If you look at global power sector emissions from 1998 to 2018, you'll see that while we have dramatically improved upon the energy intensity (energy/capita) and even are making improvements on carbon intensity (carbon/capita), but the sad reality is this: we are still using around 35% coal power in 2018, the same as we did in 1998.
And the power sector is the easiest sector to decarbonize, by the way. If you look at electric vehicles, even if we had the most rapid, insane ramp-up that's beyond even Elon's crazy predictions, we'd still have massive fossil fuel use for non vehicle uses of petroleum for chemical industries, airplanes, plastic production, and for the numerous numbers of legacy cars that will be leftover that are not EV.
We need massive innovation across all our uses of fossil fuel. We can not rest on our laurels, saying PV and wind are so cheap now. They are still around 4% of total energy consumption, and when you factor in the decline of nuclear and relative decline of hydropower in the ever-increasing industrial energy base, we see that fossil fuels are basically the same % of our energy mix as they were before 2000.
For an energy realist, I recommend checking out Vaclav Smil, who has long been predicting 21st century as the century of natural gas, and who has been skeptical of renewables taking over instantly. It will take us until the 22nd century to truly decarbonize, and by then the seas will have risen over Miami and Shanghai on a regular basis.
It's a truly scary future. Get innovating, in your personal lives and in your professional careers, everyone!
I've been looking into carbon capture recently because it's going to be vital to slowing down the warming (and buying us another 50 years for the transition).
What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country.
We need a global carbon tax and we need it now. Heck, even a carbon tax in the EU / US applied to local emissions and, importantly, to imported goods would go a long way to solving the problem.
But it's not just planting the tree, right? It's taking land that currently has no tree, reserving it for the tree, and guaranteeing that the land & tree will remain intact for a nominal period of time, possibly indefinitely?
Trees are cheap. Fertile tree-growing land not currently used for trees: not so much.
Here in the (western) US, millions (billions?) of trees are burning up every year due to forest fires.
So to add to your list, we also need a way to facilitate healthy forests without completely destroying them and re-releasing nearly all of their stored carbon back into the atmosphere within a couple of weeks. Controlled burns is one way, but that requires an investment in firefighters and other specialists.. who are currently all preoccupied fighting uncontrolled fires.
The thing that I don't like about carbon offsets is the incentive to cheat. Green consumer buys carbon offset, company selling carbon offset pinky swears to offset carbon, but failing to do what was promised is unlikely to be caught, and is pure profit if they don't do it.
And they don't necessarily have to lie to do it. Take your growing trees example. They arrive at the carbon offset by saying that a tree takes X carbon, so Y trees will offset your carbon. They plant Y trees, and they are done.
However over half of trees planted in communities, will die within 1-2 years. (See https://www.state.sc.us/forest/urbsurv.htm for a source.) Based on conversations with people who planted trees for a living after clearcuts, in a wild forest setting the percentage loss is even higher for a combination of reasons from unreliable water to browsing by forest animals to a monoculture being vulnerable to disease. What incentive is there for the company planting the trees to come back in 5 years and see how many trees are still there? The higher the number, the better for them, checking just costs them money.
Moving on, are trees permanent CO2 storage? No. As forest fires around the world demonstrate, trees are only temporary storage. You don't control what will happen to those trees by mid-century and farther.
So pay for your carbon offsets. It will soothe your conscience. It might even do some (probably temporary) good. But be aware that you're likely telling yourself a white lie if you think that they are real.
And just so people understand: the anthropogenic forcing of climate change is the net increase of persistent greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, driven by pulling fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them.
So to offset that, it's not enough to just plant some trees. We would need to plant, grow, and maintain enough net new trees, globally to fix the carbon that until recently lived in coal, oil, and gas reserves. Trading trees for fossil fuels means aiming to have more trees globally than the planet ever had for most of human history. (Because for most of human history, fossil fuels were still underground.)
What private company is going to deliver on that? And how could anyone possibly hold them accountable if they don't?
So I share the skepticism of buying offsets. To me they feel like papal indulgences from the most corrupt time periods in the Catholic Church.
Can you post information about this, especially the math? According to US stats I've seen it requires an acre of growing forest to offset 100 US gallons of gas per year.[0] We have a long commute (which I'm working on cutting) so we need about 8 acres to offset fully.
That's why I'm going to get trees planted. I grew up in the South West of the UK, when I was a kid I played in the woods and wildlife there. Now it's gone, replaced by houses.
So I figure it's worth paying extra to offset my carbon usage by double whilst rebuilding a little of what was destroyed in my birth country.
Tell that to the Egyptians, Romans, Easter-Islanders (debated now, actually), and the countless other human civilisations who didn't really appreciate their impending demise before it was too late. Hell, the Romans hired essentially barbarians (so mercenaries, basically) to defend the northern territories against...you guessed it, barbarians.
Just because the bulk of the harmful effects that humans contribute to begin at 50+ years, conveniently after humans have to live through it. Humans still create children to suffer through the hell they created though, how peculiar.
Perhaps. But oil companies give millions to climate change-denying politicians, and to think tanks that falsely claim that there is no human-driven climate change.
This is just saying oil and ags gives lots of money to Republicans which I don't think is a surprise to anyone especially because Republicans tend to not only bw climate change deniers but are also anti-environmentalism, which oil and gas still very much funds.
I was curious about this and wanted to share some quick calculations on how viable this is:
A tree can absorb as much as 48 lbs of CO2 per year [1]. This is pretty vague cause this can vary by tree age and size, but let's use this arbitrary number
In 2014 the United States generated 6,870 million metric tonnes of CO2 [2]. 48 lbs is about 0.021 metric tonnes [3]. So...
6,870,000,000 / .021 = 327,142,857,142.85
327 trillion trees!! The population in the US on 2014 was roughly 317 million people [4]. This means for each person we would have to plant
6870 / 317 / .021 = 1,031.99 trees
Just north of 1000 trees. That's 1k additional trees that need to be planted just to offset our CO2. Crazy
(Even in the short scale, 327,142,857,142 is ‘only’ 327 billion, not 327 trillion)
More importantly, those trees will capture that amount every year. So, once you have them, you only have to replace trees that get lost. Assuming a 10 year lifespan (many will die young), it’s only 100 a year to plant. That’s doable (trees you plant will be tiny)
However, 1,000 trees at, say, 10 meters average distance cover about 0.1 square kilometers/25 acres. That way, the USA would support about 100 million people (I think 10 meters distance is a bit conservative, but there also will be areas where trees won’t easily grow)
⇒ Americans will have to (at least) halve their energy use. I think that is doable.
The US has 716 per person. Sadly, it looks like China and India are the worst culprits: "Brazil had 301 billion trees (1,494 per person), Canada 318 billion (8,953 per person), and China 139 billion (102 trees per person). Among highly populous countries, India (population, 1.267 billion) had a tree population of only 35 billion, leading to just 28 trees per person."
By comparison, the US won't take that long to get to carbon-neutrality. India and China are going to be a burden on the planet for the next century at least.
Note that you don't need to plant an additional 1000 trees per person, you just need to have 1000 trees per person to cancel out their emissions.
It's actually a clever plan. They will destroy ecosystems on the way so its not _perfect_, but it's feasible and will likely work if they fuccessfully find the right kind of tree to start the forest. Greenland is doing it too[1], with a lot of setbacks, but they are starting to recover (albeit slowly)
So, if you plant 3 times your current forest sizes into wood harvesting forests, you would capture all of your CO2 emissions into a solid.
That's probably not reasonable (but I'm not sure). Even then, if you double your forest area, and cut the wood from there you'll offset some 20% of your emission already.
Good to hear about tree plantng in the UK at $400 and at $200 to compensate for European-level personal energy use. Please give me the source! Our project TreeDripper.net that promotes tree planting by schoolk in poor countries needs this type of quantative information. Or mail to [email protected] , thanks!
>What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country.
Then what happens when the trees are fully grown? Processing them for industry would just reintroduce the carbon back into the environment. Letting them stay in the forest is nice, but you would quickly run out of room. There needs to be some sort of way to bury the biomass in order to put that carbon out of the atmosphere for good.
>Letting them stay in the forest is nice, but you would quickly run out of room.
No you wouldn't. There is massive deforestation all over the world. If we planted so many trees to offset carbon emissions that we accidentally solved that problem, that would be a huge environmental benefit on its own, and it would hold an enormous amount of carbon.
>There is massive deforestation all over the world.
And that deforestation is to make room for other things, mostly farms. As the world population continues to explode, the amount of land that can be allocated to forests quickly decreases.
> "Then what happens when the trees are fully grown? Processing them for industry would just reintroduce the carbon back into the environment."
A forest is only a significant carbon sink while it is growing. Harvesting and replanting a mature forest is the best thing to do with it.
Obviously you want to use the wood for construction, or other long-term applications. Well-constructed buildings can last for hundreds of years (and after that, the timber can be recycled). Long term carbon storage.
"If you write out the basic facts of trees, but framed as technology, it sounds like impossible sci-fi nonsense. Self-replicating, solar-powered machines that synthesize carbon dioxide and rainwater into oxygen and sturdy building materials on a planetary scale." - @CryptoNature
Biodegradable. That means that at the end of its life it decomposes and returns its recourses to the environment. Normally this is good, but not when the goal is to remove a resource from the environment.
Is carbon offset by afforestation effective though? I had read that we can't counter the emissions by planting trees alone. I'm definitely interested in doing this and covering more than double of my footprint
If you chop the trees and use the wood for something durable (not paper), yes it's effective for small scale things.
Most carbon capture forests don't chop their trees. So you are just locking some land into a natural reserve. It's something good by itself, but won't help fighting Global Warming.
We need to look at every solution, as the problem is not just energy production. Concrete production produces around 5% of global C02, of which less than half is related to fuel for running furnaces. [0] Deforestation (whether deliberately or by fire) also releases large quantities of previously sequestered C02. Agricultural practices can free sequestered carbon or trap it in topsoil. [1]
Greenhouse gases are a big problem any way you look at it. One somewhat heartening thing is that _any_ technique that reduces atmospheric C02 is helpful since it's really just one big budget that everything is contributing to.
Too late. If you start planning nuclear plants now, they'll take 10 years to build.
Also, I'm not sure that the an to build nuclear reactors across Africa, South America, and the middle east will be popular; the proliferation risk hasn't gone away.
Pretty sure there will still be a huge demand for reliable base load power in ten years, even if there's a seismic breakthrough in battery technology. And no need to build in unstable countries; simply replacing all coal power plants in existing nuclear regions like Europe and China would be massive enough.
> Too late. If you start planning nuclear plants now, they'll take 10 years to build.
Probably more unless you build Gen IIs: because of the ongoing popularity of Gen IIs manufacturers have very little experience building their Gen IIIs (and the building processes have not been de-kinked yet) and Gen IVs are still years away from design completion to say nothing of actually building them.
This entire thread is talking about different ways of producing energy. I think using less energy could have an even higher impact. We'd be poorer as a result, but it's technically easiest to implement.
You can make a photovoltaic panels fab with the money that goes into a nuclear power plant, and complete it faster.
The one thing that would probably have the largest impact would be guaranteeing some demand for PV fabs. (As much as I hate governments guaranteeing demand in general.)
>You can make a photovoltaic panels fab with the money that goes into a nuclear power plant, and complete it faster.
We already have dirt cheap PV thanks to China. Panels are not the problem. Storage and transmission is. Until ultra-cheap grid-scale batteries are a reality, solar will only ever be viable in certain areas at certain times.
Coupling solar with hydro to recycle some water and allow the dam to operate at a greater capacity even when river or storage levels are low is an interesting idea [0]. Though perhaps only applicable in a few locations (I think the Waitaki power scheme in NZ could be a candidate, one day)
"For an energy realist, I recommend checking out Vaclav Smil, who has long been predicting 21st century as the century of natural gas"
My very recent reading on this topic has lead me to believe that while burning natural gas is quite an improvement in carbon emissions vs. burning coal or oil, unburned natural gas traps quite a bit more heat than carbon dioxide does.
It was even suggested that pipeline leaks, manufacturing leaks and (other misc. steps in the lifecycle) leaks make natural gas a wash in terms of climate change.
I hope this is not the case and I wonder if anyone here can comment further ?
Yes, that's the point of the commentary that I read - there are unintentional leaks in the production, transport and use of natural gas that are much larger than one might assume.
Pipelines, for instance, are quite "leaky".
These leaks are unintentional and difficult to find/monitor, so they are not burned off ...
I believe methane is around 25 times more potent at trapping heat than CO2 (have seen different figures around 25ish). There is a much shorter half-life on that methane, it degrades in the atmosphere much more quickly (<100 vs ~1000 years) than the very stable CO2 molecule. However we have to think of positive feedback loops. The methane will heat us much sooner, which will allow more ice melt, more methane emissions from the permafrost in northern climates, and accelerating the heating we've already seen in polar regions.
Why does the use of fossil fuels in chemical or plastic production factor into climate change?
I've seen this mentioned before and didn't really understand it, and interestingly that person also mentioned Vaclav Smil (in fact, it may have been an article written by him).
Is there something I'm missing or is that conflating two realted but different things for no obvious reason? Or does carbon end up in the air due to plastic production and chemical feedstock usage?
Most of this seems to be the standard carbon footprint of any manufactured good e.g. the diesel used by the trucks delivering things, the coal burnt to generate the electricity to heat the factories.
It doesn't seem to be inherent to plastic, though possibly it's impossible to drill for oil/gas without leaking some into the atmosphere. Seems to be a small fraction of the total though.
I think you need to be clearer what you mean by innovation.
If by innovation you mean new technology coming to save the day then I'm very skeptical it will work out. Teslas are nice but not a match for 1 billion Chinese entering the middle class.
If by innovation you mean a drastic change in how carbon is taxed leading to a sensible focus on how energy is consumed then we may have a chance however it means paying $50 for a bigmac and no more flights to Ibiza for 20 Euros.
I say innovation in careers and personal lives. We need all sectors to decarbonize, it's not just new tech gadgets and gizmos, but new ways of thinking, servicing, and behaving. Innovative thought is necessary from every corner, both politics for carbon tax, personal diets for less food waste, more muscle-powered transportation (helps with diabetes/obesity too), etc. If we have "business as usual" in too many places, it won't matter if we decarbonize our power sector or our transport. We have to change in thousands of ways.
If you burn the plastic now, you get all the CO2 now.
Some plastic last for hundreds of years, so the same amount of CO2 will be released more slowly. An optimistic view is that half of the "CO2" will be trapped for a few additional hundred of years.
A slightly more interesting part is that a part of the emission is methane (that is like 100x worse than CO2), but the article says that the level of methane emission is insignificant anyway.
Education is what needs to be innovated. We need more kids becoming scientists. Battery and storage technology need to be improved. We should be taking a multi-prong approach to coming up with working nuclear fusion.
What if better educated kids grow up to be lobbyists for Exxon? Or work at the Heritage Foundation? Or finance new coal infrastructure at Goldman Sachs?
The problem has nothing to do with an insufficient number of smart people being involved. The problem is that coal and oil companies are paying a lot of those smart people a lot of money to make things worse.
Is chemical/plastic production really a source of emissions? After all, oil is used in the production of plastic because plastic has a bunch of carbon in it.
Plastics reactors themselves don't really do much (if tuned properly, most aren't because it's cheaper), the emissions are mostly from the refinery processes before it. You can't make plastics from raw oil.
Obviously running these still requires a lot of power for heating, cooling and so on. Large-scale extruders for producing the plastic pellets everyone uses for e.g. injection moulding require a fair bit of electricity as well (think dozens of MW per screw pair / channel).
In the US plastic is produced via cracking natural gas into ethane. In Europe and China they still use crude oil and crack it into naptha, but that's starting to decrease as they turn to cheaper natgas.
Yes, it is. The chain of industrial processes that converts oil to plastics are energy intensive, and the chemical processes involved often have direct emissions as well. Not to mention the emissions from extracting, refining, and transporting the oil in the first place.
True, this is a huge aspect that is not discussed enough. Even if we reduce carbon intensity of our energy per capita, we may keep emissions too high simply by providing energy to many more people. I believe a huge aspect of reducing future emission would be educating women and families in developing nations, helping them through the epidemiologic transition to lower birth rates/family size much quicker.
i dont understand. you completely omit laws in your suggested solution. we need to pass laws that prevent businesses from fucking everything up worse than they already have. you can innovate all you want, but i think you should also not elect people who are fucking STUPID about climate change.
I don't understand. You completely omit laws and specific policy suggestions in your criticism. I'd love to see you advance this discussion by adding something to it.
What laws and policies would you suggest? If you don't feel like you can articulate your position well, do you have any books/articles you recommend we read?
Laws are a reasonable (thought still incredibly difficult) solution in the parts of the planet that have the rule of law. Large parts don't, and we need different solutions in those places because this is a global problem.
Unfortunately, we don't have the international governance in place to attack this problem, and we might not until its too late. Still, you go to war with the army you have, and this is the one we've got.
If Trump was waging a smarter trade war, and EU helped, we could be taxing China and the rest of the "lawless" countries more effectively - e.g. tax all goods (local and imported) based on their carbon footprint - and thus effect global change.
The best laws will help guide the economy to find solutions so we get everyone rowing in the same direction. Carbon taxes are an obvious solution though currently hard to pass in many places.
BTW I would not assume that just because such laws are hard to pass now that they will be in a few years. Climate changes are reaching a point where an increasing number of people are experiencing the costs directly.
This is hard. Like, really hard. It definitely needs to be done, but it takes tens, hundreds really, of millions of dollars and a vast network of candidates who can run for office and win (US-specific outlook).
Whereas driving coal and natural gas out of the generation mix is "as easy" as getting PPAs signed with electrical consumers and getting solar and wind installed as fast as possible. You don't need to convince people in this case, as the actors (large corporations and utilities) are economically rational (cheap renewables->huge cost savings->yes please kthx).
Great theory, but have you tried to get a climate change law through Congress lately?
People vote for people who reflect their views, or at least freely, for whoever they want, so ultimately responsibility rests with the voters for the quality of government.
Based on the current political climate, this kind of action also seems to be a ways off. While a clean revolution in laws like that of the 1970s would do much to bring about change, it will be a while before things are bad enough for enough people to care and push for these laws. In a capitalist society, I think money talks more and it talks faster. I think op is right that innovative solutions that are cheap will do more to bring about change.
The war is unwinnable. Global warming can only be reversed if we stop all Co2 and methane emissions, and then start net carbon capture to reduce current co2 levels.
Its just not going to happen. No one ever says that out loud. There is noise about reducing carbon emissions - in reality this is a lot of argument about reducing carbon emissions in wealthy countries. We can't even do that. Meanwhile even my greeny-lefty friends enjoy their central heating, imported food, masses of electronics and vacations in foreign countries. There is little hope in getting the world's peoples to reduce their quality of life. Generally everyone is happy to just blame Americans/China/Big Business/Coal/etc and keep on living as they please.
Realistically not much is going to change. It might be possible to slow down the warming a little. But its going to get much more uncomfortable, its probably worth moving to somewhere cooler.
> Global warming can only be reversed if we stop all Co2 and methane emissions, and then start net carbon capture to reduce current co2 levels.
We do not want to reverse climate change, we want to slow it as much as possible. And there is never a point at which you can meaningfully give up, 5C is better than 6C, 3C is better than 4C. What you’ve posted is just another rationalization for inaction.
There is no way to avoid all effects of climate change, but there is a significant difference between a two degree increase in global temperature and a six degree increase, which will be truly catastrophic. Thus everything that is done to reduce emission will make the effects less severe.
That is indeed what it seems like. We need a 10x improvement in this space. That can only happen with carbon capture and ability to regulate CO2 in the atmosphere. Not "planting trees", for God's sake.
The whole conversation around emissions and the massive politicization of this is disappointing. Emissions reduction doesn't seem to do much. We need a Manhattan project to produce carbon and weather manipulation technology.
we have the technology already: the cyanobacteria which produced the oxygen that ultimately became the earth's atmosphere. they're even better than trees because they're easier to multiplex and they don't catch on fire.
all you need is clean-ish seawater. i even drew up a few designs myself a few months ago.
what we lack is the will to put the plans we know will work into action.
Are there extensively measured curves of carbon uptake rate as a function of light intensity? For each curve draw the steepest line through the origin, touching the curve, the corresponding intensity is the ideal intensity, and the cyanbacteria type with the best carbon uptake rate per intensity should be selected.
Then a single solar panel roof could power multiple "floors" of these cyanobacteria?
i speculate that the black sea is not suitable because it's a bit too far north for optimal sunlight intensity and hours. in principle your idea is good, but it still suffers from the collective action problem.
The war is perfectly winnable, but not within the context of a democracy. Here you would need the equivalent of a state of emergency, lasting for perhaps a century, to force the necessary changes upon an unwilling public, who are quite happy to sort trash into three piles, stop using straws, or engage in other such cargo-cult behaviours, but not to give up their iPhones, 2nd cars or annual vacations.
Ironically, a country such as China is much better equipped than the US or Europe to handle this kind of emergency. Once the leading figures become convinced of what needs to be done, they can implement the necessary measures in full and overnight, and ensure the necessary public support via the state-controlled educational system and media.
In the West, we are reduced to endless haggling, as lobbies strive to convert the emergency into additional demand for new "green" product lines or for bogus geoengineering solutions, and political representatives end up implementing toothless half-measures that achieve nothing.
I can't agree and I think the problems you're describing concern mostly the US.
European emmisions are not only lower than the ones generated in the US despite the larger population of the former but also until last year have been consistently falling since at least 1990 contrary to what was happening in the latter.
My take is that there has to be less involvement of private entities in shaping regulations in the US. Once that's out it will be possible to e.g. make people drive smaller, more fuel efficient cars by raising taxes on fuel.
Currently driving a Ford F150 is as cheap in the US as driving a compact hybrid in most European countries- this is ridiculous and needs to stop.
A large majority of Americans support adding a revenue-neutral carbon tax, which demonstrates a willingness to reduce consumption as long as it is part of a concerted action and not just an insignificant choice by a single person that will make no noticeable difference to climate change. We need "leaders" to catch up with the general public's views on this matter, not the other way around.
> A large majority of Americans support adding a revenue-neutral carbon tax
Citation please? And how much of that is "stated preference" vs "revealed preference"? I might say a lot of idealistic things if those are never going to pan out.
Luckily, USA allows this type of experimentation by allowing carbon tax to be introduced at state-level. So if a state (eg. New York or California) can demonstrate that revenue neutral carbon tax is palatable to the populace while reducing carbon emissions, that would be a realistic political path to introduce it to wider population.
The money has to come from somewhere. If I have to pay a tax on carbon, I have to spend less money on something else. Regardless of whether or not I can afford a carbon tax, it still has to result in lower consumption.
I think it's worth fighting hard still, because while we've definitely f&%$ed over the next few generations there is a strong possibility that we could keep the world habitable at least, but if we give up now then there is the distinct possibility we could hit 4C increase and dwindle the human population down to extremely dangerous levels (or even cause or own extinction).
Why would you expect the common person to change their habits when government abs industry aren't changing theirs? It won't make a difference what I do personally. I could fly on a jet nonstop for the rest of my life and it will make little difference. Government could pass a law to reduce carbon output tomorrow and it would make a difference. Why should us regular people be uncomfortable when we're fucked anyway because of idiot climate change deniers in power, especially in the US? If we're all going to be fucked anyway, I'm going to enjoy my AC and vacations while it lasts. Maybe leaders should start fucking leading first and people should stop pretending like individuals can even make a worthwhile dent in carbon output without government and industry changing their ways.
Well, it certainly would signal something the day these government leaders stop flying private jet planes to climate conferences or even start having video conferences.
That should help. History has a number of examples of how far people will go if their leaders go first.
But as long as leaders say one thing and do something completely different? I say no wonder uneducated people don't buy it.
Note: this is not to be taken as defense for the current behaviour but as a suggestion for how to improve the situation.
The leaders aren't even going to these conferences. They deny climate change is even happening. With leadership like that, I certainly won't be making any sacrifices.
On the other hand, defeatist attitude is not going to help anyone. Reversing the climate change may be the moonshot, but unless we have an objective we cannot convince anyone outside the "greeny-lefty" minority. At a minimum, we should be good examples to our children who are in greater danger of suffering from this than we currently are. I, for one, am teaching my child respect for nature and its resources. If we all did this, world would be a better place nonetheless.
honest but silly question: since the only way to deal with the problem is to also implement carbon capture to deal with the existing excess, would the same carbon capture mechanism be also able to cope with the rest of the world continuing to emit carbon at present rates?
Yeah I've thought about this - the best carbon capture system would take CO2 and turn it into pure carbon - or something like coal. So it does seem simpler not to burn coal in the first place. Alternatively if we can grow forests then bury them that could work too.
I don't think we can ever have such an efficient carbon capture system in the forseeable future, but we should really be researching this much more than we are.
Possibly, but more likely it would be more cost effective to actually subsidize the energy of the rest of the world so that they don’t emit carbon in the first place.
I think we need a few things to win the war:
1) A few more technological solutions to make the switch to carbon free energy painless (think grid scale batteries, hopefully fusion power someday). In reality people won't want to give up some of the great benefits of a carbon-intensive lifestyle such as travel and convenience.
2) A political movement to make the case that the switch will be not-so-bad.
3) A social movement to focus on what people actually need in life (health, friends, family), not material wealth. And to consider their place in the world on century time scales.
Would it help make this more concrete for people if we were to install markers along the coastlines of various cities that say “The ocean will be touching this sign on $date”
"You will be dealing with refugees from underwater areas of $nearby_area on $date."
This is the under-appreciated risk of climate change: all those people who get displaced are going to want somewhere to move to, and they're not going to want to pay for it (they will argue it's not their fault the ocean took their land).
Meanwhile, all the people who already live in desirable places are not going to want to subsidize vast floods of strangers moving into their neighborhoods.
Climate change is one of those crux problems that necessitate the formation of a new political ideologies. Liberalism is inept to deal with it. Individual action is not enough. The current politicians will not do anything. But liberalism is not going to last forever nor is the current political climate, eternal.
Not in the US. The majority of the country isn't to the point of believing that climate change poses a serious threat, and among non-Democrats attitudes towards climate change are actually regressing: https://news.gallup.com/poll/231530/global-warming-concern-s...
Those who haven't experienced it directly might underestimate how effective the right has been at tying anti-environment beliefs to political identity, even among people who are highly educated in the sciences and should know better.
Weather or not the majority believes in climate change is irrelevant. The simple fact is: while the US reduced its total carbon footprint by ~0,4% in 2017, it increased in the EU and China. No reason to point fingers at the US.
The EU is reducing its carbon footprint if you zoom out from that one year[0]. China also has half of the carbon footprint per person[0]. The US appears the have the highest carbon footprint per capita of the major nations, beaten only by small countries[1].
Except that EU has been doing it's job since the 90s and China has been doing it as well in recent years. They both slipped the last 12 months and a lot of it, at least in Europe is combination of side-effects of the post-Fukushima nuclear scare and increase in greeny renewables (like solar and wind) that actually cause more methane and coal to burn because they cannot work as reliable base supply.
From the activism I follow in my country in last decade, I learned that politicians are apathetic, and a good activism is needed to make them move. That's how lazy governments work.
So I think until we fix governments performance we need to engage in efficient activism. What is efficient activism? This question interests me.
Workplace organizing. It's a lot easier to get people to fight for something when they know they'll benefit from it directly (via higher wages, better working conditions, etc). A unified working class is the most effective tool we have for fighting countering the power of bug business, who would rather let the world burn than stop building pipelines.
Most people don't like what's happening to the world -- they just feel powerless to stop it. So let's change that.
The politicians largely reflect the people they govern. I don't think we can expect much better from them as compared to the general population...not to mention of course the vested interests and lobbying capability of corporations. And again corporations have shareholders, employees, etc...
I think it is naive to expect someone to be better simply because they hold public office. Politicians are as fallible as anybody else...but I don't think that's a big problem in the long run. In the long run they will reflect the choices of large swathes of people. I think politics/policies are lagging indicators. For examples I give rulings on slavery, voting for women, voting for people of colour, legalisation of same-sex marriage, (bans on smoking in certain places), etc
IDK, in my universe (at least for this topic) politicians reflecting the people they govern means that any nontrivial short-term sacrifice to even start fighting a war against climate change is an impossibility, the voters will throw them down the moment they'd propose devoting a meaningful amount of resources (with the associated cuts to other areas needing funding) or forcing major lifestyle changes on everyone, not just those who volunteer to live in a more eco-friendly manner.
In this regard it's absolutely true - the vast majority of people clearly are not willing to undertake meaningful lifestyle sacrifices to fight against climate change.
"War against" ("War on") seems to mean it is a never-ending boondoggle that, at best, wastes a bunch of resources. Is there any example of these "wars" being a success? The three that come to mind are:
War on drugs: fail
War on cancer: fail
War on poverty: fail
Why is the economist trying to link climate change to this?
I can't help but think that picking apart a magazine's headline is a huge distraction from an important issue, but I also can't help myself in pointing out how off the mark you with such a superficial observation.
As far as global poverty is concerned, between 1990-2013 more than a billion people were lifted out of poverty according to the World Bank. I'm sure you can point to local and anecdotal evidence that does not correlate, but to say efforts to reduce poverty have failed are just flat wrong.
Cancer is an intractably complex disease, but to dismiss all efforts and advancements is also off the mark. Life expectancy for many types of cancers has improved significantly. Oncolytic viruses have been shown to treat some very advanced forms of cancer with profound results.
I wish I could be more optimistic about the war on drugs, so I'll concede that one to you.
If you think the branding of the effort is that terrible and counter productive, I'd love to hear your ideas on how we should brand the effort.
>"As far as global poverty is concerned, between 1990-2013 more than a billion people were lifted out of poverty according to the World Bank. I'm sure you can point to local and anecdotal evidence that does not correlate, but to say efforts to reduce poverty have failed are just flat wrong."
Those "war on" phrases refer to specific projects in the US. For that one I wasn't too familiar but quickly looked it up and didn't see anyone claiming success:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty
Think about it. The "War on Poverty" was Lyndon Johnson's campaign to expand Roosevelt's New Deal. Does that sound like something that would prosper under the Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton (consider the congress), and Bush Jr administrations? Unlike the "War on Drugs", which was actually a never-ending boondoggle that received ample bi-partisan and financial support, Johnson's programs were in the political cross-hairs since day one.
In other words, these two programs were failures for very different reasons. The comparison of the "War on Drugs" to the "War on Poverty" is incredibly superficial insofar as the only real thing they have in common are their names.
>"the only real thing they have in common are their names."
They are names for efforts by the US government to achieve some goal that it never achieves. I don't see what difference the detailed reasons for failure are, I am sure there are many.
So what you're telling me is the reason for failure really isn't important. The fact that one program was championed for 40-50 years while the other one defunded and dismanteled is of no consequence.
The real takeaway here is they were doomed to failure because the US government chose similar bad names.
> A billion people consuming more is surely bad for climate change though, no?
Let me ask you a question: How do you incorporate the concept of efficiency when you talk about wealth? Is wealth and not being impoverished defined by how much you can consume?
I'd argue that the history of technology shows us that we tend to value things that provide more value using fewer resources over a the long term. Most wealth is derived from extracting more value from the same resources and not simple resource consumption.
Let's take light for example. There was an article written by Tim Harford discussed the economic history of producing light and how price per lumen has dropped by a factor of 500,000. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38650976
Obviously, not all consumables can enjoy those tremendous gains in efficiencies, but there are technologies today whose price/performance is improving at a rate far faster than inflation. That's what we should invest in and accelerate.
In my lifetime, I've watched the cell phone and laptop replace the need to buy dozens of other things, not just in the home, but in the office too. Cheap/viable/comfortable augmented reality will only push this trend further.
A billion people consuming more natural resources, non-renewable resources and carbon emitting resources at the levels we consume them would be bad for our environment.
A billion people having access to cheap/free sources of energy, a quality education, an inexpensive digital infrastructure and devices, and knowing how to use their land efficiently is magnitudes better than a billion people simply living in poverty. Poverty isn't cheap, nor is it good for the environment, especially if it leads to wars destroying wealth and raping natural resources.
My hope is the markets in developing countries will be a huge opportunity for producers of efficient technology, providing those technologies a space where they can incubate until their quality begins to match their less-than-efficient competition. In some circumstances, this is true today.
The war on cancer is a total fail in my book. They surrendered when they started calling it "many diseases", meaning there will never be a "cure for cancer" by definition.
Huh? You consider it a fail because we learned that there are many different kinds of Cancers? Yes a "one magic pill" option will probably never exist, but we can chip away at all forms of Cancer until they all have a cure.
But realistically, this is not a war I think we can win in my lifetime. It's much bigger than people may have originally thought.
Its just an excuse, you are talking about a field with 10% replication rate, and when they tried to start doing more replications it was too expensive to even figure out what generated the data so they had to drop 25% of the studies before even beginning. One guy even calling the literature "augean stables":
Every disease can be arbitrarily split or combined into multiple categories. It doesnt mean anything. Here is a cure for cancer:
1) Detect aneuploid cells that fail to show the initial steps of the response to extracellular apoptosis signals, and have been dividing more often than usual for that tissue/environment (eg you have to take into account wound healing, etc).
2) Kill those cells.
This is technological problem, not a "cancer is many diseases" problem. Every problem can manifest in many ways and have multiple solutions.
I know a lot of smart people who've devoted their lives to solving this problem. It's very easy for you to dismiss it as easy or say that researchers are incompetent when you haven't spent years working on cancer research in a wet lab.
I have worked in a "wet lab" for years, but not cancer research. The first 3 were largely (of course there is always learning going on) a waste because I didn't understand what statistical significance really meant. I can't really blame myself since neither did anyone else in my committee, department, or seemingly the entire area of research. But anyway this meant the whole project was misdesigned from the start (the design was standard).
The next two were spent attempting to save the project by working 18 hour days almost constantly. In the end, despite what they claimed about doing it the usual way because "its so complicated, no one can come up with mathematical/computational models or actual predictions to test, no one can describe this or that in so much detail, etc", the actual truth was that it wasnt "too hard". It was that no one really cared about that. Instead they just wanted to know whether there were statistically significant differences anyway...
From what I've read of the cancer literature it looks exactly the same, probably worse. And guess what, there's been no real progress made for decades on the topic I was studying either.
I see now that they had to scale down again to only 36% of the original results:
>"A large effort to reproduce high-impact cancer research has scaled down the number of studies it plans to replicate from 50 to 18, Science reported yesterday (July 31).
[...]
Hurdles to replicating experiments included a lack of detailed protocols and easily obtainable reagents. “Communication and sharing are low-hanging fruit that we can work on to improve,” Elizabeth Iorns, the president of Science Exchange, tells Science."
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/effort-to-reprodu...
Yup, the entire system is set up for an environment of no replication. How do you expect to cure cancer without making reproducibility a priority? I'd expect people who don't do that will end up thinking everything is "so complicated" due to all the conflicting results they generate, eg "one disease" becomes "many diseases".
Well, I don't think they just started calling it that for no reason. The fact that they they now know more means they are marking progress, even if it makes it harder to declare victory.
The way I read it is that they were so far from a cure that they didn't even know what they were trying to achieve.
I am a little out of the loop and so I have a few questions:
1. At what point in time can we arrest ocean temperature rise purely by reducing emissions?
2. Even if we stopped further rise in temperature, is the current temperature (land and ocean) sustainable, or is a chain reaction already underway that will increasingly lead to more and more turbulent weather?
3. Are there viable ways to extract greenhouses gasses from the atmosphere? Will extraction necessarily lead to lowering of temperature?
4. Are there risk factors in extracting greenhouse gasses? Could we trigger excessive cooling?
5. Alternatively, is the Futurama approach of dropping a massive icecube in the ocean a viable approach?
2. Well the current temperature is somewhat sustainable because we haven't yet destroyed the Earth.. but that's not really what it's about. The condition of the Earth is not the present temperature, but the present condition of the atmosphere which is becoming increasingly filled with these gases; higher temperatures are merely the consequence. The higher temperatures themselves don't contribute much to a snowballing effect, except in the case of wildfires. If tomorrow, we magically stopped emitting a net positive amount of greenhouse gases, the Earth would stabilize and return to a previous cooler state because of carbon absorption from forests and so on, but this is impossible because it would require a commitment from 7 billion people.
3. The are plenty of ways to extract gases directly but many are fairly costly and only a few hold promise of being economically profitable. Extraction of the CO2 (and other gases like methane) would certainly lower temperatures, as they trap the heat in the atmosphere that would otherwise radiate back into space. The most clear empirical evidence we have of this on a planetary scale is Venus, which has a truly hellish climate because of it's C02 atmosphere.
5. This can't be a serious question. But, actually, there is the idea of iron fertilization of the ocean where dumping granulated iron into presently lifeless tracts of would cause massive blooms in ocean life and would have a substantial carbon capturing effect. It's likely to be a very cheap solution, relative to the outsize effect it would have.
6. Biggest benefit to warming is an increase in arable land as the climate is warmer towards the poles, which should more than make up for some losses to desertification. The other benefit is increased crop yields due to more CO2 in the air. Not much of a consolation tbh.
There was actually a very clever paper on nano materials which, instead of emitting IR on the blackbody spectrum, emit it in a band the atmosphere is transparent to. Reversing the greenhouse at ground level.
Frank Landis did a ton of research to try to find the best comparable models of what's happening, what's about to happen, and the book is still extremely easy to read (well analogized) despite trying to get to hard science answers for most of it.
2. No, not anymore, in the current situation emission reduction is about reducing the future consequences, not about preventing them. The current accumulated greenhouse gases are sufficient to continue warming for some time even if we didn't emit anything starting today, and also there are two positive feedback loops started already - methane emissions from melting permafrost and increased Arctic sunlight absorption because there's more dark water and less reflective ice.
3. Maybe - it likely could help, but it'd need a lot of investment and we're not ready to even start
4. Yes, probably.
5. Only if we had a magical source of massive icecubes, but we don't.
6. Depends on your viewpoint - if humans get eliminated, then after a few million years there might be more biodiversity, that may count as a benefit to some.
We will invent things, the question is the market conditions which will allow inventions to arise and then quickly gain market share. Even with the amazing progress in solar, wind and electric batteries, it’s still not enough. We need some meaningful pricing of carbon to allow the market to solve the problem.
Legitimate question: will there be a point where we speak about this war in the past tense, as in `The world lost the war against climate change'? How do we determine that turning point?
I wonder if future generations will think people were even serious about solving the problem. In this respect the war was lost long ago.
The vast majority of people who believe climate change will have large negative consequences make no major changes to their lifestyles. As someone who rides bike for transportation largely to save money and stay in shape (I think climate change is a lost cause), the environmental crowd seems to think I am doing something saint-like. But it really isn't anywhere near as difficult as they believe. They rarely adopt cycling to work, and at least part of the reason why seems to me that their environmentalism is not entirely sincere. This is speculation, but I think most people stop at signalling that climate change is bad. They rarely take effective action.
A large part of it is that it is a collective action problem. If you want to talk about "effective action"? You're talking about shutting down coal plants, not going after the man or woman on the street. A person needing a car to get to work is, both in real and proportional terms, causing overwhelmingly less damage to the environment than industrial-scale polluters. If everybody who could switch to a bike instead of a car (which is fewer people, at least in America, than you might realize), you would see a blip on the graph.
Calling into question the sincerity of people concerned about climate change but also concerned about actually getting to work on time and not stinking and getting fired because their bosses don't care is just some nasty, uncharitable stuff. And it's also counterproductive. It's the "but Al Gore flies in jets!" thing all over again, discrediting what state actors need to be doing because of the actions of private citizens. Don't do that. It's bad for you and bad for us.
Not all of that is personal transportation, but a lot of it is. This is not a blip on the graph.
I also agree that large polluters need to change, and that we need state action. I was just pointing out that people who seem to believe climate change is a problem rarely make major lifestyle changes consistent with their stated beliefs.
Saying this is primarily a collective action problem is passing the buck. It's a convenient excuse for doing nothing. Collective action is much harder than personal action. Ultimately, we need both collective and personal action.
> Calling into question the sincerity of people concerned about climate change but also concerned about actually getting to work on time and not stinking and getting fired because their bosses don't care is just some nasty, uncharitable stuff.
You seem to believe that cycling to work is much more challenging than it actually is. You may be surprised, but no cyclist I know has the problems you've mentioned. Those problems can happen, but they are not that common in my experience.
Yes, the US is a car dependent society, but you can choose where to live and choose your job. Like most people choose where to live based on their driving commute, I choose where to live based on my cycling commute. It is not a long commute, and I arrive on time and usually am not sweaty.
Also, cycling was just an example. It doesn't need to be cycling. Work at home, switch from your gas guzzler, etc.
Cars are bad but they're a pretty small problem compared to airplanes. A single trip across the Atlantic and back is about equivalent to commuting in a SUV for a year. Per passenger-mile cars and planes use about the same amount of carbon but people tend to take far longer plane trips.
But it seems to me that the marginal cost in terms of CO2 emissions is not exactly clear for flying. Whether I fly or not, the planes will fly. My addition to a single plane in terms of the weight is not that significant. It becomes a more murky economic argument. I agree people should not fly, but this is more of a collective action type approach in my view. It takes roughly a plane load of people to make a difference.
In contrast, a driver has much more direct control over the CO2 emissions. The marginal addition of CO2 is much clearer.
If people stop or reduce flying one by one there's clearly some point at which a stepwise reduction in service occurs. Your are unlikely to be the person who triggers this but the reduction will also be proportionately larger than your contribution too. So you should think of yourself as reducing carbon emissions by the person-mile amount in expectation even if it will never actually be that amount.
Or to frame it another way, when you fly you're playing Russian roulette with adding an amount of CO2 to the atmosphere dwarfing anything else you might be causing.
Commuting using a 50+MPG vehicle is an option for the vast majority of humanity and would make a huge difference. So, it's not like the average person has zero options. People drive ~3.22 trillion miles in the US using 142.85 billion gallons = ~22MPG so a 50% reduction is completely viable.
Further the first 50% reduction is the lowest hanging fruit. We don't need to get to 100% to make a huge difference over time.
Good points. I think even if we could muster collective action it would be required on a global scale. Related to this is that in many cases large emitters of green-house gases are largely divorced from the consequences. Ultimately most people around the world will feel some impact but it's not really a problem in the here and now. For example animal husbandry (cattle and possibly sheep) is apparently responsible for emissions of methane which is in theory has a disproportionately larger impact on raising global temperatures...but we'll have a hard time convincing people to stop eating those meats. Especially in parts of the world that are becoming more affluent, have large growing populations and are rather keen on enjoying their share of steak or leg of lamb
Outside USA many people goes to work in public bus, train and subway. In some places they are nice, in some place they are nasty, but they consume much less fuel that a car for each person
Shutting down coal power would achieve all climate goals for several decades and we can in fact just kind of do that in most places. Government subsidies are what's keeping coal power plants online in many locations. The problem is that this would impose costs on business owners, or force banks and/or governments to pay out large sums to those business owners (not that large though: tens to hundreds of millions per plant). In other words : governments worldwide would have to scale back what they're doing for a short while to instantly destroy their climate goals.
In other words: government, elected CHOICES are what's keeping the biggest co2 producers online. Governments absolute unwillingness, in Australia's case, to pay out relatively small sums they agreed to pay decades ago, and of course not getting a budget increase out of it.
Laws that are proposed, almost without fail, go after individual, totally insignificant co2 producers, and impose large costs on individuals for marginal, or even net negative gain (e.g. well known example: for the longest time, and maybe even now, solar panels were net-negative, and certainly, in the short term that's still true. Certainly in the short term switching to solar power increases CO2 emissions, it doesn't reduce them. It may become a net positive after 10 years of constantly using the panels, under idealized conditions).
Suggested changes to individual lives, like forgoing cars entirely, impose yet larger costs but thankfully for now governments are mostly unwilling to do this.
At what point do we get to conclude that the intent of climate action parties is simply to exert power over individuals, to capture government, regardless of all costs to the climate ? That these parties not only don't care about climate change, but are actually willing to sacrifice the climate, just to gain power ?
Besides: I think it's extremely telling that nobody is willing to consider geoengineering (artificially lowering out planet's albedo). We know methods to do that, and of course all governments promptly decided that was off-limits (with, get this, "what if we're wrong" arguments. Look: either climate prediction works, or it doesn't. Denying geoengineering solutions is little better than outright denying climate change entirely).
It is more telling that nuclear is on the decline. The right doesn’t take the problem seriously, and the left doesn’t take the solution seriously. So of course there is no progress.
That's one of the engineering solutions that people seem to be terminally opposed to. We have global warming ... and we have engineering solutions, indeed nuclear could do a lot as well, especially in countries like China.
Let's NOT USE THOSE ! They're scary ! Science is wrong and evil ! Green glowy children !
And of course, somehow you can criticize science like nuclear and it's safety record, but shout "science denial" at people opposing climate science. That's an entirely reasonable attitude of course.
But it's very clear: getting and grabbing power, that's what it's about. Not fixing a problem.
I drive about 50x less than most people, but this is entirely 100% a collective action problem. There are many problems government can't solve, but this is a problem only government can solve.
IMO phasing out automobiles as the primary form of transit is a herculean battle the environmental groups probably don't feel like they have a prayer of winning. I bike & bus to work, but speaking on a grand scale cars prey on our weakness for comfort & convenience, and the cities we live in are designed to accommodate cars, not bicycles.
I do get frustrated with some enviro groups though, currently the ones who want to replace nuclear plants with natural gas plants.
> cars prey on our weakness for comfort & convenience, and the cities we live in are designed to accommodate cars, not bicycles.
I agree.
Cars break a feedback loop between how far you travel and how tired you are. Bikes merely modify this feedback loop. As long as the feedback loop exists, energy use is constrained regardless of price. But this is also what makes cars so addictive.
Car dependency seems to have peaked in the US, so I am hoping to see a reduction in the future. Removing parking requirements would be a good start.
Yeah, I'm hopeful that we will reverse the dependency, but I think it needs to be more organic/grassroots than the Sierra Club can drive. We need to come to a collective understanding that we want more alternative forms of travel, for safety or economy or health or just to escape traffic jams.
The uncomfortable reality is that 7 billion people can’t all live like Americans (or Europeans). Extracting the resources necessary for everyone to live like Americans would be very bad for the environment. The effective action is to greatly reduce the number of births worldwide. It seems to me all other options are not effective.
They very likely can, but it would require a massive program of nuclear power plant building. This is unacceptable to environmentalists, who prefer to pretend that people will voluntarily reduce their quality of life.
It’s not just energy production and consumption that is the problem. Resource extraction, pollution, toxification of the environment are all contributing to the creation of a planet that sucks to live in.
Cheap energy goes a long way toward solving those problems. Many "rare" materials are only rare because they're energy intensive to extract, or they might not be needed at all (e.g. rare earth metals in motors and batteries) if we can afford to sacrifice energy efficiency in products. If we can irrigate all the deserts with desalinated sea water then there's less need for intensive agriculture. Pollution control technologies need energy to run and build, so cheaper energy means there's less opposition to using them.
The classic hyperboloid cooling tower works by evaporation, and the latent heat of vaporization of water is high, so a few degrees difference in the temperature of the make-up water isn't going to matter. It only matters with the more environmentally harmful once-through cooling, where the waste heat is dumped directly into the sea.
We have a route to that direction, and have made a lot of progress. It involves ending global poverty, providing economic opportunities for women, and ensuring contraception is available.
If you have high child mortality, limited access to contraception, and few employment opportunities for women, they have a lot of children. You change that, and they choose to have fewer. It happened in Europe. It happened in North America. It happened in South America. It happened in Asia (with some draconian policies to help it along). It's starting to happen in Africa: [0] (Check the map tab to see country-by-country over time).
We can do this without draconian policies. All we have to do is work to end global poverty. People think is hopeless, but twenty-five years ago, those same people would have said there's no way we'd cut it in half by now, and we did[1].
(Obligatory plug for the Against Malaria Foundation[2], which is my charity of choice for fighting global poverty, and at the same time, climate change.)
Yeah, it’s not a practical solution in terms of implementation. However, if implemented it would work and not require Star Trek levels of innovation. There are simply too many people in the world.
Okay...but how would that work? Where are all these people? China had a one-child policy which they've recently reversed because the ratio of old people/young people has basically reversed. On the plus side it seems that with education and generally societal improvements people tend to have less children anyway. Having said that in some developed countries they're struggling with declining birth rates. Partly because of lifestyle choices and partly due to high costs of raising children...
I mentioned that it's not practical. Forced sterilization - I'm not advocating this - would do the trick. Again, it's not practical to implement just now but I think it's clear that having fewer people would be ideal and would solve lots of problems.
I reckon the first step is to price negative
externalities into the things we buy for once. The first reason people and businesses consume so much is because they can afford it.
You don't believe that having fewer people in the world would lead to less pollution and less harm to the environment due to human activities? Or you don't believe someone is suggesting that there needs to be fewer people?
It seems clear to me that if there were only 5 million people in the world then human caused climate change wouldn't be an issue. Isn't that obvious? I'm not advocating that we get to that level. I'm just pointing out that there exists a number for the population such that human caused climate change would no longer be an issue. I don't think it's disputable that this is so.
I'm not advocating mass killings or anything like that. Just pointing out an obvious thing. If where were way less people then pollution, etc. would not be an issue.
Given how most polution comes from places where people generally have very little children, I doubt that reducing births in the third world would be an effective measure.
We need to solve for different variables: energy source (we need more nuclear), transportation (we need people to utilize public transportation and drive less cars), and we'd need to work on carbon capture (which is a technological problem).
Solving all these requires policy shift and government enforcement.
> ...seems to me that their environmentalism is not entirely sincere.
That's my problem with the entire political side of climate and environmentalism. The simple fact that Al Gore flies in a Learjet while simultaneously claiming the "Earth has a fever." Makes it impossible for me to take that movement seriously. Even if he buys "carbon credits" -- that carbon he's generating is still being generated. You can't dump mercury in a river and then pay a bunch of money and pretend mercury wasn't dumped in a river.
The Paris Climate talks -- Anyone have a look at the tarmac at Le Bourget? Delegations of essentially anonymous officials arriving via private jets and being shuttled around by private cars while suggesting that I should make my house hotter by turning up the air conditioner temperature or I should pay more to take my kids to school each morning. And they're flying private? They're actually having an in-person meeting at all? If the threat were so dire, then why not video conference? Or at the very least fly commercial and take public transit.
Even Bill and Hilary have flown commercial -- so arguments about the feasibility of that aren't very valid. Certainly random environmental officials where nobody even knows their names, let alone faces aren't subject to any special security requirements that would necessitate private jets. They do it because they see themselves as more important than those that they would regulate. It's Animal Farm where some animals are more equal than others.
To be clear, I'm not debating any particular scientific position -- I'm just suggesting that many people (like me) have a hard time reconciling how "dire" our situation is when the supposed "experts" aren't making any changes to their own lifestyle unless it's politically expedient. Personally, I try to live a low-impact lifestyle when possible. I don't waste water, I use programmable thermostats, I reuse when possible and I don't drive if it's easy to take public transit or company shuttles. However, my adherence to a reasonably green lifestyle is offset 1000 fold when some factory in China dumps benzene in the water or some Delhi trucker fills the air with dense smoke while idling in traffic for hours.
It might seem to an skeptical observer that the anti-carbon political movement might be more about controlling/profiting from/reallocating the means of production more than helping the actual environment. The implication that people on the far left care more about the environment seems to be good marketing -- people on the far left seem to care more about far left economics than the environment -- the environment is just good populist toast upon which to serve a marmalade of collectivist economic policy.
It seems that most normal people, right and left, care about the environment. For me though (on the libertarian side of the aisle,) when I hear stuff like this, from former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:
"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.
When I hear stuff like that, then that discredits a lot of the climate alarmism in my mind -- despite the fact that I actually do care deeply about the environment.
Even if he buys "carbon credits" -- that carbon he's generating is still being generated.
The point of carbon credits is offsetting. For example, suppose I plant a bunch of trees to earn carbon credits. I then sell Al Gore my carbon credits. Thus, Al Gore is able to fly about in his jet, I am able to make money planting trees, and in the end no net carbon has been added to the atmosphere.
However, we already lost it - in a very real sense - because we failed to convince enough humans that it's important, that they ought to demand tougher legislation, policies, treaties, mandates, cleaner air, better waste management, more energy efficiency, instant order of nuclear and renewable plants to phase out CO2 producing energy sources as soon as possible, etc.
We should be building 20km long hydro T-s, electrifying more and more railways, capturing as much emission as we can (chemical plants, big freighter ships, etc.)
Instead we are building walls on borders, blabbering about secession, killing/jailing/maiming/kidnapping/torturing each other in an organized fashion all around the planet.
We're simply late to efficiently manage a lot of things.
But humanity is very likely to survive, so in that sense as long as someone can ask that question we don't have to use past tense.
It's all about changing the goalposts. We have probably lost the war against 1.5 deg C climate change, as even if we were to freeze emissions now, I believe we would hit that (need fact check on that). We are currently losing the war against 2 deg C climate change. The next war is against 3 or 4 deg C climate change. All of these milestones have severe consequences more significant than the last, so all are worth fighting.
ELI5: if the temperature of a wet thermometer(which would normally be colder due to evaporation) in a given place goes over around 31C this area becomes uninhabitable for almost all mammals.
Burning all the known fossil fuels would be enough to make it so for some places on earth, but the big unknown is what about the other sources of GHG's like thawing permafrost or clathrates lying under the sea?
We have almost certainly already lost. The challenge now is to adapt to the change. Paris was not about bringing global temp change to 0C, just limiting it to 2C.
Fortunately planet Earth won't be bothered by us too much. The cycles of ice ages we are in will "correct" most anything we do. The loss of biodiversity will probably be our only legacy.
War is in the past. The war on drugs. The war on whatever. We are not waging war. War doesn't work. War is what has exacerbated the problem. We needn't dwell on the past but maybe learn from it.
I agree that wording is important. Talking about climate changes is important. We need an effort, perhaps greater than the war effort in world war 2 to make the changes necessary because whether we do nothing or make needed changes for the better, change is coming. There is no turning point. The Great Turning is a shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.
Hard to say. I don't think there will be a well-defined turning point. The thing is, the climate changes on long scales, and humans only pay attention to the immediate details, like children analyzing the stock market. The climate will get _gradually_ worse, and people will be forced to migrate north where the environment is more livable. This is obviously what is happening now, and isn't fully sustainable. A little patch of green (Europe) can't feed the world, in slightly over-the-top terms.
However, I will say this. If anyone has ever been in a large storm, or a drought, you'll be shockingly aware at how quickly a small announcement about "sold-out water" or "store stock issues" turns into absolute, utter, pure, _pandemonium_. Once _that_ happens often enough, I think people will begin to admit that we lost _something_, for sure.
To answer your question though, it's generally believed that it will be a gradually-growing sense of despair and dread, and a growing struggle. Migration into the northern hemisphere as it slowly becomes the last livable place on Earth. Ever played musical chairs in the later stages of the game? Yeah.
Honestly, it's remarkably similar to the mechanics behind the French Revolution, but instead of just rich vs poor, it's some kind of crazy triadic chaos-war between rich, poor, and nature, all made more ironic that nukes have a triadic motif.
There was an article in the NYTimes stating that we have already lost the war, but since climate changes in a continuous and highly complex fashion, I personally doubt there'll be an agreed-upon point where things changed from not lost -> lost.
I haven't seen any projected warming scenario where it'd be 31C everywhere. There's a gradual change in habitability as the habitable zone becomes smaller and smaller.
Perhaps our descendants will be farming Antarctica.
Sure, but will humans just sit idle by and wait for extinction, or will they do whatever it is necessary to keep the ecosystem from boiling away? Of course it depends on how severe the problem is, but in general we have the means to affect climate. (Solar shade comes to mind and large scale GHG capture.)
You're right to a point. The hotter it gets on average, the faster the less fit die due to various heat related reasons. Once it hits 31c@100% relative humidity, land mammals die.
So it's on a rolling scale up to 31C. At or past, yeah its a binary cliff.
Even the worst case models predict that Earth will be habitable for humans for a long time. IIRC the worst that can happen in the next 100 years is that the sea will raise a few foots and flood some costal cities, change the sites where you can cultivate some food and cause hunger in some places, more floods and drought in many places, and kill many animals and plants. The worst case prediction is a huge huge huge disaster but it is still faraway from the point it is uninhabitable for us (and uninhabitable for roaches (and uninhabitable for bacteria)).
Agreed, describing essential struggles and challenges as wars, promotes the ruthless traumatic destructiveness which actual war necessitates. The idea of making war should be repulsive, sadly it is freely glorified and normalised - and made.
I dunno, painting oil execs as subversive national security threats and investing military-level economic resources into fighting a "war" on climate change just might work...
At best, you could frame it as "people willing to act sufficiently to meaningfully combat global warming" and "everyone else," but the former group is far smaller than "those who wish to act on it."
Put plainly: It will take far more dramatic action than most climate alarmists advocate to even have a measurable impact on (let alone solve) global warming. The opposing side isn't just "those who ignore it," it's most people who rationally evaluate policy claiming to be capable of a significant effect.
The article fees cheaply alarmist to me. Its incredibly difficult to make good predictions even 2-3 years into the future let alone whats going to happen globally decades from now. We have only started to see the effects of global warming but the really bad stuff has yet to happen - and when it does the reaction wont be linear as whats being projected here.
I think Americans have a special responsibility: Not only have they probably contributed more GHG than anyone else,[0] they have the power (and thus responsibility) to do the most about climate change, and they are the chief obstacle (see below). People are dying, and will die in greater numbers. Most people who will die didn't benefit from those GHG (the people in wealthy nations, such as the U.S., benefited), in countries where they can't afford to mitigate the problem. Is it ok to do that, to watch people die, and to be a bystander?
As much as people on HN don't like to politicize issues, sometimes the problem is political and to talk about other causes and solutions is misleading. There is one powerful political entity standing in the world's way, the U.S. Republican Party; the rest of the world is generally united. The solution isn't technical or scientific, but political: Organize against them and vote them out of office if you are American.
[0] I think China may produce more GHG now, but that's just recent history; I would guess that the U.S. is the all-time leader by a good margin.
So we need a quick plan B. The required goals from nations won’t be met and people won’t change lifestyle to do something about it. We need to also do something that ensures warming stops without any sacrifice made by people (other than taxe to fund the massive programs)
Maybe we could turn things around in 10 or 30 years but the damage done may either be irreversible or runaway.
So a short term solution that ensures no temperature increase for the next 30 years would be great. But what is it? Carbon capture? Artificial Whitening of oceans? Is there any solution that is even remotely viable?
We haven't done $%# to try and execute Plan A i.e. reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It's the cheapest and easiest plan by far, so why do you think we can afford to switch to some fanciful plan B?
Most alternative are either distractions by/for those who can't accept the harsh reality, Get-rich-quick schemes by some industrialists or science-fiction by/for those who prefer to dream of a nice future rather than doing something now.
"The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period." -- The People In Charge.
It’s the simplest plan, but I’ll argue we are seeing it’s pretty difficult as it requires changing the behavior of a lot of people, if even just a little abd/or changing policies of a lot of countries.
I’m not saying plan A should be somehow abandoned or slowed (so perhaps B is a bad name because it’s typically used when A is abandoned) But it should be complemented. We should also investigate the stupidly sci-fi get-rich-quick (or perhaps lose weight fast?) schemes. Technological solutions might at least buy some time for the slow change we are seeing in behavior and policy.
And yes, I realize there is a hazard that some of these schemes risk giving an impression that the problem is being solved, and plan A isn’t necessary. That can’t happen.
I also realize that anything other than simply limiting emissions is a complex and expensive plan, but even a complex and expensive plan is better than a simple and cheap plan that is politically impossible.
>a simple and cheap plan that is politically impossible.
If it's impossible to execute the cheap and simple plan because of political obstacles, we just have to change politics. It's also simple and cheap once you know that money has nothing to do in politics.
As far as I could see the hardest problems in technology are not actually technical, but organizational/political/management problems. Politics is just management at a different scale.
We shouldn't underestimate the complexity of societal problems. They may be harder to solve than the hardest technical challenges. I think dismissing these political issues with a "just change the politics, lol" is short-sighted at best.
Who are “we”? The US? I’m pretty optimistic about the US actually, at least for the next administration. I worry more about getting big cuts from China/India/Indonesia/Bangladesh/...
One focus should be on the root cause: The human population is the reason for our environmental problems, all-of-them. And the population growth rate is frightening [0]. It renders any other approach almost impossible to succeed. So even if it is an ethically difficult topic it should be addressed!
The conclusion of this line of thinking could be less human population means less environmental problems and more prospects of success for every other approach to stopping climate change. So why not try to think of ways to incentivise birth control?
Is it really to much to ask to stop producing more than 2 offsprings per family? This would bring population growth down. I'm sure otherwise human future is doomed.
To support this you could install tax reduction for no/one/two child/ren. As any solution has to be globally installed, maybe something similar to emission trading with birth rights. Shrinking countries may need more growth, developing countries might need financial help and so on.
I know this is drastic, but you know the saying... [1]
I'm not optimistic about this for game theoretic reasons. It would require a global scale all-cooperate scenario, since any single defector gets massive economic benefit from defecting and using cheaper energy to undercut everyone else.
The only hope we have is the development of post-carbon energy sources that are cheaper than fossil fuels. If we can't do that I do not see a plausible scenario where we don't burn every bit of profitably accessible carbon.
Was there a serious attempt to begin with? Yes, there are some efficiency gains and in some developed nations CO2 emissions seemed to stagnate, but much of that seems incidental (for instance partly caused by the Great Recession 10 years ago) and rarely part of a coordinated effort. Though I guess you can at least partly credit the rise of renewable energy like Solar to some government programs.
Wonder how much faster the effort would have been if we had an actual cap-and-trade system that encompasses the global economy instead of the lackluster attempts which aren't legally binding, only cover limited industries or have an oversupply of emission certificates to render the system useless (like the European one).
But it's pointless to ponder about that. It's not there's a lack of ideas regarding possible solutions, it's a just lack of foresight by humanity. We probably can't even blame previous generations, because we would have acted the same in their situation.
Solar prices are comparable to coal nowadays, and getting lower by the month. Besides, where is that investment in solar or wind stalled? I haven't seen any place like that. Instead, I only see people talking more and more about solar, even to the point that some want to get off-grid for economical reasons (I don't agree with their calculations).
I would really like to see some study about how long will solar power need to ramp-up until coal becomes uneconomical. I would also like to see some study about how much oil, gas and coal we can actually use, with what levels of energy returns.
Instead, here it is that sensationalist piece based on basically no data at all, claiming the end of the world... At the economist.com. Journalism used to be better.
I worry that all the sink holes appearing in Russia are massive methane deposits which are probably are not factored into estimates. It being this hot in Europe and specifically the UK for this long is insane.
It sucks that we're in such a bad place right now, but I'd probably bet money that there are going to be some big geoengineering startups in the next couple of years.
Improved education and quality of living tends to have an inverse proportion with birth rates.
With that in mind, maybe the way to win the "war" could be killing poverty: No more poor people, and the population is going to decrease. Looking at Japan, according to the estimates and trends, they would no longer be around anymore in roughly 100 years.
So, we still would go extinct (eventually, in a long time from now), but the planet will keep on living, so there's that.
Serious question: whatever happened to mechanical solutions like seeding the atmosphere with a chemical that will reflect light? Are those things considered too risky to try? I remember hearing about those solutions some years ago, but they seem to have fallen out of vogue now.
One optimistic way of looking at it is that the models for success already exist. The US 2050 target for per-head CO2 emissions is to get to the same as France today. And France has just as industrial an economy, and a similar population density to a lot of US states.
So, the idea cutting emissions is impossible or will inevitably lead to massive damage to the economy or reductions in quality of life is obviously not correct. And that doesn’t even take into account the technological developments which can occur to make the transition easier again. The problems are to do with politics, economic models, and technology development, there are no fundamental barriers.
Also, the economy functions at scale, so if the majority of rich countries follow a transition other countries will likely follow by default. It’s a matter of pushing enough technologies over the tipping point where they take over even if you assume the value of the atmosphere is zero.
It depends on what your goals are. If it is human survival, then yes. If it is about maintaining the current global economy and modern civilization then absolutely not.
The loss is because we invent half-solutions that only delay the inevitable(reducing/storing/filtering emissions instead of removing sources), but are more profitable for the industry/economy in the short term vs renewables.
We should switch to a carbon/anti pollution based crypto currency that is mined in a earth friendly way. All goods and transports and all other pollution is such a system should be accounted for.
I think orbital solar collection is interesting, but I'm not sure why it needs to be used to mine BitCoin: can't we just use the energy to power a microwave beam to collectors on the surface? Not sure what the economics of that is vs. the cost of launching a geostationary satellite though.
there is no fundamental reason cryptocurrency "mining" should be energy-intensive, it was & is merely an unnecessary side-effect of the first cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) and its spin-off's / copycats. Sadly a large fraction of the crypto proponent "community" misinterprets the unnecessary energy expenditure as the source of "value", while the majority of the crypto opponents similarily consider it an unavoidable side-effect of cryptocurrencies and hence an argument against cryptocurrencies in general...
It's probably too late to save modern civilization, the new war on climate change is about making sure we don't make the planet uninhabitable for almost ever land animal. But, our chances of accomplishing that are pretty good (of keeping the planet habitable, not failing to do so), especially as we lose billions of people that will die because of catastrophic climate change.
So in the last month or so I stumbled across SFIA [1]. This guy has produced 150+ videos about futuristic topics but grounded in science. Everything from how to get into space cheaper to the Fermi Paradox to Black Hole civilizations.
Anyway, one thing I like about it is the optimism. This guy is genuinely optimistic about the future. And he has pretty good reason. Like this planet can realistically be home to trillions of people with not much more tech than we have right now.
But a recurring topic is the subject of fusion and how much of a game-changer it will be if we can do it in any kind of economic fashion. Now I'd previously somewhat dismissed this because of the naive view that it is free energy. Well the fuel might essentially be free (even that depends on what the fuel is; deuterium is common enough to essentially be free, Helium-3 not so much) but the plant itself costs money, has a power output, requires maintenance and we still need power lines and the like.
But he points out some of the reasons why this is a complete game changer and why certain problems simply cease to be. One of these is the greenhouse gas problem. Why? Because as soon as you have energy cheaper than hydrocarbons you simply use your power to make hydrocarbons from the CO2 in the atmosphere. This is pretty simple chemistry and we can do that now. There's just no point because we'd be powering the process largely with hydrocarbons (solar and wind notwithstanding).
I should also point out that I remain somewhat skeptical about nuclear fusion being economic because of the neutron problem (in that neutrons quickly destroy the container). This works fine for stars, not so well for superconducting magnets.
But (as Isaac Arthur points out) you don't even need fusion for some of these rosier outcomes. You just need cheaper than what we have now and there's good reason to think that solar may get us there, particularly if we can mass produce solar collectors in low Earth orbit (these produce about seven times the power of Earth bound collectors). And there's actually pretty good reasons to be optimistic about that.
The human condition is one of exaggeration, unfortunately. Namely that both fear and optimism tend to be overstated. You see this in markets all the time.
The counterargument against radical changes to combat climate change tends to revolve around the idea that markets will eventually solve that problem (for those that admit there's even a problem at any rate). And it makes me somewhat uncomfortable to admit that this idea probably isn't 100% wrong.
I'm similarly optimistic that outcome is possible, maybe even probable, but I'm not excited for it. When it comes to population and the future, the question is less whether we can survive, the question is what kind of world is consistent with 20Bn people? Or 1 Trillion people?
If you value open space, wild places, other species' existence, bucolic lifestyles, or other non-techno sci fi outcomes, that's a scary thought. Maybe we will all move to space and keep earth as a re-wilded paradise for vacationing and research. Or maybe future generations won't care about any of that and will densely cover the whole planet, snuffing out anything that came before.
Is there an agreed upon consensus on when SHTF? I've been trying to limit my climate change/collapse reading (keeping away from /r/collapse), but this article triggered my anxiety again. I know things aren't looking good, but is there any hope? Are we completely fucked?
The only consensus is that the shit will hit you in dribbles. So much so, you might not even notice until you just kind of become used to smelling a little bit like shit. As the stench becomes overwhelming, perhaps you might look back and think, "you know, I don't remember always smelling like shit."
In the US we've been having this "debate" and talking about the "war" since at least the late 1970s. Even that long ago it was nearly impossible in our country to garner the political will to fight climate change.
Our question now is, how do we best stall the inevitable? But the political will is still sorely lacking. The idea of a globally effective Paris Accord with teeth is laughable.
The scientists knew the consequences of warming: "When, at Charney’s request, Hansen programmed his model to consider a future of doubled carbon dioxide, it predicted a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius. That was twice as much warming as the prediction made by the most prominent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, whose government lab at Princeton was the first to model the greenhouse effect. The difference between the two predictions — between warming of two degrees Celsius and four degrees Celsius — was the difference between damaged coral reefs and no reefs whatsoever, between thinning forests and forests enveloped by desert, between catastrophe and chaos."
When the dire climate forecasts were established science, the foremost American scientists, senators, industry representatives, etc met to discuss what to do about it. They started their conference - in 1980 - with this:
“We might start out with an emotional question,” proposed Thomas Waltz, an economist at the National Climate Program. “The question is fundamental to being a human being: Do we care?”
This provoked huffy consternation. “In caring or not caring,” said John Laurmann, a Stanford engineer, “I would think the main thing is the timing.” It was not an emotional question, in other words, but an economic one: How much did we value the future?
We have less time than we realize, said an M.I.T. nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. “People leave their problems until the 11th hour, the 59th minute,” he said. “And then: ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?’ ” — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It was a promising beginning, Pomerance thought. Urgent, detailed, cleareyed. The attendees seemed to share a sincere interest in finding solutions. They agreed that some kind of international treaty would ultimately be needed to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide at a safe level. But nobody could agree on what that level was."
Well, what happened? Last I heard the outcome is some land lost, no immediate deaths, and about 100 deaths due to cancer over the next 50 years. A tragedy, but not apocalyptic. (And minuscule compared to the deaths and destruction from the earthquake/tsunami itself.)
> A private think tank says the total cost of the Fukushima disaster could reach ¥70 trillion ($626 billion), or more than three times the government’s latest estimate.
But I guess you'll say that $626 bil is just 15% of Japan's GDP, totally manageable over the long term.
I'm sure the communities where future nuclear plants are to be build will love this argument: "if disaster strikes, remember, it's for the greater good"
And the expected number of Fukushima deaths is tiny compared to the deaths caused by climate change - this summer's heatwave has already killed that many people in Japan alone.
We've had a working reactor design that doesn't suffer from Fukushima's failure mode for over 20 years. Ironically, public opposition has made nuclear less safe than it would've been.
Fukushima was not supposed to have a failure mode. But it did. How are we to ever believe the "experts" that the new design won't fail in another way, after which we'll hear about an ever safer design.
Alternatively, if they knew that Fukushima wasn't safe, why didn't they shut it down? They kept on saying "yeah, the new design is much safer, but this design is also perfectly fine"
People are easily emotionally manipulated. Show some pictures of cancer or disfigured babies and you can get everyone to rail against nuclear. Media does it all the time to skew our priorities. Think medical malpractice and healthcare is a big source of death in the US? Think again, bump stocks and crappy 3d printed plastic guns are the types of killers you should be worried about according to the media. Rinse and repeat.
It's true. Climate change really is modern day religion.
A volcanic eruption is more likely to cause the climate to change.
The war on climate change suggests that humans are capable of preventing a volcano from erupting.
The poles are shifting as well.
Pollution is a separate issue, of course we should keep everything clean, but when the climate stops changing, that probably means the planet is dead, like Mars (setting up a colony on Mars makes absolutely no sense either)
the number of volcanos erupting in some interval (say 10 years) is large enough that you can roughly treat it as a constant source of CO2, but at the same time the volcano is emitting igneous rock (i.e. the magma with CO2 removed), which will reabsorb the CO2 over a very long timespan... so yes volcanos emit large amounts of CO2, and commensurate amounts of CO2 absorbing igneous rock, in geological timescales they cancel
Yet another article that emphasizes how absolutely garbage our politicians are. They are also actively complicit in Trump's war against environmental protection and the continued apathy that began before Trump.
The problem is that environmental driven campaigns have been incredibly ineffective. Perhaps it's our responsibility to generate noise the same level of that with Net Neutrality?
Trying to link individual, recent news events to climate change is generally a bad idea. You're taking a long term term trend (climate change) and comparing it with short term extreme events - there may or may not be a direct link, it's hard to say.
This makes it easy for climate change deniers to give cherrypicked examples of outliers that tune to emotional responses, rather than factual evidence.
It's better to look at overall trends over time to see the impact of climate change, e.g. are we getting more of the extreme weather scenarios? Yes. Are temperatures globally going up? Yes. Are sea levels rising? Yes. Are the polar ice caps melting? Yes. etc.
I'll see if I can get some citations later -- but the general idea of wildfires and climate change is that climate change has caused more intense periods of drought in ares that haven't experienced those sorts of conditions before.
As such - when wildfires start (regardless of origin of the fire), they tend to spread more rapidly and more intensely.
I haven't found an academic source for this, but the suggestion is that even though triggers for fires may be unrelated, the scope and intensity of the fires are intensified due to the effects of climate change. This article discusses some of this background https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/science/climate-change-fo...
I think we're past focusing on proof. We need to focus on probabilities and insuring ourselves against possible or likely outcomes.
Reality check, we have a sample size of 1. So, if we get it wrong, it's game over and we mess up our planet for centuries or millennia. The question is how comfortable we are with being utterly wrong on that gamble. For me the answer is, pretty damn uncomfortable.
Even a 1 % gamble on getting this stuff wrong has a pretty significant chance of backfiring on us. Russian roulette has only a slightly worse probability. And to be fair, our odds might actually be considerably better putting the proverbial gun to your head considering what some scientists are saying. Are they 20% right 50% right or 80% right? I don't know. Is the water going to rise 1 m by 2060, by 2100, or later? I don't know. I do know that would be highly annoying for a lot of people and it would be awfully nice to live in a place that has dikes or is well above sea level by then.
I happen to believe it is probably ballpark closer to 95-99% but I'd argue even a 1% chance that they are not completely wrong about this should be more than enough motivation to do something about it on the off chance it is needed.
The number doesn't actually matter that much. What matters is acknowledging it is not 0%. We have a non zero, potentially very large chance that we are actively killing this planet and everything on it in either the next decades or centuries. That's too big of chance to just go "Meh, lets wait and see". As soon as you acknowledge that, opposing any action that mitigates that risk becomes madness.
There is no conclusive proof. Likely climate change is a factor, but forest management practices are as well. I can recall reading that not allowing forest fires to occur in the past can lead to an increase in dead plant matter on the ground, which makes future forest fires worse.
It will be 20 years before we have hard scientific proof. You know full well that this kind of data is slow to gather and study and draw conclusions from it.
Good analogy - which one of Barry Bonds' 73 home runs in 2001 were because he was on steroids? Hard to pinpoint any single one, but he wouldn't have hit 73 if not for being steroid-enhanced.
And the power sector is the easiest sector to decarbonize, by the way. If you look at electric vehicles, even if we had the most rapid, insane ramp-up that's beyond even Elon's crazy predictions, we'd still have massive fossil fuel use for non vehicle uses of petroleum for chemical industries, airplanes, plastic production, and for the numerous numbers of legacy cars that will be leftover that are not EV.
We need massive innovation across all our uses of fossil fuel. We can not rest on our laurels, saying PV and wind are so cheap now. They are still around 4% of total energy consumption, and when you factor in the decline of nuclear and relative decline of hydropower in the ever-increasing industrial energy base, we see that fossil fuels are basically the same % of our energy mix as they were before 2000.
For an energy realist, I recommend checking out Vaclav Smil, who has long been predicting 21st century as the century of natural gas, and who has been skeptical of renewables taking over instantly. It will take us until the 22nd century to truly decarbonize, and by then the seas will have risen over Miami and Shanghai on a regular basis.
It's a truly scary future. Get innovating, in your personal lives and in your professional careers, everyone!