Personally I think that the idea that these trends can ever be revered by some sort of world wide agreement to lower consumption is a pipe dream. People want to eat meat and drive cars and fly on airplanes. As long as they're rich enough to do so you'll never stop them.
The only solution to this problem is technology. Some combination of green energy sources plus probably very large scale terraforming.
The problem is that costs are subsidized by basically letting businesses destroy the environment. The solution should be simple: add lots of taxes, let the off-the-shelf cost of meat and gasoline reflect the real cost to our environment, make deforestation a crime, tax the shit out of all polluting industries and if a country is not participating add taxes on imports from said country, or ban those imports altogether.
As long as the burning of fossil fuels keeps being dirt cheap, there's no incentive for innovation.
You mentioned meat - if governments would tax the current CAFO practices in accordance to the destruction of the environment and of our health, the consumption of meat would go down because of the price, but that meat would end up being raised with sustainable farming practices, on organic grass, locally grown, as that would prove to be the cheaper way to raise meat and so it would have a higher quality.
"The problem is that costs are subsidized by basically letting businesses destroy the environment. The solution should be simple: add lots of taxes, let the off-the-shelf cost of meat and gasoline reflect the real cost to our environment, make deforestation a crime, tax the shit out of all polluting industries and if a country is not participating add taxes on imports from said country, or ban those imports altogether.
"
This will either lead to:
your country (and many countries) becoming a massive failure or war.
Leading people isn't done solely by smacking people repeatedly and saying "no don't do that", or taking money out of their pockets every time they do.
This mechanism doesn't work if you do it to everyone, and in fact, if you look at oppressive governments, even they tend to have at least one class of people who can do whatever they want or are paid well or whatever, and use that class to keep others in line.
Leadership instead is often convincing people to be dragged along with you in a direction they may not want to go.
It has to actually be palatable to people to do so.
There are other problems.
What makes you think people won't emigrate to the places which don't do this crazy plan?
What makes you think the leaders of those places won't end up with tons of power because they have a near-unlimited set of people who want to live there, tons of money, and a happy populace?
If they gang up with other countries, what makes you think they won't just take over your country, and if you've pissed off the populace enough, that your populace won't want that to happen?
This "simple" solution just ignores all the politics, etc involved, because it thinks they don't matter. But they do.
What do you mean? You're discarding the solution as something completely impractical when the reality is that import tariffs and taxes are very effective at controlling certain behaviors and mitigating the second-order effects of certain economic activity.
Recycling, sin taxes, environmental regulation and control for polluting industries. They are not 100% effective but they are clearly way more effective than the alternative of doing nothing.
We don't live in a black and white world where people either accept prohibition passively or defy it just because. There are cost-benefit relationships to doing these things and reasonable economic policy is about striking the balance that allows the most beneficial results.
I think the dispute is over exactly how effective they would be at actually changing the climate, though.
In the meantime, since they are very effective at changing economic activity, as you describe, the argument is that you would soon see disparities in economic output, and geopolitical power, and even immigration inflows / outflows between the countries that institute these onerous regulations, and those that don't.
I'd be willing to, if it helps the planet. I could be more thrifty in what I buy. Currently I'm not because I'm buying organic meat (even then, not very often) and other extras for sustainable things. Of course then I'd need to be thrifty on other stuff, but if that's what it takes. It helps if everyone else has to do it, too :) (for encouragement, and also because it's easier to be thrifty as a populace). Maybe it would even be nice.
It feels a whole lot more effective than my personal decision to restrict my consumption of meat to the occasional delicacy :P I often wonder, I try my best to leave a relatively small footprint, but it's real hard to get an idea what gives the biggest bang for your effort. Is it meat consumption? Maybe all those litres flushing the toilet? (although in NL, we got so much water we like to banish it) And does it really weigh up to what the industries are doing, or is it really just a drop in the ocean?
When I was a kid, one of my favourite authors, Midas Dekkers, a biologist, wrote this thing that always stuck with me: You can procreate, put a new human on this planet, or instead you can throw your empty batteries into the ocean all your life and still impact the environment less.
Although I basically agree with you (Fear & Greed aren't just what drive the Stock Market) the problem is that the Politics of Fear seem (to me) to be far more dangerous short term... but if people aren't afraid of their frog being boiled, what are we to do?
Some form of global collectivism will be required to deal with extreme climate change, whether it is enforced by governments or insurance companies and banks.
Alternately, pull out and nuke it from orbit... it's the only way to be sure.
We've basically imposed the "taxes on imports from said country, or ban those imports" on North Korea, with the result that they use the worst of environmental practices:
• Inefficient small coal-burning fireplaces in outlying areas. (Pyongyang is better.)
• Regulatory environment where factory and vehicle emissions are not even close to a priority.
• Unsafe nuclear testing.
Ok, so that was my straw man :) Hopefully it illustrates something more universal, namely:
Many countries lack the internal political will to put meaningful environmental clean ups in place. Even something as simple as the tax you proposed to pay for environmental clean up of disaster areas is impossible due to politics.
Until we have de-politicized the topic, that probably won't change. New clean tech is one great way of accomplishing this.
> Many countries lack the internal political will to put meaningful environmental clean ups in place. Even something as simple as the tax you proposed to pay for environmental clean up of disaster areas is impossible due to politics.
The point isn't changing other countries. The point is giving competing green technologies a fighting chance.
I don't care whether Saudi Arabia suffocates in cheap oil or builds a hi-tech green energy paradise. That's their choice. But I don't want the local green energy startups and organic farms be driven out of business by cheap Saudi-Arabic oil. Same with China - I think it's fundamentally unfair that local businesses have to abide to many regulations (e.g. environmental, safety, hiring) that Chinese companies don't need to, yet they are able to compete in the same market offering lower prices.
I think that the current implementation of free trade is a fundamentally failed and morally wrong model.
The point where your narrative breaks down somewhat is that when you look at pollution per capita, the US is far worse than China. This is even without accounting for the fact that most of the benefits of Chinese pollution, if there are benefits, end up in the USA.
China's population is 4.3 times that of the USA, but they only burn 1.3 times as much coal. In other words, the average American burns nearly 4 times as much coal as the average Chinese person.
Is that really a fair comparison though? If the United States managed to become as populated as China it wouldn't have the luxury / potential to use as much energy per person as it does now and would become more like China.
1. According to Wikipedia, North Korea emits 3.0t CO2 per capita as of 2011. US emits 17.0t per capita. One could almost make the claim that economic sanction is working. :/
2. The problem is to change the behavior of billions of people, and many will find it inconvenient (to varying degrees). Of course it's gonna be political. These days I end up regarding anyone proposing "de-politicization" with suspicion, because "getting the politics out of it" is a great way to ensure that whatever solution we can apply is delayed by years.
3. The same for geoengineering. I know some people are sincere, but in many cases it sounds too much like "There must be a unicorn technology that will solve the problem without us paying the price. If it's not there yet, we just have to wish it harder."
"add lots of taxes" - How incredibly naive. Any tax money would be wasted. Some people would pay more, some corrupt people will find a way to spend that tax money, and almost nothing else would change.
Well maybe, you'll make it so poor people can't drive or cool their houses in the summer, but the middle class and up won't change their behavior.
I wish you "just tax it" people would hold your electives accountable for spending before you throw more money at them.
This is a Pigovian[0] tax so the tax by itself makes the world more efficient. Also since most governments can borrow lots of money, tax revenue is fairly decoupled from government spending.
And if people are concerned about an increase in tax revenue being spent on Social Security or Medicare they could just use the money to write everyone a lump sum tax refund.(or reduce the income tax etc...)
If you think everyone should have access to some meat, you can take some of that tax money and use it to subsidize a minimal amount of meat consumption for low-income families.
That's a scary thought. Think of it this way: in a corrupt society the wealthy upper class can do whatever they want and get away with it. If we continue controlling behavior like this through tax then we'd have the same behavior as the corrupt society: wealthy people do what they want and poor people can't do anything... The difference is you'd be codifying this into law. Instead of being 'corrupt' behavior we can work to abolish, it would be the acceptable expected behavior.
Maybe that isn't corruption at all, and we've been wrong this whole time. Maybe right and wrong are malleable enough to sway under money. Maybe we need corruption to survive as a species. I don't know.
That idea about all pasture-raised, grass-fed beef isn't even possible. Current pasture-rased beef is 9% of global cattle. Grazing, mostly beef, occupies 60% of the world's pastures. So we would only need to move the grazers to 666% of the world's pastures to build our sustainable future!
One of the main causes of global warming right now is grass-fed beef because it requires so much land. In South America, it's common practice to burn down the rainforest to feed herds of cattle, which is why we end up exterminating thousands of species per year. They're eating straight through some of our biggest carbon sinks and annihilating biodiversity.
Yes and no. You can change the carbon efficiency of people's consumption quite a bit with appropriate nudging and consumption taxes. You can also have global agreements paying countries not to exploit their "unburnable" fossil fuel resources.
Little things like the EU mandate for ending incandescent lightbulbs can definitely add up. You need technology and policy and economics. The market for power plants is never going to be "free", it's always full of political considerations for permitting. So countries need to have energy policies that move towards low-carbon energy.
Terraforming I'm much more skeptical about. I can't see how you can make the economics work for anything other than a tiny bit.
The people who make me crazy are the ones who argue that everything will be fine, there's on need to change behavior because we'll fix it in post, I mean, geoengineer our way out of any problems.
I always want to suggest to these people that they should start smoking, because clearly, the future's so bright there will be a cancer cure soon.
And, not to be too crass, but that admittedly snarky reply is about one body. The geoengineering proposals are about intentionally influencing a hugely complex system we still don't fully understand, and that is undergoing changes with implications we don't fully understand. All the talk about ecological engineering seems to assume that the worst that happens is it doesn't work. That sort of naive optimism would be cute if we weren't literally talking about the planet. And if at least some of it weren't duplicitous.
This isn't the reason I chose not to have kids, but it sure does reaffirm that choice. Perhaps the Drake pessimists are correct, and intelligent life can't get off-planet before offing itself.
> still don't fully understand, and that is undergoing changes with implications we don't fully understand.
There is evidence to support what you are saying: every year there is new research that brings the inhospitable-deadline closer to today - there is a high degree of uncertainty. However, assuming that humans are at the very least responsible for the acceleration of climate change by pumping out GHGs, we could start by reversing that single change that we have made.
I don't disagree. I'm completely on board with reducing GHGs. I'm talking about proposals to pump sulfur compounds into the stratosphere[1], or the loon that decided to dump a bunch of iron into the ocean several years ago.
You might be reacting to my parting, pessimistic shot - that's fine. I don't think we should give up either. I'm just not optimistic when it comes to humans and collective action problems.
[1] details may be incorrect; I haven't paid a ton of attention to the specific proposals.
Your well-presented argument merely deserved a contribution. I really had to do a double-take on those proposals :). As for your collective action concerns, I agree with you in general - although I have recently been privy to a small glimmer of hope.[1] Until a few weeks ago I regarded this outcome as less probable than the human race improving our climate impact and had many brilliant hypotheses as to why; something that I have since been proven wrong about.
I really hope that I am proven wrong about it being too late due to trapped GHGs (but we can still try).
The economics aren't that hard, just long term and not as good as other returns. think arability. Particularly useful in areas you might terraform. (have thought about this for like 2 years now, heh. I hope it's my next startup.)
> Yes and no. You can change the carbon efficiency of people's consumption quite a bit with appropriate nudging and consumption taxes. You can also have global agreements paying countries not to exploit their "unburnable" fossil fuel resources.
No, you really can't, or we wouldn't have year-after-year record breaking temperatures. Regulation has never fixed anything. And especially when it comes to science, we need to remember that innovation and regulation are opposite ends of the same spectrum.
Plenty of people are dying from unsafe food, unsafe buildings and unsafe driving. Nobody can fix these problems because lobbyists are increasing the barrier to entry under the guise of safety.
In 1900 it was literally impossible to buy flour that did not contain significant amounts of chalk dust and other adulterants. In Hong Kong there are entire streets given over to baby formula shops because the Chinese from the mainland don't trust the stuff in their shops, with very good reason. Don't assume that just because things are not perfect that regulation hasn't made a huge positive difference.
>. In Hong Kong there are entire streets given over to baby formula shops because the Chinese from the mainland don't trust the stuff in their shops, with very good reason.
But aren't Chinese shops much more heavily regulated than the ones in Hong Kong. I've always understood China as a very heavily regulated bureaucracy and Hong Kong as a bit more free market?
The least safe new car in 2016 is vastly safer than the absolute best car produced in 1980. Remember, seat belts are a direct result of regulation mostly from US airforce testing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stapp
That doesn't matter unless you're arguing that it wouldn't have happened without a government and regulation. Most of the responsibilities of a government would be better handled and implemented by the private sector.
The first seat belt was invented over 20 years before air force testing, they went into common use directly because of studies on rapid deceleration and mandates for adoption. It's hard to credit that with any other cause.
Consider, you might think break inspections would be completely unnecessary because who would drive a car without breaks. However, in states without annual inspections have accidents related to this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...
A simple carbon tax at $X/ton and a little patience would go along way by simply making carbon-lighter solutions more competitive.
The problem with pretty much any regulation actually implemented is that politicians have been way too eager picking winners (massively subsidising specific approaches instead of letting a thousand flowers bloom) and protecting losers (assigning emissions trading credits to existing big polluters, essentially shielding the organisations that need them the most from incentives, while burying newcomers in cost and red tape), creating an opaque web of perverse incentives and an orgy for lobbyists.
The question becomes if the taxes are raised high enough to actually impact or reverse climate change, will people abide by them?
If it costs $100/day to heat your home in the winter are you going to pay that or buy black market kerosene or just chop down a tree and burn it when no government inspector is around?
There's a limit to how much can be done with taxes.
First, there's no evidence that the carbon tax would have to be so high to be effective - $7-20/ton[1], probably increasing over time. US emissions per person is the world highest at 16.5 tons -- that's several hundred dollars per year, not day.
Second, the revenue from the carbon tax should be fed back to the people by lowering other taxes. It should be net-zero on the government budget. The point is to create a clear and simple incentive across the board to switch to low-carbon behaviour, not to raise revenues.
Third, nobody promised this would be a quick fix, but nothing is at the moment. But re-jiggering the economy to give a clear incentive is a good start, and even at $7/ton, reducing carbon becomes a multi-billion dollar industry overnight.
> US emissions per person is the world highest at 16.5 tons -- that's several hundred dollars per year, not day.
That's 16.5 tons per man, woman, and child, right? So potentially over $1,000 for a family of 4.
> Second, the revenue from the carbon tax should be fed back to the people by lowering other taxes. It should be net-zero on the government budget.
The bottom 50% of earners currently pay about 3% of Federal taxes. So if you are planning on replacing the progressive income tax with a carbon tax I think you're going to run into pretty substantial problems with regressive brackets massively increasing taxes on the lower and middle class.
Total US emissions were 6.8 billion tons. At $7/ton that's about $50 billion or 1.5% of total Federal tax receipts. Sounds like no big deal, right? But for the bottom 50% it's a $25 billion tax hike on their existing $100 billion bill -- you've just raised taxes 25% on the bottom half.
Principle of charity, give the person a break. Obviously people are going to think about that before enacting a carbon tax. Funnel some of that money into offsetting transfers to low income households and you're all set. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Taxes can be progressive, flat, or regressive. This is actually one of the most important qualities of a tax.
A carbon tax is decidedly not progressive. Take a look at the carbon map [1] of the 'Americans Carbon Footprint' and you will see, the problem is not the rich motoring around in their their yachts.
Now, the biggest factor in carbon footprint is the zip code you live in -- due mainly to energy use and transportation costs. So does a carbon tax vary based on the zip code of your primary residence? Seems absurd to me. So we have to start by admitting that any carbon tax we do come up with may not actually tax a large part of your carbon emissions. Which is to say, it likely would unfairly target certain products based on their carbon footprint while giving a free pass to others. While taxing some carbon might seem better than taxing no carbon, IMO a tilted carbon tax is worse than no carbon tax.
A gasoline tax approximates transport carbon footprint. It also makes electric and public transit more desirable. You can certainly also tax electric/natural gas/oil based on their footprints. This would be effective, but again, regressive.
If you take out the part where people are paying for their carbon footprint and go back to just taxing the rich, it's not really a carbon tax anymore.
It's not like people can report their carbon footprint on their 1040. The only way to tax carbon is to tax purchases at sale -- let's call it a CAT - Carbon Added Tax. Such a 'CAT' would be regressive.
Generally, if you subsidize purchases which lead to lower carbon footprints, the rich will spend more money on those qualifying items. For example, solar subsidies. This is an example of a non-regressive approach to encouraging carbon shrinkage through the tax code. SolarCity calculated that lifetime net carbon savings of the typical solar install was 150 metric tons.
It doesn't matter whether a tax is progressive or regressive on its own. What matters is its place in the overall system of taxes and transfers. You can have a progressive wealth redistribution system based mostly on regressive taxes (sales tax, carbon tax, vice taxes) by ensuring that transfer payments and tax breaks are heavily directed towards low income residents. "Regressive" is not an end-all reason to reject a taxation scheme that has many other desirable properties, namely internalizing externalities and directing market forces towards less pollution-intensive technologies.
A simple solution could be to cut every man, woman and child a cheque for 1/nth of the carbon tax revenue. The top 50% probably use more than 50% of all the carbon (but are probably also better positioned to cut their emissions in the short term), so it should be fairly progressive, distribution-wise.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't actually change anything. You cannot make a tax non-regressive by adding a blanket subsidy. It's like shifting the curve 'mx + b' by increasing 'b'. Everyone gets the subsidy, and then there is still a regressive tax that is targeting the poor.
Not to be argumentative, but based on some brief research, the bottom 50th percentile do in fact cover close to 50% of the carbon footprint, and it's the rich, not the poor, who are in a position to cut their emissions by choosing more-expensive/lower-emitting products.
In short, these are two most disagreeable sentences.
Plus, burning trees generates a ton of other harmful particles. It's not a problem if a few people do it during winter time for fun, but it becomes a massive healthcare issue when it generates a suffocating low-lying brown smog carpeting your whole city.
This. Taxes (and some kinds of regulation like Germany's "fell a tree, plant a tree" rules) are immensely helpful to price externalities into the market.
> And especially when it comes to science, we need to remember that innovation and regulation are opposite ends of the same spectrum.
So, regulation has never protected us from the negative externalities of a scientific discovery destructively applied by the market or state? Remember, the state is also subject to regulations - the same free market that fuels your utopian free-market fundamentalist pipe-dreams is protected and sustained by regulation.
maybe, maybe not. methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas. So if you reduced CO2 90%, but methane went up by 2X then you would have stronger warming. My point is CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas.
If my bath is overflowing, the only water I have to worry about is the relatively small volume coming over the edge - not the total amount of water in the bath.
The ecosystem produces vast amounts of CO2 ... and consumes a similarly vast amount. It is the imbalance that you need to worry about. And that imbalance is largely caused by humans either damaging CO2 sinks or releasing CO2 that ha been sequestered over the last few billion years
The point is that the faucet, in this analogy, is not contributing to the overflow. The natural inflow from the faucet is matched by a natural outflow from the drain. The surplus is the problem, not the absolute inflow.
Of course, turning down the faucet would still help. But in this analogy, the faucet is jammed on, but the kid might stop if you ask him the right way.
Almost. Right now, the drain is actually emptying the tub faster than the faucet is filling it. Atmospheric CO2 is increasing at a lower rate than CO2 is being released by humans, because natural sinks are absorbing a lot of it. It was fairly stable, on human timescales, before we started adding our own input.
Can you substantiate your thesis a bit? I.e. explain where the CO2 that the nature is (allegedly) producing is coming from?
For humans, it's pretty simple: we're burning the oil on the timescale of centuries that the nature has been storing on the timescale of billions of years. For nature, the longest CO2 cycle is at most a multiple of the longest life-span (~500 years), and there's no indication that the cycle has changed (i.e. that suddenly more trees are burning in natural fires than have for the past few millenia).
"While CO2 emissions come from a variety of natural sources, human-related emissions are responsible for the increase that has occurred in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution."
If those numbers are accurate, humans contribute 0.2% of CO2 and 60% of methane. So my follow up is: Which gas is a worse contributor? Because we can greatly influence one of those.
But "source" of CO2 is meaningless without the other column, "absorbtion". Obviously nature produces CO2 (e.g. by animals and plants breathing), and CO2 isn't a problem by itself. The problem is the increase of CO2, i.e. the delta between production and absorbtion. That 0.2% of human CO2 surplus turns into 20% increase over a 100 years. That's the problem, not the production/absorbtion/cycling of CO2 itself. And that part, AFAIK, is all human-made!
Based on your statements, is there anyone whose data and interpretation of it you'd trust? I feel pretty confident that you've already ruled out anyone respected within the scientific community, particularly anyone studying climate change.
It's a lot like saying "prove it to me with numbers, because all the numbers you're giving me are bunk."
Suppose net CO2 went up on average by 1ppm per thousand years by natural causes. Well, over the last 2 billion years 2,000,000,000 / 1,000 * 1= 1,000,000 ppm. 2,000,000 ppm wait part per million so 2 parts per part that's meaningless.
Thus, net CO2 from natural causes must average very close to 0 on long time scales.
PS: If you look into it natural carbon sequestration increases slightly as atmospheric CO2 increase which is why things end up in balance. Natural carbon sequestration is also why there are huge sources of coal and oil to begin with.
You can also come at it from the other direction: look at how much CO2 humans have released over the past century or so, look at how much more CO2 is in the atmosphere, and compare. I looked this up a while ago and as I recall the result was that about half of humanity's CO2 production was being absorbed somewhere, and about half of it is still around and accounts for the increase in atmospheric CO2.
Which is to say, the natural net contribution to CO2 in the atmosphere is negative. If we somehow put a stop to natural processes involving CO2 and just carried on with human activity, the rate of CO2 accumulation would go way up.
Looking at the last hundred years or so, natural CO2 production is less than natural CO2 absorption. The difference is substantially less than artificial CO2 production, so the net change is still positive.
This is the relevant bit for how much emitted CO2 has accumulated in the atmosphere:
"From 1870 to 2014, cumulative carbon emissions totaled about 545 GtC. Emissions were partitioned among the atmosphere (approx. 230 GtC or 42%), ocean (approx. 155 GtC or 28%) and the land (approx. 160 GtC or 29%)."
If you want to double-check against increasing CO2 concentration, the mass of the entire atmosphere is about 5.15e18 kilograms, so one part per million is about 5e12kg or 5 gigatonnes.
The preindustrial CO2 concentration was roughly 280ppm. We're now at about 400ppm, so that's 120ppm or about 640 gigatonnes more CO2 in the atmosphere today. Things are a bit confusing here because for some reason emissions are measured in gigatonnes of carbon alone, not CO2, so you need to multiply emissions by 3.67 (the mass ratio of CO2 to just C) to get CO2. Taking the cited 230 GtC added to the atmosphere and multiplying by 3.67 gets us 873.46 gigatonnes, which is roughly in the same ballpark, considering this is an off the cuff internet comment using random googled sources.
It's not negligible, because the balance of the process matters. The natural processes producing CO2 were in balance with the natural processes removing it from the atmosphere, and now they're not. So the overall proportion in the atmosphere is increasing.
> Regulation has never fixed anything. And especially when it comes to science, we need to remember that innovation and regulation are opposite ends of the same spectrum.
I've said this before, and the same climate scientists who first discovered anthropogenic global warming agree, that nuclear fission plants are the only technology that can bridge the gap between fossil fuels and fusion.
Wind and Solar are now cost-competetive with nuclear, without its nasty side effects. And the cost of storage for nuclear waste has not really been calculated yet.
While being pro-nuclear was all counter-conventional wisdom cool 5 years ago, the math is changing very, very quickly. PV power is so much cheaper in terms of startup costs, and it scales both up and (more importantly) down.
Nuclear power isn't some counter-cultural fad. It's the top recommendation and consensus among climate scientists. This messianic fantasy that solar and wind will save us, to which every anti-nuclear technologist clings, is not only wrong, but dangerous.
Global warming is no longer a theoretical issue. It is here. Now. Within 20 years people will begin abandoning the Persian Gulf, sending a wave of refugees across Europe that will make current migration look like a trickle.
We are facing an existential threat to global civilization. There's no longer time to bet on a solar moonshot. We're discussing geoengineering for god's sake. We need proven technology, and we need it now.
And within 20 years, how many of those reactors will actually be built? Especially within the Persian Gulf, where nuclear weapons proliferation is a big issue. How many decades did Iran spend under sanctions while building a reactor?
The solution can't be first-world-only, and local solar is a much better bet in equatorial but poor and politically unstable parts of the world.
Unfortunately, nuclear has one big issue in addition to the issues already described (long time to build a plant; geo-political concerns on the link between plants and atomic weapons): when it goes bad, it can go spectacularly wrong. No other power source has produced a singular disaster like Chernobyl where about 2500 square km of land is basically uninhabitable for a few hundred years+. Coal fires are the only thing that come close.
For that reason, the NIMBY forces / politics against nuclear are much stronger than average (both in building the plant and storing the waste). Never mind that, on average, nuclear power is much safer than fossil fuels. People fear the spectacular more than the mundane. Take terrorism vs. car crashes, in the Western world you're more likely to die in a car crash by far, but it's terrorism that stirs up the fears.
As far as global warming is concerned, power generation is only part of the puzzle anyways. Such contributors as transportation and deforestation are also important. Honestly, solar and wind are pretty competitive right now... except for one angle. The main problem with solar / wind / etc. energy generation right now is variability, so the real "moonshot" for this technology is energy storage. (Which is the same real issue with electric transport as well).
And, what might be little known outside of Germany, we still suffer from the Chernobyl incident, as it is still not entirely safe to eat wild mushrooms (and certain game) from southern Germany forests due to radioactive contamination. And that won't change in my lifetime.
Nuclear reactors aren't economical, don't scale well, can't be deployed everywhere and it takes forever to build them.
Even if everyone would agree to convert everything to nuclear reactors now it would probably take a decade before the first goes online and several decades until enough of them are online. That's far too long.
In that same period you can easily get far more energy quicker with decentralized renewables.
Nuclear power have all types of problems for competing on the energy market. From its several sizes available: from incredibly big to absolutely huge, to its bad PR problem and NIMBY, to expensive waste treatment, to any company that runs them getting bankrupt sooner of later.
Solar and wind are are here now. And they get in all form-factors, including single-home sized. Besides, photovoltaics are way behind in the Moore's law, and still have a lot to improve.
Today, pushing nuclear energy is almost guaranteed to get you no result, while solar will probably get you the biggest improvement you can get.
Energy storage solves that problem. The technology exists, the only potential trouble is cost, so it comes back to price again. Storage costs are also dropping rapidly. A proper comparison of nuclear to wind/solar needs to account for the cost of storage as well, but even if you add that in I suspect it's approaching parity.
I'm puzzled as to why you quote part of my comment and then act like I didn't think of the point you're making, when I made the exact opposite point just one sentence later.
Batteries, pumped hydro, thermal storage, and many other technologies exist. They just need to become cheap enough. Thus, the problem is once again price.
It's not just price. None of the technologies you mention scale to anywhere near the levels of a nuclear powerplant. It's a huge engineering issue that, while most likely solvable, simply hasn't been solved yet.
How so? Pretty much any building you can point at has enough space for batteries to sustain its power needs overnight. The only reason we haven't all run out and done it is because, first, it's not necessary with the grid as it is now, and second, it costs a whole lot.
The engineering issues are in getting this stuff to be sufficiently cost effective that we can afford to put them into wide use.
How many batteries can we build? How do we build them on such a large scale? Do we mine enough raw materials for so many batteries? Are there enough materials for so many batteries? How do we cool them? How do we replace the faulty ones? How long do they last? How many people do we need to maintain them? How do we train them? How do we dispose of the batteries?
Not all of these questions have have hard or problematic answers (e.g. especially the last one is probably much worse for nuclear), but they do need to be answered, at all. We've been answering these questions for nuclear for the past 50 years.
They are currently being used in Africa and South America primarily for industry use (telecommunications mostly).
No, you won't run an aluminium smelter with them, but for load balancing during those (pretty rare!) times when you don't have either solar or wind they are fine.
I don't know about the temperature problem. I know they are used here in Australia at 40C+ and in Africa in similar climates.
I think that they are actually better for industrial use than home use. They aren't silent, and they need to be cycled. The noise isn't an issue in industry, and in home use I know the power cycling can sometimes be a problem because it is hard to find somewhere to dump the power (currently the solution is to dump it to heat, which isn't great - or alert the homeowner and get them to run a pool pump or something).
Was reading about this the other day. As far back as three years ago they predicted that Solar would undercut Nuclear. there's many articles out there, this is one of them:
If. Meanwhile as long as we are burning any amount of coal, we should be building nuclear plants as fast as possible, and we should have been doing that for the last 30 years. The fact that so-called "environmentalists" made that impossible due to their incessant FUD is why I hold them much more responsible for our current situation than Exxon.
The problem is that wind and solar are only a supplementary to nuclear power at the moment. It won't be able to replace nuclear until we find a better way to store energy.
We've got a really good storage medium for energy.
Liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons.
They can be synthesised, in a carbon-neutral fashion.
Other storage methods, including batteries, molten salt (thermal), and CAES are likely to also be used. But there are some things for which bulk liquid fuel still wins.
You're right about that. Molten salt storage will even bring it down below the price of natural gas turbines used now.
However, even with all the projected improvements and price declines in recent years, solar still will not be enough to serve global energy needs in time to stave off disaster.
That's one of those words people throw around to make a point without making a real point. Are we talking 20%, 100%, 300%. And whatever the number, is it sufficient? Also, what's the timeline? A decade?
"Most recently, Tesla landed a 500MWh grid storage deal with Advanced Microgrid Solutions. And, outside the U.S., others have taken notice. Italy's Enel Green Power SpA announced it will partner with Tesla for 1.5-3MWh battery storage, and, Ireland's Gaelectric Group entered into an agreement with Tesla Motors to build a 1 MW demonstration utility-scale project."
That article is over a year old. It sounds like slow progress, which is nice. However, given the timeline, I don't expect electric vehicles to be significant for at least another decade.
Isn't another benefit of wind and solar the fact that it's distributed rather than concentrated into a few locations? Between the increase in frequency and severity of storms associated with climate change and the threat of terrorism/accidents, I would think the distributed nature of renewables would be a consideration even if nuclear remains a key part of the national grid.
That's a fair point. However, nuclear plants can be modularized and produced industrially. These are called SMRs, and in fact they are actually the recommendation issued in the joint letter to the President on climate change.
Possibly, but it's too slow and expensive to build and insure. Even in the UK, how much solar and wind can we put up before Hinkley Point C produces its first watt?
Even photovoltaics is more economically feasible in western countries today, because construction work has become so expensive. Wind turbines are even cheaper.
And you totally ignore hydropower, which is better than any other energy form in price and following demand. It just needs lots of political will.
I tend to agree: you can't go "back to nature" when you have 8 billion people running around, a larger and larger portion of which want to live like those of us in developing countries do (especially in the basic sense of having AC to escape this increasing heat). AC is a great little allegory for the whole thing... would you rather have AC and deal with hotter and hotter days, or forego AC and wait a century, have no children or grandchildren, and hope things return to where they were?
I live just North of Toronto, it's definitely gotten above 30 degrees a few times this year and I think above 40 (Celcius), but I can't be sure.
We have no air conditioning. There are days it's downright uncomfortable and you're walking around shirtless and sitting by a fan because even warm air flow is better than no air flow.
There are a lot of cold showers and cold drinks consumed. I have to say though, it's only seemed to be 2 or 3 days at a stretch and then a storm or cold front comes in and breaks it up. So is it unlivable? No. Is it uncomfortable? Sure.
If it were my house, I'd definitely have caved and had AC installed; and if I had it, I'd most likely abuse it more than I should. If I'm honest with myself and asked "do I really need to have the AC running right now?" I'd have to say, I could count on 2 hands the number of days this year where the answer was yes (although, I did make it through without it, so is that even true?) vs. just (ab)using it because it's there and 18C is comfortable in summer.
When I build a house, it's definitely having geothermal heating/cooling to take the edge off.
... and a dehumidifier takes the edge off too. Dry heat is a lot easier to suffer than wet heat.
geothermal cooling. Really? For a private residence north of Toronto?
I have a $50 AC in my bedroom, that I'll turn on at night to get to sleep. That cost maybe $10/month in electricity.
I don't see how the upfront and maintenance cost for something like geothermal can ever breakeven in a place where you only need to use it for a few days a year in one room. Do you?
It's not a few days a year in one room. Geothermal maintains a stable temperature throughout the year so it reduces the need for AC in summer and heating in the winter. While it doesn't do the whole job, it does enough that you can reduce your power needs significantly. As for break even, it does, when you consider the whole picture. Additionally, if you don't take on environmental needs as your own personal cause, then how can you expect others to.
Many died. Even today, it's common for hundreds or thousands to die during heat waves. Today, it's people who are too poor to afford air conditioning. Before, it would have hit many more.
Those who didn't die were also far less productive. In many climates, living without air conditioning means spending much of the day simply surviving the heat, not getting anything done.
Hot climates were extremely limited in potential without A/C.
This includes the American south, much of the midwest, Tokyo, China's larger cities (especially toward the south), Indonesia, the Middle East, and Australia.
Developing regions, especially in Africa, Central and South America, the Philippines, and Australasia also tend to strongly favour aircond. It's not just a comfort thing -- computer and office equipment, and even paper, are difficult to maintain in hot and humid environments.
These are also the latitudes and climates in which the bulk of the world's population, much of it still underdeveloped, still lives. If the story of "an advanced Western standard of living for all" is to be borne out, A/C will be a large part of it.
In my part of the world (northern Europe) basically nobody has AC, but that is probably because of the cooler temperatures here. I'm curious, at what temperatures do people who live with AC start using it? Or is it going all year round?
I live in a latitude about the same as Spain, Southern Italy, Greece and Turkey, but in my part of the U.S., it's been above 30 degrees Centigrade for a few weeks, with high humidity. Our winters also get around 0 Centigrade (+- 8 or 9 degrees) pretty regularly, so we need to supply both heating and cooling.
Usually when it gets above 24/25 C we start to really put on the air conditioning. And below 20 C we put on the heat. A/C is generally important for not only cooling, but reducing humidity so your body's sweat actually does something useful.
I've lived in houses around here that didn't have A/C and it's pretty dreadful in the summer. You basically don't do anything during the day, and it's too hot to really sleep comfortably. Even fairly poor people usually end up with at least one room with A/C.
This isn't true for all of the U.S., the Pacific Northwest (e.g. Seattle) and Northern California tends to not have air conditioners because it doesn't usually get hot enough.
Quite a bit of the U.S. is at the same latitude as North Africa or the Middle East, the northern-most bits get maybe to Belgium? So even with the temperature gradients that ocean currents and global air movement affords, we get total sun that's more like areas of the world people associate with being "hot".
Having been to Europe numerous times, I notice most public areas, cars, buses, trains and offices seem to have A/C. So I'm sure you spend more time in it than you may realize.
There's definitely an element of being locally acclimatized. I remember spending some time in the desert, finally got used to the hot temperature when December rolled around. I was freezing all the time and finally checked the thermostat, 19 C.
I had a situation like that when I first went to university. My parents house in the north of Scotland was rather old and rather ramshackle with no central heating - I can remember going to have a bath once and finding 2" of ice in the bath. However, I don't remember feeling cold as a kid.
However, I went to university and stayed in centrally heated halls of residence, which I didn't find warm. However, when I returned home for Xmas it felt like I had been shipped to Siberia - I was dying of cold! I remember being pinned to the bed by a pile of blankets as I desperately tried to stay warm at night.
I'm in Newcastle and I'll probably have heating on next month - basically the lowest I let my home temperature drop to naturally is ~17C, then I put the heating on, set to 19C.
In greece, summers are atrocious without AC. But it gets even worse in the middle of polluted cities like athens.
Some corners of Athens are disgustingly unbearable. Tall buildings, narrow streets filled with parked cars. The entire thing is a dust, smoke and heat trap. Temperatures feel 10 degrees warmer in those corners. Not to mention it smells horrible.
I'm from Poland, last week we actually had 38C outside and I don't know anyone who has AC. Yes it's hot during the day and nights can be uncomfortable, but every conversation I had with friends about this always ends with "yeah it would be nice to have but it's not worth the expense for the few weeks of summer".
I live in Louisiana, southern US. I generally leave the thermostat set to ~23°C, so the AC comes on periodically to try and maintain that temperature indoors. During the warmer months, that's a significant portion of every day. During the winter, the central heating comes on instead to do the same job. There are some times of the year where neither come on, but they are brief and it will likely be on at night. It would get far too humid indoors without something running, I wager.
Here's the thing: You'd save significantly by setting it to 25deg. when cooling and 19deg. when heating. Both are very comfortable once you've adjusted for a day or two - after that, going to 23deg. actually feels wrong (either too cold im summer or way too hot in winter).
Don't underestimate the thermal power needed for just one additional degree in a typical American house with poorly insulated windows, walls and doors.
Northern Italy (just below Austria). The hottest is around 37° Celsius, but I don't use AC until I go over 30 inside the house (which has happened just once or twice this summer). Workplaces usually keep AC on as long as temp is above 23°, but that's just my experience.
I can beat that one. My school was in the mountains and had cold winters (temps < 10F/-12C not being unusual, dropped below 0F/-18C several times while I was there), but also fairly warm summers (> 90F/30C) due to being in the southern US.
The school had a campus wide steam heating system to deal with the winters, but according to what I heard they were terrified to ever turn it off because parts of it were approaching 100 years old. So, all summer long the heat was running on low in the same buildings that were being air conditioned.
in cities like chicago and new york they crank the heat in the winter so that it's 80F inside. you get sick just from the temperature differentials of walking inside and outside.
you also have to strip down to a single layer as soon as you walk in the door, and put all the damn clothes back on if you want to go outside, or you start pouring sweat. what's wrong with keeping everything on but your winter coat?
being from southern california you see this stuff for what it is -- people going insane from shitty weather. it should be 73F everywhere, inside and out, all the time.
unfortunately, it's getting hotter and hotter here, too. eventually we'll be insane also.
Regarding terraforming, I suggest a quick win may be to trigger a volcanic super-eruption. The cooling effect is known to reduce global temperatures to refreshing and/or bracing levels:
I was leaning towards using nuclear weapons to kick things off, but the potential side effects of such an event will probably be tricky enough, without the giant dust clouds soon to enshroud the Earth also being radioactive.
There may of course be other unforeseen consequences, but given the alternatives (which we see all too clearly) I ask: who's in?
Alice: Looks like there is a wasp nest under the roof, we need to do something about it
Bob: Let's blow it up with dynamite!
When thinking about terraforming people tend to think of megaprojects that would "fix" everything at once, but that doesn't work.
There are much more predictable and safer ways to do terraforming, e.g. desalinating water, building canals, planting forests, ferilizing ocean in the worst case.
Volcanic dusts are naturally more radioactive than sedimentary dust, though. So I'm not sure the long term effects of a volcanic super-explosion would be much better without the nukes... :)
I see this actually as a nice plot someone could turn into a book.
1. Build a machine that pulls significant amounts of CO² out of the atmosphere.
2. Go to the UN an straight up tell them "we can make this problem go away, give us 1tn$ and 20 square kilometers of land in these countries, over this schedule with these milestones".
Costs of carbon sequestration range from about $20 to $70 per tonne, as part of exhaust capture (CCS). For direct capture from the atmosphere, values are closer to $150/tonne.
The world is dumping 38 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. (I'll ignore the additional gigatonnes we've already committed.)
That's $2.6 trillion per year for sequestration, just to stay even. (The value's actually lower than I'd expected.)
For comparison, global GDP is about $70 trillion, so this is 3% of global GDP.
You also have to keep in mind that it's this expensive because it's not done on a huge scale. If it was, the cost would very likely be much much lower than the quoted $150.
And what if this machinery starts taking out CO2 too fast? Who will stop it, taking into a count the beaurocraty level in UN and lobby behind such a money making machine?
I think the technology for that is already there, or nearly so; the financial will really isn't. There's no way you can get $1trn for anything other than a war.
I staunchly disagree on the second point. Technological solutions generally "solve" one problem at a time. Desalination solves the fress water problem. Carbon sequestration solve one part of the greenhouse gass problem. Electric cars solve another part. Green energy production and batteries mitigate another part. Next we need to solve pollution from ocean freightliners. Then the methane problem. Next the landfill problem. Followed by the issues created by how much we've changed global ecosysyems and weather patters due to strip mining, covering massive tracts of land with asphalt and concrete and monoculture, and deforestation. Then we need to discuss how we plan to stop poisoning the oceans because of our reliance on petroleum based fertilizers and chemical pesticides. And turtles all the way down.
Untill we learn to live in balance with nature, rather than separate from it, in an extractive relationship, treating side effects as problems to be isolated and solved, it will always be more of the same.
In the same way that we were able to get rid of the hole in the ozone layer by imposing restrictions on CFCs, couldn't governments give tax incentives and impose regulations that encourage a greener, more sustainable system?
That's kind of my point. Governments are (for the most part at least) beholden to the people and the people will never tax incentivize themselves into a state of drastically lowered consumption.
Live in a multi-unit building in a city where you can commute and do errands by walking or cycling (electric bikes are fine and get around that whole pedaling bit). Source your energy renewably and use little of it (80-300kwh per month isn't crazy depending on your climate). Don't buy much stuff. Eat very little meat.
I mean, it doesn't take it to 0 but even if you DO want a comfortable life it doesn't mean living in a hovel.
I'm as guilty as anyone though. I love to travel, and I live on an island, so I fly a lot. Offsets only do so much (though they'd be really helpful if we had a functional carbon market).
There is a sad counterpoint, though, and one I think of often.
There are discretionary purchasers of fossil fuels - people/companies who would buy units of fuel but aren't because it's not cheap enough. All of the actions I named above reduce the demand for fossil fuels (by an infinitesimal amount, but still). Reducing demand reduces the price such that some other user will consume those fuels anyway. In this case it might as well be me, as a self-interested economic actor.
This is the idea behind putting a cap on emissions and selling the right to emit, but so far such schemes are a failure. And as much as I hate to admit it, they really do need to be global in scale - if cap and trade just results in more stuff being manufactured in nations that don't limit emissions, we haven't really fixed anything.
You are right about the problem that efficiency in one place will potentially cause consumption in another. In the literature, this is usually called a 'rebound effect' or Jevons' paradox.
It may be that an emissions / extraction cap could be implemented non-globally so long as a large enough block were willing to participate, and so long as they imposed tariffs on any non-participants to price in the emissions happening on the other side of the border.
Well, you certainly don't _have_ to. If you desire access to friends, goods, and services without using carbon-intense forms of transport it tends to make things easier. It also means you're not converting wild land to lawns, asphalt, parking, et cetera. Finally, one of the best ways to improve delivery efficiency is to decrease the last-mile distance (probably poorly named) from a distribution point, like a grocery store, to the site of consumption.
Living in a small residence in wild land without the need for automobile-scale infrastructure to support it would address most of the issues I raised above (a small cottage accessible primarily via mountain bike perhaps? I think I'm selling myself on this idea...)
Then again subsistence farming in a manner that doesn't remove wild vegetation, or better yet uses it without drawing too much from the population, is probably even better. It could be a lonely life though.
Or just live in the country and ride your bike to the city a lot.
I disagree. There are advanced cultures in the world without this ambition you speak of (I'm looking at you, Holland), where convenient life in a local environment that is all accessible by bike, eating lots of fish, and caring less about immense wealth and impressions and more about quality of life.. it is attainable.
I'd be interested to see a comparison on the amount of advertising done per capita in Holland vs. the United States.
Once I stopped watching television, I was no longer exposed to such incessant advertising.
As a result, I stopped caring so much about impractical consumption. I.e. buying the new car they show every 10 minutes in such persuasive and skillfully crafted multi-million dollar targeted advertisements.
Me too. I rail against advertising incessantly on here, but I really think it's far nearer to the core of the issue than a lot of people think.
Even a lot of anti-ad folk are like "just make them less intrusive and it'll be fine". No, that's just an extra annoyance. Ads are, at their very essence, incredibly bad.
And the coolest thing about Holland is that they are one of first to do terraforming on a large scale by creating a local environment under the sea level!
Technology never ceases to amaze though. Just last week I replaced the 12 50 watt spotlights in my kitchen with 42 watts total worth of LEDs. For twenty dollars. You can't tell the difference except that maybe it's a bit brighter in there.
That was something I wouldn't have predicted being able to do 10 years ago. If something changes in the next 30 years that make this whole climate change panic look like a bunch of silly overreaction, I won't be all that surprised.
- A consistent exponential growth in emissions
- A consistent improvement in GDP/energy and a mild improvement in energy/CO2
raises the question: can technical efficiency gains reduce emissions? If so, can they do so rapidly enough to prevent catastrophe.
This question has been open since Jevons wrote about the use of coal in the Empire, but it is certainly not cut-and-dried.
In the case of your spotlights, there are several places for a rebound effect:
- You have more spare money; you spend that money on something else, which (perhaps) causes some emissions
- You have avoided using some electricity, lowering the cost of electricity. This renders electricity useful for some other customer for whom it was previously marginal
And so on.
For efficiency gains alone to work, the new technology will have to be astounding enough to reduce the cost of energy below the marginal production cost for all the existing sources, and to allow us to chuck away all of the existing fossil fuel infrastructure without discomfort.
Otherwise we will just use astounding new technology along with all our old technologies, and do more stuff.
Efficiency gains (which will come, and are welcome and necessary) need to be coupled with a political limit on extraction of fuels to avoid this outcome, in my opinion.
Lighting is pretty small potatoes compared to transportation and agriculture and climate control. Your efficiency improvements, while great, are vastly outweighed by increases in global population and standards of living.
If you were to wave a magic wand and put a complete stop to human CO2 emissions today, the consequences of climate change would still be felt for decades. Never mind some technological change in the next 30 years, we needed something in the last 30 years. It's too late to stop it now, the only question is how much it can be mitigated, and how to deal with the consequences.
>> Some combination of green energy sources plus probably very large scale terraforming.
The Achilles heel in all of this is how to make green energy affordable. If you want to really make impact, making these technologies affordable for lower income and the poor is the best way to reduce energy consumption.
Unfortunately, a lot of these technologies are still way way way out of reach of these people to take part in. Last time I checked, getting a small solar array on my house would cost in the neighborhood of $20K just get it installed. With a ten year ROI, this isn't feasible for me to do right now, and our state just ended their solar tax deductions with no signs of it ever coming back - giving me even less incentive to do this.
I'm all for less consumption and green technologies, but most are not affordable, and the long ROI isn't worth it right now.
> The Achilles heel in all of this is how to make green energy affordable. Last time I checked, getting a small solar array on my house would cost in the neighborhood of $20K just get it installed.
Depending on where you live, green energy might already be affordable today.
I had the same sticker shock at solar prices. While looking into that, I learned that my local for-profit electric provider offers a "green energy" option, where they promise to replace my billed electricity usage with mostly wind energy instead of the coal / natural gas mix normally used.
The total cost of that is $0.01/kwh extra. Or, roughly $6/month extra on an average electricity bill, to switch from coal to wind.
Last I saw stats, something like 57% of the U.S. is officially living in poverty. Trying to afford anything more than the necessities of life isn't going to happen on an individual basis for them, so it'll need to be a state/federal level effort to provide them with that.
It's not just the practical problem of getting rich people in the west to lower their consumption, it's the deeply moral problem of denying the lifestyle we've enjoyed for the past ~century to the couple of billion people currently joining the middle class.
So yes, technology is the only solution. Incremental improvements in efficiency should not be shunned, but they're not going to be 'solutions'.
I'm not even sure we will need to go to very dramatic steps to get there. Solar competitive with coal at market-prices seems to be right around the corner, that'll be a massive water-shed moment. I have high hopes for algae fuel (perhaps naive), because this can plug directly in to the existing downstream oil infrastructure (and burning hydrocarbons is going to be part of life for the foreseeable future).
> some sort of world wide agreement to lower consumption is a pipe dream
This has been my conclusion recently too. Sure, we can all do our own bit individually, but I can't realistically see a global shift in conscientiousness taking place.
How about Lunaforming? If there's enough water, there's certainly enough sunlight to split it for H and O, making habitation and manufacturing possible. Migrating heavy industry off-planet, the old L5 society [0] idea, might be an option.
The trouble with heavy industry is that it's heavy. You can't ship e.g. bauxite to orbit and aluminium back down using conventional rockets and have the economics make any sense.
The timeframe is unlikely to work either. We're a decade away at least from the first industrial building on the moon, but we need to change CO2 production now.
Edit: the only sci-fi space solution that might make sense is the solar shade, if you can find a suitable reflective durable thin light material for it.
I was thinking, but didn't write, that mining on the moon is the place to start. It'd be silly to ship raw materials to space. It's not nearly as hard to ship finished products back.
Didn't Yao Ming single handedly reduce the amount of ivory trade in China by spreading awareness about elephant situation?
Obviously meat is much more dear to people than ivory, we might need a million Mings to spread awareness - it is still worth a shot though. Even if we manage to reduce meat consumption by say 5 to 10%, it would be a huge help.
We really need a global carbon credit system (with stiff tariffs for countries that do not participate). Cut net greenhouse emissions by a few percent a year until net emissions are negative and atmospheric CO2 and methane are back to pre-industrial levels. This will help renewables (and nuclear, for better or worse) in the short term. In the medium term, the invisible hand of the market will make carbon capture profitable, which means smart VCs will start dumping cash into it now.
I think this sounds more plausible than terraforming, but is really the same thing.
> The only solution to this problem is technology.
There already exists a "carbon offset market" [1]
So the solution is economical, which in turn will lead to technological solutions (carbon-reducing technology directly driven by profits in this market).
It's missing from far more than just meat; the problem is raising taxes is politically painful in the short-term, and said policy will not reap any tangible benefits... The chances of a political solution (economics) to global warming won't be tenable until it's too late.
Honestly? At this point, I think that the only solution which will prevent Earth from becoming uninhabitable to all but simplest lifeforms is a war which will destroy at least most of humanity and reverse our technology level to one before of industrial revolution. New tech will never adopted fast enough by people acting out of their economic self-interest.
I agree that technology in terms of energy supply will be important, but is terraforming really a sensible option? Given how little we understand the climate, trying to manipulate it in this way feels like a very risky manoevre.
And there are big problems here in terms of externalities: my 'improved' climate might be disaster for you.
That depends on what you mean by terraforming. If it is use nuclear bombs to cause huge volcano eruption, it is obviously stupid, but if it is using mirror to heat up air behind the cyclone makes it dissolve or change route, it's a great idea we should try. And we'll learn a lot about the climate in the process.
> my 'improved' climate might be disaster for you.
People tend to like the same kind of climate, so it will be disaster mostly for white bears and desert lizards. Of course it's possible that someone tries to improve climate in his location, by making it worse in other places, but that is not a risk introduced by terraforming.
I would say political will. I still don't understand why aa advanced country like USA doesn't have a good public transportation system which could easily take the cars off the road. Many people would be happy to avoid sitting in cars for hours and polluting more.
> As long as they're rick enough to do so you'll never stop them.
This is the key. We just have to start charging properly for externalities. Then two things can happen, either only the very rich eat meat regularly or someone finds the technical solution you are hoping for.
I think you hinted at the solution. "as long as people are rich enough to.." Well, put in place taxes high enough that people are rich enough to afford it! and use the money for sequestration tech or alternative energy.
Per capita CO2 production has dropped in the US and EU by over 20%. Remember, the only long term causes are fossil fuels which are both finite and replaceable.
This is what i was thinking ~15 years ago, but now it is painful for me to remember that i could seriously support such an idea.
Environmental friendly matters only because it is human friendly. Removing all the humans is not environmental friendly since climate change and extinctions happen a lot without humans too. Reducing number of people to half the current population is not environmental friendly since we were cutting down huge forests and driving species to extinction even before the industrial age.
The most environmental friendly thing you can do is have more than 2 children, and make sure they are well educated.
There are still lots of deserts on earth that they can make into forests, we just need the science and manpower for that.
Warmer arctic region is not a problem, it gives more livable space. Higher sea level is not a problem, it gives more water to create lakes and fill aquifers in places like Sahara, Iran, and central Asia. 50 bln people on earth is not a problem, it gives more creativity and more workforce to go to Mars.
> Higher sea level is not a problem, it gives more water to create lakes and fill aquifers in places like Sahara, Iran, and central Asia.
Higher sea level is absolutely a problem, as it disproportionately takes away the most valuable, economically productive, and inhabited land, and causes huge refugee crises. There's no shortage of seawater. Everything you mentioned could be done now (if we had enough power for desalination anyway). Higher sea levels don't make it appreciably easier, but they sure make everything else way worse.
You are right, I should've said slowly raising. If we let it to actually rise and flood cities it would be indeed a catastrophe, but the perspective of raising sea can incentivize richer countries to invest into moving that water somewhere else.
The best (and really only) place to store that much water is in kilometer-thick ice sheets at the poles ... the melting of which is what is causing the current problems. The aquifers simply aren't close to big enough to make a dent.
Its a question I ask myself as I don't plan on having any. There is some instinct in me to avoid suffering of future generations. It seems to be the right thing to do. Not sure where that comes from.
Only if you reduce humans to simplistic 'worthless carbon-gobblers'
Having children in western democracies, where they can learn and act with large amount of freedom and information is frankly eventually much better for the planet and humanity. Compared to poorly educated children in a 3rd world country, with oppressive government, western children are much more likely to find and make solutions for energy access and technologies that allow humanity to live reasonably, potentially even off-Earth one day.
In the same way that PG showed us how startup = growth, AGW = continued exponentially growing emissions.Since the effect of CO2 on temperature is logarithmic, there can only be marked warming in the continued exponential growth scenarios.
Europe and even US have negative emission growth recently, even though our populations are slowly growing, our emissions efficiency is outclassing our increased consumption for a net small retreats in emissions. 1st world alone, and at their current and projected rate we'll continue to increase CO2 concentration and warm but second derivative of temperature will go strongly negative, and we will never hit a crisis.
There are no scary AGW that show this 1st world emissions plateau, instead they show continued exponential growth coming from increased wealth and high population growth (e.g. projected 6 billion people in Africa by the end of the century) in the developing world.
This doesn't me to "blame" anyone, simply to point out that if we "froze" the consumption levels and population at today's levels there is no scary AGW. Only with inexorable population and economic growth do we get +2C scenarios.
As far as I can tell, I think most of your assumptions here aren't born out by the evidence.
Firstly, 6B in Africa is the most pessimistic assumption possible[1].
Secondly, this is completely wrong: 1st world alone, and at their current and projected rate we'll continue to increase CO2 concentration and warm but second derivative of temperature will go strongly negative, and we will never hit a crisis.
To quote Wikipedia: In a scenario where global emissions start to decrease by 2010 and then declined at a sustained rate of 3% per year, the likely global average temperature increase was predicted to be 1.7 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2050, rising to around 2 °C by 2100.[2]
To make it clear: with a global reduction in emissions (not just first world) we are still in the "crisis" area of a 2 °C increase in temperatures by 2100.
Those estimates were made in 2008, and I believe we are already past the possibility of dropping emissions enough to meet those targets.
We've already warmed close to +1C. While this huge +1C warming crisis was going on, we raised agricultural output by 10x. We've gone from thousands of people dying in hurricanes to dozens.
There is a warming amount ("climate sensitivity") that will rock our civilization, but it's not 2C - that amount would be background noise in the progress on the 21st century.
Language can be a form of play! I picked up my vocabulary from books, back when books were what you had to use. You have the Internet. Go thou forth and roll around in it!
I also speak Spanish, but not in comments since my goal is to have the people understand me. ;)
IMO it's important to keep the person who's going to read your words in mind if you want them to understand you rather than using your favorite high-dollar words to try to sound smart. Making word soup like that obfuscates your message, as evidenced by the off-message conversation we're having right now.
Not that you're wrong, but I've been having conversations like the one that is on message here for a very long time now. I'm accustomed to there being a few people who will say "well, the real problem is that there's just too many people", and I'm familiar with the typical unwillingness of such people to be drawn on questions like exactly whom they find surplus to requirements, exactly how they see that changing, and exactly why they imagine it reasonable to say such things in front of God and everybody, just as though it were nothing to be ashamed of.
I've more or less given up trying to draw such people into useful conversation, because there isn't enough common ground for direct discourse between me and someone who finds it other than abhorrent to seriously contemplate mass human slaughter as a geoengineering technique. Happily for my state of mind if nothing else, that perspective seems rare enough overall to make largely unnecessary an engagement for the benefit of the audience - put simply, this isn't really a subject on which most people need a worked example.
So, in such a case, I sometimes feel at some liberty to indulge myself, especially here on Hacker News, where the typical user's personal lexicon is considerably broader than you tend to find a lot of other places. Of course I understand that it's not a game to everyone the way it is to me. But I also understand that I'm not the only one who feels that way about it. And I don't really know that there's a lot of grounds to assume, for example, that I'm just "using high-dollar words to try to sound smart". I mean, I already know I'm not all that smart, and I hope I'm not terribly insecure about it; I make myself useful in other ways, and in general I'm just glad to be able to keep up on HN to the relatively limited extent I succeed in so doing.
Some folks just like playing with words, that's all. I've always been one of them. Sometimes, when there's no real need to hammer home a point most people already grasp implicitly and the rest aren't at home to, I screw around a little. You're the first person who has evinced any upset at all about that since before I was in high school. Maybe you're right, and I shouldn't indulge myself this way at all, rather than just doing so very rarely. But I don't really know that I care to stop. I guess I'll just have to hope that people getting bent out of shape over it remains as rare as it has been throughout my life heretofore.
"Less people" is not a solution. "Very slowly reducing the world population" could be one. But it could never be implemented. Reading Thomas Piketty's book is really good to apprehend this population growth vs economic sustainability subject.
That is assuming humans will live 80 years like they do now. Hopefully in next 100 years we'll figure out a way to increase human lifespan enough to keep exponential growth of total population. (Some people believe that it is possible http://www.sens.org/)
That the problem is there are too many people in a world of finite resources. A solution is less people.
I'm not suggesting how this is done, but we probably shouldn't e.g. subsidize growth anymore. You shouldn't get a tax break for having kids. It should go the other way.
You're probably correct on this point in general, but the tax break I get from having kids offsets the cost of almost two weeks of preschool. No one is having kids to save money.
You're right of course. Again, no real solutions just pointing out a problem. Also, not sure why people assume I want to reopen Auschwitz when I say we need less people.
Hey, don't get me wrong - I don't assume you want to reopen Auschwitz. I mean, Hitler was a piker. If you really want to get rid of excess population, you want to go for something like engineered famine. Worked for the Soviets, at any rate, to the tune of something like thirty million, but of course that's almost a century ago and there's inflation to consider, so you're going to want to shoot far higher.
Perhaps you think I'm being unkind to you here, or unjust, or unreasonable somehow. Perhaps you don't really understand how people make a connection between saying "there are too many people" and this kind of thing. Perhaps, too, it has escaped your notice that a lot of people said things like that in the century just past, and that the result was atrocity on a scale possibly never equaled, certainly never exceeded, in all human history before that time.
And here you are, not even a hundred years later, trotting out the same blood-soaked idea that started it all - and with the sheer unthinking temerity, the gall, to expect a friendly reception. Do you know nothing of history? Or do you just not care?
Fair enough. Then people should pay more in taxes than they receive in health and pension benefits. Right now, American retirees on average get more in benefits than they paid in taxes. The only way that works is if we have continual population and productivity growth, meaning we need to incentivize kids or we need to stop retiring and getting sick so much.
It gets problematic, because then you'd basically have a system where the government decides who gets to have kids.
A better solution is probably a raised standard of living and more education.
edit: By raised standard of living I'm not talking about AC and other energy-intensive luxuries. I mean not having to have 7 kids because many of them will probably die.
Its an interesting question to ponder if the reduced birth rate by increasing quality of life, education levels and general health will offset the raised material resource consumption by that move.
In the end I think the individuals themselves will be the ones making the decision to have fewer kids. I don't have a source for this, but I seem to remember that immigrants to more developed nations have fewer children after assimilating than people in their native, less developed countries.
Several principles suggest not. The Jevons Paradox, White's Law (after Leslie White), and the Darwin-Lotka Power Law.
These seem to reflect strong underlying tendencies of complex evolving systems. In particular that higher levels of organisation and complexity very powerfully tied to greater rates of energy and resource use, overall if not individually.
If humans manage to defeat this tendency it would be a singular exception.
Populations past a certain level of prosperity for a generation or two do seem to drop reproductive rates. Perhaps the answer here is higher educational costs to discourage people from having many kids, and lots of alternative activities instead (Pokemon)?
Higher education costs would lead to the opposite of what you're hoping for. Generally poor and uneducated families have more kids than educated ones, for a variety of reasons. You'd be better off lowering education costs.
Are you really suggesting people will play Pokemon instead of screwing? I mean, yeah, if they weren't going to screw anyway, maybe, but the idea of advancing the one as a serious alternative to the other...well, I mean, I know people get really into those games for whatever reason, but that much?
Increase college tuition (even more?) with the hopes of stemming population growth? You know the majority of the planet doesn't actually attend college as is already?
Solar panels now sell for about 45c a watt out of China. Cost to create is around 36c / watt.
This allows deployments such as in Chile & Dubai where the cost/kwh is 3 cents & below.
This now cheaper than coal, without subsidy.
Remove the subsidies that oil, gas & coal receive, and you will witness a new day.
Only problem for solar right now is over supply caused by a sudden drop in demand. China reduced its subsidy a bit. Also the US extended subsidy for 5 years, which is great, but it has removed the urgency to complete utility scale solar plants before subsidy cutoff, causing the utilities to sit it out & wait.
Better act soon! (250 years to clear CO2 from atmosphere, feedback loops only now being discovered.)
"Remove the subsidies that oil, gas & coal receive, and you will witness a new day."
Yes. But you will also need to remove the anti-dumping import duties on Chinese-made PV cells.
Those are some pretty big special interest groups (particular the first one) receiving government protection from foreign competition. So good luck with getting those protections removed.
Also the power grid cannot accommodate in it's current form. Older substations struggle to do with the load fluctuations that are caused by solar panels, which is why they are discouraging them in Hawaii. A huge investment would be required to upgrade these substations. But yes, soon solar will be cheaper than coal.
Absolutely. I was just pointing out that in the current state of a lot of developed countries, coal is still cheaper than solar because of the infrastructure. But we're bloody close!
I wonder if they're going to go in the direction of requiring those big home battery systems with every personal PV install? It would drive the install price up a fair bit, but could theoretically smooth out the demand on the power grid to avoid these problems. In fact it could be a better situation than we have today for a place like Hawaii. The battery backed solar homes would start needing grid power in the middle of the night, roughly the time demand is otherwise at its lowest.
Is the necessary volume achievable, both in land required and producing the actual panels? I'm under the impression that efficiency drops when you move towards the poles, where many of the developed countries are. Also, do solar panels still require rare minerals to manufacture?
These maps are based on emission trends continuing, assuming no political action will be taken. But wouldn't a hotter world tend to exacerbate emission trends, with human needs for AC and desalination rising, plus forest fires? Moreover, there might be some tipping point for large scale methane release. The 'tail risk' to global warming has appreciable density a long way out.
Well the trend has so far been that countries increase their emissions generally and not the reverse. Especially with emerging economies like China and India.
A lot of Swedish politicians claims that Sweden has lowered it's emissions and while that is true we also outsourced a lot of production and increased our consumption rendering our emissions actually higher when you count that in.
This is a big concern of mine. One of the grand results of local environmental regulation plus globalization has been to export pollution from first world nations to third world nations.
Pollution (at least Carbon pollution) is a global issue, and tackling it only at the local level has proven to be ineffective. It's a shame that it is politically impossible for the UN to make its own version of the EPA--complete with an enforcement arm that has teeth. Without it dirty manufacturers simply go where the pollution laws are least stringent (or at least poorly enforced) and continue to kill us all slowly.
I think you misread the comment you responded to (only the first sentence and then you assumed the rest?). He asked the opposite. The question asked about the other direction, up/more, not down/less. Goes to show we should hear one another out...
Actually, CO2 extraction from the atmosphere may work. But zero emission doesn't. Let me quote from IPCC AR5 SPM E.8 (Climate Change Commitment):
"A large fraction of anthropogenic climate change resulting from CO2 emissions is irreversible on a multi-century to millennial time scale, except in the case of a large net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere over a sustained period. Surface temperatures will remain approximately constant at elevated levels for many centuries after a complete cessation of net anthropogenic CO2 emissions."
This is because most of additional energy (more than 90%) from CO2 forcing is stored in ocean. Oceanic thermal inertia is enough to keep warming in 1000 years scale without any additional CO2.
The earth goes through cycles (to an extent), so I like to believe that if everyone died, given enough time, the earth would return to its former self. However, I could be wrong.
It seems likely. 500 million years ago, atmospheric CO2 was hundreds of times higher than even the worst projections allow humans to create. CO2 eventually weathers into limestone and gets subducted under continental plates. Ultimately, geological activity renews the balance, and stops us turning into Venus.
NPR article is "irreversible in 1000 years scale". Yes, things are different in million years scale. But even immeidately achieving zero emission today will not cool the planet, at least for 1000 years.
Basically it is irreversible on a human level timescale. Many generations of life on this planet are going to have to adjust to higher average temperatures. It's going to be (and already is really) a mini-extinction event. Unless we don't change course, then it might be a mass extinction.
We can't even agree to stop causing damage. Agreeing to undertake a colossally expensive project to reverse the damage seems like a political impossibility. In 50 or a 100 years maybe, but not in the world as it is today.
I'm not sure. Many of the countries with the largest emissions per capita are in regions where houses are heated in the winter and cooled in the summer.
Given that indoor temperature is ~ 20C, the ∆T for heating can be much greater than for cooling, since cold outdoor temp can easily go as low as -20C, while really hot weather won't go much above 40C.
Thus, in a warmer climate where you need less heating in winter and more cooling in summer, you might actually end up using less total power for AC.
Compressed earth brick is pretty amazing. The whole house become a water vapor trap and the house cools itself as the heat of the day increases. Granted then you need to cool the house at night to refresh the thermal mass.
Shockingly that is pretty much how heat pumps work to a first degree (oh the pun), they don't much care which side is the evaporator and which side is the condenser. There are minor details in size of fan and design of coil vs tolerable noise level vs quality of insulation on connecting pipes. Also the pressure vs temp graphs are a little non-linear which does show up at the extremes (and the extremes are a small fraction of total operational time)
In the west most cooling is done with a heat pump permanently wired into refrigeration mode aka a conventional air conditioner. There's a widely held belief that the entire system coefficient of performance is exactly 1 with somewhat less popular urban legends claiming a small fraction of 1 or only analyzing 100% efficient theoretical gas table cycles of 30 or whatever. However real world deployed average systems including air handler (aka fan) power and a realistic depreciation or embedded energy of manufacture etc results in about 3. So in the real world the total cost to the environment is about a kilowatt/hr to move about 3 kilowatt/hr of heat out of a building. It scales better than linear with size, something to do with moving air being expensive and larger AC being connected to larger buildings having a better surface area to volume ratio.
Anyway for better or worse a kilowatt into an electric heater costs 3 KW of burned coal or uranium down at the plant and generates about 1 KW of heating in a typical building, whereas a kilowatt into an AC or heat pump costs 3 KW of burned coal or uranium down at the plant and moves about 3 KW of heat out of the building.
In practice it takes less energy to cool than to heat although in theory a heat pump has difficulty telling the difference between 90F outdoor and 50F outdoor temps.
That seems very backwards. Heat pumps for heating can have a COP of as much as 4.5 at an external temperature of 7C, i.e. deliver 4500 W of heating using only 1000 W of electricity. An electric heater has a COP of 1.
Global warming also increases the number of extreme weather events, so we can't necessarily extrapolate winter => winter + 1ºC, so therefore we need less heating.
We've known the basic climate math since the 1960s. The first political attempts to reach global agreements on emissions controls were in the early 1970s.
45 years on, we've yet to achieve an actual reductions agreement, let alone enact it.
There are many books and authors on this topic. For the energy angle, I strongly recommend Vaclav Smil. For the political dynamics, William Ophuls is among the best I've read. His 1977 Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity is a brief, but commanding overview of the problems and dynamics. It's long ago enough that many of its predictions are testable. While pessimistic on population and food, much the rest has held up, and Ophuls' predictions specifically on China and the former Soviet Union are uncannily accurate.
He's written more since, with what he says is his final book being published in 2012.
If there's a methane tipping point, we may have already passed it. Have a look on YouTube, and you'll see people in Siberia happily creating fireballs by poking a stick in the ground and holding a lighter over the hole they've just created. And more methane is bubbling up from the Arctic continental shelf every year.
Not only this, but as the article touches upon, it may end up being lethal to go outdoors. At over 35C/95F with humidity of 100%, humans and other animals cannot cool themselves, even naked, in a breeze, in the shade, and die of heat exhaustion.
So yet more air conditioning will ensue, consuming more energy, warming oceans further, raising humidity, and thus exacerbating the problem.
> Not only this, but as the article touches upon, it may end up being lethal to go outdoors. At over 35C/95F with humidity of 100%, humans and other animals cannot cool themselves, even naked, in a breeze, in the shade, and die of heat exhaustion.
There are plenty of places in the world that regularly ge t those conditions. People/Animals survive.
I don't think so, not with that humidity. People can't live in conditions where wet bulb temperature exceeds body temperature for long. You simply can't cool down by sweating.
Another unmentioned consequence of rising CO2 levels is the lost productivity and quality of life that will accompany that.
Consider the levels of CO2 rising from ~280 in the pre-industrial era to maybe ~700 by 2100. A 420 CO2 PPM outdoors also increases by at least that amount the air indoors, which leads to much higher CO2 concentrations, which are uncomfortable for people to breath in.
I notice fatigue, grogginess and reduced cognition at levels above 1500 PPM, which are quite often reached in poorly ventilated offices and bedrooms. So levels that might be okay right now at ~1200 won't be okay by the end of the century.
This is assuming a constant CO2 rise for the next 85 years at 3 PPM/year, which is quite optimistic. Depending on how bad the positive feedback cycles are, the rise might be much higher and will result in very poor indoor air quality for most people.
I've come to the (I feel) inevitable conclusion that we are already well and truly fucked. I will still do what I can to slow the inexorable slide into worldwide famine, war and anarchy, in the hopes that the majority of my children's lives will be made incrementally better, should they choose to remain on this planet (and, it is assumed, that they may actually have a choice, but there's no way I can know).
We're on the wrong side of the story arc here. It's too late. The damage has been done, and it will continue to snowball even if we stop putting carbon (as both CO2 and methane) into the atmosphere today. Anyone who cooks can instinctively understand how "carryover heat" works - the temperature gradient hasn't yet finished equalizing, the latent energy (and, for that matter, the latent GH gasses) stored in the oceans and, indeed, the land itself hasn't yet made its full effects felt, and we've successfully argued and argued and argued about it without actually doing anything substantial enough to make a meaningful difference.
But that sort of hopeless talk makes me sound like a crackpot, and I've typed this sort of message into many a text field on the Internet over the past year before deleting it, or pressing cancel, or closing the browser tab. But today, in a moment of vulnerability, or for another reason I can't hope to know, something is telling me to press "submit".
This is tangential to your point about remaining on this planet, but it is much easier to survive on our planet, polluted or not, than it is to setup shop on a different planet.
I am fully in agreement with your view on how messed up things are on our planet due to human action. I just felt compelled to point out that any adjustments to be made on other planets can be done here. Can't breath on mars? Build a dome and generate air into it. The same thing could be done on Earth if the situation was bad enough. Can't survive on the surface of Venus due to hot and thick atmosphere? Live floating in the clouds. We could do the same on Earth.
The process of getting to another planet is so infeasible at this point and probably will be for a long time yet. We can hope, but I like to play devil's advocate. Also, Human's are very good at adapting and I'm sure the will to survive will keep our species alive even if pollution degrades our environment to the point of toxicity.
I guess my line of thought on my kids leaving this world for another has an additional assumption: that they, and the others who would do so, would leave to escape not just the planet's climate, but the people who screwed it up for them to begin with.
Don't you think that the problems with the environment sort of stem most significantly from emergent social phenomena analogous to (but not exactly the same as) such things as tragedy of the commons? It's not like this version of the human race just got lucky and got all the bad 'uns. Humans are humans, no point in bemoaning reality. But the social structures are in a sense an equally root cause.
I would say, yes, the economic theory of the "tragedy of the commons" is a major part of the issue. Good thing that the modern counterparts to those theorists have come to understand that the solution to the tragedy of the commons is to ensure that the costs of the consumption are borne by the consumer.
Regulation, societal norms drafted from the start to ensure transparency, and the "greater good" spirit that, one could easily argue, would be prevalent in those who would choose to risk their lives to leave this rock behind... all those things would form the framework by which our offspring would ensure that they're capable of learning from the mistakes of their forebears.
I believe that, as a race, we're too late to undo the damage we've done to our environment. The patient (our way of life) is terminal, we can only hope to make ourselves comfortable in our waning years without unnecessarily spreading the disease.
But, as cliché as it sounds, I am not hopeless, and I simply cannot allow myself to believe that future generations would do the same thing if they had another planet - or even this one - to start over again. I MUST believe that part of the human condition includes learning from and not repeating the mistakes that cost billions of lives.
OK so what disqualifies a polluter with a pile of cash from buying a seat from one of these kids?
I see the whole problem as related to manifest destiny, either economic or religious. Pure free markets will save us, and/or so will some deity. Because such faith can't possibly be wrong, can't possibly lead us astray to the degree the species ends.
I don't think a deity or a politician or a wealthy philanthropist will save us. We're beyond saving. I think I can teach my kids how to help save themselves and their like-minded peers, those very peers that would leave this planet behind if they could.
As for what stops someone buying a seat on that one-way ride to a brave new world? Two things:
1) Your hypothetical buyer isn't actually that brave.
2) The same reason people can't rush the cockpit of a fully loaded airliner any longer. The rest of the passengers know it's in their best interests, as a group, to prevent that from happening.
>>This is tangential to your point about remaining on this planet, but it is much easier to survive on our planet, polluted or not, than it is to setup shop on a different planet.
While true, this also means that we have taken our planet for granted, since survival on it is so easy. We have to plan things much more carefully and deliberately on the next planet we inhabit.
The environmental conditions of a 'scorched' Earth aren't themselves that big a problem. The bigger problem is the disparity between how many people are on Earth now, and how many people we can support in those new environmental conditions.
As usual: humanity's primary challenge is humanity.
* the inexorable slide into worldwide famine, war and anarchy*
The projections for increased CO2 emissions and thus warming are predicated on global increases in GDP, because greater consumption correlates to greater emissions.
Thus, we should expect that famine will not be the result of climate change, at least within any foreseeable range of change. Falling into famine would dramatically decrease GDPs, and thus forestall climate change. It seems people fail to realize this connection. The factors creating the problem are symptoms of overall prosperity.
I suppose it's possible for things to go non-linear and mess up that relationship. Perhaps we start to rely more on energy sources that are even dirtier (maybe people burn wood to economize, or misguided environmental regulations won't allow for cleaner natural gas to replace increasingly-dirty coal). Or, as I mentioned above, maybe some threshold is crossed where agriculture suddenly requires vastly greater energy input per calorie harvested. But barring very unlikely events like that, climate change will happen because we're ever more prosperous.
I think the problem with your idea is that there's huge lag in the system. Even if all human CO2 production ceased today, there would still be huge changes for decades to come. A global catastrophe due to climate change would eventually put a stop to further climate change, but by then it'll be a little too late.
It's a bit like arguing that you can't die from jumping off a bridge, because then you wouldn't be alive to make the jump. It misses the important temporal relationships.
Right, that's a big part of the lag. If climate change causes civilization to collapse, it'll still take decades or centuries for the built-up CO2 to drop back to normal levels. Plus the fact that emissions won't stop right away just because a bunch of people start starving.
You seem to be overlooking the part of those predictions that deal with the societal effects that the forced migration of entire cultures would likely entail when those groups try to ensure their own survival as they leave behind their homelands because their land is under water / no longer arable / too hot / too cold.
Not at all. If things ever got to the point of forced migrations, that migration would necessarily entail a plunge in their GDP, thus at least slowing the effect.
(The other replies to my GP point out a delay in the feedback loop. I'm still thinking on that part.)
Or a carbon tax. Exxon is planning on a $80/ton tax, which is about $0.80/gallon of gasoline. It's a travesty that Exxon is taking this more seriously than the majority of US politicians.
Absolutely, that should be part of it. Fleets of drones planting forests. But artificial photosynthesis modules in the desert and engineered algae could also play a huge role.
The cost of taking carbon out of the atmosphere by not burning it is going to be far cheaper than taking it out of the atmosphere directly, for a long time. Hell, a lot of the things we are failing to do now are outright profitable through reductions in energy costs even without any costing in of carbon emissions.
The cost is not entirely relevant, even putting aside the need to take out the carbon that we have already emitted. There is a power law distribution of wealth, and people on top have just about all of the financial and technological means to combat global warning, but limited means to convince the people on the bottom to use their tools. Deforestation, automotive and agricultural emissions are just not going to stop fast enough. It's faster, easier and probably more morally sound to build something like a Gigafactory for carbon sequestration modules than to wage (even economic) war on countries that emit too much greenhouse gas.
>Anyone who cooks can instinctively understand how "carryover heat" works
My thermo professor was fond of re-branding "global warming" as "global heating." Right now we're just melting the ice cubes. If that heat-reservoir ever dries up, things will really start warming.
I understand your despair, but there's hope to be found in the fact that this, too, shall pass. We've weathered worse crises as a species and come out of them smarter and stronger - and we'll do the same with this one, though it take a thousand years.
I do appreciate the sentiment. Truly, I do. It occurs to me that my pressing "submit" on that first comment was actually an important milestone for me, mentally.
Through the years of my watching my species demonstrate the law of triviality, I can see now that I've gone through the five stages of grief, as defined by the Kübler-Ross model.
Denial: Mainly, as a child. I can't think of a moment of my life after the executive function portions of my brain were developed that I was in profound denial, but I can identify spans where I felt that my negative impact didn't really count.
Anger: My early adult years, angry with the "political-industrial complex" for metaphorically writing the environmental checks I and my offspring would have to cash.
Bargaining: In my late twenties and early thirties, thinking "maybe if I make these changes, I can convince others to do the same, and together, we can effect real change in our government and in society." It's about this time that I also noticed that people who use the phrase "[foo]-industrial complex" come off as either idealists or conspiracy theorists.
Depression: In recent years, I've experienced a growing sense of despair while watching story after story showcasing the arguments between humans who, you'd think, would all prefer not to have to worry about how difficult life will become when the effects of climate change are really felt; grand ideas that couldn't possibly be implemented in time; seeing how my voting and writing politicians and commenting on web sites (ha!) failed to make a difference; thinking that my kids' lives will be harder, and as a parent, all I want is to make their lives better than mine.
Acceptance: And here we are. My "coming out" as a person who's realized it's too late gets (as I write this) 26 fake internet points. I feel validated, in a weird way, and it gave me peace to see those first dozen points roll in over just a few minutes. I've accepted that the climate is irrevocably (in my lifetime) wrecked, and there are things I can do now to help my children. I can help them learn the lessons my generation didn't. I can show what changes we can make that would make a difference, not because they will make a difference for me, but because there may come a time that those lessons would be passed on, possibly made part of a societal contract to stop arguing, stop fucking up the environment, and start doing what's necessary to ensure, wherever they live in the future, these mistakes won't be repeated. Teaching them the simple math behind it all:
When you spend, over just 150 years, a natural currency that took millions of years to save, you drive the environmental economy into ruin. From day one, a fourth grade student could've done the math and said, "hang on, guys... this doesn't add up."
And then I realize: I don't have to teach them that last part. My son figured that out on his own. Two years ago. In the fourth grade.
> When you spend, over just 150 years, a natural currency that took millions of years to save, you drive the environmental economy into ruin.
It's not really so much the environmental economy - just ours; we're running out of runway, but the good news is, we don't go out of business if we go off the end. We just have to find a way to bootstrap with a lower burn rate.
Thank god for negative feedback loops eh? I'm actually glad we have more CO2 in the atmosphere, because it will increase biodiversity and agricultural yields. I don't see any evidence that climate change is proceeding at a fast enough pace to cause damage.
There's a pretty solid factual case for quantifiable damage here: floods in Louisiana, Texas, India, West Virginia and France and fires in California, Portugal and Canada. There's also decreased crop yield due to droughts and decreased fish yield due to ocean acidification. This is non-zero.
Almost all of those cases can have explanations that are not global warming related.
For example, in Canada those fires were huge because of too-efficient fire suppression methods. Not enough controlled fires were done in that area and Fort Mcmurray expanded beyond its Fire Protection zone.
Not every weather-related catastrophe is caused by global warming, that just harms the credibiltiy of that argument
Under conditions of increased CO2 availability, plants tend to decrease waster usage and sequester more carbon. Growth rates are faster, but require increased mineral availability. Unfortunately, nitrogen levels in plants decrease in high-atmospheric CO2 conditions, which leads to lower protein concentrations. As a result, consumption crops provide less energy and nutrition when consumed.
So, all in all, the downsides outweigh the upsides -- faster growth, lower nutrition, more aggressive soil depletion, and increased water runoff. On the bright side, carbon sequestration increases up to 40%, so the efficacy of planting forests as a sequestration measure will increase.
As for biodiversity -- well, dieoffs are already outpacing speciation. Unless you believe in abiogenesis, the trendline is moving sharply downward.
You're going to extrapolate from lower nitrogen levels in plants in higher CO2 conditions (without a citation, might i add) to higher CO2 levels causing overall lower nutrition? and more aggressive soil depletion? Keep in mind that obviously more plant growth means more plant decay which cycles back int othe ecosystem.
Are you trying to suggest that we should be decreasing agricultural yields so as to prevent soil depletion? There are better ways.
It's well established that increased CO2 leads to increased plant biomass, thereby satisfying my claim that it leads to increased agricultural yield (as per greenhouses for example).
My claim that increased CO2 leads to more biodiversity is more tenuous but is more likely than a decrease in biodiversity, all other factors being controlled for.
Typical double standard, your speculation is perfectly reasonable but the other guy's claims need scientific backing. Annoying, and not very convincing!
You must have never delved too much into science then. There are certain claims that have been well established for so long that citations are no longer needed. For example, we don't need citations to state the order of colours in a rainbow. Likewise, I don't need a citation to state that plant biomass increases with a greater concentration of CO2. That's basic science, it's unequivocal and not controversial. On the other hand, the previous dude made wild speculation about increased CO2 causing increased soil depletion. I'm sorry if you don't see the difference. Not everyone is suited to being a scientist.
Searching around, it looks like what you say is often the case, but is not guaranteed, and the full effects of increased CO2 concentration on real-world crops is still very much up in the air. For example:
Yes, CO2 was into the single-digit parts per thousand for much of the dinosaur era. I have no idea how that affected plant growth, but even if that's the cause, it seems tenuous to look at Mesozoic plant growth and assume modern agricultural crops will imitate them. Certainly far more tenuous than the evidence that climate change is causing damage and will cause more.
So you think that rising temperatures may be good for agriculture?
From a website:
As climate change leads to more frequent and intense natural hazards, it is expected that climate displacement will only increase in Bangladesh. The best estimates suggest that up to 18 million people may be displaced by sea level rise alone. http://displacementsolutions.org/ds-initiatives/climate-chan...
Europe us really struggling to deal with the migrants and refugees from Syria. I do wonder how we'll cope with future migrations. It really brings into perspective the idea of a border. Of a country. Just a man drew a line on a map.
It is not tenuous to suggest that modern agricultural crops will yield more in a higher CO2 environment (look into greenhouses). It is actually far less tenuous than speculating that CO2 is causing runaway global warming.
Anyone else who feel that the climate-related news are getting very scary? If for every month for the last year, there was a new sprinter breaking the last months world Record in 100 meters you'd know something was fishy. Like some kind of incredibly potent anabolic steroid runners were ingesting. With new and improved versions of that steroid being released every few months...
Sure but I am assuming the parent have read about climate change in german before. Whether he undertands the difference is another question all together.
Because to a non-native speaker the 2 words can be confused as synonyms.
Hell I didn't even know there was a distinct difference between the 2 words until just now (and i've been speaking english my whole life), and I had just assumed that these kinds of discussions were talking about the "long term" data.
I can't believe that I got downvoted so much just because somebody in a reply misconstrues my point and then others jump on the bandwagon.
Check again the starting comment: they make an analogy in which every month a new sprinting record is set. I then point out that such perceived "records" can be deceiving when it comes to climate because they might be local phenomena. I do this by giving a counter example to whatever "record" the OP was alluding to, namely that some parts of the world have not seen similar effects. My comment is not confusing weather and climate but is actually implicitly point it out: a series of new temperature records over the period of one year does not imply much in terms of climate.
I can't help but feel that the reason I got downvoted was not my comment but the way others reacted to it.
wasn't the parent just saying that where they were it wasn't that hot which is the wrong way to look at it but does that have anything to do with languages unless this is the first time the parent ever read anything about climate change and weather?
I'm amused that you're being chided for citing your local weather as a source of skepticism....yet if you were citing incredibly hot local temperatures as a reason you're incredibly concerned no one would blink an eye.
The core science of global climate change is surrounded by a cloud of toxic subjectivity and witch-hunting. The hypocrisy is sometimes staggering.
There is much we can do in the US to decrease air pollution within a very short time. These reductions also contribute to lowering asthmatic episodes and hospitalizations and various forms of heart disease in the elderly, especially women.
1. As of a few years ago, 10% of the 450 coal powered electric power plants produced half the air pollution by coal powered plants (according to an Environmental Pollution Agency report). Take the top 45 polluters off line. The Obama administration is already to shut down some of these plants.
2. Many buildings in the Northeast and Midwest burn old #6 and #4 fuel oils for heat during the winter which are very polluting. New York City, where I live, has now banned the dirtier #6 oils, but politics has intervened and significantly delayed the banning of #4 oil. But other cities should ban the burning of these dirtier fuel oils.
The shutting down of the top 45 polluting coal powered electric plants and the banning of #6 and #4 fuel oils for heating buildings would not be hard to do and would make a significant difference to reducing air pollution.
El Nino + urban heat island effect. According to satellites, July 2016 is the 2nd hottest July since the 70's when satellite records began. The hottest is July 1998, also El Nino.
Sergey Brin made a statement regarding global warming: something like, "I'm not worried about it. We can put solar-powered carbon scrubbers in the deserts of the world and essentially fix the problem with an investment in the tens of billions (relatively small)."
I forget where I heard this and wasn't able to dig up a source. I think it was a Jason Calacanis podcast or video of an interview. Either way it was secondary information. Bad sourcing, I know--sorry.
I agree with many who suggest reducing consumption is a risky gambit at best. How practical are counter-measures? Can we just geo-engineer our way out of it?
Brin has the right idea. The only thing that will realistically help - aside from massive reforestation efforts or maybe bioengineered algae - is a mass-produced, maintenance-free solid-state artificial photosynthesis module. The problem is, very few people - almost all academics - have even been thinking about such a thing, much less engineering it. So there's enormous amounts of work to do.
It'd be brilliant to see the US and Russia develop a new arms-control agreement under which warheads are gradually decommissioned and their power metals reworked into civilian-grade fuel suitable (only) for use in power generation, retaining effective near-parity of weapons throughout so that nobody has to get uncomfortable under the old MAD-style rules, and ending with enough of a remaining stockpile to ensure national security - and an enormously advantageous trade position besides.
But that's far too optimistic and sensible to ever happen.
Faster, cheaper, and much less effective. Renewable is very much worthwhile, but I'd argue it is at its best as part of a strategy which addresses irreducible baseload demand by means of modern nuclear.
It's not even something we need to be prissy about. We've pretty much had the basic "we don't know everything we don't know yet" accidents. Stopping at this point is as much a waste as giving up on aircraft development in 1965 or so would have been.
Isn't that extremely small area compared to submerged coastline and harbors and coastal cities?
Some industrial processes and some datacenter services require baseload power. "most" power demand doesn't truly require baseload. Conveniently they require approx no people. Go build the plants and the data centers and the aluminum refineries in the desert next to the a-bomb test sites and no one will notice or care.
As an example my cheap old refrigerator "needs" 24x7 power but with better insulation and higher thermal mass it could trivially run once a day, or even less, at peak solar production.
Another example is culturally we "need" to have retail and service businesses open during the lowest solar generation times of the day, but that cultural demand has no technological basis. There are cultural and economic reasons walmart can't replace all its gigawatts of light bulbs with skylights but no technological reasons.
Another cultural example is there's no reason we "have to" have millions of people living in deserts, and no matter how much environmental damage it causes we're not going to depopulate the West USA down to a sustainable level for purely political and cultural reasons. Ditto the far south. We as a culture have decided no level of environmental damage is too large to stop providing water and air conditioning for millions to live in historically unlivable climates, even if there's plenty of land in livable climates. In that way, ionizing radiation doesn't matter any more than the destruction of the Colorado River matters, for example.
The US might have plenty of desert, but you need rather a lot of cool water to run a nuclear plant, which is why they're often built on coasts.
And what of other places? France has a decent set of nuclear reactors, but there aren't really uninhabited areas in Europe to put more in. Only relatively less populated areas. The UK is currently struggling to get one off the ground and the economics of it look terrible.
The Palo Verde nuclear generating station is the largest nuclear reactor in the US, and possibly in the western hemisphere. It is located in the US desert, an hour out of town pretty much in the middle of nowhere & nothing.
"The facility evaporates water from the treated sewage of several nearby municipalities to meet its cooling needs. 20 billion US gallons (76,000,000 m³) of treated water are evaporated each year."
We all know by now CO2 and CH4 leads to a warmer planet. We also know what's driving greenhouse gas levels to rise across Earth. Contributors are deforestation, intensive animal farming, and primarily the combustion of carbon fossil fuels like coal, tar sands, oil, natural gas etc. But here is the underlying problem, despite us knowing how bad things are, (97+% of scientists who study this field agree we are causing the planet's climate to shift away from the temperate climate we thrived in) not enough is being done at present to truly solve the problem.
What really is disheartening and what no one in the media and government is talking about is how in 2015 CO2 levels rose by the largest amount in human recorded history. 3.05 PPM http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html We are being lied to and mislead by our governments that uniform actions are being performed to save the planet for the future of man. Vested interests in the fossil fuel industry continue to drive climate change. Yes, solar and wind energy is starting to become incredibly efficient and cheap but not enough of it is coming online in proportion to fossil fuel burning that persists and is also installed annually. If we do not rally against it, our ability to live on this planet is at stake. The lives of our posterity are also at risk because of the burning. It will not be until we take extreme actions not on a country level but as humanity together that we will slow the burning and save ourselves.
What are these actions you might ask that will actually be effective? These can range from banning fossil fuels entirely, global carbon pricing system, banning deforestation, changing human diets, extreme uniform investment in renewable energy and potentially fourth generation nuclear reactors, more funding for developing nations to install alternative energy sources, and to shift the transportation grid towards sustainability.
The problem is that not enough people care. I've tried bringing it up with many of my friends. Responses include:
"We can't risk damaging the economy"
"The biggest priority in this country should be the mistreatment of minorities, you wouldn't care so much about the environment if you weren't white"
"It's not a big deal, we will just relocate cities when flooding happens"
"Scientists are wrong plenty of times"
...and on and on. Nobody really takes it seriously that we could be destroying the conditions which allow human life to exist on this planet. They are shielded by a raft of excuses, the issues which they are most concerned with, and endless high-budget entertainment.
Unless there is a technological miracle that makes all of this simple, I believe that we are (in the words of another commenter) well and truly fucked.
I own a home built in the 1960s in the northeast US. My home (like many others, I'm sure) uses an oil-fired boiler to provide heating and hot water. I don't have gas lines to my house. The gas company won't run them unless I pay ~$5,000 for them to do so. Even if my home used natural gas instead of oil, I feel like it's not really solving the problem.
What are my options here? Is solar viable? What can _I_ reasonably do to improve consumption? I use only LED lighting, eat meat rarely, use a programmable thermostat, have new windows/doors, etc. Improving the situation seems either not economically viable for most people or an incremental improvement. Just wait?
Take a hard look at the numbers. For example, livestock are responsible for 3.1% of US co2 equivalent warming (Wikipedia citing the US EPA), so going from average meat consumption to no meat consumption isn't a huge impact, but it's something.
$5k is about a dollar a day for 13 years; switching to natural gas is about 25% more efficient than fuel oil, co2-wise. Depending on how much heating you need that 25% could be vastly more impactful than a life without meat. Also, look into electric heating, depending on your electric supply that could be vastly more carbon efficient.
Also, around the house efficiency in the form of insulation and modern appliances is something that's usually super cost effective and carbon effective on a house from the 60s. It again will require up-front capital but is almost always a super smart move to do as soon as possible.
In some ways it's easier to be super self sacrificial and not eat meat, but it's important to look at the big picture. It really is about the numbers here; personal purity does nobody any good. Except on the political side; become a vocal single issue voter and never vote for a politician that doesn't have climate change part of their platform, and the same goes for political parties. Ultimately putting in mile carbon taxes will shift the market to do the right thing, but the politics make this impossible. Yes anti-economical too, negative externalities must be addressed by societal means, just like liabilities must be addressed through societal means.
> livestock are responsible for 3.1% of US co2 equivalent warming (Wikipedia citing the US EPA)
The same Wikipedia article also mentions FAO studies giving 14.5% and 18% globally. I wonder what explains the difference. Methodology? Ignoring the contribution of imports? Much higher emissions in the US compared to the world in other areas reducing the relative but not the absolute impact of livestock?
In any case meat and animal products seem very relevant to GHG emissions worldwide, and they might be in the US once you reduce other waste. But it's indeed a good idea to focus on the major contributors and low-hanging fruits first.
Sorry, 5k to run the lines, and I'm guessing another 5k to remove the oil tank and install new equipment. Roughly 10k for me to switch from oil to gas. Mentioned my insulation situation in other comments. Thanks!
We already give pretty good indications on how much carbon something is producing based on the power/oil bill. If you act to reduce your total outgoings, you're probably heading in the right direction.
Add insulation. If your house was built in 1960, was it retrofitted with wall insulation? Put more into the ceiling.
Depending on how much space you have, you can de-carbon your heat generation. Investigate heat pumps (ground loop for up there) for both hot air and hot water.
Solar hot water might be viable. In the US, the tax breaks make solar power a gimme if you have the money.
Stop watering the lawn, and install rain water tanks for any gardens you have.
As appliances die, replace them with more energy efficient ones. A small full fridge is more efficient than a large empty one. Beer and wine fridges should be gotten rid of.
Then, try to convert peak load to base load. Shift to a demand pricing tariff at your power company (where the price changes by time of day), and then try to lower your bill by changing when you do things.
Then we get into transport reduction, which is another whole kettle of fish.
> Add insulation. If your house was built in 1960, was it retrofitted with wall insulation? Put more into the ceiling.
Walls were stripped to the studs approx. 8-10 years ago and new fiberglass insulation installed at that point. Attic has (rough) batt insulation, but I suspect it could be better there. Air handler for the air conditioning system is also in the attic due to, I suspect, no other viable option for the design. Probably some loss there.
> Investigate heat pumps (ground loop for up there) for both hot air and hot water. Solar hot water might be viable. In the US, the tax breaks make solar power a gimme if you have the money.
I'll take a look, thanks. I'll note that I have ductwork for the air conditioning system but the (separate) heating system uses baseboard. Unfortunately, the finished basement doesn't have ductwork installed.
You may find some cheap, easy gains by adding thermostatically controlled fans to your attic's soffet vents. It can get very hot in an attic on hot, sunny days, even if the floors below are held in comfort by A/C. Forcing the (hot but not nearly as hot as attic air) fresh outside air in (especially during the cool night, then idling during the day) can reduce the work your A/C has to do.
Incremental improvements are the only way. Only you can make the decision as to what's viable for you. How's your insulation? Political engagement matters too: is there anything you'd like to lobby for or against?
I declared solar PV viable for me in Scotland at 56N, due to the available feed-in tariffs, and it's working pretty well. House not so old but the gas heating bill is unpleasantly high.
Don't overlook transport in global warming, it's not just about the house.
Better insulation was missing from your list (or was maybe part of "etc") but if you want a more efficient heating / cooling system ground source heat pumps are an option. They can run from the grid more efficiently than most other sources of heating or cooling or optionally be combined with solar.
This graphic could've used a Brett victor style tangle.js based simulation model. Then we could play around with it assuming future emission rates going down or up etc.. http://worrydream.com/Tangle/
I'm just a software developer with a side interest in climate science so please excuse any ignorance on this topic. What I find troubling is it seems, from what I have read, our climate models currently have a poor handle on co2 and methane feedbacks, both positive and negative. For example there seems to be a general scientific consensus that NOx from industrial sources (mostly coal power plants) is having some cooling effect. When these are removed, which will happen slowly but steadily as coal is retired, there will be a warming response but it is not clear how much this response will be. Similarly, you have positive feedbacks coming into place like the decline of sea ice in the arctic, less forests and more combustion of those forests, and co2/methane releases from permafrost. These are other feedbacks are known but nothing I have read has convinced me we have a full scientific understanding of the impact that these feedbacks will have.
Thats why like others in this thread I feel rather hopeless about humanity ever getting global warming under control. We of course have the problem of humanity to continue putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere via our economic activity. This of course is co2 but also methane and HFCs. The challenge of bringing these down to safe levels while keeping not only the standard of living we enjoy currently in the west but also bringing billions more people into the middle class world wide is impossible with existing technology and incredibly hard with emerging technology. To get to a carbon neutral prosperous, middle class society for everyone on the planet will take many decades. If we ever get to that point I'm afraid feedbacks and built in system inertia will be so strong that the planet will keep on warming for 1,000s of years despite our best efforts.
TL;DR I think we as humans really screwed this up and I don't have much hope of us collectively being able to fix it.
I didn't know if it was just because I now have a 2 year old, but New York summers have definitely seemed harder to deal with each year I've lived here.
Is there a commonly accepted minimum temperature difference threshold that is perceivable by humans? E.g., if summer in 2016 was hotter than 2015 by X, I will notice?
Humans are lousy at comparing temperature differences over the course of a year. What we remember are extreme events: four years ago we had deep snow all winter, last year I only had to shovel twice. Remember when we didn't turn on the A/C except for one week in August?
This is a "just noticeable difference", stacks of research on it. In some situations the JND for temperature is as small as 0.02 degC. Whereas if I sneak the room temperature up over the course of about 10 minutes you may not notice a 5 degC change. From one summer to another? I'm going to speculate that people have no idea whether it was cooler last year.
It's an average over time. People were talking about going to the local lake this weekend because the local weather service reported it was going to be the warmest ever water temperatures for this year - 0.1 degree warmer than last year.
The answer will probably be complex and unpleasant: We'll get serious climate disruptions before people get serious. We'll need to choose to deliberately forego energy sources, and energy is tightly linked to economic growth. The nuclear proponents will have to demonstrate that nuclear power can be economical and safe. If it is not economical, as it has not been so far, it is useless.
If we are past the point of preventing large scale calamity, geoengineering will probably have to be part of the solution. It's very risky, not least because it will lead to complacency if it works at all.
1. Reach a firm global consensus that this is a problem and we need to do something about it. (I'm looking at you, United States and Australia.)
2. Implement a top-down program of transition to low-carbon technologies. Switch from coal power stations to nuclear, switch to electric vehicles, and so on.
3. Invest heavily in R&D to find ways to cope with global warming. Heat-tolerant crops, "cloud brightening", flood mitigation, and so on and so on. We must have the necessary tools and technology to hand before we need them.
Move to renewable energies as fast as possible. Wind and solar is now cost-competetive, especially if you look at solar in the south of the US. If anyone operates an AC unit at home, why is it not powered by solar? Especially as you really need it when the sun shines.
Tesla have shown: electrical cars are a thing. The quicker the automotive sector moves to electrical, the better.
We can't solve the problem over night, but thats the reason we should start now. There is a lot we can do. Last year, Germany produced 30% of its energy with renewables, up from 25% the previous year. As I write this, German solar produces 22 GW of solar electricity alone.
Decreasing the CO2 emissions - which wont happen due to losses in profits.
Reduce deforestation - which wont happen due to losses in profits.
Increase the planting of grasses, and fast growing carbon sequestering crops such as hemp - Wont happen because it costs money, unless its triggered by individuals (Green plants absorb infrared and sequesters CO2). For those people who say, OH! but the CO2 cycle is neutral for growing plants because they rot... B.S. what do you think permafrost is and not to mention... oil.
Seed the oceans with iron to encourage algal blooms, and dredge it all up and bury it deep.
Change the mode of Air Transport to reduce contrails as studies have suggested that ‘contrail cirrus’ is a contributing factor and leads to greater forcings. We need widespread Maglev trains, or dare I say it something revolutionary such as Hyperloop (but one that actually gets made.. lets focus on what we have already)
If you somehow cut personal transportation of all kinds to zero in the US, you'd cut total GHG emissions by about 13%. Nothing to sneeze at, but it won't solve the problem by a long shot.
So 14 of the 15 hottest years ever have taken place since 2000. I'm wondering, if this is the result of global heating due to emissions, why do we see so many new record highs only now?
The industrial revolution has been going on already for over 150 years. Why were there so few records broken in, say, 1980 - 1996, and so many in 2000 - 2016?
The Nth "hottest years" are relative to the present day. So in the graph, it looks like 1981 would have been a record hot year - but now it's only the 30th (or whatever) hottest year.
If the graph were a completely smooth upward-sloping line, then you'd expect that 15 of the 15 hottest years would have been since 2000.
Thanks for the chart. To me it still seems like we are missing something. If you look at the period of 1940 - 1980, then there was not really an upward or downward trend. But in the 36 years after 1980, the global temperature has been going up like crazy. Should all of that be attributed to statistical noise? To me it looks like some new factor has started to influence the climate in the recent years, whatever that factor may be.
The standard explanation is that aerosol emissions (soot and SO2) masked the warming during 1940-1980. Once environmental protections in the West kicked in, the warming due to CO2 has taken up.
If you compare the rate of fossil fuel use over time, you'll find that that has also been accelerating tremendously. There are other factors involved, including particulate emissions (mostly from coal) which tended to repress warming trends.
From 1945 - 1975, fuel consumption was roughly doubling every decade. The rate of increase moderated slightly during the 1970s oil crises, but picked up afterward, with China's growth since 2000 being particularly troubling.
Rather than eyeballing it, why not do a proper regression?
To me, it looks like a line going up from 1900 with a bump in 1940. But you don't have to take my word for it, there's piles and piles of data out there.
I'm not denying that the world has been heating up since 1900. I'm saying that during the last ca. 36 years it is suddenly going very much faster than it did before.
World CO2 emissions in 2014 were about 9.8 gigatonnes. The current concentration of atmospheric CO2 is about 400 parts per million. In 1980, the relevant figures were about 5.3 gigatonnes and 340ppm.
We've got the accelerator to the floor. It's no wonder that we're getting all the speeding tickets now.
Essentially, think compound interest, except carbon in the atmosphere. More carbon in the atmosphere causes and uses more carbon to combat this. Everyone using A/C is a good example. Also China and India are industrializing right now, at a scale we can't comprehend.
The problem is the accumulation of these emissions over decades. CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for roughly a century. Also, the recent industrialisation of countries like China means we are emitting more today than ever before.
The part I find especially frustrating is that, on average, a New Yorker has a lower carbon footprint than the typical American, probably due to the heavy use of the train.
So even when I do the (I think) eco-friendly thing by not having a car and using public transit, I'm still being punished for what the rest of the US (and the rest of the world) does.
Even with your slightly lower footprint due to not owning a car you still have a much larger footprint than the world mean. Probably 2-3x. So there are billions of people being "punished" for what you're doing.
Well, considering that I get my power from a combination of Nuclear and wind power, I doubt that I give a particularly high carbon footprint.
But you're not wrong, I almost certainly have a higher footprint than most of the third world.
I guess what I was getting at is that I think the levels New York has are substantially more sustainable than the rest of the US. Sorry for the confusion.
I would guess your footprint is more increased by getting all kinds of stuff (you don't really need). And the stuff being shipped across half the globe.
That's a fair point and I'll admit I hadn't considered that.
Conceivably, we could make electric (or something) transportation systems that can travel across the world and not produce and CO2, but we certainly haven't gotten there yet.
Marine transport is incredibly efficient. Total marine transport accounts for ~2% of global CO2 emission. It would be nice to have, but definitely a low priority.
Do you have any data to back up your claim that New York is "substantially more sustainable than the rest of the US"? I'd be genuinely curious to look at that data
From the article:
"New York, with a population of 19.6 million people, had the lowest per capita CO2 emissions – 8 mt per capita. A large portion of the population is located in the New York City metropolitan area where mass transit is readily available and most residences are multi-family units that provide efficiencies of scale in terms of energy for heating and cooling."
I think you and i share a similar line of thought. I'm trying to rack my brain (and contribute something) as when (other eras) in history has the "regard of future generations" cause for such debate or action like this one.
Nobody can predict if another person's life will be better if "x" happens. This is a foundation of suicide prevention.
How much Carbon did it take to make New York into New York? That's "your Carbon" too if we are going to talk about "punishment"
That's just the wrong language and maybe the wrong perspective, we are all in this together when it comes to climate change, we all pay for the sins of others.
Even more troubling: we are being punished by what the world did, generations past.
This stuff has, by our standards, long delayed effects.
The implication is disconcerting: a FULL STOP of excessive green house gas emissions right now will have, at best, a notable impact in several decades.
I don't know really what you're arguing. I don't think that the poster was suggesting that we go back to the flintstones-age, and I'm sure he/she was appreciative of the work that's been done in the past, but that in no way deters from the fact that current and future generations are going to have to do a lot of cleanup from the past generations.
If your parents died and left you an inheritance of $1000 and also a debt of $100 you're still $900 ahead. Most people wouldn't call that being "punished."
Oh, I totally get that society has benefited from our 150 years focus on using the concentrated energy found in the ground.
The hell of it is that we've only had a reasonable understanding of the dangers associated with using this energy for a few decades. I find no fundamental fault associated with their decisions back in the day.
Well clearly it has nothing to do with man-made pollution, it's nature taking it's course and these rampant wildfires. Oh wait, what causes the wildfires you ask? :-)
Not to negate the issue at hand, which is important, there there's an interesting note on perception here.
"ever recorded" is used but how long have we been recording? The last study I checked on that made a claim like this was about 100 years. "ever recorded" sounds more sensational.
In any case, how we treat our planet... our ecosystem... is important. Seeing it go downhill is saddening and motivating. Glad to see things pointing out the change, its direction, and possible impact.
It could be the hottest January on record. Seeing as half the world is experiencing winter right now, what do you think will happen to global temperatures when the southern hemisphere experiences their summer?
Not much, the southern hemisphere has a lot more water than land, leveling out the temperature. Records are created or not based off what happens in the northern hemisphere.
FUD of what? Generally FUD is used to gain some financial advantage. The only party who has anything to gain from continuing with the economic policies which acerbate climate change are the owners of fossil fuel sources. These constitute billions of dollars of future profit - but only if it's burnt up into the sky. Everyone else is only going to lose in the long term.
If one does not understand anything of climate science, one use the help of political insight to understand the underlying dynamics of the discussion: who has the greatest incentive to lie?
I am personally acquainted with the dealings of several environmental NGOs. Not climate related, but I extrapolate. And we are talking branches of the biggest NGOs out there.
They have a very big incentive to spread FUD and they do it all the time. They are basically extortion and defamation platforms used as a political lever. At least here. But I very much doubt it's much different elsewhere.
Of course, there will always be people who are less than noble in their pursuits. In academia, in NGOs, in environmental groups, in government, in private industry, everywhere.
Ask yourself though, even if all this climate change and global warming is FUD, what happens if we respond to it like it is real? Result: we have a cleaner planet (cleaner air, cleaner water, oceans that still support life) and we have a sustainable path when fossil fuels do eventually run out.
What happens if we ignore it? Result: the potential demise of the world as we know it...
Think about it from a risk vs reward perspective. It's clearly much riskier to ignore than it would be to take a hit on our economic growth and pivot hard to 100% renewable energy.
It's very fucking expensive. And those articles frequently on the front page of HN are biased and are not telling the whole story. That's the problem. NGOs are framing the public discourse in a very one-sided way. If you raise concerns, you are a "denier" and downvoted into oblivion because people just want to believe the beautiful story of clean energy vs. greedy capitalist pigs.
That's definitely true, it's rare to see a fully civilised discussion where those concerns are addressed without the accompanying rhetoric.
Having said that, surely it's a fact that we'll run out of fossil fuels at some point and will need an alternate source of energy, and that will be expensive no matter when we do it, so why not start early?
Opportunity cost. Those resources could conceivably be better spent building roads, railways, factories, protecting wetlands, rewilding forests, educating children...
There are plenty of current, pressing problems to solve; why solve a problem that won't exist for decades if not centuries?
OK, I can understand that. Does that however not come with the assumption that we can solve that problem quickly when it does come about (assuming we can calculate roughly when we run out of fossil fuels)? I don't know how much evidence there is out there that that's the case.
In a market economy, we never actually run out of a resource; rather, the price rises gradually in accordance with increasing scarcity and cost of extraction, making alternatives more cost-effective, increasing the reward to researching alternatives, and pushing the use of that resource into niches where the cost doesn't matter as much.
Examples of this would be guano (replaced by saltpeter and then by the Haber process) and whale oil (replaced by petroleum).
You don't seem to grasp what I am saying at all. I am not against upgrading our energy capabilities. This whole comment chain started because of the claim that only lizard people have incentive to lie. This couldn't be further from the truth. There are snake people who lie, scream and spread FUD who just want to take the lizards' place.
Their screaming leads to a lot of tension and escalation. THIS IS A PROBLEM. SOLVE IT RIGHT NOW. This is what FUD is after all. This leads to rash decisions. We don't know where and when to invest. Should we invest in more nuclear and supplement with distributed photovoltaics? Should we build giant panels? Should we focus on batteries and what kinds of batteries?
Or should we focus on hydro power instead? Or maybe beam energy from space (it's a thing)? What about clean chemical reactions?
And most importantly - when should we start and when should we double down on it? What are the checkpoints of R&D and production grade equipment? What should we wait on?
Opportunists did what they do best - they found an opportunity to get attention and are exploiting it for their gain. This goes against the general public's gain. That's what I am against. Repeating completely unproductive rhetoric to get the tension high.
I agree about unproductive rhetoric, and my question wasn't aimed at you specifically, I was just wondering out loud about the opposite viewpoint. The focus of the climate discussion in general should definitely be more towards the points you raised, I'm just curious about people who don't think it's even a discussion worth having.
Yes, your upfront cost are expensive, because of course the plants have to be build. But that was the case with fossil plants as well, the only difference is, they are already built.
But in the long run, it's cheaper due to the lack of needed fuel.
So there's three things here: upfront cost, running costs, and decommissioning costs. The running costs of renewable generation are nonzero even if the fuel is free, as there's considerable maintenance cost. The long run cost - and so the decision whether to build fossil or renewable - has to take all three into account.
Sorry, but at this point this gets absurd. I can understand that for some people it is beneficial to deny the idea of climate change.
But since you are already acknowledging the self-evidence of it, how is it "not clear at all", that the change is not human made?
The scientific community could not possibly hope to have a definite answer to that.
Hard liners on "man-made" climate change are sponsored through various channels just like hard-liners on no climate change at all.
I am no ecologist, but I know my statistics, math and logic. From what I've read on the subject, claims that it is man-made are based on assumptions which don't hold and huge jumps in logic and conclusions.
What we can safely deduce is that there is some shift in the climate with temperatures increasing. Humans probably are a contributing factor without any way of knowing how much we contributed overall.
Every paper which claimed something differing from the above made HUGE jumps in their logic.
The claims that climate change is likely mostly man made are based on a combination of well-established physics and chemistry as well as observations of how climate change correlates with the various conditions which are theorized to drive it, which gives a pretty clear idea of the direct contributions, and we have very good ideas of the root causes of those direct contributions, at least to the extent of which ones are largely the result of human activity (e.g., atmospheric CO2) and which are not (e.g., variations in solar conditions.)
Yeah, those physics and chemistry models are made by scientists who are really, really smart and are 100% correct, 100% of the time. They have lab coats and all.
It's definitely possible to model the whole climate system. Amazon is making recommendations with machine learning AI and shit.
"The scientific community could not possibly hope to have a definite answer to that."
Do I take that by your logic we should not even try to understand the environment? Since definitive answers are not possible, and if the current expert's opinion is not sufficient, then I fail to see what argument could possibly be of any higher quality.
"Hard liners on "man-made" climate change are sponsored through various channels just like hard-liners on no climate change at all."
Evoking "hardliners" sounds like all debates would be about selecting the most charismatic authority and sticking with their opinion.
I prefer to peruse the reports of established scientific bodies http://www.ipcc.ch/
No, it sounds like balanced opinions are always better than radical opinions. Radicals are almost always wrong and always unproductive.
And to answer your other question, environmental NGOs have plenty to do with atmospheric research. They publicize it some of it. They fund some of it. They use some of it as a political lever.
Are there any links between NGO "environmental fud" and IPCC federated results that would point out stronger political rather than scientific drivers for the results?
What do environmental NGO:s have to do with anything? If they do any serious atmospheric science research then I'm not aware of it. Goading naive teenagers to chain themselves to forestry machines is more in their line of expertise.
Spoken like a true merchant of doubt. It takes no effort to make accusations like this, and it works too well because the majority of people lack the rational decision making processes to understand that they are being tricked.
On behalf of the fossil fuel industry, keep up the good work! It's people like you that keep our profits (and emissions) high! Never give up the fight, comrade. Our next quarterly bonus depends on it!
This claim has been thoroughly discredited. Even the climate change denier Andrew Watts agrees that it is false. And in any case, it makes no sense -- to believe this claim is to believe that all climate scientists are part of some conspiracy.
I am lucky I live in the northen parts of Europe. I do not wish to live in America in ~50-100 years from now since there is so much guns and other weapons easily available.
People who care about their childrens future should start planning now. I think when the shit hits the fan it will hit hard and fast.
Make no mistake there are a lot of guns in Europe : we had so many wars, WW1, WW2, Yugoslavia and now the Ukraine. Each time quantity of weapons "disappear" only to reappear later.
In France criminal and terrorists organizations are mainly using surplus from the Yugoslavian war but the Police still seize regularly WW2 guns which are still quite capable compared to more modern guns.
So if we didn't manage to clean the mess of WW2 70 years later, I see no reason why there won't be black market Ukrainian weapons at the end of the century.
I never understood people that think they are safe if only law abiding citizen don't have guns. The Police can't protect you from an immediate threat, they come to collect your body and find the killer.
The invention of the modern firearm, one that fires an integrated cartridge (what the layperson would call a bullet), predates the invention of the bicycle.
Both bicycles and firearms have about the same number of moving parts, and manufacturing either does not require any tooling or materials outside of what you can buy at a home supply store.
Basically, the genie left that bottle a long time ago. You can certainly disarm people that follow laws, but that's about it.
Doesn't seem to make life harder on the criminals at all. A pistol runs about GBP 150 on the black market in the UK, and a lot of criminals are armed, although said guns are used more to intimidate and coerce than to kill.
> I see this over and over . . . If you don't have kids, who exactly are you saving the world for?
The billions of people (including kids) who already exist. Whether through adoption or supporting better general social programs. Clearly if that were the focus and the way humans thought the world would be a better place. But of course it's wishful thinking and people have every right to have and enjoy their own children.
I take it the world isn't going to be 'saved'. The question is how we respond to that.
Why do you see 'saving the world' as a priority? The natural (non-human) environment doesn't have any right to exist. Our priority should be to avoid harming humans, and people born into a world that's mostly uninhabitable for them will have pretty shit lives.
If the shit hits the fan, I'd rather be in the country with a lot of weapons. Historically, American weapons usually get used on other countries, not on ourselves.
It looks like the actual increase was minimal and within the margin of error:
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced this week that according to their calculations, July 2015 was the hottest month since instrumental records began in 1880. NOAA says that the record was set by eight one-hundredths of a degree Celsius over that set in July 1998. NASA calculates that July 2015 beat what they assert was the previous warmest month (July 2011) by two one-hundredths of a degree.
But government spokespeople rarely mention the inconvenient fact that these records are being set by less than the uncertainty in the statistics. NOAA claims an uncertainty of 14 one-hundredths of a degree in its temperature averages, or near twice the amount by which they say the record was set. NASA says that their data is typically accurate to one tenth of a degree, five times the amount by which their new record was set.
Are we supposed to ignore the established long-term warming trend just because the records now being set aren't sufficiently beyond the ones from one anomalous year?
The only solution to this problem is technology. Some combination of green energy sources plus probably very large scale terraforming.