Hopefully everyone has seen this and I’m beating a dead horse, but it bears repeating and reposting and sharing.
I’ll just post this image.
The World Meteorological Organization did something very basic in this chart. (The full report is here.) Basically, they took the average temperature for each decade from 1881 to 2010.
The trend is stunning.
Global warming is happening. There’s no skepticism to be had. Nine of the ten warmest years on record have been since 2000.
Regardless of whether you think it is caused by humans or not, global warming is happening.
However, we KNOW that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. This is a simple fact of basic chemistry and physics. Anyone who denies this is a moron. Sorry, but it’s true. A denier of this fact is someone who has willfully chosen to be ignorant.
Now, we take these two known facts and come to a simple conclusion. To reduce the average temperature of Earth, we should reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
We simply must stop using fossil fuels as primary sources of electrical energy and transportation. We have other options now. We need to start using them.
Check this graph out.
This is from the US Energy Information Administration (here) and shows the US use of fuel various fuel sources. Yes coal has gone down from it’s peak (2-3 years ago) by almost 5 Quadrillion BTUs and petroleum has dropped as well, but natural gas has gone up. Now, I prefer NG to the others for a variety of reasons, but it’s still pumping 250 million year old carbon into the atmosphere.
There is a spot of good news. The International Energy Agency has posted a report that renewables will produce 1/4 of all the world’s power by 2018. By 2016, renewables (including hydro) are expected to exceed that from gas and be double that of nuclear power.
The question is, will it be a fast enough transition?
