bombastic statements aside - the division is between EU+India who propose language "to phase out fossil fuels" in some international agreements, versus the USA+Commonwealth who will not accept that language.
I wish climate change news would make some effort to distinguish among the following levels of climate change outcomes: 1) the change would mean we have to change our way of life in some way like wear more sunscreen and not eat cows anymore and food gets more expensive and glaciers melt and polar bears now live only in zoos vs. 2) there will be major upheaval like every coastal city goes underwater and central USA for example will become like the sahara desert and many people die and it causes wars vs. 3) we reach some feedback loop where earth becomes just literally venus and every liquid and metal vaporizes and every human dies even the grandchildren of billionaires and even the ones who tried to burrow under ground.
I feel like so many stories about climate change the headline is like 'humans are doomed if we don't stay below 2 degrees Celsius increase since pre-industrial baseline' and then the body of the article is like 'our way of life will be affected by climate change if we don't do whatever'. I feel like this framing is bad. I'm not a climate change denier. I'm not even one of the guys who is like 'woke democrats are trying to hijack the climate change issue to take away my steaks and make me live in the pod and eat bugs'. I just want some information and not be lied to. Maybe it's normal journalistic sensationalism but I feel like it's extra damaging for this issue in particular.
0) Since the troposphere has actually warmed only 0.5C in the last forty years, and the world is rapidly reducing human CO2 emissions (which turn out to be a smaller fraction of the total than previously thought), there is little to worry about, and we should direct our efforts at resolving more important issues.
I'm not an expert but my impression of the issue is like we are headed to (1) no matter what and they are trying to say that if we keep digging up and burning coal and venting or burning natural gas then we are in danger of reaching (2). But the headline says (3) and the deniers say (0).
right, but the purpose of the news is not to tell you the future but to make you feel anxious about it and to push forward political agendas of the people who pay for it. i just pay as little attention as possible to any of this shit beyond entertainment value.
Well it's also simply false, scientists have historically been careful to provide multiple projections of future outcomes based on optimistic, pessimistic, and in-between estimates.
If misleading statements was the problem, then people would be a lot angrier about the blatant lies and propaganda large oil companies pushed for decades.
Dishonesty is the problem, but not in the way you suggest.
> In the past scientists have admitted to overstating the issue based on the justification that people would blow off their concerns if they didn't provide a certain amount of shock value.
I always found our lack of understanding the scariest thing about climate change. We're launching a big experiment on the atmosphere and the climate that'll be irreversible for generations without fully understanding the effects. That by itself should already be enough to shock anyone.
Doing nothing is an experiment we don't understand. We know the earth went through hundreds of warm and cold periods in the past, and those are just the ones we're very certain of.
Every action and inaction is a risk. You've got to have some faith that you have enough data and vision to react.
It’s getting really tiring responding to these decades old nonsensical arguments. The difference between the Earth going through cooling or warming periods over the course of many millennia compared to us forcing rapid change over the span of a few hundred years is obviously significant.
Did the parent poster claim that the hot/cold cycles we've found evidence of are evidence that human induced climate change doesn't exist? If so then I missed it.
Granted, their phrasing was a bit cryptic so maybe I misunderstood, but their last sentence led me to believe that you two are actually in agreement.
There is no trace of any release of CO2 in the atmosphere at the pace we have managed for a century now. None! There are releases over much longer periods, with massive observed impacts. Humanity will scrape by in Groenland, Antarctica... Unless Geo-Engineering saves some and buries others.
Maybe read the book "Termination Shock" ?
Do you have source? What I've heard is the opposite: scientists have consistently made conservative predictions because of the hostile political landscape.
Basically, if you predict bad thing X would happen by year Y, and it doesn't, then you're branded a liar. But if you don't predict X will happen, and it happens, nobody's angry at you. It creates an incentive structure where scientists would tone down their predictions, instead of doing their best to find out the most likely outcome.
Unfortunately, I'm having trouble finding the source. It was quite some time ago that I read it. It's certainly possible that it was a public communicator peripheral of the people working on the actual science who made the comment, and not the scientists themselves.
I'll poke around a bit more and try to find the source. If I find it I'll add it as a response to this comment.
Update: I didn't find the source. The closest I found was an article featuring a prominent climate change scientist lamenting about other scientists overstating the issue, on the basis that when people find out it was overblown they would lose trust in whole idea. The scientist herself did not however, overstate the issue - she advocated a conservative approach to communicating with the public.
You're forgetting the part where if they predict bad thing X would happen by year Y, they would get Z funding. The monetary incentives in academia and public are stacked towards predicting doom.
Science communication and trying to appropriately communicate risk has a lot of issues, yeah. I don't really blame them because there's been more than two decades of very obvious failure to get sufficient numbers of people sufficiently politically engaged to change enough to avoid catastrophic outcomes. In general, if you're a relatively high information person, you should probably be looking up the actual reports themselves by organisations like the IPCC.
As to your 1/2/3 scenarios, 1 is basically impossible at this point unless every major country starts extremely rapid decarbonisation, like zero carbon within 15 years sort of thing. We think we are on track for option 2, and with predictable mitigations (countries successfully pull off all pledged reductions) it's still pretty much 2, just potentially less severe. By "less severe", I mean we can try to prevent at least some of that sea level rise which means there will be some cities that become coastal but don't get catastrophically flooded. But like, Miami for example, that city won't exist by the end of the century without a hypothetical and unproven seawall (people always say seawalls, sure it's a decent idea, but we don't know if it's even feasible for us to build them to the necessary standards. It's like asking every coastal city to build something more complex and safety critical than Hoover Dam).
An important thing to think about is that the difference between 1 and 2 is class based. When I said 1 was impossible, I meant that it was impossible for like "most people", because we're on track for billions of people to become refugees because of climate change, likely leading to wars and significant political issues. But obviously if you're wealthy enough, you are basically insulated from those outcomes because you can just keep moving away from the coast (even if millions of other people are trying to move there at the same time) and the only real impact on you is the broader economic impacts on the country you live in, and even those are muted. So for the wealthy, it's always really been a question of "Is it going to be 1 or 3?", which is a big part of the reason why it has been so immensely hard to see significant political change to prevent anthropogenic climate change.
We don't really understand the science of 3 well enough to understand what the tipping points would be to start a runaway greenhouse effect, so no one knows for certain. We need more science on it. I think a very reasonable guess is that it won't happen until our greenhouse gas heat retention is at least as high as it was during the various times in Earth's history when the polar ice caps didn't exist, which gives us significant runway to work with. Beyond that, we just don't know.
Engage in a thought experiment with me, if you would. Imagine yourself 20 years in the future. And, somehow, you find that the world is a bit warmer, but things are still pretty much exactly as they've always been. Yet during this time you heard endless proclamations of the world effectively ending if extremely radical change isn't carried out in some window of 5-10 years. How do you think your future self would then further respond to such ongoing predictions?
The point the earlier poster is making is that he's making is that this behavior is self defeating, and absolutely should be blamed. The tale of 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' dates back at least 2600 years and has its own version, independently 'discovered', in essentially every culture and language. Resorting to hyperbole for attention is simply self defeating if you care about the long-term, and in this case there is literally nothing except the long-term.
And this has been going on for far longer than 2 decades. This article [1] dates back to 1989. It starts with a lede of, "A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000." with only more excitement from there. Incidentally, that page has also been edited to remove the date of publication. You can see an archive of it here [2]. Very classy AP.
If I could go back in history to try to make people care about climate change, what I would do is lowball every single prediction to emphasize that when I make a prediction not only does it come true, but it invariably ends up even greater in magnitude than I predicted. Instead of creating a rubber banding effect where you get this huge shoart term gain in attention followed by a slap back in the face, you'd instead see an initially small but ever-growing and consistent movement.
I totally agree with you. For this reason, I don't follow mainstream outlets about climate change. The most balanced source I have found so far is this substack by Hannah Ritchie. Here is one of those balanced article - https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/15c-warming-tempor...
Our world has dramatically increased in living standards during the period of increasing global average temperatures.
All of the IPCC future scenarios - including their worst case outcomes - still project a world where living standards keep increasing.
To restate this: the economic and scientific consensus (as presented by the IPCC) is that our world will be better off in the future even in their worst scenarios. The claims about humans being unable to survive are not supported by science.
It's so bizarre to see people who occupy positions of power make statements like this.
Anyone who knows the basics of energy, agriculture, or economics knows this statement is exactly the opposite of the truth.
At the current population level, fossil fuels are not incompatible with survival. They are necessary for survival. This isn't an ideological or rhetorical statement, it's just a fact that we are dependent upon fossil fuels to feed ourselves, keep warm, transport goods (and ourselves) and do work.
Climate change is a problem. So is mass starvation, freezing to death in the winter, and living in abject poverty.
>“The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions,” Guterres said, a nod to recent comments made by Sultan al-Jaber, the United Arab Emirates official who will lead the next U.N. climate summit. “It’s fossil fuels – period.”
The statement is incoherent. Why are fossil fuels, apart from their emissions, "a problem - period"?
Every resource we use, every decision we make, always have tradeoffs. Framing fossil fuels as a problem in and of themselves makes no sense to me. They've obviously been an incredible boon to humanity.
It feels akin to demonizing antibiotics because eventually antibiotic resistance will be a problem. It has saved countless lives, and will continue to save countless more, but it has some downsides which will get worse in the future. So let's say "antibiotics are incompatible with human survival."
From a resource industry perspective fossil fuels are a problem as they have a finite supply through which we've churned through essentially all the relatively easy to get to stuff.
The Saudi's have already reached peak oil for their region (by the estimate of their own engineers) which means they have essentially hit peak monthly production and the next 50 odd years will see less and less production at higher and higher cost.
This is the reality of fossil fuels, the world will see them about for the next century but (failing other energy sources) the demand will increase as populations increase both in number and in per capita consumption as the supply dwindles and the costs increase .. not to mention every barrel pulled up from deep underground is a nother barrel going toward the climate problem.
With no move to replace fossil fuels as the principal energy source we're heading into increased conflict over access.
ie, - They're an ongoing problem and we're best off moving to other means while we are able to do so.
As for antibiotics, yes, they are a problem, especially their current excessive use in the livestock industry where casual overuse is only accelerating the timeline to them becoming useless.
I remember all the peak oil claims in the early 2000s, then all of a sudden shale oil, gas, and fracking made all the people sounding the alarm look very silly.
Resource scarcity isn't a new phenomenon. It's why markets exist. Prices allocate resources. There is no emergency here.
Sure, fossil fuels are finite - can you give me a number for how finite? Everyone who tried in 2008 was wrong. Prices increased, we got more exploration, the tech improved, and all of a sudden our fossil fuel supply massively increased.
Everyone seems so utterly confident in predicting so many problems in the future, yet things keep getting better generation after generation.
We need to stop pretending we can predict and solve all of society's future problems right now.
> Prices increased, we got more exploration, the tech improved, and all of a sudden our fossil fuel supply massively increased.
But no actual new resources were created, as I said it's a limited resource and now we've passed a point where further access to what's left require greater cost, greater effort, greater energy .. and when we do use these tail end supplies we continue to add to increasing C02 load in the troposphere.
> We need to stop pretending we can predict [...] society's future problems right now.
Bit general, but we can at least specifically predict how much additional energy is trapped by increasing insulation in the troposhere .. that's thermodynamics and a spherical spreadsheet.
Easy enough to think of a 100+ years ago, back of the envelope in the 1970s, and model indetail today.
>we've passed a point where further access to what's left require greater cost, greater effort, greater energy
This is exactly what was said before, and was premature, that was my point.
It's technically correct that no new resources were created, but practically speaking, the new technology revealed resources we didn't know existed (or couldn't retrieve). The point is that we don't know how far this extends in the future. Reality has a way of making fools of anyone who naively extends trend lines.
> > "“The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions,” Guterres said, a nod to recent comments made by Sultan al-Jaber, the United Arab Emirates official who will lead the next U.N. climate summit. “It’s fossil fuels – period.”"
> "The statement is incoherent. Why are fossil fuels, apart from their emissions, "a problem - period"?""
I was curious about this so I read the context. Your quote hints at the context as "a nod to recent comments made by Sultan al-Jaber, the United Arab Emirates official who will lead the next U.N. climate summit." Elsewhere in the AP article they explain the context in more detail: "Secretary-General António Guterres also dismissed suggestions by some oil executives - including the man tapped to chair this year’s international climate talks in Dubai - that fossil fuel firms can keep up production if they find a way to capture planet-warming carbon emissions." So with this context, it sounds like when it was suggested the fossil fuel industry burn less fuel, the fuel industry guy said something like 'ok but what if we burn the fuel and then capture the emissions :trollface:' and Guterres is calling them out on this incoherent troll suggestion. I mean if you know anything about physics or chemistry then you know that the suggestion is incoherent or deceptive like maybe at some point they plan to redefine emissions to not include carbon dioxide or some other scheme like that.
It might seem like that fuel industry guy is just trolling or is ignorant of physics or chemistry when he says meaningless things like that, but the real effect is that it gives cover for people who defend the fossil fuel industry and to say that Guterres is the one making incoherent statements when you take parts of the conversation out of context. So it's not just a silly thing it's actually malicious.
>it sounds like when it was suggested the fossil fuel industry burn less fuel...
But the fossil fuel industry doesn't burn very much fuel at all. You (and everyone reading this) buy it and burn it because it makes your lives so much better. Or buy electricity or other things which burned the fuel to make them.
>the real effect is that it gives cover for people who defend the fossil fuel industry
Gives cover, what an interesting phrase.
The context doesn't make the statement more coherent. Why are fossil fuels a problem absent the emissions? Resource scarcity and advancing technology have always led to changing energy sources and usage over time, no fear mongering about planetary extinction necessary.
> "Why are fossil fuels a problem absent the emissions?"
They aren't. The problem is that the fuel industry guy was suggesting to burn the fossil fuels and then recover every emission. That's not something that makes sense in chemistry or physics. So the industry guy was either stupid or he was lying. He's not that stupid, so he's obviously lying, and the UN guy knows he's lying. The UN guy tried to call out the fuel industry guy's lie by saying that the fossil fuels themselves were the problem. So now people are going on the internet and saying that the UN guy is stupid because he doesn't know that fossil fuels aren't a problem absent emissions. I guess that's a win for the fuel industry guy and it's why he gets paid the big bucks.
You can disagree with who the UN chooses but having representatives from countries and industries which are absolutely crucial for humanity's functioning seems like a good idea.
'the UN guy' is the secretary-general of the United Nations, the chief administrative officer of the United Nations.
'the fuel industry guy' is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan_Al_Jaber and he is described as "the Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology of the United Arab Emirates, managing director and group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC Group), chairman of Masdar (the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company), and the United Arab Emirates' special envoy for climate change. He is the President-Designate of the upcoming COP28 climate talks."
> "You can disagree with who the UN chooses"
OK but I wasn't doing that. Such defensiveness did catch my interest though, and I see there is a whole section on his wiki page including "A further Guardian investigation revealed in June 2023 that a large number of fake Twitter and Medium accounts, using stock or AI-generated profile images, have been either promoting and defending the hosting of the UN climate summit by the United Arab Emirates, including reposting UAE government tweets and trying to rebut criticism of Al Jaber's presidency."
>He is the President-Designate of the upcoming COP28 climate talks
Which is an UN body.
It's funny that instead of admitting that the UN chief made a troubling statement, you're blaming a third party (who was appointed by the UN to lead a climate summit) and then invoking conspiratorial thinking when anyone points out this out.
Dissenting opinions online aren't all fake. The idea that fossil fuels are a problem, period, is stupid, and it's troubling that someone with political power believes it, and espouses it.
> "It's funny that instead of admitting that the UN chief made a troubling statement, you're blaming a third party"
Oh I fully admit that the UN chief made a troubling statement. I found the statement very troubling, which is why I looked into it and it's why we are having this charming online discussion. What I found was that the UN chief was successfully rhetorically baited by the oil industry executive who is scheduled to lead the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference, and the AP wrote the headline like the UN chief just woke up in the morning with the plan to lie to the press about climate change. It's not like I don't blame the UN chief. I wish the UN chief was not so easily baited. It seems like that should be one of the job requirements for being UN chief.
> "The idea that fossil fuels are a problem, period, is stupid, and it's troubling that someone with political power believes it."
According to that article what he said was: “The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions,” Guterres said, a nod to recent comments made by Sultan al-Jaber, the United Arab Emirates official who will lead the next U.N. climate summit. “It’s fossil fuels - period.”
It was taken from the context of a rhetorical engagement with someone who was trolling him, and the AP reported it uncritically. The oil ceo said something like 'fossil fuels aren't a problem, only burning them and not capturing all of their emissions is a problem :trollface:' and then in response the UN chief said "It's fossil fuels - period." because they both knew that the extracted fossil fuels would be burned and their emissions would not be fully captured.
The statement (in the title anyway) is fundamentally, blatantly false though. Humanity will survive with climate change, and if you take into account the haber-bosch process, half of humanity only exists due to fossil fuels. We might have a hard time with them from climate change, but we will have a hard time without them too. We will survive either way.
This is what makes people sick of the constant climate talk and skeptical. So many of the claims are exaggerated and sensationalized, not just by media but also by officials. If you want to win people over with facts and science you have to make sure your loudest voices and most powerful proponents don't say outright lies.
If you read the context, that UN chief got trolled and lost his cool. An oil executive is planned to chair this year’s international climate talks in Dubai, and this executive suggested that fossil fuel firms can keep up production if they find a way to capture carbon emissions. Which if you know anything about chemistry or physics doesn't make any sense. The only way it makes sense is if they are planning to do something sneaky later like only capture some of the emissions or just not comply or roll it back or redefine emissions to mean only particulate emissions or something like that. So when the UN guy was arguing against this obvious attempt at deception by this oil exec who is going to chair the climate talks, the UN guy said that fossil fuels themselves were the problem and when he was trying to emphasize that point he said they are incompatible with humanity. Probably that rhetoric gaffe made the day of the oil exec lol he is probably worth his salary to that oil company even if its millions of dollars he made the climate-supporting UN chief sound so dumb. And of course that's the quote that the AP picks as their headline lol.
If you can play UN chief like a fiddle to tell you outright lies, then he should rather resign than be out there pushing more people to skepticism about climate.
I don't necessarily disagree. But maybe the AP headline should have been more like "UN chief loses composure in the face of absurd proposal by oil industry executive in high stakes energy and climate debate."
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadsource- a negotiator blog somewhere last year
I feel like so many stories about climate change the headline is like 'humans are doomed if we don't stay below 2 degrees Celsius increase since pre-industrial baseline' and then the body of the article is like 'our way of life will be affected by climate change if we don't do whatever'. I feel like this framing is bad. I'm not a climate change denier. I'm not even one of the guys who is like 'woke democrats are trying to hijack the climate change issue to take away my steaks and make me live in the pod and eat bugs'. I just want some information and not be lied to. Maybe it's normal journalistic sensationalism but I feel like it's extra damaging for this issue in particular.
0) Since the troposphere has actually warmed only 0.5C in the last forty years, and the world is rapidly reducing human CO2 emissions (which turn out to be a smaller fraction of the total than previously thought), there is little to worry about, and we should direct our efforts at resolving more important issues.
This sure doesn’t look like a “rapid” reduction either https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
We’ve added 25% of ALL our Co2 emissions since 2010, and if current emissions remained flat we would add another 25% in ~15 years.
But sure, let’s focus on 1 variable and live in denial.
Since when? This is news to me.
there was a dip in 2020 apparently, but i'd hardly call that a trend -- and the reason is obvious: the world halted for a little bit.
Dishonesty is the problem, but not in the way you suggest.
I always found our lack of understanding the scariest thing about climate change. We're launching a big experiment on the atmosphere and the climate that'll be irreversible for generations without fully understanding the effects. That by itself should already be enough to shock anyone.
Every action and inaction is a risk. You've got to have some faith that you have enough data and vision to react.
Granted, their phrasing was a bit cryptic so maybe I misunderstood, but their last sentence led me to believe that you two are actually in agreement.
Basically, if you predict bad thing X would happen by year Y, and it doesn't, then you're branded a liar. But if you don't predict X will happen, and it happens, nobody's angry at you. It creates an incentive structure where scientists would tone down their predictions, instead of doing their best to find out the most likely outcome.
E.g., https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/scientists...
I'll poke around a bit more and try to find the source. If I find it I'll add it as a response to this comment.
You can come back from being ignored, you can't really come back from losing people's trust.
As to your 1/2/3 scenarios, 1 is basically impossible at this point unless every major country starts extremely rapid decarbonisation, like zero carbon within 15 years sort of thing. We think we are on track for option 2, and with predictable mitigations (countries successfully pull off all pledged reductions) it's still pretty much 2, just potentially less severe. By "less severe", I mean we can try to prevent at least some of that sea level rise which means there will be some cities that become coastal but don't get catastrophically flooded. But like, Miami for example, that city won't exist by the end of the century without a hypothetical and unproven seawall (people always say seawalls, sure it's a decent idea, but we don't know if it's even feasible for us to build them to the necessary standards. It's like asking every coastal city to build something more complex and safety critical than Hoover Dam).
An important thing to think about is that the difference between 1 and 2 is class based. When I said 1 was impossible, I meant that it was impossible for like "most people", because we're on track for billions of people to become refugees because of climate change, likely leading to wars and significant political issues. But obviously if you're wealthy enough, you are basically insulated from those outcomes because you can just keep moving away from the coast (even if millions of other people are trying to move there at the same time) and the only real impact on you is the broader economic impacts on the country you live in, and even those are muted. So for the wealthy, it's always really been a question of "Is it going to be 1 or 3?", which is a big part of the reason why it has been so immensely hard to see significant political change to prevent anthropogenic climate change.
We don't really understand the science of 3 well enough to understand what the tipping points would be to start a runaway greenhouse effect, so no one knows for certain. We need more science on it. I think a very reasonable guess is that it won't happen until our greenhouse gas heat retention is at least as high as it was during the various times in Earth's history when the polar ice caps didn't exist, which gives us significant runway to work with. Beyond that, we just don't know.
The point the earlier poster is making is that he's making is that this behavior is self defeating, and absolutely should be blamed. The tale of 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' dates back at least 2600 years and has its own version, independently 'discovered', in essentially every culture and language. Resorting to hyperbole for attention is simply self defeating if you care about the long-term, and in this case there is literally nothing except the long-term.
And this has been going on for far longer than 2 decades. This article [1] dates back to 1989. It starts with a lede of, "A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000." with only more excitement from there. Incidentally, that page has also been edited to remove the date of publication. You can see an archive of it here [2]. Very classy AP.
If I could go back in history to try to make people care about climate change, what I would do is lowball every single prediction to emphasize that when I make a prediction not only does it come true, but it invariably ends up even greater in magnitude than I predicted. Instead of creating a rubber banding effect where you get this huge shoart term gain in attention followed by a slap back in the face, you'd instead see an initially small but ever-growing and consistent movement.
[1] - https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20201101032435/https://apnews.co...
All of the IPCC future scenarios - including their worst case outcomes - still project a world where living standards keep increasing.
To restate this: the economic and scientific consensus (as presented by the IPCC) is that our world will be better off in the future even in their worst scenarios. The claims about humans being unable to survive are not supported by science.
Anyone who knows the basics of energy, agriculture, or economics knows this statement is exactly the opposite of the truth.
At the current population level, fossil fuels are not incompatible with survival. They are necessary for survival. This isn't an ideological or rhetorical statement, it's just a fact that we are dependent upon fossil fuels to feed ourselves, keep warm, transport goods (and ourselves) and do work.
Climate change is a problem. So is mass starvation, freezing to death in the winter, and living in abject poverty.
But also neither sustainable nor worth the ongoing problem with emissions.
The statement highlights the pressing need to move to alternatives.
The statement is incoherent. Why are fossil fuels, apart from their emissions, "a problem - period"?
Every resource we use, every decision we make, always have tradeoffs. Framing fossil fuels as a problem in and of themselves makes no sense to me. They've obviously been an incredible boon to humanity.
It feels akin to demonizing antibiotics because eventually antibiotic resistance will be a problem. It has saved countless lives, and will continue to save countless more, but it has some downsides which will get worse in the future. So let's say "antibiotics are incompatible with human survival."
The Saudi's have already reached peak oil for their region (by the estimate of their own engineers) which means they have essentially hit peak monthly production and the next 50 odd years will see less and less production at higher and higher cost.
This is the reality of fossil fuels, the world will see them about for the next century but (failing other energy sources) the demand will increase as populations increase both in number and in per capita consumption as the supply dwindles and the costs increase .. not to mention every barrel pulled up from deep underground is a nother barrel going toward the climate problem.
With no move to replace fossil fuels as the principal energy source we're heading into increased conflict over access.
ie, - They're an ongoing problem and we're best off moving to other means while we are able to do so.
As for antibiotics, yes, they are a problem, especially their current excessive use in the livestock industry where casual overuse is only accelerating the timeline to them becoming useless.
Resource scarcity isn't a new phenomenon. It's why markets exist. Prices allocate resources. There is no emergency here.
Sure, fossil fuels are finite - can you give me a number for how finite? Everyone who tried in 2008 was wrong. Prices increased, we got more exploration, the tech improved, and all of a sudden our fossil fuel supply massively increased.
Everyone seems so utterly confident in predicting so many problems in the future, yet things keep getting better generation after generation.
We need to stop pretending we can predict and solve all of society's future problems right now.
But no actual new resources were created, as I said it's a limited resource and now we've passed a point where further access to what's left require greater cost, greater effort, greater energy .. and when we do use these tail end supplies we continue to add to increasing C02 load in the troposphere.
> We need to stop pretending we can predict [...] society's future problems right now.
Bit general, but we can at least specifically predict how much additional energy is trapped by increasing insulation in the troposhere .. that's thermodynamics and a spherical spreadsheet.
Easy enough to think of a 100+ years ago, back of the envelope in the 1970s, and model indetail today.
This is exactly what was said before, and was premature, that was my point.
It's technically correct that no new resources were created, but practically speaking, the new technology revealed resources we didn't know existed (or couldn't retrieve). The point is that we don't know how far this extends in the future. Reality has a way of making fools of anyone who naively extends trend lines.
> "The statement is incoherent. Why are fossil fuels, apart from their emissions, "a problem - period"?""
I was curious about this so I read the context. Your quote hints at the context as "a nod to recent comments made by Sultan al-Jaber, the United Arab Emirates official who will lead the next U.N. climate summit." Elsewhere in the AP article they explain the context in more detail: "Secretary-General António Guterres also dismissed suggestions by some oil executives - including the man tapped to chair this year’s international climate talks in Dubai - that fossil fuel firms can keep up production if they find a way to capture planet-warming carbon emissions." So with this context, it sounds like when it was suggested the fossil fuel industry burn less fuel, the fuel industry guy said something like 'ok but what if we burn the fuel and then capture the emissions :trollface:' and Guterres is calling them out on this incoherent troll suggestion. I mean if you know anything about physics or chemistry then you know that the suggestion is incoherent or deceptive like maybe at some point they plan to redefine emissions to not include carbon dioxide or some other scheme like that.
It might seem like that fuel industry guy is just trolling or is ignorant of physics or chemistry when he says meaningless things like that, but the real effect is that it gives cover for people who defend the fossil fuel industry and to say that Guterres is the one making incoherent statements when you take parts of the conversation out of context. So it's not just a silly thing it's actually malicious.
But the fossil fuel industry doesn't burn very much fuel at all. You (and everyone reading this) buy it and burn it because it makes your lives so much better. Or buy electricity or other things which burned the fuel to make them.
>the real effect is that it gives cover for people who defend the fossil fuel industry
Gives cover, what an interesting phrase.
The context doesn't make the statement more coherent. Why are fossil fuels a problem absent the emissions? Resource scarcity and advancing technology have always led to changing energy sources and usage over time, no fear mongering about planetary extinction necessary.
They aren't. The problem is that the fuel industry guy was suggesting to burn the fossil fuels and then recover every emission. That's not something that makes sense in chemistry or physics. So the industry guy was either stupid or he was lying. He's not that stupid, so he's obviously lying, and the UN guy knows he's lying. The UN guy tried to call out the fuel industry guy's lie by saying that the fossil fuels themselves were the problem. So now people are going on the internet and saying that the UN guy is stupid because he doesn't know that fossil fuels aren't a problem absent emissions. I guess that's a win for the fuel industry guy and it's why he gets paid the big bucks.
You can disagree with who the UN chooses but having representatives from countries and industries which are absolutely crucial for humanity's functioning seems like a good idea.
'the UN guy' is the secretary-general of the United Nations, the chief administrative officer of the United Nations.
'the fuel industry guy' is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan_Al_Jaber and he is described as "the Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology of the United Arab Emirates, managing director and group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC Group), chairman of Masdar (the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company), and the United Arab Emirates' special envoy for climate change. He is the President-Designate of the upcoming COP28 climate talks."
> "You can disagree with who the UN chooses"
OK but I wasn't doing that. Such defensiveness did catch my interest though, and I see there is a whole section on his wiki page including "A further Guardian investigation revealed in June 2023 that a large number of fake Twitter and Medium accounts, using stock or AI-generated profile images, have been either promoting and defending the hosting of the UN climate summit by the United Arab Emirates, including reposting UAE government tweets and trying to rebut criticism of Al Jaber's presidency."
Which is an UN body.
It's funny that instead of admitting that the UN chief made a troubling statement, you're blaming a third party (who was appointed by the UN to lead a climate summit) and then invoking conspiratorial thinking when anyone points out this out.
Dissenting opinions online aren't all fake. The idea that fossil fuels are a problem, period, is stupid, and it's troubling that someone with political power believes it, and espouses it.
Oh I fully admit that the UN chief made a troubling statement. I found the statement very troubling, which is why I looked into it and it's why we are having this charming online discussion. What I found was that the UN chief was successfully rhetorically baited by the oil industry executive who is scheduled to lead the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference, and the AP wrote the headline like the UN chief just woke up in the morning with the plan to lie to the press about climate change. It's not like I don't blame the UN chief. I wish the UN chief was not so easily baited. It seems like that should be one of the job requirements for being UN chief.
> "The idea that fossil fuels are a problem, period, is stupid, and it's troubling that someone with political power believes it."
According to that article what he said was: “The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions,” Guterres said, a nod to recent comments made by Sultan al-Jaber, the United Arab Emirates official who will lead the next U.N. climate summit. “It’s fossil fuels - period.”
It was taken from the context of a rhetorical engagement with someone who was trolling him, and the AP reported it uncritically. The oil ceo said something like 'fossil fuels aren't a problem, only burning them and not capturing all of their emissions is a problem :trollface:' and then in response the UN chief said "It's fossil fuels - period." because they both knew that the extracted fossil fuels would be burned and their emissions would not be fully captured.
This is what makes people sick of the constant climate talk and skeptical. So many of the claims are exaggerated and sensationalized, not just by media but also by officials. If you want to win people over with facts and science you have to make sure your loudest voices and most powerful proponents don't say outright lies.