> The American people, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves.
We need to embrace carbon-free electricity (whether its nuclear or solar or whatever) and electrify as many things as possible.
Degrowth isn't a humane solution, and it would first require the destruction of democracy as no electorate would endure it for long.
We need to do that (and even that is proving very hard, looking at the issues building out electrified ground transport and electrifying heating) and it will help a lot, but it won't be enough.
We have quite a few sectors where (economic or even feasible) non-carbon solutions aren't very forthcoming: Especially in (animal-based) food and aviation, but also manufacturing of e.g. new steel or concrete. These account for a huge chunk of emissions and reducing their emissions close to 0 in the next 20 years doesn't seem very likely. Looking at other technologies that are currently economically viable, such as solar, wind, electric cars or LED lighting, 20 years for nearly full adoption is very optimistic.
Reducing emissions there will mean also reducing consumption (and thus production, or the other way around) of those products. If we only accept superior technology as a means to "solve" climate change, we won't.
That'll very likely not mean degrowth as a whole as many sectors of the economy, especially the growing ones, are very compatible with an "electrify-everything" approach.
> the most reasonable way to
> share this is that we get an
> equal share. For far to long
> certain countries have taken
> up much more of their share.
Yes, we sure got the raw end of that deal by having more developed countries spearhead technological development.
I'd much rather be doing sustainance farming today, rather than taking my chances with the IPCC's estimate of climate change depressing world GDP by 2-10% in 2100.
Yes, developed countries should be leading the way to becoming carbon neutral or negative, e.g. with nuclear, solar, etc.
But let's not make this into some mischaracterization of early industrialized countries taking something away from the rest of us. That's bullshit.
That doesn't sound reasonable to me.
How do you to find equal?
Who implements the counting and penalties for someone taking more or less than their Fair share?
Is there anybody who is going to be left out of "we"?
I could go on...
more importantly, we should stop pointing fingers and act within our reach!
Here in Spain, we still plan to shut down our nuclear reactors (while many other countries are restarting their nuclear programmes) and at the same time the EU has placed crippling tariffs on Chinese EVs so the transition to electric vehicles remains unaffordable for most people.
When appeasing an ideological voter base or German shareholders remains more important than lowering emissions, we don't have much hope of making further progress.
That was my "OK, so you're completely unserious about this" moment. Governments have been subsidizing EVs, now they're cheap enough to not require subsidy, and you're cutting them off to appease the VW liars?
If we actually are in trouble the people in power can easily geo-engineer cooling the whole planet. Countries have done cloud seeding for decades, we can cool the planet if we want.
It's incredible how one can see what happens in practice but believe what people say rather than what people do.
"A lot of people have looked at the impact of the marine shipping regulation change. If you take that and you put it into some climate model and you estimate the temperature change, right now you’d expect about 0.05 of a degree, 0.08 of a degree [of warming per year], and then building over a decade to about 0.1 degree. So that seems like it helps, but it doesn’t seem like it’s sufficient."
Seems like the models have quite a few holes. It made me wonder if anyone has considered making a complete list of assumptions that are baked into these models, so they can be looked at in detail.
Yes, there are big overviews of the models and how they differ - the IPCC look at the over|under predictions of all the models and look at the spread and assumptions to select a "most probable" middle ground prediction for climate going forward.
For example while the current year has been warmer than expected it's also been cooler than a number of worst case scenarios that assume faster methane releases and water vapor increases, etc.
I had a goto link for a good overview .. currently it's redirecting to:
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is working on our digital Special Collections and the connection with OSTI. This includes all LLNL produced Technical Reports, Theses & Dissertations, and eSholarship content. We are working at making these available through OSTI. We apologize for the interruption in service.Yes, they did, it's called an "ensemble model" when multiple models are collated to account for their different modelings.
A friend of mine did his physics PhD on cloud formation at a molecular level exactly to tackle the issue some models had to account for that over longer time scales, most of the holes you can think of from the top of your head have been considered, there are many thousands of very smart people working on these models for the past 30-40 years.
Weather != climate.
The 10cm sea level rise over the next few decades isnt very relevant and the speculation about increased storms is highly location dependent and low confidence.
Far more problematic are the effects on farming of a degree rise.
Its also very degrowth to conflate energy use with CO2 emissions. Many types of energy use are time flexible (or, like AC, focused on sunny days) and thus can use solar power.
Eating so much meat, especially beef is devastating on the environment.
A single hamburger pollutes like driving an SUV for 50 miles.
For some reason the food industry catches very little attention despite the gigantic impact.
Climate scientists also try to paddle a bit the doomerism because the worst predictions make normal laypeople tune off (as is evident on a lot of comments on HN about it), ignoring those hot models was also a PR move to not make the general public become disinterested or detached since the outcomes might be much worse than they heard before.
I have quite a few friends doing their PhD in different areas of climate science here in Stockholm, all of them are much more pessimistic than the general public, they also think that bringing this sentiment out will make things worse, in their opinion it's good to give people hope.
Needless to say, I am not very optimistic about getting climate change under control.
If you have relatives in college in MI, WI, PA, NC, GA, NV or AZ who are concerned about the climate, get them to shake off the stupor.
https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to...
If you think the "business-as-usual" climate mitigations will be insufficient, it may be worthwhile to go for high-variance approaches that leave humanity better able to react relatively quickly to unexpectedly large warming.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade#Lightweight_sol...
There may have been skeptics 20 years ago, but now no one seriously doubts it.
I don't understand how technology people make decisions to deny a problem even if there is no 100% certainty. In my company, even if there is less than a 1% chance of something going wrong, we have to think of ways to mitigate it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga–Hunga_Haʻap...
Nor the water vapor producing volcanic eruption either.
Both are addressed in the article along with other possibilities.
The article referred to the "first study" but did not mention which study that was. According to the Wikipedia article, initial thoughts were that cooling would happen, but a later study disagrees. Trust the science you agree with.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022GL09...
BUT if I did, the only real way to reduce energy usage is to reduce the population of earth drastically. People cannot be made to live in squalor willingly.
From the Georgia Guide stones: Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
For those who are keen on math, that means we need to eliminate 7.6 billion people to return to "balance".
WEF Jane Goodall, advocates reducing the global population down to 450 million https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5U7R73_9xQ
You might not agree with the Guidelines but are you going to disagree with the entire World Economic Forum?
It's even in the popular zeitgeist. Like this example where Bill Maher is advocating for population collapse:
New Rule: Let the Population Collapse | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB97iwcm_Qc
What’s staggering to me is that the climb towards 1.5 C is of course not evenly distributed across the globe. But what it does result in is some places going up as much as 15 F+ above average since 1970.
The inly issue with that kind of optimization is, just like with all optimization, that by cutting out too much slack from the system you — well —don't have any slack in the system. Slack that would save the day if models are wrong or unpredicted things happen.