On the Ottawa Citizen's website, David Reevely touches on a topic, that is, running a city like a business, that came up early in the thesis that Kate Murray, Chidi Ogbuagu and I did last year (here's the version of the resource guide with working hyperlinks). We were trying to create a business case for sustainability for cities. Cities aren't businesses, and the motivations that drive cities are different - they need to build more than just economic capital. That's why we instead did a report on how building community capital (including economic, built, natural, social, cultural, human and political) to move towards sustainability.
The comments on this posting are also pretty intelligent!
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Thorium - will it give nuclear energy a future?
Just posted this on Facebook. Would like to hear the opinions of others.
Is there a place for nuclear energy in a sustainable energy system? What if its radioactive byproducts only needed 300 years of storage instead of tens of thousands years? And they couldn't be converted into nuclear weapons?
If we moved to thorium instead of uranium, maybe the threats posed by nuclear energy would be far smaller. I kept this in mind after Karl-Henrik Robèrt mentioned thorium in a session at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola last year. There may be a future for nuclear fission that is different from the past.
Your thoughts?
Is there a place for nuclear energy in a sustainable energy system? What if its radioactive byproducts only needed 300 years of storage instead of tens of thousands years? And they couldn't be converted into nuclear weapons?
If we moved to thorium instead of uranium, maybe the threats posed by nuclear energy would be far smaller. I kept this in mind after Karl-Henrik Robèrt mentioned thorium in a session at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola last year. There may be a future for nuclear fission that is different from the past.
Your thoughts?
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Climategate - a tale... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
Hi there,
I just put this on a friend's Facebook page, and wanted again to save it somewhere.
We're pretty sure that Phil Jones at the CRU lacks tact and common sense in a lot of areas. We're pretty sure he needs to learn how to write, and not be so flippant in his emails, and use proper language that doesn't make him look like an arse if someone does happen to illegally hack his account and find his language. The Associated Press has done a good assessment of what was found in the CRU emails.
That's an objective assessment of "Climategate" - a tale... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing - scientists behaving badly doesn't change the science. Another question - I wonder what we would find if Pat Michaels, Fred Singer, Anthony Watts, Steven McIntyre and the like had their emails hacked.
We're also about as sure as it's possible to be that climate change is happening now, temperatures continue to rise, the data points to a minor slowing in the rate of increase in the last decade, but no reversal or stoppage in the growth. So, to Mr. Lott's article, the answer is, the scientific community is about as sure about climate change as it is about the ozone layer, the link between smoking and lung cancer, and evolution. Which is to say about as sure as it can be.
At the IPCC Working Group I meeting, the authors wanted to say that it's 'virtually certain' that climate change is the result of human activity, because the data points that way. Who stopped them at the plenary, and got them down to 'very likely'? China.
The IPCC document, especially the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM), is a conservative assessment of climate change, because EVERY government in the room has to agree to the text. The SPM is agreed to word-by-word by governments. This includes the US under Bush, China, India and Saudi Arabia.
I just put this on a friend's Facebook page, and wanted again to save it somewhere.
We're pretty sure that Phil Jones at the CRU lacks tact and common sense in a lot of areas. We're pretty sure he needs to learn how to write, and not be so flippant in his emails, and use proper language that doesn't make him look like an arse if someone does happen to illegally hack his account and find his language. The Associated Press has done a good assessment of what was found in the CRU emails.
That's an objective assessment of "Climategate" - a tale... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing - scientists behaving badly doesn't change the science. Another question - I wonder what we would find if Pat Michaels, Fred Singer, Anthony Watts, Steven McIntyre and the like had their emails hacked.
We're also about as sure as it's possible to be that climate change is happening now, temperatures continue to rise, the data points to a minor slowing in the rate of increase in the last decade, but no reversal or stoppage in the growth. So, to Mr. Lott's article, the answer is, the scientific community is about as sure about climate change as it is about the ozone layer, the link between smoking and lung cancer, and evolution. Which is to say about as sure as it can be.
At the IPCC Working Group I meeting, the authors wanted to say that it's 'virtually certain' that climate change is the result of human activity, because the data points that way. Who stopped them at the plenary, and got them down to 'very likely'? China.
The IPCC document, especially the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM), is a conservative assessment of climate change, because EVERY government in the room has to agree to the text. The SPM is agreed to word-by-word by governments. This includes the US under Bush, China, India and Saudi Arabia.
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