by Chris Wiegard

Created on: December 26, 2010   Last Updated: December 28, 2010

In a perfect world, the human race could deal with the burgeoning energy demand of seven billion humans while successfully meeting and defeating the dangers of global warming. Humans, however, do not live in that perfect world. For the past twenty years, climatologists have watched in growing concern while human energy demands have quickly grown, and have continued to be met by the use of fossil fuels.  This process has pumped billions of tons of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into our skies, resulting in a gradual increase in global temperatures due to the heat trapping characteristics of these gases.

Climatologist James Hansen argues in his book “Storms of our Grandchildren”, that the human race needs to drive the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere back down to 350 parts per million. We are already up to 388 ppm, and the level is rising at an increasing rate. Hansen looks at the potential energy generating solutions to the problem. There is solar, and there is wind, but so far in the global scheme of things, these two technologies do not add up to a big slice of the energy “pie.”  Hansen argues that if the human race takes nuclear power off the table, the shift to renewable power probably happens too slowly to get the job done of driving greenhouse gas levels down to a sustainable level before the human race experiences serious consequences such as sea level rise.

The problem of global warming is an immediate and pressing threat that forces us to plan with clarity and purpose. It poses the question: What do humans need to fear most? Twenty years ago with memories of the Chernobyl disaster fresh, it might have been logical for the human race to fear nuclear power more than climate change, but more recent discoveries are changing that equation.  Global warming has the clear ability now to raise worldwide sea levels by as much as two hundred feet if it results in the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps. If you compare that to Chernobyl, probably the worst possible case of human incompetence and folly in managing a nuclear power plant, climate change is by far the greater danger.  Compare Chernobyl, a regional emergency that killed hundreds of people through radiation exposure and eventual increases in cancer rates, to climate change, a global emergency that endangers the future descendants of the entire human race. There is no contest as to which of the two we should fear more. Yes, nuclear

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>