[You can] Hunt down sources that are more careful in getting it all right, not just the parts requiring a corrective. The scientists at RealClimate, while tending towards the technical, are very patient with handling comments from laypeople. While most of those tend to be from inchoate (and sometimes genuinely naive) skeptics, there are also people who come more despairing than necessary. Their "start here" page is also a wealth of sober explanation:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/
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Excellent point.
And actually, what I neglected to mention earlier is that the arguments of Lovelock, Paltridge and their fellow travelers, which also come up among my non-wingnut yet strong denialist or on-the-fence friends and associates -- in fact, I learned about Paltridge from one of these chaps -- give me an opportunity to point people towards sources such as Real Climate which I've followed since its launch.
Come to think of it (and this is just occurring to me as I type) what I *really* appreciate about the Lovelocks and Paltridges of the world is just that since, as you pointed out, the questions they raise are covered more comprehensively within the field.
Michael Pollak wrote:
[Your discussion of long-term radioactive waste management] seems to skip over my length of time point. Any solution to nuclear waste disposal that depends on social arrangements is not a solution because social arrangements cannot plausibly be expected to endure over even a tiny fraction of the relevant time frame. So the only conceivable solution would be purely technical solution, e.g., a means of making the stuff permanently non-radioactive and non-reactive.
...
Oh, you probably know me well enough to guess that I'm all about research into neutralization and/or transuranium transmutation which, as you wrote, is probably the best case, future-proof, scenario. There are contending proposals (for example, I'm curious about the viability and risks of plutonium/thorium fuel designs) and the usual amount of snake oil-ish claims.
Still, a necessary pursuit.
.d.