http://www.dailytech.com/Myth+of+Consensus+Explodes+APS+Opens+Global+Warming+Debate/article12403.htm

And people are overly afraid of nuclear energy. It takes a near catastrophic disaster combined with extreme negligence to create a nuclear meltdown, and in reality coal power plants produce more nuclear byproducts than nuclear plants:

From Scientific American

The result: estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities. At one extreme, the scientists estimated fly ash radiation in individuals’ bones at around 18 millirems (thousandths of a rem, a unit for measuring doses of ionizing radiation) a year. Doses for the two nuclear plants, by contrast, ranged from between three and six millirems for the same period. And when all food was grown in the area, radiation doses were 50 to 200 percent higher around the coal plants.

The biggest problem with nuclear energy is the waste produced by the power plants, but over the lifespan of the plant there is actually less waste than most power plants that simply dump CO2 into the atmosphere.

There is risk in believing CO2 global warming.

Retreat of Glaciers

We can argue until we’re blue in the face whether this is natural or man-made destruction. We can also look at increased CO2 since the turn of the last century and we can also look at increased temperatures.
Even if you don’t want to put two and two together, the first and most logical step would be to look at the current situation and take steps at reducing the increase of CO2 emissions (unless you think increasing CO2 is completely fine – at which point the debate here is over). This takes time and money, and CO2 isn’t going to decrease on its own.
I understand that some people don’t want to believe that man has an effect on the global environment, but what I don’t understand is why advanced nations would rather wait to see if it’s true. Let’s say that 20 years from now we finally determine that it was our fault all along. Any changes to CO2 production will most likely take 10 years to implement and an additional 10 – 50 years to have any effect. It’s an extremely large gamble to continue to wait for concrete evidence.

And there are lots of reasons that developing nations won’t have access to nuclear power, but I doubt that it is the fault of diverting money to environmental groups. Take the US for example. The EPA has a yearly budget of $7.1 billion dollars. At the same time, the war in Iraq is costing us $12 billion dollars per month.
Second, I would argue that most developing nations won’t have access to nuclear technology because of the fear of terrorism. Nuclear power has a huge stigma attached to it, and that won’t go away any time soon.

The new age of Science will not be ruled by theories or facts (be they generally accepted or ridden with holes). Given our increasing computational ability to hoard data and process it, conflict-resolution (environmental or otherwise) will simply be determined by looking at data trends. That means Takeda’s data may indeed show a current (and perhaps time-limited) trend that certain types of recycling have no significant benefits; but differing factors in the future could change those trends.

Theories are called “theories” for a reason: they are not perfect, and do not describe some law that can be applied on a global scale indefinitely. “Data Science” simply aims to dispel the illusion that “theory” is the goal. Why bother trying to develop a theory or pursue a consensus? All we really care about is the raw data, and it’s right there in front of us.

Saying that the scientific community agrees on something means very little. In the 1970s the National Science Board warned of man-made global cooling, and that we were headed into a new ice age.

“During the last 20-30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade.” – 1974.

You can apply that quote almost directly to what we see in the media today! Just change “fallen” to “risen”.

That developing nations will not have access to nuclear energy is partially the fault of developed nations having money diverted by environmental groups for earth studies, instead of investing it in TRUE aid. (Not food, but a means to independence.) What the developed world is doing is giving fish to the poor instead of teaching them how to go fishing themselves.

Medical doctors can be intelligent people, but they may not know a whole lot about CO2 emissions, solar activity, and similar topics. At least not enough to discredit a theory without having done research themselves.

Graph of surface temperatures

Also, global warming can cause lowered temperatures. You have to take into account the entire climate and how the pieces fit together. For example, Greenland consists mainly of glaciers. Because of global warming the glaciers are melting at an increasing rate and pouring a tremendous amount of fresh water into the surrounding ocean which in turn lowers the salt content of the currents and depresses the Gulf Stream – this would change all of the weather patterns in Europe. Also heat transfer slows down because there is less difference between the cold and hot regions.

Why ice at Greenland is important

If people like this are wrong and we’re not doing anything to help the environment: we’re screwed.

You first said:

Progress, according to humanity, is simply to make attempts are doing various things in various ways and experiment – which is, in actual fact, quite confluent with how nature works anyway.

Then you say:

That’s what they said when they found RUBBER, and OIL.

So are you advocating for progress or for stopping?

There was ‘consensus’ on eugenics in the early part of the last century. Just because a lot of scientists think an idea is sound doesn’t make it so.

I tend to take most of what scientists and experts say with a pinch of salt, it all sounds like handbags at dawn to me

Burning plastic always releases extremely toxic chemicals into the air no matter how high-tech the incinerator. Tokyo has one of the worst air quality ratings in the world. Air pollution is only the beginning. The price of crude oil drives up the price of anything not made of recycled plastic.

This is not the time to sit back and chill like this professor is advocating. We can look at this in two ways – either we do nothing and hope for the best in the future like Takeda says, or we can make a concerted effort now to improve technology as it exists. The first one leaves no room for error, the second choice gets the ball rolling early.

Of course recycling takes more energy. The purpose of recycling is not to ‘get rid’ of trash, though. It’s to reuse garbage in other ways – i.e. reduce the amount of resources being consumed. Not to mention that burning garbage releases dioxins into the air.

And just take a look at the global warming page on wiki:

The average global air temperature near the Earth’s surface increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the hundred years ending in 2005.[1] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas concentrations”[1] via an enhanced greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward.[2][3]

These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least thirty scientific societies and academies of science,[4] including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.[5][6][7] While individual scientists have voiced disagreement with some findings of the IPCC,[8] the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC’s main conclusions.

There are so many holes in everything he says, it’s hard to know where to begin. The only thing of value in this interview is his ‘observation’ of how using biofuels causes food shortages. Anybody and their brother can see this just by looking at the price of corn.

He says the energy crisis is nothing to worry about because in 40 years nuclear energy will be safer and more efficient. He fails to mention that developing nations probably won’t have access to nuclear energy (lack of building funds and nuclear fuel) and also that cars and factories don’t run on nuclear energy – they run on fossil fuels. Unless you come up with an alternative to these fuels, nuclear energy doesn’t do squat.

Seriously, his idea of progress is to sit around and do nothing while hoping that human ingenuity will pull us through these issues. It takes planning and government subsidies to get research moving, and it takes careful planning to market new alternatives to the public. Sounds to me like he’s just going against common sense to sell books.