Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist • Hacker News Board

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#151

Post by rayiner » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 1:31 AM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #2

Lots of assumptions baked in here. Chief among them is that renewables deployment will continue to be slower than new energy demand. If you look at the charts, this is pretty unlikely since the renewables trend is a consistent exponential increase year over year while the demand curve is very lumpy and mostly linear when averaged. Next is the assumption that renewables have to be deployed at grid scale, with the mate…

Breaking out energy demand by country doesn’t work, because the climate doesn’t care whether a ton of CO2 is emitted by an American or a newly middle class Indian. There is no strategy based on renewables and conservation that even plausibly allows the third world to reach the development of the first world while averting climate change.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#152

Post by xyzzyz » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 1:32 AM UTC

taneq wrote: post #68

xyzzyz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So where do we get energy from in case we get a windless week in winter, if not fossil fuels or nuclear?

Solar panels? Even on the most heavily clouded days mine generate over 50% of nominal. And on that very rare windless, deeply overcast week, maybe we adapt and just don't run the tumble dryer or aircon for a week? Most house energy usage is pretty gratuitous and if you cut it back to lighting, refrigeration and entertainment you could get by on a few kWh a day. If you absolutely must have 100% uptime then $1000 will…

> If you absolutely must have 100% uptime then $1000 will get you a diesel generator which would keep the batteries topped off if you ever need it

Ah, great, so every house that has food in a freezer or likes to stay warm in winter now has to buy and maintain a diesel generator. Welcome to the great new renewable world.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#153

Post by jejei93ndmd » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 1:32 AM UTC

cyrksoft wrote: post #122

flukus wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who are you or any politician to decide how many kids can a couple have? I'm someone who subsidizes families having children, my taxes are paying for their healthcare, their schools, their childcare, etc. And while I'm happy to do that because maintaining society is important I'm not happy to do it for someone pumping out 15 kids. > I bet you this will be a political discussion in some years. I bet you it won't, re…

How many 15 kids family are there out there? Besides, they also pay their tax share...

Yes, you’ve made your point. Take stock in the fact you’ve reiterated the whole debate is an incalculable, formless hypothetical in the first place without saying so explicitly.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#154

Post by euske » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 1:33 AM UTC

The real problem to me is the Climate TMI. There are just too many arguments/opinions/facts etc., there's no way to tell which one I should believe based on my gut feelings (which is the only thing I can rely on at the end of the day). This OP looks sensible, but I'm sure I'll be persuaded by any other article that has an opposite argument. I'm practically drown in the sciences. I hope it's not just me.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#155

Post by rayiner » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 1:34 AM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #50

cyrksoft wrote: post #35

"11. A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature." Part 2: https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/12/Climate-Crisis-Realis... This is highly disturbing. With the 11,000 scientist warning the other day they proposed something similar. I find it very worrying. Who will decide who lives? Or who has kids a…

If the human population were limited to one-child per couple for a few decades, then everyone can have a family, and the population still declines. This is happening naturally in a lot of countries already: > According to projections of the population with the current fertility rate, over 65s will account for 40% of the population by 2060,[10][11] and the total population will fall by a third from 128 million in 2010…

> If the human population were limited to one-child per couple for a few decades, then everyone can have a family, and the population still declines.

Yeah, you can fuck right off. I may consider stopping at 3 kids. Or I may not.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#156

Post by NeedMoreTea » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 1:39 AM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #146

ggm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem to understand either pumped-hydro, or economics. Using hyperbolic language like "through the roof" when we cannot magically wave a wand to make a 100% renewables world in one go, but are approaching it asymptotically means that the pricing function, the costs, and the outcomes are not 'through the roof' but a function of where we are in a migration. I don't know how to predict the future reliably eithe…

> You don't seem to understand either pumped-hydro, No, you don't seem to understand pumped-hydro. The largest pumped-hydro plant in the US, the Bath County Pumped Storage Station, can store enough energy to satisfy US energy use for 250 milliseconds. Yes, milliseconds . Suppose you want to have enough pumped-hydro to store US energy use for, say, 1 hour. There are 3600 seconds in an hour. You need ~15 000 pumped hyd…

Where are you getting 250 milliseconds and needing 15,000 from?

Wikipedia claims US yearly electricity consumption is 4,090 TWh, and Bath County stores 24 TWh, with a generation capacity of 3,003 MW. That comes out as enough storage for a couple of days worth of US electricity use. Obviously you'd need 3 more to cover generation capacity.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#157

Post by 8bitsrule » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 1:41 AM UTC

cgh wrote: post #121

8bitsrule wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we need to increase electricity generation by an integer factor As in India, which is nearly finished building from ~ 40GW to 170GW of renewable energy. And you skip past the powers of conservation. We don't need more power, we need less CO2. > capable of scaling ... nuclear fission The CO2 problem needs to be addressed promptly, and efficiently. Renewables build -much- more quickly, and the immediate cost of hundr…

Did you read the articles (there are two)? They address renewables in depth.

I did. I prefer to read what scientists and engineers have concluded, and have for decades. I like this: https://thesolutionsproject.org/resources/

Consider if we had acted and done in the same short period what India has done, we'd now have the equivalent of 130 nuclear plants online ... ready for a mandate to move to electric transportation.

The future cost of continued reliance on fossils completes the calculation.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#158

Post by ronilan » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 1:46 AM UTC

Invictus0 wrote: post #132

ronilan wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people live on this planet is not a matter of personal preference. Neither individual nor collective. I thought that was obvious.

There are multiple people alive today that could decrease the global population by hundreds of millions without having to even put their shoes on.

Indeed. But it’s up to them to decide what they want to do with their life and liberty and how they’d like to pursue their happiness. Shoes on or off, excluding specific placements, should not be a factor. Neither, me, you nor loony, father of two, UBC professor have a say about that. It is self-evident.

(And as a side note: peak humans has arrived and the consequences may not be as rosy as the UBC professor who spent his entire life and career in an immigration infused growth zone, thinks they will)

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#159

Post by xyzzyz » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 1:51 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #148

xyzzyz wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A week's supply of biofuels, given our current energy use of 101 quadrillion BTU/year, and assuming 100% efficiency, is 2 quadrillion BTU. At the peak of our production, we produced around 0.2 quadrillion BTU worth of biodiesel. This means that a week's supply of biofuels is around 10 years of production. Of course, in practice, if you overbuild renewable energy generation to a large enough multiple that will greatly…

> A week's supply of biofuels, given our current energy use of 101 quadrillion BTU/year, and assuming 100% efficiency, is 2 quadrillion BTU. At the peak of our production, we produced around 0.2 quadrillion BTU worth of biodiesel. This means that a week's supply of biofuels is around 10 years of production. We produce around ten times as many gallons of ethanol as biodiesel. It has about half as many BTUs, which impl…

> Because we do whatever costs less. Nuclear plants are expensive. On the other hand, so is storage. It's not actually clear which one is going to cost less in the long term,

Right. It's really worth asking why exactly nuclear plants are so expensive to build, and why they were so much cheaper in the past. The plants that French built in the 70s and 80s were produce much cheaper electricity than fossils and renewables, in terms of LCOE. Why is US so terrible at building things today? Would it even be possible to build, say, Hoover dam today? How many more times it would cost now than it did in the 1930s, in inflation adjusted dollars, despite great advancements in the available technology?

> so what we should probably be doing is building both at the same time.

If you build nuclear, there's no need to build storage, really. Energy storage is very expensive to build, per stored MWh, much more expensive than nuclear is today, even at today's greatly inflated prices.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#160

Post by graeme » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 1:59 AM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #140

graeme wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This worldview implies abandoning all coastal cities and several entire countries, correct? Sea level rise alone requires that, to say nothing of other effects. And then there's higher wet bulb temperatures in heat waves. With enough warming, that should render a large chunk of the planet effectively uninhabitable without AC. Do you accept these consequences when you make such claims?

>This worldview implies abandoning all coastal cities and several entire countries, correct? Over hundreds of years, yes. Some of the biggest cities in the world didn't exist 200 years ago or were small villages. I lived on land that was under Lake Michigan 100 years ago. It'll change the world for sure, but that won't kill us off. The change is too slow.

Hundreds of years? Faster than that. If we just keep burning carbon we'll warm faster than IPCC predictions. Most forecasts assume we decrease.

We'd probably lose Boston, New York, San Francisco and Miami this century, or at least chunks of them.

It's not just where the waterline is either: what matters is where the water goes in storm surges. Most current coastal cities would be unliveable within a 100 years I think, if we keep on burning carbon and do "mitigation" only, as OP suggested.