Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
was in the bookstores in April of
years
after I had moved from physics to energy as my main
work. Its contents back then re
, roughly
under-
standing of the issues and the technology that might be
used to confront them, and aimed to tell the reader what
we knew, how we knew it, what the uncertainties were,
and what we might do about the climate problem. Five
years have passed, and although almost everything is still
basically correct, a tune-up is in order to tell what
advances and what retreats have been made in all the areas
in the past
ected my
five years, and what has been happening on the
policy front.
There is also a need to take a view broader than just
climate change when thinking about and planning an
energy future that takes into account the aspirations of
the developing world and the national security interests of
all. Just telling a poor nation that they have to do some-
thing about climate change is not enough to get action if
that action will keep them poor for a longer time; more
about this later.
On the climate front, there is a new report [
] from
Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC). It is highly technical, and the
analysis strengthens the case that climate change is real
and that we are responsible. I am not sure that it means
much to the non-expert to have the experts say that the
probability that human activity is the cause of the tem-
perature rise in the past
years has gone from very
likely to extremely likely. More meaningful might be the
conversion of an old friend at Berkeley from climate-
change skeptic to believer. After the hacking of the emails
from the University of East Anglia in England a few years
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