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Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

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Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#201

Post by runarberg »

rayiner wrote: post #197
runarberg wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So by “cost effective mitigation” I presume you mean something akin to: Investing in green infrastructure, international agreements, and carbon tax, right?

Yes, that’s what I meant to refer to in my post above: > It's worth the U.S. spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on climate-change mitigation. The EU is planning on spending 260 billion euro annually by 2030. That's roughly the scale of Biden's plan. I’m not arguing against those investments. My point is that saying climate change will have “untold cost” suggests that massive economic shutdowns or “war ti…

I think we have a different understanding of what a green new deal means. For me it means investing in green infrastructure, an amount that the global economy is already spending on carbon polluting ventures (including the military).

I can’t possibly see how reducing (in my opinion) stupid and corrupt business investments and increasing in sustainable infrastructure that will lower our carbon footprint can cause more harm then good. For me this fact is obvious. I think we there must be some fundamental difference between us for us to arrive at such different conclusions.

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#202

Post by bobthepanda »

letsgoyeti wrote: post #87
ggreer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydrogen vehicles will never become popular. There are several reasons for this: - To be carbon-neutral, the hydrogen must come from splitting water.[1] Currently hydrogen comes from steam reforming of methane (which releases lots of carbon).[2] - Hydrogen is a very pernicious molecule. It will slowly leak through metal and weaken it.[3] - Hydrogen vehicles must be refueled at special fueling stations. Electric vehic…

I think most hydrogen proponents are pushing for it to replace hydrocarbons for shipping, planes, and seasonal energy storage, not cars. There's not a lot of other great options today if we want to decarbonize those sectors because of the energy density required.

Also add trains to that list, mostly because the cost of stringing wire is constant and below certain traffic levels batteries make more sense.

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#203

Post by baron_harkonnen »

rayiner wrote: post #188
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never read any serious research that proposes what you are proposing: that climate mitigation is going to cost more than the consequences of failing to mitigate it. We're on the path to a 4C world by something like 2100. An increase by that much might possibly wipe out the species. If it fall short of that forecast the damage will be far greater. Not to mention that pandemic shares the same root cause as clima…

> We're on the path to a 4C world by something like 2100. An increase by that much might possibly wipe out the species. That is absolutely not what scientists and economists are predicting. An RCP 8.5 scenario (which is considered on the worse side of what's likely in a "do nothing" world) is expected to knock 6.7-14.3% of US GDP by 2100: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019102... (p. 7). That wo…

All of the RCP scenarios assume large scale carbon capture and storage, a technology we have no pathway to scaling.

None of the RCP scenarios consider potential positive feed back loops. This is understandable because from a climate modeling perspective these are complex and involve a lot of uncertainty/unknowns. However historical evidence suggests that in all mass extinction events involving rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 there is a point at which CO2 concentrations appear to start to dramatically increase due to some systemic trigger. We don’t know what exactly that may be, but many climate change concerns are happing “faster than expected”.

Events that cause positive feedback include things like increased CO2 emissions from wild fire, destruction of the amazon rainforest, increased albedo from melt arctic sea ice, methane release from melting permafrost, etc. We really don’t know how to account for all of these but past climate/co2 events suggest there is a “tipping point” for radical climate change.

It is also worth pointing out that climate change is only one of the ways in which our current system is completely unsustainable.

Our current economy demands perpetual growth. We are already living unsustainably. The consequences for this are obvious, and if we were remotely capable of surviving in a way remotely resembling our current standard of living we would have to immediately start scaling back production and consumption. The green new deal is a joke, and we clearly are incapable of changing our path.

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#204

Post by marcosdumay »

stretchcat wrote: post #131
nostrademons wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary targets for nukes aren't cities, they're other nukes. Most of these warheads are set for groundburst (or underground burst - I remember a bunch of research in the 80s about burrowing/penetrating warheads), because to blow up a 3-4 foot thick reinforced concrete silo you basically need to land right on top of it. That's the big fallout threat.

The nuclear winter theories I've read all involve the injection of soot into the stratosphere by nuclear-ignited firestorms. Buried nuclear blasts can dig pretty big holes (Sedan crater and all the other craters in the Nevada Test Site, which looks like the surface of the moon) and are certainly a huge fallout threat, but the claim of nuclear strikes against buried silos causing a nuclear winter is a new one to me. S…

Since the concept of 32 thousand nukes exploding in a war sounded realistic (a bit on the "too many" side, but nothing completely impossible), I got into wikipedia to check if that was any particularly large bomb. I have bad news for you:

> The fusion-fission blast had a yield equivalent to 104 kilotons of TNT (435 terajoules)

That is a quite small fusion-fission bomb. If your calculation is right, we are talking about some hundreds of more normal ones, not tens of thousands.

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#205

Post by runarberg »

rayiner wrote: post #199
runarberg wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So loosing a large part of Bangladesh to the sea by 2050 and then loosing more to the sea by 2051, and even more by 2052, etc. with no hope of recovering... displacing therein tens to hundreds of millions of people that will need new homes, and new infrastructure that is requiring housing, feeding and transporting those people is going to cost less then then a year and a half of pandemic? I would love to see your cal…

See: https://phys.org/news/2019-11-climate-impacts-world-trillion...

I mean, sure... if we count to 2050 and then stop counting... maybe. But that is not how the world works. We need to count beyond 2050 to get a good estimate. If (and that is a big if; ’cause I don’t really trust this number) the climate impact is gonna cost 7.9 trillion dollars by 2050, I’m sure it will cost $8.4tr by 2051, and $12.5tr by 2055, $22tr by 2060 and then $120tr by 2070. And then maybe by 2100 the economy as we know it will have collapsed and any cost estimate is void.

The climate impact is getting more severe at an exponential rate, and—unlike the pandemic—it is not gonna get better in the foreseeable future.

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#206

Post by rayiner »

runarberg wrote: post #201
rayiner wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that’s what I meant to refer to in my post above: > It's worth the U.S. spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on climate-change mitigation. The EU is planning on spending 260 billion euro annually by 2030. That's roughly the scale of Biden's plan. I’m not arguing against those investments. My point is that saying climate change will have “untold cost” suggests that massive economic shutdowns or “war ti…

I think we have a different understanding of what a green new deal means. For me it means investing in green infrastructure, an amount that the global economy is already spending on carbon polluting ventures (including the military). I can’t possibly see how reducing (in my opinion) stupid and corrupt business investments and increasing in sustainable infrastructure that will lower our carbon footprint can cause more…

The Green New Deal is a specific set of proposals with that name: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/181441...

It advocates a “World War II” style mobilization, of the sort that existed back when the federal government took over almost half the entire economy.

I understand that’s not what you support, but people do support massive efforts like this to combat climate change. My point is simply that when you say climate change will have “untold cost” you make it impossible to understand why the programs you support might be worth it, while a World War II-style mobilization would do more harm than good.

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#207

Post by eli_gottlieb »

rmk wrote: post #157
huragok wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trillions used for the GND is debt but trillions sunk into tax cuts for the top 1% is just good economics.

Incurring debt != Foregoing revenue via income tax

Money is fungible, actually.

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#208

Post by rayiner »

runarberg wrote: post #205
rayiner wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See: https://phys.org/news/2019-11-climate-impacts-world-trillion...

I mean, sure... if we count to 2050 and then stop counting... maybe. But that is not how the world works. We need to count beyond 2050 to get a good estimate. If (and that is a big if; ’cause I don’t really trust this number) the climate impact is gonna cost 7.9 trillion dollars by 2050, I’m sure it will cost $8.4tr by 2051, and $12.5tr by 2055, $22tr by 2060 and then $120tr by 2070. And then maybe by 2100 the econom…

Yes, but the cost of ratcheting down the economy through lockdowns to reduce emissions also has a continuing cost.

And no, climate change, even if we do nothing, won’t cause the economy to collapse by 2100: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/how-much-will-the-green-ne...

> “While it is true that we estimated damages as high as 10% of GDP annually at the end of the century for warming of 15°F above pre-industrial levels, the odds of a temperature change that would drive damages of this magnitude are slim,” he wrote. “In fact, they are less than 1-in-100 by our original calculation.”

It’s worth spending a lot of money to avoid a 10% GDP loss. But it’s not worth spending the kind of money you’d be willing to spend if you thought the economy was going to collapse completely otherwise.

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#209

Post by triceratops »

nostrademons wrote: post #167
missedthecue wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you realize how cheap sea walls are? The Dutch were building them 800 years ago with medieval technology and resources.

My threat model for global warming is different from most people's (hence "unpopular prediction"). I think sea-level rise is going to be a non-event: the worst models predict about 18 inches over a century, which is less than tidal variation in most places. Changing weather and vegetation patterns is going to be a big event. We're going to see some previously fertile areas (Mesopotamia, Northern Europe, sub-Saharan A…

> Canadian & Russian taiga and the Sahara, for example, become fertile grasslands

It'll take a lot more than climate for those areas to become productive. Glaciers have scraped away most of the topsoil in the Canadian shield[1], for instance. The Sahara desert's sand isn't a great growing medium. And so on.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield

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