Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ago (
as it was called), the language in some
of those emails led some to conclude that the temperature
results had been manipulated. My friend raised the money
to do an independent analysis, put together an extremely
sophisticated group of statisticians, and did a complete
reanalysis of all the temperature data, getting the same
results as the IPCC. He is now a believer; call this epiph-
any by statistics.
Some green technologies have shown greater promise
since
“
Climategate,
”
, while others, particularly biofuels, have failed
to live up to their early promise. Wind and solar electri-
city have proved to be effective at small scale, but hard to
use at large scale because of their variability, which is not
balanced by large-scale, affordable energy storage that can
be used to smooth the
fluctuations.
The Fukushima nuclear accident in
has led some
countries to move away from nuclear energy while others
are going full-speed ahead.
In the United States, the shale-gas revolution has so
lowered the cost of natural gas as to make it an effective
transitional fuel to help move along a necessary change in
our energy usage while lowering the cost of electricity and
reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The potential supply
of shale gas in other regions is still uncertain, but it may
well be that there is much more waiting to be exploited
which would have worldwide impact.
There are still big problems on the policy front. The
Kyoto Protocol
which was supposed to place legally
binding obligations on the developed countries to reduce
emissions
-
-
has been a failure. In my opinion it was a silly
idea in the
first place because there was never a mechan-
ism to enforce its so-called legally binding commitment.
