This episode: Extreme weather, Wegman strikes again, conservative science vs liberal science, no science in science class, climategate still nothing to see here, blame Canada, self-debunking deniers tie themselves in knots, renewable energy and a book with John Cook, bad news from the melting arctic, and a bunch of foul-mouthed rapping climate scientists.
I’ve enjoyed your talk so much that I would like to hear the remainder after 24 minutes. If you could find the time to email if possible when you have the rest up on your site. If not it would be understandable.
Jeff Green
Not sure what you mean. Perhaps the download did not complete properly, and the end of the podcast was cut off. Try to re-download it. If it still doesn’t work let me know
Perhaps Jeff is referring to the link from Skeptical Science, which says you editied this episode down from over two hours of material. It’s been an absolute pleasure to listen to over an hour of unadulterated sense and I for one would happily listen to the full two hours if you made it available.
Thanks. Unfortunately there is no easy way for me to make the unedited version available (plus some of what is edited out is edited out because frankly it isn’t very good).
Heraclitus,
You were right.
My latest gripe is where are the rational conservatives on this subject and when are they going to take their party back from the fossil fuel magnates. How can this irrationality be tolerated so long by the calmer part of the conservative party?
I don’t really have a good answer, but I would be shocked if money had nothing to do with it. Politicians are in a constant need of money to financed their re-election campaigns, and fossil fuel companies have a rather large amount of it.
Then there is the fact that generally the solutions to climate change require some government action, and conservatives are generally more weary of government action that liberals.
And finally there is a conflict of time-scales. Politicians tend to think it terms of election cycles that are only a few years long, but climate change isn’t a problem on the time scale of a few years. This makes politicians reluctant to act when the benefits of climate policy will be felt long after the politics leaves office, but the costs will be much more immediate. This is actually the main reason why even politicians who accept climate change still refuse to do much about it.
Well that’s my story and I am sticking to it.
Good show, Dan. I particularly liked the discussions of renewable baseload energy and the true cost of coal. That’s right up my alley :-)
Let’s talk about the infrastructure needed to support distributed sustainable energy generation.
I am just starting to dip my toes into the whole renewable energy stuff. Learning everything I need to know about energy infrastructure is a tall order indeed.
For now suffice to say that a massive amount of energy infrastructure will have to be replaced or retrofitted and there is no way that wont cost a lot of money, and take decades.
All the more reason to start as soon as possible.
Oh yeah no question about it. Targets to get 100% energy production or close to it from renewables are around 2050, and that’s best case if we actually get serious about it and put the effort in. Like you say Dan, all the more reason to get started and get serious about it ASAP. Nobody ever said solving the climate problem will be easy. Far from it.
Really great work, Dan! I especially enjoyed your elucidation of the Wegman shenanigans.