i read trainspoting twice to try to understand what those scotsmen were talking about.

The hypothesis that solar variation impacts the Earth's climate by cloud formation due to cosmic rays is still not supported.

There we are. Not supported. Of course the IPCC has to bring a message, that is what they are payed for, though not everything is clear. They cannot say: well, we are not sure that AGW has at least 90% chance of existing and we better write (A)GW. In the past temperature changes often played out in tens-hundreds thousands years.

IIRC there were 4 working groups. The reports getting the most heat were composed of economists and social scientists, who included a couple of questionable non peer-reviwed sources. None of the "error" had any influence on the studies conclusions. The best analogy I've seen to whats happened is the OJ Simpson murder trial. The prosecution had mountains of evidence. More evidence is NOT better than less. Clever defense teams were able to comb out some bad evidence, and paint a picture of prosecution malfeasance, and convince the jury of doubt. The same thing has been happening with climate science -find a few questionable things and trumpet them the discredit the whole thing. Humans don't seem capable of dealing with stuff like small false positive rates in large data sets. We tend to think in terms of personal stories, and any large dataset will generate a few that seem counter to the overall trend of the data. There low occurrence rate doesn't register in our brains.

As a "Gear" I get to put my faith and reputation into data and numbers all day long and this means jack-sh!7 to anyone outside my small circle of profession, even my parents. And, I find it somewhat pointless to enter into a debate on the validity of AGW. To me the observable fact is clear and is the large scale result that will impact most of the population regardless of their belief.

On this observable fact I don't get any push back or debate. "Watch the water..."

Not sea level rise. I think that is a false warning as if the seas will rise 1 metre over night. They will undoubtedly rise and will make adjustments season by season, year by year, and we will get by just fine if that were the only phenomena to be concerned about. It's the fresh water.

Like most of the AGW critics, if drinking water makes me an authoritative hydrologist, then I can state we are in a water crisis now. I'm not the first, nor the last to point out this little problem. Now you have some insight why I moved back to a region that has abundant fresh water and will continue to do so beyond other regions in N. America. (Hint, BC, Winter Olympics). And even then we are experiencing affects from low water in some regions. We could be in for another tough forest fire season. Those mountains around Vancouver should be snow capped until end of March at the earliest.

Oh, that report on ABC made my day! Thank you.

I know many of the older guard may disagree, but I find the mainstream media, which is all national tv stations, magazines, and newspapers, to be completely irrelevant. I'll keep repeating that as long as I'm here.

They failed to report on the stolen elections. They failed to report on the illegal Iraq war. They failed to report on the loss of our liberties. They are failing to report on peak oil and agw/cc. And don't get me started on their failure on all things financial.

What makes any of you think that they are going to turn around, or all of a sudden become responsible custodians of our American way of life, and defend us against those awful Teabaggers??

I say, bring on the radical right. The collapse is happening; let's not be afraid to accelerate it.

Question is, are we facing a Roman Empire scenario or an Easter Island scenario?

That would depend upon the extent of collapse, on the lessons carried away by the survivors and the ways in which they adapted to their post-collapse environment. Ecosystems can recover if keystone species are not extinguished. However, once key species are gone -- think "trees" on Easter -- then the co-evolved species do not return. Diamond notes in "Collapse" that when Dutch sailors first made contact with the Easter natives that they were stunted, in poor health, and timid. Being isolated as they were, without the means to build watercraft that could have taken them away, their vigor was limited by the poor quality of the resource base.

Rome's collapse didn't result in isolation of the empire's subjects, thus, collapse wasn't as complete.

FWIW, it is unlikely that Easter Island could ever support its former population. Once the resource is degraded, the remnant population continues to place demands on the system which prevent any sort of recovery (even if species can be "reseeded" in from another location).

We don't know anything for certain about Easter Island.
As far as the Roman Empire goes, things are complicated.
The 'Roman Empire' was split in 285 AD by Diocletian into
the Eastern(Byzantium) and Western(Milan)--it was deemed to vast to rule effectively. There were two Emperors, two courts and two armies. Naturally, there were wars and the Empire was reunited by Constantine and his family and then divided again in 364 by Valentinian and his brother Valens. It was rejoined in 392 AD by Theodosius and divided between his two sons.
Rome was sacked in 410AD but Byzantium/Constantinople remained the seat of the Eastern Empire until 1453.

The Western empire lasted until 476 AD when the crown and sceptre were returned to the Eastern Emperor Zeno by the military commander of Italy, Odoacer who asked to be made
'duke' of Italy, the political system of the West having evaporated--nobody wanted or could keep the job of Emperor.
The barbarians allies were exasperated and in 493 AD Theodoric the Goth proclaimed himself King of Italy.
It's interesting that Theodoric passed laws requiring the Italians to maintain their roads and buildings and he presided over the Roman Senate and other laws were passed
keeping Goths from mixing with Romans, but Romans were
second class citizens for the next 900 years. People weren't interested in politics and the prevailing religion predicted the end of the world.
St. Augustine wrote a book, 'The City of God' justifying the destruction of the Roman Empire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_God_(book)

While it is not impossible that a new civilization might arise one thousand years after a collapse of the current civilization, that civilization will face challenges that ours did not. As our civilization developed, we plucked the 'low-hanging fruit' of high-grade minerals and ores that were relatively readily available and made use of them. They are now gone for geological periods of time, until geological activity replenishes them. Granted, it will be possible to scavenge some materials from the remains of our towns and cities, but many resources such as iron will have rusted away and dissipated over a millennium. Other resources that would presumably be useful for a developing civilization, such as most of the fossil fuel resources, were burnt off and are entirely non-recoverable.

I won't attempt to guess how well local ecosystems such as forests or prairies will have recovered over such a period of time. Such a time frame may be adequate for many ecosystems to reach a new equilibrium after the extinctions, introduced species, and climate changes that humans are responsible for have sorted themselves out. Even if the ecosystems themselves are reasonably healthy, the abundant, rich soils that were available to us took, in many cases, multiple thousands of years, as well as glacial activity and volcanic deposition, to develop.

Another issue this hypothetical civilization will have to deal with are the various hazardous materials, including toxic wastes and radioactive materials, many of which will persist for millennia, that we have left strewn around the planet. While local knowledge of some contaminated sites may persist, others are likely to be entirely unknown to future generations of mankind until situations similar to Love Canal occur.

Again, I am not stating that a new civilization that surpasses ours is impossible. It just seems unlikely (at least for the time-frame that you suggested) that one could successfully develop, given the issues I have described. I am sure that there are other human-introduced problems that I haven't thought of that this hypothetical civilization would need to address as well.

I have absolutely no insight into what might happen or what the shape of things might be 200+ years from now. That is all purely academic speculation. I can really only think with even the slightest degree of confidence on things that might happen within the lifetimes of people who are at this moment alive.

fitz - looks like you have been reg here for only a couple weeks. Perhaps you have been reading for longer but you would do well to read a lot more.

"Peak" is not so much purely a reference to quantity. We have for the most part used up all the cheap, easy, and highest quality of all these resources. That brings huge pressure onto the economy and in fact IMO, it IS the cause of what we are seeing in the global economy.

The world has generated millions of "smartest men in the room" who believe that the world revolves around finance and finance only. This has been very lucrative for them for a very long time but has never been very accurate or reality based.

Adapt or be darwinized.

Depart from us, Keynesian. I've heard your siren song before and have no intentions of ever again listening to it.

Yes, finance/economics is the problem at the top of the "in basket" right now. However, you've left out the biggest part of it. This problem developed primarilly because of crony capitalism. Governments (primarily, but not exclusively, the US) were captured by financiers, they were allowed to run rampant, got themselves into inevitable trouble, and then instead of the discipline of the market being allowed to run its inevitable and self-correcting course, they pulled the strings again and took over national treasuries to bail themselves out.

In other words, NOTHING that has been done over the past year or two has made the slightest bit of difference when it comes to actually correcting the real underlying problem. Nothing is on the table to actually correct things, either. Volker made a few promising suggestions, and was promptly marginalized and ignored.

Nothing in your proposed solutions will do it, either. Actually, it may well come closer to spraying gasoline on a fire.

I suspect some of it may have to do with unacknowlegded blind spots. My dad drove his car into a curb, because he wouldn't admit he had a large visual blind spot. In most cases these sorts of things develop slowly, and the brain simply fills in the missing pixels. So the driver thinks he is still capable, but he really isn't. And no one wants to tell him to quit, because that means a huge loss of independence.

They are retired workers, but should still be diligent, active drivers - or get off the road.

Mind you - my partner and I have four parents between us over 85, and three of them still drive ... something of a miracle I guess, but I make sure I always take the wheel whenever there's a trip on to somewhere and I'm there - even the local shops. But the point is a good one - without their cars, and with quite compromised mobility, they would be really stuck if they had to use public transport (even though it isn't bad here - but it is crowded and tough for people with walking difficulties - particularly steps).

And we Boomers are going to be a total menace on the roads in our dotage ... just you wait and see.

Great - and then let's see if the TA can figure out a way to derivativize our FSCs and make them more like CDSs or better yet MBSs...

Blah blah blah - haven't we had enough of these scams and financial "innovations" that go by these harmless sounding little acronyms or abbreviations but are the financial equivalent of a tsunami.

What could possibly go wrong...?

Through trading of this new commodity, DMCs can access additional funds to implement alternative policies, technologies, systems and fuels that would not otherwise make the most financial sense...

Would a DMC be a Dead Money Country? I did quite a lot of work for the Asian Development Bank in the late 1980s ... there is no bureaucracy like a Pacific Nation bureaucracy, I can tell you. We always seem to work on the principle of "... that would not otherwise make the most financial sense ..."

We still have some highly unionized industries. Unfortunately, the unions have driven them into the ground.

Germany has a growing national debt, it is expected to be well over 100% debt to gdp ratio in a few years. The welfare state cannot be sustained.

To add to your point - Thom Hartmann loves to bring up the issue of when (and why) the tide really turned in the US:

Pre-Reagan (~pre 1981) the US was the largest importer of raw materials and the largest exporter of finished goods in the world.

Post-Reagan (~post 1988) these figures had completely reversed - US became largest exporter of raw materials and largest importer of finished goods.

That's 80.7 Canadian years - probably much less in USA equivalent years when you factor in the exchange rate...

The conservation levy should be a % of the bill, or an amount per kWh, which amounts to the same thing. That way, the people/companies who DO conserve pay less of the tax. Like any "behaviour" tax, the real idea should be to encourage people to minimise/avoid it by doing certain things, in this case conservation.

If someone reduces their usage by half, they have certainly done their job, and should not still be paying the same tax to support those that haven't.

As someone who has designed water rates to encourage conservation, I am firmly of the opinion that the two best things that can be done (with rates) to encourage conservation are;
1. Increasing tier or block rates, so the more you use, the more expensive each kWh becomes. Thus you get the best payoff for conservation, as you save the most expensive electricity
2. Day/night peak and off peak rates. These have been commonplace for all households in Australia, NZ and Britain (and probably Europe) for decades. When everyone knows that the price halves after 10pm, it's a great incentive to run things like the dishwasher/washing machine at night, use night store heaters, have electric hot water heaters with different setpoints (i.e. overheat at night). My uncle had a timeclock on his hot water so it would only come on from 10pm to 7am, and they never ran out of hot water.

I managed the electric (and water) utilities at a BC ski resort for several years, and we participated in a major trial of peak/off peak rates, and it is amazing how much load can be shifted, when you start to look for it.

If the peak rates mean that you can take 10-15% off the peak and shift it to off peak, that not only delays new generation, but gives the utility the option of running peaking plants in off peak, or buying off peak power, whichever is more favourable. It also delays expansion to transmission lines etc.

In short, it makes the best use possible of the existing equipment, much of which runs at 50% capacity factor.

Putting a fixed conservation levy is an attention grabber, but provides little reward for the conservers. Change the rate structure so that they can buy it for 50% off, or 50% more (i.e. 150% of current rates) and then just watch what happens - not only will load shift but total usage will decrease, as the load shifting exercise makes all customers examine their usage, and find things that can be turned off altogether.

Hi Eric,

Nova Scotia Power is heavily dependent upon coal and petcoke and a number of these plants are inching ever closer to retirement. In addition, the Province is imposing increasingly more stringent emission standards (NOx, SO2, Hg and GHG) and it will be difficult and costly to bring these existing facilities into compliance. The writing is on the wall.

Nova Scotia Power's 2009 Integrated Resource Plan calls for coal-fired generation to fall from just under 8,000 GWh/year in 2011 to less than 4,000 GWh in 2032, with the largest drop occurring between 2017 and 2019. By that point, DSM is projected to supply between 5,000 and 6,000 GWh of total demand, which is forecast to be just over 14,000 GWh. That's a radical transformation of the utility's business model and I wish them Godspeed.

Source: http://www.nspower.ca/site-nsp/media/nspower/2009%20IRP%20UPDATE%20-%20F...

Cheers,
Paul