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Conservation Won't Stop AGW, Either
Although he continues to ride a bike or bus to work, line-dry family clothing and use a push lawn mower, University of Utah professor Tim Garrett believes humans can't really affect climate change. Instead, he says the Earth's course will run along a "predetermined trajectory."He doesn't see the major cause of global warming being stabilized any other way than if the increasing flow of carbon-dioxide emissions ultimately collapses the world's economy or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day. Nuclear plants, which produce one gigawatt of continuous power, would be necessary to compensate for the increasing growth in energy consumption around the world, said Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the U. Apparently, he still believes CO2 is the source of all the warming, but also that it is hopeless to conserve? Although it "feels good to conserve energy," he said, "there shouldn't be any pretense that it will make a difference." These views, both radical and controversial, will be published this week in Climate Change, an online academic journal edited by renowned Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider. Other research journals declined to publish Garrett's research. "I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have," he said. Garrett treats civilization as a "heat engine" that "consumes energy and does 'work' in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy," he said. Makes sense. "Economists think you need population and standard of living to estimate productivity," Garrett said. "In my model, all you need to know is how fast energy consumption is rising." It's like a child who "grows by consuming food, and when the child grows, it is able to consume more food, which enables it to grow more," he said, adding that when the food supply runs short, the child will stop growing and eventually die. Or live out a full and productive life. "If society invests sufficient resources into alternative and new, non-carbon energy supplies, then perhaps it can continue growing without increasing global warming," he said, adding that it would be "too bad" if civilization pursued avenues for climate change that ultimately backfired. "Ultimately, it's not clear that policy decisions have the capacity to change the future course of civilization." I hope this makes it all the way to Copenhagen. Posted by: Bobby 2009-11-25 |
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