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77% of Top Climate Scientists Think 2.5°C of Warming Is Coming—And They're Horrified
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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There is no ceiling. It might go up 6 or 7C. The people who have the power to change things do not give a shit if the rest of us die. They don't care, and they won't change anything. That's the world we live in.
4C is basically Mad Max breakdown of society. Problem is self-correcting after that.
If there are survivors, they will be the dicks. Nature is heartless and unforgiving. It is truly survival of the fittest.
They (selfishly) believe that allowing the problem to flourish is what will get us to solve it.
They're not wrong. There's just way better, more humane approaches.
So you're mostly right. Because they know they have the wealth to weather the discomfort in comfort. But it is accurate that humans historically are fucking aces at reacting and kinda piss poor at proacting.
Yes, they are wrong. Because we don't know if there are positive feedback loops that will take us beyond survivable temperatures once we've crossed an invisible line.
Even the ultra-rich won't survive +5C because the entire concept of "wealth" falls apart when society does.
Oh, you’re hot? Return to work. Our buildings are kept cool for your convenience! 😈
That’s the next play
Not really. Economies started to slow down and crash when warming gets over 2°C and CO2 production crashes with it.
Finally some good news on the climate. Our ability to fuck the Earth will mostly go away when our civilization collapses. We might even get a second Genghis Khan cooling when everyone dies.
There is a problem of lag. By the time temperatures are high enough to force the economy to stop, the amount of CO2 will be sufficient to continue pushing the temperature up considerably.
The problem is that feedback loops start to kick in above 2°C so it doesn't matter if the economy crashes.
In fact, in some cases that makes things even worse. One example is that without smokestacks and ships pumping out sulfur dioxide the albedo of the atmosphere will rapidly drop, which might cause immediate and rapid warming over a period of only a few years.
We could be pushed past 2.5°C or even 3°C without industrial forces contributing at all.
Source? (The past tense make me think you're quoting a paper)
There isn't one definitive paper I can give. They're are of course also papers claiming the opposite.
I've seen multiple articles about this. Less yield from staple crops, productivity loss with heatwaves, storm damage. There are a bunch of papers too, usually about a specific region. But roughly above 2°C, the hurt really begins with the cost to the economy exceeding almost every country's growth. Exact numbers differ per article.
Too bad, I'll have to hunt around myself. Simulation is always a bit vulnerable to assumptions when human behavior is involved, but it's definitely worth trying to model things.
If that's true, the political landscape is going to become starkly different. We expect growth right now; it's used as the yardstick of economic success. Obviously past civilisations didn't, and we could go back, even peacefully for all I know, but it would be uncharted territory post-industrialisation.
I kind of suspect climate adaptation produces more CO2 than other forms of activity, because it would be construction heavy. I wonder if that's factored it. Actually, I wonder what the adaptation assumptions are in general.
I mean they might care when billions of people try migrating in to more northern countries.
As a citizen of one of those "more Northern countries", that is one of the things that concerns me.
Same. England for me, but I think it’ll bother the people in power who abhor people migrating and also deny climate change or at the least taking adequate action to mitigate the effects / affects (which is it).
Edit: The interweb says its effect.
Well, renewables seem to be saving our undeserving asses, just by virtue of finally getting cheap.
Yes and no. Renewables are now cheaper than other forms of energy but cost isn’t the only issue.
There are practical limits on how many renewables projects we can build and integrate at a time. We’re not even remotely close to building them fast enough to save anything. We can’t even build them fast enough to keep up with the ever increasing demand energy.
Nuclear is expensive as fuck but we need to be building more of it as well as renewables because we can’t build enough renewables fast enough to avert the catastrophe, and that’s about the only other tech we have that can generate energy in the massive quantities needed without significant greenhouse gas emissions.
I don't think that's quite true. Where I live it has expanded from nothing to a major power source in just a few years. We'll need grid storage of some kind to kick fossil fuels completely, but that seems surmountable. Worst case scenario we build pumped air and just eat some round trip losses.
Nuclear plants take many years to get off the ground, so I'm not sure that's actually an easier solution. Once they're up and running at scale they're actually really cheap per unit production, so I would have agreed with you a decade ago, but as it is solar and wind have just pulled ahead.
Don’t take my word for it. Look up the numbers for yourself and do the math.
Search for “National GHG inventory {your country}”.
You find a report listing (among a bunch of other things) the amount of electricity generated each year by each method, and the emissions from each. Look up the total TWh of electricity produced by fossil fuels.
Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.
You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.
And that’s before you realize that only about 25% of fossil fuel combustion goes to electricity generation. As we start switching cars, homes, industries to electric we’re going to need 2x-3x more electricity generation.
Yes it takes a long time to bring on a new nuclear plant, roughly 7-9 years. If it was remotely realistic that we could build enough renewable power generation in that time to replace all fossil fuel generation then I’d agree we don’t need nuclear. But we’re not anywhere close to that.
It’s also helpful to note too just how much power a nuclear reactor generates. I live in Canada, our second smallest nuclear power plant in Pickering, generates almost 5 times more electricity annually than all of Canada’s solar farms combined. It will take 1000s or solar and wind farms covering and area larger than all of our major cities combined to replace fossil fuels…
…or about 7 nuclear power stations the same size as Pickering.
Sorry for the delay. I'm trying to get this the response it deserves, including gathering figures for Alberta, and some basic mathematical modeling.
I get ~2 decades when I extrapolate these numbers (from 2010-2023) to get to 2022 total primary energy usage for solar alone.
Energy usage will grow as well, and keeping that growth is ambitious, but it the future doesn't look that bleak too me if you look at it that way.
Did you use linear extrapolation, or something else? Because it's an actual paradigm shift happening now, I'd guess some kind of exponential or subexponential curve would be best. That would bring it even faster.
Extrapolation is tricky, and actually kind of weak, although I think it's appropriate here. This XKCD explains it really well, and I end up linking it all the damn time.
Exponential, it fits the curve very nicely. I can give you the python code if you want to. I got 2 decades for all energy usage, not only electricity, which is only one sixth of that.
I just took the numbers for the whole world, that's easier to find and in the end the only thing that matters.
The next few years are going to be interesting in my opinion. If we can make efuels cheaper than fossil fuels (look up Prometheus Fuels and Terraform Industries), we're going to jump even harder on solar and if production can keep up it will even grow faster.
Yes, code please! This sounds amazing.
E-fuels are a big deal, particularly for aviation. Non-electricity emissions are also something to watch. Hydrogen as a reducing agent seems like it can work very well as long as we do phase out fossil fuels like promised, so that solves steel production and similar. Calcination CO2 from concrete kilns is a very sticky wicket apparently, since they're extremely hot, heavy, and also need to rotate, which is challenging to combine with a good seal.
Cheap grid storage is a trillion-dollar question, but I suspect even if new technology doesn't materialise, pumped air with some losses can do the trick, again subject to proper phase-out of dirty power sources.
Here you go, you'll need numpy, scipy and matplotlib:
Here's what I get, global solar energy generated doubles every ~3.5 (1/0.284) years.
Thank you! That does look like a great fit.
So that's just solar, then? Long term, it does seem like the one that's the biggest deal, but right now there's also a lot of wind and hydro in the mix, so that's another point in favour of the assumptions here being conservative.
Yes, just solar. Hydro is bigger now, but it doesn't have the growing potential. Wind is currently also growing exponential, but I don't see it doing that for 20 more years. And even if it does, it doesn't really make a big difference since exponential + exponential is still exponential. If it grows as fast as solar that would mean we're just a few years ahead of the curve.
Alright, I can't seem to find useful numbers anywhere. We went from 50% coal to nil in just a few years, though, so big changes fast are possible. If you're in Ontario, you also have to consider your local renewables penetration was really high to start with, because of those waterfalls.
And yeah, like I said to the other person, exact growth pattern matters. It's probably exponential-ish right now, not linear, because it's just unambiguously cheaper to move to renewables, and so just getting ducks in order to do it is the bottleneck.
I respect you for doing your own research. People need to understand the scope of the problem if there’s going to be meaningful action.
The reason I’m passionate about nuclear in particular is that only about a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption is from electricity generation.
Most of the rest is burned in transportation, buildings, commercial and residential applications. We have the tech already to switch most of these things to electricity, and eliminate their direct emissions, but that’s not much of a win if we’re burning fossil fuels generate that electricity. Which is what happens today when electricity demand is increased, we can’t just turn up the output of a solar/wind farm in periods of high demand, but we can burn more natural gas.
Switching to electric everything (Car, trucks, ships, heat pumps, furnaces, etc) will increase electricity demand by 2-3x.
Even if renewables growth is held to the exponential-ish curve it’s been so far (doubtful) we still need 15+ years just to get to the point of replacing current global fossil fuel electricity production in the most optimistic case, never mind enough to handle 2-3x demand.
Massive quantities of new carbon free electricity generation is needed to “unlock” the electrification technologies we need to deploy if we going to avoid the worst of the disaster. If we wait until renewables alone get us there it’ll be too late.
The more carbon free energy we can build in the next 20-30 years, the more options we have. Even if we can reach a place of excess capacity, there are a lot of things like DAC and CCS, that we could use it for that today result in more emissions from electricity generation than they sequester.
That's fair. Thanks for the intelligent conversation.
I don't mean to diminish your point about the utility of nuclear, but (a) it's subject to the same ramping up/scaling issues as anything else*, and (b) you'd be surprised how quickly we could ramp up manufacturing of renewables if The Powers That Be actually wanted to.
(* Or worse: in particular, the absolute debacle that was Plant Vogtle 3 and 4 -- delivered years late and billions overbudget, while bankrupting Westinghouse in the process -- shows that we definitely did not maintain our nuclear expertise over the past several decades of building exactly fuck-all new plants.)
Not if, when
This why argued we might as well make it worse maybe we will suffer a bit less is unlikely change is coming in time anyways