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

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

#161

Post by graeme »

julienb_sea wrote: post #101
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?

Yes, my expectation is that we will build habitats which withstand sea level rise and temperature fluctuations, and abandon habitats which cannot be retrofitted to withstand present conditions.

Meaning, we abandon all coastal cities, and countries where a few billion people currently live?

No one has yet retrofitted a local climate. Air conditioning works on the level of buildings.

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

#162

Post by duahncjak »

0xffff2 wrote: post #100
duahncjak wrote: post #17

I think solutions to climate change that require global coordination are doomed to failure. When things start getting rough it’s going to be some entity independently pursuing a geoengineering solution, with whatever risk that entails. It’s not the best approach, but it’s something that someone can impose on the whole world without conquering them and shutting down their coal plans.

I'm afraid you're right, but I'm also afraid that no one has the necessary combination of money, technological skill and military might to undertake that kind of geoengineering unilaterally.

This paper estimates the cost at ~$2.25B/year, and notes that more than 50 countries have military budgets exceeding $3B: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d#...

They point out the plan assumes you can launch planes from a few different points around the globe. You don’t need global agreement, but at least access to some foreign airports.

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

#163

Post by xyzzyz »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #156
xyzzyz wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ah, I rechecked, I actually lost 2 orders of magnitude. It's 25 seconds, not 250 milliseconds. However, you lost 3 orders of magnitude: Bath County is 24 GWh, not TWh.

My calculation was done under assumption of 101 quads of annual US energy use, but I'll redo this calculation with assumption more charitable to your argument.

US uses only 4090 TWh worth of electricity, which is about 13 quads, but it also uses about 70 quads of energy in other forms than electricity. See the breakdown at [1]. Let's assume that moving to all-electric world reduces the transportation energy use by half. In all electric world, the 25 quads we waste to generate electricity also vanish. Thus, the annual US energy needs is 101 - 25 - 14 = 62 quads, assuming we can increase efficiency by replacing majority of heat engines with electric engines. Putting this in Wolfram Alpha[2] gives you about 40 seconds.

So, now we need about 100 pumped hydro plants of the same size as largest one energy storage facility in existence, to cover 1 hour of US energy use (I'm ignoring of course the problem of not enough generating capacity to convert that storage to electricity fast enough as needed). Where are you going to build them? Where are you going to take water from?

[1] - https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained//us-energy-facts/ [2] - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2824GWh%2F62+quads%2F...

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

#164

Post by richk449 »

Gladdyu wrote: post #11
mdorazio wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, but I don't see why that matters. Exponential output increase will overcome linear demand increase in pretty short order.

Unfortunately true exponential growth of a physical system cannot exist - it'll always be some sort of logistic model that looks exponential near x=0.

I’m intrigued. Why cant true exponential growth of a physical system exist?

Do you mean it can’t be maintained forever? I can think of lots of physical processes that have exponential behavior for some amount of time.

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

#165

Post by richk449 »

cyrksoft wrote: post #92
journalctl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People hate to admit it, but having a child is the most carbon-intensive thing you can do. Unfortunately, it’s a tragedy of the commons. Enough people act in their own self-interest to the detriment of everyone. This is uncharted territory for humanity, and I’m afraid we’re not yet up to the task of tackling it. I mean, in a world with scarce food, water, and arable land, yeah, bringing another resource-intensive hum…

How do you propose to fight it? Everybody acts in their self interest all the time.

The fact that everyone acts in their own self interest is well known. Typically this is countered by some combination of societal mores and laws. Think Moses and “thou shall not steal”.

If you want to solve tradgedy of the commons type problems, the two known solutions are privatization and regulation. Nobody has yet thought of a way to privatize the earths climate, so we are pretty much stuck with regulation.

That sucks.

But the alternative sucks worse.

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

#166

Post by falcolas »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #116
falcolas wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it's sunny and windy. Thus far we don't have a large scale way to take sunny and windy day energy and store it for less sunny and windy days (or even to transfer it from sunny and windy locations across thousands of miles to non-sunny/windy places). EDIT: I'd appreciate knowing where I'm wrong.

The problem with the simplistic comment is we do already have large scale ways to store and move energy, and wind is typically available offshore 24/7, though some coasts are better served than others. We haven't chosen to build that storage yet. We also have ways to move demand to times of excess. Trying to keep it short and intentionally ignoring new ideas like molten salt and winched weights etc: + A smart grid al…

So, we don't have it in the US, and don't have plans to have it in anything resembling a helpful timeframe. All we have is a few people installing solar on their roof and patting themselves on their back for saving our future.

> A smart grid allows demand and load to be managed

Which we don't have on a national (let alone international) scale, and won't have in any reasonable period of time.

> Pumped hydro can add TWh of storage if built at scale.

It's not, and it's not being built or even planned.

> sell and buy electric from surrounding countries

We can't. There's not enough transmission capacity, and there's no sign that capacity between countries is being built. We can't even ship power from the east coast to the mid-west interior.

> It is very unlikely the whole of the US will completely lack wind at the same time, especially offshore.

Which doesn't help the interior of the US - see comment about a complete lack of transmission capacity. We also have effectively-zero offshore wind capacity, and none in the works to be built.

It's a dirty secret but the US simply doesn't have the capacity to ship power any major distance. The country is broken into individual sub-groups that are maybe a thousand miles on a side that are physically incapable of linking up due to a lack of infrastructure for lots of power.

Theoretical technology won't solve our problems; Pumped Hydro is a great example. It effectively doesn't exist outside of a few demos; per Wikipedia the total installed pumped hydro storage in under 200 GWh. That wouldn't even cover the electricity imported into CA.

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

#167

Post by chrisco255 »

seibelj wrote: post #30
chrisco255 wrote: post #18

When the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation flip negative, and the deep, multi-decade solar minimum we are about to enter kicks in (it already has begun), we will see temps lower globally (and especially in the northern hemisphere). But of course, with this, we will be dealing with a set of problems much more difficult than warming. Warming is good for crops and humanity. Cold tempe…

It will be extremely interesting to me if cooling begins to happen on a global scale. It could very well be that we have shifted the world hotter, so this time the cooling is less and the next warming cycle is hotter. But if we have a decade(s) of global cooling trust in our scientists and institutions will be so absolutely, impossibly damaged that the commentary will be very interesting to observe objectively.

I wouldn't suppose that the cooling will be any less. Heat dissipates very quickly in the atmosphere. CO2 can't store heat but for microseconds at a time. The oceans, well they can store heat for much longer periods and that's why the Multi-decadal oscillations occur. The massive heat content of the oceans shift climate systems in dramatic ways. But in the event of a Multi-decadal decline in solar energy and shift in oceanic oscillations, CO2 is powerless to stop that effect.

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

#168

Post by 40four »

greglindahl wrote: post #32
jandrewrogers wrote: post #22

The crux of the matter is that we need to drive thermodynamics backward at planetary scale. This is a fancy way of saying that we need to increase electricity generation by an integer factor beyond current global demand without producing net CO2. The list of existing energy sources capable of scaling like this that don't rely on burning carbon is extremely short: nuclear fission. I don't see any possibility of the re…

> The list of existing energy sources capable of scaling like this ... solar and wind are scaling much better than every prediction, for many years now, yet somehow that's not good enough for the people who claim to be realists. Odd.

The article directly addressed this point & why it is a wash, at best.

New demand every year is at parity or maybe outpacing the new production of wind & solar.

Not to mention the huge amounts of glass, plastic, concrete (which by the way, we are apporoaching a shortage of suitable sand for making it), and rare earth metals required to build wind & solar infrastructure.

Dont get me wrong, I'm with you. I want to beat climate change as much as the next guy, but this article is saying what we need to hear. The situation is dire & it might be too late to avoid the worst.

Man, I hope not. I'm very hopeful. But I often get worried, & pessimistic like the author. If you really look at it objectively, everything is still trending in the wrong direction. Even at the rate renewable energy is coming online.

Electricity is only part of the problem. Only 20% according to this guys numbers. And it's still predominantly created by coal. What about all the gasoline/ diesel for cars? Oil heating homes & buildings?

There's too many people. Crap it's hard to not be pessimistic :(

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

#169

Post by chrisco255 »

klyrs wrote: post #86
chrisco255 wrote: post #18

When the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation flip negative, and the deep, multi-decade solar minimum we are about to enter kicks in (it already has begun), we will see temps lower globally (and especially in the northern hemisphere). But of course, with this, we will be dealing with a set of problems much more difficult than warming. Warming is good for crops and humanity. Cold tempe…

Come now. These factors swing by about 1C combined. [1] https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=448 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...

You should be skeptical of skeptical science. It's a pop science blog, and an opinionated one, it's not an arbiter of truth.

The second post was better, but it's from 2011...and the PDO did not stay negative for very long, by 2015 it was positive again, so that was not a longer term negative flip in PDO [1].

So we saw warmer temps in 2016, which briefly skirted highs set in 1998...but since then global temps have cooled. The AMO will go negative sometime in the 2020s and it will coincide with a negative PDO and a grand solar minimum and that is well correlated with global temps dropping based on thousands of years of ice cores and tree rings. See below.

[1] http://research.jisao.washington.edu/pdo/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34297/

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

#170

Post by RickJWagner »

Merrill wrote: post #126
greglindahl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The list of existing energy sources capable of scaling like this ... solar and wind are scaling much better than every prediction, for many years now, yet somehow that's not good enough for the people who claim to be realists. Odd.

The problem with wind and solar is that they both require extensive spatially distributed energy collection systems, storage to overcome intermittent generation, and complex transmission networks to collect, manage, and distribute the electrical power. It seems unlikely that such can be secured in a world where conflict is steadily increasing, and where a tiny, but significant, percentage of the population is bent on…

I agree. Sooner or later, we'll need to have a serious discussion about nuclear energy. It's the best way out of this mess.
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