Salon has an article today, Calculating the global warming catastrophe, that I recommend everyone read. This is the most important subject. It is vastly more important than our election, except that our election offers a way to start doing something about the problem. We only have a few years to turn things around. (To see it I had to watch an ad for a car that doesn’t get good fuel economy…)
HOW serious is the problem? The article quotes one scientist who says it is already too late and makes a dramatic worst-case prediction,
Human beings, a hardy species, will not perish entirely, he says; in interviews during his book tour, Lovelock has predicted that about 200 million people, or about one thirtieth of the current world population, will survive if competent leaders make a new home for us near the present-day Arctic. There may also be other survivable spots, like the British Isles, though he notes that rising sea levels will render them more an archipelago. In any event, he predicts that “teeming billions” will perish.
Others, however, say that we are heading that way, BUT we still have 10 years to turn it around.
The article says – along with many scientists – that the only way to really address the problem is to start replacing our power plants with nuclear power plants right now.
It’s to the question of solutions to mitigate the effects of global warming that Lovelock eventually turns, which is odd since in other places he insists that it’s too late to do much. His prescriptions are strongly worded and provocative — he thinks that renewable energy and energy conservation will come too slowly to ward off damage, and that an enormous program of building nuclear reactors is our best, indeed our only, real option.
I believe the problem of where to put nuclear waste pales in comparison to what we face – and what we are doing now is just dumping the waste (CO2) from burning fossil fuel into the air.