Fart away, Jim. You need to find some way to notify the thousands and thousands of people here in California who have already converted their energy source to solar to convince them they their lower energy bills and income are illusory. And you had better send an urgent message to Pacific Gas and Electricity, to the experts there who are wrong and should be listening to you instead. They will want to know that the increasing percentage of energy they are getting from solar sources is illusory, too. After all, you know better, and you can do a great public service here by telling people about this.

I know I have seen more organized, thoughtful papers among kids in the fifth grade. Your low grade comes from a lack of organization and coherence. I think if you went back and learned how to use a topic sentence it would add a great deal to your writing.

I have more than enough knowledge to grade any papers of yours.

OK, so you lived 30 years involved with nuclear energy and civilian nuclear plants. What's your point ?

Our energy in California has a number of sources, and we are making progress every year to diminish the need for coal plants. We have wind, solar, hydroelectric and conventional generating plants. Maybe in your neck of the woods you folks should follow suit. Sooner or later, you will do so, because eventually you will learn to do something besides complain. The way California goes, the rest of the country eventually goes, too.

When you were pumping gas it was 29 cents/gallon ? When I first started driving it was 12 cents/gallon.

My party line is definitely science. How would I know ? I have been around a lot longer than you, and I have been reading science and teaching science a great many years.

But what is your real beef here, anyway ? I mean, what's behind this outburst of insulting (but ineffective) blather ?

What did you live for 30 years ?

The only context I have is what you write in your post.

I was merely responding to your statements, some of which are false. That one about rising gasoline costs is a good example.

I was grading your paper. You want a grade ? OK. C minus.

Why not take actions now about energy and then we can have the advantages of fusion power when it comes along? This isn't going to be next year, you know.

My party line, as you call it, is determined by science, not conservative fantasy.

The EPA has jacked up the price that we pay at the pump
That must be why gasoline is less expensive now than it has been in several years.

"They have skyrocketed our electricity bills" My electricity costs haven't gone up-, or if they have, it hasn't been by much.

Now to get the "struts" replaced on your car the mechanics basically put in all new running gear and it costs a fortune. The little valves and other do dads on your engine to control emissions cost about 400 dollars each and they are plastic. That's the price you have to pay if you wqant to reduce pollution.

The worst travesty is that the fuel pumps are inside the gas tank and to change out a defective pump is a major undertaking. So what

The EPA really sounds good but it has gotten way out of control and so have the progressive nut cases in the Congress.
I planted trees every summer when I was a kid and also cut trees down to thin the forest, the Amazon has been devastated for money and the greatest source of oxygen and the demise of C02 on the planet is ailing.This is truly a shame. I think we all agree with you about this


The coal plants have suffered through horrendous EPA rulings but still exist, why? Which would you rather -- that we suffer from the emissions produced from burning coal, or that the coal plants suffer? My choice is to make the coal plants suffer.

The coal and oil fired power plants are still there even though the EPA has crippled them, because since the I***ts in the U.N. followed the lead of the U.S. and v**ed for a moratorium on Nuclear energy, following the knee jerk reaction after Chernobil in the old soviet Union. You are getting incoherent here

No nukes, you have to keep the grid going so that you have lights in your classroom to indoctrinate the kids in the truest Bill Ayers fashion.I will certainly do my best to indoctrinate by telling them the t***h

It is unlikely that I can plant enough trees to offset even .000001 percent of the CO2 problem, but you could always get out there and do the same thing to help. I have a neighbor who h**es trees and has cut every one of them on her lot down. The dirt bags, as you call them, who burned coal way back included most of the electricity generation plants in the country The situation isn't helped by the fact that conservatives/Republicans want to do away with all regulation and do away with the Environmental Protection Agency. But they will never succeed.

I can do my part by vigorously teaching my pupils in school as much as I can about g****l w*****g and c*****e c****e. Since the subject is part of the prescribed curriculum, you can be darn sure I do and will continue to do so.

Hey, Terry, try this one on for size. It comes from Scientific American.

News 7 Email Print
This article is from the In-Depth Report 400 PPM: What's Next for a Warming Planet
CO2 Levels for February Eclipsed Prehistoric Highs
G****l w*****g is headed back to the future as the CO2 level reaches a new high
March 5, 2015 |By David Biello
earth-atmosphere-from-space


More and more carbon dioxide molecules are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere.
Astronaut photograph from International Space Station courtesy of NASA.
February is one of the first months since before months had names to boast carbon dioxide concentrations at 400 parts per million.* Such CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have likely not been seen since at least the end of the Oligocene 23 million years ago, an 11-million-year-long epoch of gradual climate cooling that most likely saw CO2 concentrations drop from more than 1,000 ppm. Those of us alive today breathe air never tasted by any of our ancestors in the entire Homo genus.

Homo sapiens sapiens—that’s us—has subsisted for at least 200,000 years on a planet that has oscillated between 170 and 280 ppm, according to records preserved in air bubbles trapped in ice. Now our species has burned enough f****l f**ls and cut down enough trees to push CO2 to 400 ppm—and soon beyond. Concentrations rise by more than two ppm per year now. Raising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to 0.04 percent may not seem like much but it has been enough to raise the world's annual average temperature by a total of 0.8 degree Celsius so far. More warming is in store, thanks to the lag between CO2 emissions and the extra heat each molecule will trap over time, an ever-thickening blanket wrapped around the planet in effect. Partially as a result of this atmospheric change, scientists have proposed that the world has entered a new geologic epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene and marked by this climate shift, among other indicators.

keeling-curve-graph-february-2015

We aren't done yet. Greater concentrations will be achieved, thanks to all the existing coal-fired power plants, more than a billion cars powered by internal combustion on the roads today and yet more clearing of forests. That's despite an avowed goal to stop at 450 ppm, the number broadly (if infirmly) linked to an average temperature rise of no more than 2 degrees C. More likely, by century's end enough CO2 will have been spewed from burning long-buried stores of fossilized sunshine to raise concentrations to 550 ppm or more, enough to raise average annual temperatures by as much as 6 degrees C in the same span. That may be more c*****e c****e than human civilization can handle, along with many of the other animals and plants living on Earth, already stressed by other human encroachments. The planet will be fine though; scientists have surmised from long-term records in rock that Earth has seen levels beyond 1,000 ppm in the past.

The current high levels of CO2 have spurred calls, most recently from the National Academy of Sciences, to develop technologies to retrieve carbon from the atmosphere. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on C*****e C****e relies for that on growing plants, burning them instead of coal to produce electricity, capturing the resulting CO2 in the smokestack and burying it—or in the argot: BECCS, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, a few examples of which are scattered around the globe. Other schemes range from artificial trees to scour the skies of excess CO2 to fertilizing the oceans with iron and having diatoms do the invisible work for us.

C*****e c****e is inevitable and, if history is any guide to what can be expected, so, too, may be regime change. A few years of diminished rainfall and attendant bad harvests have been enough in the past to fell empires, such as in Mesopotamia or China. The world's current roster of nations struggles to hash out a global plan to cut the pollution that causes c*****e c****e, which currently stands at 90 pages of negotiating text. In addition, one nation has submitted its individual plan (or "individual nationally determined contribution," INDC in the argot) to accomplish this feat—Switzerland.

The plans of China, the European Union and the U.S. are already broadly known, if not formally submitted. Together, they are both the biggest steps ever taken to address g****l w*****g and likely insufficient to prevent too much c*****e c****e, scientific analyses suggest. The E.U., U.S. and China remain reliant on f****l f**ls and the world is slow to change that habit thus far. In fact, China has become the world's largest polluter and millions of Chinese have lifted themselves out of poverty with the power from burning more and more coal, a trick India hopes to follow in the near future.

For the Swiss, the bulk of pollution comes from driving cars and controlling the climate inside buildings. Their long-term plan is "to reduce per capita emissions to one–1.5 tonnes CO2-equivalent," the INDC states. "These unavoidable emissions will have to be eventually compensated through sinks or removals." In a world that spews more and more CO2 but needs to get to below zero emissions, bring on those sinks and removals. In the meantime the sawtooth record of rising atmospheric CO2 levels moves ever upward and March 2015 will likely be the name of the next month to boast levels above 400 ppm.

*Correction (3/16/15): This sentence was edited after the original posting to correct an error.