Excuse me for a short answer.

1) solar cannot produce more than it electrically takes to manufacture, transport (physically in distance from the manufacturing site), the install (including power transmission) and the costs of items used to maintain it.

2) wind power has the same argument.

3) I never ignored thermodynamics, in fact I would argue this plays a part in keeping high energy molecules such as heated water in place up there. It plays well with dew point science

4) I would never have an issue with science that was open and admitted strong error. Http:www.surfacestations.org will

show US gathered weather information used by the NOAA NASA and all other promoters of global warming is based off of severely tainted evidence. One who actually studies it is inclined two believe we are entering at best a cooling period and have been.

5) Politicians was mentioned here. Or political agendas. Either way there is ample proof of "tree hugger" and" anti-meat" activists faking evidence on a number of issues to fit their adgenda

This is a powerful political bloc of severe extremists.

6) My mind is not closed either. I study the issue extensively but I can undoubtably conclude the wrong data, the outright lies, and the utter failures of all models on the alarmist side, versus the working models (Farmers Almanac) the open source science and lack of a political agenda of the 'doubers' is clear proof for me.

7) Zara you write so much more eloquently than I do! I may have to hire you as a speech writerwriter!

K tho I did a post on that last year

Nope

http://michellemalkin.com is pretty much liked cracked.com right?

Before there was fossil fuels, there was the beginning of life on earth. Since that time the atmosphere has slowly changed. The percentages of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide etc do change over millions of years. Life on Earth as we know it now may have found the atmosphere a struggle (even a killer) 100 million years ago. This is why creatures such as crocodiles that have barely changed in 10+ million years are an evolutionary freak.

As for this research by CERN. It is more a case of proving theory we already factored upon. It doesn't state this is the ONLY factor for cloud formations. Or even that clouds are the ONLY factor for varying global air temperatures - just that clouds are important.

So we now know the sun is very important in forming clouds. We also know the sun is very important in affecting the Earth's air temperature. However, we also still know there's other factors (tectonic, volcanic, lunar, celestial events/bodies, natural cycles in ocean currents, etc) that do not involve Man. Then we also know Man-made activities are also a factor and that includes the burning of fossil fuels.

Okay, your turn, Pixies!

> Paragraph 2-7:
I covered all of that by saying "no matter how much you vary the boundaries". All you did was "vary the boundaries". Yes there is an instance in history where a global depression led to a world war, but that does not mean it will happen again .. pretty poor science for you to make that jump. But if it does happen, surely it will still be a better option than having a world war with the weather in chaos and the environment in tatters . A lot of things could spiral us into a nuclear war and winter, and civilisation as we know it could be snuffed out in a couple of hours .. but that is the threat we face everyday. Surely controlling our depression over a few decades, with set milestones and goals is better?

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1: If either of us are using "poor science," I'd say it's the one saying "screw it, I'm not going to try to analyze the science and figure out if it's true or not."  Science is about determining truth value to our understaning of the world.  I've explained it a few times (so far without a retort), but your stance here is unequivocally as far from scientific as humanly possible.

2: We don't have an observed example of global warming... and you aren't engaging in the scientific debate behind global warming, which means as far as we know from the words you have given here, global warming is speculation at worst, or an unproven theory at best (at least from what you've stated here).

3: At the point where you concede that the methodology behind the cost-benefit analysis creates incentives for trumping up threats, you concede that people in favor of global warming are motivated to magnify the effects in order to encourage people to stop evaluating truth value.  That means the truth value of your own claims regarding what happens if global warming is true are in themselves suspect, especially since you won't engage the scientific-level debate and since we don't have an empirical example of global warming.

4: What we do have, though, is an example of at least one instance in which a global depression led to war.  Now, we don't have a counterexample with regards to the depression example case, which means the scenario isn't proven, but it's also not yet disproven, mainly because of repeatability issues.

However, we can dissect the different portions of my depression -> war story to determine their truth value.  I have two specific scenarios in the depression->war story:
A: Depressions encourage nations to become more reliant on otherwise expensive natural resources to obtain wealth... essentially, a resource grab.
B: Depressions encourage nations to increase trade barriers with one another.  Those increased trade barriers between nations both further perpetuates the depression and encourages xenophobia among nations, while at the same time increasing domestic scarcity for foreign resources... encouraging multiple levels of war which are inflamed by the lack of interdependence among states.

Let's go through each of these.
A: Throughout Africa, warlord conflicts coninually focus on obtaining and securing control of the oil, diamonds, or other resources, completely ignoring the possibility of domestic growth.  Why?  Because when the capital and labor resources of a nation are in a state of recession, the only source of wealth in a nation is natural resources.  Thus, these nations are forced to rely on natural resources to obtain wealth, at the expense of labor and capital.  This is also a good representation of the mercantilist-era European imperialism era, actually.
B: What about my trade story?  Well, the Great Depression was marked by the US, Britain, Germany, and other European countries establishing trade barriers against on another.  We've also seen a resurgence in trade barriers following the 2008 recession as well (It's really easy to blame a recession on foreign companies taking jobs, and establish barriers to keep jobs at home).

We also know that nation-states which trade with one another are much less likely to declare war on one another.  There's a few examples of this.  In Europe, in which nations were run by mercantilist economic theory, leaders generally believed that net exports were a sign of strength and weakness in a state, encouraging trade only when your nation was the exporter (but since importing was bad, the other country would avoid the trade, if at all possible).  In this period, we saw lots of great power wars... Just in the 1700's, we had the War of Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, and the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars... and this is just a few wars involving the Western European nations.  In addition, this is supported by the fact that, in the past 50 years, there's a few wars we haven't seen happen (the US hasn't fought anyone in Western Europe in a long time... why haven't we invaded Canada or Mexico).

Those two pieces combined with enough empirical examples proves my scenario.

5: If I win the argument that economic decline means nations will lose respect for environmental policy, then it means the world of the recession is also a world of reduced overall environmental policy (including global warming policy), resulting in environmental destruction (including global warming).  You don't get to weigh the claims that global warming is more important than economic collapse when part of the result of an economic collapse is global warming.  That being said, the tiebreaker is the question of what comes first: a depression or global warming?  Economic problems would occur before global warming would because otherwise, we would be too late to prevent global warming anyway, which means anti-global warming legislation would be useless anyway.

> Paragraph 8: In 20 years those developing countries will be where we are today, and we will still look on them as "poorly lowly developing countries". With our burgeoning intelligence we've been able to produce food by exploiting our environment for an ever increasing population. Instead of controlling our environment for the benefit of our welfare maybe we should control the population for the longevity of the our environment and hence what we have developed so far.
-------------------------------------

1: When I use the words "developed" and "developing," I use them based on how economists use the terms: developed nations are ones with the capacity for a widespread industrial base, whereas developing nations lack that base.  Your semantic game doesn't avoid the fact that nations relying on agriculture and mining actually damage the environment more through such tactics as strip mining, monocropping, slash-and-burn farming, and cutting environmental regulations to attract factories for investment.  This is a non-starter argument.

2: Have you noticed where the most population growth is in the world?  Hint: It's not anywhere in the developed world.  In fact, developing nations have completely stagnant population levels (with growth generally only occurring as a result of immigration, not natural population growth).  The major population growth is occurring in the developing world.  So if we want to "control the population for the longevity of the environment," the best way to do so (assuming you're not proposing another Holocaust) is to encourage development so that normal household trends will discourage population growth.

3: Oh, and how does trade fit into the mix?  For example, let's assume the US couldn't import oil anymore.  Who thinks the Democrats would still be defending the protection of the Artic National Wildlife Refuge when there is no longer oil?  Long story short, a lack of trade allows nations to be more selective in their harvesting of resources, allowing important environmental zones such as the Artic National Wildlife Refuge to actually exist, simply because we don't need it.

> Paragraph 10: The simple fact is, in a very brief time-frame our population has exploded and we've pumped a whole load of stuff into the air around us, devastated the flora (the environments respiratory system), and wiped out the biodiversity (98% of the land-animal mass is now domesticated, 50 years ago it was the other way around). If you shrunk our planet to the size of a snooker ball, our atmosphere would be thinner than the varnish on it. It is only recently that we have come to realise these issues and how small our environment really is. We're now arguing about whether or not we've affected the environment significantly. Man has a tremendous talent for deceiving himself. We are not yet advanced enough to draw a scientific conclusion on the matter, but we have a huge amount of evidence point both ways. Are we teetering on the balance, or are just too dumb to realise we're screwed already? The Earth will be fine whatever happens.
-----------------------------------

First of all, we wouldn't even know about our effects upon the environment without the technology in question.  It took technology to understand what technology was doing to the ozone layer.  It also takes technology to allow the economic growth which allows states to establish regulations upon the environment.  We can fix environmental issues with less economic problems, but we can't act rashly, and can't act impulsively.

Second, man is also a creature that's inherently built to generally fear the unknown, and respond in kind.  It's an impulse necessary from prehistoric eras, important in ensuring that people don't do stupid things.  But as a species, we've evolved.  Not physically, but socially.  Our greatest tool, the sciences, allows us to understand how the world functions, and what to do about it.  When used to its best effect, we can understand much more than that for which we even give ourselves credit.  That being said, we're still men.  When we see a veil of darkness, we still instinctively fear the idea of stepping into the darkness, unknowing of what hides in the darkness.  The difference is that now we have science, the tool which gives man the light to peer into the darkness and see what lies there.  This is what I've been trying to encourage, with this particular darkness.  Your thesis, in contrast, would have us assume the worst in the darkness, and steer away from it at all costs.  This principle prevents even the most basic forms of understanding both amongst people and of the world around us.

Third, and most important, there's my methodology claim.  You're still missing the crux of this argument.  If your logic is accepted (evaluate the risks first), we no longer value truth-seeking.  Politics would instead just be a game of individuals pumping up the claims of their arguments, without supporting evidence for the premise, for the sake of obtaining favorable political results.  The result is utterly random legislation on all levels, rooted more in people's oratory skills than any sort of reality basis.  THAT is my #1 biggest problem with your whole giant argument.  Even if this risk assessment is benign with regards to global warming, it's a terrible terrible terrible precedent!

> Paragraph 12: When the heck did I say we should only jump straight onto "emssion caps"??
--------------------------------------

1: I never said you said we should only jump straight onto emissions caps.  I said you were in support of those (you may be in favor of emissions caps and funding alternative energies, at which point I'd say alt. energy is fine, emissions caps bad).

2: You've been playing a dodgy game in expressing what you actually support, despite me specifically trying to get you to specify a policy you like and a policy you didn't like... which means if I made a wrong conclusion, it's 100% your fault.

3: "If we do something and it turns out that the Earth just happens to be more of a sustaining regulatory systems than we imagined, then relative to the potential catastrophic loss, we spent some pocket change and developed a few useful technologies. Oh dear."

Circumstantial piece of evidence #1: Whatever you support will have some sort of expenditure to it.

4: Circumstantial piece of evidence #2:

My post:

"1: Depending on what sort of climate change solutions we're talking about, your risk analysis may not be entirely accurate.  Now, if the only policies you advocate are, for example, alternative energies, there aren't many people who would have a problem with it because the technologies have alternate uses.  I'm pretty sure most of us, regardless of political ideology or stance on global warming, would have no problem with alternative energy because it has external benefits.

However, there's a separate class of proposed solutions which I, and others would claim are uniquely dangerous."

This was followed by my long statement which only argued that emissions caps were economically terrible ideas.

Now, you could have very easily said "I don't like emissions caps either," and saved us both a few hours.  But what did you choose to do?

"All you can do in this sort of situation is take a risk assessment. We can try and make an informed guess with those we think are most qualified to do so. But let

p.s. Flint

"Your side said AGW no matter what.

My side says it is all within natural variation, and since it is within the scope of natural variation Earth's atmosphere and as well man can survive and thrive."

^^ I think you should get away from the idea of "sides". There is evidence and there are conclusions, when you so rigidly "take a side" it becomes a lot harder to objectively review the evidence to come to a logical conclusion.

> Einstein wrote:

> Excuse me for a short answer.

1) solar cannot produce more than it electrically takes to manufacture, transport (physically in distance from the manufacturing site), the install (including power transmission) and the costs of items used to maintain it.

with all these variable its hard to imagine all of them are actual factors in the price, transportation probably maes little to no impact on the price, installation is a question of size, quality and labor, i could simply build and install one myself. production seems to be the only actual factor here and i doubt that a panel that costs roughly $150 cannot produce that worth in energy given its expected life.

You've got your sums wrong by mixing up units.

watts/kilowatts are a unit of power (i.e. energy per unit time) so the statement "a large cell can get about 1.5kW per year" is a bit meaningless, you've quoted a second derivative of energy with respect to time, which you've then multiplied by time (20 years), which is just wrong.

I haven't paid any attention to your transportation calculation so I don't know if that is right or not.

The example quoted in the link you gave is better (although I have no idea how valid his assumptions are)

Assumptions:

19% efficiency
Average insolation for London over the year 109Wm^-2
30m^2 panel (no idea how this compares to average rooftop coverage)
He is also assuming a flat panel which isn't going to be true on a rooftop. In addition a south facing roof will get more sun than any other direction and angle of incidence will change over the day and over the year.

He calculates:
Power = 0.19*109*30 = 621 W averaged over the year.

There are 24*365.25 = 8766 hours in a year.
So Energy generated in one year = 621*8766 = 5444 kWh
Over a 20 year lifespan (assuming no change in efficiency, which is unlikely)
20*5444 = 108873 kWh

Which is really quite different from your numbers

I had forgotten about this thread.  Being busy with, well, you know... physics research and all Flint.  

Firstly, I just found this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15373071.  This is what made me remember this thread.  Happy reading!

About the cost of generating and transporting the panels.  It is true that they may cost a lot of energy in the first instance, but the energy it generates from that point onwards is essentially free.  I do not know exactly what the payback time is, but I would be surprised if it is more than 10 years.  If you reckon the average panel will last for 20 years, then for 10 years you do get free energy. 

Additional: As I was reading back this post, I decided to read that link you posted.  In the comments section, you will find this link from the blogs author: http://lightbucket.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/energy-payback-ratios-for-electricity-generation/.  The payback ratio for a PV cell (probably silicon) is 6.  Any number greater than unity is good, but the larger the number the better.  Coal is double PV, gas is terrible.  Wind turbines are *much* better than PV in this regard but the overall winner **by a looong way** is ..... drum roll... hydroelectric.  So you're point here is, unfortunately, blown totally out of the water.  On a blog you quoted.  *facepalm*

"This shows in England a large cell can get about 1.5 kilowatts per a year. Yes I do study this sort of stuff as a hobby."

If you are also big into reading about the UK, you would also have perhaps found a guy called Robert Llewellyn.  He's an actor and TV presenter best known for being "Kryten" in the sitcom Red Dwarf and for presenting "Scrapheap Challenge".  He's a big advocate of PV and decided that he would personally test out electric cars and PV cells on his house to see just how effective they are.  You can find some of the results of his little experiment on Twitter, his blog and YouTube.  To give you some idea, his current record is 23.8 kWh of electrical energy generated by PV in a single day and in a little over two months generated over 700 kWh of electricity.  This is not insignificant.  If you then consider that he uses the PV cells to power his fully electric Nissan Leaf, 700 kWh is enough to travel close to 3000 km.  That would be enough to travel from Portland, OR to New York City, with plenty of miles to spare.   

Now, for the record, I want to say again that I don't believe PV is the be all and end all.  It isn't ideal for all locations and all situations.  But it can certainly play a big role in powering the homes and businesses of the future as part of a thoroughly considered and well rounded energy policy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/20/global-warming-study-climate-sceptics

Here we go again

AGWers:  We measured climate in some places, and then we guess it applies to places we don't measure, and the earth is getting hotter than ever!

Humans:  You can't really apply a measurement to a place and time you didn't measure.

AGWers:  STFU can we get these people fired? Oh crap they stole our email

Humans:  See if you don't measure it then you don't know what the temperature was in that place, and since "global warming" is just a set of local measurements, you have no business saying the areas you did check count for places you didn't.

AGWers:  Well we applied the measurements to the places we didn't check, and it comes back THE SAME TEMPERATURES ALL OVER. 2x must equal 4!

Humans*: What part of "you don't know so you can't guess in Science" don't you get?

AGWers:  OK assmunch we checked a BILLION readings, and then we applied them to the blank spots, and we CONFIRM it's the same temperature all over!  3 Across is "Qqqqqq"

Humans:  Sorry I'll stick with basic logic and the scientific method

AGWers:  I get paid to guess about climate! You get paid by oil companies to save the first world economy! You're a whore!  I asked Fred and Mitt who I met in a bar at a conference, and they guess what they don't measure too, so, it's consensus!   I file my taxes BEFORE I get my income reports so I get my refund in time for Christmas

Humans:  remind me what the empirical test of your theory is again

AGWers: There isn't one! That's being lawyerly instead of scientificy! 

* i can think of insulting names too