Panthera,
Based on my personal observations climate change is very much an (upper) middle-class driven initiative. It has everything to do with resource and wealth re-distribution and very little with the atmosphere. You are right though, it is about squeezing average and low-income households to breaking point, globally. Current world energy and food costs are impacted by the politics that flow from this issue amongst other things.
If this issue were truly driven by genuine and serious science we would have real and protracted debate about it. As it currently stands though, it is nothing more than shrill propaganda, scaremongering and (very successful) social engineering on a grand scale. Considering the lack of good quality science and debate, I wager that a few years from now climate change/ global warming will go into the annals of history as a grand hoax. BTW, science has clearly established that climate has never been a constant and significant changes have occurred over very small time-frames pre-industrialization. I find statements such as 'we can stop/reverse climate change' highly amusing and indicative of the ignorance and disingenuousness of climate change advocates.
Renewables are expensive and don't deliver the goods that will serve humanity with a better and egalitarian future. A case in point are hybrids, which deliver some kind of net energy benefit in city traffic, but are no more efficient than an ordinary petrol engine on the freeway. Taking into account the entire life-cycle (from production, use to the disposal)of hybrids and their higher cost, they are actually a very poor choice. There are diesel cars that are 30% cheaper, kinder to the environment and hip pocket. Studies have shown that, even with current petrol prices, it will take consumers approximately 30 years to recoup the extra cost of their hybrid purchase through petrol savings. In real terms the only positive is a warm and fuzzy feeling if one chooses not to look at the bigger picture.
Currently photovoltaic power generation is less than 50% efficient, when compared to electricity generated from fossil fuels and very much more expensive. If we were to put installations in place on a scale required to meet modern energy demands, the net outcome would be financial and environmental ruin. In the future things may very well change, but this is how it stands at the moment.
I still think that clean coal and carbon sequestering are very real and sensible options. The emerging economies will continue to use cheap coal as their primary source for energy generation, regardless of the environmental sentiments of the West. If we keep developing improved technologies for conventional fuels, not only can we keep using our own resources, but also sell them.
Energy consumption will only increase, unless we either experience a significant reduction in the world's population, some other cataclysmic or social event that throws us back to pre-industrialization. I see no merit in the current policy directions that are being formulated by industrialized nations. Carbon trading and the Kyoto protocol are a scams that cut down more trees to create imaginary value from thin air without any tangible environmental positives. These types of initiatives are designed to inveigle, obfuscate and fleece the general public.
Anyway, enough of that for now.
BTW, going back to the original topic of this post - tornadoes do occur in Germany and other parts of the world with regularity. Did you know that in India and Bangladesh more people are killed by tornadoes every year than in the US?
When I lived in the mid-western US many years ago, I experienced lots of spectacular thunderstorms, but never once a tornado. Though, in the early seventies our car got trashed by a tornado that blew through my home town of Kiel, Germany. Mum and I had gone to Hertie for some shopping and we'd parked our car opposite by the rail station, which also happened to be in the path of that tornado. We didn't know what had happened until we got outside well after the event - which is a credit to German building codes. To say the least, the place looked as if a bomb had been dropped right in the middle of the car park and our car was totalled.
Some climatologists are saying that global warming may actually reduce future tornadic and hurricane events, due to reduced temperature differences in the troposphere. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Personally, I am of the opinion that US building codes do not offer adequate protection from severe weather events.
