Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018
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Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018
#2Relatively ignorant observer here. I thought things were looking pretty good on this front.
How does this headline square with "The U.S. Leads All Countries In Reducing Carbon Emissions" (Oct 2017)? [1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the-u-s-...
Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018
#3Relatively ignorant observer here. I thought things were looking pretty good on this front. How does this headline square with "The U.S. Leads All Countries In Reducing Carbon Emissions" (Oct 2017)? [1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the-u-s-...
Yeah, this is a new development:
> United States emissions are expected to rise 2.5 percent this year after several years of declines
> “We thought oil use had peaked in the U.S. and Europe 15 years ago,” he said. “The cheap gasoline prices, bigger cars and people driving more miles are boosting oil use at rates that none of us expected.”
Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018
#4Relatively ignorant observer here. I thought things were looking pretty good on this front. How does this headline square with "The U.S. Leads All Countries In Reducing Carbon Emissions" (Oct 2017)? [1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the-u-s-...
The were, from the article though: "United States emissions are expected to rise 2.5 percent this year after several years of declines." Also, the article you sourced is about what Scott Pruitt said, and he's not exactly unbiased!
Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018
#5It's hard for me to take climate science seriously when
1. We know of the state of crisis that all other soft sciences are in (p-value abuse, publish or perish, institutional bias, replication crisis) [3]
2. We know that the earth has been substantially warmer in the past (with accompanyingly higher CO2 levels) and life thrived [2]
3. We know that we've been coming out of an ice age since long before the industrial revolution [1]
4. It is nearly impossible to find studies for possible benefits of a warmer earth, because the subject is, frankly, taboo. For example, expansion of arable land from melting permafrost.
5. We are extrapolating a ~hundred year old trend in a system which normally evolves on scales of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, and sudden historic shifts are likely beyond the resolution of geologic records (ice cores only get you ~Modern climate science is extremely biased, does not allow for skepticism, and is therefore bad science.
Of course, none of that precludes erring on the side of caution. But dogma is bad for everyone.
1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_glacial_retreat
2.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Climate_Cha...
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001632871...
Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018
#6It's hard for me to take climate science seriously when 1. We know of the state of crisis that all other soft sciences are in (p-value abuse, publish or perish, institutional bias, replication crisis) [3] 2. We know that the earth has been substantially warmer in the past (with accompanyingly higher CO2 levels) and life thrived [2] 3. We know that we've been coming out of an ice age since long before the industrial r…
In response to #2 and #3: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Also, yes. Earth has been substantially warmer in the past. Earth's atmosphere also had higher oxygen levels in the past[1], but it would be very bad for most life on earth if we suddenly returned to those conditions[2].
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen
Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018
#7Relatively ignorant observer here. I thought things were looking pretty good on this front. How does this headline square with "The U.S. Leads All Countries In Reducing Carbon Emissions" (Oct 2017)? [1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the-u-s-...
> The U.S. Leads All Countries In Reducing Carbon Emissions
I guess that's technically not false (depending on the definition of "leads"), but it's like saying "Flint, MI leads all US cities in reducing the amount of lead in tap water".
Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018
#8>> Even as coal has fallen out of favor in some markets, the rise in emissions has been driven primarily by stronger demand for natural gas and oil
This is interesting. If you care about CO2 emissions, you don't want to use coal because it's mostly carbon. But if you care about the greenhouse effect, you probably want to burn coal rather than gas or oil because those contain a lot of hydrogen which forms water vapor when burned. And water vapor is a far stronger greenhouse gas.
Either way I'd prefer if planes burned coal so they wouldn't produce contrails. Yeah, I know why that's not going to happen.
Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018
#9I cannot take any of these reports seriously unless they are comparing emissions from each country on a per capita basis.
This is an easy way to make US look like a responsible polluter compared to India and China.
Its a different ball game, if you factor in the total emissions per capita over last 100 years, in which case, US emissions are probably a few multiples over China and India combined (that's my guess. I'm too lazy to calculate these numbers).
Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018
#10Relatively ignorant observer here. I thought things were looking pretty good on this front. How does this headline square with "The U.S. Leads All Countries In Reducing Carbon Emissions" (Oct 2017)? [1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the-u-s-...
The article directly addresses the US:
> United States emissions are expected to rise 2.5 percent this year after several years of declines, and despite a shift away from coal toward cleaner sources of energy. Dr. Jackson attributed part of the increase to a colder-than-normal winter in some parts of the country and a hotter summer in other parts, which inflated demand for heating and cooling.
October 2017 was before the cold winter and hot summer. Not to mention that the US output falling 1% per year is not nearly as big of an impact as China's growing by 5% per year. As the article mentions, US emissions are only 15% of global.