“It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.” --James Hansen

Clasificación de países según el porcentaje de ciudadanos entre los 25 y 34 que no han acabado la secundaria.

Politicians in Paris might notice their host country ranks 20th in per capita income but 50th in greenhouse emissions. You know why: France gets 75% of its electricity from nuclear. France has waded forward even while, for reasons having to do with horror of nuclear war and atmospheric testing, the world has surrendered since the 1950s to an unfounded dogma that radiation exposure is always dangerous in direct proportion to dose.

This is roughly the equivalent of saying a bullet fired at one foot per second has 1/900th the chance of killing you as a bullet fired at 900 f.p.s. (the actual muzzle velocity of a .45 automatic). Known as the linear no-threshold model (LNT), it underlies predictions of thousands of cancer deaths from Chernobyl or Fukushima that have consistently failed to be borne out.

This column assesses the evidence and finds that whereas in the 1990s highly educated women had fewer children than women with a lower education in the US, it is no longer true today.

Security Engineering — The Book. Free online

When the Earth’s slow cyclic tilting and wobbling along its eccentric orbital path once again leads to a major cooling period some 50,000 years from now, enough of our heat-trapping carbon emissions will still remain in the atmosphere to warm the planet just enough to weaken that chill. In other words, our impacts on global climate are so profound that we will have canceled the next ice age.

“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

[Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962]”

― John F. Kennedy

The realistic view: There is a very long way to go before renewables take over, and very little time

Many people assume that once wind and solar become cheaper than coal, oil or gas, the whole world will rapidly switch to them. But in a free market, wind and solar energy could get too cheap to be profitable, because too much electricity will be produced whenever the sun shines or the wind blows. That means companies would stop building new wind or solar farms unless there were cost effective ways of storing the energy from them.

And if demand for fossil fuels starts to fall, they may get cheaper as producers try to sell as much as they can while they are still able to. This may already be happening with coal, and some countries are taking advantage by burning more.