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Europe's new climate in seven charts

bbc.com

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Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#221

Post by jmyeet »

graemep wrote: post #217
jmyeet wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh... I understand now. You're right wing and quoting a right-wing dish rag like the Spectator to play into a conspiracy that "dark money" is pushing some "net zero" agenda, somehow at the expense of the UK. Got it. According to one study, the UK's investments in wind power have saved consumers 100 billion pounds since 2010 [1] all while spending 16-20 billion pounds a year on subsiizing natural gas [2] plus more on…

Your first link (the credible one) says "This massive expansion of UK offshore wind is partly due to UK government subsidies." so it proves me right. The other one is a campaign group who say there are subsidies but fail to name a single specific one. Insulting people who come up with facts that do not suit your case does not prove anything, and there are guidelines on HN about personal attacks and assuming bad faith…

> The other one is a campaign group who say there are subsidies but fail to name a single specific one.

It seems deliberately obtuse to try and deny there are significant energy (and thus natural gas) subsidies in the UK. Ok, try the Office of Budget Responsibility [1]:

> By the time of our November 2022 forecast, the Government announced a series of additional measures to support households and business, which increased our forecast of the total cost of energy support in 2022-23 to £67.1 billion (2.7 per cent of GDP).

> Insulting people who come up with facts

So you're not right wing? Cry-bullying about "personal attacks" for using an accurate political label correctly isn't helping your defense.

Pushing a conspiracy theory that a cabal of dark money is pushign renewable power and using The Spectator as a source is the UK equivalent of quoting Sean Hannity.

[1]: https://obr.uk/box/the-cost-of-the-governments-energy-suppor...

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#222

Post by nmeagent »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #193
adrianN wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any high technology has incredibly long dependency chains. I think you seriously underestimate the difficulty of bootstrapping, say, WW2 level tech from irradiated wastelands after major nuclear exchanges.

"Irradiated wastelands" -- surely you realize that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are large cities today? Harmful radiation usually doesn't stay harmful for very long. In any case, I don't share your low opinion of future humans. They'll be as capable as we are; maybe far more capable. You also over-estimate and over-weight how destructive nuclear exchanges really are, the readiness state of the world's nuclear arsenals, and…

> surely you realize that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are large cities today?

I don't think you understand the massive difference in scale between detonating a couple of atom bombs vs. thousands of thermonuclear devices, each with at least an order of magnitude (~16 kt vs hundreds) more destructive power. Nevermind the vast fallout dispersal that would blanket the northern hemisphere at least, as well as the ridiculous amounts of soot in the atmosphere from the resulting firestorms that would, to put it mildly, be a bit of a setback for agricultural yields for a damn long time. You might be okay in those unaligned places, sure, bit if you're in roughly half of the world you're pretty much effed.

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#223

Post by rsanek »

sfn42 wrote: post #156
IneffablePigeon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conditions leading to the Cold War were reversible, this crisis is becoming very much less so. Despite what the carbon capture techno optimists say.

If you actually look at the numbers of carbon capture its entirely obvious that it can't work. It's honestly strange to me that they even waste money on it, personally I think it's a distraction - "look we're working on a fix, now let us just pump up the rest of this oil in the mean time and we'll definitely fix it later". In order to just offset our current emissions, we would need around a million carbon capture fa…

I think you're measuring one method against a goal it wasn't set for. I assume you are referring to Mammoth direct air capture in your comment -- Stratos in Texas will soon be up, at ~15x the size of Mammoth. But DAC is only one method, and it's the hardest to scale. Just look at options outside of DAC, like Vaulted Deep, whose costs (financially and energy-wise) are far lower.

I do agree that it's unlikely that we can ignore reduction and just depend on purely scaling capture, especially if we care about avoiding more negative climate effects as the scaling goes on. But to say it is "completely infeasible" is not accurate.

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#224

Post by bob001 »

intended wrote: post #215
bob001 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> collapse of society due to the ensuing refugee crises Society won't collapse. Humans will do amazingly evil things to survive. The British were happy to starved millions of Indians to death until the country gained independence. All to support the British empire. We live in an era of basically unprecedented niceness in the history of humanity. Even the great empires of the past oppressed and killed multitudes more…

> Billions may die but society will go on with a somewhat lower regard for life and a larger amount of nationalism. Arguably what we consider western society will collapse but that's only existed for under a century. It is easy to write provocative things when we do not let ourselves bear the weight of their implication. This is horror being outlined. In earnest conversation, these are sombre and sobering implication…

I never said it's not a horror.

> In some ways that is more depressing than society simply collapsing.

The inability to discuss a horror in realistic terms is how you get a horror. Not exaggerated "society will collapse" but actually tangible realistic and terrible outcomes. Society collapsing is an abstract and nebulous thing. The thing we will get is much worse and unless we look it in the face we will get it.

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#225

Post by argentinian »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #199
argentinian wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about the concept of "externalities", making producers of excessive contaminating gases pay for it because they are harming the planet?

Will never happen in real life

Why not?

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#226

Post by stinkbeetle »

fulafel wrote: post #202
stinkbeetle wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA is around 18th country in CO2 emissions per capita, and has reduced emissions per capita around as much as the combined EU since 2000, or a little more. Can't see how some random politician is "to blame", that's pretty absurd claim, and not supported by the claimed evidence.

The others above USA are tiny countries. USA is at 14, Saudi Arabia at 20, EU at 5, China at 9. The reductions in absolute tonnage for USA are big because there's a lot of low hanging fruit left. And it's partly a petrostate.

China produces far more absolute emissions than USA.

I love how the intelligentsia claim without evidence that that per-capita is the important and moral metric when you talk about total emissions, then all of a sudden absolute emissions are the important thing when you point out that western countries are not at the top of the per capita lists either!

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#227

Post by petesergeant »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #133
defrost wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the consumption habits of the USA are responsible for how many more tonnes of CO2 emissions that are not onshore within the USA ? The USA was far and away the very worst global source for a very long time, that only changed by offshoring the processing and manufacture that feeds US consumption.

> And the consumption habits of the USA are responsible for how many more tonnes of CO2 emissions that are not onshore within the USA ? Probably quite a few thanks to globalist politicians among all major political parties to offshore production to countries with fewer regulations and much higher emissions intensity of production. But it would not be the highest emissions per capita. Much the same as the EU. The hand…

> thanks to globalist politicians among all major political parties

So you're saying climate change is real, but the liberals/globalists/experts betrayed us by doing nothing useful?

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#229

Post by sfn42 »

rsanek wrote: post #223
sfn42 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you actually look at the numbers of carbon capture its entirely obvious that it can't work. It's honestly strange to me that they even waste money on it, personally I think it's a distraction - "look we're working on a fix, now let us just pump up the rest of this oil in the mean time and we'll definitely fix it later". In order to just offset our current emissions, we would need around a million carbon capture fa…

I think you're measuring one method against a goal it wasn't set for. I assume you are referring to Mammoth direct air capture in your comment -- Stratos in Texas will soon be up, at ~15x the size of Mammoth. But DAC is only one method, and it's the hardest to scale. Just look at options outside of DAC, like Vaulted Deep, whose costs (financially and energy-wise) are far lower. I do agree that it's unlikely that we c…

A 15x improvement over mammoth (spot on by the way) is still many times more capture plants than we have power plants. And there's limits to the efficiency of these facilities in terms of how much air they can consume per day. Not to mention the carbon costs of building and operating them.

Maybe I'm wrong, I'm certainly not an expert. It just seems like a hopeless case to me. Even if they make one significantly more effective than this Stratos you mentioned, we're still talking about tens of thousands of them to have a real impact.

Re: Europe's new climate in seven charts

#230

Post by phs318u »

swiftcoder wrote: post #170
inigyou wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What actions will you take to ensure the summer of 2050 isn't 200F?

Solar + heat pumps, electric vehicle (I'd rather use public transit, but I live in the wilderness), eating locally-grown seasonal fruits and vegetables, etc. I walk this walk, bud, but at the same time, whatever I do is completely irrelevant if we don't get off our collective asses and force the governments and corporations to do their part.

At least when your grandkids look up from reading books where you’ve had to explain what ice skating was, and ask you, “What did you do?”, you’ll be able to answer honestly, “I did my best. Sadly kids, most people back then were arseholes.”

We are individually responsible for our actions. Nothing more.

We are collectively responsible for the outcome.

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