Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

In fact, you don’t need to imagine it, you are living the dream.

Telsa’s prototype in Australia was able to prove you can stabilise a grid at scale, profitably and with simple enough technology. In addition to Li-ion (that provides good response) you can have gravity-based capacity (essentially a crane), heat-storage (rocks kept at 4000ºC feeding a thermal power plant) and liquid-metal batteries. Two of those are mostly century-old tech redesigned for a word with cheap intermittent energy; the third seems like the best, most reliable, simplest, most scalable idea out of MIT from the last decade.

I have the impression that these represent enough options, with enough evidence that it will be profitable within a short lifespan, so I’m not even sure you want government support. But if they can facilitate permits, access to the grid, etc. why not get the help? All those will stabilise the grid no matter what source of power we have, so why not implement what we can at scale, see how it helps, and double it six months later if it works? After five years, we should have enough to tell how much wind and sun it can cover but I can’t see why it wouldn’t handle 100% of demand. All of those ideas can be any size, from a hand to a large city; all have many alternative elements to adapt to circumstances, price point; there are complementary and work well together.

>Humanity is going to go extinct

There's no evidence for that. A temperature rise of 2 degrees celsius is by no means a threat to the human race. It is a problem, but not an extinction event.

>We should invest in nuclear

Nuclear is extremely expensive and prone to going wrong. It's not a valid argument to state that "nuclear has improved and now it's safe" because nothing is 100% safe and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster is a perfect demonstration of how even recent iterations of the technology with multiple redundancies can go wrong.

>Wind/solar doesn't work because it's intermittent

There's no reason we can't have a distributed network of wind and solar farms around the world that can fulfill demand at all times.

>We should tax carbon

Taxing carbon could reduce output, sure, but the fact is that humanity is dependent on fossil fuels right now. How can you possibly suggest we start punishing consumers for their carbon footprint when there is no viable alternative? Besides, reducing output at this scale won't have any impact now, it's too late for that. We need to be reversing output.

>We need to stop eating meat on Mondays

Sorry but these schemes have no purpose other than to make one feel good about themselves. Most people are not interested in giving up meat at all, let alone for one day a week, so the demand for meat isn't budging. Meat alternatives are promising but won't take hold unless the consumer has an incentive to switch.

>We need to capture carbon from the atmosphere

This kind of technology has been debunked by Thunderf00t and many others. To grab that carbon you need to spend at least as much energy as you got from the combustion. So, effectively we need AT LEAST as much energy as we have used since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Trees are good at gathering carbon but they're not good as a long-term carbon sink.

>We need to use electric cars

...this solves nothing. The energy still needs to come from somewhere, the carbon is still in the atmosphere, and moreover we need to build everybody a new car which is a carbon-heavy and environmentally unfriendly process in itself.

I'm not sure that’s the case and I would encourage you to dig into what the worst or medium range scenario would mean. As I understand it, the _middle_ scenario predicts that a billion people would either die in a climate-related catastrophe or be displaced before 2050. That means that several ethnic or cultural groups would go through essentially genocide.

There are details like loss of water reserves in California and the impact on food access in the US, fish population collapse, climate-related migration from the densest populated areas in the world that are very concerning.

I’ve seen scientist give very clear alarms on several global issues (usually my father was making the point); I’ve personally made several myself, and every single time, the reaction was… dumbfounding: trying to minimise, negotiate, taking the most optimistic scenario as a worst case, delaying…

I have, unironically, witnessed several conversations that literally went:

“If you do that, you, your family and your way of life will die forever.

— You are exaggerating, that’s too scary.”

They did nothing, and soon later: exactly what the prediction said.

This is not only the most common scenario, it is the only scenario I’ve seen, with one exception: CFC and the Ozone layer. And that was because there’s a handful of industrials, who had clear alternatives that proved cheaper.

“Other people do nothing; I’d rather believe the reassuring story than evidence” is exactly how we end up with the bystander effect.