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Politics : View from the Center and Left

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To: Cogito who wrote (62992)5/2/2008 3:09:53 PM
From: Sam  Read Replies (1) of 541991
 
>>Coal is sustainable. We have coal stores out the wazoo.<<

Karen -

Our supply is finite. Thus, coal is not sustainable.

Even if coal would "last" for several hundred years, it still is not sustainable unless we have a way to remove the CO2 emissions. The environment won't remain in a habitable condition for hundreds of years if we (and others like China and India) keep burning coal like we have been doing over the past decade.

Some scientists--notably Jim Hansen, who has been studying this problem for over 2 decades now, think we may have already reached a tipping point where the positive feedbacks will overwhelm us in the lifetimes of some people already alive--perhaps many people already alive, no one can really be sure. To many unknowns, both unknown unknowns and known unknowns--the latter includes just how quickly the polar ice sheets will melt; last summer, they melted as much as the best guess of the IPCC consensus thought they would melt by 2035 or so--it is all happening much more quickly than the conservative IPCC consensus view suggested just last year.
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