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This graph shows the projected reference scenario, with the world population increasing to 8 billion from today's 6.7 billion, a projected energy consumption growth of 1.6% per year, and two thirds of this energy still coming from fossil fuels. This BAU (business as usual) scenario is considered unsustainable.
NOTE: click on images to enlarge them. Also:
c4s means "click for source" and
c4x "click for additional explanation".
c4s This graph shows the "rich" or developed countries at the top, the poor and developing countries at the bottom. The horizontal axis shows per capita energy consumption in kilowatts (kW). Canada and the U.S. lead with a consumption per capita of 11 kW. This knol has a diagram showing how that 11kW are used. Europe has half of that, and developing countries roughly 1 kW but catching up fast.
In the future, developed countries should decrease their energy use by applying conservation measures, while developing countries are expected to increase theirs. With these changes on both ends of the spectrum, the new world average would be 2kW, a goal slightly less than today's use of 2.3 kW. Such a future, charted by the Swiss ETH institute is called the "2kW" society.
Let's illustrate this more concretely with few examples what watts and kilowatts mean: If you continuously run 10 light bulbs of 100W each, you are using energy at a rate of 1kW, which means 1kwh (kilowatthour) every hour. That also happens to be the average consumption of a U.S. household. The U.S. average energy use per capita is 11 kW . Roughly 10kW of this figure is for nonresidential use, such as transportation and industry, prorated per capita.
Currently, 1kWh costs about $.10 or 8 € cents. That price will go up, even in a BAU scenario, as cheap energy sources get scarcer. With measures to limit emissions, such as the ETS cap & trade tax on emissions mentioned in our last post, the cost of energy will increase even faster. Do we really want to do this? Not everyone thinks so.
Skeptics, Alarmists and Deniers
In every area of scientific research there is controversy. Hypotheses and bold assumptions are made, argued for and against, tested, and eventually accepted or rejected. An example of such a process was triggered by an idea put forth by the Danish scientist Svensmark. He asserted that cosmic rays, rather then increasing concentration of Greenhouse gases influence the Earth's climate and cause Global Warming. That was a skeptical hypothesis. The European laboratory CERN built an experiment to test that hypothesis. That research is still underway, but preliminary results show that the effect of cosmic rays is, at most, very small. The hypothesis was welcome, and tested. That is part of the normal scientific debate.Research concerning climate and climate change, or "global warming," has attracted far more controversy than normal scientific debates, controversy which plays out primarily in the popular press and on the Internet.
This blog has vowed to listen to both sides of any controversy. The data quoted above are from mainstream sources, meaning data collected by government-supported research centers and collated by organizations such as (IEA) or (WMO) . The question is: How should I deal with opinions which strongly contradict those data and conclusions? How much space should I give to the spectrum of opinions, arguments and convictions?
Researching web resources for this post gave me this perspective on this question: In the final section below I describe the history of the Earth's changing atmosphere. As I compiled this, I remembered that levels of oxygen were rising during the early formation of our planet, due to photosynthesis by plants, until the time when animals appeared. Wanting to verify the time when animals appeared on the planet, I entered two search queries into the Google search engine. They differed in only in one word, "origin" vs "creation," of animals. The results surprised me:
Amazing! There are almost as many Internet pages devoted to creationist questions, questions such as: "How did all the animals fit on Noah's Ark?" as pages devoted to mainstream science. Some of those pages look more serious, bringing in thermodynamics, entropy, and mathematical formulas. Their aim is to prove the "Young Earth 'fact'", that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, as the Bible is held to reveal. Their goal is to prove that evolution could not have happened and to disprove the "Old Earth 'hypothesis'".
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The photo shows "Adam and Eve" palling around with dinosaurs, according to the Creation museum built in the Ohio.
I concluded that I cannot give "equal time" to all views. I will mention websites, but not deal with "arguments" repeated over and over again in order to prove some dogma. Science does not have a goal to prove or disprove any "known truth" or hypothesis. Its one essential goal is to find the truth. It is a very concrete search filled with constant questioning and rigorous testing. Science is not divorced from a sense of awe and wonder at Creation. It just doesn't force its conclusions into a mold formed by an interpretation of the Bible.The area of the climate research is not much different than the field of evolution. The controversy surrounding these two areas of science actually shares some of the constituency: people who suspect or reject mainstream science on ideological grounds, and who oppose government actions using the same rationale.
The relationship of scientific research to government, and of ideology to public policy, was well-illustrated in the recent drama of the U.S. presidential elections. On one side was Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin who claimed that dinosaurs and people coexisted and also supported the Bush administration's "war on science" in the areas of environment and climate. Mainstream science tended to align itself with the opposing party. This may have contributed, in small part, to Mr. Obama's victory.
The End of the Flat Earth Society?
The U.S government has now changed in ways Americans could not have imagined during the past eight years. The scientific community has hailed Obama's appointments to science-related posts, as have a good many ordinary citizens. A Nobel laureate physicist will now head the Department of Energy, for example.
"After the anti-science Bush administration, this is like going to a Mensa meeting after eight years of being trapped in the Flat Earth Society." was
one liberal commentator's remark about Obama's science appointments.
Said a typical physicist:
"Some good news: grownups will soon be running U.S. science policy."
On the other hand, the reaction of another physicist, known for his strong right-wing convictions, was: Harebrained theorist John Holdren will become Obama's science adviser. Dr Horden's briefing which brought about that reaction is highly recommended viewing for serious consideration. It is 61 overhead transparencies which review what he calls "climate disruption."
Stepping into Bush's shoes
With U.S. President Bush's exit, the dubious honor of having an anti-science president now passes to the European Union when Czech president Klaus assumes the rotating EU presidency in January. He was recently heard exhorting scientists to abandon the "climate change religion" and "return to reason."Obama intends to set the U.S. on a course towards resuming a science leadership position in the world, not least in the areas of the environment and climate change. Controversy continues, of course, but in next 8 years we should be able to compare and evaluate the results of Bush's policies and policies of Obama's team.
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