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Comment by llamataboot | Hacker News Reader

Nearly every prominent climate scientist disagrees strongly with you, and sees the current move towards fracking as climate suicide.

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I'm sure you have them, but since the parent commenter was nice enough to supply sources for his claims, perhaps you could as well?

http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/#.UknaKlN7WMc

That's a very useful report but where does it support the claim of "the current move towards fracking as climate suicide"?

I wasn't able to find anything in there that is specifically about fracking.

What's more likely? That we'll convince people to cut their energy consumption in half, or convince people to purchase higher efficiency equipment and slowly move over to cleaner forms of energy as they become available? What's needed in the climate debate is a healthy dose of pragmatism.

What do you do when "pragmatism" doesn't produce the results you need?

Maybe convincing people to cut their energy consumption in half isn't in the cards. At the same time, maybe that is what is needed. The universe doesn't have to cooperate to give us pragmatic solutions.

If the "impossible" solution is required, and the "pragmatic" solution isn't sufficient... why should climate scientists advocate for the latter over the former?

Why wouldn't pragmatism produce the results needed? Moving over to Nuclear Power would, without a doubt, solve the climate crisis. Granted, it would introduce other challenges, but we're talking about the lesser of two evils here.

I don't think a rapid wholesale move to nuclear power is any more pragmatic than a rapid move to cut average per capita energy consumption in half.

One solution requires the economy to stall, the other does not. Take your best guess as to which one will have better public support.

Is there a point to ranking impractical solutions?

Impractical, yet exactly what France did..

In a different age, when public opinion on nuclear energy was substantially different.

Well, for one thing, the "impossible" comes with large error bars and thus is difficult to trust, even those trained in the sciences (or, perhaps, ESPECIALLY for those trained in the sciences). At least the pragmatic buys time, if nothing else.

I have a minority view: Climate change is now in a positive feedback loop (thawing tundra, forests burning, ocean acidification) and ceasing human activity won't stop it.

I believe we need to proactively remove atmospheric CO2. Retool our economy and industrial might for that job.

To do that, we need a strong economy.

I'm not saying more, cheaper fossil fuels is a good thing. I just think we should play the cards we're dealt (to ourselves).

I have often wondered if the CO2 is really the most dangerous ecological experiment we are applying to this planet at this point in history. It is, after all, a plant nutrient that eventually goes away over time. 3.5 billion years ago this planet was covered with methane and O2 was a trace poison to most existing life, until plant forms devoured the carbon and farted out O2 we all love. We are doing many kinds of "terraforming" on a planet wide scale, and CO2 is but one example.

But to effectively retool our economy requires a non-CO2 source of abundant power. I am not sure that nuclear as we know it now would fit the bill, because of the various construction and infrastructure costs. Using less is probably more practical then re-inventing nuclear power (iteratively improving nuclear power would still have value).

Trying to stay positive here, I hope:

- with solar capacity doubling every 30 months (1), once our electricity needs are met, we use excess capacity to produce hydrogen.

- we displace most fossil fuel with a combination of biodiesel (algae), cellulosic ethanol, and hydrogen.

- we clean up all our radioactive waste stockpiles, and generate electricity, with traveling wave reactors.

Source? I keep hearing this - but only see a small sampling of papers from the large scientific community.

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