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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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?
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 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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/)
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
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?
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
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!
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.
CO2 production will stop. We are at or over the Hubbert peak, and nothing can stop co2 production from falling in the future. Therefore, no policies are necessary to make it happen, and anything you do do is counterproductive at best, sabotage at worst.
The ecosystem is bounded by co2 in the air. Proof : just see what happens to plants if you put them in a co2 rich environment. The ecosystem is expanding to eat the extra CO2, and it will win, guaranteed. Especially since we won't even try to stop it. The amounts of land area that are turning green in Africa and Asia are mind-bogglingly big.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only if also levied on imports in a reasonable way, otherwise it will have the opposite effect. Why ? Because China and all of cheap Asia runs on coal, and that's not going to change quickly.
If it is not levied on imports, it is probably better to actually subsidize domestic CO2 production, because it is better and more useful (more useful work/more industrial production) than having that energy in China, and even China is better than the cheapest parts of Asia (Bangladesh, for example).
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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... :)
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.
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.
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."
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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...)
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.
I know, let's make the rest of the world just as aspiriational and let's also import people from places where they had little environmental impact right into societies where they can have far greater impact, and then let's let them keep making more of them with abandon, especially in the third world where they then emerge to overrun the civilized world from because they reproduce at far than sustainable, let alone carrying capacity rates.
The problem is clear, the solution is clear, yet the vast majority of people don't have the will to even just face the only solution. You simply can't rationally claim to want to do something about climate change and global warming on the premise that it's negative and needs "fixing", without talking about population control of poorly educated, low qualification people. Anything and everything else but qualitatively weighted population control is simply delaying disaster (if that is the premise you are operating on). We need to stop "saving" every child and person in the third world just so they can reproduce with abandon. For example, Nigeria is projected to reach 1 BILLION people by 2050. They can barely sustain themselves at the current 140 Million, you cannot consider yourself a rational or intelligent person if you think they will be able to do so at 1 BILLION.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
if almost half you input data is made up" and not raw observations then you can falsely come to this conclusion. The real data shows spiking in the mid 1930s far above current levels.
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.
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."
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'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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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? :-)
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.
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.
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?
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 331 ms ] threadI think this is a very realistic assumption.
Global Warming Is Irreversible, Study Says:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9988890...
"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.
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.
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.
http://www.passivhaus.org.uk/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuQB3x4ZNeA
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.
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.
So yet more air conditioning will ensue, consuming more energy, warming oceans further, raising humidity, and thus exacerbating the problem.
Positive feedback cycles sure are great.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
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.
There are plenty of places in the world that regularly ge t those conditions. People/Animals survive.
I'd like to see flukus spend a day in a hot sauna with water continuously dripping on the coals.
The average high temperature for some months is in the low to mid 30's and with >90% humidity (which goes up locally after rain).
45 years on, we've yet to achieve an actual reductions agreement, let alone enact it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Conference_on...
I'm not particularly sanguine.
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.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-sc...
http://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-the...
http://www.worldcat.org/title/sane-polity-a-pattern-language...
{{citation needed}}
Ignorance of irreversible consequences of messing with the composition of the atmosphere is sufficient reason to avoid doing so, no?
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?
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.
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.
What is not clear at all is whether humans are responsible for it.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
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.
It's definitely possible to model the whole climate system. Amazon is making recommendations with machine learning AI and shit.
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/
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.
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?
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.
There are plenty of current, pressing problems to solve; why solve a problem that won't exist for decades if not centuries?
Examples of this would be guano (replaced by saltpeter and then by the Haber process) and whale oil (replaced by petroleum).
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!
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.
It would be interesting to know if there is causality between human activity in those years and that spike.
Similarly if you turn off the stove, the water will continue boiling for some time.
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.
We've got the accelerator to the floor. It's no wonder that we're getting all the speeding tickets now.
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.
http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/alternativeenergyinnewy...
Were there ? In 1980, it was the hottest year ever. But in 1996, that was the hottest year ever. And that trend continues.
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?
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.
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.
All in, the gains you've received from your ancestors FAR FAR outweigh the losses.
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.
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.
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."
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...
Nobody can predict if another person's life will be better if "x" happens. This is a foundation of suicide prevention.
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.
http://grist.org/climate-energy/the-16-scariest-maps-from-th...
NB from 2012.
Interesting that it actually predicts that the UK will have a distinct benefit from warming when it comes to agricultural productivity.
[0] http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/08/16/july_201...
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.
If you believe this, wouldn't the ethical thing be to not have kids?
Besides, global warming-derived refugee flows into Europe could well put it in a much worse position than the US.
I see this over and over . . . If you don't have kids, who exactly are you saving the world for?
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.
Long term, the world will be fine, we won't.
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.
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.
The only solution to this problem is technology. Some combination of green energy sources plus probably very large scale terraforming.
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.
Even if all humans die, mankind will survive for eternity as a collection :)
We need to reduce the solar incident radiation...
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.
That's the reason some houses have not AC in the south of Europe but all the offices have.
Don't underestimate the thermal power needed for just one additional degree in a typical American house with poorly insulated windows, walls and doors.
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.
I'm pretty sure we don't put our heating on here in Edinburgh until October when nights are probably getting to be well below 10C.
Mind you for me 10C is "comfortable", 15C is "warm", 20C is "hot" and 30C means I'm on holiday somewhere hot where I can go capsizing to stay cool.
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.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tyne/7892733.stm
We tend to use AC if the outdoor temp is above 30C, so most days November to April.
It gets to above 45C here, which is pretty horrible without AC.
We don't put the AC, we open the balcony door and the air current is enough.
In winter, we reach at most 5C, we don't put also the heating. Some neighbors have it very high and in our apartment the temperature is 20-21C.
The insanity boggles my mind.
I had to go out and buy a sweater and thick trousers to sit in the office while it is 32C/90F outside.
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.
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.
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.
I have a $50 AC in my bedroom, that I'll turn on at night to get to sleep. That cost maybe $10/month in electricity.
I don't see how the upfront and maintenance cost for something like geothermal can ever breakeven in a place where you only need to use it for a few days a year in one room. Do you?
Be the change you want to see in the world.
This includes the American south, much of the midwest, Tokyo, China's larger cities (especially toward the south), Indonesia, the Middle East, and Australia.
Developing regions, especially in Africa, Central and South America, the Philippines, and Australasia also tend to strongly favour aircond. It's not just a comfort thing -- computer and office equipment, and even paper, are difficult to maintain in hot and humid environments.
These are also the latitudes and climates in which the bulk of the world's population, much of it still underdeveloped, still lives. If the story of "an advanced Western standard of living for all" is to be borne out, A/C will be a large part of it.
Those who didn't die were also far less productive. In many climates, living without air conditioning means spending much of the day simply surviving the heat, not getting anything done.
1. Build a machine that pulls significant amounts of CO² out of the atmosphere.
2. Go to the UN an straight up tell them "we can make this problem go away, give us 1tn$ and 20 square kilometers of land in these countries, over this schedule with these milestones".
3. Profit.
Indeed, worth a book.
Or you could plant a tree.
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.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/carbon-dioxide-emissions-rise-to...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration
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.
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.
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).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset
https://www.google.com/#q=greenhouse+gases+livestock+tax
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.
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.
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.
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.
Someone, or something, will ultimately be making decisions.
Why not a government, or government analog?
What about that bothers you? What alternatives do you suggest? Different mechanisms? Different institutions?
Raising standards of livings has always required raising material resource consumption.
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.
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.
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.
High levels of industrial production without counting the cost of carbon emissions is the problem.
Counties with high birth rates (mostly in Africa) aren't the ones causing that.
It's really the 2 person family in the West, with 3 cars, a MacManshion and 4 overseas holidays a year.
They are simply on their way to become like us: high population density, high individual environmental damage.
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.
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.
[1] https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/ (Need to choose Africa)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_circulation_model
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.
2C is generally considered to be the line above which things are critical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoiding_Dangerous_Climate_Cha...
http://www.rspb.org.uk/Images/below2degrees_tcm9-132866.pdf
I have a big problem with what you said. It should be "fewer people."
And there are big problems here in terms of externalities: my 'improved' climate might be disaster for you.
> 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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society
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.
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?
Not only that but try telling the billions in India and China "ok, now you're out of poverty you can't have a refrigerator or cooker"
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.
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.
That's just silly. Regulation guarantees the safety of the food you eat, the buildings you live in and the car you drive.
After all, check out this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12340694
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...
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?
Would that be because you know you've just made an unsustainable statement. Regulation has prevented plenty of ills.
that's a shame. how could we fix this? perhaps... regulation against lobbyists?
The analysis that I'm waiting to see is "of the global CO2 production each year, how much of it is due to humans?"
If we contribute 90% of CO2 production, then reducing it may change things.
If we contribute 10% of CO2 production, then even reducing our portion to zero, the overall change is near-negligible.
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
If the faucet is on and your kid is dropping pennies in, both are contributing to the overflow but stopping your kid is going to be irrelevant.
Do we know which humans are?
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."
Ref: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases (on the carbon dioxide tab)
And the Energy Information Association goes on to include magnitudes here:
http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/1605/archive/gg04rpt/pdf/tbl3.pdf
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.
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.
The ecosystem is bounded by co2 in the air. Proof : just see what happens to plants if you put them in a co2 rich environment. The ecosystem is expanding to eat the extra CO2, and it will win, guaranteed. Especially since we won't even try to stop it. The amounts of land area that are turning green in Africa and Asia are mind-bogglingly big.
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.
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.
What?
https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions
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 a lot like saying "prove it to me with numbers, because all the numbers you're giving me are bunk."
Edit: tense
"Nature generates X million tons of CO2 each year. Humans generate Y million tons of CO2 each year which primarily comes from A, B, and C."
From my own search, there are lots of numbers around X and Y and they're wildly different. Do they converge around a range?
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.
Perhaps planting a tree should incur a negative carbon tax.
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.
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.
1: http://www.carbontax.org/blog/2008/10/18/a-question-of-balan...
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.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases
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.
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.
[1] - http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/american-carbon-footprint
That's the goal, no? Burning oil releases CO2. Growing trees and burning them is carbon neutral.
If it is not levied on imports, it is probably better to actually subsidize domestic CO2 production, because it is better and more useful (more useful work/more industrial production) than having that energy in China, and even China is better than the cheapest parts of Asia (Bangladesh, for example).
Young, inexperienced but passionate fish sometimes have been known to deny the existence of water. Later they're embarrassed.
As long as that inventor doesn't turn out to be a new Thomas Midgley Jr.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
NB Inventor of both leaded petrol and CFCs.
...
> 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.
One word, CFC
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.
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.
It's not as though we should just give up.
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.
I really hope that I am proven wrong about it being too late due to trapped GHGs (but we can still try).
[1]: http://ewn.co.za/2016/08/22/Victory-for-DA-as-Herman-Mashaba...
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.
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.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-16/new-wind-s...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Yes, but we don't have that solution.
Batteries, pumped hydro, thermal storage, and many other technologies exist. They just need to become cheap enough. Thus, the problem is once again price.
The engineering issues are in getting this stuff to be sufficiently cost effective that we can afford to put them into wide use.
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.
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).
RedFlow (one manufacture) is in the same building as me, and they have an interesting report: http://redflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Diesel-Runtime...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery are cheap to produce, have decent power density and are solving this exact problem now in Africa and South America.
Production levels are just starting to ramp up now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
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?
https://evannex.com/blogs/news/34327493-battery-costs-fallin...
"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."
[there are hyperlinks in the original paragraph]
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.
There's over 50 years of research into it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Energy/Coal/C...
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."
Emissions are a byproduct of our progress (thus far).
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Disclosure: part of a populace)
> that your populace won't want that to happen?
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.
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.
You're busy looking up, and forgetting there's a class or two of people below you that would be [disproportionately] affected by your policy.
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.
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...)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
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.
The problem is clear, the solution is clear, yet the vast majority of people don't have the will to even just face the only solution. You simply can't rationally claim to want to do something about climate change and global warming on the premise that it's negative and needs "fixing", without talking about population control of poorly educated, low qualification people. Anything and everything else but qualitatively weighted population control is simply delaying disaster (if that is the premise you are operating on). We need to stop "saving" every child and person in the third world just so they can reproduce with abandon. For example, Nigeria is projected to reach 1 BILLION people by 2050. They can barely sustain themselves at the current 140 Million, you cannot consider yourself a rational or intelligent person if you think they will be able to do so at 1 BILLION.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://new.consumersenergy.com/residential/programs-and-ser...
A plan like this should be affordable for the vast majority of Americans.
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.
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.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/272314/advertising-spendi...
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.
Or taxes.
I think this sounds more plausible than terraforming, but is really the same thing.
Naw. See the well-documented phenomenon of the Jevon's Paradox:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
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.)
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.
Already the major chinese manufacturers are opening fabs in Malaysia. First Solar and Sunpower (US PV companies) also manufacture in Malaysia.
I'm not saying they are actually doing this, but how hard will it be to ship modules from China to Malaysia and then onto final destinations?
Politifact do a nice job of debunking it. http://politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jun/25/stev...
And the technology doesn't scale well. Few big plants that take ages to build, compared to panels on every roof and turbines put up one by one.
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.
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 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."
Interesting read, I'd never heard of Palo Verde.
[1] https://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_...
Megatons-to-megawatts is the closest modern equivalent of swords-to-plowshares; it's harder to think of something the world needs more.
But that's far too optimistic and sensible to ever happen.
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.
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)
Less commutes == less emissions.
[1]http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_wea...
Other countries write about climate change too :)
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.
climate = Klima
weather = Wetter
So, I really don't think that the confusion can be excused by language in this case :)
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?
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.
Even if your summer was cold, it was extra hot elsewhere and more than cancelled out the difference. Next year it could be reversed.
In fact the reversal did happen. The US had an unusually cool and wet summer last year and an unusually hot one this year.
What was considered norm not 30 years ago is now called colder than usual and used as a rebuttal for climate change.
The core science of global climate change is surrounded by a cloud of toxic subjectivity and witch-hunting. The hypocrisy is sometimes staggering.
Whom to add salt to. Yes tough question indeed
Take a look at weather stations that have been situated in the same place for 100 or more years, far from cities: http://www.john-daly.com/stations/stations.htm
Edit: my comment was originally made tongue-in-cheek, but it's clear that some acolytes are highly offended. I'll take it as vindication.
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climat...
In relation to the El Nino, sure, it is a factor in the heat every 5-7 years or so, including last year, but it doesn't explain the trend.
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.
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.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/23/tom-harris-g...