Deal To Keep 1.5C Hopes Alive is Within Reach, Says Cop28 President (theguardian.com) 218
An "unprecedented outcome" that would keep alive hopes of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C is within reach, the president-designate of the UN Cop28 climate summit has said -- and even Saudi Arabia is expected to come with positive commitments. From a report: Significant progress has been made in recent weeks on key aspects of a deal at the crucial meeting that starts in Dubai this week, with countries agreeing a blueprint for a fund for the most vulnerable, and reaching an important milestone on climate finance. Sultan Al Jaber, who will lead the talks on behalf of the Cop28 host country, the United Arab Emirates, told the Guardian in an exclusive interview on the eve of the talks that the positive momentum meant the world could agree a "robust roadmap" of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 that would meet scientific advice.
"I have to be cautiously optimistic," he said. "But I have the levers and the traction that I am experiencing today that will allow for us to deliver the unprecedented outcome that we all hope for." He added: "Getting back on track, and ensuring that the world accepts a robust understanding of a roadmap to 2030 that will keep [a temperature rise above pre-industrial levels of] 1.5C (2.7F) within reach is my only goal."
"I have to be cautiously optimistic," he said. "But I have the levers and the traction that I am experiencing today that will allow for us to deliver the unprecedented outcome that we all hope for." He added: "Getting back on track, and ensuring that the world accepts a robust understanding of a roadmap to 2030 that will keep [a temperature rise above pre-industrial levels of] 1.5C (2.7F) within reach is my only goal."
delusional (Score:5, Informative)
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November was already 1.6C above preindustrial. I'm aware the goal is based on a rolling average but still.. 1.5C is a dead duck and so is 2C by any sane estimation.
Maybe, but it may not be too late for 3C or 4C, which is much better than doing nothing and heading for even more.
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But clearly the dummies in charge don't know that and are marshalling resources in the wrong direction.
Different goals need different battleplans and different strategies and resources.
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In this case it's the same goal, to limit global warming. Whether we are at +1.5C already and want to limit to 3C, or if we are at +0 and want to limit to 1.5C, the strategy is pretty much the same.
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November was already 1.6C above preindustrial. I'm aware the goal is based on a rolling average but still.. 1.5C is a dead duck and so is 2C by any sane estimation.
It's now one day away from December, and here in PA, we had our first killing frost. Back in my youth, that was often the end of September. but never later than mid October.
And all of those brain dead plans to remove carbon are well - brain dead. Causing more problems than they fix, if we could even do it.
Re: speaking of delusional (Score:2)
"Solar and wind are useless for projecting military power."
That is true if you pretend that the chain stops there.
But you can use solar and wind to make hydrogen which can be used for war. Or less efficiently, synfuels.
War being one of the few places nuclear power makes sense (on carriers) there is also the opportunity to make the fuel on carriers, which spend most of their time loitering.
If you produce your own fuel from solar and wind then your supply chain shrinks.
Fucking Farce (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Fucking Farce (Score:5, Informative)
"As well as being COP28 president, Mr Jaber is also CEO of the UAE's giant state oil company, Adnoc, and of the state renewables business, Masdar."
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/scien... [bbc.com]
Clarification only, as you aren't far off from the truth if you read the article I sourced. Behind the scenes, Aramco could very well be doing the same.
Re:Fucking Farce (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about climate, it's about wealth redistribution.
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It's not about climate, it's about wealth redistribution.
I'm not sure what you are suggesting here. The climate proposals we most often hear include increasing renewable energy sources, developing energy storage methods to deal with intermittency, improving energy efficiency, upgrading electrical transmission infrastructure, and changing oil-fueled infrastructure to electrical. What part of this do you consider "wealth redistribution"?
Currently an immense amount of wealth is flowing to oil companies. Are you saying that slowing down this flow of money to the ri
Re: Fucking Farce (Score:2)
All of those changes are going to both require and cause wealth redistribution. The money has to come from somewhere, and there are people profiting from the current status quo who wouldn't be.
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All of those changes are going to both require and cause wealth redistribution. The money has to come from somewhere, and there are people profiting from the current status quo who wouldn't be.
Well, I suppose if you define a market economy as "wealth distribution," sure, this is wealth distribution.
Paying money to oil companies and buying oil is also "wealth distribution" by that definition.
So is pretty much all economic activity.
But they won't do it (Score:2, Insightful)
- 100 new nuclear power plants
Here's a list of all the ways we can get it done within 20 yaers, which is too slow:
Solar, wind, wave, fusion, hydro, geothermal
It's almost like they don't actually care about actually solving the problems because politicians care more about NIBMY whiners and their own careers than the planet.
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>> 3 years:100 new nuclear power plants
Nope. You're delusional.
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I take it you haven’t seen the timeline for building a nuclear plant, or the price tag. They simply aren’t cost effective.
Re:But they won't do it (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear: costly and slow [Re:But they won't do it] (Score:2)
I take it you haven’t seen the timeline for building a nuclear plant, or the price tag. They simply aren’t cost effective.
They are if you build enough of them at a time and don't get your prices from oil company lobbyist "studies"
But they aren't if you look at construction times and prices from actual nuclear power plants in the real world, and don't get your prices or construction times from amateur nuclear devotees.
Now, nuclear indeed may be the solution (or, an important part of the solution.) But ignoring real world nuclear power plants in favor of imaginary nuclear power plants is not helping. Nuclear power has real problems which must be acknowledged in order to be solved, and one of these problems is that it has been, to dat
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Yup pro-nuclear advocates (like myself) will point out the success of France's nuclear strategy but don't actually want to implement the policies that made it happen (state control of the nuclear industry, government standardized designs and construction)
Nuclear cannot and will not be a "market" solution for the exact reasons you laid out: too capital intensive, too long to reach breakeven, the risk profile is unlike all other energy sources (extremely safe running but small risk of hugely catastrophic prob
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To be clear I support the French model for nuclear and would support the DOE or whatever just building and operating the plants directly similar to the TVA
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The French are having some problems too, though: https://www.barrons.com/news/n... [barrons.com]
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For sure, nuclear power is a capital intensive process and safety has to be paramount due to it's risk profile. A state apparatus can afford those price shocks, a private company faced with the same issues is either going to shutter the plants, go out of business or reach out for subsidies to continue running them so to me it makes sense to just cut out the middleman as it were.
A nuclear power backbone to a future non-fossil energy grid has benefits economically that are not directly profit driven, a gover
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You mean that rance that had trouble keeping the lights on last winter and had to buy electricity from Germany? Or that France were EDF needs to be massively supported by government money because nuclear is an economic nightmare? Or that France that has regular outages of, in theory, working nukes in winter and summer because river-cooling does not actually work that well? Is it that "success" you are talking about?
Seriously, go hallucinate someplace else.
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Re:Nuclear: costly and slow [Re:But they won't do (Score:4, Funny)
Let's blue-sky this idea and get some synergy on it.
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Let's blue-sky this idea and get some synergy on it.
Ooh! Ooh! Can I help? My core competencies are conceptualizing, actualizing, and bringing action items to fruition in aggregate architectures and best of breed infrastructures.
You in?
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THE main problem with nuclear power is that it's very dangerous unless you treat it very carefully. And management tends to cost cut on things they don't understand.
Re: Nuclear: costly and slow [Re:But they won't do (Score:2)
Another issue is supply/demand. You cannot feasibly just "spin down" a reactor for a little bit if you are overproducing. Sure, battery banks and the like can help buffer that, but the issue is still there when that buffer fills up.
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I don’t need any studies. Watts Bar cost over $12 billion to finish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I donâ(TM)t need any studies. Watts Bar cost over $12 billion to finish.
That sounds like a bargain compared to the cost of global warming.
Ivanpah cost over $2 billion to finish and it produces less than 900 GWh/year. Watts Bar produces over 16,000 GWh/year. 6 times the cost to get 16 times the annual energy output. Tell me again how nuclear power costs too much?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: But they won't do it (Score:2)
"That sounds like a bargain compared to the cost of global warming."
False dichotomy. Nuclear never looks good without one.
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Cost efficient isn't clear, and the timeline depends a lot on paperwork. But the paperwork is there for a reason...unless you run nuclear plants very carefully they are very dangerous.
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I take it you haven’t seen the timeline for building a nuclear plant, or the price tag. They simply aren’t cost effective.
If it was an emergency we would get it done. It is obviously not an emergency.
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The climate is changing, our actions are the primary cause of the change, and aspects of the change will be very bad. But it is not happening immediately; it will be continuing over a large number of years, and the number of people and organizations contributing to the cause is huge, such that no one entity is anything but a small contributor to the problem. The problem will continue for years and even decades, and the solutions must be implemented to last for periods of years
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It is a slow-motion emergency.
And we are taking slow-motion action.
Plenty of people think we can be picky about our solutions, so I figure it is not really that big a problem then. They have it solved, have at it. I don't need to care, and I don't.
Re: But they won't do it (Score:2)
AGW is affecting you now, and it will affect you more before you die. And it will affect you less if we do more about it. You don't have to care if you're dead, otherwise you will.
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People like you have me convinced that wind and solar are so cheap that it's not worth considering nuclear power. Wind and solar are being built, so problem solved. Hence, not worth worrying about.
That's not my industry, so nothing for me to do. If it starts to look like building wind and solar isn't going to solve the problem, we could start looking at nuclear. But for now I'm just going to assume the people who are building wind and solar are going to get this taken care of.
Re: But they won't do it (Score:2)
Re: But they won't do it (Score:2)
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If the cost of nuclear power is a concern then global warming must be cheaper.
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It's hard to understand, really. But something about using a liquid metal that explodes on contact with water and bursts into flames on contact with air to heat up water just didn't end up being very reliable. We may never know for sure.
ORNL was ready to give us molten
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] -- that design would have been commercially viable tbh (not to mention a helluva lot safer than the water cooled designs out in the field today)
as for proliferation concerns, oh well. We already have tons of nuclear weapons. producing a bit of enriched plutonium that would be used as fuel isn't going to hurt anything. it also solves the problem of you know, hollowing out a fucking mountain and storing tons of waste with a half-life measured in thousands of years (vs the
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It takes an average of about 10 years to build a nuclear plant in a country that cares about quality.
It takes about 6 months to build a 50MW wind farm in the same countries.
You have to be awfully bad at math to support nuclear power.
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If only there were methods of storing electricity.
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If only there were methods of storing electricity.
How do we store electricity now? As natural gas in steel tanks. In the future we can store electricity as uranium or thorium in nuclear reactors. Fuel is stored energy, it is kind of how we define fuel, we need only have devices to convert that energy to electricity.
Re: But they won't do it (Score:2)
Re: But they won't do it (Score:2)
The wind never stops blowing, it just doesn't blow nearby. Luckily electricity is fungible and we know how to transport it.
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Re:But they won't do it (Score:5, Informative)
It takes an average of about 10 years to build a nuclear plant in a country that cares about quality.
4.5 years is the average in the world now. You do realize even the nuclear plants in China are subject to international inspections, and the latest ones actually use the Westinghouse AP1000 design (which is what make them even more secure than the previous ones)?
The difference is that China doesn't allow drinkypoos to slow them down. They are actually doing what is necessary for the climate. Whereas you are just repeating fossil fuel lobbies arguments, over and over again.
It takes about 6 months to build a 50MW wind farm in the same countries.
In your wildest dreams. In this article from Iberdrola [iberdrola.com] (offshoring wind farm builder): "the construction of an offshore wind farm is estimated to take between 7 and 11 years. Three to five years are dedicated to the development phase, one to three to the pre-construction phase and two to four years to construction. "
Onshore wind farm are slightly better on the deployment phase, but worse during the pre-planning phase because of NIMBY people (exactly like you for nuclear, who could have guessed).
You have to be awfully bad at math to support nuclear power.
Many countries are planning and starting building new nuclear plants. I guess they are all bad at math.
Speaking about math, here is a simple equation:
50g CO2eq/kWh < 450g CO2eq/kWh
The former are CO2 emissions per kWh for France (67% from nuclear, rest from solar/wind/hydro and some gas). The latter for Germany (50% solar/wind, and a lot of coal and gas for the rest). Germany has been deploying solar/wind for the past 30 years. They are extracting more lignite as we speak, and building new LNG terminals and plants. At which point do you acknowledge that their strategy failed?
Re: But they won't do it (Score:2)
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What are you talking about?
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Between Japan and South Korea you could maybe finish reactor vessels for 50 (China and Russia will be unlikely sources for mass build out of new nuclear).
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Nuclear power plants do not get built because of NIMBY mentalities.
Nuclear power plants do not get built because of Greed N. Corruption profiting from a decade or two of red tape before ground is even broken. I doubt you can even find a single thing we humans build on this planet that is more front-loaded with project-destroying costs.
Solve the real problem.
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You might get emissions done, in your dreams. But I thought this was about global warming, not emissions?
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Maybe there will be real movement before the AMOC suddenly shuts down or the Thwaites glacier collapses, maybe that's what it'll take to kick some asses into gear.
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The only way? Really? Your imagination is very, very limited. But I would like to see the science and economics that support your view.
Meanwhile, here is some food for thought: https://www.economist.com/scie... [economist.com]
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Way to disgrace yourself, idiot. Neither are 100 nukes in 3 years in any way possible, nor could they be supplied with fuel. You are deeply delusional.
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Here's a list of all the ways we can get it done within 3 years:
- 100 new nuclear power plants
Not actually. The carbon we've put into the atmosphere isn't going anywhere. for a long time. Nuc plants don't sequester carbon.
As well, the mining, processing and other production of the fuel is not carbon free, nor the building of those plants. So while during operation, they might not be releasing CO2, the process has releases.
The problem is perhaps beyond most people's ability to come to grips with. CO2 stays in the atmosphere a long time, and methane which is more potent a greenhouse gas doesn't s
It's called COP28 (Score:2)
Vote. Vote in primary elections.
my crystal ball says (Score:3)
We're going to keep burning up those fossil fuels as long as it is economically viable.
Then a certain contingency of mankind will further continue to burn fossil fuels just to be abrasively contrarian.
All those fossil fuels are going to be used. We should plan accordingly.
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Vote. Vote in primary elections
For whom? Please cite specific legislation that passed which you think shouldn't have passed or that didn't pass which you think should have.
If you cite specific bills and state which way you think the vote should have gone, I assure you I will check my current representative's voting record to see how they voted.
OK people! (Score:2)
The elephant in the room is China, maybe India too (Score:3, Insightful)
China and India together are, if the theory is right, emitting on their own enough to put 1.5C way out of reach. Not only that, but they are increasing their emissions. All the evidence is they do not believe in the climate emergency. They are just going to grow their economies and let emissions go where they will.
So if these hopeful remarks are to be more than fantasy what we have to see is China and India (and maybe Indonesia) signing up to real reductions of the tonnage of CO2 they emit.
Not a promise to reduce CO2 emissions per unit of GDP. Not a promise to have peak emissions somewhere in 2040, 2050, 2060. Not a promise to install ever more wind and solar. No, a schedule of real tonnage reductions by year, ending with China on under 2 billion tons a year by, for instance, 2035 or 2040.
Call me when you hear Xi commit to that. Till then, its just tens of thousands of officials flying around the world and emitting hot air at these endless pointless conferences.
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You can't have a global agreement when only 1/3 of the nations on the planet actually commit to it.
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It is true that India and China has vastly increasing emissions. And your point about double-talk is very well taken. I am also frustrated and terrified by the lagging pace of progress on decarbonization.
However, I don't think India or China don't believe in the climate emergency - they just don't think their countries' respective publics will tolerate the consequences of not adding cheap power immediately. Sadly, I think that calculus is accurate - in terms of public perception and power, lots of people ex
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Please note the climate (aka physics) only cares about the absolute amount... Accounting tricks don't work on it.
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This whole "blame game" is real silly. There is plenty of blame to go around. The US and EU have 150 years of industrialization, China and India have massive amounts in the last 40 and the rest of the world is still transition or even just starting.
Myself, as an American I don't really care if China and India are moving as fast as us. As a believer still in the upsides of US global hegemony I want the US to be the example setter, the ideal everyone can look to. We've already been doing it without the eco
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Did I claim that US isn't a high CO2 producer? In fact I said it was high! Point was the trend since 2007 is downward and all the signs point to it only going lower as time moves on:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2... [ourworldindata.org]
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Did you lose the ability for reading comprehension? Did i claim it was the "poorer" peoples responsibility? In fact my first comment was against this idea that we can blame India and China and other unindustrialized nations and have to set the example in spite of the fact that these other countries will continue to pollute and I have in fact argued the point that it's not fair to hold newly developing nations to the same standard as nations that already have gone through the process, especially as nations
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The only circle I draw is around the entire world.
The point is: someone has to start. If the Chinese/Indians start now, you can bet that some westerners would be embarrassed into doing something.
If the US starts now, it would provide a (too high) plateau to achieve. Same for the EU.
If Asia doesn't start now, 2C is definitely gone.
If North America doesn't start now, 2C is definitely gone.
If Europe doesn't start now, 2C is definitely gone.
In other words: brace for 3-4C or more. No one will do anything, becaus
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Wrong. China does close to 11 billion tons a year. Compared to the US 5 billion.
"People like you keep saying emissions per capita don't matter. They are actually the only thing that matters."
They don't matter because what supposedly drives the climate and drives climate change is the gross tonnage emitted. So it does not matter if you do 10 or 100 or 1,000 tons per capita. What matters is if you do 11 billion tons or 1 billion. World emissions supposedly have to come down from around 37 billiontons a y
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They don't matter because what supposedly drives the climate and drives climate change is the gross tonnage emitted. So it does not matter if you do 10 or 100 or 1,000 tons per capita. What matters is if you do 11 billion tons or 1 billion
Wrong. This is exactly why emissions per capita matter: the gross tonnage emitted is the sum of the individual emissions (the capita ones). Thus, you only have two options to reduce the gross tonnage:
- either you reduce the number of people
- or you reduce the emissions per capita
A third, more probable scenario involves a blend of both options. However, attempting to assign blame to others when you personally exceed sustainable per capita emissions by a significant margin reflects a reluctance to take any pe
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What does the size of a country have to do with physics. Is Vatican City the greenest country in the world? Maybe we should lump all the Western countries together and compare to China. NATO has a population of around 1 billion, so it's at least close to China.
Now I'll agree China is a useful focal point sinc
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Sorry, that argument doesn't work. There are plenty that do, but that isn't one. The pollution you create DIRECTLY is the pollution you should be charged for. If you do it for someone else, it's still your pollution to deal with, and you should bundle the charge for dealing with it into the price you charge.
Just ignore the back room deals (Score:2)
The hope is alive, on the condition the back room deals on oil arenâ(TM)t kept alive.
COP? (Score:2)
The biggest lie of the oil and gas companies (Score:2)
But they are only talking about emissions in their production/transportation processes.
They leave out the order-of-magnitude larger emissions from the burning of their product.
As long as this deception is in place, climate mitigation plans are doomed to fail.
We need ramp down of oil and gas production to meet any reasonable physically effective target and improvement in the climate forecast.
Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
Yes of course (Score:2)
Let's solicit more promises from countries who (even if we assume they genuinely make them) are unlikely to hit any of the targets.
Because promises are just as good as actual action, right?
1.5C? Forget it... (Score:2)
That one went out of reach 10 years ago or so.
C'mon, does anyone take this serious anymore? (Score:3)
I mean, no later than when they decided to hold that conference in a country that pretty much exists because of the international dependence on fossil fuel and that would instantly collapse into the third world shithole it is, it was pretty obvious to anyone that they don't even try to pretend anymore.
This conference is about getting wined and dined and enjoy being at some conference, not about trying to get anything done. It's mostly an excuse for a couple of "important" people to waste taxpayer money.
And I wonder why ISIS (or whoever is terrorist-group-du-jour) doesn't want to score brownie points in the public eye by just blowing THAT pigsty up for a change.
How to solve all problems (Score:2)
How did they all get to Dubai? Oh. Right. OK...
If such a conference is necessary and must happen in person, it might be a nice touch to have it in a town that is genuinely on the front line. In Canada I nominate Timmins, Ontario or Prince George, BC.
That the climate is changing is obvious. What to do about it (if anything) is not at all obvious. Socialism always seems to be the answer, no matter what the actual problem is...
...laura
Re:Why 2030 why not just starts right now ? (Score:5, Insightful)
We can't. There are six more years for various governments to take the money and run to fund "social justice" programs. Or just take their 10% for the big guy.
See Washington State for example.
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their electricity is mostly hydropower.
That will be going away. Because of the fish. And hatchery fish don't count, even though the resident orcas are more than happy to eat them.
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We seem to be trapped in a cul-de-sac of emissions reductions, which have become a proxy for reducing global warming. This fixation on emissions is preventing us from addressing the actual problem - global warming.
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Since emissions cause global warming, a fixation on emissions is addressing global warming.
If you're saying, why not develop cooling technologies (such as, e.g., aerosol particles in the atmosphere that reflect sunlight) to directly address the warming, there are many reasons. One good one is that unless we also stop emissions, we're going to have to keep increasing the intensity of our cooling technologies, forever.
And, while the heating due to emissions lasts for a century or more, cooling technologies ne
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Don't come crying to me when we blow past 2 deg warming because your emissions efforts were too little, too late and ended up being more expensive than cooling. Good luck, anyway.
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Yep, pretty much. That you got moderated "Troll" just illustrated the general delusions about the actual state of affairs.
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Not clear. If alternatives get cheap enough, oil will be too expensive to use. That's already starting to happen to coal.
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After fossil fuel and concrete the rest is just screwing around in the margins.
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We can't store it as carbon dioxide. That requires gas tight confinement, which is very difficult to maintain for even a century. It needs to be converted to something else, and that's going to be an energy intensive process. Trees and grass are probably as efficient at converting it as is possible, or nearly so, but what they convert it to isn't durable. It's probably fairly easy to convert wood or grass into a durable plastic, but the useful plastics have their own problems, so probably the best we co
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That the effects are along a gradient curve is correct. And it was chosen as a marketing slogan. The rest of your statement is garbage. Every hundredth of a degree makes things a bit worse. The does tend to get lost in the noise, as even yearly averages vary a lot, but it's still real.
Re: 1.5 is a marketing slogan (Score:2)
If something shaves a millisecond off my life expectancy (which is the order of magnitude effects we're talking about with tenths of a degree), I just plain don't care how many times it happens so long as it doesn't go over a few dozen billion.
The doom and gloom shit is a lie and the rest is arguing about the applicability of mean values to individuals. By that logic I'd have a fractional number of kids, eyeballs, and fingers. And it's the same level of absurdity in predictions of climate having an effect o
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Every nation that has lowered their CO2 emissions dis so with some combination of hydro, geothermal, and nuclear fission. Every nation that tried to lower CO2 emissions without those energy sources failed.
The US lowered their CO2 emissions from 2010 to 2021. Geothermal is nearly zero in the US, power from nuclear fission reactors was not changing much over that period, with a slight downward trend as reactors were being decommissioned, and hydroelectric was pretty constant (went up about 2% over that period, not enough to make a difference, and nowhere near enough to account for the decrease in emissions.)
So apparently no, it's not true that you can't lower CO2 emissions without these energy sources.
Data: US