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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Missed one point:

Extreme winter events like this, now being seen more often in unusual locations, are EXACTLY what was predicted 15-20 years ago in a number of reports and research papers about the coming effects of climate change. Global warming and climate change doesn't just mean "everything is getting hotter everywhere all the time", it also means shifting global wind patterns and unusual weather that breaks previous 100-year records every 5 or 10 years.

And where else in the USA has been a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism, than Texas?

Atmospheric co2 increase over time: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/475891-extreme...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/11/2...

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49753680

https://globalnews.ca/news/7634414/another-12-new-record-low...

View on HN

Texas is the leader in wind power in the US, and #2 in solar.

https://www.kxan.com/weather/green-energy-report-where-does-...

If Texas were a country, it would rank fifth in the world: The installed wind capacity in Texas exceeds installed wind capacity in all countries but China, the United States, Germany and India. Texas produces the most wind power of any U.S. state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Texas

>Texas is the leader in wind power in the US

Not per capita, it isn't:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_North_Dakota#/me...

This is important given the shear size and consumption of Texas compared to other states.

What's the relevance or value added here?

The fact that states with notably high winds and 1/30 of the population are 3-6x higher in a per capita metric is predictable based on these simple approximations.

The idea is that people need that power. If a state with a lot of people has a lot of power generation this will be not enough if per-capita power generation is too low. Of course power can be imported but overall per-capita seems to be more important than the total.

Correct. It is also relevant here because Texas is not connected to the federal electrical grid. That means any amount of excess wind power they produce cannot be harnessed by selling it to other states (or bought, during outages).

But power use per capita does not tell us that with any degree of confidence.

If this metric is adjusted for residential use, I would agree, but if this metric is a simple division of aggregate totals it seems of very little use.

The number of people residing in Texas is not a good indicator for how much energy various organizations operating in Texas are consuming.

I don't like per capita metrics with states because some states are the size of countries in population, and others like the one referenced are more like cities. (North Dakota pop: 700k, Dallas city pop: 1.3 mil).

It's like saying "Well Germany does X, but Luxembourg has better per capita stats!" Ya don't say... perhaps there's a reason! Maybe Germany should be more like Luxembourg

Isn't per capita a more equalizing metric? If you go off raw numbers the data will be skewed even more heavily. Though there are certainly other methods to compare, such as per km^2, that you could use to perform other comparisons, depending.

It's not, because of the scales involved. One is a heavily agrarian/rural state and the other is a combination of rural and major metropolises.

Because of how the states are divided, it becomes a compare "nearly pure rural" to "vibrant mix of major rural, suburban and urban" communities. Some states are just absolutely tiny by population and entirely rural. And it's just not an apples to apples comparison to compare one rural area with one rural/urban area. A better comparison would be just Texas's rural areas to Nebraska, without any of its cities.

When comparing apples to oranges this way, it's a roundabout way of saying "just be rural" or "don't even try to solve urban problems".

It’s a relevant metric when the discussion is about asymmetric supply/demand. The context is that if they are disproportionately high in the demand side, it stresses the grid.

It’s essentially an approximation for normalizing production (supply) based on consumption (demand). It tells us (roughly) how stressed the grid is.

> I don't like per capita metrics because it makes Texas look bad

Ok.

To be a "leader in wind power" you shouldn't just be a populous state with an ordinary per-capita amount of wind power. That wouldn't make you "the leader in wind power", it would make you "the leader in large population".

So this person is taking seriously the idea of being a "leader in wind power", and exploring whether there's any merit to it.

This is comparing to super small states. Not a super fair comparison.

Per capita or per square mile are meaningful comparisons. Per state is silly.

That's my point when making comparisons to other states about who produces the most wind power. Data needs to be normalized.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1138/

15-20% renewable power doesn't mean they aren't "a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism", especially given how much oil they produce.

Nonsense, they're ahead of the game, as natural gas turbines are the only currently existing scalable solution which could potentially handle variable production of Solar and Wind.

Why is that nonsense?

Being ahead of the game on wind doesn't make everything else they do disappear.

Stance on petrochemicals isn't a single dial that turns back and forth and affects everything you do in unison.

How is one of the most renewable energy places on earth a "bastion of the oil/petrochemical industry"?

The answer to the question "where else in the US?" is basically "everywhere else in the US".

The fact that Texas has huge exploitable oil reserves is an accident of geology, not a political stance.

If you drive I20 west through Dallas and on toward Midland and Odessa, you will come to the Permian Basin. From there to I20’s merge with I10, the air will smell like a can of motor oil much of the time and at night the land will extend to the horizon with mercury vapor lights of pump jacks every few hundred yards.

Of course it’s West Texas and not many people go out that way - it’s the road from Atlanta to El Paso - making it out of sight; out of mind.

And if you take I10 west out of New Orleans, after the refineries of Louisiana, you will see refineries from the border to Houston and Port Arthur. Open your mouth and you might just taste the air.

The post colonial history of Texas is people arriving to extract its resources. The oil may just be chance. The roughnecks and their oil pumps are deliberate.

But has resulted in many oil companies being based there, which means lots of money flowing to politicians, which DOES make it a political stance.

'member Halliburton? ExxonMobil?

Virtually every large US-based oil company is headquartered in Houston.

And certainly not just domestically either, if you look at where much of the technical expertise came from that set up the modern organization of Saudi Aramco. Houston, mostly.

Uh, how is it not?

Texas produces 41% of US oil, more than 4x any other state.

They also dominate refinery capacity.

Sounds like Texas is a bastion of energy.

Maybe even the energy capital of the world.

> Sounds like Texas is a bastion of energy.

Sounds to me they are the bastion of the energy industry.

Which are historically the main opponents of any concern regarding climate change.

an opponent wouldn't be the top wind producer in the country and second in solar.

Only because all the original climate change activists were stridently anti-growth / borderline misanthropes.

And obviously the energy industry is firmly in the "growth" camp.

Yes, but if you think they'd put a price on carbon anytime soon then I have a bridge to sell you.

They're a bastion of climate denial, and bringing up their wind power is irrelevant whataboutism.

Except, wind lost generation capacity in the cold, just as all other forms of energy generation did.

Is it possible that warming temperatures in the oceans weren't considered to be an issue when we first started seeing arctic air being blown further south by the jetstream due to a changing climate from anthropogenic carbon sources? Possibly. There are certainly mitigation mechanisms they could have invested in. If the public heard their taxpayer dollars or utility fees were being wasted on winterizing efforts in notoroiously hot Texas, even if there were responsible decision-makers, their hands were tied at risk of being shamed for wasteful spending in the court of public opinion.

It is still a shame that they're left out in the cold, so to speak. Hopefully they can come up with more sensible remedies, if not out of a change of ideology, perhaps a sense of practicality?

> If the public heard their taxpayer dollars or utility fees were being wasted on winterizing efforts in notoroiously hot Texas

This is a direct consequence of the climate change denial coming, to a great extent, directly out of those same lawmakers.

If the public had instead been informed about the likely extreme weather events that will be brought about by climate change with the same zeal that they are being lied to today, this type of spending could have easily been presented as necessary.

Instead of taking this crisis as a time or reckoning, we're of course seeing everyone doubling down on this, insisting that it's proof global warming isn't happening and all the expected bs.

No one gets votes for disaster preparedness.

> Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy

> Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? Using data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending, but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending. These inconsistencies distort the incentives of public officials, leading the government to underinvest in disaster preparedness, thereby causing substantial public welfare losses. We estimate that $1 spent on preparedness is worth about $15 in terms of the future damage it mitigates. By estimating both the determinants of policy decisions and the consequences of those policies, we provide more complete evidence about citizen competence and government accountability.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...

Well, your source doesn't necessarily contradict my claim. If there had been similarly competent propaganda on the risks of more and more extreme cold events due to global warming, to the same extent as climate change denial propaganda, perhaps the trend in this study might change.

>Except, wind lost generation capacity in the cold, just as all other forms of energy generation did.

They don't in Iowa, or North Dakota. Or anywhere north, where they spend a few extra dollars to make sure they can handle the cold

Right... because getting cold is normal in those places.

>as natural gas turbines are the only currently existing scalable solution which could potentially handle variable production of Solar and Wind.

Nuclear, pump back hydro and other storage solutions.

People like to explain how massively expensive and vast the storage solution would need to be, I get it, trillions of dollars. Sorta like how hard it is to produce all the oil and natural gas we produce with amazing large scale engineering projects like fracking and deep sea oil wells, supertankers to transport it, etc etc.

>Nuclear and other storage solutions.

Nuclear is great for base load, but their prohibitive upfront expenses makes load-following wildly impractical. You want to be running them at full capacity at all times.

> pump back hydro

Not scalable. That there are some very specific oppporunities to use pump back is great, but what are you going to do in Texas? It just doesn't scale.

> other storage solutions >People like to explain how massively expensive and vast the storage solution would need to be, I get it, trillions of dollars. Sorta like how hard it is to produce all the oil and natural gas we produce with amazing large scale engineering projects like fracking and deep sea oil wells, supertankers to transport it, etc etc.

I would hope that scalability would be something that HN readers understand. We're not just talking Trillions of dollars to build out the battery networks. We're talking about spending trillions of dollars periodically as those batteries are consumables. We're talking millions of tons of toxic waste being produced as by products.

There's a reason why no one has done it yet, it's just not feasible.

The best solution would be adopting France's design of majority Nuclear. If you must use variable sources like wind and solar then have Nuclear as a baseline and supplement the intermittence with nat gas.

> Nuclear is great for base load, but their prohibitive upfront expenses makes load-following wildly impractical. You want to be running them at full capacity at all times.

Only for a very weak definition of "prohibitive".

Let's say nuclear costs 10 cents per kWh if run at full load. If you use only those plants, averaging 2/3 output, your power costs 15 cents (plus distribution). If you plan for really high peaks maybe you average 1/2 output and power costs 20 cents (plus distribution). None of those costs are prohibitive. It's more than 9 cents (plus distribution) from coal but not that much more.

Prohibitive is something like trying to use batteries for long-term power balancing. A battery that's needed once a year or less could cost upwards of 10 dollars per delivered kWh.

I can't find the link anymore, but a few years back they were looking into using pulley systems with large blocks of concrete to store kinetic energy in a similar fashion to pump back. I think something like that in theory could work.

https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...

Absolute bs. Both nuclear and hydro can and do handle it easily.

As load following for wind?

Technically it might be possible, realistically and economically its not. The hydro could load follow, but as the other pointer notes scaling it would be very difficult.

Nukes are on the other side, its much more difficult to load follow with them, particularly economically. The maint and overhead costs are going to tend to be a huge fixed overhead independent of if they are at full capacity or idled. And spinning them back up frequently can take days (as just happened when a sensor tripped at STP1). Your better off building 100% nuke capacity and running it at 100% and dumping the excess energy into syngas production via co2 recapture, desalination, H2 production, or whatever other energy intensive processes that could be used to burn up cheap excess energy while providing a return.

So he is right, and I've posted (and been down voted) for noting the exact same thing. The wind in Texas is enabled by the cheap NG peaker plants, some of which aren't even combined cycle. They turn them off when the wind is blowing and the price of energy goes down, and can spin them up very quickly* when the wind dies and energy prices spike. There really isn't a good replacement for them (and no batteries aren't there). But the big negative of course is that your no longer talking about wind being a "green" energy source (or really cheap) if you have to build a MW of gas for ever MW of wind to cover the ~25% of the time they are covering for the lack of wind capacity. All you have really done is slowed the growth in CO2 emission by a decade or two.

*(note cold startup of first stage in 20-25 mins https://etn.global/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Startup_time_r...)

Getting full power from a nuclear plant has negligible fuel costs, so it's good to stay at 100% and use the power somehow, but that doesn't mean they're bad at load-following. A plant made with load-following in mind can go between half power and full power in minutes.

Nuclear, yes, but hydro, no. Hydro simply isn’t scalable, once you build out practical sites, you cannot get more of it. This is doubly true in flat and dry places like Texas.

I might nitpick and point out that Texas is not flat and dry. It is flat and wet, or dry and hilly. East Texas has the swamps and weather patterns of the traditional gulf southern states. West Texas has mountains higher than anything on the east coast of the US. The rockies don't just dead end in northern NM, there are sky islands and mountain ranges extending all the way down through Mexico. Central Texas has a bit of both, but the water situation is unreliable enough that while there are a fair number of dams and reservoirs with hydroelectric very little of it is used consistently for electric generation. That is because the water value in the reservoir exceeds its electric generation value. Those dams were built mostly for flood control, so they get hammered every couple years and end up opening spillways, then slowly dropping for years as the remaining water gets used up. The hydro only really takes effect when they are sending water from one lake down to the next for water control purposes.

There is still a lot of hydro potential left in the US. And there is no generation should be anywhere near that centralized.

I think I worded my point poorly. Nuclear and Hydro can provide great low emission baselines, but if you're building up a large percentage of your grid on solar and wind you need something which can very quickly ramp up and ramp down generation. Nuclear's costs means that it would be far better to have be a consistent baseline running at full capacity.

In that case simply don't use that much wind or hydro. It seems that the costs outweigh the benefits when hydro and nuclear are so cheap and provide such low emissions.

Either that, or structure the grid so that wind and solar are used to power accumulative loads.

Nuclear could scale

Yes it can, but it's not practical to have intermittent nuclear to supplement your solar and wind. You want nuclear to be producing at capacity at all times.

Coal, oil, and nuclear are scalable. What's special about natural gas here? The production method doesn't leave it in a significantly better place just because the actual burn process is cleaner.

> What's special about natural gas here?

On/off in seconds as the sun fades or the wind drops to fill in for the missing power output.

Coal isn't great on startup times, but oil can be as good or better: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956.

According to that same page, most natural gas plants currently in use utilize a combined cycle system which takes significantly longer than more flexible, but less prevalent, combustion turbines.

Though maybe the point is moot: Even if the total environmental impact of natural gas is the same as oil, and leaving aside the geopolitical issues-- natural gas is still cheaper, so if you're going to choose between two bad options then you might as well go with the lower cost one. At which point you just invest in upgrading those combined gas plants to more flexible combustion turbines.

However, nuclear isn't completely out of the game here: It may have a very long cold-start time, but in the last decade there's been progress in making it capable of load-following instead of just baseload, especially when it's planned, e.g after sunset. There's certainly other environmental factors there, but if we're worried about decreasing CO2 ASAP, nuclear should probably be part of the conversation.

I absolute agree that nuclear should be part of the conversation, but the biggest barriers to nuclear is regulation and costs. Spending all the effort needed to build a plant just to not run it at maximum capacity all the time would be an unaffordable luxury. It makes much more economic sense to have it be base.

would be an unaffordable luxury

An underutilized nuclear plant may still be a necessity instead of a luxury if we're running out of time on CO2 emissions. In this case, making economic sense may run counter to long term human interests.

The important combination is easy fast regulation as you say, but also cheap to build and operate.

Many are built to operate < 10% of capacity, so simple single stage instead of more efficient CCGT, because it's insanely cheap peak power compared to alternatives.

Oil = bad is too simplistic.

There are a few industry stakeholders... energy producers, petroleum, energy infrastructure, etc. Each has different drivers and motivations. One of the issues with all of these businesses is that maximizing return in capital investment is about cost control, and the interests of the operators of power plants and electric infrastructure don’t always align.

Scenarios where you cannot burn gas do not benefit gas drillers. But gas drillers have nothing to due with reducing capital spending that makes infrastructure resilient to unlikely/infrequent risks. That’s all about pipeline and utility operators, who want to keep that dividend rolling.

Oil is used for a lot more than just energy. We won't stop producing oil even if the entire country was powered by renewables.

and yet 85% of their grid power is produced from gas, oil and coal, a tiny portion from nuclear.

Texas grid is about a quarter powered by Wind. Since Wind and Solar are dynamic - there may be variations and how they are measured, but to claim Texas Electric Portfolio is 85% fossil is not right numbers.

Coal is almost dead and there is minimal oil for electric generation. Hawaii burns oil more than Texas.

I think there are 2 nuclear power plants .. one is Comanche Peak which is south west of DFW, not sure of the other.

edit: https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=TX#tabs-4

(click the electricity tab)

Other is the South Texas Nuclear Plant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Texas_Nuclear_Generating...

Locals call it STP. I’ve looked at the blinking lights on the domes from my aunt’s farmhouse since childhood. It provides power to 2 million homes a couple hundred miles away in central Texas.

And even one of their nuclear plants had to shut down from the cold.

One of the reactors of one of the nuclear plants. Each nuclear plant has two reacts, so 1/4 tripped.

> If Texas were a country [..] the installed wind capacity in Texas exceeds installed wind capacity [..] except[..], the United States [..]

Is this a tautology or this counterfactual removes texan capacity from United States total?

It is tautologly. Here:

China: 236,402 MW

United States: 105,466 MW

Germany: 61,357 MW

India: 37,506 MW

Texas: 28,843 MW

Spain: 25,808 MW

Any drug dealer will tell you "Don't get high on your own supply". It is good business.

Being behind Germany is no achievement in the grand scheme either, because we need much more wind turbines but legislation does try to prevent them.

The general public still does not get that climate change is a frickin problem that needs to be addressed asap.

All the scientific evidence points to global warming is real and will cause more extreme heat events.

But the science that global warming will cause more extreme cold events is on much more tenuous grounds.

From the epa

"Although the United States has experienced many winters with unusually low temperatures, unusually cold winter temperatures have become less common—particularly very cold nights (lows). Record-setting daily high temperatures have become more common than record lows. The decade from 2000 to 2009 had twice as many record highs as record lows."

I recently watched an interesting video* on the phenomena of extreme cold events increased by climate change. To massively simplify, one theory is the jet stream around the Polar vortex is being destabilized by climate change. While the North Pole is warming faster than ever, it is still very cold air, and moving that air further south means unusually cold weather. The jury is still out of course as you mentioned.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W84bi9YEGY

On a large scale, it's basic physics. The jet streams are driven by temperature gradient: warm air from equatorial regions flows to the cold poles, warming up the regions inbetween.

The planet is not heating up uniformly, poles are heating up more than the equatorial regions. This of course means that the temperature gradient between the hot and cold realms is not as steep as it was. Net result? Weaker jet streams.

Now it appears that moving heat from the equator to the (northern) high latitudes was only a part of the equation in keeping these latitudes temperate. Confining the freezing polar vortex to the pole was another.

I'm sure there are others, and the population at large is going to learn about them in some very instructive ways in the future.

Yeah I read a similar one; because of warming, the glaciers and melted ice melt, causing the sea to desalinate a bit, which in turn makes the gulf stream stop. This stops warm water from going north and vice versa, making the north colder and the south warmer. It was implied that this caused the ice in the last ice age to travel southward.

I mean I hope it won't happen in my lifetime, there were kilometers of ice on my country.

The term global warming really did a number on the awareness of climate change.

The propaganda against climate change did a number on awareness of climate change. Blaming people for not phrasing it perfectly is a secondary cause at most.

FWIW a better phrase would be "climate destabilization".

That’s a good name for it.

And to your other point, it must be emphasized that oil and coal companies knew about it 40+ years ago, and chose to fund opposition research and disinformation instead.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_co... Exxon knew since the 1970s

http://www.climatefiles.com/coal/mining-congress-journal-aug... Choice quote from this article in a 1966 coal journal:

> If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result. Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London.

I like Climate Catastrophe, because that's what we are in.

Frank Luntz brags (exaggerates) about changing the vernacular to benefit the GOP/deniers - we should do the same to scare people into accepting and understanding the current reality.

Catastrophizing doesn't work. It fuels extremism at worst and at best breeds distrust in experts. Covid19 has been a fantastic study on how not to handle global catastrophes.

Just because we can't handle the catastrophe doesn't mean we are not in one (multiple)

Sure. But getting everyday people to panic will actively hurt efforts to deal with these problems. People get really stupid, shortsighted, violent, and desperate when they feel like the world they know and benefit from is slipping away from them.

That's like saying the term "stunted growth" in children is bad because we keep finding examples of increasingly taller or obese children.

"Global warming" always referred to an on-average increase in warming on a global scale. The term wasn't the issue, it was people intentionally deciding they didn't like it for political reasons.

using unproven science or bad science for political gains is why people don't like "global warming" for political reasons.

Yes the political gains of making sure that we are a little less worse off in the future.

Arguably, the term itself was only part of the problem; the ensuing propaganda deluge that followed in its wake also seriously conflicts with the claims. tl;dr: hyped-up panic usually finds itself at odds with findings mere years later. Slow down and step carefully, and you'll find you don't get this kind of whiplash.

But in this particular case, all signs point to the panic being significantly hyped-down: the world is in a much worse shape than most mainstream predictions, and global warming is accelerating faster than many "worse-case scenarios" even a decade ago.

It's also important to remember that this isn't a gradual phenomenon - there are certain break points that, when we'll reach, we won't ever be able to go back. And by all accounts, unless we significantly change the global economy literally today, there is no chance that we won't reach those breaking points in 50-100 years. And even if we did today, there's a good chance it's too late.

The mess we're leaving for our children to fix should make all of us feel deeply ashamed.

Right, but in the early years of messaging, a lot of media was generated that spoke in volumes without proper scientific understanding; or the actual conclusions were stated publicly before sufficient certainty was had, leading to the average person seeing wildly different narratives begin to conflict, one after another. That's a colossal messaging failure, and what's worse is that politicians tend to get stuck in one of the intermediate messages regardless of how outdated it becomes, using it to drive action in all sorts of wrong directions. See the problem?

The term climate change took over global warming because of how laughable wrong all the "global warming" predictions failed to come true and disastrously so.

Like most prophecies by religions do.

The global average temperature is increasing. How is that a failed prediction?

15,000 years ago, there was ice a mile thick where I sit. We are still coming out of that glaciation. It is warming.

C - catastrophic - there is no evidence in the historic temperature record that anything unusual is happening.

A - anthropogenic - the human contribution is small, compared to natural sources.

G - global - not local.

W - warming - see above.

In addition, there is no good evidence that the slight warming in the last 50 years is causing extreme weather events, and there isn’t any good theory to support it, either.

> C - catastrophic - there is no evidence in the historic temperature record that anything unusual is happening.

There is no evidence in the historic temperature record that the Earth has ever been this hot in the past million years.

> A - anthropogenic - the human contribution is small, compared to natural sources.

The human contribution to CO2 and other greenhouse gases is not small, it is almost the entire quantity. There is very little contribution to greenhouse gas emissions from non-human sources (of course, methane from cows for example is a human source).

> G - global - not local.

Not sure what you mean here.

> W - warming - see above.

see above.

> In addition, there is no good evidence that the slight warming in the last 50 years is causing extreme weather events, and there isn’t any good theory to support it, either.

The brainwashing propaganda from interested science deniers is not better informed than the practically unanimous conclusions of all the earth's climate scientists.

The Earth is headed for catastrophe, both ecologically and geopolitically. Sea level rise is already above initial predictions, and that effect alone will displace the 300 million people currently living in one of the lowest plains by the sea in the world, in Bangladesh. The coming migrant crisis at the confluence of India, Pakistan and China, three nuclear power with an uneasy relationship, would be cause for serious concern alone.

Of course, the ever increasing droughts and extreme temperatures (including >50C wet-bulb temperatures, which can kill healthy adults outright) in those same regions makes them a literal hotbed for social and political upheaval like the world has never seen.

You are simply deluded if you think everything is fine.

>The coming migrant crisis at the confluence of India, Pakistan and China, three nuclear power with an uneasy relationship, would be cause for serious concern alone.

This is what really keeps me up at night. Nevermind the direct effects of 4+ degrees of warming if we fail to stop it - we'll start WW3 long before the temperatures hit that.

So that's why the key here is strong international organisations. We need to co-operate both to have any chance of making the changes that need to be made to keep warming within survival bounds, and to keep discussions open so when conflicts do arise, they are less likely to result in war.

> A - anthropogenic - the human contribution is small, compared to natural sources

CO2 from burning fossil fuels and burning plants has a different isotope mix than does CO2 from other sources. We can use this to tell how much of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from that kind of burning. There aren't enough wildfires or other natural sources to account for more than a small fraction of it.

Hence, we can prove that most of that type CO2 comes from human sources. And that type account for most of the increase since pre-industrial times.

C: Irrelevant. It doesn't matter if this is unusual on a geological time scale. It can be catastrophic either way.

A: The enormous consensus based on available evidence contradicts you here in your implication that human contributions are irrelevant. Natural sources have also been balanced out by natural sinks. Humans are both destroying natural sinks and releasing more of our own. The issue is also not whether we "own" a majority of the emissions, it's about upsetting a delicate balance. Chaotic metastable systems do not necessarily need a big push in order to have a massive impact. Sensitivity to initial conditions is very high.

G & W: you're not expressing your criticism here. Global average temperatures are rising. What is you dispute with that?

Your last point: I'm not aware of alternative theory for the observed changes that fits available evidencr, while on the other hand there are plenty of research papers like the following: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/42/11770. Whether or not there is smoking-gun level proof, available evidence fits the theory.

One third of the CO2 in the atmosphere is man made. It's not small. 66% times 1.5 is 100% meaning humans have added 50% CO2 on top of natural CO2 in the atmosphere.

One of the worst names ever coined is "global warming". To the layman, it simply means things getting hotter, and that's not what it means at all.

Earth's climate system is an energy matrix, a complex interoperation between co-operating systems, all driven by energy, all "seeking" lower energy states at the expense of other systems. Some of that energy does indeed go into warming (melting ice, sea temperature rise, ...) but a huge chunk just makes these energetic systems more energetic because of a lack of suitable energy sink.

Put a glass beaker full of water on a lab-stirrer, and you're going to get the occasional splash, but replace the 9v battery-driven motor with a Harley Davidson (you know, to force way more energy into the system) and you're going to get a whole lot more splashes. Splashes are bad.

Forcing energy into immense, complex, non-linear dynamical chaotic systems that literally govern our existence on this planet is not a good idea if you want to continue to exist on this planet. All you're doing with "global warming" is giving these systems far more phase-space to explore, and we just don't have the knowledge or experience to predict what some of the solutions those systems can explore will do.

I still feel it ought to have been christened "energy death of the planet" or similar (akin to the heat-death of the universe". Something that the tabloids could grab hold of and point out disasters as we creep, seemingly inexorably, towards a tipping point we may not recover well from.

[sigh]

> that's not what it means at all

That's exactly what it used to mean. But then it wasn't warming and they had to revisit.

It's a little bit more complicated than that. The primary "extreme weather" predictions I remember from 20 years ago was more hurricanes. We do seem to observe and name more hurricanes (in part, at least, due to much better weather equipment), but fewer hurricanes have made landfall in the United States. https://www.statista.com/statistics/621238/number-of-hurrica.... Other extreme weather statistics are similar - we spend a lot of time talking about polar vortexes (vertices?), but many of the cold records are from back in the 1930s. I don't doubt that the world's temperature is rising, but I continue to view the extreme weather predictions as fairly speculative and a distraction from the core issues - temperature rising, ice melting, sea level rising, with unpredictable effects. If you had some more academic (and less click-funded) sources to share related to data demonstrating the extreme weather hypothesis, I'd be interested in taking a look.

This isn't quite what you said, as your comment spoke about the energy industry specifically, but I decided to see if there was any data on people's beliefs about climate change by state. I found this interesting site from a program on Climate Change Communication from Yale, and it allows you to view the results on various questions related to climate change by state. My conclusion from clicking through a few of these is that Texas is close to the national average in climate change beliefs.

Some numbers: Global warming happening 71% (-1 from Avg), Caused by humans 56% (-1 from Avg), Support regulating CO2 72% (-3 from Avg), Expand offshore drilling 57% (+5 from Avg)

https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...

Due to the broken nature of American politics; what Texans believe on any single issue doesn't really matter unless Texans can organize better than the vested interests paying for climate change denial in policy.

Missed one point:

There has not been increase in cold weather events in Texas. Rather, the shift to energy producing technologies that are more susceptible to going offline in cold weather is why Texas is now going offline more often.

Back when people burned coal for electricity, it was a lot dirtier but did not suffer the issue of windmills freezing. Attempts to politicize this issue and hijack it for whatever crusade you are waging means that the Texas grid wont be made more reliable, and this is going to be a growing problem in other areas that are beginning to rely more on energy sources that are subject to being disrupted by cold weather.

Does this storm constitute an unusual weather pattern? If I do a check for record lows in Houston, none of them are 2021.

And we set records all the time. Many of them set in the 1800’s when climate change wasn’t an issue. Setting a record is hardly proof.

The point wasn't missed, because the predicate of global warming is not in question here.

> And where else in the USA has been a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism, than Texas

This is a ridiculous statement.

It's factually true - unless you believe the phenomenon of climate change denialism itself does not exist.

Follow the money. Who funds it? Primarily Houston headquartered oil and gas companies. Or if not headquartered in Houston, with very significant operations in texas and its oil industry.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-money-funds-...

What are you hoping to prove with this? In terms of what they are actually doing, it sounds like they're installing a lot of renewable energy. Indeed, more than most places. Do you also expect the Texas government to bust into oil and gas company headquarters and force them to say they believe in global warming?

What does it matter who believes what if the real things that are actually happening are that they build a lot of renewable energy sources?

> Do you also expect the Texas government to bust into oil and gas company headquarters and force them to say they believe in global warming?

Expect them to? No. Wish for it? Yeah, definitely. And then hold them accountable for the decades of gaslighting while they knew that was the case. That’s kind of the role of a government. How is GameStop stock more controversial than climate change denial? GameStop is ephemeral, climate change is existential.

The easy thing is to say “bankrupt the fuckers, kill the orgs!” and I feel that. I want to see them suffer for the path they’ve put the whole planet on. The responsible societal thing to do though is probably to mandate renewables, stop petro subsidies, and make them eat the cost for the switch if they (the orgs) want to stay alive. We have the evidence; it’s public knowledge now even if not widely disseminated.

They’re adding renewables, but not fast enough because there is still profit to be made in petro even though it fucks us further. That has to stop ASAP. Governments are the place where that happens.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26189551

> What does it matter who believes what if the real things that are actually happening are that they build a lot of renewable energy sources?

It matters A LOT. The anti-climate change propaganda is one of the biggest roadblocks to meaningful climate action. In a normal world, the population of the US would have risen up instantly if their president had withdrawn from climate accords or forced the EPA not to talk about global warming. These are lunatic acts, much crazier than the than Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

Sure, it's nice that they're planting a few wind farms. But that is a drop in the bucket compared to the real changes required if we are to stop global warming from completely dooming our civilization. Building wind-farms would have been a solution if it had started 40 years ago.

Today, the only option is to stop most non-renewable plants, and most factories that rely on their power. We need to produce a fraction of the goods we are producing today (not talking about the US specifically, this is a global problem), with all the human costs that will entail. I'm not holding my breath for any of it.

In a normal world, the population of the US would have risen up instantly if their president had signed such a do nothing deal like the climate accords which fails to even get us within spitting distance of dealing with the issue.

The solution wasn't building wind farms, it was finishing the nuclear build up like they had originally planed, just like how France did. But that was killed by self proclaimed environmentalists of that era.

Quite possibly, though there are/were good reasons to be wary of nuclear energy as well. I do personally believe that the risks from global warming outweigh those from nuclear plants at this time, but I don't think this was clear at all 50 years ago.

> Do you also expect the Texas government to bust into oil and gas company headquarters and force them to say they believe in global warming?

Actually, yes, I would be perfectly happy if the oil industry was not run on full 'free market' capitalist principles, and they acknowledged climate change is real.

An article contrasting the Alberta and Norwegian oil industries.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/c...

A more thoughtful question to ask:

If oil and gas companies are so opposed to renewables and have the money to work against them, how did Texas - which is where those companies should have the most control - become the #1 producer of wind power and the #2 producer of solar?

What are the possible explanations?

It's profitable.

Both in dollars and cents and in PR value being able to push back against environmentalists and climate change advocates. But you can be assured, global climate be damned, no drop of oil or natural gas will be left in the ground until it becomes unprofitable or unless regulatory changes force the issue.

It is not rocket science. If you are in the business of selling oil and gas, you ideally consume as little of it as possible. Solar and wind are cheaper sources of energy but they aren't easily transported. So Texas is using solar/wind to both cut costs and allow them to export more of their petrochemicals.

The most obvious answer is oil&gas despite its best efforts isn’t all that powerful.

I mean, everyone loves the stories of how car companies single handedly ripped up all the street car tracks but apparently they couldn’t stop Tesla from eating their lunch despite teetering on the brink of insolvency for years.

Throwing one's weight around using capital is a lot easier than innovating.

Texas is big?

Well, they do keep electing climate change deniers, which given the political power of Texas does have a big influence on environmental policy in the US as a whole..

This is like the left-wing version of "Hurricane Katrina was a punishment for homosexuality". A mix of generalization, moralizing, and I-told-you-so. Just nasty.

No - predictions are different than post-dictions blaming the people you already didn't like.

Yes, and this is the latter.

climate science is neither "left" nor "right" - If you believe that the IPCC and its various participants' scientific findings is some sort of vast left wing conspiracy, you probably live in an alternate-reality echo chamber.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...

If we can’t trust the WHO to give us honest answers about the sources and dangers of a pandemic virus, I don’t see why we’d default to trusting a similarly structured organization to give us honest answers about climate change research.

> honest answers about the sources and dangers of a pandemic virus

The accuracy of answers about the source of a virus was very much dependent on the level of openness and cooperation from the jurisdiction in which the virus originated. Climate change, on the other hand, does not have a single geographical source, and therefore the IPCC is less limited in the information available to it.

Similarly, I suspect that the WHO's early mistakes or inaccuracies in assessing the dangers of the virus were due to the fact that most of the early cases and mortality data were being collected in a single jurisdiction.

WHO deliberately chooses to kowtow to China and exclude Taiwan, the country with one of the best records on Covid-19 and with the experience and knowledge to fight it successfully. At some point sacrificing public health to accommodate a genocidal regime becomes a matter of institutional failure. Don't waste your breath making excuses for them. The WHO's "inaccuracies" go far beyond believing CCP propaganda.

The WHO is part of the UN. The UN doesn't recognize Taiwan. It's as simple as that.

You're experiencing the 'criticising the CCP is forbidden' backlash with these downvotes, it's one of the HN voting system failures.

But you've hit on a problem: can we maintain global cooperative institutions in the face of an expansionist hegemonic power like China? I don't think we can, because anything controversial and it gets ripped apart.

The US and allied countries have their own national organizations, but even the EU is compromised on a number of issues, such as creeping fascism (Poland and Hungary) and the inability to take action against member states, or even coordinate in a pandemic. Even NATO is compromised by expansion to include such countries, and Turkey as well. So I'm questioning how useful large group multi-lateralism is for an organization like the WHO.

No he isn't. He is experiencing the "people will downvote dumb criticisms of climate science". The WHO's response to the pandemic is not in any way evidence that the IPCC is untrustworthy after decades of thorough study of climate change. That's the reason for downvotes, not because he criticized the CCP.

I'm sorry, he doesn't mention climate or the IPCC?

Edit: And I just scanned the last week of posts and can't see mention of anything like that. You're confusing with user koolba.

Large multinational organizations can have significant value, as NATO and the UN have shown in the past. But once the "regulatory capture" effect happens and the UN becomes a platform for genocidal dictatorships to spew anti-Semitic propaganda, we should discard that organization in favor of something better (even if "better" hypothetically had to be "nothing"). A truly global organization is, as you've explained, probably impossible because the bullies won't participate in a fair organization. But large regional organizations can still have value, as long as we recognize their limits and don't look to them for leadership that they can't adequately provide.

What we have seen with the WHO, and what you can also expect from the IPCC, is a minimization of the problem. The incentives for such organization are always to downplay the size of the risk, to present optimistic estimates as worse-case scenarios.

So yes, most likely the IPCC is wrong or lying to some extent: global warming is almost certainly a much bigger problem than their official estimates.

> So yes, most likely the IPCC is wrong or lying to some extent: global warming is almost certainly a much bigger problem than their official estimates.

If official, peer-reviewed reports from international agencies are "wrong or lying," what better sources would you recommend?

Or more importantly..

If they're wrong, why aren't any of the groups involved catching these errors and correcting them?

If they're lying, you're suggesting a multi-decade, international conspiracy spanning thousands of people that threatens humanity as a whole where the watchdogs are either complicit or not competent enough to catch. I hope you have something to back that up.

I'm not claiming some huge conspiracy. I'm just claiming that, just like the WHO initially downplayed the risks of Covid19, so too I expect the IPCC is likely downplaying to some extent the risks from global warming.

This doesn't require some complex conspiracy, just some natural amount of wanting to tell people (heads of state) what they want to hear, some amount of funding and promoting less alarmist research, some amount of feeling like they have a duty to avoid extreme rhetoric etc.

I hope it's clear, I'm not claiming that I know all this for a fact. But it is how international organizations seem to operate in general. You would definitely not expect a major international inter-governmental organization to present a position that would be called extreme position, even if that extreme position may be right.

Didn't the who correct those mistakes within weeks?

I didn't say it was left or right. I was responding to your comment, which was petty partisanship.

Anyway, your attitude is unscientific. If there were no unusual weather events for 5 years, it wouldn't "prove climate change wrong". By the same token, it's moronic to say "look, climate change!" every time there's an unusual weather event.

Plot the number of 100 year records being broken per year, for extreme heat or extreme cold, on a chart for the past 20 years and then tell me there isn't something unusual going on in the recent climate.

It's a scientific fact that many places in the world are now seeing weather extremes that have literally not been recorded in their past 100 years of data, on a rapidly increasing basis.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53140069

https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/06/1066882

but I'm sure that you'll be happy to tell me that the United Nations and the BBC are both extreme left-wing partisans.

Is it true we're having an anomalous number of extreme cold events? All of your links are about an anomalous number of extreme heating events.

You took my first response as "climate change is left-wing". You took my second response as "statistics aren't real". I never said either of those things.

I think pointing to a weather event and saying "look climate change!" is dumb. It's not statistics. No matter how steep your line is, it doesn't prove "X weather event would not have occurred if not for global warming".

All I responded to was this comment which was nasty and added nothing to your post:

> And where else in the USA has been a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism, than Texas?

Yes you told us, and we didn't listen. You are so right, and we are such fools. We are so sorry.

I understand that global warming models predict more extreme events both hot and cold. However, at some point, empiricists will have to admit that global warming models will have no statistical power.

To that end, what evidence of weather patterns would you have to see to believe less in the global warming model? Would years of "less extreme event days" make you believe in the global warming model any less?

I would need to see average global surface temperature being uncoupled from atmospheric CO2 levels, sustained over a long period of time. Given that we have hundreds of thousands of years of climate records [0], that seems like a tall order.

One cold spell does not disprove global warming. While Dallas might be experiencing abnormally low temps, Jacksonville's seeing uncharacteristic highs (86F today).

[0] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming/temperature-change

Global warming models have no statistical power? I'm sure this well documented increase in atmospheric co2 will have no effect, then.

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

If you spend 30 seconds googling you'll see that communities in the high Canadian arctic, alaska and greenland have been setting new temperature records on a regular basis. And the subsidence and melt of coastal permafrost in some areas is increasing at a rate that will soon look like a hockey stick curve on a chart.

> To that end, what evidence of weather patterns would you have to see to believe less in the global warming model?

Certainly a decreasing average global temperature would do it. However, we are seeing a consistent upward trend in the global average[1] even if some regions have lower than normal temperatures.

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

> EXACTLY what was predicted 15-20 years ago

a nitpick, but an important point:

this is 100% not what was being said 20 years ago - thats why its called global warming and not the destruction of global weather patterns. thats also why all the sources you linked are less than two years old.

the initial alarmism really shot itself in the foot by making specific predictions (ice caps melting, sea levels rising). we still arent even remotely close to being able to model the global weather system today. it really delegitimized the movement and slowed humanities reaction. they had to do this awful, awful position change and say "well, we were 100% wrong about all the predicitons we made but we're still right!" it helps explain how we ended up the way we are.

> the initial alarmism really shot itself in the foot by making specific predictions (ice caps melting, sea levels rising)

Checks notes, checks on venice and miami watches day after tomorrow, looks at Texas from hurricanes to ice

Which of the predictions are looking like they're not progressing?

For example, while we get tons of “extreme weather events” nobody was talking about 20-30 years ago, sea level rise that was announced very loudly and widely, is actually going to be relatively minor: in IPCC report, even in their most catastrophic RCP8.5 scenario, they scientific consensus is that the sea level are highly unlikely to rise by more than a meter by 2100; that’s less than a difference between low and high tide.

You say that as if a meter will not have catastrophic impact on the world. Pacific island nation states, and sea level rise of a meter + a major cyclone hitting Bangladesh could set an all time casualty record for a single weather disaster. Even if it's half a meter average rise and not a full meter.

It could, if people just sit on their thumbs and do nothing about the issue. However, this is relatively easy problem to solve from engineering perspective: the Dutch have successfully implemented solutions hundreds of years ago already, before most of modern technology had been invented.

Really, out of all ways the climate change will negatively impact the world, sea level rise in the amount we are actually going to observe it is really rather minor problem.

The Dutch wouldn't still be there if they were in a Karst region.

In my opinion naming it global warming was the biggest mistake. People hear it‘s getting hotter, don‘t see this effect and „don‘t believe in it“. Events like this is another point why people don‘t believe in global warming, they see very cold weather outside where this is very untypical and say global warming is bullshit.

It should have only been named climate change, drastic wheather change or something incorporating your naming of shifting wheather patterns.

Nobody had a problem with it being "global warming" until the mid 90s when political interests made a culture war point. They would have done so regardless of how accurately the phrase described the phenomenon.

But the whole point of the article is that these events are not especially unusual, that they have happened quite a few times before, including several times in the last decade alone.

One problem with the Texas outages is everyone seems to be trying to cast it in terms of pre-existing viewpoints on environmentalism. None of them really fit. Clearly, the Texas outages weren't really caused by wind farms and attempts to tie them to that require quite indirect arguments of the form, "if they hadn't built wind farms they'd have built more gas plants instead". There might be something in that line of argument if developed further, e.g. if it's easier to 'winterize' gas plants than wind farms. But it's not there yet.

At the same time, trying to tie this to CO2 increases is also reaching. People who keep ignoring the poor track record of climatology look increasingly like the true "climate deniers". Here's just one fairly typical example of a prediction, an article from 2011 by a professor of atmospheric sciences:

https://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Texas-is-vulne...

"It is a particularly appropriate read as we suffer through the hellish summer of 2011. While it is unknown exactly how much human activities are contributing to this summer's unpleasant weather, one lesson from the book is clear: Get used to it. The weather of the 21st century will be very much like the hot and dry weather of 2011."

And from the article we're reading now:

"The earliest report I could find was from the 2011 winter event in Texas[14]. A very strong cold front hit Texas (and other parts of the south central US) bringing temperatures below freezing for over 4 days and winds over 30 MPH."

Maybe the difficulty the US has in funding winterization of the power grid is because professors keep telling them the future will be really hot and really dry all the time? Obviously if you're generous enough to these sorts of predictions then you can find ways to argue they're "nearly right", but it's too often taken to an extreme that leads to unfalsifiability. No matter what happens to the weather, it's always because of CO2.

Their last major event was 2011 for Texas so they aren't becoming more common. They did act on many recommendations from that event but no one would have predicted a storm of that magnitude. Similar to how the some Southern states suffered a once in 100 if not 1000 year flood in 2009 that has not reoccurred though similar declarations it was going to be common. Lets not even get into the doom and gloom after Katrina followed by the absolute lack of any storms for years.

As in, FUD only ends up defeating arguments because every dire prediction is bound to fail. You get real change by showing people what the benefits are to every day life not based on some biblical level type hysteria.

Texas is one of the leaders in wind and solar so I am not sure where you are coming from other than succumbing to the unfortunately common parroting of facts that don't apply to the situation.

So summary, Texas and the nation need to have a common and joined grid management program but for reasons of providing stability and growth. Don't lead off with telling people they have to have it because of climate change as too many will tune you out and for good reason, the conversation tends to hysterics and theater more than reality.

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