Global warming and science consensus data.

Lets say the skeptics are right and all the scientists wrong, so we go ahead and build an economy based around alternatives to fossil fuels and produce a new renewable economy that cleans up the air and stops all the pollution of the rivers and land that result from mining for fossil reserves, well ok it cost a bit but the world is cleaner and sustainable indefinitely into the future for all our kids and their kids and so on.

Lets then say oops the skeptics were wrong after all, result at worst we lose the entire planet, at best it costs us trillions upon trillions decade after decade trying to cope with the changes and we still face the eventual loss of a technological civilization because we haven't built sustainable energy environment.

I don't know about you but I like modern technology, I like being able press a button and get light, I like going to the movies and having fresh food in my house that lasts a long time because I have a fridge and freezer, I would dearly like for my kids to have access to these benefits of modern technology for all of their lives too.

Climate science results are expressed as level's of probability there is no other way it can be done, so yes there may be a chance albeit unlikely that the climate modeler's have it wrong, but using that as an argument to just keep the status quo, full steam ahead, drain the oil burn all the coal, forget about the pollution it doesn't matter, well when you find out you're wrong it will simply be too late.

Alternative energy sources are beneficial in their own right and the climate argument is not required to justify that path for the human race.

At the end of the day all of the energy we use is derived from Solar in one way or another (almost, there are two exceptions but I will explain them later).

The reason I say that is that plant biomass is created by photosynthesis which is not very efficient but was a bloody clever thing that nature figured out, photosynthesis takes light, water and carbon dioxide and turns it into complex organics and oxygen, the trees and the plants we eat literally appear out of thin air that's where their carbon comes from, the sun provides the energy to make the reaction happen, it's not quick and it's not particularly efficient but it's the basis of life on this planet. You should understand that photosynthesis does not just occur on land it occurs in the ocean as well via Phytoplankton, when these things die some of their mass get locked into carbon deposits either at the bottom of the ocean or on land over milllenia and eventually end up as oil, gas and coal millions of years later, it's all stored sunlight all of it. Some form of biology acted as the intermediary but what we get back when we burn fossil fuels is effectively fossil sunlight, in the space of a few hundred years we will release millions of years of stored energy.

The other two sources of power are Nuclear (materials created back long before our Sun came into existence) all the heavy radionuclides were created in Supernovae explosions billions of years ago so again the power comes from a star, the next source is tidal and that comes from gravity, there is a tiny conversion of mass to energy both on earth and in the moon to power the tides and a transfer of angular momentum from the earth to the moon that is accelerating it away from us through a form of friction. By the way geothermal power is effectively Nuclear in origin as the core of our planet is effectively a giant nuclear reactor, if it wasn't it would have solidified long ago.

So that's a long winded preamble to explaining why solar cells are not cheap or very efficient.

Ok lets start on that, the very best plants (the green living variety ) get up to about 7% efficiency at converting light to sugars via photosynthesis, so biofuel is going to be something that requires vast amounts of land and huge processing in order to produce the kind of volume of fuel we need. On the other hand the best solar panels get about a 20% efficiency converting incident light directly to power, now that sounds pretty damn good but compare it to fossil fuels that had the advantage of building up their store of energy over millions of years and even at 1% to 7% conversion efficiency the fossils win hands down because they had so much time to store all that chemical energy in that barrel of oil or ton of coal.

Solar cells and panels need complex manufacturing and rare earth materials that are in limited supply, most of the material needed are found in China and precious few elsewhere, but even at that with the application of industrial scale production these days the prices are coming down ever faster, there is also the chance that theoretical conversion rates of 50% could be achieved one day in the future but they are never going to be dirt cheap, not without some miracle breakthrough in material science or unless we get new easily accessible rare earth elements, that's not impossible by the way, there are significant amounts of rare earth's available at the bottom of the ocean.

So the real issue should be asking ourselves what the return on investment on fossil fuels has been, cheap to dig out, cheap to burn but nobody ever put a price on the crappy air quality the pollution from the mining and what the price is if the Climate Change scientists are right, might have been cheap for 250 years then bloody expensive as we try to fix the planet. Solar is expensive but it is getting cheaper, same for wind, tidal has its problems as it generally has an environmental impact.

While they are expensive, when you look at solar or wind from the viewpoint of the long term cost of fixing 250 years of fossil use then maybe they aren't that expensive, when you ask science to produce a super efficient solar cell cheaply you are asking scientists to invent something vastly better than anything nature has produced and that is a very very tall order.

I am not averse to Nuclear but no one single alternative could fill the role of fossil fuel, to replace fossil fuel with nuclear alone would require hundreds of new nuclear stations worldwide every week, it's not physically possible, likewise none of the other options scale up quick enough on their own hence the whole conservation response i.e. cut down on energy use and make everything as efficient as you possibly can, in a lot of ways we are already stuffed to be honest.

The problem is that folk just don't 'get it' in their heads, the amount of power we actually use to run this planet and the number of people we have on it, it's huge and it's a huge problem to fix and whatever we do it won't be cheap.

I've not proofed this response in detail yet so I might change it as I go along, took a bit of time to put together as it's all me own words but I did have to cross reference my facts as I don't remember all the numbers in detail these days

It's a good point John but while the industrial base that manufactures these things is still based on a largely hydrocarbon economy they still have an emissions price, i don't know the numbers but only a tiny proportion of the worlds energy is renewable so all industry must still be costed in carbon terms when we look at the cost of individual products.

Still very much in favor of electric bikes though (ex motorcyclist) would love to see the TT one day always missed it when I was in IOM as a kid, apart from anything else the torque available from electric motors puts all internal combustion engines to shame and torque is what bikers and petrol heads really like, especially when it is prolonged!

Sorry I skipped over your posts John, very interesting in the context of the IOM, you can do stuff like this in a small community but scale is always the question, however I feel we need all scales and so this kind of project makes sense wherever and whenever it can be effectively implemented!

The Germans have been one of the two big producers of Solar panels, it's true Germany will probably be in a position to switch off all nuclear by that time but they will still be using a large amount of fossil fuel even then.

Organic Polymer cells I had vaguely heard of they are low efficiency compared to others but obviously a much simpler technology, and there then is another good reason to stop burning all that oil as we need it as the raw feedstock for these kind of polymers amongst a million other uses.

I'm back at work so I can't go into big long posts during the day