2014 was one of the 3% coldest years in the last 10,000

I don't think anyone is, no. Which is good, because it means that the advocates for all renewable, all the time, aren't quite off their rockers yet. And realize that even they aren't capable of such a feat, so it becomes difficult to that obvious hypocrisy to be sold to the less enthusiastic.

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As opposed to those of us in science based engineering-stan, particularly those of us who get 13%+ of our electricity from wind, and maybe another 20% from solar panels on the garage roof. So my number in engineering-stan runs about 33%, and I'm not in hydro land, so I can't get REALLY good numbers, but I do okay.

 

Let me demonstrate what the serious people are actually talking about.

http://unsdsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/US-Deep-Decarbonization-Report.pdf

"Deep Decarbonization" refers to an 80% reduction in USA CO2 emissions by 2050, and the study looks at costs of getting there.

Their conclusion is that the cheapest option is roughly a 50/50 mix of nuclear power and renewables, that being around a third of the cost of an all-renewables system. Wait. Weren't those dirty hippies supposed to hate nuclear power?

As everyone points out, renewables aren't reliable, and grid outages are not acceptable. In a mostly-renewables strategy, renewables would have to be overbuilt by around a factor of four, so that one area where the wind is blowing could deliver power to an area without wind. That would cost big. Having the big nuclear baseline would prevent the need for overbuilding, and save money.

The cost of that high-nuclear strategy is about 1% of GDP, which is rather unlikely to destroy the economy or make all poor people starve to death.

 

What's wrong with a high-natural gas strategy? At the end of the day something like natural gas is established and reasonably priced, new nuclear going forward certainly might be more expensive than some folks are going to be happy with. I'm pretty happy with panels myself, I think they should be required on all new single family home construction in at least all the places in the country where the sun might shine.

 

Natgas is certainly useful in the short term for reducing emissions. And in the long term, it can make up a part of the "20% of current emissions" target. A few natgas plants that can fire up fast would be useful for the grid.

However, in the long term, natgas has a problem in that it will eventually run out. And that using it reduces CO2 emissions some, but not enough that a pure natgas strategy could work.

 

Still haven't proved it dude.

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Maybe someday you'll learn what an experiment is. And oh by the way electricity costs are going up I don't care what you say you can't prove that you haven't proven it thanks for playing

 

weird, was warmer here then normal.... republicans use local temps to disprove it's warmer then normal, so guess I will use my local temp to say it's warmer then normal

climate change is a tricky thing, could we be pushing back the next ice age, might if have been even colder had it not been for global warming?

we have a lot to learn about mother nature.....

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Ball

If you are going to make an argument about the science, it is frequently useful to argue it from the standpoint of the actual science, not from the opinions of political writers frequenting agenda-driven political blogs.