When will global warming hit the landmark 1.5 ºC limit?
nature.com
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Africa and Asia are going to want the same standard of living as the west so carbon use is only going to go up. You don't intentionally cripple industries in your country in the face of global competition.
* A global carbon tax/cap/trading/limit system, with sanctions for any country that does not comply.
* A realistic risk that a global compulsory carbon cap/tax/trading system will be implemented, and that any carbon emissions tracking will be backdated - such that any extra emissions today might disadvantage your country in the future.
With neither of the above two, it is in every countries best interests to emit as much carbon as possible and use free/cheap carbon based energy to produce goods/food/whatever, while doing only a few highly visible environmental moves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC_BCz0pzMw
The economic incentives (in a sort of basic example) are in favor of fossil fuel plants. It takes too long for traditional nuclear plants to have a return.
Energy generation is sadly more complicated than I had hoped as a laymen. The sources have to compete on variable demand basis along with amortized costs over years.
Nuclear needs novel designs with better economic returns, or to be given assistance by government to be more competitive on this amortized basis.
It’s not, so here we are. Solar and wind do nothing for base load generation - except distract people from talking rationally about energy. I don’t know where people think all the power to charge electric cars is going to come from. And what transmission lines are going to carry the miracle of power either.
Feel free to pick a citation of your preference.
I think the trajectories for solar are so strong that we will stop talking about any lack of energy in one or two decades.
Case in point: Germany will build 13 GW of renewables this year, which offsets those last 4 GW of Nuclear which were switched off this year.
Last winter's reduced gas useage was a big positive, though. We really need to build on that.
Re-reading I didn't quite understand your original point. What do you mean big power plants have the exact same grid problem? The issue comes from the dispatchable nature. You can tell a combustion plant to set output to a particular level and it will do so. That's what you need to keep a grid stable. Wind/solar can't do that.
The goal is to avoid CO2 emissions at reasonable economic prices.
We won't need to focus on the hard things as long as we have sufficient easy things to get done first. For instance I don't think replacing jet fuel is something we should be prioritizing over bringing renewables to developing countries.
In general, no. For a few select usecases, yes - particularly highly insulated newbuilds which need very small systems (heat pumps miniaturize better than furnaces).
So it's completely possible that people are going to be willing to pay a price premium to ensure the demise of civilization and perhaps humanity.
We can discuss how and when but trajectories make it clear that it will be rather fast.
The possibly maybe eventual seizing of a couple of large and polluting meat farm / factories close by natural reserves won't have any effect on our ability to feed ourselves, at all. The problem is mostly about unsustainable ways to produce ungodly amounts of meat and milk, not 'farms' in general.
Woke has nothing to do with it.
This isn't true. A major goal of nitrogen cutting programs (started by the UN Environment Program) is to reduce climate change. You can read about it here:
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/four-reasons-why...
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/renewables-supplied-8... (Renewables supplied 88% of Portugal's electricity consumption in January)
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65557469 (Wind is main source of UK electricity for first time)
https://english.elpais.com/spain/2023-05-19/the-nine-hours-i... (The nine hours in which Spain made the 100% renewable dream a reality)
https://yle.fi/a/74-20032375 (Finnish nuclear plant throttles production as electricity price plunges) (My note: Estonia and Finland just signed an MOU to build an additional 1GW interconnector, "EstLink3", to import more clean energy from Finland but it won't be done until early 2030s)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35965186 (HN: Renewables supplied 65% of new US utility-scale generating capacity in Q1 2023)
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/renewables-cheapest-form... (Renewables: Cheapest form of power)
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost... (Lazard 2023 Levelized Cost Of Energy+)
https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf (Tesla Master Plan Part 3: Sustainable Energy for All of Earth)
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map?wind=false&solar=false (Live global electrical generation mix data)
Would be funny in a way if GreenPeace's actual accomplishment was delaying nuclear until it was too late.
So if you build a nuclear power plant you have less CO2 reduction than if you use the money for renewables. And no we don't need nuclear for baseload (hint renewables are baseload) and nuclear costs are not dominated by regulation any more than other power sources (Nuclear had >50 years, of development and government subsidies, that's 30 more than solar. And they still did not get onto an exponential cost reduction rate).
1. Seizing farms is not happening here, only a few farms have been sold by the owning farmers to the government.
2. The aim is to reduce nitrogen emissions, which have been accumulating in the ground.
The Netherlands is a net exporter, apparently, so we could stand to loose some food production.
But yes, Dutch farms are very efficient per area. We should export that expertise, and I think we actually do that too
The countries importing that food will now have to import from somewhere else. It doesn’t seem to be solving any climate problem, just shifting it elsewhere.
Maybe we should export the meat and ship the nitrogen with it and distribute the emissions instead of it all piling up here.
Literally the only reason not to reduce this excessive production is in order to protect established business interests and not rock the boat.
That doesn't meam buying out farms is necessarily the way to go. A lot can be done to reduce nitrate pollution by changing the feed for cattle, letting them roam outside as much as possible (the biggest polluters are factory farms woth thousands of animals), and other measures. But reducing the food production won't cause any problems; it will solve them.
EU farm subsidies shouldn't be rewarding production at any cost, but sustainable production and care for the environment.
That’s some rather disingenuous spin. Look, I’m not at all interested in the merits of the buyouts (maybe they’re entirely justified, I don’t care) but don’t misrepresent what’s going on there - buyouts are being taken under duress, “voluntary” today with statements that they will become mandatory if enough volun-told people don’t step up. Again, I literally don’t care about the propriety of the motivations - not my circus, not my monkeys. In the US we have something called eminent domain that amounts to the same thing: “move and take this bag of cash that we deem to be the market value, or we’ll come with brickbats and make you move.” Sometimes it’s abused, sometimes it’s justified, but it is what it is - the government taking (seizing) property. The fact that there’s some compensation makes it mostly equitable at least. As far as I understand the offers from the Dutch (funded by EU?) are above market. What can never be quantified and captured adequately in a buy-out price, of course, is the legacy of multi-generational ownership, sentiment, and the cost of occupational rehabilitation. Given the variable factors that would go into such things, it’s probably a fool’s errand to even try to calculate such things anyway.
Germany only had 5% nuclear, those have been replaced by renewables not by coal[1].
Those reactors were at the end of their lifespans anyways. Would nuclear have been great if we never stopped investing in the technology? Maybe, but as it stands now it's much cheaper and way way faster to install renewables than to install nuclear. (Nuclear power plants have lead times in decades and cost overruns in the billions.)
As for your farming claim. Netherlands is reducing milk and meat production, products that have been artificially propped up EU wide by subsidiaries. Meat and diary are one of the biggest contributors of greenhouse gasses and the major driving force behind deforestation (more than 80% in terms of area).
Nobody is going to starve without meat or diary, in fact you are much less likely to have certain diseases on a vegan diet. As for vitamin deficiencies, almost everybody is B12 and D deficient, including omnivores, so you should take vitamin supplements anyways. In fact most cows are B12 deficient too (not enough grass feed), so we inject them with vitamin boosters, so you might as well cut out the middleman.
1: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
They’re malicious.
This “ruling” class just does the theater to keep us in the, sometimes actual, dark.
As for the "naive pipe dreams" as you put it, I suppose being more pessimistic will soon lead you being labelled as a doomer and ignored. There is some material though, like Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. It's a depressing read.
The types you ask for are quite rare. If you accept human nature for what it is, you have to admit the possibility that claims are being exaggerated for political opportunism, fame, grant money, clicks ... and due to the huge cost of all proposed solutions, you'd want to double check. But if you ever double check any of this stuff you're doomed because environmental research is so riven with fraud. You end up a skeptic and be immediately excluded from politics, media, and academia. That's why you can't find many of that school of thought.
Cars get ever more fuel efficient, there's more investment in public transit than ever, Britain is interested in nuclearizing again, carbon offsets are widely purchased and many of our most energy hungry companies are finding ways to go to less or zero emissions.
Continuous carastrophization and disrespect for things people actually are working quite hard at doing, with implicit blame for "those other guys" to boot is how you make people try less.
Large efforts to transform the economy are quite difficult and take a long time. Transitioning away from fossil fuels entirely may be the single most complex international effort ever attempted.
You can say that all the bad guys at oil companies want more cars and more profits - but the reason they are so profitable is that energy consumption is directly related to quality of life, and until 10 or 20 years ago - fossil fuels were the way to get it.
Carbon offsets are largely a scam which could have a worse than useless effect when people believe they are actually real.
China is also investing heavily in reducing their dependency on fossil imports.
Sure they want to import less LNG because of increased cost and unstable geopolitics. But they are continuing to build huge amounts of new coal plants (which is largely domestically sourced).
... quick search [1]
[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
Modern temperature graphs are the output of models. The raw data isn't reported. This results in strange artifacts like record breaking temperatures that later become un-record breaking due to revision of historical values. In fact, the "recorded" temperature for every month in history changes every month:
https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...
NOAAGlobalTempv5 is a reconstructed dataset, meaning that the entire period of record is recalculated each month with new data. Based on those new calculations, the new historical data can bring about updates to previously reported values.
"A," whispered C, "I think I'm going fast." "How fast do you think you'll go, old man?" murmured A.
Whole thing here https://www.online-literature.com/stephen-leacock/literary-l...
Costly, but not insanely so. We spend more on quite a lot of things.
I cannot find that anywhere.
1. If you mean what 1.5 degrees is above, it's an anomaly, which is defined as the difference from an average computed over a somewhat arbitrary time window. I think this one is defined as 1850-1900, which is defined as "pre industrial" times. Britain and America might disagree about that classification, but this is how it's done.
2. If you mean what 1.5 degrees is below, the answer is nothing. A 1.5 degree limit is a goal designed to motivate politicians. It's not justified by any particular research. It is discussed in this interview in Der Spiegel with an IPCC climatologist [1]:
SPIEGEL: Why then have you, as one of the creators of the two-degree target, imposed such a magical limit to which all countries must slavishly adhere?
Schellnhuber: Politicians like to have clear targets, and a simple number is easier to handle than a complex temperature range. Besides, it was important to introduce a quantitative orientation in the first place, which the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change managed to elegantly wangle its way out of. And let's be honest: Even if we aim for the two-degree target, we'll end up somewhat higher. Whenever there's a speed limit, most drivers tend to go a little faster.
[...]
And of course the world won't end if temperatures go up by 2.01 degrees, let alone end suddenly. From today's scientific perspective, we could possibly live with a warming of two to three degrees
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-climatolog...
It's strange that we don't a value but a definition of a value.
I totally understand that we need a target to motivate politicians (sad but true).
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/g....
In my opinion the only way to slow down involves changing this growth oriented economy. I hope the EU conference "Beyond growth" is a start of a new movement.
But I'm not even sure ratios matter here. The earth is a sensitive system and the amount of change it takes to knock it out of wack is peculiar to it. I don't think you can just look at ratios of (absolute) temperatures.
How sensitive exactly is called equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). Climatologists compute it using global climate models and different climatology groups have different models, so they produce different numbers. Unfortunately the span is wide and has been getting wider with time as the simulations become more detailed, so confidence in this value has been falling. This isn't meant to happen and we're rarely directly told it is, actually we're told the opposite (that there is consensus on everything).
IPCC 2013 AR5: "No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence".
The most recent IPCC reports try to solve this by de-weighting the models that compute a high ECS i.e. a highly sensitive climate. They do this because they know the models must be wrong, as they conflict with observational data. The climate can't actually be all that sensitive to CO2 relative to what some climatologists try to claim. Unfortunately most climatological research does not do this and assumes all models are equally valid, so justs averages all of them. It's clearly not valid when error bars are so wide.
Also, this situation leads to the obvious question of why not simply compute ECS from observed data to begin with? Unfortunate answer: because if you do, you get a very low value indeed (see the work of Lewis). With ECS values that low CO2 stops being a significant environmental problem and is probably less important than other environmental problems like e.g. clean rivers, biodiversity. Climatologists don't like to do this and prefer to continue deriving values from models, even though they know that at least some of them cannot be correct.
tl;dr - what you state as fact is actually one of the most bitterly argued and controversial aspects of climate science. They have a way to express it numerically but nobody can agree what the right number is.
If the average temperature were above 40°C there, again, would be no life on this earth, because proteins start coagulating at about that temperature, weird vent hole creatures at the bottom of the oceans exempted.
A temperature change of 1.5°C is a big change in the context of temperatures that support life, let alone temperatures that allow humans to have the foods and outdoor fun that we’ve enjoyed this past few hundred thousand years.
Recent research suggests that if we stop emitting CO2 right now, the earth could continue warming to a peak of +10ºC over centuries. https://theclimatebrink.substack.com/p/warming-in-the-pipeli...
Obviously, it'd be great to limit the production of more CO2 going forward but I don't believe that everyone will collectively just give up.
Hitting the 2100 target 70 years early should be a wake up call to us all.
I see little evidence we will even attempt to cut our output and less that we will pay money to solve this issue before we have global disaster.
We are currently pumping every day 35 billion tons of carbon into an atmosphere that already has umpteen billions of tons of carbon that needs to be removed. We are never going to have machinery or technology that can remove carbon at the necessary scale. And not only is the volume an impossibility, the energy requirements are, too: it will require more energy to remove the carbon than it provided in the first place.
Best I can figure is we need to use fast-growing solar-powered organics. Replace corn with hemp, or grow algae, something like that, and sequester the mature product at an active subduction zone. Return it back into the deep earth.
Not to dismiss your paper, but a lot of people hearing your comment or reading the link will think "If going to zero won't help, let's not bother going to zero".
Have fun doing a running means, medians, and average year-over-year as your N-sample increases without regard to urban versus rural settings.
This eliminating of cluster bias because of this hyper-focusing of added but coalesced sampling has got to be nothing but challenging.