September was the most anomalously hot month ever

Before you read my detailed response below, my tl;dr point is not that wind and solar suck, or that we need to hold on to oil and gas forever. My most salient point is that proclaiming an "emergency" of an "existential threat" that requires centralized authority (held by decisionmakers who usually pay no cost for being wrong) is a playbook that's as old as history, and one that almost always resulted in great human toll.

I predict that more human misery will be generated by efforts to counter climate change that are predicated upon such centralized authority, than that generated by the status quo. Having said that:

> The economic and political power of the oil and gas lobby is magnitudes larger than the economic and political power of the wind and solar lobby. We're talking about entrenched interests here.

No arguments there from me, except I would like to add that the degree of entrenchment reflects how much modern society depends on oil and gas.

> If there's ever an existential threat to our global human civilization through wind and solar

You're presupposing that oil and gas is an existential threat to global human civilization. Evidence points the other way around, that humanity flourished more than ever with the usage of fossil fuels.

> We have have trillions of yearly subsidies for oil and gas[0], we've had it for decades.

$7T of subsidies around the world according to your source (including "implicit" subsidies; direct subsidies of $1.3T), out of a global GDP of ~$96T; a subsidy of around 7.3% for an energy source that comprises over 80% of the world's consumption[0]. I'd say that sounds like a good deal. I'm sure if and when wind and solar get to that level, they will have similarly vast subsidies behind them.

> where even the rules of the game are written by the fossil fuel lobby is ludicrous

I'm not sure if I understand the point of your source for this. It says that availing yourself of the legal system is somehow wrong, and accuses O&G of lobbying "with the goal of putting their profits and pay above all else" (some real objective stuff there).

Big Pharma spends over 3x the amount of money lobbying every year, and depending on the year there's 3-7 other industries that spend more than oil and gas. The largest producer of wind and solar energy in the country, NextEra Energy, spent $6.2M in lobbying in 2021, about the same as ExxonMobil or Chevron that year. Nobody likes lobbying, but it appears that everyone does it. It's not especially bad only when it comes from the O&G industry.

Out of S&P 500 companies, CEO pay for the energy industry is about the middle of the pack[1]. The "green & renewable energy" industry has a higher EBITDA to sales as well as a higher SG&A expense to sales ratios than either the "coal & related energy" industry or the various types of "oil/gas" industries[2]. So if anyone's putting "profit and pay above all else", it would appear it is the renewable energy execs.

> Power generation through wind and solar has been lower then all and any fossil fuels, for years

LCOE is useless without storage costs. LCOE with storage costs included is comparable between gas, wind, and solar[3]. It is currently infeasible to supply baseload power with purely wind and solar. Even the countries that have a plurality of their total electricity consumption come from wind and solar (like Denmark), they import a lot of electricity from neighbors with stable baseload sources.

If the all-in cost of providing electricity, including costs of intermittency and storage, to the grid is lower for wind and solar than all other sources, then good news: you can become a gazillionaire by taking advantage of that market failure.

[0]: https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021...

[1]: https://www.equilar.com/reports/101-equilar-associated-press...

[2]: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...

[3]: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....

Much more constructive thank you. To be honest I haven't looked into it much in the last decade just going from the news and general discourse. I've noticed that we've been going into an active phase and it's mentioned a lot in other situations but never when it comes to the reasons behind climate change. Especially since it could make it worse I'd assume they'd push harder on it being more of a problem now. Feels like they're hiding something.

According to your first link we can track solar activity:

> Evidence of variations in solar activity on millennial timescales can be found in the records of cosmogenic radionuclides in such long-lived natural features as ice cores from large ice sheets, tree rings and ocean sediments. Using careful statistical analysis it is now possible to identify decadal and centennial signals of solar variability in climate data.

7% sounds low yes, but 30% is absolutely not a "small" factor. I'd think the direct effect of solar activity would be much easier to measure even on a micro level than CO2. A decade back a graph was popular where temperature and solar activity correlated almost 1:1.

I'm not trying to argue for emissions, I'd prefer no cars, fresh air and banned plastics. But an honest debate where I'm not a conspiracy nut for asking completely valid questions is not much to ask for (not directed at you just the general discourse).

If it really is serious then don't tell me we need to keep the economy going, that we have a demographic problem or try to sell me emission rights. We do or we don't, the next iphone or the next generation, that's the solution I expect to the level of threat they're telling me it is. Meanwhile they fly in private jets from summit to summit.

I'm not even trying to keep my way of living I'm already a hermit with a broken screen on my 4 year old phone, and rarely eat red meat. What they say and what they do doesn't seem to match.

> And the annual variation in temperature of ~50 degrees C many places on earth does not really support it.

Ummm, hello? so "most anomalously hot month ever" does not suggest a change in the underlying system??

Would you predict that handrails in Arizona now can give 3rd degree burns? https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/health/arizona-heat-burns-er/...

Because I remember conversations like this when I was growing up:

"Mommy, can I go to the playground?" "No, Johnny, the slide will fry your ass"

The article mentions 1991. 1940 is better, but not by a large extent and definitely not enough to justify the use of "ever".

Solar, wind and nuclear (theoretically) are limitless.

> We can't just magically stop the greenhouse effect.

You're absolutely right, that's why tech is the only non-magical solution.

Anyone thinking they can change the behavior of 8 billion people is engaging in magical thinking.