Re: Nuclear Power, Trivializing Global Warming

[Stewart Farber <farbersa@optonline.net>]

6/1/04 11:36:27 AM, maury <maury@webtexas.com> wrote:



......

>A principal scientific question still centers on:  if and to what extent 

observed climate changes are anthropogenic.

>>My conclusion from the balance of available evidence is simply that the 

anthropogenic component of total >variance in climate change is trivial.

>===========================

>John_Sukosky@DOM.COM wrote:

>

>> Ruth and Howard,

>>

>> What makes you so sure this is a hoax?........ 

=========

Dear Ruth, Howard, and all:



NONE of the folks on Radsafe are climatologists [to the best of my knowledge]. 

There is obvious and substantial expertise on all aspects of ionizing and non-

ionizing radiation,  and most folks here have a stake in sane societal attitudes 

toward nuclear technologies. 



More and more, interest is being expressed from all over the world [even from the 

lifelong Green father of the Gaia hypothesis as noted in a recent Radsafe thread] 

as to the advantage and absolute need of the essentially zero carbon emissions 

from the nuclear fuel cycle. The world's nations are struggling with how to slow 

the growing emissions of CO2 from the fossil fuel cycle, and meet the Kyoto 

protocol's goals, which cannot happen while meeting society's needs for energy 

without stopping the building of more and more coal plants and building more 

nuclear power plants.



Why should anyone on this list be trivializing the potential environmental 

impacts of global warming, stating that salt water intrusion into Florida canals 

has more impact than global warming ever would as Ruth stated? The greenhouse 

effect on climate is something that once it begins is likely to have 

accelerating, synergistic components. Melting snowpack extent all over  the 

Northern hemisphere [which is already being observed] will decrease albedo and 

speed up heat absorption by the earth. Once begun, global warming will have a 

time component of hundreds, if not thousands of years before it can be reversed. 

When the oceans rise by another 10" by 2100 [consensus estimate today] cyclones 

sweeping into the Bay of Bengal will kill thousands more in poor nations like 

Bangladesh. Should this be trivialized? Humanity has embarked on an experiment of 

global dimensions in releasing carbon to the atmosphere via combustion in a few 

hundred years which it took nature hundreds of millions of years to store in the 

earth. 



QUESTION: Why should anyone on this list "be spitting into the wind" in trying to 

fight public beliefs and concerns about the greenhous effect? Why should any of 

us seek to trivialize global warming's environmental and health impacts [an area 

none of us have any real expertise] and thereby make ourselves look like 

environmental reactionaries or Luddites to the general scientific community, the 

media,  and the public? Why should scientists and professionals interested in the 

sensible application of nuclear technologies [and sensible regulations] fight an 

issue that has the potential to make governments, the public, and the media 

embrace the need for a revival of nuclear energy and to finally realize that the 

radiation impacts of the  nuclear fuel cycle are trivial vs. any ready bulk-power 

alternatives [as would happen if the public realized they had NO ALTERNATIVE to 

more nuclear plants if their lifestyle and environmental/climatic protection 

demanded it].



Stewart Farber, MS Public Health [Air Pollution Control]











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