https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/story/Article/2...
I think the Overton window needs to shift soon to include the idea that widespread government intervention will be required to avoid 800 million climate refugees
I think the Overton window needs to shift soon to include the idea that widespread government intervention will be required to avoid 800 million climate refugees
Millions of people may have to adapt. Fortunately, people are good at that.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jul/31/why-you-need...
People can survive amazingly hot temperatures, as long as they can sweat - once the wet bulb temp gets far above 31c people are in trouble - the theoretical maximum is 35c.
We won't hit these wet bulb temps in places like the US or even much of Europe, but built up China, India etc are at risk of approaching these in our lifetimes, potentially far sooner.
> Concern often centres on the “threshold” or “critical” WBT for humans, the point at which a healthy person could survive for only six hours. This is usually considered to be 35C, approximately equivalent to an air temperature of 40C with a relative humidity of 75%. (At the UK’s 19 July peak temperature, relative humidity was approximately 25% and the wet-bulb temperature about 25C.)
(WBT is Wet Bulb Temperature)
Yes, I read that people have been living for 100s of years (pre-AC) through temps regularly hitting 46 degrees, but see also the response on wet-bulb temps and survivability. 46 degrees for 5 days straight without AC (as in, backup power is gone...) and I think we'll see some losses.
Europe regularly sees large deaths due to heat during summers already today, true mostly in elderly.
Make it a hundred, though, so I can defend it to my dependants better and you're on.
(I realize that even if I win, I lose, but whatever, I'm more interested in talking with someone who has significant hope, enough to put money on the line.)
In my opinion, this reduction in deaths is mostly due to the increasing ability of the developing world to better master their environment, enabled by technological advances powered largely by cheap energy from fossil fuels. If you have alternative explanations, I'm happy to hear it. But as the evidence stands, it would be more delusional to think climate change will cause rampant mass deaths.
[0]: https://library.wmo.int/viewer/57564/download?file=1267_Atla...
"to handle" or "to mitigate" it's way to late for "to avoid"
There are alternatives, there have always been alternatives. Better ones, cheaper ones.
0 - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
We're far away from getting to the point where we've gotten rid of fossil fuels at the expense of everything else. We've not actually really started to get rid of fossil fuels, yet.
If there are "better and cheaper" alternatives available right now, market forces will assure their dominance. The oil and gas lobby is not so omnipotent that millions of people looking out for their own best interests, despite the imperfection of their knowledge, will stick to an obviously inferior means of achieving their goals.
In other words, very few people will actually "maintain/increase fossil fuel usage just to stick it to their perceived enemies", as the GP said, if it hurts their pocketbooks to do so.
There is plenty of edvidence to the contrary. See e.g.
“Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt
“Tracing Big Oil’s PR war to delay action on climate change”
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/09/oil-companies...
“Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago”
“A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
As for the market argument, it is costly because all historical capacity is in fossil fuel based systems. This is a major cost advantage to fossil fuel based solutions. Waiting for the market to adjust might be too little to late, climate change is path dependent, you can’t simply undo it.
The economic and political power of the oil and gas lobby is magnitudes larger than the economic and political power of the wind and solar lobby. We're talking about entrenched interests here.
Also, wind and solar didn't spent more than fifty years spreading misinformation and denialism about an existential threat to our global human civilization, framing and defaming credible scientists.
If there's ever an existential threat to our global human civilization through wind and solar and the wind and solar lobby is found to spread misinformation, framing and defaming credible scientists, I'm willing to revisit the topic.
Until then I'm not playing this game "both-sideism". There's a real and actual culprit here.
> If there are "better and cheaper" alternatives available right now, market forces will assure their dominance.
That's the "free market" fallacy. But we don't have a free market. We have have trillions of yearly subsidies for oil and gas[0], we've had it for decades. We spent trillions building up oil and gas infrastructure. To expect wind and solar to compete on such an uneven playing field where even the rules of the game are written by the fossil fuel lobby is ludicrous[1].
Oh, by the way. Power generation through wind and solar has been lower then all and any fossil fuels, for years[2]. So much for "the market will solve it".
[0] https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...
[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/oil-lobbyists-use-r...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
Yes, it's true that levelized cost is not giving the full picture. But that's not quite the point here. The point is to show that the "free market" is not the solution we're looking for and that waiting for the market to solve this will closely resemble Waiting for Godot.
So sure, that infrastructure needs to be built. But that was also the case for fossil fuels. Think of the massive infrastructure required to get gas to a power plant. Much of that infrastructure is subsidized, it's already there and thus any energy source trying to get into the market cannot just be slightly cheaper; the cost advantages of the established system is just to great.
So in a way, your statement supports my argument that the market will not able to fix this for us.
I predict that more human misery will be generated by efforts to counter climate change that are predicated upon such centralized authority, than that generated by the status quo. Having said that:
> The economic and political power of the oil and gas lobby is magnitudes larger than the economic and political power of the wind and solar lobby. We're talking about entrenched interests here.
No arguments there from me, except I would like to add that the degree of entrenchment reflects how much modern society depends on oil and gas.
> If there's ever an existential threat to our global human civilization through wind and solar
You're presupposing that oil and gas is an existential threat to global human civilization. Evidence points the other way around, that humanity flourished more than ever with the usage of fossil fuels.
> We have have trillions of yearly subsidies for oil and gas[0], we've had it for decades.
$7T of subsidies around the world according to your source (including "implicit" subsidies; direct subsidies of $1.3T), out of a global GDP of ~$96T; a subsidy of around 7.3% for an energy source that comprises over 80% of the world's consumption[0]. I'd say that sounds like a good deal. I'm sure if and when wind and solar get to that level, they will have similarly vast subsidies behind them.
> where even the rules of the game are written by the fossil fuel lobby is ludicrous
I'm not sure if I understand the point of your source for this. It says that availing yourself of the legal system is somehow wrong, and accuses O&G of lobbying "with the goal of putting their profits and pay above all else" (some real objective stuff there).
Big Pharma spends over 3x the amount of money lobbying every year, and depending on the year there's 3-7 other industries that spend more than oil and gas. The largest producer of wind and solar energy in the country, NextEra Energy, spent $6.2M in lobbying in 2021, about the same as ExxonMobil or Chevron that year. Nobody likes lobbying, but it appears that everyone does it. It's not especially bad only when it comes from the O&G industry.
Out of S&P 500 companies, CEO pay for the energy industry is about the middle of the pack[1]. The "green & renewable energy" industry has a higher EBITDA to sales as well as a higher SG&A expense to sales ratios than either the "coal & related energy" industry or the various types of "oil/gas" industries[2]. So if anyone's putting "profit and pay above all else", it would appear it is the renewable energy execs.
> Power generation through wind and solar has been lower then all and any fossil fuels, for years
LCOE is useless without storage costs. LCOE with storage costs included is comparable between gas, wind, and solar[3]. It is currently infeasible to supply baseload power with purely wind and solar. Even the countries that have a plurality of their total electricity consumption come from wind and solar (like Denmark), they import a lot of electricity from neighbors with stable baseload sources.
If the all-in cost of providing electricity, including costs of intermittency and storage, to the grid is lower for wind and solar than all other sources, then good news: you can become a gazillionaire by taking advantage of that market failure.
[0]: https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021...
[1]: https://www.equilar.com/reports/101-equilar-associated-press...
[2]: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
[3]: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
> My most salient point is that proclaiming an "emergency" of an "existential threat" that requires centralized authority (held by decisionmakers who usually pay no cost for being wrong) is a playbook that's as old as history, and one that almost always resulted in great human toll.
We've known for more than 100 years that there might be an impact on our global climate from our use of fossil fuels. We've known for almost 50 years that there is an impact from our use of fossil fuels. After years of stalling and ignoring the ever stronger signals that something is amiss, the world came together in 2015 and agreed to limit the warming of the climate to 1.5°C.
Now in 2023 we've blown through that self-imposed limit.
The list of likely and dreadful consequences is long and known. I won't repeat them here. Many of them have grave consequences to our global society, some of them are very threatening to social stability. This will have dire consequences.
Up to now we've not really been acting. And we should, because with every passing day, the potential outcome slowly but surely slides more and more into the direction of global systemic collapse.
For me this is not a "climate crisis". It's a climate crisis, period.
They've been spreading false information for decades. I'm not sure there's ANY industry that has undercut competing industries to the extent that they have. This is especially damning considering the millions of gallons the oil industry has been responsible for dumping directly into the ocean. All this and they still get massive federal subsidies.
Worst I've seen solar and wind do is over-promise and support existing climate activists.
The solar and wind industries haven't even existed for as long as the oil and gas industries have been spreading misinformation. They're not even in the same league.
The ideologically-driven people are a minority. A very vocal minority, but a minority.
Most people just choose what's cheap, convenient, and gets the job done. We can put our fingers on the scale by shifting subsidies and taxes around.
If we can maintain the status quo with better technology, it will be adopted. It's just not there yet. Hence, we stick to what we have.
The liberal position on these societal problems is "take things away until the problem is fixed" which I find incredibly ironic, while the other's is "free market drives innovation when it's overwhelmingly necessary."
Why spend a penny on fission nuclear when renewables are cheaper, have shorter lead times by decades, and are vastly less financially risky?
High soil occupancy in competition with food crops and human activities
Cannot provide guaranteed baseline of supply without storage (more minerals)
Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive, there are many historic examples of safe reactors built for very reasonable costs. (French and earlier American reactors especially.)
Unfortunately there seems to be zero appetite to discuss let alone fix the killing of nuclear power though an absolutely crazy regulatory framework.
I'm a global warming believer, but I'm starting to question whether the planet warming won't actually be posivite for a lot of first world economies. More solar power, less money spent on heating, less dependent on foreign resources etc etc etc. Meanwhile, poor countries will take the brunt of the disasters due to geography and lack of own resources.
If the rich turn out richer and the poor poorer due to man-made global warming, I do believe we owe them help as a restitutive obligation.
Well this is a fun new twist on climate denial.
I have a hard time understanding how you can believe this when we've already seen incredible and costly damage in the US caused by climate change in just the last few years. Insurers are pulling out of Florida because they can't afford the increased risk and the entire insurance industry is at risk of catastrophic failure if extreme events keep getting more extreme [0].
> More solar power, less money spent on heating, less dependent on foreign resources etc etc etc.
What? Climate change means less predictable weather, not more sunny days; I think people in Texas would have a hard time buying your argument for "less spent on heating"; less dependent on foreign resources is another way of say "reduced global trade" which has been and continues to be a major part of our economy.
0. https://www.wsj.com/finance/insurance-catastrophe-reinsuranc...
From his Wikipedia article:
> Although Luntz later tried to distance himself from the Bush administration policy, it was his idea that administration communications reframe global warming as climate change since "climate change" was thought to sound less severe.
The memo you are referring to happened well over 20 years later. The term was not created by Frank Luntz.
>In the 1980s, the terms global warming and climate change became more common. Though the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably,[24] scientifically, global warming refers only to increased surface warming, while climate change describes the totality of changes to Earth's climate system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Terminology
https://web.archive.org/web/20100809221926/http://www.nasa.g...
TBF I'm growing more and more apathetic to this whole "economy" thing. Unbounded growth is what led us to the present problem in the first place. What about we try to optimize for quality of life instead of quantity of made-up number?
That's still economic growth. I don't know about you, but I would like there to be treatments for medical issues that aren't curable yet. I would also like to get improvements in life in general like better insulation, better water etc. The sum of all of that improvements is economic growth though.
Just look at the mean salary in US vs western EU, but compare healthcare, access to education, public transport. EU still has a very long way to go, but I think it's proof enough that "line go up" is very different from (even if correlated to) actual quality of life.
Aren't solar cells led efficient at higher temperatures?
But the rest of your point does stand. Europe is pretty far north, as is Russia and Canada and even the northern parts of the US.
Solar systems are not an exception.
It’s funny how something considered racist is now considered necessary now that the migrants are being dumped in their front yards.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/politics/biden-administration...
I also worry that hardening the infrastructure in first world countries is going to be very expensive. Especially if the developing countries are so badly affected that they can't provide the normal supplies of food, minerals, ores, etc.
It's not about whether it will be good or bad to live in a warmer climate. Maybe it would be better. But the rate of change is the danger. If we were slowly warming over the course of millenia, it'd be a different story. But 2C of warming over less than 100 years is something the planet has never seen before, and that we are ill equipped to deal with.
Which is why you need to posit a causal mechanism.
To say current climate models are overly narrowing the problem domain as to exclude purely natural factors (assuming humanity is not part of nature, but that’s an ontological discussion) you would need to provide an alternative one which can predict past and future pathways.
It would also need to be at least as good and not rely on improbable assumptions… which is one reason climate scientists favor the anthropogenic models.
Anyway, it's very likely that the younger dryas had a much sharper shift in temperature.
We have precise records from antarctic core samples that can say with near absolute certainty what our climate looked like for hundreds of thousands of years. I won't argue any further about basic chemistry.
>very likely that the younger dryas had a much sharper shift in temperature.
...which was a catastrophic event for humanity that nearly wiped us out as a species. So yeah, point taken.
But furthermore, what exactly do you have to gain here by claiming that the sky isn't blue? That is the number one thing that confuses me about this idiocy. The earth is warming, and that will cause massive problems for society. It's a cut and dry fact of reality, regardless of your opinions.
Cool story, bro.
The antarctic ice cores contain valuable information, but they do definitely not tell a complete story of neither temperatures, nor anything else across the whole globe on a granular time scale.
> ...which was a catastrophic event for humanity, and led to the winnowing of our population to less than 100,000 individuals. So yeah, point taken.
Yes, it wasn't fun. But then again people seemed to die when temperatures went very quickly down, and thrive very well when they shortly after increased again.
Anyway, you just wrote that such temperature shifts had never happened before. And now you say that it did naturally, not so long ago.
What I've got to gain on calling out bad apocalyptic propaganda? I might just be able to avoid the cure for 2C temperature increase, which looks like it may very well make life completely miserable for almost everyone.
As they say, the cure for climate change is the disease it claims it's fighting.
Explicitly what's wrong with listening to Joe Rogan ?
Plenty of really cool guests on there
Ehh, he's not particularly awful himself. I used to be a fan long ago, before the slide. It's just that his show now serves as the entry way to the crazy funnel of Jones, Peterson, Tate, et. al. for impressionable young men, which then leads to things like climate change denial and other (worse) conspiracy theories taking root.
Mostly it's just an indicator of poor critical thinking skills than anything else. Kind of like how it's been shown that the single most reliable indicator someone will believe in a given conspiracy theory is whether or not they believe in any others, even completely unrelated ones.
If you care more about the price of energy than the price of bread, sure.
Like, increased heat is already causing rails to heat up, forcing railroad delays[1], which will eventually translate into more expensive shipping for everything. And if we start getting Wet Bulb 95 conditions[2] then an afternoon power outage in any American city will lead to a million dead (the homeless will die either way in these conditions).
[1] https://ggwash.org/view/90938/summer-heat-means-longer-amtra...
[2] https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/3151/too-h....
This is complete speculation. And the annual variation in temperature of ~50 degrees C many places on earth, does not really support it.
Ummm, hello? so "most anomalously hot month ever" does not suggest a change in the underlying system??
Would you predict that handrails in Arizona now can give 3rd degree burns? https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/health/arizona-heat-burns-er/...
Because I remember conversations like this when I was growing up:
"Mommy, can I go to the playground?" "No, Johnny, the slide will fry your ass"
"equilibrium so precarious that a couple degrees in mean temperature change" does not really mesh very well with having annual (and even daily) variation much larger.
If you never experienced a hot slide as a kid, maybe you were just coddled? Lots of the modern so-called environmentalism is driven by people having ridiculously little first hand experience with nature or even being outdoors.
Global warming does not mean we get more solar power. It means we trap more of the Sun's energy in our atmosphere. Solar panels are not going to be getting more light.