(Climate) Scientists aren't actually that helpful in proposing solutions, just predicting how screwed we are if we do nothing.
Moving from fossil fuels is actually quite hard. There is nothing to replace oil as fuel for global trade (i.e. fuel for airliners, cargo ships, long-haul trucking). There are tens of thousands of petroleum-based products without an obvious replacement. The environmental movement is still spreading FUD on nuclear (the only non-carbon emitting power source along with hydro and geothermal), preferring to push solar and wind even though those need natural gas backup to be viable.
At this point it's probably more practical to start planning for mitigations to climate change effects.
They are doing exactly what is expected of climate scientists. They are not policy makers, they gather and process data to build predictive models. Now they are scared of what they predict. Why require that they also come up with solutions, before sounding alarms?
But that was my point. Right now I think we have a good handle on the severity of the problem. The policy is much harder and 'listening to the scientists' doesn't help.
I have the feeling that some policy maker are not aware of the severity. But let's say they are. Now they make a new policy. How do we gauge what the impact of this policy? This falls within the realm of said scientist. How to suggest new policies etc, that requires another skill set. We also should listen to those guys.
This is utter nonsense. There are things that are hard to replace, but all of what you talk about is being studied by scientists extensively. Obviously not climate scientists, becasue, duh, they are experts on cimate, not on long haul shipping.
But renewables are scientifically a solved problem (all the predictions on the long term technological development of renewables also turned out to be far far to conservative). For the last 10% or so you need synthetic gas for long term storage of energy, but actually with the electrification of the heating sector, it turns out that nuclear would need synthetic gas for long term storage, too, for economic reasons.
Further, it is is clear that a lot of R&D is still required, but again, environmental economists have discussed in detail that the best way to incentivize the R&D spending required would have been a solid carbon tax.
The problem is not the lack of solutions, the problem is the lack of political will to implement them. It's disruptive, powerful lobbies have been funding climate denialism for decades, and people are unwilling to suffer even a minimal drop in living standards in order to stop climate change.
The technical hurdles are all doable, but whether we as a species can collectively act on the knowledge that we collectively have is an open question. It's the hardest question, and it's infused with ideological battles on all sides. The US can't even operate an efficient public health system. It accepts enormous inefficiencies and human suffering for ideological reasons. And that's for its own citizens. Climate change will affect the poorest countries most.
>But renewables are scientifically a solved problem
I don't think so. Whenever there is huge investment in solar and wind, you see a comparable investment in natural gas to bridge the intermittency issues (e.g. Germany). That isn't a solved problem. That solar and wind require huge amounts of rare earth minerals, have huge land-use requirements, and are largely unrecyclable, is not a solved problem.
>For the last 10%
You sure that shouldn't be the 'last 50%'?
>so you need synthetic gas for long term storage of ener
These discussions always seem to go this way. When presented with major challenges to large scale deployments of solar and wind, an unproven, unavailable or unworkable workaround is propsed. No, synthetic gas is not a solution, just like pumped/gravity or Li-ion storage isn't either.
>The technical hurdles are all doable
To be clear, this is an expression of hope for the future (after more R&D), and not reality today, correct? Today, we don't have a way to fully move off of fossil fuels.
>It's disruptive, powerful lobbies have been funding climate denialism
There are powerful lobbies all over the place. For example, did you know that natural gas companies are one of the biggest lobby groups for solar and wind deployments? Why is that?
Even though all that is true, in reality our output of CO2 is still increasing.
The scientific problems that remain are so far away from our current effort that the question of whether it's the last 10% or last 50% is almost irrelevant.
Yes! So is my home province (http://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html). No point in investing in solar and wind here (but we still do because it makes people feel good)
Hydro and geothermal is great if you have the right geography. Nuclear works everywhere.
Places that achieved this level of carbon-free emissions always have a mix of some or all three technologies, like my province, Sweden, Costa Rica, France, and unlike Germany (which doubled down on solar and wind and Russian natural gas).
That's a good summary of all the arguments made by the people who denied it was happening while talking to any audience that would buy that line when they're talking to slightly more sophisticated rubes.
But it's not based in facts, it's just a collection of false talking points.
No one who brings up rare earth in these discussions cares about that issue. Usually they don't even understand or care why they're called rare earths.
But people are still denying it's even happening, others are arguing it's a good thing so we should expect people to trot out well rehearsed lies on the proposed solutions too.
I don't understand why anyone would want to do that, but again it's plainly clear that's what's happening and pretending it's not isn't going to help anything.
The benefit of the doubt has been sorely abused by the "skeptics" in this matter, and now they want to be "skeptical" of the solutions to the problem they claimed didn't exist.
Well mark me down as "skeptical" of these so-called skeptics.
In particular this line about the evil gas lobby being behind the push for solar and wind is the most cynical lie I've heard in a long time.
> I don't understand why anyone would want to do that
Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway covers that pretty comprehensively. Often it is the very same think tanks, PR agencies, and people who are quoted "the science isn't certain" across decades and multiple damaging products and activities. Sowing doubt is their service, built out into a career. The common factor appears to be an irrational fear of any and all regulation - no matter how necessary.
>But it's not based in facts, it's just a collection of false talking points
That's not true and unfair. Believe it or not, I want to be proven wrong. I want somebody to walk me through what a end-goal for our ideal energy mix is, preferably without casually throwing it that we just need to create a new exotic battery technology. The most hopeful proposals always put in something in the fine-print like burning some carbon-emitting fuel, like 'biofuels' (i.e. burning garbage or corn) to work around intermittency issues of solar and wind. That's how I got disillusioned with solar(and wind) being the answer to climate change. Then there's Germany (and California to a lesser extent), huge economic regions that are a great test bed for large-scale deployments. Germany is signing multi-decade deals to build NEW pipelines to ship natural gas and isn't expected to be carbon free until 2060s (i.e. never). Both Germany and California are importing fossil fuel-based electricity from neighbours to plug holes in their grids. Meanwhile, France is basically carbon-free for energy generetion, without much solar and wind.
Also, you haven't actually said which part is wrong. Just that it's wrong. Can you make an effort?
>No one who brings up rare earth in these discussions cares about that issue.
I think there's a level of hopeful and overly positive thinking around what solar panels can be to the point where it is cult-like. Why can't you be skeptical of solar energy? I'm not denying climate change, or the need to minimize carbon emissions. I'm skeptical of solar and wind as a modality for that change.
There are major challenges with scaling solar deployments past a certain point due to the fact that solar energy is highly diffuse, intermittent and variable (across seasons and years).
I agree, the material requirements are a secondary consideration, but let's be clear, if you're going to scale solar to being something like 50% of global energy mix, those are important considerations.
>But people are still denying it's even happening
There are people like that, but they aren't the problem because we don't have a real solution anyway. The people that are spreading FUD on nuclear are the real problem. If Western world doubled-down on nuclear power to the same level as France in the 60s and 70s think of the trillions of tons of CO2 that would not have been emitted. So is the anti-nuke movement or conservative climate change denials that is worse for climate change?
I believe you are genuine, but also the information you present is miles from the reality in Germany and Europe, and the state of research in the field in general.
> Believe it or not, I want to be proven wrong. I want somebody to walk me through what a end-goal for our ideal energy mix is, preferably without casually throwing it that we just need to create a new exotic battery technology.
Until 80% the carbon optimal mix is Gas + Renewables. For the last 20% you need to start producing the Gas from excess energy during times when renewables outstrip demand.
Also, gas is incredibly much better for carbon footprint than coal, so in the short term replacing coal with gas makes a lot of sense.
And again, there are no unproven technologies in this scenario. Everything exists and exists today. It just makes no sense to start generating gas from renewables until you have many periods where renewables outstrip demand.
Finally, again, for economic reasons it starts making sense to do the same (turn excess production into gas) for nuclear as well [2]. It also is obvious that Germany fucked up with getting out of nuclear when they did.
The intermittency issues you claim also don't really exist as such in todays grid. What's your source for that? In Germany the amount of balancing energy used to combat intermittency has been _declining_ for years [1]. They have congestion issues, but that is again a political rather than a technical issue (if you can't get people to accept power lines in their backyards, good luck with building nuclear power plants).
European grid stability has generally been improving with the build out of renewables (and blackouts are ten times more common in the US than in Germany). This is often said to be related to the improved coordination in the European system.
A number of authors have mapped out different aspects of the transition towards 100% systems [3]. But again, we already have 100% systems on islands today. So your claim that no one knows how to build them is manifestly wrong. There are plenty of problems with transitioning or scaling, but there is no fundamental mystery about any of this.
For the 100% scenario the work of Greiner for example explicitly is built around tackling the question of transmission vs storage, taking all sorts of variability into account [4]. You can always quibble with the assumptions, with the level of modeling, etc. But none of this is entirely new. We have had reports maping out the 100% scenarios for years, with a number of different options. (Last relatively excentric one I saw advocated building electrolysis platforms powerd by windfarms offshore and directly transporting gas into the gas system, I would class that as a technological challenge, even if there isn't anything fundamentally unproven about the technology).
And again, look at what happened with solar. Our knowledge of running and building these systems will increase dramatically as we build them. There is no indication to me that we are not capable of doing so _if there was sufficient political will_. And that last part is what's truly hard.
Of course then we still have to face the hard problems: Industry and agriculture....
>Until 80% the carbon optimal mix is Gas + Renewables.
I don't understand what we're arguing about? All I said was that renewables (solar and wind specifically) need natural gas backup. In an ideal world where carbon emissions weren't a problem, that would be a non-issue, but we are trying to completely remove carbon emissions - so how is solar and wind actually helping?
>For the last 20% you need to start producing the Gas from excess energy during times when renewables outstrip demand.
This is hopeful thinking. The most efficient process for creating syngass is from fossil fuels.
Syngas from renewables ... that's not technology that is currently viable, and it may never be viable.
The other issue is that you need to greatly overprovision solar and wind infrastructre to generate a huge amount of excess energy to brige the intermittency gaps. I remember seeing some numbers on that, and they are astronomical.
>A number of authors have mapped out different aspects of the transition towards 100% systems [3].
The big problem with these estimates is that they use 'biomass' to plug in the gaps that wind and solar have. Do you know what that means? It means burning garbage or using huge swaths of land to grow corn or soy or whatever to burn. That is the technology of the future? And even in that situation Germany can't be emission neutral until 2050 (i.e. never)!! This is the insanity I'm talking about. We're willing to destroy the environment we have to grow crops just to burn (not to feed people, and we still need to do that), just so that we don't use nuclear. Jesus.
Why is Germany not following France, and increasing their nuclear infrastructure? Because insanity, that's why. Because of the cult of renewables.
>Also, gas is incredibly much better for carbon footprint than coal
Maybe. Natural gas is certainly efficient, though efficiency in this case is a little bit of a detriment, as more efficiency means more CO2 emissions. Ironically coal's dirty particulate emissions (the ones that kill humans) are actually good for cooling the planet by blocking or sun's rays.
But yeah, overall natural gas is much more efficient and less CO2 is emitted per generated Watt, though the gains may be lost if the pipelines are not properly maintained and there is leakage.
The big hope is that natural gas is a bridging fuel, but to what exactly?
>But again, we already have 100% systems on islands today.
What islands? We're talking about a grid for a modern, developed economy with millions (or hundreds of millions) of people and heavy industry, not some dinky little island.
>Of course then we still have to face the hard problems: Industry and agriculture....
Yes. This is why I'm frustred that we're wasting our time with solar and wind and not scaling up our nuclear infrastructre. That's a low hanging fruit.
If you're genuinely interested in escaping your info bubble then I've been recommending this video as a quick intro for people who don't feel at home with left wing solutions to climate change. Part of its about climate change denial, but it covers the attacks made (often by the same people) on the viability of renewables too and your pont about the solution not existing yet:
And yes, climate change deniers are the real problem, not people who are irrationally scared of nuclear. Nuclear is just one solution, and as of today it's not a cost effective one. We could have been building nukes for a while but what was the point in investing so much money in what was just a big hoax anyway? We could have had a carbon tax that made Nuclear competitive but again, what's the point when it's just a hoax?
>If you're genuinely interested in escaping your info bubble
What info bubble? There is hardly any critical analysis in the press about the constraints of solar and wind.
I watched the video you posted from the marker you linked to. The author identified a 'conservative' objection to solar and wind as lacking an effective storage solution (why is that a conservative objection?). The author's retort is that we merely lack a 'can-do-attitude'. No seriously - those are his words and the crux of his response. He argues "If mass storage systems don't exist, then invent them, use Li-io, or compressed air storage, or gravity storage".
Except none of those are actually viable technologies to supplant a natural gas peaker plant that is REQUIRED to backup large solar and wind deployments. Take the Tesla battery deployment in Australia which the author claims is an example of what can be achieved if we just put our minds to it. That battery deployment is not meant to provide power when solar output is negligble or non-existent, it is there to even out grid load, and supplies energy on the order of seconds. A battery back up of solar and wind deployments on the scale of a nation's economy, would need to provide enough storage for WEEKS of energy - there is NO battery technology today or upcoming that can do that. You can see that by looking what nations like Germany that want to go renewable, are actually doing.
I get the 'can-do-attitude' line of thinking, but let's be clear, this line of argument means that 1) we cannot replace fossil fuel sources TODAY and with CURRENT technology, with renewables, and 2) sometimes no amount of 'can-do-attitude' can beat thermodynamics. We used fossil fuels (fundamentally a 19th century technology) becuase there aren't a lot of other options. Energy density of fossil fuels is not trivial to beat.
And yes, this is typical. I want to understand what an economy based totally (or mostly) on renewables would look like and all I get is a a pot-pourri of things that don't exist that we need to invent.
>And yes, climate change deniers are the real problem
You spend an inordinate amount of time on climate change deniers. I've never claimed human-driven climate change is a hoax or that our best science is wrong on the effects of it. Why bring it up? And why implicitly try to link me with those guys?
I suspect this is because it is a low-hanging fruit that allows you to criticize an easy to criticize group without focusing on the fact that renewables are not getting us to where we need to go. It's like focusing on creationists when your school system gradautes functionally illiterate students. Yeah creationists are a problem, but not THE problem for solving illiteracy.
> A battery back up of solar and wind deployments on the scale of a nation's economy, would need to provide enough storage for WEEKS of energy - there is NO battery technology today or upcoming that can do that.
With a sufficiently broad definition of battery to include pumped hydro, grid scale batteries do exist and are cost effective. This does require rather specific geography.
It's not my fault that the entire conservative and libertarian movement decided to adopt the most idiotic possible stance and stick with it long after it was obvious to everyone that it was a low quality lie.
Am I now supposed to pretend that didn't happen and naively assume that those same people are genuinely curious about the impact of mining rare earths, or wether gas backup of renewables is better economically and environmentally than burning coal, or about bird deaths from wind turbines?
No thanks, unlike the people who believe this nonsense I'm not a complete chump. Maybe you're only pretending to be ill informed about renewable energy, but either way repeating talking points you learned from climate change deniers isn't in the least bit convincing.
Yes the guy in the video sounds like he's talking to very slow children. That's how you talk to people with opinions unmoored from reality. He's right though. Tesla didn't look at whether EVs were possible and say "this doesn't exist therefore it never can" they looked at the physics of it and will be creating large amounts of electricity storage that is cheaper and more environmentally sound than what came before.
Just repeating "this isn't possible" when lots of domain experts think it will be isn't convincing. Just like denying climate change wasn't convincing, just politically convenient.
You keep focusing on climate change denialists. I am with you on that. It is irrational to dismiss the findings of a multitude of good well-meaning scientists across a wide spectrum of scientific disciplines.
Having said that, climate change denialists are not the problem. In fact, they are great for proponents of solar and wind because it shifts the conversation to how dumb and evil the denialists are instead of seeing how bad wind and solar are for the environment and climate change action.
Look at our conversation. You keep going back to denialists and not actually any answer any question I have on renewables. And annoyingly you keep linking me with climate-change denialists. Can you stop? Being skeptical about renewables is not the same as denying climage-change or for action to comabt climate-change.
>Yes the guy in the video sounds like he's talking to very slow children.
That wasn't my concern. My objection was that he skirted answering a question in the same place that everyone from the cult of renewables does. It always ends up with an argument that we just need to tap human ingenunity to invent new technology just as we did when we went to the moon. Maybe we can, maybe we can't. Going to the moon turns out to be easier than a lot of other things that feel like they should be easy.
>Just repeating "this isn't possible" when lots of domain experts think it will be isn't convincing.
I listed reasons why it isn't possible. You sent me a link that argued the same except the youtuber argued we just need a 'can-do-attitude'.
Let me send you a link. Here's a 'Real Engineering' Youtube video on reasonable issues with (California's) renewables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cm7HOAqZY and even that video ends in the same place ... we just need to invent new battery technologies.
Natural gas is a sensible bridging technology. But there is no lobby comparable to the oil lobby for anything anywhere.
> These discussions always seem to go this way. When presented with major challenges to large scale deployments of solar and wind, an unproven, unavailable or unworkable workaround is propsed. No, synthetic gas is not a solution, just like pumped/gravity or Li-ion storage isn't either.
Explain how synthetic gas storage wouldn't work? It has a shit efficiency, but if we are willing to stomach a 50% increase in electricity prices and made the land available, we can build fully renewable systems today.
In fact we do, on islands, where electricity prices are much higher to start with.
Again, it's not a technical problem. It's only a technical problem if you add the political constraint that you have to save the planet without hurting any established economic interests.
This is different for other industrial processes which are harder to decarbonize, but right now we are not incentivizing the necessary R&D into these processes.
On the substance the rest of your points don't really hold. There are efficient wind turbines without rare earths for example.
And if we start building carbon neutral technologies prices will come down. Most dramatically so they did for solar:
So the completely ridiculous incentives to build solar home systems in Germany in the 90s created a market that was neither efficient, nor lead to very many CO2 savings. But it ended up bringing the break even point, where solar is cheaper than coal, forward by many years.
And organizations like the IEA continue to get all of this really consistently fundamentally wrong:
I don't know why we aren't going full bore on developing a sun shade that we have some control over so regardless of the cause we can just regulate the temperature of the planet.
You can say it is risky to engage in terraforming projects like that but we have already been engaging in terraforming for hundreds of years now with no plan at all.
Also humans are pretty good at uniting around one singular huge project, but pretty bad at the millions of small projects that are required to fix this problem the correct way.
Even at projected SpaceX lift prices of $1000/lb access to space is still prohibitively expensive. The Earth is big and a big mirror would be needed: millions of tonnes size range. Not only that but it would have to be delivered to the L1 Lagrange point, SpaceX prices are for lift to LEO only.
We did global trade before we had combustion engines, you know. So that is not impossible, just takes longer. And I remember reading about using cellulose-based packaging (corn husks I believe) to replace plastic some fifteen years ago.
Agreed on nuclear though, I think it's essential to have. And yes, I agree that we're well past the "avert" scenario, we need to start planning mitigations.
Yeah, because the damn environmentalists have all the power to impose their views on the unsuspecting, well meaning, oil giants and global corporations. If only those oil giants and their allies had pushed back early enough, maybe the truth could have won out!
Well, reality check, in the 90s the GOP and even the oil giants accepted the reality of and scientific consensus on global warming, but with sufficient funding from interested parties, they were able to stave of decisive action for decades, netting them many many billions.
With the human population growing exponentially, its a certainty that we will breeze by the 1.5 degrees limit very soon.
People don't want to give up their cheeseburgers, all excuses are good, and the level of misinformation that goes around the topic of climate change is through the roof.
I'm glad Greta is contributing to informing the general public of the consequences of their choices but people don't want to hear it will take a lifetime to change the behavior of even a small amount of people.
Sooner - when insurers start either putting premiums up to completely unaffordable levels, or outright refuse insurance. When cities can no longer afford the infrastructure burden, and are forced to put taxes through the roof. That won’t take Miami being completely underwater, just a few more severe storm surges. When millions of people start losing their retirement homes, tunes will change.
I get your point about people being stubbornly ignorant, but I learned this today so I thought I’d throw it out there.
If ocean rising has gotten so bad that Miami is underwater the accompanying acidification of those oceans will have reaped havoc on marine fishing putting 500 million people’s food security at risk.
Half a billion people in underdeveloped countries without to a vital part of their diet. Half a billion, and that’s just people that rely on fish. Inland people add to the numbers if their farming suffers.
What are you talking about? Even in my very conservative neck of the woods, I see people changing their buying patterns. Being "green" is now desirable, unlike 15 or so years ago. Honestly, I think a few things could nudge people in the right direction, such as:
- decreasing size of trash and recycling cans
- small tax on single use goods, like grocery bags and packing materials
- end or at least reduce subsidies for food, oil, etc
- charge vehicle registration based on milage/year and vehicle type
- create a pollution tax and return it as a dividend
We can try to force people to do the right thing, but I'm of the opinion that people are really good at avoiding rules, so increasing costs may be more impactful. That's a large part of my many of my neighbors are becoming more green:
- LEDs are cheaper than incandescents or florescents over time
- electric cars are more convenient (no gas station visits) and getting to be price competitive with gas cars
- reusable shopping bags are becoming more and more common
People want to be green and will often choose the "better" option, provided it's reasonably close in price. Thus increasing the cost of bad options should increase competition and innovation for good options.
That's a 108% increase in a century, which is a relatively short time in historical terms. Imagine the damage to the planet with double the current human population. This could be around the corner, historically speaking.
It still sounds pretty bad, like doubling the current population or close to that in 100 years. If not 100, make it 150 or 200 it's still not much on historical terms.
With modern medicine, modern agriculture and the tendency to reduce warfare around the world, there is no reason to believe the growth will stop, by the contrary.
I think you've misunderstood the change in growth rate. It has dropped from 1.19% to 1.08% growth in the last five years or down 0.11%. If this trend held in the next five years it would drop to 0.97% growth by 2024 and in ~50 years it would be 0% growth, ie the population would stabilize.
Indeed! One has got to appreciate how words in the English language are not always (read: never) the best way to describe math.
By the way, this reminds of the series 1/n^s and the fact that the sum converges exactly for s > 1, but diverges for 1/n. Personally, I prefer to call the latter s = 1 case the infinite pizza series, since it can ensure that you have free pizza for the rest of your life by choosing an interval for n large enough to be ~1 in the sum; every day.
And by the way again, this is also the Riemann Zeta! [1]
[1] Provided that complex exponentiation is explained to you in a way that doesn't lead the same sensational misgivings written about Heisenberg uncertainty in Medium articles...
Oh yeah and more more thing: 1% on it's own is exponential, but the key fact is that in logistic growth the exponential factor (or rather compound factor) goes down over time... much like changing the s over time in the above example of 1/n^s.
Are there any compelling papers or presentations on the impact and science of climate change? Virtually all reporting presents/qualifies it as 'what scientists say'. Since the convention in journalism is to create doubt for the reader by phrasing something as 'person says' I find these articles easy to ignore.
Unfortunately this is not based on real science. The main argument relies on a source called "arctic news", which is a crank blog.
These doomsday messages aren't helpful. The situation is bad. The real science is grueling. Telling people that there's nothing to be done any more isn't helpful.
it is generally agreed that doing everything we can now will only give us a 50/50 chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. seeing as we will not do everything we can, it is reasonable to think that it is too late https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/car...
"Catastrophic climate change" is not a binary thing where you either have it or you don't.
We'll almost certainly have catastrophic climate change. It will still make a huge difference if we try to limit it as much as possible or if we just go on without caring.
i'm not talking about how bad it will be, i am talking about how much of a difference changes made by us will make. there is a point where even if we stopped all carbon emissions it will not stop climate change
it's not a "will it flood or not" it's "how many miles from the coast will we lose to the ocean" Is the water going to come 2 miles in or 30? Both are catastrophic, but to different degrees.
You could do worse than read an IPCC report - https://www.ipcc.ch/ - which aims to distil the agreed impacts. In aiming to present only that which is most certain they err on the side of benign conservatism, which has attracted criticism.
A more readable view on possible impacts, which is the result of one journalist's attempt to understand the science, is David Wallace Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth. Whilst well cited throughout he may have included studies and impacts that are less concrete.
For a balanced presentation BBC's Climate Change - The Facts with David Attenborough gives all you should need in an hour.
Reminder that every single sentence in the IPCC report must be approved unanimously by a panel of government-appointed authors from various countries, including e.g. Saudi Arabia. Therefore IPCC reports are to be considered as quite conservative (the seriousness of the situation is often leveled down).
Nonetheless, that's what makes them an irrefutable source. Anyone discrediting the IPCC reports findings can and should be dismissed immediately from the discussion.
Being an intergovernmental body, they also include representatives from the oil states and administrations who are "wilfully unconvinced" by any science that might impact profit or industrial dominance. Yet IPCC reports still require unanimity.
Here's a report of Saudi leading a push to tone down reports to protect their oil interests, which I see as substantively different to making a mistake:
"Change" by Graeme Maxton [1]. I read it recently and highly recommend it to non-scientists. It gives you an accessible forecast of the next 50 to 100 years, based on scientific research.
We will have overpopulation and environmental crises in the future and they will get explained away mindlessly as being completely caused by climate change, when that may be only a partial or even not significant factor in the events.
Not enough fresh water - climate change! Not the fact that the population increased by a factor of 4, and the local acquifers have been drained.
Hu? Climate change causes changes in rainfall patterns. These are hard to predict, but it's where a lot of research is focusing right now. The IPCC also says so. In some regions it might be helpful, in others it will hurt.
So climate change interacts with everything, but I think it's obvious to everyone invlved that it isn't the main driver of everything?
There have always been droughts though, and things have varied from location to location. This effect you are invoking needs actually quantifying, and then comparing to the change in population. Would these regions coped if their populations hadn't drastically increased? Has water supply actually even decreased?
e.g. Yemen, population has gone up x4 in 40 years (or something like this). They have wars, and water shortages. What is the relative contribution of climate change?
It is fairly balanced and fact filled, but when it comes to reduced rainfall and climate change, they are invoked, but left completely unquantified. No source, no estimate, no numbers (let alone a nice impartial unmanipulated graph). Did it decrease 10%, 1%. So if they have absolutely no handle on the quantification how can they make the claim at all? If there is a large uncertainty then that should be expressed.
This is what I mean, we are being primed to accept climate change as an explanation. When we have other massive, dominating factors - massive population growth and running out of acquifer runway (i.e. they have been in deficit for a long time).
Literally in the first paragraph of the article you cite as problematic it says:
> Like other unstable situations in the region, climate change may be an exacerbating factor in the country’s instability, not a primary cause, and to what extent is uncertain.
It's simply a hard question to quantify the impact of climate change on rainfall. Major effort in the IPCC report just goes into adequately representing the uncertainty in precipitation changes. And this is not hidden it's front and center in the Summary for Policymakers:
So yeah, people now look for the contribution of climate change to all sorts of things. It will often not be a dominating driver, and often hard to quantify, but I don't see anything terribly problematic here in the sense that the dominant reasons are ignored. (Population growth in this context is often also indirectly taken into account through land change uses, which mostly means turning nature into farmland.)
They are citing it as a cause but have no quantative basis for it what so ever apparently. The effect could be 0, or negative, they've apparently just brought feelings on the situation.
So figure SPM.7 looks pretty serious. It is 60-80 years in the future (probably further at the time of the models) and based on models (albeit on the agreement of presumably independent models). However current shortages are being attributed to climate change. To do this it should be possible to a) show a long term drop in precipitation and b) show climate related causality somehow. This should be easier than accurately predicting the future - but of course is less easy than innaccurately predicting the future.
So what you show I would say reenforces my point. We have predictions based on models (which we can take seriously or not), but then we also have current events which are being attributed to climate change with no quantifiable basis for doing so - despite the fact it should be possible to come up with some kind of proxy for climate induced problems(other than just a shortage happened).
But literally SPM.7 is the summary of the summary of the summary. There is so so much research published on precipitation, the vast majority of which is careful and precise in giving uncertainties.
It's also actually harder to attribute causality to long term trenda for individual current events than to look at model based predictions for the future. The entire extreme events due to climate change business is incredibly tricky to quantify, even though there are some good heuristic reasons to think it might hold.
So you won't conceed that this is problematic that there is according to you presumably relevant data they could cite - even if it doesn't directly apply to yemen in that particular perioud, but they chose not to? I mean what ever happened to 'citation needed'.
I mean uncertainties is a bit of an umbrella term. You should be able to be certain about predictions if you make the error bars big enough. If you still can't come up with a reliable assertion doing this then things are spurious.
There's already a lack of fresh water in various parts of the world but the problem is particularly concentrated in the Middle East where 70% of the world's desalination plants are located.
For example Kuwait meets more than 90% of its water demand through desalination.
I dunno, either we lurch from crisis to crisis and possibly end up with an ungovernable world, or look at implementing something like a one child policy in countries with very high population growth (or pressuring them to do so by preventing them from exporting population).
Certainly move the discourse beyond ... so well population is going up, nothing can be done about it.
Fertility has already fallen below replacement levels in most of the world. The only exception is Africa however carbon emissions from that part of the world are so small it barely makes a difference. Even if you wanted to focus in on Africa you will find the countries with the highest emissions like South Africa have a fertility rate barely above replacement level.
The reality is nearly all the increases in population are built in already, it's caused by people surviving into old age. The population is going up and nothing can be done about it.
This is why arguments about population are pointless with regards to climate change, we resolved that years ago through education and better health provision.
Personally, I think the overpopulation argument is weak. The places that have overpopulation issues are the places where people don't listen to people talking about overpopulation. It's the same problem with plastic use, non-green electricity generation, etc. Most policies are just going to negatively impact the minority without actually solving anything.
I firmly believe that necessity is the mother of innovation, so we should be encouraging those who feel a need to cut back to reproduce, because those are the people who will innovate for the rest of the world. If you have the means to make positive changes, you have the means to raise children to continue that effort. If food starts to become scarce (globally, not just regional distribution issues), we'll innovate new ways to produce food. If water starts to become scarce generally, we'll innovate ways to conserve it and/or desalinate. If pollution gets out of hand, we'll innovate solutions there too.
So I think all of the talk about overpopulation is counterproductive. We should be discussing the problems overpopulation causes and solve those since there's no way to force another individual or group to stop reproducing, but you can make living more sustainably more cost effective.
Something worth noting that likely gets ignored regarding the topic of climate change. Some of the population really doesn’t care if the world becomes inhabitable for humans after they die. As an optimist I’ve observed this outlook and I think it’s because quality of life has actually diminished from the visibility of social media and rising cost of homes. I could be wrong on the cause but the original problem exists and I wonder if society needs to improve for the mid to lower classes before people have the desire to help in the protests.
Unfortunately, it seems to last 1-2 years, so I really only trust the news about 50-75% of the time, less if there's ongoing political drama. The less I hear from politicians in the news, the more I trust the news, which is sad...
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadAnd the mainstream media keeps reporting this while completely ignoring the scientists.
Moving from fossil fuels is actually quite hard. There is nothing to replace oil as fuel for global trade (i.e. fuel for airliners, cargo ships, long-haul trucking). There are tens of thousands of petroleum-based products without an obvious replacement. The environmental movement is still spreading FUD on nuclear (the only non-carbon emitting power source along with hydro and geothermal), preferring to push solar and wind even though those need natural gas backup to be viable.
At this point it's probably more practical to start planning for mitigations to climate change effects.
But renewables are scientifically a solved problem (all the predictions on the long term technological development of renewables also turned out to be far far to conservative). For the last 10% or so you need synthetic gas for long term storage of energy, but actually with the electrification of the heating sector, it turns out that nuclear would need synthetic gas for long term storage, too, for economic reasons.
Further, it is is clear that a lot of R&D is still required, but again, environmental economists have discussed in detail that the best way to incentivize the R&D spending required would have been a solid carbon tax.
The problem is not the lack of solutions, the problem is the lack of political will to implement them. It's disruptive, powerful lobbies have been funding climate denialism for decades, and people are unwilling to suffer even a minimal drop in living standards in order to stop climate change.
The technical hurdles are all doable, but whether we as a species can collectively act on the knowledge that we collectively have is an open question. It's the hardest question, and it's infused with ideological battles on all sides. The US can't even operate an efficient public health system. It accepts enormous inefficiencies and human suffering for ideological reasons. And that's for its own citizens. Climate change will affect the poorest countries most.
I don't think so. Whenever there is huge investment in solar and wind, you see a comparable investment in natural gas to bridge the intermittency issues (e.g. Germany). That isn't a solved problem. That solar and wind require huge amounts of rare earth minerals, have huge land-use requirements, and are largely unrecyclable, is not a solved problem.
>For the last 10%
You sure that shouldn't be the 'last 50%'?
>so you need synthetic gas for long term storage of ener
These discussions always seem to go this way. When presented with major challenges to large scale deployments of solar and wind, an unproven, unavailable or unworkable workaround is propsed. No, synthetic gas is not a solution, just like pumped/gravity or Li-ion storage isn't either.
>The technical hurdles are all doable
To be clear, this is an expression of hope for the future (after more R&D), and not reality today, correct? Today, we don't have a way to fully move off of fossil fuels.
>It's disruptive, powerful lobbies have been funding climate denialism
There are powerful lobbies all over the place. For example, did you know that natural gas companies are one of the biggest lobby groups for solar and wind deployments? Why is that?
The scientific problems that remain are so far away from our current effort that the question of whether it's the last 10% or last 50% is almost irrelevant.
If we are talking just electrical grid power then Sweden is 95% there on a mix of nuclear and hydro.
Edit: I acknowledge that hydro only works if the geography gods have been extremely kind.
Hydro and geothermal is great if you have the right geography. Nuclear works everywhere.
Places that achieved this level of carbon-free emissions always have a mix of some or all three technologies, like my province, Sweden, Costa Rica, France, and unlike Germany (which doubled down on solar and wind and Russian natural gas).
But it's not based in facts, it's just a collection of false talking points.
No one who brings up rare earth in these discussions cares about that issue. Usually they don't even understand or care why they're called rare earths.
But people are still denying it's even happening, others are arguing it's a good thing so we should expect people to trot out well rehearsed lies on the proposed solutions too.
I don't understand why anyone would want to do that, but again it's plainly clear that's what's happening and pretending it's not isn't going to help anything.
The benefit of the doubt has been sorely abused by the "skeptics" in this matter, and now they want to be "skeptical" of the solutions to the problem they claimed didn't exist.
Well mark me down as "skeptical" of these so-called skeptics.
In particular this line about the evil gas lobby being behind the push for solar and wind is the most cynical lie I've heard in a long time.
Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway covers that pretty comprehensively. Often it is the very same think tanks, PR agencies, and people who are quoted "the science isn't certain" across decades and multiple damaging products and activities. Sowing doubt is their service, built out into a career. The common factor appears to be an irrational fear of any and all regulation - no matter how necessary.
That's not true and unfair. Believe it or not, I want to be proven wrong. I want somebody to walk me through what a end-goal for our ideal energy mix is, preferably without casually throwing it that we just need to create a new exotic battery technology. The most hopeful proposals always put in something in the fine-print like burning some carbon-emitting fuel, like 'biofuels' (i.e. burning garbage or corn) to work around intermittency issues of solar and wind. That's how I got disillusioned with solar(and wind) being the answer to climate change. Then there's Germany (and California to a lesser extent), huge economic regions that are a great test bed for large-scale deployments. Germany is signing multi-decade deals to build NEW pipelines to ship natural gas and isn't expected to be carbon free until 2060s (i.e. never). Both Germany and California are importing fossil fuel-based electricity from neighbours to plug holes in their grids. Meanwhile, France is basically carbon-free for energy generetion, without much solar and wind.
Also, you haven't actually said which part is wrong. Just that it's wrong. Can you make an effort?
>No one who brings up rare earth in these discussions cares about that issue.
I think there's a level of hopeful and overly positive thinking around what solar panels can be to the point where it is cult-like. Why can't you be skeptical of solar energy? I'm not denying climate change, or the need to minimize carbon emissions. I'm skeptical of solar and wind as a modality for that change.
There are major challenges with scaling solar deployments past a certain point due to the fact that solar energy is highly diffuse, intermittent and variable (across seasons and years).
I agree, the material requirements are a secondary consideration, but let's be clear, if you're going to scale solar to being something like 50% of global energy mix, those are important considerations.
>But people are still denying it's even happening
There are people like that, but they aren't the problem because we don't have a real solution anyway. The people that are spreading FUD on nuclear are the real problem. If Western world doubled-down on nuclear power to the same level as France in the 60s and 70s think of the trillions of tons of CO2 that would not have been emitted. So is the anti-nuke movement or conservative climate change denials that is worse for climate change?
I believe you are genuine, but also the information you present is miles from the reality in Germany and Europe, and the state of research in the field in general.
> Believe it or not, I want to be proven wrong. I want somebody to walk me through what a end-goal for our ideal energy mix is, preferably without casually throwing it that we just need to create a new exotic battery technology.
Until 80% the carbon optimal mix is Gas + Renewables. For the last 20% you need to start producing the Gas from excess energy during times when renewables outstrip demand.
Also, gas is incredibly much better for carbon footprint than coal, so in the short term replacing coal with gas makes a lot of sense.
And again, there are no unproven technologies in this scenario. Everything exists and exists today. It just makes no sense to start generating gas from renewables until you have many periods where renewables outstrip demand.
Finally, again, for economic reasons it starts making sense to do the same (turn excess production into gas) for nuclear as well [2]. It also is obvious that Germany fucked up with getting out of nuclear when they did.
The intermittency issues you claim also don't really exist as such in todays grid. What's your source for that? In Germany the amount of balancing energy used to combat intermittency has been _declining_ for years [1]. They have congestion issues, but that is again a political rather than a technical issue (if you can't get people to accept power lines in their backyards, good luck with building nuclear power plants).
European grid stability has generally been improving with the build out of renewables (and blackouts are ten times more common in the US than in Germany). This is often said to be related to the improved coordination in the European system.
A number of authors have mapped out different aspects of the transition towards 100% systems [3]. But again, we already have 100% systems on islands today. So your claim that no one knows how to build them is manifestly wrong. There are plenty of problems with transitioning or scaling, but there is no fundamental mystery about any of this.
For the 100% scenario the work of Greiner for example explicitly is built around tackling the question of transmission vs storage, taking all sorts of variability into account [4]. You can always quibble with the assumptions, with the level of modeling, etc. But none of this is entirely new. We have had reports maping out the 100% scenarios for years, with a number of different options. (Last relatively excentric one I saw advocated building electrolysis platforms powerd by windfarms offshore and directly transporting gas into the gas system, I would class that as a technological challenge, even if there isn't anything fundamentally unproven about the technology).
And again, look at what happened with solar. Our knowledge of running and building these systems will increase dramatically as we build them. There is no indication to me that we are not capable of doing so _if there was sufficient political will_. And that last part is what's truly hard.
Of course then we still have to face the hard problems: Industry and agriculture....
[1] https://www.next-kraftwerke.de/wp-content/uploads/ausschreib...
[2] https://nworbmot.org/blog/burden-of-proof.html
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
[4] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf
I don't understand what we're arguing about? All I said was that renewables (solar and wind specifically) need natural gas backup. In an ideal world where carbon emissions weren't a problem, that would be a non-issue, but we are trying to completely remove carbon emissions - so how is solar and wind actually helping?
>For the last 20% you need to start producing the Gas from excess energy during times when renewables outstrip demand.
This is hopeful thinking. The most efficient process for creating syngass is from fossil fuels.
Syngas from renewables ... that's not technology that is currently viable, and it may never be viable.
The other issue is that you need to greatly overprovision solar and wind infrastructre to generate a huge amount of excess energy to brige the intermittency gaps. I remember seeing some numbers on that, and they are astronomical.
>A number of authors have mapped out different aspects of the transition towards 100% systems [3].
The big problem with these estimates is that they use 'biomass' to plug in the gaps that wind and solar have. Do you know what that means? It means burning garbage or using huge swaths of land to grow corn or soy or whatever to burn. That is the technology of the future? And even in that situation Germany can't be emission neutral until 2050 (i.e. never)!! This is the insanity I'm talking about. We're willing to destroy the environment we have to grow crops just to burn (not to feed people, and we still need to do that), just so that we don't use nuclear. Jesus.
Why is Germany not following France, and increasing their nuclear infrastructure? Because insanity, that's why. Because of the cult of renewables.
>Also, gas is incredibly much better for carbon footprint than coal
Maybe. Natural gas is certainly efficient, though efficiency in this case is a little bit of a detriment, as more efficiency means more CO2 emissions. Ironically coal's dirty particulate emissions (the ones that kill humans) are actually good for cooling the planet by blocking or sun's rays.
But yeah, overall natural gas is much more efficient and less CO2 is emitted per generated Watt, though the gains may be lost if the pipelines are not properly maintained and there is leakage.
The big hope is that natural gas is a bridging fuel, but to what exactly?
>But again, we already have 100% systems on islands today.
What islands? We're talking about a grid for a modern, developed economy with millions (or hundreds of millions) of people and heavy industry, not some dinky little island.
>Of course then we still have to face the hard problems: Industry and agriculture....
Yes. This is why I'm frustred that we're wasting our time with solar and wind and not scaling up our nuclear infrastructre. That's a low hanging fruit.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D99qI42KGB0
And yes, climate change deniers are the real problem, not people who are irrationally scared of nuclear. Nuclear is just one solution, and as of today it's not a cost effective one. We could have been building nukes for a while but what was the point in investing so much money in what was just a big hoax anyway? We could have had a carbon tax that made Nuclear competitive but again, what's the point when it's just a hoax?
What info bubble? There is hardly any critical analysis in the press about the constraints of solar and wind.
I watched the video you posted from the marker you linked to. The author identified a 'conservative' objection to solar and wind as lacking an effective storage solution (why is that a conservative objection?). The author's retort is that we merely lack a 'can-do-attitude'. No seriously - those are his words and the crux of his response. He argues "If mass storage systems don't exist, then invent them, use Li-io, or compressed air storage, or gravity storage".
Except none of those are actually viable technologies to supplant a natural gas peaker plant that is REQUIRED to backup large solar and wind deployments. Take the Tesla battery deployment in Australia which the author claims is an example of what can be achieved if we just put our minds to it. That battery deployment is not meant to provide power when solar output is negligble or non-existent, it is there to even out grid load, and supplies energy on the order of seconds. A battery back up of solar and wind deployments on the scale of a nation's economy, would need to provide enough storage for WEEKS of energy - there is NO battery technology today or upcoming that can do that. You can see that by looking what nations like Germany that want to go renewable, are actually doing.
I get the 'can-do-attitude' line of thinking, but let's be clear, this line of argument means that 1) we cannot replace fossil fuel sources TODAY and with CURRENT technology, with renewables, and 2) sometimes no amount of 'can-do-attitude' can beat thermodynamics. We used fossil fuels (fundamentally a 19th century technology) becuase there aren't a lot of other options. Energy density of fossil fuels is not trivial to beat.
And yes, this is typical. I want to understand what an economy based totally (or mostly) on renewables would look like and all I get is a a pot-pourri of things that don't exist that we need to invent.
>And yes, climate change deniers are the real problem
You spend an inordinate amount of time on climate change deniers. I've never claimed human-driven climate change is a hoax or that our best science is wrong on the effects of it. Why bring it up? And why implicitly try to link me with those guys?
I suspect this is because it is a low-hanging fruit that allows you to criticize an easy to criticize group without focusing on the fact that renewables are not getting us to where we need to go. It's like focusing on creationists when your school system gradautes functionally illiterate students. Yeah creationists are a problem, but not THE problem for solving illiteracy.
With a sufficiently broad definition of battery to include pumped hydro, grid scale batteries do exist and are cost effective. This does require rather specific geography.
Am I now supposed to pretend that didn't happen and naively assume that those same people are genuinely curious about the impact of mining rare earths, or wether gas backup of renewables is better economically and environmentally than burning coal, or about bird deaths from wind turbines?
No thanks, unlike the people who believe this nonsense I'm not a complete chump. Maybe you're only pretending to be ill informed about renewable energy, but either way repeating talking points you learned from climate change deniers isn't in the least bit convincing.
Yes the guy in the video sounds like he's talking to very slow children. That's how you talk to people with opinions unmoored from reality. He's right though. Tesla didn't look at whether EVs were possible and say "this doesn't exist therefore it never can" they looked at the physics of it and will be creating large amounts of electricity storage that is cheaper and more environmentally sound than what came before.
Just repeating "this isn't possible" when lots of domain experts think it will be isn't convincing. Just like denying climate change wasn't convincing, just politically convenient.
Having said that, climate change denialists are not the problem. In fact, they are great for proponents of solar and wind because it shifts the conversation to how dumb and evil the denialists are instead of seeing how bad wind and solar are for the environment and climate change action.
Look at our conversation. You keep going back to denialists and not actually any answer any question I have on renewables. And annoyingly you keep linking me with climate-change denialists. Can you stop? Being skeptical about renewables is not the same as denying climage-change or for action to comabt climate-change.
>Yes the guy in the video sounds like he's talking to very slow children.
That wasn't my concern. My objection was that he skirted answering a question in the same place that everyone from the cult of renewables does. It always ends up with an argument that we just need to tap human ingenunity to invent new technology just as we did when we went to the moon. Maybe we can, maybe we can't. Going to the moon turns out to be easier than a lot of other things that feel like they should be easy.
>Just repeating "this isn't possible" when lots of domain experts think it will be isn't convincing.
I listed reasons why it isn't possible. You sent me a link that argued the same except the youtuber argued we just need a 'can-do-attitude'.
Let me send you a link. Here's a 'Real Engineering' Youtube video on reasonable issues with (California's) renewables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cm7HOAqZY and even that video ends in the same place ... we just need to invent new battery technologies.
> These discussions always seem to go this way. When presented with major challenges to large scale deployments of solar and wind, an unproven, unavailable or unworkable workaround is propsed. No, synthetic gas is not a solution, just like pumped/gravity or Li-ion storage isn't either.
Explain how synthetic gas storage wouldn't work? It has a shit efficiency, but if we are willing to stomach a 50% increase in electricity prices and made the land available, we can build fully renewable systems today.
In fact we do, on islands, where electricity prices are much higher to start with.
Again, it's not a technical problem. It's only a technical problem if you add the political constraint that you have to save the planet without hurting any established economic interests.
This is different for other industrial processes which are harder to decarbonize, but right now we are not incentivizing the necessary R&D into these processes.
On the substance the rest of your points don't really hold. There are efficient wind turbines without rare earths for example.
And if we start building carbon neutral technologies prices will come down. Most dramatically so they did for solar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law
So the completely ridiculous incentives to build solar home systems in Germany in the 90s created a market that was neither efficient, nor lead to very many CO2 savings. But it ended up bringing the break even point, where solar is cheaper than coal, forward by many years.
And organizations like the IEA continue to get all of this really consistently fundamentally wrong:
https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1064529619951513600
You can say it is risky to engage in terraforming projects like that but we have already been engaging in terraforming for hundreds of years now with no plan at all.
Also humans are pretty good at uniting around one singular huge project, but pretty bad at the millions of small projects that are required to fix this problem the correct way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade
Conceptually it would work fine, economics are a problem.
Agreed on nuclear though, I think it's essential to have. And yes, I agree that we're well past the "avert" scenario, we need to start planning mitigations.
Indeed. Going back to pre-industrial way of doing global trade is certainly a kind of a solution. Not sure how reasonable that is.
Well, reality check, in the 90s the GOP and even the oil giants accepted the reality of and scientific consensus on global warming, but with sufficient funding from interested parties, they were able to stave of decisive action for decades, netting them many many billions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTmS0exb7r8
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examin...
People don't want to give up their cheeseburgers, all excuses are good, and the level of misinformation that goes around the topic of climate change is through the roof.
I'm glad Greta is contributing to informing the general public of the consequences of their choices but people don't want to hear it will take a lifetime to change the behavior of even a small amount of people.
If ocean rising has gotten so bad that Miami is underwater the accompanying acidification of those oceans will have reaped havoc on marine fishing putting 500 million people’s food security at risk.
Half a billion people in underdeveloped countries without to a vital part of their diet. Half a billion, and that’s just people that rely on fish. Inland people add to the numbers if their farming suffers.
- decreasing size of trash and recycling cans - small tax on single use goods, like grocery bags and packing materials - end or at least reduce subsidies for food, oil, etc - charge vehicle registration based on milage/year and vehicle type - create a pollution tax and return it as a dividend
We can try to force people to do the right thing, but I'm of the opinion that people are really good at avoiding rules, so increasing costs may be more impactful. That's a large part of my many of my neighbors are becoming more green:
- LEDs are cheaper than incandescents or florescents over time - electric cars are more convenient (no gas station visits) and getting to be price competitive with gas cars - reusable shopping bags are becoming more and more common
People want to be green and will often choose the "better" option, provided it's reasonably close in price. Thus increasing the cost of bad options should increase competition and innovation for good options.
This is not true as of 2019. The only continent that possibly does not show logistic growth (yet) is Africa. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#/media/File:...
While it’s likely true that we will end up with a sigmoid curve, population is still growing at a high rate
Population in the world is currently (2019-2020) growing at a rate of around 1.08% per year.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72
Not sure you can extrapolate out 100 (or 66) years when there's been a 0.11% (1.19 -> 1.08) change in the growth rate in just the last 5 years.
With modern medicine, modern agriculture and the tendency to reduce warfare around the world, there is no reason to believe the growth will stop, by the contrary.
By the way, this reminds of the series 1/n^s and the fact that the sum converges exactly for s > 1, but diverges for 1/n. Personally, I prefer to call the latter s = 1 case the infinite pizza series, since it can ensure that you have free pizza for the rest of your life by choosing an interval for n large enough to be ~1 in the sum; every day.
And by the way again, this is also the Riemann Zeta! [1]
[1] Provided that complex exponentiation is explained to you in a way that doesn't lead the same sensational misgivings written about Heisenberg uncertainty in Medium articles...
On a logarithmic scale, an exponential function is linear, making the test easy!
These doomsday messages aren't helpful. The situation is bad. The real science is grueling. Telling people that there's nothing to be done any more isn't helpful.
We'll almost certainly have catastrophic climate change. It will still make a huge difference if we try to limit it as much as possible or if we just go on without caring.
EDIT: at this point there is still a chance but the odds are not in our favour.
EDIT: 10 years ago we had a 50/50 chance as that article quotes UK Met Office
The latest big IPCC report is unfortunately already a bit dated: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/
The SR15 (Special report on 1,5 degree target) is more up-to-date, but less generic: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
particularly this, most recent, one: https://science2017.globalchange.gov/
A more readable view on possible impacts, which is the result of one journalist's attempt to understand the science, is David Wallace Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth. Whilst well cited throughout he may have included studies and impacts that are less concrete.
For a balanced presentation BBC's Climate Change - The Facts with David Attenborough gives all you should need in an hour.
Nonetheless, that's what makes them an irrefutable source. Anyone discrediting the IPCC reports findings can and should be dismissed immediately from the discussion.
Here's a report of Saudi leading a push to tone down reports to protect their oil interests, which I see as substantively different to making a mistake:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/m...
[1] https://www.graememaxton.com/gpm/2018/03/30/change/
Not enough fresh water - climate change! Not the fact that the population increased by a factor of 4, and the local acquifers have been drained.
So climate change interacts with everything, but I think it's obvious to everyone invlved that it isn't the main driver of everything?
e.g. Yemen, population has gone up x4 in 40 years (or something like this). They have wars, and water shortages. What is the relative contribution of climate change?
So, see this article.
https://climateandsecurity.org/2016/08/03/a-storm-without-ra...
It is fairly balanced and fact filled, but when it comes to reduced rainfall and climate change, they are invoked, but left completely unquantified. No source, no estimate, no numbers (let alone a nice impartial unmanipulated graph). Did it decrease 10%, 1%. So if they have absolutely no handle on the quantification how can they make the claim at all? If there is a large uncertainty then that should be expressed.
This is what I mean, we are being primed to accept climate change as an explanation. When we have other massive, dominating factors - massive population growth and running out of acquifer runway (i.e. they have been in deficit for a long time).
> Like other unstable situations in the region, climate change may be an exacerbating factor in the country’s instability, not a primary cause, and to what extent is uncertain.
It's simply a hard question to quantify the impact of climate change on rainfall. Major effort in the IPCC report just goes into adequately representing the uncertainty in precipitation changes. And this is not hidden it's front and center in the Summary for Policymakers:
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/AR5_SYR_FINA...
Figure SPM.7
So yeah, people now look for the contribution of climate change to all sorts of things. It will often not be a dominating driver, and often hard to quantify, but I don't see anything terribly problematic here in the sense that the dominant reasons are ignored. (Population growth in this context is often also indirectly taken into account through land change uses, which mostly means turning nature into farmland.)
They are citing it as a cause but have no quantative basis for it what so ever apparently. The effect could be 0, or negative, they've apparently just brought feelings on the situation.
So figure SPM.7 looks pretty serious. It is 60-80 years in the future (probably further at the time of the models) and based on models (albeit on the agreement of presumably independent models). However current shortages are being attributed to climate change. To do this it should be possible to a) show a long term drop in precipitation and b) show climate related causality somehow. This should be easier than accurately predicting the future - but of course is less easy than innaccurately predicting the future.
So what you show I would say reenforces my point. We have predictions based on models (which we can take seriously or not), but then we also have current events which are being attributed to climate change with no quantifiable basis for doing so - despite the fact it should be possible to come up with some kind of proxy for climate induced problems(other than just a shortage happened).
But literally SPM.7 is the summary of the summary of the summary. There is so so much research published on precipitation, the vast majority of which is careful and precise in giving uncertainties.
It's also actually harder to attribute causality to long term trenda for individual current events than to look at model based predictions for the future. The entire extreme events due to climate change business is incredibly tricky to quantify, even though there are some good heuristic reasons to think it might hold.
I mean uncertainties is a bit of an umbrella term. You should be able to be certain about predictions if you make the error bars big enough. If you still can't come up with a reliable assertion doing this then things are spurious.
For example Kuwait meets more than 90% of its water demand through desalination.
Certainly move the discourse beyond ... so well population is going up, nothing can be done about it.
The reality is nearly all the increases in population are built in already, it's caused by people surviving into old age. The population is going up and nothing can be done about it.
This is why arguments about population are pointless with regards to climate change, we resolved that years ago through education and better health provision.
I firmly believe that necessity is the mother of innovation, so we should be encouraging those who feel a need to cut back to reproduce, because those are the people who will innovate for the rest of the world. If you have the means to make positive changes, you have the means to raise children to continue that effort. If food starts to become scarce (globally, not just regional distribution issues), we'll innovate new ways to produce food. If water starts to become scarce generally, we'll innovate ways to conserve it and/or desalinate. If pollution gets out of hand, we'll innovate solutions there too.
So I think all of the talk about overpopulation is counterproductive. We should be discussing the problems overpopulation causes and solve those since there's no way to force another individual or group to stop reproducing, but you can make living more sustainably more cost effective.
Not to dismiss climate change-- it's a real issue-- but the publicity around it is certainly tied to politics.