Excellent article and very worth reading. I have to wonder how many actually read the whole thing, though.
Good article all the way through, except at end where he unfortunately gives credence to the “CO2 is bad” argument by proposing agricultural carbon sinks. Good energy and economics comparisons.
[nuke probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) models said meltdown could be handled. I think he discounts that too readily as a ‘detail.’ IPCC AGW models really ARE fraudulent and could be proven as such in a court of law-where the EPA edangerment finding may end up (a la “State of Fear” novel by Crichton. Nuke PRAs could model a physical event and take defense in depth steps to simply remove heat]
Thirty years ago, the case against nuclear power was framed as the “Zero-Infinity Dilemma.” The risks of a meltdown might be vanishingly small, but if it happened, the costs would be infinitely large, so we should forget about uranium. Computer models demonstrated that meltdowns were highly unlikely and that the costs of a meltdown, should one occur, would be manageable—but greens scoffed: huge computer models couldn’t be trusted. So we ended up burning much more coal. The software shoe is on the other foot now; the machines that said nukes wouldn’t melt now say that the ice caps will. Warming skeptics scoff in turn, and can quite plausibly argue that a planet is harder to model than a nuclear reactor. But that’s a detail. From a rhetorical perspective, any claim that the infinite, the apocalypse, or the Almighty supports your side of the argument shuts down all further discussion.