Panic from a former Microsoft polymath who’s so smart he’s fallen for climate alarmism.
Greenwire reports:
A transition of all existing coal-fired power plants to natural gas would spare the world little warming over the next century, according to a study published yesterday by a prominent climate analyst and a former Microsoft polymath.
Despite its reduced greenhouse gas emissions, the fossil fuel energy needed to build out natural gas plants at a massive scale, combined with the long atmospheric life of CO2, means that construction emissions will place a heavy thumb on the climate scale for gas into the next century, according to Ken Caldeira, a prominent climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution, and Nathan Myhrvold, the co-founder of Intellectual Ventures.
“If countries were to start right away and build really fast, so that they installed a trillion watts of gas-fired electricity generation steadily over the next 40 years,” Myhrvold said in a release, “that would still add about half a degree Fahrenheit to the average surface temperature of the Earth in 2112 — that’s within a tenth of a degree of the warming that coal-fired plants would produce by that year”…
in response to that fellow:
There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
― George Orwell
Evidently, unless we can afford to install all “green” conveniences in our homes like Al Gore (in which case we can burn energy at 10 times the rate of a normal household) we all need to move back to caves. Oh wait, that won’t make the environmentalists happy either because we will have to chop down trees to heat and light the caves!!!
If the life-time of CO2 in the atmosphere is soooo huge, why are there seasonal variations in the ppm of CO2?
So then, it makes no difference and we should do what makes the most sense economically. As long as we’re in agreement on that then. And forget the trees as offsets. May I have his 401(k) since he’s sure he’s doomed?