A Radical New Scheme to Prevent Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise

I've never lived in the US, so anyone, please correct me if i'm wrong, but anecdotally I have heard that Americans don't generally have (or use) outdoor clothes lines to dry their washed clothes, rather they just use a dryer. I live in Australia and when I learned this I was floored. That approach is unthinkable in Australia due to our astronomical energy costs (South Aus, where I live has the highest energy cost in the world).

With our high prices, we only very occasionally use dryers which are a horribly inefficient way to dry clothes.

Maybe the solution to affect peoples' behaviour is to dramatically increase the cost of (dirty) energy.

So. Much. Fucking. Carbon. Trillions is nothing if it means no consumer-level caps on carbon output for the next generation or two.

How popular might it be? Like, kill the whole coal industry around the world; who would mind? Make fuel, say, 2x as expensive; who would mind? Make barbecue coals as expensive as the meat; would anyone notice? Also, enforce it globally, including places like India, Russia, or China, the latter critically dependent on coal-based electricity.

Now compare to building some walls around glaciers, maybe mere thousands of miles.

I heard somewhere a great parable. Imagine that some aviation specialist would analyze plane hijacking data and recommend to install strong locked doors to pilot cabins on airliners. It would have prevented 9/11, saved thousands of lives, and would have been incomparably cheaper than all those security measures implemented in the aftermath. But likely every airline would be against this unneeded expense, and it would be very hard to push this measure.

Same thing with the global warming, wars, and various other (impending) catastrophes: people hope that they'll get by somehow; how bad it can really be? You see, nothing is happening! When it hits, the view changes drastically, but it's too late already.

I certainly don't disagree with you. I should make note that while I am a conservationist at heart, this was more a 'devils advocate' position I was bringing up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails

But fuel oil is really just a byproduct of refining crude. It's the muck left over when you've extracted everything else that's useful. And of course, it is not taxed, so prices don't account for it's environmental externalities.

If we can reduce overall demand for petroleum products, this should eventually cause fuel oil prices to rise because there'll be less crude being refined, and thus reduced supply.

See, for example, here:

https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-cli...

Note that this actually understates the overprediction, because the models whose average is shown included three sets of models that made three different assumptions about how CO2 would rise. But CO2's actual rise over the period where we're comparing models with data was about the same as the assumption of the "worst case" (or "business as usual") scenario, so that scenario is the only one that's relevant to the comparison between models and data. And when you compare just that sheaf of models with the data, the divergence between model and data is even larger.

For the reasons why the upper troposphere temperature comparison is more relevant than the surface temperature comparison (which is what is shown in the IPCC AR5), see the article.

> According to NASA[1] we're already at a 0.9 degree anomaly for 2017. The IPCC prediction[2] is 1 degree anomaly in 2020 for the worst case prediction in the worst case scenario.

But, as you note, the two anomalies are relevant to two different baselines. That means the comparison is invalid, not "not perfect".

> if you want to look at IPCC's best case scenarios, the prediction is about 0.1 degree

That's for future temperature change under the future best case scenario. It has nothing to do with past temperature change under the actual scenario that actually happened.

> See page 11

Those graphs don't show models vs. data. They show models only (and with the actual time period for which we have data compressed on the far left of the graphs so you can't extract any useful comparison with data from them).

The Summary for Policymakers, which is what you linked to, does not show any direct comparison between models and data for a period for which we have data. Previous reports did, but in this one they decided not to--it's only buried in the WG1 report, in Chapter 9, p. 768:

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chap...

The divergence between the CMIP5 mean (red) and the actual temperatures (black) in the upper graph in the 2000s is visible; the EMIC mean in the lower graph only appears to go up to 2000 so it doesn't provide a useful comparison. Also, both of these graphs show all of the models, not just the ones whose CO2 rise assumptions matched reality over the data period, so they understate the actual overprediction for the reason I gave above.