My city wasn't founded until 1934, how does NASA have stats from 1894?
If more people gave 10% of their income we can stave off the apocalypse, end of humanity, rapture, end times, whatever you want to call it. The rich will never inherit the kingdom of Mother Earth.
Solar panels are a poor choice, they help somewhat but they are far too expensive for what they provide.
If you actually want to make a difference then agitate for more nuclear power. There is absolutely nothing else that will help.
The worlds population has doubled in the last 30 years, placing ridiculous demands on our planet.
And then there is this "small detail":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_ma...
Governments around the world are considering a range of waste management and disposal options, usually involving deep-geologic placement, although there has been limited progress toward implementing long-term waste management solutions. This is partly because the timeframes in question when dealing with radioactive waste range from 10,000 to millions of years, according to studies based on the effect of estimated radiation doses.
and
Hannes Alfvén, Nobel laureate in physics, described the as yet unsolved dilemma of high-level radioactive waste management: "The problem is how to keep radioactive waste in storage until it decays after hundreds of thousands of years. The geologic deposit must be absolutely reliable as the quantities of poison are tremendous. It is very difficult to satisfy these requirements for the simple reason that we have had no practical experience with such a long term project. Moreover permanently guarded storage requires a society with unprecedented stability."
So much for solutions that actually exist. There is no long term solution to nuclear fission, not yet anyway, while on the other hand, the sun does exist, so does technology to harness solar power. The tricky part, other than building it all of course (robots and nanobots surely will help there, both with building as well as with getting/making the materials required), is getting the energy from there to here. Microwave? Converting it into chemical energy on-site and sending titanic pocket warmers to Earth? That's not even that important, since even 0.00001% efficiency would net us more energy than we could otherwise have in our wildest dreams. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28energy%2... ]
Do you really think it would take us even 5000 years to get to the point of being able to build a dyson sphere? Hmm. At any rate, that's something that would work; on the other hand, we might find ways to use/defuse/store nuclear waste, we might not. We simply don't know yet.
So yeah, I'll be doing that.
Nuclear power requires a huge amount of fossil fuels in its life cycle. From building the plant to mining the uranium then decommissioning it. All energy extensive.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/04/nuclear-is-not-a-low-...
http://mediamatters.org/mobile/research/2013/11/07/myths-and...
Right now nuclear compares to other renewables
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_of_life-cycle_green...
however it is though if it is widely adopted, uranium will become more energy intensive to mine uranium and convert it to fuel.
And renewables are MUCH worse. You don't need much uranium to make energy, but you need a TON of metal to capture wind or sun energy.
> however it is though if it is widely adopted, uranium will become more energy intensive to mine uranium and convert it to fuel.
And again, renewables are worse in that regard. They do well now only because they aren't used a lot.
But use them a lot and the price (due to rarity) will go up, meaning the resources needed will go up.
There is no perfect energy source. It's just a matter of relative harm.
http://warmingworld.newscientistapps.com/about.html
"Surface temperature measurements are not evenly distributed across the globe. So the NASA team interpolates from the available data to calculate average temperatures for cells in a global grid, with each cell measuring 2 degrees latitude by 2 degrees longitude. The analysis extrapolates up to 1200 kilometres from any one station, which allows for more complete coverage in the Arctic – where monitoring stations are sparsely distributed, but where the warming trend is especially strong."
I love statistics :-)