At least in Europe, an order of magnitude (or two, depending on country) more people die from the cold than from the heat[0]. Going by the numbers, if green energy policy keeps summer temperatures down but makes energy more expensive[1], it will kill more people.
energy efficiency makes the same amount of power, go further. Look into reducing outdoor lighting, wasteful uses of electricity, and improving efficiency for heavy applications, you might find more than enough savings to handle dire, life-and-death situations.
The low-hanging fruit have mostly been picked by now, regulating demand-side is not a solution and will lead only to immiseration and state overreach. Unless you are fine with only flushing your toilet on Wednesdays, this is not a desirable future overall.
I think it's more accurate to say that consumer-side regulation is not a solution. I'm willing to bet there are tons of industries out there that can significantly reduce their energy usage, but it's either undesirable from a profit perspective or infeasible from a cost perspective.
That said, the "obvious" solution at this point seems to be larger supplies of non-carbon-releasing power generation (e.g. green or nuclear energy).
The problem is that high-energy regimes can crowd out low-energy designs that actually produce better outcomes in terms of well-being.
As with food calories: either for an individual or a population group, if you don't have enough, more is very, very much better.
This is not the same as more being always better. Sometimes the same or less in a smarter implementation produces better outcomes, and sometimes it takes a regulatory shove to get there.
Societies that require everyone to have a car just to have a basic acceptable level of mobility and participation, and which expect even moderately high performers to fly multiple times a year, case in point. Huge amounts of energy deployed for marginally better outcomes.
The mistake is in observing a strong positive correlation on part of the curve, and extrapolating that to interpret it as a linear relationship.
There are parts of the world which still need a lot more deployable energy. Getting household white goods to the majorities in poorer countries, etc. The same additional amount in the hands of the top 80% or so of Western hands would be frittered away to no noticeable benefit - we could get by with a lot less.
> The same additional amount in the hands of the top 80% or so of Western hands would be frittered away to no noticeable benefit - we could get by with a lot less.
We could, but getting by with less out of choice is much better than getting by with less out of deprivation (like you said, "if you don't have enough, more is very, very much better"). And if your solution involves a large group of people depriving themselves to benefit those on another side of the world, I'm afraid there's no historical evidence to suggest that it will work even a little bit.
> sometimes it takes a regulatory shove to get there.
Almost all the time, additional powers granted to the government for that regulatory shove are not relinquished. Virtually all the time, a government that is powerful enough eventually becomes tyrannical. We have to weigh that very real possibility against the cost of what appears to be inefficient outcomes.
By definition, if you have enough, it's not deprivation. And, at an individual level, deprivation isn't really something you can do to yourself (barring extreme circumstances, eating disorders, religious asceticism and suchlike).
This does get more complicated when it's a societal level choice. You might feel subjectively energy-deprived at a very different point to me. At the same time though, a well-designed low-energy regime isn't perceived by its citizens as despotic. There's very little call (nowadays) to smash Houston-style freeways through Europe's semi-pedestrianised neighbourhoods. Curiously, this was not the case in lower-information times, but the intersection of high bandwidth/discoverability and walkability is a much bigger topic.
Now I'm old enough to remember Eastern Bloc totalitarianism, and I find the current Gen Z fashion/fetish of all things DDR/Soviet vaguely tragic, but the outcome of the path we're on right now is at least equivalent to tyranny, at least for the three billion or so people at the pointy end of it all.
> At the same time though, a well-designed low-energy regime isn't perceived by its citizens as despotic. There's very little call (nowadays) to smash Houston-style freeways through Europe's semi-pedestrianised neighbourhoods.
Despotic it may not be, yet people vote with their feet. Way more Europeans leave their delightfully walkable cities to make a living in Houston than the other way around[0]. 650k Germans, 180k French, and 90k Dutch lived in the US in 2017, compared to 140k, 50k, and 30k Americans living in the respective countries.
And despite the ugliness of Houston's monstrous freeways, it at least grows and takes newcomers: Metro Houston nearly doubled (grew 70%) from 2000 to 2020, compared to (the metros of) Berlin only 5%, Paris 13%, and Amsterdam 14%.
Broadly, I see current European policy as a defensive posture, one looking to maintain things as they are in all aspects: climate, population, wealth. There doesn't appear to be the same appetite for change and growth. It's as though they've decided that the way things are now is the best it'll ever be, and anything more advanced (that is, requiring more energy expended per capita) is somehow immoral. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it.
No shortage of Americans in the fairly walkable, and notably English-speaking, UK.
Paris, London and Berlin of 2023 are markedly different in so many ways to, say, 1983. Berlin was in two different countries back then, and if you tried to cross, you died. Much of London was still semi-derelict from WW2 and post-war economic changes.
Perhaps a history measured in millennia means a little more patience around change. Perhaps Europeans don't see the struggle for more wealth as the most important thing.
And looking at life expectancy trends in the developed world (as a very crude proxy for wellbeing).. perhaps they might be on to something.
> lighting alone is a huge sector for unrealized power savings, in all categories.
Do you have some sources I can read about this? I find it hard to believe that large consumers of light haven't already switched to LEDs given the financial incentive to do so, and on the consumer side, the transition has already been made in most of the world that has lighting.
If I crank up the wave generator in a wave pool, I would get both taller waves and shallower water. Cranking up the heat retaining gases in the atmosphere is going to make both weather extremes more likely.
Desertification of previously farmed arable land is going to result in significant migrations and food supply instability. I think it goes without saying that will result in lost lives from myriad direct causes. This is the sort of thing wars are made of.
Redistributing the world's wealth by killing all the rich, and taking all their stuff, might[1], just like your opinion of climate change, also turn out to be a 'net plus', yet these kinds of ideas don't currently seem to be in vogue.
[1] I say might, because there's uncertainty around this. I do know, with absolute certainty that redistributing - say - your organs to multiple people who need transplants would definitely be a 'net plus', but you don't see me making such bloodless utilitarian arguments.
The difference is that there's a lot of historical precedent against what you described, so we can reasonably expect the outcome of such an idea. Could explain why it's not in vogue, though it does appear more and more popular among the young.
>
The difference is that there's a lot of historical precedent against what you described, so we can reasonably expect the outcome of such an idea.
Whereas we have exactly zero historical precedent to know whether or not climate change will even be a 'net plus'.
(I do know that organ redistribution would definitely be a net plus, though. We kill one person, we save the lives of N people, the calculus seems to add up to me...)
> we have exactly zero historical precedent to know whether or not climate change will even be a 'net plus'.
My point exactly! If you respect Chesterton's fence, we shouldn't make radical changes to the status quo without clear and convincing proof that the change is worth the cost. Fossil fuels, as bad as they are, also brought up living standards for literally billions of people. There are still billions of people who have yet to enjoy Western standards of living. We shouldn't handicap their growth by demonizing fossil fuels before alternatives are ready.
It takes incredible mental gymnastics, and a massive ideological blindspot to consider flooding our atmosphere with billions of tons of carbon, and causing a climate catastrophe to be 'the status quo'.
Status quo just means the world as it sits now. It has no bearing on whether it is an ideal state to be. Humanity is indubitably better off now than it was prior to the Industrial Revolution, and there's 10x more of us now to enjoy it, thanks in large part to energy unlocked by fossil fuels. Do you dispute that point, or is your point rather that we should go back to the living standards and world population of the 1700s?
At the same time that we've been flooding the atmosphere with carbon with nations around the world industrializing (1970-2019), climate-related deaths around the world shrank to one-third, while the human population doubled[0]. Not one-third in rate, that's one-third in absolute number. Is that the "climate catastrophe" you're talking about? The IPCC released its first report in 1990, and deaths of climate has only decreased since then, mainly due to the improving ability of developing nations to better master their environment -- again, via cheap energy enabled by fossil fuels.
I'm not the one with mental gymnastics and blind spots if you cannot acknowledge the instrumental role that fossil fuels have played in getting humanity to this point, and the inability of current renewable energy technology to replace it wholesale.
By your definition, draining down your savings because your expenses far exceed your earnings is 'status quo'. A drug addict upping the dose they take every week, to maintain the same rush, until their heart finally gives out is 'status quo'. Continuing to push on the accelerator, as your car is on its way off a cliff is 'status quo'.
You're also presenting a laughably false dichotomy for an alternative. I have an incredibly hard time imagining that you honestly believe that to be the only alternative for our current trajectory.
Given that most of the world's land is in the northern two thirds of the globe[0], it seems more likely than not that eventually it will be a net plus in arable land and overall agricultural output. Other commenters, of course, have a good point in how pleasant that transitional period will be.
If internet discussion is demographically and geographically skewed, I promise you it's not towards Europe... try being a non-American on the internet someday, while people are speaking about miles and states and seasons etc.
> However once ignited, wildfires are being driven to larger and more intense extremes due to rising global heat and drought conditions caused by the climate crisis.
I don't intend to reduce Europe's summer to Greek wildfires, in fact quite the opposite, I want to point out that they are a bad example because their causes are still being investigated.
Abundant and reliable energy sources will let us deal with the higher variance; notably, deaths related to climate have decreased to one-third over the fifty years from 1970 to 2019[0], even as the human population more than doubled. That isn't one-third the rate, it's one-third in absolute number.
Even a perfect engine is not 100% efficient, if we don’t find a way to expel more energy or reduce the energy we use, we will only create more heat and will need even more energy to deal with it.
It is also the case that a large part of the world is simply not built to withstand such temperatures, and using more energy to accommodate that means putting more heat into the atmosphere.
> we will only create more heat and will need even more energy to deal with it
Yes, that's a thermodynamic certainty. But the moment Homo sapiens left the year-round pleasant high plains of East Africa, we were going to need energy; you can't blame the caveman for lighting a stick on fire to keep himself warm.
> a large part of the world is simply not built to withstand such temperatures
People live in some truly inhospitable places, some cold, some hot, and have done so since before modern conveniences. Unless the plan is to make sure everyone in the world lives in places where you naturally don't need (or want) heat or air conditioning, the extra heat in the atmosphere is the price we must pay.
I don't think you appreciate what you are asking here.
Infrastructure in London was melting last summer, lots of our infrastructure will have to be rebuilt, which is severely inefficient, and will require even more energy.
Then we must adapt and rebuild the infrastructure. What's the alternative, that everyone just abandon London?
Climate scientists agree that if the world stopped all carbon emissions today, at the snap of a magical finger, the planet will continue to warm for the foreseeable future. It seems to me then that the correct path out is through, not backwards. And "through" involves building and rebuilding, using whatever energy sources are economical. By all means, bring renewables in that fold, but renewables alone are far from sufficient.
It's not just a matter of everyone driving Teslas instead of F-250s, or indeed even of everyone cramming into electric-powered city buses or walking instead of using automobiles. The primary industries are all still powered by vast amounts of fossil fuels: the huge mining trucks, farm tractors, and backhoes that produce the real things that real people need to consume to survive, have such high energy density requirements that there are no viable electric alternatives yet.
Events like the polar jet-stream split are a consequence of increased temperature, and their frequency increases with heat.
When the jet-stream splits, air from Sahara gets trapped between the now two or three streams, and cannot escape. This creates a heat dome that we can’t manipulate and change.
It may be ignorant or even insane, but this sort of thinking is also taken seriously in certain places, and even highly rewarded. William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for a model which predicts that if the planet warms by 6C - an extinction level event!! - GDP will only be reduced by 8.5%. Why? Because most high-value production happens indoors, where we have aircon. [1]
At first I thought this comment was a joke, but I see you made the GP comment so maybe serious (or just a good troll?).
In any case, yes, the Nobel Prize committee for Economics is made up of eminent economists, who are indeed probably best thought of as small-c conservative small-p politicians, rather than academics in the tradtional sense.
It was a serious question, and thank you for your answer. I knew nothing about the composition of the people who award it. I see now that the same Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that awards the other (hard science) Nobel Prizes also award the Nobel Memorial Prize, and I'll take your word on the views of the composition of that specific committee.
Quite likely his work over the decades is consistent and builds upon itself, but your initial declaration was rather misleading, he did not win a Nobel Prize for declaring that a 6C increase in temps will result in an 8.5% decline in GDP.
Anyway, they gave a Nobel to Al Gore who made some pretty wacky claims that have failed to materialize, so it's not like the Nobel Committee has a spotless track record.
What's baffling is making energy more expensive and less reliable when all of human development has been about spending more energy per capita at less cost.
Those who take climate change seriously should have gone all in on nuclear, but somehow there was enough of an overlap between that group and anti-nuclear activists that it never happened. That's what's truly baffling.
More and cheaper energy is quite literally the solution to all of humanity's physical problems. I don't care if the summers get hotter or winters get colder, if we have abundant, cheap, stable, clean energy from nuclear sources. Barring that, abundant, cheap, stable, and regrettably unclean energy from fossil fuels is the second best option. But what some in the developed world has chosen is stasis, degrowth, and decay instead.
I may be ignorant, but you don't seem to be offering any viable alternatives to my ignorance.
>all of human development has been about spending more energy per capita at less cost
What? No. That makes no sense. Human development includes a lot of things that have nothing to do with that ridiculous and narrow definition.
>Those who take climate change seriously should have gone all in on nuclear, but somehow there was enough of an overlap between that group and anti-nuclear activists that it never happened. That's what's truly baffling.
>Barring [nuclear energy], abundant, cheap, stable, and regrettably unclean energy from fossil fuels is the second best option.
What about increasing renewable energy options? What about increasing carbon efficiency by introducing it as a concept into markets via a carbon tax significant enough to drive innovation and behavior change? What about increasing city density and improving subways and trains? What about reducing meat consumption?
> Human development includes a lot of things that have nothing to do with that ridiculous and narrow definition.
What other concept so concisely captures the difference between how our primitive ape ancestors lived, to how cavemen lived, to how the ancient cultures lived, to how we live now? Or how countries at different stages of development now are to each other?
The Human Development Index correlates highly with per capita energy expenditure[0]. It's basically a necessary but not sufficient component of human development; otherwise you'd see countries in the lower-right quadrant of that chart. I find it surprising that you have such a strong reaction to this.
> Follow the money
Of course, Big Oil lobbied for their interests. I'm sure solar executives spend money on lobbying, too. Doesn't mean that the public, especially the interested and motivated public ("those who take climate change seriously"), should have been duped by it.
No one is absolving Big Oil for their part in swaying public opinion, but the public should also grow a backbone.
> What about [...]
They're all good ideas. My point is that good ideas don't happen in a vacuum. Everything carries with it an opportunity cost. "Increasing renewable energy options" isn't something that happens as a result of someone waving a wand; it's accomplished using limited time and resources that could be used elsewhere. So when you implement those ideas by taking away from fossil fuels, you had better make sure that the tradeoff is worth it.
> What about increasing city density and improving subways and trains?
On this point especially, I'm all for reforming zoning so that cities can become more dense. This would alleviate so many problems in America's highly desirable cities that are laughably sparse compared to other world cities (but of course, the precious "neighborhood character"...).
And sure, let's improve transit systems. But how? Take a look at the MTA's budget[1]: only a quarter is paid for by fares, meaning that people who don't use the subway already pay for three-quarters of the MTA. Even pre-pandemic, fares were a little over a third[2]. And this is in the area with the highest transit usage percentage by far out of anywhere in the country; the one place where they should be able to make it work!
So it appears that there is already a high degree of subsidization of subways and trains. Given how rapidly the ridership experience is deteriorating in almost all American transit systems, it seems irresponsible to put even more tax dollars in that direction, without first addressing the issues that make people not want to ride them very much.
You framed a correlation like a requirement. Human development involves a lot of things, many of which don't have a strong causal relationship with energy usage.
That chart has major outliers on the top right. Most countries toward the top are clustered close to the left. Yes, the top left is rounded off and everyone at the top uses more resources than everyone at the bottom, but the outliers are enough to skew an average and make the effect appear larger than it is.
My reading is that several energy intensive countries can significantly reduce their energy expenditure while maintaining a high level of human development.
It's strategic. Smart people are used to being praised for being smart and hate to look stupid, to the point that it becomes a reflex. It's easy for a cynical actor to frustrate and steal the time of smart people by knowingly asserting counterfactuals or adopting a posture of ignorance. Consider all those influencers and e-celebs whose profits depend on keeping their audience annoyed and in a constant state of outrage. People get addicted to that feeling and pay to be regularly provided with it.
Green energy policy in Europe has people replacing gas heat with heat pumps. And since heat pumps are also air conditioning, many European homes are getting air conditioning for the first time.
One of those rare "have your cake and eat it too" moments.
No, they were using more BTUs of energy just heating with gas and wood than heating and cooling with an electric heat pump. Also the carbon intensity per BTU is going to be lower on almost every European grid than directly burning any fuel.
Believe me, I'm all in favor of using heat pumps. I think it's silly the degree to which Europe as a whole relies on combustion heating, in a part of the world that doesn't get all that cold.
I just want to ensure that the electricity that powers those heat pumps doesn't get more expensive as a result of the shift away from nuclear and fossil fuels. There's some preliminary research to indicate that more renewable power in the grid results in lower wholesale prices[0], but the relationship isn't very strong, and it's likely that Europe soon will (if not already) meet the point of diminishing returns. After all, there are only so many places you can put wind turbines, solar panels, or dams.
And a lot less population density. People in low-lying areas aren't going to be able to move to higher ground, because someone else already owns that ground.
There's a key difference; territorial animals are owner-occupiers. If a bear loses a territorial fight, it dies or moves. It doesn't call in the forest police. Also, bears want to keep other bears out. They don't much care about smaller animals, or try to restructure the entire landscape in the name of bear commerce.
Several nation-states will be huge beneficiaries of a hotter world.
Russia's tundra becomes arable land, and their fossil fuels become more accessible. Their navy will be able to freely roam the seas when the polar ice caps melt.
Canada will receive the same benefits - enormous access to fresh water, ease of navigation, and agriculturally ideal conditions.
Greenland will have an increasingly large stake in geopolitics, trade, and energy.
China will be less existentially concerned about a blockade of the Strait of Malacca.
Obviously, but you missed the point. The problem is competetion by increased polarity between the haves and have-nots. The latter aren't just going to roll over and die. They're going to go to war to survive because there's nothing to lose in not doing so and everything to gain.
> The latter aren't just going to roll over and die. They're going to go to war to survive because there's nothing to lose in not doing so and everything to gain.
And they'll lose.
If you look at the distribution of power, it's not predicted to change all that much. The superpowers are enormously capable of maintaining their grip.
The complaints of poor nations will be met with meager welfare packages and mostly tuned out by the working class of weather nations. It's how the world already operates.
I figured you would say that but your hubris is entirely unwarranted. The Taliban just handed the most powerful military on the planet their ass. They beat the USSR too. The Veitcong did it before them. Look at how badly the barefoot Houthis beat the shit out of KSA even with direct US support. Look at Russia being sent packing. Don't gamble on these things. It's foolish to expose yourself to those kinds of risks if you don't need to.
I'm not sure this is a good stick to measure. The American voting public didn't have an appetite for those fights.
Put the American economy at risk and you get the Gulf War. Attack America directly and you get the Pacific theater.
In any case, none of those particular points matter. No poor country is going to be able to resource starve the wealthiest nations. If they try to invade or block trade, they'll find out the limits of their power.
It's irrelevant what appetite they had because they lost abd they were losing long before they left both Afghanistan and Vietnam.
Several of the countires made "poor" by climate change will have nuclear weapons: Indian, Pakistan, France, Israel, North Korea. You're living in a fantasy. Time to wake up.
The Canadian Shield[1] is hard rock with a very thin layer of dirt. There's nothing remotely "agriculturally ideal" going on here. South and west of the Shield are peatlands[2] -- those are dessicating and deflagrating. As hot winds continue to blow across increasingly treeless land, thin topsoils will be stripped from the land. Saskatchewan is already facing a collapse due to farm practices, and a second "dust bowl" seems nigh inevitable. Do not look to Canada, we cannot feed billions in the decades to come.
There has been about 69 per cent decline in the wildlife population of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish across the globe in the last 50 years. The highest decline, 94 per cent was in Latin America and Caribbean region. According to WWF report, Africa recorded 66 percent fall in wildlife population, the Asia Pacific 55 percent and population of freshwater species reduced by 83 percent globally.
The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation?
"Estimate that, since around AD 1500, possibly as many as 7.5–13% (150,000–260,000) of all ~2 million known species have already gone extinct, orders of magnitude greater than the 882 (0.04%) on the Red List."
We had a ~10C increase in temperature from 20000 YA - 13000 YA or so and then a yoyo jump back down ca. 6C and up again in a 1000 years, during the younger dryas.
While the 19th-21th century increase of 1-1.2C or so is a bit faster, it's not a magnitude faster.
Humans have definitely changed nature everywhere, and is probably responsible for many species dying. But blaming that on the climate change doesn't really make sense. Deforestation is much more likely to be the cause.
But deforestation and the following biodiversity loss is a completely different problem than reducing CO2. And in general, very few things that will reduce CO2 is going to help against deforestation (and contrary to popular opinion, even large scale reforestation will probably not affect CO2 very much either).
> very few things that will reduce CO2 is going to help against deforestation
Reform of agriculture might be it. Agriculture is also the leading driver of deforestation (50% of pastures were forested in the past).
> large scale reforestation will probably not affect CO2 very much either
But it could, it's probably the best tool in our arsenal. And it would not only affect CO2, but many of our other problems too (droughts, biodiversity, warming ...).
Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century
Agricultural land use, particularly for animal feed, poses the biggest obstacle to ecosystem restoration and carbon sequestration, hindering climate efforts. The potential for carbon sequestration is vast, with enough capacity to meet the entire 1.5°C carbon budget.
Improving soil could keep world within 1.5C heating target, research suggests. Better farming techniques across the world could lead to storage of 31 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year, data shows
Every year the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. At least three-quarters of this is driven by agriculture – clearing forests to grow crops (upto 80% for animal feed), and raise livestock
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area the size of Africa).
> If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area the size of Africa).
No we wouldn't. Everybody gets cause and effect backwards on this one. They see that we're using essentially all of our arable land for food production and draw the conclusion that's how much is needed to produce the amount of food we currently produce.
But it's actually the other way around. We use all the land available because that's the cheapest way to produce the amount of food we need. If we had more land, we'd use it and food would be cheaper. If we had less land we'd produce the same amount of food, but it would be more expensive.
For an extreme example, we could probably feed 8 trillion people on the same amount of land by covering all of our arable land with greenhouses.
Moving towards a plant-based diet would mean needing less land as we wouldn't be raising as many animals for meat. The greenhouse idea is cool, but it'd be very resource intensive.
So, while we can definitely get creative with land use, we also need to consider the costs and environmental impacts.
No, it means that farmers will stop dumping so much fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides on their land chasing high yields. It means 30 bushel per acre crops instead of 100 bushel per acre crops. It means cheaper food. All good things, but land usage won't change significantly.
> means 30 bushel per acre crops instead of 100 bushel per acre crops
It would not be so bad, imho. Industrial ag might be effective (from the economic viewpoint, very destructive from the environmental one), but not as much as producers of that stuff would like us to beliveve. And if we manage to deplete our soils even further, then even industrial ag wouldn't be able to do much.
We could and should change the way we farm, while preserving comparable yields. It might be necessary to learn farming again, or invent new machinery. There are dozens of methods we could utilize (syntropic, natural, veganic farming, permaculture, food forests, nitrogen fixing plants / trees, companion planting, etc.), and new ones would be found.
"The analysis we present here offers a new perspective, based on organic yield data collected from over 10,000 organic farmers representing nearly 800,000 hectares of organic farmland. Averaged across all crops, organic yield averaged 80% of conventional yield. However, several crops had no significant difference in yields between organic and conventional production, and organic yields surpassed conventional yields for some hay crops."
Well, if the earths population was 2 million, 15000 years ago and Sudan's today is 50 million, I think it's quite clear that Sudan's population has gone up quite a bit also over 15000 years.
The abstract question of whether a higher or lower temperature would result in more habitable land (assuming, say, a gradual change over a million years) is completely 100% irrelevant to the issue of climate change.
A fast enough change will:
- Make places where large numbers of people currently live uninhabitable due to temperature and sea levels
- Kill off most plants and animals because the ones in a given place won't be adapted to the new climate, even if theoretically the climate in other places would now be suited to them, in a way that will take millions of years to recover from.
Simply saying "warmer is better" is utterly missing the point.
We are witnessing the sixth mass extinction event. Defined as the loss of 75% of species, this process typically spans around 2.8 million years. However, we're on track to reach this milestone in just about 100 years.
There were no precise instruments 120k years ago. The historical record used is a hodge podge of proxy data. Much modern temperature data was US centric. Also, there is controversy over the placement of temperature stations (e.g. on an urban heat island, next to an airport, near exhaust vents). Factors were added to temperature modesl (there were higher apples to apples temperature readings in the 1930s). Many regions have record cold temperatures as well.
I have doubts over the OP claim. It sounds like sensationalism. Review & time will be needed to verify the claim.
You must be aware that dismissing very-overtly-obvious climate claims out of hand makes you sound very dubious, right? Super "merchants-of-doubt"y.
The only way to deliver this opinion in a non-suspect way would be something like: "I'm aware that all metrics show it's the hottest month on record, and everyone is experiencing that everywhere, but <a detailed reason why for some reason your model of the world invalidates that experience that doesn't just wave your hands and dismiss all the evidence>".
Like, it is obvious in the last fifty years. Your argument is "well maybe 200 years ago was hotter and we forgot". Who cares? People are worried about this because it is bad for humans, now.
The climate always changes. Always has & always will. No political movement, economic paradigm, or technology will make the climate static. The geomagnetic field fluctuations, Sun, the solar system's current cosmological coordinates, cosmological effects are too big of a driver of the climate.
Geologically speaking, we have just left a mini-ice age. Our efforts are better invested in adjusting to these inevitable changes.
Who cares? if everyone dies and you say "well it always changes" the answer is still "...and we could have done something about it and we didn't do enough."
It has no bearing if it changed in the past if we can do something about it not killing most (non-rich) people in the future.
Well it was one bearing if it was like this in the past: it gives people a convenient argument for dismissing it now. So if your goal is "definitely let's make sure we don't handle this well", then at least, if you're right, you can justify that. Pretty pointless, though, unless your goal is destruction.
> Who cares? if everyone dies and you say "well it always changes" the answer is still "...and we could have done something about it and we didn't do enough."
I don't take a nihlist approach. I take a realistic approach. The changes will occur. What will we do about it? Go into a delusion that we can stop the change or take steps to prepare?
> Well it was one bearing if it was like this in the past: it gives people a convenient argument for dismissing it now
I'm not dismissing it. I'm saying it IS HAPPENING & nothing we do will stop it. So what are we going to do? Sacrifice to the gods to stop the inevitable? Good luck with that...
I would prefer to mitigate these changes by hardening our infrastructure, utilize tech & social systems to improve quality of life, and address pollution like the toxic sludge byproduct to mine materials for your "renewable" equipment.
No, you argued that it has happened before, which does not imply that the fact that it is happening now is not anthropogenic this time -- which it obviously is.
If you can do work now to make "the planet getting very hot and messed up everyone's lives" take thousands of extra years, during which time it is more livable, why would you not? Obviously you would balance this against other economic and policy concerns, which everyone is, and it comes out way ahead because warming is very bad for everyone.
"It has happened in the past, therefore turn your brain off and tell everyone else to stop thinking also." is not a "realistic" approach, it's a delusional one. It doesn't involve a realistic model of the present or the future. It's profoundly unconcerned with any sort of causal model of reality that makes predictions about the future and therefore analyzes what we ought to do based on their expected outcomes.
The question always is if we can even do something about the climate now or if we should spend the energy and resources into preparing for a potentially inevitable future.
Humans have always been champions of handling change. Why should this be different?
> The question always is if we can even do something about the climate now or if we should spend the energy and resources into preparing for a potentially inevitable future.
It's usually easier to stop doing something than to deal with the consequences of doing something.
> Humans have always been champions of handling change. Why should this be different?
Humans have never faced this kind of change. It will be different because it's not just a different temperatures, it's the collapse of the ecosystem which we rely on for food.
Can you point to any time during the existence of our species with a similar kind of change?
> and it's collapse of whole ecosystem.
That's mostly based on scientific studies, existing examples of rapid changes in ecosystems, and previous mass extinction events. Do you have any evidence counter to this idea?
All evidence points to it not being inevitable on the timescales it is happening on. On some timescale, obviously the planet melts from the sun. Doesn't mean we want it to melt soon.
Yes but it is changing in very specific and problematic ways with well understood causes that are at least partly under our control. We do not understand it perfectly but we don’t need to.
That can be 100% true, and humans can still be contributing to the current change? So not only would it be possible and desirable for us to stop contributing, but to try and influence the direction of change in a way that's more beneficial for more of us (which could be reforesting or olivine weathering or something crazy like solar shielding or sulfur dioxide cannons, depending on who you ask).
> The biggest threat to a thriving world economy with high degrees of personal freedom
I would suggest it is lack of low-cost, easily-accessible energy. Energy has been the driving force behind virtually every technological and economic advance in the past century.
But extinction of pollinators or key species, extreme temperatures causing mass crop failures, extreme droughts, several meter sea rise or a cascade of tipping points could certainly make some serious damage too.
Solar PV became the "cheapest source of energy in history" levels 3 years ago in places with low cost of capital, prices have continued to fall and are forecast to keep dropping as we get more experience.
You got to explain to me how wrecking our electricity grid and living with threat of exploding electricity prices (so much so, that there has been many reports of poor people not being able to afford heating in the winter) is making the world a better place.
The Texas grid that broke down was all natural gas [0]. Coal kills millions a year, not even through warming, but through pollution [1]. There is no equivalence.
The rate of change is what matters here. We are causing the climate to change at a staggering rate. Faster than anything ever seen in nature except during cataclysmic events (massive volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts, etc).
The biosphere will not be able to keep up with these changes and we already know that we are causing a mass extinction event and destabilization of the biosphere. Our food system depends on the biosphere.
Our society also depends on the conditions that have been relatively stable for the last several millennia. Sure, there was a mini ice age, but we're talking about a smaller change in climate and far more gradual in that ice age, than what we are currently experiencing and causing. And that mini ice age was enough to cause mass disruption to human societies in areas most impacted by it.
Our current human caused climate change - if allowed to continue unabated - is likely to cause disruption on scales that lead to the death of billions of humans and the likely collapse of societies. We cannot ignore the cause of it (us) and simply adapt to the new reality. The way we adapt to this is by changing the behaviors that created it in the first place: We stop burning fossil fuels. That way it stops getting worse, then we work to return the climate to what it was previously, or we work to adapt to our new (now, hopefully, stabilized) reality.
We're quickly losing the window to even do that, however, because we're triggering feedback mechanisms that make this change self-replicating. So we likely need to go heavily into carbon removal and fast as well.
> Our efforts are better invested in adjusting to these inevitable changes.
Of course. If those changes would happen in a timeframe spanning hundreds of centuries we could dedicate some effort to progressively adapt to them, when it looms to violently happen upon us in the next 50-100 years and it's known it could've been partially avoided I don't think we can just magically wave it away to "it will eventually be solved technologically". It might as well not be, that's the scary part.
Far from everyone experiences this as a particularly hot summer. There has been some warm days around the Mediterranean, US and china, but talking to people in e.g. central and northern Europe and India it has been, probably cooler, than average.
Scientists use tree rings, coral reefs and deep sea sediment cores to measure historical temperature from a long time ago. These methods are based on the principle that the growth and chemistry of these natural archives reflect the environmental conditions that they experienced. Tree rings show the annual variations in temperature and precipitation on land. Coral reefs show the sea surface temperature and salinity in tropical and subtropical regions. Deep sea sediment cores show the ocean circulation, productivity, and climate over millions of years. These methods are not perfect, and they have some limitations and uncertainties. Therefore, scientists need to use multiple methods and sources of data to cross-check and validate their results.
What I find extraordinary is that you can in good faith (which seems a little questionable tbh) say that the absolutely incredible amount of sophisticated evidence that scientists have developed in the last 100 years to repeatedly affirm that humans are dramatically altering the climate with fossil fuel use is NOT extraordinary. The technology and mathematics behind climate science are absolutely incredible and you must be numb to the world if you think otherwise.
Ok, so what's the actionable take here? Are people going to use this to try and push wealth redistribution and authoritarian controls which is about the only thing I've ever seen from "climate action" types? Or does this imply those wouldn't work anyway now? Is anyone or any government going to look at actual motivations to help live in a warmer place? And/or to pull carbon out of the air, or get more nuclear, or whatever else we need to keep living normally?
It's going to be hard to get people to care about this if the takeaway is going to be "other people have to do what we say" as it usually is with climate stuff.
I'd recommend looking up a few things: how much private wealth is invested in fossil fuel industries, how much carbon extraction costs, how much money is spent subsidizing fossil fuels, how much money is spent on renewable sources of energy, and then speculate on how to fund it. "get more nuclear" is ok, for whatever it means.
>It's going to be hard to get people to care about this if the takeaway is going to be "other people have to do what we say" as it usually is with climate stuff.
Eh, more like hold the ultra-wealthy accountable for profiteering off, or at the expense of, the planet? and the (comfortable) existence of lots of people based on how things are going?
(The really cool thing is, most (all?) of the individual climate-shaming is propaganda from corporations who know damn well that individuals contribute very little to climate change compared to corporations themselves and the wealthy capital class.)
> The report finds that these billionaires’ investments give an annual average of 3m tonnes of CO2e per person, which is a million times higher than 2.76 tonnes of CO2e which is the average for those living in the bottom 90 percent.
Yes, I understand that's via investment, but that's still kinda precisely my point. Why shouldn't they be held to account?
That's generally how things must work. If a bunch of companies are polluting a river with industrial waste because if they don't, they won't remain competitive and profitable with the other companies that do, the solution is to regulate that no, you can't dump your industrial waste in the river. Is that "authoritarian"?
> It's going to be hard to get people to care about this if the takeaway is going to be "other people have to do what we say"
The poor collectively decide they want clean air and the rich shriek "stop telling other people what to do!" Then the rich turn around and say "stay off my land, and don't you dare occupy my 3rd vacation home even though it's empty right now!"
The point I'm trying to make here is that telling other people what to do is foundational to many of our most basic rights. Do not kill people, do not trespass on other people's property, do not copy my copyrighted works, do not infringe my patents, etc. These things are so basic they are taken for granted and overlooked. Notably, they benefit those who already have wealth. But then, if the poor say "do not destroy the air" or something like that, suddenly the wealthy are concerned about telling other people what to do.
In my past experience the poor I know are saying, "I would like to be able to afford gas to drive to work, and have a workplace that treats me with dignity and afford a good night on the town a few times a year."
I'd love to know which poor folks you know who have time to worry about global warming.
The unthinkable yet true thing is that there isn't anything we can do to reverse or cure the situation. Best we can do is try to adapt. We're far past the tipping points. Ever heard of Collapse with a capital C?
Ok well let's do that then instead scream about the crazy stuff many sibling comments are advocating. All this rearranging the deck chair on the titanic stuff is just transparently political.
> only thing I've ever seen from "climate action" types
Not surprised. This topic should go across political spectrum. Unfortunately for several decades, instead of proposing solutions, right spectrum was denying that there is problem.
How do you suggest paying for climate mitigation, carbon capture, or nuclear power? Those must be paid for by government since they aren't profitable. The rich have the money, and have benefited the most from carbon emissions.
How do you suggest reducing carbon emissions that aren't profitable? We are lucky that wind and solar cost less than other forms of energy, but at some point we will have to pay people to switch to electric cars and then make ICE cars illegal.
Dealing with climate change means everybody needs to stop producing carbon dioxide and pay to pump it back out of the atmosphere. Only government can do that.
it's the agnostic, post-Christian rapture, complete with agnostic, post-Christian original sin, agnostic, post-Christian dogmatic orthodoxy, and agnostic, post-Christian heresies. it's even got an agnostic, post-Christian priest class that wear agnostic, post-Christian vestments while doing agnostic, post-Christian holy work.
the only thing missing is agnostic, post-Christian salvation…
I'm afraid to ask but… what would the McDonald's Rapture be? and McDonald's Original Sin for that matter. plus, McDonald's Salvation seems pretty straightforward to me…
regardless, the Church of McDonald's, for all of their other shortcomings as a Church, doesn't seem to fit the profile of "doom cult", so I'm not too concerned about them.
The McDonalds Armageddon (I think climate change is more of an Armageddon than a rapture) is what happens to you after you commit too many McDonalds sins, which are the menu items. :-)
McDonalds is one of the biggest culprits here, for sure.
Climate change is just a symptom of much bigger problem, and that's ecological overshoot. Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot.
Animal ag is the leading driver of deforestation, biodiversity loss, pollution and soil erosion.
McDonalds is one of the biggest companies driving deforestation worldwide (5th?), in fact 8 out of 13 biggest deforesting companies worldwide are in the meat industry, one way or another.
Every year the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. At least three-quarters of this is driven by agriculture – clearing forests to grow crops (upto 80% for animal feed), and raise livestock
The spatial variation map is very interesting, it shows my area as a dark blue spot, which confirms something I've felt anecdotally. Last few years have been colder and wetter than ever before.
1. The nice thing about these charts is that if I cherrypick particular dates (Coldest months in the past few years, warmest months decades ago), I can clearly demonstrate that temperatures aren't actually going up.
2. Which is exactly what dishonest people do with them.
3. Things over the past few years aren't as bad as they seemed now. These past few years are likely going to be the coldest years of the 21st century.
4. The Antarctic sea ice graph is beautiful. We're smashing every record.
> June's average mean temperature, calculated from the average daytime and nighttime temperature from across the UK, of 15.8C beats the previous record of 14.9C (set in both 1940 and 1976) by 0.9C. It was the hottest June since records began in 1884
Personally I find it nice not having to go to sleep naked, with no covers and a fan while still being uncomfortably hot. These occasional non cloudy, dry 22-24 C days are perfect weather.
I've been thinking about how relief from the impacts of climate change will not be available for all. I was wondering if access to climate relief should be limited for people who denied climate change or supported climate change deniers. With past voting records, social media posts, etc, we should be able to figure that out for a large number of people. I think this would be very unpopular but if relief is limited how else do you decide? The only reason I became politically active 20 years ago was because of my concern about climate change and recognizing we needed leaders in place that would take appropriate action. That didn't happen in large part because of the types of people I debated against. Maybe those people shouldn't have the same access to relief as things get worse.
You have a somewhat justifiable position, but you lost me when you started talking about social media posts. In your proposed rationing of "climate relief" it shouldn't be focused on people's thoughts. It should, instead, focus on specific actions people have taken or not taken that directly impact the client.
I could see something like a carbon credit for individuals based on their actions that impact the climate such as limiting their power use, not driving their car frequently, or not having pets. This type of rationing also has problems, though, as it starts to become effectively limiting things to wealthy people who can afford a lifestyle in which they can use a car less frequently or own an energy-efficient home for example.
I don't think there is a reasonable way of rationing climate relief in a morally justifiable way.
Aren't social media posts a large driver of actions? Weren't they used very intentionally to misinform people on this issue? I believe social media (along with traditional media) is a large part of why we ended up where we did, with a large number of people still claiming this issue is a hoax when it very clearly is not.
No one person will decide. The “market” will decide. The strong will be relieved and the weak will suffer. To get relief the weak should become strong. Unfortunately, suffering will make them weaker.
Are the currently strong going to keep the weak down, will the weak destroy the strong, will power be distributed to minimize the number of weak at the expense of the strong, or will something else entirely happen? My bet is that the strong have quite a lot longer to go getting stronger before the weak can enact meaningful change.
Also worth noting are that there is a large gap between, for example, the American weak and the global weak. The global weak will suffer more and have less avenues to enact change. Americans have the luxury of climate “debate” while Indonesia (not even a super poor country) moves its capital and while others suffer.
EDIT: To be clear, I think this situation is absolutely horrible. Based on how countries have been acting for the last couple decades though, I'm not expecting things to get better before they get much worse.
I've been thinking the same. The fact that this issue is still not overwhelmingly recognized as legitimate seems to imply that a lot more suffering might be required before anything meaningful happens. Problem is the longer we wait the more pointless any action becomes.
Clearly you're not factoring in the nuclear winters that the third and fourth world wars will provide for us within that timespan if climate change destabilises world politics to the predictable degree.
Hopefully! I'm guardedly optimistic, because I think renewable tech will save us, but we're going to have some real stormy political times to get there.
Donald Trump, the conspiracy theorist gameshow host was elected president of the USA! And might be again! So there's no room for complacency.
Sorry to burst your bubble but even if we used magic to switch to 100% renewables tomorrow the warming wouldn’t stop for a very long time. We’re on a bad path no matter what we do, it’s just how bad?
You're correct to a degree, magically eliminating FF use now will not stop warming increase for some time (damn heat and gas equations and lag), but
we do have the option (whether we take up on that) to
* reduce input visible light by (say) using space bubbles to gently shade earth, and|or
* extract C02 from atmosphere using big industry scale procesess powered by excess renewable energy (and then to sequester that CO2 rather than use it to make more faux green synthetic fuels that return it to the atmosphere).
These are not easy things, these are things that require nation scale commitment and follow through, but yes, options exist.
What's bad about it? I don't mind the heat. And it's nice that the growing season is getting longer, the earth is greening and we're getting bumper crop yields. I'd be a lot more depressed in 50 or a hundred years or so when the cooling kicks in.
There's terrifying scientific evidence that nuclear winter is perhaps increasingly impossible as climate change continues and nuclear fallout (and even volcanic ash fallout) move us closer and closer to turning Earth into Venus 2: Electric Boogaloo thanks to the (runaway) greenhouse effect.
The popular consensus seems to be that global warming is happening. I doubt the few hold outs are actually what is holding back action, as opposed to some powerful and rich organizations getting very rich off it, and a lack of general will to make drastic changes.
Okay well until people start losing elections because they aren't doing enough for the environment I don't think we can expect much to change. People are a lot more worried about their day to day problems for the time being.
Powerful interests working to push back public opinion and paying politicians is an obstacle too though, for sure.
Strawmen notwithstanding, the main controversy today is about governments as well as non-elected organizations (like the WEF) calling for increased central control over ordinary citizens and adopting tyrannical measures to reduce the standard of living and increase the cost of energy, food, travel and so on, using "climate crisis" as a vague excuse to invoke some sense of urgency in the hopes that people are stupid enough to say yes to policies that widen the wealth gap and further impoverish the working class.
If you're already well off (like most HN posters, probably) then you might not care if the leader of your country tells you that you will have to reduce your standard of living for the sake of the environment (and keep in mind that they rarely make those claims based on realistic analyses). If you are barely making ends meet and don't know if you will be able to retire after toiling your whole life like many people it is a harder sell. For example, where I live my electricity provider is harassing me to switch to "clean" energy sources, coyly admitting that the price will be higher in fine print. Turns out they entice people to join only to increase their prices later (see https://www.thedailybeast.com/cleanchoice-energy-is-the-snea...). Can you afford to pay double or triple the price for energy? What if you had to? Some of us cannot afford to run air conditioning at a certain price.
Some still think that this is a mere "conspiracy theory", but the messaging is slowly becoming more explicit about this power grab. I'm talking about some national government figures talking about lowering your standards out loud. Less obvious tells are organizations connected to governments setting lofty "sustainability" goals which involve reducing energy footprints to a level that is impossible to achieve without significantly impoverishing nations. Farmers forced to reduce their use of nitrogen fertilizer are the appetizer.
I'll just say that I agree that most people are not ready/willing to pay the price of real climate action in dollars today. We'll probably just have to pay down the line. I guess we'll see how bad it gets.
I’m surprised that so many highly analytical minds (such as HN posters I’d assume are) mistakenly believe that whatever crisis may or may not be at hand would be solved by individual action as instructed by some vague institutions or organisations. It’s like asking people to drive slowly without introducing and enforcing speed limits, or more tangibly whatever the farce with recycling has been for the past decades.
Come on, as an engineer you know these problems are solved by removing the human error from the equation, not by desperately trying to adjust the weight of the human error.
I don't know where you're getting that from my comment. Personally I don't think we can meaningfully change the trajectory without a worldwide, coordinated government effort. I do think that won't happen unless people push for it, and I don't think people are going to push for it because it's going to mean higher energy prices, lifestyle changes and it's going to make it harder for economic growth, especially in developing regions.
Sure, I'll still recycle and try to not waste food and whatnot. But I know it's a drop in the bucket.
I think the real problem is that the temperature is variable.
Phoenix had its longest stretch of 110+ degree days since 74, which is damning to the average person for climate change. Think “if we had a comparable heat wave 50 years ago, why should I assume the planet is heating up?”
Now, do I believe in climate change? Yes, of course. Do I think this one year is the mark of the next year and the year after that steadily increasing in temp? No, not at all, or at least not an amount that is noticeable by humans. Climate change is something that is far more subtle and far reaching than “phoenix is a 5f hotter”
You’re not wrong on a micro scale, but this is global average temperature. There is significantly more energy trapped on the surface of the Earth, and it doesn’t have anywhere else to go. There are many many factors contributing to the reason why this year has been such a massive leap, primarily El Niño (behind GHG’s of course), but the consequences are dire.
There will be permanent damage to critical Earth systems that will further accelerate climate change, even if the temp backs down as El Niño retreats.
Oh, and by the way, El Niño is still ‘ramping up’ and won’t be at max energy for another 2-3 years. Expect more large temperature anomalies in the coming summers.
Show me the evidence and I'm the easiest the man in the world to convince. But so far I only see good in the climate change. Longer growing seasons, bumper crop yields and more food security. Earth is greening, enjoy it.
Longer seasons will be good for a few years, until summer gets so hot that people start dying. Oh wait, they are dying, in the order of hundreds of thousands of climate deaths each year. But that’s okay, because we have hearty, heat resistant crops. Oh wait, we don’t. There are already reports of major crop failures in North Africa and minor crop failures in Europe.
Some years there will be massive flooding that obliterates yield, and other years it will be heat and drought. None of the reputable science sources I’ve read post anything positive about future crop yields regarding climate change, quite the opposite.
Current climate predictions place us at +3C by the end of the century, which means 100F+ wet bulb temps in previously moderate climates. Nothing we care about survives those temperatures. Not people or crops or cattle.
Depends on how you define an "average" and what temperature you're measuring.
The oceans are directly affected by global warming. The oceans are like a big thermal battery. The atmosphere and resulting weather are indirectly affected.
What determines the weather are the global jetstreams. Global warming causes more turbulence in them, but the heat being experienced is not literally from global warming. It could be just as hot or cold or moreso in the past, and it definitely has been.
You cannot go outside and feel global warming. That's a really dumb myth and my entire point. Every time it's hot it's an opportunity for the media to rally all the idiots together and wheel out the same tired propaganda and so many people believe it every time.
It's very important to realize that all those graphs that show increasing temperatures are talking about the ocean.
That still doesn’t contribute to the whole planet getting 10 degrees hotter in one year. The oceans heating up means that over the next 30+ years we see that kind of change maybe, honestly more like 80-120 years.
Climate change is real, but this heat wave has nothing to do with it
Even if 2023 was a cooler year, globally, I would still be seriously concerned about the decades-long trend of significant warming. The emphasis put on the warming this year is completely rational.
Imagine if our global surface temperature average continues to steadily increase, say over 50 years, and we continue to see dramatic spikes in temperature like we're seeing now? Not only will habitats and the life within them be decimated, but humans will be included. In my small city, the 2021 heatwave in Western Canada killed over 600 people more than a heatwave typically would. That's staggering, and we're just getting started.
Deceleration isn't really an option. Many developing nations are going to continue to have increasing energy needs. To ask these countries to reduce their energy requirements is to ask their citizens to live a lower standard of life. Hypocritical of those in the West to make that request.
The only real solution is to make energy ubiquitous and plentiful. Governments should be investing 100's billions of dollars into fusion tech. I don't think there is any vision or foresight. Ironically, Oppenheimer came out this year highlighting the development of Los Alamos and the impact of federal projects.
> The only real solution is to make energy ubiquitous and plentiful.
Renewables have been the boring, consensus answer to this for about a decade.
There's some obscure academic discussions about the exact makeup of the last 15% of energy needs, but most of those options revolve around how to best reuse the massive amounts of nearly free electricity that a sensible overbuild of renewables will create at other times.
I know the mainstream media flips between it all being a hoax and us all going to die but I still don't understand how it's possible for so many HN posters to have a worldview that so neatly excludes these world shaking tech developments.
Wind, solar, and geo haven't really made up a significant enough portion of overall energy generation. Also they don't seem to be scaling up quickly enough. We're still seeing many coal plants operating and new ones coming online in the West.
> IEA figures shows that it expects global electricity generation to rise by 2,493TWh between 2022 and 2025.
> The IEA expects the growth in renewable generation to cover the vast majority of this total, growing by 2,450TWh. This is equivalent to 98% of the overall increase in global demand.
Fossil Fuels Made Up 82% of Global Energy Consumption in 2022: New Data
Data published Monday shows that fossil fuels made up 82% of global energy consumption in 2022, another indication that the global transition away from planet-warming sources is moving far too slowly as rich nations continue burning oil, gas, and coal at an unsustainable pace.
“Despite further strong growth in wind and solar in the power sector, overall global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions increased again," said Davenport. "We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris Agreement."
2/3rds of that fossil fuels becomes wasted heat. We only need to replace the third that actually performs useful functions.
Even if the plants were cost competitive, which they are not, the existing ones are only built to last 30-50 years which means they'll age out and be replaced by renewables on that timescale at the very worst.
That doesn't consider different energy use cases, existing infrastructure, and increasing global energy demands, which could require more than simply replacing the 'useful' energy currently obtained from fossil fuels.
Also note that heat pump based heating can be 5x as efficient as nat gas heating. Which means using gas to generate electricity to run heat pumps is an improvement.
edit to add: also note that the oldest, dirtiest and least efficient plants will get shut first, having an outsized impact.
Any future fusion that requires a steam turbine to generate electricity will not be cost competitive with wind/solar/batteries by the time it arrives as the steam turbine will cost more to build and maintain than the alternatives even if you assume the fusion part is free.
Some fusion approaches convert more directly to electricity and might make a difference, but probably not for decades.
The radical insistence on renewables as the ONLY energy source, and the equally radical opposition to Nuclear is part of why we aren't improving fission and researching fusion more, which would get us out of the woods.
No compromise is being pursued from the renewables side, while the nuclear side completely agree that renewables will be a major part of our grid.
The opposition to nuclear fission is no more radical than the "opposition" to Solar CSP, Tidal, Wave, Vertical Axis Wind, Hydrogen cars and heating etc.
We tried a few things and figured out what worked best. That sucks if you have a weird emotional attachment to one of those techs that didn't make the cut but that's life.
Nuclear is simply still too expensive to “overbuild” on, if we got costs down then sure, but we can’t just magic up all the capital needed to build and even maintain the plants, even if they are cheap to fuel. But right now solar, wind, and perhaps more hydro (if we aren’t at our limit yet) make more sense.
A lot of those folks in the developing world are going to die from the new heat normal, and no one is going to do anything about it. Tragic to be sure.
> To ask these countries to reduce their energy requirements is to ask their citizens to live a lower standard of life. Hypocritical of those in the West to make that request.
Without a hint of sarcasm or snark, life isn’t fair. We’re on a trajectory of progress (energy transition) and reduction in quality of life (excess heat deaths) for various geographic cohorts, and not much is going to bend either curve.
Yeah, that's without question. Overall energy needs will still continue to increase during that time, global population growth will almost certainly continue as well.
Right, you're spot on. We're lucky in that fertility is plummeting across the world [1], which means the population peak won't be too high [2], but we're still going to have to provide for all the people who are going to exist over the course of the next century.
The world is rapidly aging [3]; we should build renewables while we still have a young, productive worker cohort [4]. How are people who are going to want or need to migrate, to survive carbon emissions catching up with us, going to? No idea.
Not all coastal properties are low lying. Florida is going to get decimated by sea level rises, California is going to lose maybe a few feet of beach in comparison.
> To ask these countries to reduce their energy requirements is to ask their citizens to live a lower standard of life. Hypocritical of those in the West to make that request.
That's a weird take. The West has colonized the rest of the world, enslaved people, exported cheap product to decimate local industry (sometimes at gunpoint), extracted resources (frequently with indigenous people working like slaves), propped up dictators, you name it ...
(I'm not particularly trying to blame the nebulous "West," as many other countries would have done the same if they had the chance. See what Japan did during WW2.)
... but we draw a line at trying to avert a global climate disaster?
Just this year, America was busy making sure China doesn't get the chips they want, by pressuring its own allies into not making more deals with China. And these things are considered completely normal and part of "business as usual" as long as they support the continued hegemony of America.
But talk about fending off the existential threat against the human civilization, and people are like "Oh no! Won't anybody think about those poor Indians who need their gas-powered cars!!"
You share a larger portion of this percentage of genetic information with some person from centuries ago, who fucking cares. Those people are simply detracting and not helping. I'd just ignore them. The signal to noise ratio of this site has taken a giga nose dive.
But my point is that the US is hindering China's chip industry development just fine, without a single gunshot fired, and it's considered totally mundane.
There are a lot of ways developed countries can nudge developing ones toward better energy efficiency. Many of them (like, say, funding solar arrays or nuclear plants) would actually benefit these countries. Some of them (say, higher customs tax for products made with fossil fuel energy) may not, but they can be implemented incrementally and paired with other "carrots" like renewable energy projects.
tbh west does not have much carrots or sticks to nudge - not to mention they'll be nudging towards affordable PRC renewables or nuclear considering poor state of western energy infra export. Really only agent that can nudge is PRC as current dominant infra exporter who did ramped down coal plant funding on BRI which is somewhat sigificant long term. Short medium PRC still going to be building more domestic coal than rest of world combined and there isn't anyone that can pressure PRC to change her energy security considerations under current geopolitical climate. Long term global, post RU sanctions, less developing countries are going to rely on western high tech for something as critical as energy. Emphasis on high tech, like fusion or nuclear or other sufficiently advanced energy solutions developing countries can't hope to replicate or substitute if ever sanctioned/denied. I predict relatively accessible low tech energy generation like fossil fuels and renewables like wind/solar/hydro is going to remain mainstay of energy mix because we are entering world where global south are less likely to depend on west for critical infra. Which is to say they'll be burning a lot more coal for base load power.
How many wrongs do you think will make a right? Shouldn't we strive for a solution that uplifts everyone rather than limiting the aspirations of those who were historically exploited?
It's not about denying climate change or the necessity to act, but it's about finding a path forward that respects the rights of all nations to develop. This entails working towards sustainable, clean energy solutions and aiding developing nations in transitioning to such technologies, rather than simply demanding they cut their emissions. Let's strive for an equitable transition to sustainability rather than rehashing past wrongs as justifications for present impositions.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] thread[0]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
[1]: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/10/26/lets-come-clean...
I think it's more accurate to say that consumer-side regulation is not a solution. I'm willing to bet there are tons of industries out there that can significantly reduce their energy usage, but it's either undesirable from a profit perspective or infeasible from a cost perspective.
That said, the "obvious" solution at this point seems to be larger supplies of non-carbon-releasing power generation (e.g. green or nuclear energy).
As with food calories: either for an individual or a population group, if you don't have enough, more is very, very much better.
This is not the same as more being always better. Sometimes the same or less in a smarter implementation produces better outcomes, and sometimes it takes a regulatory shove to get there.
Societies that require everyone to have a car just to have a basic acceptable level of mobility and participation, and which expect even moderately high performers to fly multiple times a year, case in point. Huge amounts of energy deployed for marginally better outcomes.
The mistake is in observing a strong positive correlation on part of the curve, and extrapolating that to interpret it as a linear relationship.
There are parts of the world which still need a lot more deployable energy. Getting household white goods to the majorities in poorer countries, etc. The same additional amount in the hands of the top 80% or so of Western hands would be frittered away to no noticeable benefit - we could get by with a lot less.
We could, but getting by with less out of choice is much better than getting by with less out of deprivation (like you said, "if you don't have enough, more is very, very much better"). And if your solution involves a large group of people depriving themselves to benefit those on another side of the world, I'm afraid there's no historical evidence to suggest that it will work even a little bit.
> sometimes it takes a regulatory shove to get there.
Almost all the time, additional powers granted to the government for that regulatory shove are not relinquished. Virtually all the time, a government that is powerful enough eventually becomes tyrannical. We have to weigh that very real possibility against the cost of what appears to be inefficient outcomes.
This does get more complicated when it's a societal level choice. You might feel subjectively energy-deprived at a very different point to me. At the same time though, a well-designed low-energy regime isn't perceived by its citizens as despotic. There's very little call (nowadays) to smash Houston-style freeways through Europe's semi-pedestrianised neighbourhoods. Curiously, this was not the case in lower-information times, but the intersection of high bandwidth/discoverability and walkability is a much bigger topic.
Now I'm old enough to remember Eastern Bloc totalitarianism, and I find the current Gen Z fashion/fetish of all things DDR/Soviet vaguely tragic, but the outcome of the path we're on right now is at least equivalent to tyranny, at least for the three billion or so people at the pointy end of it all.
Despotic it may not be, yet people vote with their feet. Way more Europeans leave their delightfully walkable cities to make a living in Houston than the other way around[0]. 650k Germans, 180k French, and 90k Dutch lived in the US in 2017, compared to 140k, 50k, and 30k Americans living in the respective countries.
And despite the ugliness of Houston's monstrous freeways, it at least grows and takes newcomers: Metro Houston nearly doubled (grew 70%) from 2000 to 2020, compared to (the metros of) Berlin only 5%, Paris 13%, and Amsterdam 14%.
Broadly, I see current European policy as a defensive posture, one looking to maintain things as they are in all aspects: climate, population, wealth. There doesn't appear to be the same appetite for change and growth. It's as though they've decided that the way things are now is the best it'll ever be, and anything more advanced (that is, requiring more energy expended per capita) is somehow immoral. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it.
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/interactives/global-migra... obviously, I don't mean literally Houston itself.
Paris, London and Berlin of 2023 are markedly different in so many ways to, say, 1983. Berlin was in two different countries back then, and if you tried to cross, you died. Much of London was still semi-derelict from WW2 and post-war economic changes.
Perhaps a history measured in millennia means a little more patience around change. Perhaps Europeans don't see the struggle for more wealth as the most important thing.
And looking at life expectancy trends in the developed world (as a very crude proxy for wellbeing).. perhaps they might be on to something.
‘I Don’t Want to Be Here Anymore.’ The Economic Cost of Houston’s Heat (wsj.com)
Making energy efficiency a priority concern often leads to overall better systems. Smaller, quieter, doing more with less and doing it better.
(Otherwise we'd all be posting on Presler Pentium D's.. dual Netburst all the way /s)
really? lighting alone is a huge sector for unrealized power savings, in all categories.
Do you have some sources I can read about this? I find it hard to believe that large consumers of light haven't already switched to LEDs given the financial incentive to do so, and on the consumer side, the transition has already been made in most of the world that has lighting.
If I crank up the wave generator in a wave pool, I would get both taller waves and shallower water. Cranking up the heat retaining gases in the atmosphere is going to make both weather extremes more likely.
[1] I say might, because there's uncertainty around this. I do know, with absolute certainty that redistributing - say - your organs to multiple people who need transplants would definitely be a 'net plus', but you don't see me making such bloodless utilitarian arguments.
Whereas we have exactly zero historical precedent to know whether or not climate change will even be a 'net plus'.
(I do know that organ redistribution would definitely be a net plus, though. We kill one person, we save the lives of N people, the calculus seems to add up to me...)
My point exactly! If you respect Chesterton's fence, we shouldn't make radical changes to the status quo without clear and convincing proof that the change is worth the cost. Fossil fuels, as bad as they are, also brought up living standards for literally billions of people. There are still billions of people who have yet to enjoy Western standards of living. We shouldn't handicap their growth by demonizing fossil fuels before alternatives are ready.
At the same time that we've been flooding the atmosphere with carbon with nations around the world industrializing (1970-2019), climate-related deaths around the world shrank to one-third, while the human population doubled[0]. Not one-third in rate, that's one-third in absolute number. Is that the "climate catastrophe" you're talking about? The IPCC released its first report in 1990, and deaths of climate has only decreased since then, mainly due to the improving ability of developing nations to better master their environment -- again, via cheap energy enabled by fossil fuels.
I'm not the one with mental gymnastics and blind spots if you cannot acknowledge the instrumental role that fossil fuels have played in getting humanity to this point, and the inability of current renewable energy technology to replace it wholesale.
[0]: https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=10989
You're also presenting a laughably false dichotomy for an alternative. I have an incredibly hard time imagining that you honestly believe that to be the only alternative for our current trajectory.
Given that most of the world's land is in the northern two thirds of the globe[0], it seems more likely than not that eventually it will be a net plus in arable land and overall agricultural output. Other commenters, of course, have a good point in how pleasant that transitional period will be.
[0]: https://www.ecoclimax.com/2016/08/land-mass-at-each-longitud...
https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/temperatures-e...
And since, then https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/wildfires-greece-burn-f...
So, no, Europe is not least affected or best off.
> However once ignited, wildfires are being driven to larger and more intense extremes due to rising global heat and drought conditions caused by the climate crisis.
Reducing Europe's summer 2023 to "The Greek wildfires" - fires plural - and then to "some arson on Corfu" is ridiculous minimisation.
Rhodes's firefighters also suspect arson ( https://greekreporter.com/2023/07/26/wildfires-arson-greece/ ) and arrests have been made on Kefalonia ( https://greekcitytimes.com/2023/07/25/kefalonia-two-arrests-... ).
[0]: https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=10989
It is also the case that a large part of the world is simply not built to withstand such temperatures, and using more energy to accommodate that means putting more heat into the atmosphere.
Yes, that's a thermodynamic certainty. But the moment Homo sapiens left the year-round pleasant high plains of East Africa, we were going to need energy; you can't blame the caveman for lighting a stick on fire to keep himself warm.
> a large part of the world is simply not built to withstand such temperatures
People live in some truly inhospitable places, some cold, some hot, and have done so since before modern conveniences. Unless the plan is to make sure everyone in the world lives in places where you naturally don't need (or want) heat or air conditioning, the extra heat in the atmosphere is the price we must pay.
Infrastructure in London was melting last summer, lots of our infrastructure will have to be rebuilt, which is severely inefficient, and will require even more energy.
Climate scientists agree that if the world stopped all carbon emissions today, at the snap of a magical finger, the planet will continue to warm for the foreseeable future. It seems to me then that the correct path out is through, not backwards. And "through" involves building and rebuilding, using whatever energy sources are economical. By all means, bring renewables in that fold, but renewables alone are far from sufficient.
It's not just a matter of everyone driving Teslas instead of F-250s, or indeed even of everyone cramming into electric-powered city buses or walking instead of using automobiles. The primary industries are all still powered by vast amounts of fossil fuels: the huge mining trucks, farm tractors, and backhoes that produce the real things that real people need to consume to survive, have such high energy density requirements that there are no viable electric alternatives yet.
When the jet-stream splits, air from Sahara gets trapped between the now two or three streams, and cannot escape. This creates a heat dome that we can’t manipulate and change.
[1] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/sep/nobel-prize-winning-econ...
In any case, yes, the Nobel Prize committee for Economics is made up of eminent economists, who are indeed probably best thought of as small-c conservative small-p politicians, rather than academics in the tradtional sense.
More thorough critique: https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/The_app...
Anyway, they gave a Nobel to Al Gore who made some pretty wacky claims that have failed to materialize, so it's not like the Nobel Committee has a spotless track record.
Those who take climate change seriously should have gone all in on nuclear, but somehow there was enough of an overlap between that group and anti-nuclear activists that it never happened. That's what's truly baffling.
More and cheaper energy is quite literally the solution to all of humanity's physical problems. I don't care if the summers get hotter or winters get colder, if we have abundant, cheap, stable, clean energy from nuclear sources. Barring that, abundant, cheap, stable, and regrettably unclean energy from fossil fuels is the second best option. But what some in the developed world has chosen is stasis, degrowth, and decay instead.
I may be ignorant, but you don't seem to be offering any viable alternatives to my ignorance.
What? No. That makes no sense. Human development includes a lot of things that have nothing to do with that ridiculous and narrow definition.
>Those who take climate change seriously should have gone all in on nuclear, but somehow there was enough of an overlap between that group and anti-nuclear activists that it never happened. That's what's truly baffling.
Follow the money: https://atomicinsights.com/how-important-has-oil-money-been-...
>Barring [nuclear energy], abundant, cheap, stable, and regrettably unclean energy from fossil fuels is the second best option.
What about increasing renewable energy options? What about increasing carbon efficiency by introducing it as a concept into markets via a carbon tax significant enough to drive innovation and behavior change? What about increasing city density and improving subways and trains? What about reducing meat consumption?
What other concept so concisely captures the difference between how our primitive ape ancestors lived, to how cavemen lived, to how the ancient cultures lived, to how we live now? Or how countries at different stages of development now are to each other?
The Human Development Index correlates highly with per capita energy expenditure[0]. It's basically a necessary but not sufficient component of human development; otherwise you'd see countries in the lower-right quadrant of that chart. I find it surprising that you have such a strong reaction to this.
> Follow the money
Of course, Big Oil lobbied for their interests. I'm sure solar executives spend money on lobbying, too. Doesn't mean that the public, especially the interested and motivated public ("those who take climate change seriously"), should have been duped by it.
No one is absolving Big Oil for their part in swaying public opinion, but the public should also grow a backbone.
> What about [...]
They're all good ideas. My point is that good ideas don't happen in a vacuum. Everything carries with it an opportunity cost. "Increasing renewable energy options" isn't something that happens as a result of someone waving a wand; it's accomplished using limited time and resources that could be used elsewhere. So when you implement those ideas by taking away from fossil fuels, you had better make sure that the tradeoff is worth it.
> What about increasing city density and improving subways and trains?
On this point especially, I'm all for reforming zoning so that cities can become more dense. This would alleviate so many problems in America's highly desirable cities that are laughably sparse compared to other world cities (but of course, the precious "neighborhood character"...).
And sure, let's improve transit systems. But how? Take a look at the MTA's budget[1]: only a quarter is paid for by fares, meaning that people who don't use the subway already pay for three-quarters of the MTA. Even pre-pandemic, fares were a little over a third[2]. And this is in the area with the highest transit usage percentage by far out of anywhere in the country; the one place where they should be able to make it work!
So it appears that there is already a high degree of subsidization of subways and trains. Given how rapidly the ridership experience is deteriorating in almost all American transit systems, it seems irresponsible to put even more tax dollars in that direction, without first addressing the issues that make people not want to ride them very much.
[0]: https://visualizingenergy.org/does-more-energy-use-increase-...
[1]: http://web.mta.info/budgetdashboard/Budget_Transparencyd.htm...
[2]: https://new.mta.info/sites/default/files/2019-03/MTA-2019-Ad...
One is bigger than the other.
> the public should also grow a backbone
:)
> zoning & public transport
Let's take inspiration in Europe or Japan, not in the USA.
You want more of public transport, not less. And you want it ideally (almost) free, omnipresent and reliable, to let more people use it.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/25/story-cities-...
That chart has major outliers on the top right. Most countries toward the top are clustered close to the left. Yes, the top left is rounded off and everyone at the top uses more resources than everyone at the bottom, but the outliers are enough to skew an average and make the effect appear larger than it is.
My reading is that several energy intensive countries can significantly reduce their energy expenditure while maintaining a high level of human development.
One of those rare "have your cake and eat it too" moments.
I just want to ensure that the electricity that powers those heat pumps doesn't get more expensive as a result of the shift away from nuclear and fossil fuels. There's some preliminary research to indicate that more renewable power in the grid results in lower wholesale prices[0], but the relationship isn't very strong, and it's likely that Europe soon will (if not already) meet the point of diminishing returns. After all, there are only so many places you can put wind turbines, solar panels, or dams.
[0]: https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2022/Engli...
Russia's tundra becomes arable land, and their fossil fuels become more accessible. Their navy will be able to freely roam the seas when the polar ice caps melt.
Canada will receive the same benefits - enormous access to fresh water, ease of navigation, and agriculturally ideal conditions.
Greenland will have an increasingly large stake in geopolitics, trade, and energy.
China will be less existentially concerned about a blockade of the Strait of Malacca.
And they'll lose.
If you look at the distribution of power, it's not predicted to change all that much. The superpowers are enormously capable of maintaining their grip.
The complaints of poor nations will be met with meager welfare packages and mostly tuned out by the working class of weather nations. It's how the world already operates.
Put the American economy at risk and you get the Gulf War. Attack America directly and you get the Pacific theater.
In any case, none of those particular points matter. No poor country is going to be able to resource starve the wealthiest nations. If they try to invade or block trade, they'll find out the limits of their power.
Several of the countires made "poor" by climate change will have nuclear weapons: Indian, Pakistan, France, Israel, North Korea. You're living in a fantasy. Time to wake up.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/wildfires-peat-chall...
edit: bryanlarsen pointed out that there was an even more extreme event in earth's history.
It kicked off the largest mass extinction event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...
"very quick" = 60 ± 48 thousand years, we're aiming for 100 years or so
> It kicked off the largest mass extinction event
Yet. Let's wait few decades.
> It is also the largest known mass extinction of insects.
We're already 75-80% down.
https://www.businessinsider.com/germany-insect-population-fl...
https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-202...
https://wwflpr.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/lpr_2022_full_r...
There has been about 69 per cent decline in the wildlife population of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish across the globe in the last 50 years. The highest decline, 94 per cent was in Latin America and Caribbean region. According to WWF report, Africa recorded 66 percent fall in wildlife population, the Asia Pacific 55 percent and population of freshwater species reduced by 83 percent globally.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/brv.12816
The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation?
"Estimate that, since around AD 1500, possibly as many as 7.5–13% (150,000–260,000) of all ~2 million known species have already gone extinct, orders of magnitude greater than the 882 (0.04%) on the Red List."
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-bi...
The way we eat could lead to habitat loss for 17,000 species by 2050
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss
While the 19th-21th century increase of 1-1.2C or so is a bit faster, it's not a magnitude faster.
Humans have definitely changed nature everywhere, and is probably responsible for many species dying. But blaming that on the climate change doesn't really make sense. Deforestation is much more likely to be the cause.
Mainly our agriculture (deforestation, biodiversity loss, pollution), misuse of fossil fuels and the structures of our societal and financial systems.
Reform of agriculture might be it. Agriculture is also the leading driver of deforestation (50% of pastures were forested in the past).
> large scale reforestation will probably not affect CO2 very much either
But it could, it's probably the best tool in our arsenal. And it would not only affect CO2, but many of our other problems too (droughts, biodiversity, warming ...).
https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4
Agricultural land use, particularly for animal feed, poses the biggest obstacle to ecosystem restoration and carbon sequestration, hindering climate efforts. The potential for carbon sequestration is vast, with enough capacity to meet the entire 1.5°C carbon budget.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/04/improvin...
Improving soil could keep world within 1.5C heating target, research suggests. Better farming techniques across the world could lead to storage of 31 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year, data shows
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-ap...
The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately, says study
https://news.mongabay.com/2023/06/to-meet-u-n-climate-biodiv...
To meet U.N. climate, biodiversity goals, 79% of plant cover must be saved, study
https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation
Every year the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. At least three-quarters of this is driven by agriculture – clearing forests to grow crops (upto 80% for animal feed), and raise livestock
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area the size of Africa).
No we wouldn't. Everybody gets cause and effect backwards on this one. They see that we're using essentially all of our arable land for food production and draw the conclusion that's how much is needed to produce the amount of food we currently produce.
But it's actually the other way around. We use all the land available because that's the cheapest way to produce the amount of food we need. If we had more land, we'd use it and food would be cheaper. If we had less land we'd produce the same amount of food, but it would be more expensive.
For an extreme example, we could probably feed 8 trillion people on the same amount of land by covering all of our arable land with greenhouses.
So, while we can definitely get creative with land use, we also need to consider the costs and environmental impacts.
It would not be so bad, imho. Industrial ag might be effective (from the economic viewpoint, very destructive from the environmental one), but not as much as producers of that stuff would like us to beliveve. And if we manage to deplete our soils even further, then even industrial ag wouldn't be able to do much.
We could and should change the way we farm, while preserving comparable yields. It might be necessary to learn farming again, or invent new machinery. There are dozens of methods we could utilize (syntropic, natural, veganic farming, permaculture, food forests, nitrogen fixing plants / trees, companion planting, etc.), and new ones would be found.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/jo...
"The analysis we present here offers a new perspective, based on organic yield data collected from over 10,000 organic farmers representing nearly 800,000 hectares of organic farmland. Averaged across all crops, organic yield averaged 80% of conventional yield. However, several crops had no significant difference in yields between organic and conventional production, and organic yields surpassed conventional yields for some hay crops."
15 thousand years ago Canada was under 3 kilometers of ice. Now it is home to 40 million people and covered in wildlife.
The human population went from 2 million to 8 billion during this warming period.
All the evidence points to a warmer planet supporting more life, not less.
current population 50.000.000 population in 1950: 6 191 000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sudan
I'd say they've been thriving.
You mean wildfire? Bad autocorrect. /s
A fast enough change will:
- Make places where large numbers of people currently live uninhabitable due to temperature and sea levels
- Kill off most plants and animals because the ones in a given place won't be adapted to the new climate, even if theoretically the climate in other places would now be suited to them, in a way that will take millions of years to recover from.
Simply saying "warmer is better" is utterly missing the point.
Where is the evidence that the trend is ending?
An airliner lands on a runway and smoothly decelerates from 150 MPH to zero over 10,000 feet. This is just fine.
An airliner does the same deceleration over 10 feet. Everyone on board dies in a huge fireball.
Even for neutral or beneficial changes, the rate matters.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/what-is-the-sixth-mass...
I have doubts over the OP claim. It sounds like sensationalism. Review & time will be needed to verify the claim.
https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/3071/the-r...
The only way to deliver this opinion in a non-suspect way would be something like: "I'm aware that all metrics show it's the hottest month on record, and everyone is experiencing that everywhere, but <a detailed reason why for some reason your model of the world invalidates that experience that doesn't just wave your hands and dismiss all the evidence>".
Like, it is obvious in the last fifty years. Your argument is "well maybe 200 years ago was hotter and we forgot". Who cares? People are worried about this because it is bad for humans, now.
Geologically speaking, we have just left a mini-ice age. Our efforts are better invested in adjusting to these inevitable changes.
It has no bearing if it changed in the past if we can do something about it not killing most (non-rich) people in the future.
Well it was one bearing if it was like this in the past: it gives people a convenient argument for dismissing it now. So if your goal is "definitely let's make sure we don't handle this well", then at least, if you're right, you can justify that. Pretty pointless, though, unless your goal is destruction.
I don't take a nihlist approach. I take a realistic approach. The changes will occur. What will we do about it? Go into a delusion that we can stop the change or take steps to prepare?
> Well it was one bearing if it was like this in the past: it gives people a convenient argument for dismissing it now
I'm not dismissing it. I'm saying it IS HAPPENING & nothing we do will stop it. So what are we going to do? Sacrifice to the gods to stop the inevitable? Good luck with that...
I would prefer to mitigate these changes by hardening our infrastructure, utilize tech & social systems to improve quality of life, and address pollution like the toxic sludge byproduct to mine materials for your "renewable" equipment.
If you can do work now to make "the planet getting very hot and messed up everyone's lives" take thousands of extra years, during which time it is more livable, why would you not? Obviously you would balance this against other economic and policy concerns, which everyone is, and it comes out way ahead because warming is very bad for everyone.
"It has happened in the past, therefore turn your brain off and tell everyone else to stop thinking also." is not a "realistic" approach, it's a delusional one. It doesn't involve a realistic model of the present or the future. It's profoundly unconcerned with any sort of causal model of reality that makes predictions about the future and therefore analyzes what we ought to do based on their expected outcomes.
The question always is if we can even do something about the climate now or if we should spend the energy and resources into preparing for a potentially inevitable future.
Humans have always been champions of handling change. Why should this be different?
It's usually easier to stop doing something than to deal with the consequences of doing something.
> Humans have always been champions of handling change. Why should this be different?
Humans have never faced this kind of change. It will be different because it's not just a different temperatures, it's the collapse of the ecosystem which we rely on for food.
Can you point to any time during the existence of our species with a similar kind of change?
> and it's collapse of whole ecosystem.
That's mostly based on scientific studies, existing examples of rapid changes in ecosystems, and previous mass extinction events. Do you have any evidence counter to this idea?
You didn't ask for "evidence for my worlds".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Pett#/media/File%3AWhat...
The biggest threat to a thriving world economy with high degrees of personal freedom is climate change.
I would suggest it is lack of low-cost, easily-accessible energy. Energy has been the driving force behind virtually every technological and economic advance in the past century.
But extinction of pollinators or key species, extreme temperatures causing mass crop failures, extreme droughts, several meter sea rise or a cascade of tipping points could certainly make some serious damage too.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-is-now-cheapest-electricit...
[0]: https://www.eenews.net/articles/investigation-texas-failed-t...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/fossil-f...
https://electrek.co/2023/07/26/thanks-to-wind-and-solar-texa...
The biosphere will not be able to keep up with these changes and we already know that we are causing a mass extinction event and destabilization of the biosphere. Our food system depends on the biosphere.
Our society also depends on the conditions that have been relatively stable for the last several millennia. Sure, there was a mini ice age, but we're talking about a smaller change in climate and far more gradual in that ice age, than what we are currently experiencing and causing. And that mini ice age was enough to cause mass disruption to human societies in areas most impacted by it.
Our current human caused climate change - if allowed to continue unabated - is likely to cause disruption on scales that lead to the death of billions of humans and the likely collapse of societies. We cannot ignore the cause of it (us) and simply adapt to the new reality. The way we adapt to this is by changing the behaviors that created it in the first place: We stop burning fossil fuels. That way it stops getting worse, then we work to return the climate to what it was previously, or we work to adapt to our new (now, hopefully, stabilized) reality.
We're quickly losing the window to even do that, however, because we're triggering feedback mechanisms that make this change self-replicating. So we likely need to go heavily into carbon removal and fast as well.
Of course. If those changes would happen in a timeframe spanning hundreds of centuries we could dedicate some effort to progressively adapt to them, when it looms to violently happen upon us in the next 50-100 years and it's known it could've been partially avoided I don't think we can just magically wave it away to "it will eventually be solved technologically". It might as well not be, that's the scary part.
It's going to be hard to get people to care about this if the takeaway is going to be "other people have to do what we say" as it usually is with climate stuff.
>It's going to be hard to get people to care about this if the takeaway is going to be "other people have to do what we say" as it usually is with climate stuff.
Eh, more like hold the ultra-wealthy accountable for profiteering off, or at the expense of, the planet? and the (comfortable) existence of lots of people based on how things are going?
(The really cool thing is, most (all?) of the individual climate-shaming is propaganda from corporations who know damn well that individuals contribute very little to climate change compared to corporations themselves and the wealthy capital class.)
> The report finds that these billionaires’ investments give an annual average of 3m tonnes of CO2e per person, which is a million times higher than 2.76 tonnes of CO2e which is the average for those living in the bottom 90 percent.
Yes, I understand that's via investment, but that's still kinda precisely my point. Why shouldn't they be held to account?
The poor collectively decide they want clean air and the rich shriek "stop telling other people what to do!" Then the rich turn around and say "stay off my land, and don't you dare occupy my 3rd vacation home even though it's empty right now!"
The point I'm trying to make here is that telling other people what to do is foundational to many of our most basic rights. Do not kill people, do not trespass on other people's property, do not copy my copyrighted works, do not infringe my patents, etc. These things are so basic they are taken for granted and overlooked. Notably, they benefit those who already have wealth. But then, if the poor say "do not destroy the air" or something like that, suddenly the wealthy are concerned about telling other people what to do.
I'd love to know which poor folks you know who have time to worry about global warming.
The unthinkable yet true thing is that there isn't anything we can do to reverse or cure the situation. Best we can do is try to adapt. We're far past the tipping points. Ever heard of Collapse with a capital C?
Ok well let's do that then instead scream about the crazy stuff many sibling comments are advocating. All this rearranging the deck chair on the titanic stuff is just transparently political.
Not surprised. This topic should go across political spectrum. Unfortunately for several decades, instead of proposing solutions, right spectrum was denying that there is problem.
How do you suggest reducing carbon emissions that aren't profitable? We are lucky that wind and solar cost less than other forms of energy, but at some point we will have to pay people to switch to electric cars and then make ICE cars illegal.
Dealing with climate change means everybody needs to stop producing carbon dioxide and pay to pump it back out of the atmosphere. Only government can do that.
the only thing missing is agnostic, post-Christian salvation…
regardless, the Church of McDonald's, for all of their other shortcomings as a Church, doesn't seem to fit the profile of "doom cult", so I'm not too concerned about them.
Climate change is just a symptom of much bigger problem, and that's ecological overshoot. Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot.
Animal ag is the leading driver of deforestation, biodiversity loss, pollution and soil erosion.
McDonalds is one of the biggest companies driving deforestation worldwide (5th?), in fact 8 out of 13 biggest deforesting companies worldwide are in the meat industry, one way or another.
https://earth.org/major-companies-responsible-for-deforestat...
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Every year the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. At least three-quarters of this is driven by agriculture – clearing forests to grow crops (upto 80% for animal feed), and raise livestock
https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation
https://berkeleyearth.org/june-2023-temperature-update/
2. Which is exactly what dishonest people do with them.
3. Things over the past few years aren't as bad as they seemed now. These past few years are likely going to be the coldest years of the 21st century.
4. The Antarctic sea ice graph is beautiful. We're smashing every record.
The colored lines are sometimes 30 years and sometimes 20 years. I wonder why they're not equally spaced?
best I've found is https://judithcurry.com/
The last time the temperature stayed this hot was 2.5 million years ago, in the Pilocene.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#Ov...
Early June was warm in the UK.
I could see something like a carbon credit for individuals based on their actions that impact the climate such as limiting their power use, not driving their car frequently, or not having pets. This type of rationing also has problems, though, as it starts to become effectively limiting things to wealthy people who can afford a lifestyle in which they can use a car less frequently or own an energy-efficient home for example.
I don't think there is a reasonable way of rationing climate relief in a morally justifiable way.
Are the currently strong going to keep the weak down, will the weak destroy the strong, will power be distributed to minimize the number of weak at the expense of the strong, or will something else entirely happen? My bet is that the strong have quite a lot longer to go getting stronger before the weak can enact meaningful change.
Also worth noting are that there is a large gap between, for example, the American weak and the global weak. The global weak will suffer more and have less avenues to enact change. Americans have the luxury of climate “debate” while Indonesia (not even a super poor country) moves its capital and while others suffer.
EDIT: To be clear, I think this situation is absolutely horrible. Based on how countries have been acting for the last couple decades though, I'm not expecting things to get better before they get much worse.
Donald Trump, the conspiracy theorist gameshow host was elected president of the USA! And might be again! So there's no room for complacency.
we do have the option (whether we take up on that) to
* reduce input visible light by (say) using space bubbles to gently shade earth, and|or
* extract C02 from atmosphere using big industry scale procesess powered by excess renewable energy (and then to sequester that CO2 rather than use it to make more faux green synthetic fuels that return it to the atmosphere).
These are not easy things, these are things that require nation scale commitment and follow through, but yes, options exist.
Powerful interests working to push back public opinion and paying politicians is an obstacle too though, for sure.
If you're already well off (like most HN posters, probably) then you might not care if the leader of your country tells you that you will have to reduce your standard of living for the sake of the environment (and keep in mind that they rarely make those claims based on realistic analyses). If you are barely making ends meet and don't know if you will be able to retire after toiling your whole life like many people it is a harder sell. For example, where I live my electricity provider is harassing me to switch to "clean" energy sources, coyly admitting that the price will be higher in fine print. Turns out they entice people to join only to increase their prices later (see https://www.thedailybeast.com/cleanchoice-energy-is-the-snea...). Can you afford to pay double or triple the price for energy? What if you had to? Some of us cannot afford to run air conditioning at a certain price.
Some still think that this is a mere "conspiracy theory", but the messaging is slowly becoming more explicit about this power grab. I'm talking about some national government figures talking about lowering your standards out loud. Less obvious tells are organizations connected to governments setting lofty "sustainability" goals which involve reducing energy footprints to a level that is impossible to achieve without significantly impoverishing nations. Farmers forced to reduce their use of nitrogen fertilizer are the appetizer.
Come on, as an engineer you know these problems are solved by removing the human error from the equation, not by desperately trying to adjust the weight of the human error.
Sure, I'll still recycle and try to not waste food and whatnot. But I know it's a drop in the bucket.
Phoenix had its longest stretch of 110+ degree days since 74, which is damning to the average person for climate change. Think “if we had a comparable heat wave 50 years ago, why should I assume the planet is heating up?”
Now, do I believe in climate change? Yes, of course. Do I think this one year is the mark of the next year and the year after that steadily increasing in temp? No, not at all, or at least not an amount that is noticeable by humans. Climate change is something that is far more subtle and far reaching than “phoenix is a 5f hotter”
There will be permanent damage to critical Earth systems that will further accelerate climate change, even if the temp backs down as El Niño retreats.
Oh, and by the way, El Niño is still ‘ramping up’ and won’t be at max energy for another 2-3 years. Expect more large temperature anomalies in the coming summers.
Some years there will be massive flooding that obliterates yield, and other years it will be heat and drought. None of the reputable science sources I’ve read post anything positive about future crop yields regarding climate change, quite the opposite.
Current climate predictions place us at +3C by the end of the century, which means 100F+ wet bulb temps in previously moderate climates. Nothing we care about survives those temperatures. Not people or crops or cattle.
A logistic curve starts out slow, and that's what we are witnessing.
The reality of weather should not be reduced down to politics, yet here we are. Living in idiocracy.
We're in a strong el nino at the moment and it's not even the worst one in the last 50 years.
The oceans are directly affected by global warming. The oceans are like a big thermal battery. The atmosphere and resulting weather are indirectly affected.
What determines the weather are the global jetstreams. Global warming causes more turbulence in them, but the heat being experienced is not literally from global warming. It could be just as hot or cold or moreso in the past, and it definitely has been.
You cannot go outside and feel global warming. That's a really dumb myth and my entire point. Every time it's hot it's an opportunity for the media to rally all the idiots together and wheel out the same tired propaganda and so many people believe it every time.
It's very important to realize that all those graphs that show increasing temperatures are talking about the ocean.
Climate change is real, but this heat wave has nothing to do with it
Imagine if our global surface temperature average continues to steadily increase, say over 50 years, and we continue to see dramatic spikes in temperature like we're seeing now? Not only will habitats and the life within them be decimated, but humans will be included. In my small city, the 2021 heatwave in Western Canada killed over 600 people more than a heatwave typically would. That's staggering, and we're just getting started.
The only real solution is to make energy ubiquitous and plentiful. Governments should be investing 100's billions of dollars into fusion tech. I don't think there is any vision or foresight. Ironically, Oppenheimer came out this year highlighting the development of Los Alamos and the impact of federal projects.
Renewables have been the boring, consensus answer to this for about a decade.
There's some obscure academic discussions about the exact makeup of the last 15% of energy needs, but most of those options revolve around how to best reuse the massive amounts of nearly free electricity that a sensible overbuild of renewables will create at other times.
I know the mainstream media flips between it all being a hoax and us all going to die but I still don't understand how it's possible for so many HN posters to have a worldview that so neatly excludes these world shaking tech developments.
> The IEA expects the growth in renewable generation to cover the vast majority of this total, growing by 2,450TWh. This is equivalent to 98% of the overall increase in global demand.
Fossil Fuels Made Up 82% of Global Energy Consumption in 2022: New Data
Data published Monday shows that fossil fuels made up 82% of global energy consumption in 2022, another indication that the global transition away from planet-warming sources is moving far too slowly as rich nations continue burning oil, gas, and coal at an unsustainable pace.
“Despite further strong growth in wind and solar in the power sector, overall global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions increased again," said Davenport. "We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris Agreement."
Even if the plants were cost competitive, which they are not, the existing ones are only built to last 30-50 years which means they'll age out and be replaced by renewables on that timescale at the very worst.
Electricity generation (coal) ... 33-40% efficiency
Electricity generation (nat. gas) ... 50-60%
Heating (nat. gas.) ... upto 97%
Transportation ... 20-30%
Industrial ... cement for example at about 50%
What am I missing? Got any links or references for "we only need to replace the third"?
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method
Also note that heat pump based heating can be 5x as efficient as nat gas heating. Which means using gas to generate electricity to run heat pumps is an improvement.
edit to add: also note that the oldest, dirtiest and least efficient plants will get shut first, having an outsized impact.
Any future fusion that requires a steam turbine to generate electricity will not be cost competitive with wind/solar/batteries by the time it arrives as the steam turbine will cost more to build and maintain than the alternatives even if you assume the fusion part is free.
Some fusion approaches convert more directly to electricity and might make a difference, but probably not for decades.
What's happening in the meantime?
TISM
They're scaling up at a rate of 5% of total electricity production per year. And that rate is increasing by about 1/3 per year.
That's insanely quick.
https://electricenergyonline.com/article/energy/category/cli...
No compromise is being pursued from the renewables side, while the nuclear side completely agree that renewables will be a major part of our grid.
We tried a few things and figured out what worked best. That sucks if you have a weird emotional attachment to one of those techs that didn't make the cut but that's life.
> To ask these countries to reduce their energy requirements is to ask their citizens to live a lower standard of life. Hypocritical of those in the West to make that request.
Without a hint of sarcasm or snark, life isn’t fair. We’re on a trajectory of progress (energy transition) and reduction in quality of life (excess heat deaths) for various geographic cohorts, and not much is going to bend either curve.
https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/devastating-worlds-p...
The world is rapidly aging [3]; we should build renewables while we still have a young, productive worker cohort [4]. How are people who are going to want or need to migrate, to survive carbon emissions catching up with us, going to? No idea.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rates/
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-over-time
[3] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ageing-and-...
[4] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/electricity-generatio...
It has risen and fallen in the past, but nonetheless it's quite a decline at the moment.
That's going to continue to work for many years and degrees to come, so I'm not sure if the problem really is as severe as you think.
We were talking about survival, not luxury living.
Better to give them solar panels and wind turbines. Even if the third world can't manufacture them they can maintain them themselves.
That's a weird take. The West has colonized the rest of the world, enslaved people, exported cheap product to decimate local industry (sometimes at gunpoint), extracted resources (frequently with indigenous people working like slaves), propped up dictators, you name it ...
(I'm not particularly trying to blame the nebulous "West," as many other countries would have done the same if they had the chance. See what Japan did during WW2.)
... but we draw a line at trying to avert a global climate disaster?
Just this year, America was busy making sure China doesn't get the chips they want, by pressuring its own allies into not making more deals with China. And these things are considered completely normal and part of "business as usual" as long as they support the continued hegemony of America.
But talk about fending off the existential threat against the human civilization, and people are like "Oh no! Won't anybody think about those poor Indians who need their gas-powered cars!!"
I refuse to be guilted into thinking I’m somehow a bad man because what someone ultra privileged did, just because of my relative proximity.
USA isn't going to invade countries to hinder their development. Neither is China. Energy needs continue to increase.
There are a lot of ways developed countries can nudge developing ones toward better energy efficiency. Many of them (like, say, funding solar arrays or nuclear plants) would actually benefit these countries. Some of them (say, higher customs tax for products made with fossil fuel energy) may not, but they can be implemented incrementally and paired with other "carrots" like renewable energy projects.
Sure a lot of small 1% improvements can make a change, but we don't know if the curve is linear or exponential.
That threat will always be there, just need to have awareness of it.
Hopefully its linear a linear curve we're on and not exponential. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
It's not about denying climate change or the necessity to act, but it's about finding a path forward that respects the rights of all nations to develop. This entails working towards sustainable, clean energy solutions and aiding developing nations in transitioning to such technologies, rather than simply demanding they cut their emissions. Let's strive for an equitable transition to sustainability rather than rehashing past wrongs as justifications for present impositions.
https://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
Bundling with ocean surface temperature may make it hotter. But then again, why would you do that?