1. Uses far less nuclear fuel - maybe 100 times less.

2. Can use existing nuclear waste, depleted uranium or plutonium from decommissioned nuclear weapons as fuel. It can in fact help with existing waste problem.

3. There is enough existing fuel to last a long time. Uranium mining not needed.

4. Waste processing possible on site, vastly reducing security and safety risks of transporting large quantities of dangerous materials.

5. Produces much less high level waste than current designs. Perhaps 1%. And the waste mostly has a shorter half life.

6. "Softer" failure modes => better safety.

7. Maybe possible to prefabricate in factories => cheaper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor

When all is said and done, I think that the carbon pollution problem will only be solved by inexpensive clean electricity. Some hard choices will have to be made.

Under the cloak of "realism" your response is nothing other than ideological - a blind acceptance and defense of current economic organization.

When it comes to realism, I'm afraid that Greenpeace et al have it right, at least in broad principle even if the details are occasionally a bit rough.

The reality is that we are reaching planetary limits, in climate change, destruction of biodiversity, the nitrogen cycle and the phosphorus cycle with problems with fresh water availability and ocean acidification waiting in the wings. Today there are something like 25 - 30% fewer wild creatures living on the planet than in 1970. The planet could not support it's 6 billion humans consuming resources at the same rate as US or Australia (to name the worst culprits).

It the true realists that recognize this situation. Proposed actions to mitigate the problems might not always be perfect but business as usual is just crazy.

From: ernst.kattweizel@redcar.ac.uk Sent: 29th October 2009 To: The Knights Carbonic

Gentlemen, the culmination of our great plan approaches fast. What the Master called “the ordering of men’s affairs by a transcendent world state, ordained by God and answerable to no man”, which we now know as Communist World Government, advances towards its climax at Copenhagen. For 185 years since the Master, known to the laity as Joseph Fourier, launched his scheme for world domination, the entire physical science community has been working towards this moment.

The early phases of the plan worked magnificently. First the Master’s initial thesis - that the release of infrared radiation is delayed by the atmosphere - had to be accepted by the scientific establishment. I will not bother you with details of the gold paid, the threats made and the blood spilt to achieve this end. But the result was the elimination of the naysayers and the disgrace or incarceration of the Master’s rivals. Within 35 years the 3rd Warden of the Grand Temple of the Knights Carbonic (our revered prophet John Tyndall) was able to “demonstrate” the Master’s thesis. Our control of physical science was by then so tight that no major objections were sustained.

More resistence was encountered (and swiftly despatched) when we sought to install the 6th Warden (Svante Arrhenius) first as professor of physics at Stockholm University, then as rector. From this position he was able to project the Master’s second grand law - that the infrared radiation trapped in a planet’s atmosphere increases in line with the quantity of carbon dioxide the atmosphere contains. He and his followers (led by the Junior Warden Max Planck) were then able to adapt the entire canon of physical and chemical science to sustain the second law.

Then began the most hazardous task of all: our attempt to control the instrumental record. Securing the consent of the scientific establishment was a simple matter. But thermometers had by then become widely available, and amateur meteorologists were making their own readings. We needed to show a steady rise as industrialisation proceeded, but some of these unfortunates had other ideas. The global co-option of police and coroners required unprecedented resources, but so far we have been able to cover our tracks.

The over-enthusiasm of certain of the Knights Carbonic in 1998 was most regrettable. The high reading in that year has proved impossibly costly to sustain. Those of our enemies who have yet to be silenced maintain that the lower temperatures after that date provide evidence of global cooling, even though we have ensured that eight of the ten warmest years since 1850 have occurred since 2001(10). From now on we will engineer a smoother progression.

Our co-option of the physical world has been just as successful. The thinning of the Arctic ice cap was a masterstroke. The ring of secret nuclear power stations around the Arctic Circle, attached to giant immersion heaters, remains undetected, as do the space-based lasers dissolving the world’s glaciers.

Altering the migratory and reproductive patterns of the world’s wildlife has proved more challenging. Though we have now asserted control over the world’s biologists, there is no accounting for the unauthorised observations of farmers, gardeners, bird-watchers and other troublemakers. We have therefore been forced to drive migrating birds, fish and insects into higher latitudes, and to release several million tonnes of plant pheromones every year to accelerate flowering and fruiting. None of this is cheap, and ever more public money, secretly diverted from national accounts by compliant governments, is required to sustain it.

The co-operation of these governments requires unflagging effort. The capture of George W. Bush, a late convert to the cause of Communist World Government, was made possible only by the threatened release of footage filmed by a knight at Yale, showing the future president engaged in coitus with a Ford Mustang. Most ostensibly-capitalist governments remain apprised of where their real interests lie, though I note with disappointment that we have so far failed to eliminate Vaclav Klaus. Through the offices of compliant states, the Master’s third grand law has been accepted: world government will be established under the guise of controlling manmade emissions of greenhouse gases.

Keeping the scientific community in line remains a challenge. The national academies are becoming ever more querulous and greedy, and require higher pay-offs each year. The inexplicable events of the past month, in which the windows of all the leading scientific institutions were broken and a horse’s head turned up in James Hansen’s bed, appear to have staved off the immediate crisis, but for how much longer can we maintain the consensus?

Knights Carbonic, now that the hour of our triumph is at hand, I urge you all to redouble your efforts. In the name of the Master, go forth and terrify.

Professor Ernst Kattweizel, University of Redcar. 21st Grand Warden of the Temple of the Knights Carbonic.

Tosh.

There are a wide range of opinions on what measures would be effective to mitigate global warming. For example there is heated debate on the necessity and/or desirability of nuclear power. Nobody is labeling nuclear proponents as "deniers".

James Hansen, one of the best known climate scientists in the world, condemns cap and trade and likens it to indulgences granted by the medieval Catholic Church. He advocates "fee and dividend". Nobody is calling him a denier.

It you want to be part of the debate about mitigation measures then please do so - everybody is welcome - but could we dispense with the false accusations of victimization.

And you wonder why people get sick of hearing nonsense like "mystery models with hidden data"? Because it is fundamentally a lie repeated by people like yourself either willfully or through being too lazy to actually look and see what is publicly available. I recommend that you start at the handy page of links provided by the climate scientists who run the RealClimate site. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

On that page you will find links to NCDC raw station data which is used to compile the NCDC and NASA GISS global surface temperature reconstructions. You will also find links to the Global Paleo Climatology Network, maintained by NOAA, containing vasts amounts of proxy data such as tree rings ice cores etc. You will also find links to freely available climate model code. And lots more besides. Try visiting the NASA GISS site where just about everything they do is downloadable - data, papers, models, code - the lot.

This single page of links provides any thinking person who posseses the requisite skills, with sufficient information to begin their own evaluation of climate science. Or you could start by reading some of the published research.

People will stop saying "you are full of it" when you stop constructing straw men and telling porkies.

I do believe this has been going on for a long time now. It's called publishing in peer reviewed journals. Thousands of times.

It seems that the published science is so compelling that every national science academy, scientific society and professional body of international standing that has expressed a public position has asserted the reality of AGW.

If this reasoned published evidence is good enough for the leading bodies of world science, then I'd say you need some very cogent arguments to dispute it. Hand waving doesn't cut it.

You are to brutally honest, full of it.

You want some falsifiable predictions from mainstream climate science. Try these:

1. The global temperature will increase - predicted by Hansen's model from early eighties. There is an observed increase in temperature.

2. Arctic and antarctic to warm faster than rest of the planet - predicted by all models. Observed.

3. Troposphere to warm and stratosphere to cool - predicted by all models. Observed.

4. Increasing signature of CO2 in long wave spectrum form top of atmosphere. Observed by satellite spectrographically.

5. Increasing acidification of the oceans. Observed.

and plenty more where those came from. Please cut the crap about climate science not being falsifiable. Try looking at the evidence, the science and the facts for a change.

It seems some "skeptics" have (finally) got off their arses and made an honest attempt to make their own global temperature reconstruction using the NCDC dataset. Which is a great improvement over the morons who think filling in form letters for vexatious FOI requests has something to do with science.

And what a surprise! They find that their record pretty much agrees with the CRU compiled record. If anything it shows a little more warming.

It is discussed here http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/global-land-temps-cru-style/

Indeed you do need a wake up from your zombie state, for that is the condition of those who endlessly echo zombie arguments about climate science throughout the blogosphere. A zombie argument is one that endlessly presents an illusion of life no matter how many times it has been shown to be just plain wrong.

Let us start with the availability of raw temperature station data from the CRU. Nearly all of it is and has been for several years freely available from the Global Historical Climatology Network maintained by the National Climate Data Center (US Department of Commerce). Here it is: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/ Some station data held by the CRU was not made available publicly because it is the intellectual property of some national meteorological services around the world and subject to non disclosure agreements. Moves are afoot to change that situation. Move along - no conspiracy here.

The NCDC station temperature data set is used by NCDC to produce their global temperature record. It is also used by NASA GISS to produce their temperature record. All three of the temperature records - HadCruT (from CRU), NCDC and NASA are all in close agreement. Furthermore the satellite temperature records produced by UAH and RSS from entirely different data and using entirely different methods are also in agreement with the surface temperature record. All of this stuff is freely available (including code). Do we see a pattern here?

Lest the OP still feel deprived of data, the RealClimate web site (run by real climate scientists) provides a handy page of links to freely available data and code: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

Notably, this page also contains a link to the NOAA Paleoclimate site which make oodles of paleo climate data available including multiple studies and their multiple data sources that broadly support the famous hockey stick.

The reality is that climate science has had excellent public and free access to data (and code) and the situation is improving all the time.

So could we please get on with the science and the enormous tack of implementing solutions rather than dealing with the echoes of zombie arguments that stagger around aimlessly on the Internet.

Talk about jumping to wild conclusions based on next to no evidence, but firmly ensconced in ideological clap trap.

There are innumerable examples of governments "making things". As we are talking about electricity generation I will point out the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme in Australia, built by the Australian government and operated to this day by a wholly government owned corporation. It is the largest engineering project ever undertaken in Australia and frequently cited as an example of civil engineering excellence.

In scope and difficulty, putting up some wind turbines is just not in the same league.

So what is it you were saying about governments?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_Mountains_Scheme#cite_note-ASCE-6

Climate models have had notable successes:

1. Hansen's model from the early 80s predicted about the right amount of surface temperature change they we see today

2. This model successfully predicted the cooling effect of the Pinotubo volcano in the early 90's

3. Climate models all predict the cooling of the stratosphere and the warming of the troposphere agreeing closely with observation.

4. When the UAH satellite record diverged from both the instrumental surface temperature record and the models (much to the delight of the deniosaurs) it transpired that the calculations in the UAH record contained errors and the climate models were right. The UAH record now agrees pretty much with the surface record and the models.

5. The climate models predicted the rapid warming of the poles especially the arctic. They have been proved right with dramatic warming of the arctic.

Finally, climate models are PHYSICAL models - not statistical models. Drawing some silly distinction between climatology and say physics is a nonsense. It is physics, chemistry, geology etc etc. applied to the study of climate. Attempts to designate it as a second class science because certain people don't like it's conclusions are contemptible.

Models and computer models and physical computer models are used all over science and engineering. Heard of finite element analysis? The three body problem ? Just because a model doesn't tell us everything, it doesn't mean it tells us nothing. In fact it may tell us rater a lot with high confidence.