SkepticLance

The thing I find uplifting about this development is that it is a permanent fix. Once the last guinea worm and guinea worm egg is gone, this ailment will never, ever afflict anyone ever again. We have already seen this with smallpox. Not quite a permanent fix, since there are stocks of smallpox virus held by US and Russian labs. If they can be induced to destroy them, humankind will be utterly and totally free of smallpox for ever. Polio is another that is declining, and may become extinct. It was on the verge of extinction, when a few idiot Muslims in Nigeria told the locals that the polio vaccinations were Americans trying to spread AIDS. Doh! However, that setback, in spite of causing unnecessary and untold misery to thousands of new victims, is on the way to being overcome. Polio can be rendered extinct also. Another is leprosy. Once the last leper is cured, that is it - for ever. Any illness that afflicts only humans can be rendered extinct, and we should be putting every effort into doing so. There may even be some ills that are carried by certain animals that can be eliminated totally, with vaccinations of the carrier animals also. I see this as a wonderful legacy to leave to posterity.

iNow Until you apologise for your reprehensible action is delivering gratuitous insults and ad hom attacks, you have forfeited your right to be taken seriously. Perhaps someone who can debate in a more civilised fashion may choose to respond, but I have no interest in debating with iNow.

From a newspaper article this morning, I see an ex US President doing something wonderful. Jimmy Carter has spearheaded a campaign to counter a truly dreadful affliction - Guinea worm in Africa. This is described in : http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/international/africa/26worm.html The eggs of this worm are picked up by drinking contaminated water. The worm grows inside the body, to sometimes almost a metre long, at which stage it 'eats' its way out to spill its eggs. The pain is apparently excruciating, and there is no cure. However, by changing the quality of drinking water, the entire life cycle can be stopped in its tracks. Jimmy Carter managed to raise a little over US$ 200 million, and his team has wiped out this beast, village by village, across its range, by stopping the transfer of eggs to human host. Where once over 3 million people suffered, it is now down to about 10,000 and looks like it will be the first disease after smallpox to go totally extinct. What a great example! Instead of spending 2 trillion dollars killing over a million people in Iraq, Carter used his good offices to save 3 million and stop an entire disease in its tracks.

It is really very easy to misread another person's statement, if you do not study it closely. A series of such misreadings have been shown on the last two posts. First : James Hansen. I have NOT said that he was writing in peer reviewed journals. Even Hansen is not stupid enough to write something as utterly nonsensical as his 5 metre sea level rise in a journal where his peers can shoot it down in flames. He expressed it as an opinion, which is all it is. But he expressed it very strongly. I first came across this in a paper edition of New Scientist, in a full length article. However, I cannot post that via the internet, so I have found and posted the condensed e.version. Anyway, the whole point of me mentioning this was simply to back up my earlier statement showing the absolutely normal way people go from a rational opinion based on data, to an irrational opinion based on exaggeration, via repeated discussions with others who share their opinions. Al Qaeda is a perfect example. A few Muslims get together and express their view that America is a threat to their faith. After repeated such meetings and discussions, their vague fears balloon into full blown paranoia, and the end result is 9/11. This is a normal and natural human tendency and is probably a social mechanism for binding tribal groups. Sadly, in today's world, it can result in weird exaggerated ideas. Global warming extremism is just one example. Since so many people have over-reacted to my example of this psychological phenomenon, let's just put it behind us? Edtharan You have misread and misunderstood my statements about warming and linearity. I said the last 30 years saw unprecedented warming, which it did. But over that 30 year period, ignoring minor fluctuations, that warming approached linear. The two statements do not contradict each other. You said : "Hang on! In the sentence right before this (see above) you said that there is an inverse relationship with CO2. Again you keep contradicting your self. In one sentence you sate that if CO2 increases we will get a cooling, but then in the very next sentence you say that we will get a warming. " Perhaps my wording was clumsy here. The relationship between CO2 and warming is not mathematically inverse. I used the word 'inverse' since I could not think of a better. There is a special relationship between CO2 and warming in that doubling CO2 will increase warming, but to a degree less than double. To get substantial increased warming will require an increase in CO2 that is more than substantial. I do not have the exact equation in front of me, but to illustrate the point, it is as if you need triple the CO2 to get double the warming. I learned of this relationship first in Dr. Patrick Michael's book 'Meltdown' which is about global warming. However, I have seen it mentioned in other sources since. It is a fairly basic relationship in the global climate change debate. You also said "That means that in just 50 years we will have experienced the same warming that took around 250 years before." Actually, the past 30 years saw warming and the 20 years before saw cooling. 1800 AD to 1940 AD saw a warming of 0.6 C. 1940 to 1976 saw a net cooling of 0.2 C. 1976 to the present saw a warming of 0.3C. Thus you will see that your statement above is a wee bit inaccurate. "You keep putting this up as your argument that there are climate catastrophists (and there are). But, even if this guy is one, it doesn't mean that the other scientists that are not catastrophists, but also not deniers are also wrong. Or that if someone mentions something about global warming that is a little bit unsettling, it does not mean that they are scaremongers." Again you are ascribing to me things I never said. Of course not all climatologists are scaremongers. Most are good scientists who would not publish anything that goes beyond the bounds of good science. However, the rational and restrained ones are not the ones who get the publicity, and the opinions of the public are disproportionately modified by the exaggerators. You only need to look at something like the Greenpeace web site to see how this can get out of control! "Notice here how you have lumped Wind Turbines in with Dropping Powered lime or Iron fillings into the ocean, or launching a phenomenal number of mirrors into orbit in the same group." Again it would help if you read my statement a bit more carefully. I said wind turbines were one of the measures often mentioned. I did not say it was stupid. I said some of the measures mentioned were stupid. That is not the same thing as criticising wind turbines, which do have a role to play. Edtharan, I have no problem with you criticising or even attacking my thesis. But in future, I would really appreciate you reading it properly first, before you launch your attack.

iNow Please, please, please, please, please ignore me!!! Please just exit from any thread in which I am debating, and leave it alone. Pretty, pretty please. I am getting heartily sick of gratuitous insults and ad hom attacks purely because you do not like what I have to say. Just in case you did not get the message, please ignore me and any thread I am involved in. If you cannot behave in a civilised way, it is far better that you get out.

To hitman That question is too general to answer. Much depends on the species of bacteria, and much depends on the situation where the bacterium is transferred. For example : Staphylococcus aureus is found on most of us, and is pretty much harmless when it sits on our skin. But get it into an open wound in sufficient numbers, and it can be lethal. There are also many strains of each. So multidrug resistant Staphylococcus aureus is much more dangerous than other strains. Even something like Yersinia pestis (bubonic plague) varies enormously in how lethal it is, depending on where it is found. In skin, it leads to terrible sores, but most survive. In the lungs, it kills most of its victims.

iNow A blatant ad hom attack hidden behind a reference is still a blatant ad hom attack. Outright insults like that should get you banned from the thread, and if there is a moderator reading, I formally request that iNow be banned. You may have thought that was funny. It was not!

Swansont said : "Is the first statement you quoted from Hansen wrong?" That first statement was : "As an example, let us say that ice sheet melting adds 1 centimetre to sea level for the decade 2005 to 2015, and that this doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. This would yield a rise in sea level of more than 5 metres by 2095." Current sea level rise is 3 mm per year, which ties in with Hansen's 2005 to 2015. Sea level rise has increased, with about 20 years ago being 2 mm per year, and so there has been an increase. However, I cannot see any empirical evidence to support a prediction as extreme as Hansen's. Sea level rise has not been doubling each decade, and apart from catastropist pseudo-religious act of faith, there is no reason to assume it will double each decade in future. iNow said "Like a good scientist, Hansen stated it as an "if/then." He never said, "this WILL happen." Interestingly, that's exactly what the models do. They don't predict climate. They model it based on various possible inputs. " But what Hansen said was : "Of course, I cannot prove that my choice of a 10-year doubling time is accurate but I'd bet $1000 to a doughnut that it provides a far better estimate......." This is not a good scientist's objective assessment of an if/then statement. This is an assertion of faith by a person who follows a pseudo-religion. Now, I am not for a moment saying that all climatologists are so downright subjective. Just that Hansen showed a major weakness, and showed that his ideas on global warming do not meet the high standards any scientist should expect. Now why don't we leave this sorry story behind us and move on to something that more meets those high scientific standards.

To ophiolite. The reason I did not include water is simply that it is not in danger of running out, as oil is. Instead, we are faced with a problem based on people using the wrong techniques. For example : world-wide, about 80% of water use is in agriculture, and most of that is wasted. Methods such as whole field flooding are common. Switching to efficient water use methods such as trickle field irrigation can at least double or triple the water resource. Methods such as desalination will be great for supplying cities, but not agriculture where the economics are different. However, there are many techniques which can be used. The problem is not one of a resource running out. It is a problem of the wrong methods being used.

The James Hansen quote was from : http://environment.newscientist.com/article/mg19526141.600 He is quoted as saying : "As an example, let us say that ice sheet melting adds 1 centimetre to sea level for the decade 2005 to 2015, and that this doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. This would yield a rise in sea level of more than 5 metres by 2095. Of course, I cannot prove that my choice of a 10-year doubling time is accurate but I'd bet $1000 to a doughnut that it provides a far better estimate of the ice sheet's contribution to sea level rise than a linear response. In my opinion, if the world warms by 2 °C to 3 °C, such massive sea level rise is inevitable, and a substantial fraction of the rise would occur within a century. Business-as-usual global warming would almost surely send the planet beyond a tipping point, guaranteeing a disastrous degree of sea level rise." Swansont has implied before today that I indulge in lies or unsupported false assertions. I do not. As with the James Hansen statement above, what I say has a good basis. It does not prove I am always right, of course, since my sources can be wrong. However, if I am wrong, it is innocently so. My information is drawn from what should be good sources. However, statements such as the one quoted above, must be challenged. When people come out with catastrophist bulldust like that, with no good scientific basis, it is time for true sceptics to point out that this is speculation. To scalbers The points you have just made are perfectly valid. I have always supported reasonable action to combat global warming. However, we must decide what is reasonable. Suggestions for what we should do range from dropping a trillion tonnes of powdered lime into the ocean, to dumping iron filings in the ocean, to orbiting thousands of mirrors to reflect heat away, to laying thousands of square kilometres of white cloth over the land to reflect away heat, to banning private cars, to building 10 million wind turbines etc etc. Rather obviously, some of those suggestions are sheer stupidity. I advocate careful, well managed, and well researched action. Some things can be done now, and some will require more research. I suggest a bit of good sense in such decisions, and an avoidance of crackpots. I also see no point setting up 'remedial' action that forces significant drops in standard of living or removes our precious liberty.

iNow As I tried to point out earlier, solid data is not something I sneer at. However, the vast bulk of these debates is not about data. It is about different ways the data is interpreted. The interpretation is highly variable and highly dependent on the social, emotional, and political bent of the person doing the interpretation. As I have said before, all scientists are also human, and behave in ways that are normal for humans to behave. One normal behaviour is that of the reinforcement of the group. A well studied and pretty much ubiquitous behaviour. This is well recognised with religious and pseudoreligious groups. This happens when a group of people get together who all agree on a subject. As they discuss the subject together, they reinforce each others views and strengthen those views on an emotional level till they move towards extremism. For example : the older feminists who got together and determined that 'all men are rapists.' I mention that example because I have been verbally attacked by some of these women and accused of being a rapist (falsely, I hasten to add) simply because I am male. Another example is Muslims who discuss the 'threat' of Americans to their faith. Their mutual agreement reinforcing each other can lead to atrocities such as 9/11. However, the principle applies equally well to believers in the disastrous outcomes of global warming. The more these groups get together and talk to each other, the more extreme their views become. This is totally normal human behaviour, but leads to ideas that are just plain exaggerated. As witness Hansen and his 5 metre sea level rise. The 'proper' scientific approach, which by passes these all too human weaknesses, is to rely on the scientific method. This was originally written down by Sir Francis Bacon, and uses empirical (real world) testing as the yardstick by which our picture of reality is achieved. When we stray from this principle we do so at severe risk of spreading the bulldust. A good example is super string theory. It is currently a form of science fiction. The reason why it is fiction (or speculation) is because there is no empirical testing to support the ideas. Super string theory will remain speculation until someone finds a suitable empirical test, at which stage it will become a more solid theory, or be disproven totally. Much of modern global warming ideas have been developed by the same method used for super string theory. That is : moving away from the real world and into an internal world of models - both computer and mental. Until these things are fully tested by empirical means, they must be treated with suspicion. If we rely on genuine data, we will see a warming of about 0.18 C per decade as a global average. Also an increase in CO2. We will see that this is unusual. We will conclude that human activity is causing warming, and we should do something about it. So far, that is sound science. However, it is the next step beyond that which we need to be sceptical of. We cannot predict the future, and we do not know that disaster is coming. The simple truth is that the entire concept of global warming is full of doubt and uncertainty, and it is dishonest to deny that.

iNow Exactly right. People like Dr. George Hansen who firmly believes that sea levels around the world will rise 5 metres before the year 2100 AD. The evidence underpinning this is meagre to say the least. His logic is most shaky. People like Dr. Stephen Schneider, who admitted to an interviewer that he deliberately exaggerated his message. He considered that justified in order to alert people to the danger. Sorry, iNow. I prefer honesty, integrity, and sanity.

To iNow In any issue there is data, and there is interpretation. I do not challenge data, unless I have good reason to believe it is faulty. Interpretation on the other hand ...... I see my role in these kinds of discussions as being the person who points out the degree of doubt and uncertainty. I may puncture a few people's fond beliefs, and make myself unpopular that way. But it is still healthy to have someone who challenges. In global climate change, there is a chunk of good data, and certain obvious conclusions. And then there is interpretation, in which different people extend their speculations to different degrees. Some of the reasoning used is good, and solid. Some is weak and tenuous. And some is almost certainly quite wrong. One of the things that makes me a bit different is that I know perfectly well that beyond a certain point the conclusions are seriously uncertain. By contrast, a lot of people regard global climate change modelling as an exact science. It is not. It is highly uncertain, and there will be a bunch of surprises in store over the next few decades. Some have already been experienced, but there will be more. In fact, as I have pointed out before, there is quite a body of scientific literature, in reputable scientific journals, pointing out the possible sources of error in climate modelling, and hence in the accuracy of models conclusions. When I point these out, it is not well received. I suspect that some people regard the disaster interpretation of climate change almost as a religion.

To Edtharan Let me commend you again. There are certain people inhabiting the science forum who would be unable to debate, and disagree as we do without descending to insults and ad hom attacks. I find it pleasant to debate with someone who can rise above that. Thank you. I do insist on my right to disagree. For example : take complexity. In ecology, the more complex a system is, the more stable it is. The same should apply to climate. If a system is highly complex, including many feed-back mechanisms, the net results should be (like in ecology) to increase the stability of the system. On trends being linear. In fact, nothing in nature is ever linear. Everything fluctuates. However, we can approximate linearity for some things. For example : the warming over the past 30 years approximates linear. There are lots of small fluctuations in temperature over that period, but a regression line can be drawn through all the points on the graph that is damn near a perfect straight line. In earlier times temperatures vary considerably. We have a long history of fluctuations, over a period of (say) 500 years, of temperatures rising and falling over about 1 Celsius. The peak of the Roman Empire was a warm time. The 'dark ages' occurred during a time of relative cool. 900AD to 1200 AD is often referred to as the Medieval Climate Optimum, and was a time of relative warmth. The period of 1350 to 1800 was the Little Ice Age and lived up to its name. Over that time period, of course temperatures are not linear, and I never implied that. Even approximate linearity will be over shorter periods. Perhaps a few decades at most. As you said, we cannot use that approximate linearity to predict future trends. However, neither can we predict accelerating warming. As I pointed out, if CO2 increase continues at the present rate, the rate of warming will reduce, since the relationship is an inverse exponent. Only if CO2 emissions increase very substantially, will warming increase beyond what it is to any great degree. You suggested that, because the last warming began around 1750 to 1800 AD, it had to be related to the industrial revolution and CO2 release. That suggestion looks exceedingly unlikely when you look at actual rate of CO2 increase. Before WWII, carbon emissions were very minor indeed. And in the 19th century, they occurred at a rate of about 5% of the current level. Yet warming until WWII was 0.5C, and since only about 0.3 C in spite of carbon emissions accelerating 20 fold. My belief is that a change in a vital natural parameter was the primary cause of cooling from 1200 to 1500 AD, and the return of that variable to 'normal' conditions drove the warming from 1800 to 1940 AD. We even know which parameter. It appears to be sunspot activity, which was very high during the Medieval Climate Optimum, and nearly zero during the Little Ice Age, and rising to massive again by 1940. Though many will dispute with me, I believe that the only clear cut warming caused almost solely by human activity, largely unaffected by other significant factors, has been from 1976 to the present.

To layman I do not think anyone here is going to support child abuse, though the definition may be argued. And very few are going to dispute the idea that a minimal physical act like a smack on the bottom is some kind of harmful abuse. The comparison to animals is given because we are animals, and we still behave according to our genetic programming in the form of instinct. If higher animals such as chimps control their offspring according to instinct with a smack, and bearing in mind that we share 98% of our genes with chimps, it is highly probable that we share the same instinct. Chimps and humans both have behaviour that results partly from millions of years of evolution. Evolution does not work to cause harm. And if that evolution leads to an instinct to chastise offspring with a smack, it is seriously unlikely that the smack will cause serious harm. Humans behave according to instinct as well as learning. If you do not believe me, think of how a person, anywhere in the world, any time in history, responds when a baby smiles at them. Pure instinct! Your reference 'questia' has two flaws in terms of this argument. 1. We cannot access it all anyway. 2. It refers only to adolescents. I would not approve of physical punishment for adolescents. If it is needed by then, it is already too late. Simple physical punishment should be given, and only lightly and only when appropriate, to children - not adolescents. There are only two methods that work on adolescents, who have not been disciplined as kids. 1. Time. By the time they get to 30, most adolescents are starting to come right! 2. Lock em up or kill em. If this don't seem acceptable, refer to 1. above.

To bombus I dunno about a nuclear war. We got through the cold war without that madness taking over, and I have hopes we can do the same for long enough to get some colonies going. Running out of vital resources seems much less likely to me. Very few vital resources are in any danger of running out (oil may be an exception). Instead, what happens is that high purity mineral ores get used up and we learn to exploit lower quality ores. Each time the potential resource increases in size. In addition, humans are very good at substituting. eg. Biofuel for oil.

To Edtharan Quite a long post you entered, but at least you use short paragraphs. I commend you for that. Too many people write ultra long paragraphs, or none at all, making understanding much less likely. You talk a lot about tipping points. I am not quite sure of exactly what you are saying. It sounds to me as if you are using the term to describe positive feed-back scenarios, rather than true tipping points. On positive feed-back, I have to point out once more that there are as many hypothetical negative feed-back mechanisms as positive. In the last hot time I mentioned, 120,000 years ago, when it got 2 Celsius more than at present, the warming reached a maximum and then cooling set in. This is more characteristic of a negative feed-back mechanism than positive. A warming of 2 Celsius, assuming current warming rates, would take 110 years. To take as little as 50 years would require warming rates to more than double. Since there was no 'tipping point' 120,000 years ago with a temperature 2 Celsius warmer than at present, it seems unlikely that we will see one now for many decades. I tend to regard these positive feed-back ideas leading to 'tipping points' as simply some doomsday ridden theorists hobby horse. They may happen, but there is no empirical evidence to suggest it could happen in the near future. We need a time line of 100 years plus. It would be rather nice to see some of the hypothetical negative feed-back mechanisms given some weight also. However, that would ruin the fun of those who love a dark pessimistic picture of the world. You suggest warming is exponential. You are right, but you have the curve inverted. The response to CO2 is indeed exponential, but negatively so. A doubling of CO2 leads to a warming that is substantially less than double. An exponential increase in CO2 may lead to a warming that is purely linear. Your description of temperature change over the last 1000 years is not correct. Around 1000 years ago, the temperature was marginally cooler than the present as a global average. Around 1250 AD, cooling set in, of about 0.5 Celsius global average. Around 1750 to 1800 AD, warming set in, and slowly raised temperatures around 0.5 Celsius, by WWII. Over the last 30 years, warming has been about 0.3 Celsius. The first part of the warming, of 0.5 Celsius can be seen as a return to 'normal' conditions. Only the last part, of 0.3 Celsius can be regarded as exceptional. The earlier warming was seen as early as 1800 AD, with a number of geologists alarmed at the melting of glaciers. If we look at global temperature over a longer period - the current ice age of one million years - we see an interesting pattern of glacial and interglacial changes. There is an interglacial roughly each 100,000 years, plus or minus about 20,000 years. The peak temperatures of these interglacials have been increasing. If the current interglacial follows the same pattern, we can expect its peak to be warmer than the last one. And its peak was, as I have said, 2 Celsius warmer than the present. If current warming follows the 'natural' trend, we can expect it to peak out more than 2 Celsius than the present, even without human input. The current ice age is not, of course, the normal climate of planet Earth. The norm is considerably warmer than the interglacials. Most of the evolution of life on Earth has taken place at temperatures well above that which we have at present. This is not a rationale for approving warming, but an indication that the level of warming we currently get, and can expect for many decades to come, is not actually disastrous. Life thrived in the past at higher temperatures, and can be exected to continue to thrive, if the world warms beyond normal interglacial levels. We have time. Humanity will need to reverse CO2 levels, but not in the next decade as many catastrophists will preach. I suspect we have at least 50 to 100 years to get our act together. Yes, we need to get started on this. But no. We do not need to institute panic measures. Careful management of change is needed.

A suggestion for a definition of acceptable. We all know that a smack can raise a red mark which quickly fades. Beating tends to leave welts or bruises that do not. I suggest that 'acceptable' smacking is anything that cannot be detected by a doctor 24 hours later. Anything that leaves any kind of a mark detectable by said doctor after 24 hours is a beating and unacceptable. This definition may not be perfect, but at least gives a handle for enforcing this rule.

Swansont The economic arguments you and I both presented are sound, but there is a datum missing. What percentage of the cost of constructing a nuclear power station is the cost of skilled labour? If skilled labour costs twice as much, how would that impact on the cost of the plant? For this, I am talking only about skills relating specifically to nuclear plant construction - not the more common skills related to builders, electricians etc. We need the answer to determine if that factor is significant. It is like those who argue that nuclear power gets too expensive if the cost of U235 increases, without realising it is only 10% of the cost of the electricity generated. Bearing in mind that 'unskilled' labour will be as abundant and 'cheap' as before the nuclear plant construction, I would suspect that the cost of skilled labour would not be a major fraction of the cost of total construction.

Edtharan is correct in saying skilled workers are needed for making nuclear power plants. However, that is not an excuse to avoid starting the process, including training more workers. Realistically, we are not going to see 10,000 plants under construction, even if that is what is needed. However, we can get a few hundred under way, and work on training those people who will be required for the next lot. My views would not be a threat to solar energy even if those ideas were totally shared by the people in politics and business who make all the important decisions. I am fully supportive of massive investment and development of solar energy, along with a wide range of other energy developments. I just do not see it as being a suitable alternative for mass electricity generation in the short to medium future. Some day, perhaps - and we continue investing towards that day. The time factor for global warming disaster, if at all, is not known. Edtharan thinks 20 years will be too late. I doubt it. It is easy to forget how minimal global warming has been. Sure, the last 30 years has seen warming at an unprecedented rate. But 30 years, or even 60 is a very short time in global climate change. Total warming, as a global average, is still less than 1 Celsius since the end of the Little Ice Age, and is only about 0.5 Celsius more than the average global temperature over the past 1000 years. It is still 2 Celsius less than the maximum reached during the previous interglacial period 120,000 years ago. This was shown recently here in NZ. We have just had the biggest snowfalls in recorded history. Mount Ruapehu - our most popular ski field - has a snow base of 4.5 metres. They have records going back to the late 19th Century, and this is the deepest ever! This is NOT a denial of global warming. I am just trying to put it into perspective. If we think in terms of signal to noise ratio in warming, the noise is still massively greater than the signal. The season to season variation is much, much, much greater than the minimal 0.8 Celsius overall average global warming. The next few decades will see further average warming, but it will still be much less than the variation season to season. In other words, we have the time to take required action, and panic measures are absolutely not needed. Climate models, when they first came out, predicted warming in Antarctica. That has not happened, and the main body of this continent has actually shown cooling. The modellers have tweaked their algorithms and now model the cooling, but this indicates the weakness of models, when dealing with such an immensely complex set of thousands of interacting systems. To make a prediction that we have only 20 years before a tipping point is simply laughable. Especially in view of the minimal warming that can happen over such a short period of time.

To Edtharan You have presented some good arguments from the view point of economics. I would love to debate it point by point, but I think that will take us substantially off the thread topic. Perhaps another thread?? A couple of points, though. Yes, there are indirect subsidy equivalents, and the current New Zealand government, which is a little left wing, has been guilty of using some of these. In my opinion, those are seriously undesirable also. It is probably true that there is no such thing in the world today as a nation untainted by some form of subsidy - more is the pity. I am not keen on the concept of carbon taxes. I think you can appreciate that they are wide open to abuse. I think there are much better ways of achieving the needed goals. And yes, they can be used as a form of relative subsidy. Again, not something that I consider desirable. I would like to see all power generation technologies on the hypothetical 'level playing field' so that rational choices can be made uninfluenced by government or lobby group bias. You said : "Hang on. Earlier you were arguing against moving to solar (and instead moving to Nuclear), because there was unknowns about whether or not technology would be able to develop a good solution. But here you are arguing for nuclear with the proviso that new technologies end up being invented. You are applying a double standard here." You may have misunderstood my point. As things stand right now, nuclear is a proven and practical and economic technology. Solar is proven, but not economically competitive as of right now. I was making the point that nuclear, along with other technologies may (probably will) improve further, and especially in terms of making nuclear fuel more readily available. Solar will improve also, but nuclear is ahead in economic terms at present. On the need for skilled workers for nuclear. Yes, they are needed, and if we were to start building 10,000 new plants today, that need would be critical. However, it is a temporary shortage only. Skilled people can be, and will be trained. It takes 20 years for a nuclear power station to go from conception to commission, and it takes a lot less time than that to train skilled workers.

To bombus If the human species can survive long enough to establish self sustaining colonies in a number of other star systems (a matter of a few thousand years), then we will become highly resistant to extinction.

To swansont Re raising or lowering prices of power generation with a greater number of plants. There are two principles here. 1. If something is in limited supply, then increasing demand will raise prices. That is why gold and diamonds are so expensive. 2. If something can be made in more or less unlimited amounts, then increasing demand increases number of units made which lowers prices. The old 'cheaper by the dozen' principle. If solar panels are limited by silicon availability, then increasing demand raises prices. Similarly the price of uranium goes up with increased demand, because the availability is limited. It is very likely that both these examples would reverse, and they would actually get cheaper in quantity, if new technology and extra investment is introduced to increase availability of silicon and uranium. However, if we are going to make 10,000 nuclear power stations, the cost per unit goes down. The cost would go up only if there was some limit on building nuclear power plants, and I do not think that applies.

Like iNow, I am not going to google 'animal rape.' There would be 20,000 porno sites appearing and you would never get rid of all of them! However, I did see a TV documentary some time ago on animal behaviour that made the point that rape in the animal kingdom was actually very common. Chimps carry out rape, for example. Rape among humans mostly is only done by a minority. I suspect that about 1 in 10 guys are capable of rape. The rest of us respect and care for our fairer half, and would even put ourselves at risk to save them from that other 1 in 10. The major exception is wartime, when young randy soldiers over-run an enemy community. Since the women are the hated enemy and hence 'less than human', they are raped by men who are pillars of the community at home. I have to say, though, that YT's daughter cannot be taken as typical of all children. There are plenty of kids who kick over the traces often and severely. Normal human genetic variability guarantees that this will happen. Simply talking to those kids in a stern but loving way will not achieve anything. More drastic measures are needed. Not anything resulting in physical damage, but the short, sharp administration of pain often is the only effective way of altering their behaviour, short of drugs.

To Edtharan I think our views on economics are different. I assume you are American??? I am New Zealander, and we look at things a bit differently. Our opinion is that the USA got its economics very badly wrong. The US administration uses tariffs and subsidies to distort the economy in all sorts of ways - usually for the gain of whatever lobby group happens to be most influential at the time. Way back in 1984, the NZ government dumped all tariffs and all subsidies. We now operate according to open competition. At the time everyone thought it would be a disaster. It is still a disaster to those who attempt to get into uncompetitive money making activities. They lose big time. However, it has resulted in the biggest boost to our primary products industry in our history. The area we were good at, we got really, really good at! For this reason, I cannot condone your suggestion that the way forward is via subsidies. If the US government (and others) were to remove subsidies off other means of generating electricity, and solar panels became stars as a result, then I would applaud. To try to turn solar panels into a success by adding a subsidy is simply wrong. Another distortion.