My view is that we should accept the IPCC findings as correct- they do seem to be our best source of information. (It's very disturbing that we have eliminated US funding for the IPCC in our present budget.)
My subjective gut feeling (very subject to change) is that the one degree change we have seen so far isn't going to do much- but a 3 or 4 degree change in the next 50 years or so is reason for concern, but not for alarum.
We should proceed in a thoughtful and objective way, freely facing up to the good points and bad points of the various remedies. Some solutions may well make things worse. We can fill the west with windmills chopping up raptors, but windmills might not really cut significantly into our use of fossil fuels. The energy loss in transmitting electricity long distances is huge. Power plants can’t always use the extra power from sources which are sporadic.
We are going to be generating CO2 for some time, but hopefully not for ever.
We should be monitoring the tundra very carefully, a sudden increase in methane from this source could really mess things up.
It’s ironic that most of the proposed solutions have a much bigger foot print than the nuclear and fossil fuel plants we are presently using.
I’m not thrilled with thousands of acres of windmills or solar panels.
I’ll be struggling through Jefferson Tester’s Sustainable Energy-Choosing Among Options. This 800 plus page work is a text book used in a graduate level MIT course on these issues. I consider Dr. Tester a much more objective student of these issues than Lester Brown and his ilk. .
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