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Chapter 1 begins by stressing the severity of climate change (CC) and showing how, contrary to popular belief, atomic energy is not a viable solution to CC. Many scientists and most market proponents agree that renewable energy and energy efficiencies are better options. The chapter also shows that government subsidies for oil and nuclear power are the result of flawed science, poor ethics, short-term thinking, and special-interest influence. The chapter has 7 sections, the first of which surveys four major components of the energy crisis. These are oil addiction, non-CC-related deaths from fossil-fuel pollution, nuclear-weapons proliferation, and catastrophic CC. The second section summarizes some of the powerful evidence for global CC. The third section uses historical, ahistorical, Rawlsian, and utilitarian ethical principles to show how developed nations, especially the US, are most responsible for human-caused CC. The fourth section shows why climate-change skeptics, such as “deniers” who doubt CC is real, and “delayers” who say that it should not yet be addressed, have no valid objections. Instead, they all err scientifically and ethically. The fifth section illustrates that all modern scientific methods—and scientific consensus since at least 1995—confirm the reality of global CC. Essentially all expert-scientific analyses published in refereed, scientific-professional journals confirm the reality of global CC. The sixth section of the chapter shows how fossil-fuel special interests have contributed to the continued CC debate largely by paying non-experts to deny or challenge CC. The seventh section of the chapter provides an outline of each chapter in the book, noting that this book makes use of both scientific and ethical analyses to show why nuclear proponents’ arguments err, why CC deniers are wrong, and how scientific-methodological understanding can advance sound energy policy—including conservation, renewable energy, and energy efficiencies.

A November 2009 poll by the Pew Foundation showed that two-thirds of Americans mistakenly believe that scientists disagree about global warming. One possible reason for this is that an industry of denial has mounted a successful public relations campaign, employing the same small set of apostate scientists to claim that global warming is false, or at least nothing to worry about, many of whom formerly applied their skills to denying that smoking causes lung cancer. A review the list of “experts” to whom the media turn to “balance” the opinions of mainstream scientists shows that the same handful of names turns up. These names also reappear in books that deny global warming, in the list of speakers at a Heartland Institute Conference, and in the list of “fellows” or “research associates” of the denier organizations. This chapter shines a spotlight on a sample of the scientist-deniers and their claims. These include the grandfather of global warming denial, S. Fred Singer; the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT Richard Lindzen; and senior fellow at the Cato Institute Patrick Michaels.

The nuclear winter did not generate excitement among the public, but spurred nuclear analysts and policy experts to contemplate on the issues. Carl Sagan and his fellow nuclear winter proponents ultimately failed to convince the federal government to study the political consequences of the phenomenon. Nevertheless, it sparked a large and rich outpouring of policy ideas and analyses and gave planners the option to pursue nuclear arms expansion, arms control, or do nothing. This chapter examines some of the policy issues in the debate over nuclear winter. It looks at S. Fred Singer’s views about a threshold for climatic effects as well as strategic and tactical nuclear weapons. It also discusses Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.

A number of prominent scientists and would-be scientists argue that humans are not responsible for global climate change and sea-level rise. Their goal is to discredit the notion that humans are responsible for sea-level rise and to prevent the expenditure of large amounts of money that will be required to respond to the sea-level rise. Much of the funding support for these individuals comes from the petroleum industry, either directly or indirectly. Their goal is to continue the high rate of useage of CO2 producing petroleum products.

Well, the story of the K/AR ages of Iron meteorites ended not with a bang but a whimper. We were at a loss to explain them, so for the moment we concentrated on tuning up the experiment, trying to find some error in our technique. We couldn’t. Yet clearly something was wrong. By this time Rancitelli had measured a large number of meteorites, so we thought of plotting the measured ages against the argon contents: if there was any truth at all to the ages, they should be proportional to the argon. They weren’t. The data showed nothing but scatter. Just for fun we plotted the ages against the potassium content—and there was a definite anticorrelation! No question about it, there it was: the more the potassium, the lower the age. Not only that, but the extrapolated end point at the high potassium end gave an age of just about 4.6 billion years! The whole story—the high potassium-argon ages, the ten-billion-year story—was due to leakage of potassium from the meteorites. It had never occurred to us. We had expected that if anything, during weathering on earth and during our cutting and cleaning of the meteorites, they might lose argon, since argon is a gas and loosely bound; if they had, the true ages would be even higher than our measured values. Now we realized—well, hypothesized—that since the argon is formed in a radioactive decay it comes with a burst of kinetic energy and might well lodge itself in the iron matrix, where it would stick while the potassium slips out. Monday morning quarterbacking. Hindsight. So there went five years of my life. Trying to measure the potassium-argon ages of iron meteorites turned out to be a useless endeavor, a waste of time. Damn you, Stoenner and Zähringer! All in all, it wasn’t a great year. I was finishing my fifth year at Cornell, and was due to be either promoted and given tenure or kicked out.