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Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

nytimes.com

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Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#51

Post by pokemongoaway »

rland wrote: post #12
fromthestart wrote: post #5

It's hard for me to take climate science seriously when 1. We know of the state of crisis that all other soft sciences are in (p-value abuse, publish or perish, institutional bias, replication crisis) [3] 2. We know that the earth has been substantially warmer in the past (with accompanyingly higher CO2 levels) and life thrived [2] 3. We know that we've been coming out of an ice age since long before the industrial r…

I'm just a layman, not a climate scientist, but I don't think the magnitude of the warming is our big issue. The issue is how quickly it's changing. Previous warming events happened very slowly; even the quickest ones occurred over thousands or tens of thousands of years. Ours is happening a couple orders of magnitude faster. We can look back, not at the geological record, but at the biological record. Large, fast sh…

Disgusting HN censorship as usual... We're not even allowed to reply to dead comments. And there is no excuse! Plenty of replies and nothing mean. HN is incredibly political - it is part of fake news and censorship since so many political pieces get to #1 and so many comments that don't break the rules get censored.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#52

Post by perfunctory »

mberning wrote: post #28

That is a pretty staggering amount of uncertainty. The US for example looks like it could be anywhere from 0.5% to 4.5%. That is something I would like to know with more certainty before undertaking any major public policies. From a simple triage standpoint it would seem that focusing on developing economies would hold the most promise. China and India are the likely leaders and given the population and current state…

I am not sure how you or I or US can focus on developing economies. We should focus on ourselves. Do our part first and negotiate with the rest of the world second.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#53

Post by hwillis »

fromthestart wrote: post #19
rland wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just a layman, not a climate scientist, but I don't think the magnitude of the warming is our big issue. The issue is how quickly it's changing. Previous warming events happened very slowly; even the quickest ones occurred over thousands or tens of thousands of years. Ours is happening a couple orders of magnitude faster. We can look back, not at the geological record, but at the biological record. Large, fast sh…

>Previous warming events happened very slowly; even the quickest ones occurred over thousands or tens of thousands of years Here's the problem - we don't actually know how quickly historic shifts have occurred, because our evidence comes from geologic and fossil records that simply do not have good resolution past 1Ma or so. Especially consider all the doomsday runaway scenarios like the clathrate gun and melting per…

> because our evidence comes from geologic and fossil records that simply do not have good resolution past 1Ma or so.

That's not true. For any point when oceanic life was common, their sediments give WAY better resolution than that.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#54

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

orblivion wrote: post #36
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #30

It seems to me we are truly and globally fucked: 1. There were just massive protests and riots in France (a relatively ecologically-aware country) due to an increase in the diesel tax of about 8 cents a liter meant to help wean the country off carbon. As a result of the riots, the tax was cancelled. 2. Current US administration is going 180 degrees in the other direction, i.e. doing everything it can to support coal.…

> 2. Current US administration is going 180 degrees in the other direction, i.e. doing everything it can to support coal. And apparently failing miserably in this effort: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/17/epa-cheers-...

I think this article helps me clarify a great point, mainly in these sentences: "The yearslong decline in U.S. emissions has been widely credited to the oil and gas boom. Power plants increasingly turned from coal to natural gas as innovations in extraction technology resulted in lower prices."

Lots of people talk about carbon emission reductions, but there is a much simpler way to think about it. There is a lot of carbon stored in the ground in the form of coal, natural gas and oil. What's the probability that a great deal of that carbon will be left there, permanently? The only way this will happen is if the production costs of non-emitting forms of energy (mainly solar, wind and nuclear) are fundamentally less than the extraction costs of the carbon forms in the ground. That may be possible for some high-cost carbon sources like coal, but the cost of production of some traditional oil sources (like Ghawar field) are ridiculously cheap, and tech like fracking has made other carbon sources like natural gas also cheaper.

Thus, the idea that reducing the production cost of natural gas is good for the environment is ridiculous. At the end of the day you've made another huge carbon source that much cheaper to extract. It may temporarily switch from some more polluting source, but at the end of the day all of that (now cheaper) gas is coming out of the ground and going into the air.

So instead of looking at emission rates, we should be asking "What is the probability that non-carbon-emitting forms of energy will eventually be made cheaper than carbon-emitting forms of energy". If you do the math on this one, even leaving a lot of uncertainty that tech on one side or the other will change the equation a bit, the only conclusion you can come to is that there are still huge amounts of carbon to be released. We're inevitably fucked.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#56

Post by paulmd »

sandworm101 wrote: post #38
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #30

It seems to me we are truly and globally fucked: 1. There were just massive protests and riots in France (a relatively ecologically-aware country) due to an increase in the diesel tax of about 8 cents a liter meant to help wean the country off carbon. As a result of the riots, the tax was cancelled. 2. Current US administration is going 180 degrees in the other direction, i.e. doing everything it can to support coal.…

The protests in france are a little more nuanced than a simple reaction to a new gas tax. They are in the context of a larger budget debate. There is an air in all western countries that the highest earners aren't being treated fairly. New policies that favor the rich have become a norm. The people of france are rebelling against that trend, as they have done dozens of times in France's past. The graph in this story…

Also, a reform of the school system means that fewer students will be going to college, so the students are out protesting that too.

Really these protests are an amalgamation of various groups that have almost nothing in common with each other other than being upset with the current government. And some of the goals are even opposing... presumably those students want something done about climate change, but they've joined pro-global-warming protests and are about to throw out a government trying to do something about climate change, just because they're upset about college.

They're probably correct that taxes should be going up on the wealthy. And it's also probably correct that taxing energy consumption is the wrong approach to take when you have industrial mega-polluters that can individually put out more carbon than whole countries. Maersk going carbon-neutral is the best climate news I've heard in a long time.

On the other hand, it's easy for the young to demand in front of the UN that something be done about climate change... it's harder when the changes you demand begin to impact you personally (says a person who has felt no real impact himself).

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#57

Post by rwcarlsen »

calvinbhai wrote: post #49
rwcarlsen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earth's atmosphere doesn't care about per-capita emissions - it just cares about absolute concentrations of greenhouse gases. If you want to solve the problem, largest (in absolute terms - not per capita) emitters need to cut back. Somewhere in the world one human emits more CO2 per capita than everyone else in the world. If they stop emitting, we haven't solved anything.

Earth's atmosphere doesn't care about geo-political boundaries either Countries won't solve it. If Americans can own up to the fact that per capita reduction in co2 emissions by them, will have a huge effect on co2 emissions in the world (because that means practices/regulations/technology that'll trickle down to largest polluting countries.), then it'll mean genuine difference. American media has no right to point f…

You have some good points. I personally think we still would have an unacceptably large problem w.r.t. climate change regardless of what happens in the USA. And the U.S.'s potential for emissions growth is just so much smaller than other large countries - and ones that have strong, independent governments to boot. The US is definitely a big player. I think it is still most useful to look at this in terms of emissions per geo-political entity rather than per capita since that will be the mechanism by which the problem is addressed (or not).

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#58

Post by rdm_blackhole »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #30

It seems to me we are truly and globally fucked: 1. There were just massive protests and riots in France (a relatively ecologically-aware country) due to an increase in the diesel tax of about 8 cents a liter meant to help wean the country off carbon. As a result of the riots, the tax was cancelled. 2. Current US administration is going 180 degrees in the other direction, i.e. doing everything it can to support coal.…

Protesters are not protesting just the taxes on fuel.

They protest the fact that taxing fuel is not the solution if you don't provide an alternative mode of transport.

Some people live far from the cities, Should they be the ones paying for everybody else and let the people living in the cities without a car not pay their fair share of the burden?

The problem with taxing the diesel is that you are telling people that they are criminals and should stop polluting, but at the same time, airline companies, and freight transporters don't pay the same taxes.

Rich/urban people don't care, they just rent an Uber or get a Lime and I guess that's ok, but lately, it seems that the only ones paying the price of carbon are the lower and middle classes.

Surely, you can understand that people are tired of paying when they can't even feed their families properly?

Should I remind you that there are 9 million people living close or below the poverty line in France? And half of those people are actually working or looking for work but can't find any, yet the government is asking those people with the least amount of disposable income to foot the bill for the entire country.

Sounds like a shitty deal to me.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#59

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #38
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #30

It seems to me we are truly and globally fucked: 1. There were just massive protests and riots in France (a relatively ecologically-aware country) due to an increase in the diesel tax of about 8 cents a liter meant to help wean the country off carbon. As a result of the riots, the tax was cancelled. 2. Current US administration is going 180 degrees in the other direction, i.e. doing everything it can to support coal.…

The protests in france are a little more nuanced than a simple reaction to a new gas tax. They are in the context of a larger budget debate. There is an air in all western countries that the highest earners aren't being treated fairly. New policies that favor the rich have become a norm. The people of france are rebelling against that trend, as they have done dozens of times in France's past. The graph in this story…

Nuanced or not is pretty irrelevant. At the end of the day there is extremely little tolerance for making carbon sources of energy more expensive. It's certainly not just France - in the US the gas tax was last raised 25 years ago, it is not indexed to inflation, and there is 0 substantive political discussion about raising that tax in the US.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#60

Post by fromthestart »

hwillis wrote: post #53
fromthestart wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Previous warming events happened very slowly; even the quickest ones occurred over thousands or tens of thousands of years Here's the problem - we don't actually know how quickly historic shifts have occurred, because our evidence comes from geologic and fossil records that simply do not have good resolution past 1Ma or so. Especially consider all the doomsday runaway scenarios like the clathrate gun and melting per…

> because our evidence comes from geologic and fossil records that simply do not have good resolution past 1Ma or so. That's not true. For any point when oceanic life was common, their sediments give WAY better resolution than that.

Not even close.

Fossil dating is based on whether or not certain marker species exist in a particular rock sample. The very same species that gradually evolve and become extinct on scales of millions of years. The resolution is piss poor, and so unreliable that most wells in petroleum forgo biostratigraphic dating altogether.

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