A dramatic reduction in dependence on foreign sources is doable, and a great idea, but it ain’t independence. Get used to that idea, and stop with the delusional fantasies.

No such thing as using “renewables” only. Bad idea.

No way can we become fully sustainable in a decade with renewables only, like that crackpot Obama ad promised. Not possible, and not a good idea. It shouldn’t even be attempted.

We will need to use oil and coal for decades to come. Bringing along other sources is a great idea, and should be done aggressively, but not as a crash program. Let’s get real about this and act like grownups on energy issues. Yes, bring back nuclear — if it’s good enough for Stewart Brand, it should be good enough for everyone else.

Drilling on dry land is as necessary as off-shore drilling. I call it the “1% Solution.” 1% of the total U.S. land mass, and of the continental shelf parts of the oceans bounding the U.S. are all we need to stake out for drilling. We can’t spare one freakin’ percent?

It’s not true that we must discourage drilling and also artificially raise the price of gasoline to coerce people into going for renewables. That’s nonsense. The push for alternate energy is strong enough now that it doesn’t require coercion and bullying of an American citizenry that just got fleeced for a trillion dollars (and counting) for all these bailouts. What is the upside of pissing off millions of potential voters?

Also, and I know this from painful experience and observing others, it is so easy to introduce experimenter bias into a computer model, even when you are diligently trying to avoid that. When you have an emotional stake in the results, experimenter bias is almost guaranteed. And these folks obviously have an emotional stake, since their reaction to critics and skeptics isn’t to defend their results, but is to compare the skeptics to Holocast deniers or to say they are committing crimes against humanity. (Trials for heresy, anyone?)

Michael Crichton was right. Environmentalism changed from a legitimate and useful concern about excess pollution to a secular religion. We are about to get the theocracy that the liberals warned us about, except it won’t be submission to Christ or Allah, but to Gaia.

A more important question is, “Is this the right kind of data to use to answer the first question?” I don’t know the answer to that one. I expect Roy Spencer does.

The intelligent design thing is an issue. Non-AGW is a minority view within climate science. Intelligent design is way out there. Many great scientists have held some extremely strange and just plain wrong ideas on subjects outside of their formal areas of expertise so maybe it should just be ignored.

On the other hand non-AGW and ID do seem to come a set more often than you would expect if people were thinking about them idependently. Why is that?

That’s particularly sardonic as one of the first great changes that protected whales was the shift to petroleum (kerosene) for lighting; and the switch to coal allowed the forests to re-grow.

Cut……nose……face.

Then we can enjoy reading by that renewable resource: Whale oil lamps.

It’s a real problem for people who care about the environment and don’t want the effort to save it to get a bad name by these people. Beware the backlash!

One common method of modelling complex systems such as a climate model is to just stick in a constant for all those variables that you don’t want to deal with. Doesn’t do a lot for accuracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)