Mama Fresco

Canada is so behind.  We need to catch up.  Kinder Morgan pipeline is supposed to help save our economy!  How about wind and solar energy saving our economy?  With all our hydro power, how much of it is being sold to the US and are we making any money on it?

So am I.  But I would have thought China would have been brighter than it is.   

Great map.    Thanks.

Third world countries are not the countries causing most of the emissions.  Developed countries are by far the biggest contributors so must be the ones to create the solutions and find green ways of living and doing business.  Then the underdeveloped countries will adopt our green technologies and not our carbon based technologies.  Actually it is already happening on a small scale, when in very poor areas some solar panels are used to provide small amounts of electricity  eg. enough to light a lamp so children can study in the evening.

The fact that you are shooting the messengers rather than reviewing the studies by Pew and Yale would indicate the bias you apparently oppose.  Weren't you just saying how impressive your University education was?  This is Yale, man.

Just going to leave this here:
https://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/the_ugly_delusions_of_the_educated_conservative/
 

Even if you put the science aside, all you need to do is use your eyes at how crappy some things are getting.  Our rivers look like brown sludge.  There's smog that pollutes the air in larger cities...including the entire country of China.  There's a giant plastic island forming in the Pacific ocean.  There are factories that blow big plumes of black smoke from their smoke stacks that can't really be good to breath in.
It shouldn't take much for us to say..."hey, maybe we should change the way we do things".  There are enough bad things out there that we can see with our eyes without even looking at climate change or scientific evidence.

One of the biggest cost to Tesla right now is maintenance of these cars.  
There are not enough garages to service them.  If you are outside the range of a Tesla service centre, they will drive a replacement car to you, take yours away on a truck, then return it once it is fixed.  For general maintenance, they have mobile trucks that can do basic maintenance and repairs.  A lot of the cost of the vehicles today is to factor in those costs.
As Tesla grows, and their presence grows, that cost becomes less.
There are recycling programs in place today to deal with their batteries.   Other issues with Tesla cars are they need to be really light weight, so the metals they use can be more expensive then a regular car.
The charging of batteries can shift / mask environment concerns as well.  For many areas in the states, you are shifting powering cars by gasoline to coal (since coal generated electricity would recharge the cars battery).  Still not great for the environment.
I've read some studies that say the overall impact if you include manufacturing of the battery of these cars to normal cars aren't much better if they are being powered by coal.  (coal being more efficient for the environment then gas, but the manufacturing process adds to that).   But for wind and hydro electricity, there is a net benefit.
I have no problem with the government subsidizing these types of things in the beginning , but there has to come a time when they've advanced the technology enough they can be self sufficient. 

Well the Climate Change people make it seem like this is going to happen imminently.  What's the "scientific consensus" on when we can expect mass deaths from rising oceans and mass refugees from areas where it becomes too hot to survive?  And more importantly, will this 1.5 degree increase that is so horrific going to make us nice and comfy all year long in Manitoba?

I thought I'd wade in here with a few thoughts, just to discuss a few points people have made (WARNING: very long post). First off, I have a doctorate degree in Earth Sciences, have worked as an active researcher for a number of years, and have published a number of papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. I'm NOT a climate scientist, so I don't have any credentials/expertise in that field. What I do have is an extensive background in Earth Science and I know how the scientific process works from a research perspective. I also have friends/colleagues who are climate scientists and actively involved in leading research in the field. If you really want to understand the topic of climate change you need to go to the original source which is peer-reviewed scientific publications - not blogs, magazine articles, CNN, etc. The problem is that most people don't have access to the publications, and they're highly technical and require an appropriate background to really understand them.
 
As far as the debate goes there are two very important things where the debate is pretty much over among people with the credentials necessary to really understand the topic. First, since the beginning of the industrial revolution humans have pumped unprecedented amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and CO2 is very efficient at trapping heat. No debate there. Second, there is almost no debate about whether Earth's climate is getting warmer. The real debate is over what the connection is between human produced CO2 and warming, and whether there are other significant natural factors that also come in to play. Given the first two points, there really is no debate that humans have had a significant effect on global warming. The question is what the contribution is of natural causes, what steps (if any) can be taken to mitigate the effects, and what the cost-benefit is (i.e. is it worth taking any steps).
 
One topic that has been brought up in this thread is that the Earth naturally goes through variations in climate. True. In fact, the Earth's average temperature throughout its geologic history has actually been several degrees warmer than it currently is, and this is not even including the first few hundred million years when Earth was essentially a ball of molten rock. A well known example is the 135 million years when dinosaurs ruled the Earth - the average temperature was at about 5 degrees warmer. In fact, we are currently in a cool period in Earth's history with alternating cycles of ice ages and warmer periods (our current state). Why the ice ages first started is still unclear - one theory is that the rapid rise of the Himalaya's disruputed global climate patterns and changed the climate. That doesn't change the fact that human society is optimised for our current climate state, and any significant changes in climate would have significant effects on human society. Human society would likely adapt, but the time-scale to adapt will be on the order of decades, not centuries.
 
It's been mentioned in this thread that increasing output from the Sun is the cause for warming. Variations in output from the Sun of even a few percent can have a significant impact; however, actually measuring the variations accurately is surprisingly difficult. It's only been possible to get accurate measurements since we've been able to launch satellites which has only been in the last few decades. It's not really possible to establish any type of long-term pattern in solar output in that amount of time. So people who state that increasing solar output is the cause of warming, and basically state it as fact, really have little data to base it on.
 
Another topic that has been mentioned is how climate scientists flip-flop - how 40 years ago we were told we were entering an ice age and now it's the opposite. During the mid-20th century there was a global cooling - I certainly remember some pretty brutal Winnipeg winters in the 70's, and those were by Winnipeg standards. However, the idea that we were entering an ice age was pretty much a media creation - there are no scientific publications where any climate scientist claimed that. As I mentioned above, we are in a current warm period between ice ages, and it's highly likely that in a few thousand years the Earth will enter another ice age. But it's not imminent and no climate researcher ever said it was.
 
Someone in this tread said that the people mostly concerned with climate change are left-wing liberals. The many scientists I know run the full range of left-wing liberal to right-wing conservative (including climate scientists), so to catagorise everyone concerned with climate change as left-wing liberal is wrong. Just published in the Washington Post is an article about ExxonMobil executives who believe that climate change is real and a serious problem. I'm going to go on a limb and say that most of those executives are probably right-wing conservatives. And this is a multi-billion dollar company whose business relies on pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/even-exxonmobil-says-climate-change-is-real-so-why-wont-the-gop/2015/12/06/913e4b12-9aa6-11e5-b499-76cbec161973_story.html?utm_source=hootsuite
 
On a positive note, the first helium-plasma fusion device has commenced operation in Germany. This could be a crucial step towards finally achieving the holy grail of nuclear fusion, which has always been 50 years away from being 50 years away. The next step is to do it with hydrogen-plasma. A controlled hydrogen nuclear fusion reactor would essentially solve all of Earth's energy and emission problems.

You've said this several times, KBF -- that climate change alarmism is lucrative and will continue so long as people can get paid to study it. And I don't think this is unreasonable. People will do things to get paid, and people get invested in the things they get paid for.
However, this argument has never been convincing to me because action on climate change will cause significant disruption to moneyed interests. If you say that climate change science is fueled by greed and avarice, surely you must also acknowledge that opposition to climate change action is motivated by greed and avarice as well, and not by ivory-pure devotion to the preponderance of scientific evidence.

Absolutely. The free market is pretty wonderful at making new stuff for us. For instance, the free market is kicking ass when it comes to making better and better computer hardware. It's a great time to be a software guy like me. The automotive industry is awesome too. Cars in the 2010s are insanely better than cars built just fifteen years ago. We have practical hybrid vehicles and plug-in cars. We have Teslas.
However, the free market can also be addicted to the status quo, to rent-seeking, to profiteering. Look at how fat and happy the telecommunications industry is. Look at how the quality of Internet access in the West lags behind the rest of the world. Look at how the pharma industry invests in the next Viagra instead of a cure for diabetes.
There's a role for governments to invest and incentivize for the public good. The American government subsidizes things like corn and oil to an absurd degree, and while it's infuriating to see companies like Exxon and BP and Monsanto sucking at the public teat, it also makes some sense from a strategic standpoint. What nation can survive without a stable food and energy supply -- especially one as big and spread-out as the USA?
In telecommunications, we see communities across the USA starting to build their own publicly owned broadband networks, because the free market just isn't cutting it. We have publicly-funded pharma research (which is then snapped up and patented by pharma companies, but that's another issue). We have investments with no obvious immediate return -- any crewed space travel falls under this category.
The free market is cool, but it needs to be nudged sometimes and, occasionally, bypassed completely.

He might like the Vikings tv show though.

There are two reasons on why we may never see other intelligent life:
1.       The huge distances between solar systems and galaxies.  We may never discover a technology similar to “warp” or “light speed” that allows us to travel the distances required to go to another planet, or to create a telescope powerful enough to see that level of detail.  At this point in our development, we haven’t even sent an unmanned probe to go investigate another solar system.

Put that in perspective, Voyager 2, which was launched in 1977 is the furthest man made object away from the Earth (at least according to Wikipedia).   It is .002 light years away from the sun.  The next closest star is 4.2 light years away.
 
2.       Humans have only been around for a very very very short time on this planet.  It is entirely possible that we (and species like us) go extinct in such a short time relative to the universe that the chances of coming across a planet while a species like us is alive is very low.