7 ms·

CO2 levels mark 'new era' in the world's changing climate

65 points by nedsma 10y ago

dougmwne 10y ago
I really wish people would stop saying we're screwed. I know it's a compensation for climate denial, but I think it's terrible rhetoric. If you say, "it's too late, we're screwed," then the message is that nothing really needs to be done but deal with the consequences. This is a big, scary situation and it's easy to feel hopeless in the face of it. But we are faced with multiple potential futures. Our outcome is tied to our action and the outcomes could be anywhere between mild and catastrophic. No invisible hand is going to swoop down and fix this one for us. This one's on us.
rb808 10y ago
> Levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have surged past an important threshold and may not dip below it for "many generations". Is this at all reversible? I presume not. The real problem is that lots of people and putting a lot of effort and money into reducing emissions - where if the above is correct seems very very difficult (with a growing developing world) and likely a waste of time. Surely we should be trying harder to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and spend less time on reducing emissions?
- grhino 10y ago
  The path to reducing emissions is much clearer than the path to efficiently scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. Also, scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere gets harder and harder as CO2 emissions grow. There is some research to sequester CO2, but I don't think we have an ideas that are better than planting trees.
- czechdeveloper 10y ago
  We release it because it allows us to produce energy (burn something). To remove it from atmosphere would require to put it some higher energy state so that we can store it and that require again some source of energy. Pumping pure CO2 in some mine will probably not do the job. In reality, we will try to just reduce temperature without removing CO2, but CO2 causes problems other than tempterature rise. See ocean acidification. There seems to not be any good solution really.
  - ep103 10y ago
    yeah, but we release it because burning things is an easy way of releasing energy whenever / wherever we need it. Reducing CO2 can be done pretty much anywhere in the world. So if we needed to build a nuclear powerplant somewhere just to power our CO2 scrubbers, so that our cars and planes could burn fuel, that's completely doable.
  - collyw 10y ago
    Plant a hell of a lot of trees?
    - lisper 10y ago
      That is actually the most effective way of scrubbing CO2. The problem is that trees take up a lot of valuable real estate.
      - the8472 10y ago
        Lots of unused land are shrubs, grass and hillsides. The mediterranean coast used to be all trees a little more than two millenia ago[0]. Some semi-arid zones around deserts could also support reforestation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman...
  - madshiva 10y ago
    Just stop growing is the solution itself.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      If we were to "just stop growing", it would pretty much collapse the entire civilization on the spot. Unfortunately, the assumption of growth is the basis of not just the economy, but a lot of things in the society. Sure, I think we should move away from the growth-based economy. But this needs to be a gradual process.
- Brakenshire 10y ago
  > Surely we should be trying harder to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and spend less time on reducing emissions? It's simply a matter of cost. While we are continuing to put CO2 into the atmosphere, preventing one gram of CO2 from being emitted is equivalent to scrubbing one gram of CO2 from the atmosphere, and at present the former is far, far cheaper than the latter, and there is a huge amount of low hanging fruit still to be gathered. In fact, a lot of the emissions abatement is profitable - for instance an LED lightbulb might cost $5-10, but saves you 500-750 kWh over its lifetime, which is $50-100 worth of electricity even without pricing in carbon. The hope is if you introduce a carbon price (for instance by cutting other taxes and introducing a revenue neutral carbon tax) that you can further spur investment so that the market will make more of these technological developments towards resolving the problem. That may involve scrubbing carbon, for instance the recent process which has got a lot of publicity, using renewable electricity to turn CO2 into ethanol. But you're looking to resolve things at the lowest cost, and it may be that scrubbing is unnecessarily costly, and you can do everything through other means. We need to just price in the externality and let the market do what it does best.
  - rb808 10y ago
    Sure maybe cutting emissions can be cheaper than scrubbing - but the article says the CO2 levels are already too high. If we magically stop all emissions right we should be scrubbing as well. So maybe we should be reducing emissions where its easy - and scrub
    - Brakenshire 10y ago
      > Sure maybe cutting emissions can be cheaper than scrubbing - but the article says the CO2 levels are already too high Ah, I see what you mean. It's a bit like national debt and deficit I suppose. At the moment, debt is high, and the deficit is high. CO2 abatement measures can reduce the deficit, but not the debt. You'd need CO2 scrubbing to actually push the deficit into surplus, and reduce the debt, rather than just stabilize it. In an ideal world, you're right that we want to be getting the total concentration down, not just stabilizing it by reducing the rate of increase. But I think that stabilization would be such a major challenge for the foreseeable future that we should be looking to that first. Prioritizing more expensive ways of trying to reduce the total concentration in 30-50 years, over cheaper ways of stabilizing the concentration right now would, in my opinion, be making the perfect the enemy of the good. Also, I'm not sure stabilization at 450 or 500 ppm (equivalent to 2-3C warming) would be that bad, what we're trying to do is avoid the definitively atrocious outcome of warming above the 2-3C range.
- jamesblonde 10y ago
  The elephant in the room that people don't talk about is population growth. If we don't get that under control, there really is no chance of us avoiding catastrophic consequences, like melting of the methane clathrates.
  - Scarblac 10y ago
    The vast majority of the CO2 is produced by only a small part of the population (the rich people in the west), and they aren't the ones whose population is growing.
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      Actually China is #1, triple the USA. Have they stopped growing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
      - Scarblac 10y ago
        How much of that is by factories producing things for consumers in the west?
        JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        Its mostly charcoal cooking fires if I understand right.
      - _ph_ 10y ago
        China has a birth rate distinctively under the one necessary for a constant population. But as people keep living longer, the total population is going to grow slightly for some years to come. The bigger environmental impact is, that the energy consumed per citizen is still growing as prosperity develops.
  - WhoBeI 10y ago
    Education, prosperity and equality can solve that. TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...
mrb 10y ago
Here the scary chart in question: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/mlo_full_record.png https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/pl... The last 2 years where it can be seen the level never returned under 400 ppm: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/mlo_two_years.png https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/pl...
avar 10y ago
For context here's the Earth's level of CO2 over geologic time periods: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.g...
- _ph_ 10y ago
  While this diagram shows, that the current CO2 content is lower than in many historic phases of the earth climate, this has little impact on the seriousness of our current situation. The biggest problem we have with the change of the CO2 content of the atmosphere is the speed by which it changes, and consequently the speed of the warming up. Eco systems change way quicker than they can adapt too. And dying eco systems and their input on our life are the big problem humanity is facing in the next 100 years.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    I can't help but to think that it will solve the problem by putting pressure on its source, aka Humans.
    - briandear 10y ago
      Are humans the primary source? Would love a reputable citation.
      - idlewords 10y ago
        You can prove it to yourself by asking what happened to all the carbon in coal and oil extracted since the 18th century. It tracks the rise in atmospheric CO2, as you would expect, since we burned it.
        TillE 10y ago
        I've been pointing this out to obstinate nerds for years. This really isn't complicated: human-generated CO2 does not magically disappear, and we know exactly how it interacts with infrared radiation. Just put these two simple facts together.
diafygi 10y ago
If you're wondering what software entrepreneurs can do about it, here's a reply I recently wrote: ---- I'm in a climate change startup, and here's how I look at it: 87% of the energy sources we use are fossil-based[1] and will need to be replaced with non-fossil alternatives in the next 30 years. That's trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure and technology growth opportunity for clean energy and energy efficiency[2]. The next Google will be an energy company[3]. To answer your question more specifically, in order to actually pull the 87% energy transition off, clean energy sources face huge financial and engineering challenges. This presents a lot of business opportunities for tech startups that can improve efficiencies for those clean energy companies. Energy efficiency, electric self-driving vehicles, solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, public transit, etc. all need to grow by 100x in 30 years, and a huge chunk of that growth will be software driven. The advanced energy industry is already a $1.4 trillion industry (larger than airlines and fashion industries)[4]. So there is, right now, a ton of market size for climate change tech, and it will grow by several orders of magnitude over the next few decades. Now is one of those rare moments where you can save the planet and have a business model. For example, my startup is a SaaS company that is used by tons of distributed clean energy resources to smooth out the process of collecting energy data for feasibility analyses. We shave about 5-10% off the installed cost of energy audits and distributed solar, and make money doing it. So if you're interested in doing tech startup in climate change. Do it! We need all the help we can get. If you're interested in the Bay Area professional clean energy scene, check out the calendar https://bayareaenergyevents.com/ https://bayareaenergyevents.com/ (I run it) and start showing up to stuff! [1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11951 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11951 [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/aug/31/citi-report-slowing-global-warming-would-save-tens-of-trillions-of-dollars https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... [3]: http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/ http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/ [4]: http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/advanced-energy-hits-record-revenue-nearly-1-4-trillion-2015/ http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/advanced-energy... From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12344113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12344113
melling 10y ago
Without nuclear power, there's no stopping global warming: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_nuclear_power_is_hurting_the_environment?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_... We squandered the past 3 decades, now we're screwed.
- _ph_ 10y ago
  Nuclear certainly keeps the CO2 emissions down. France has a pretty low CO2 footprint based on 80+% nuclear electric power. However, nuclear is not only controversial, but going forward, expensive. For new installations, wind and solar installations are cost competitive if not even cheaper, with little environmental or economic risks attached.
  - hacker42 10y ago
    > For new installations, wind and solar installations are cost competitive if not even cheaper, with little environmental or economic risks attached. Citation needed.
    - Recurecur 10y ago
      Exactly. If subsidies are removed from the equation, solar in particular is quite a bit more expensive. Wind and solar also lack the 24/7 reliability of nuclear.
      - _ph_ 10y ago
        No, solar is about 100€/MWh without subsidies. Indeed, the one big problem remaining with wind and solar is constant supply over the day. But the larger the connected grids are, the better this balances out. While a nuclear power plant delivers a constant output 24/7 (this is also not ideal as we are lacking consumption in the late evening and night, thats why Belgium put lights onto their highways), nuclear power plants regularly get pulled of the grid entirely, if there is a technical problem. A new one should of course have less downtimes than an older one, but one needs to plan in a certain amount of replacement capacity.
_ZeD_ 10y ago
Sigh... https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
grondilu 10y ago
"[...] all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. [...] There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans." Freeman Dyson, heretic thoughts about science and society. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xFLjUt2leM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xFLjUt2leM https://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-heretical-thoughts-about-science-and-society https://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-heretical-th...
- idlewords 10y ago
  The scary thing about global warming is that it happens on a timescale that our political institutions aren't equipped to handle, and requires concerted effort by countries that are not equally affected. It's also hard to model and has outcomes that range from "mild disruption" to "Earth turns into Venus". The precautionary principle suggests that we take it seriously.
  - grondilu 10y ago
    > Earth turns into Venus Unfortunately I don't remember where I did read it, but I do recall reading a paper rejecting the idea that Earth could follow a runaway green-house effect as on Venus. I don't know if people seriously see that as a real possibility or not, but at the very least I've never heard any scientist mentioning it seriously. EDIT: well, apparently it wasn't so hard to find. It's right in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article about runaway greenhouse effect[1] "For instance, a “runaway greenhouse effect”—analogous to Venus-- appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities."[2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect 2. http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session31/inf3.pdf http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session31/inf3.pdf

65 points by nedsma 10y ago

I really wish people would stop saying we're screwed. I know it's a compensation for climate denial, but I think it's terrible rhetoric. If you say, "it's too late, we're screwed," then the message is that nothing really needs to be done but deal with the consequences. This is a big, scary situation and it's easy to feel hopeless in the face of it. But we are faced with multiple potential futures. Our outcome is tied to our action and the outcomes could be anywhere between mild and catastrophic. No invisible hand is going to swoop down and fix this one for us. This one's on us.

rb808 10y ago

> Levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have surged past an important threshold and may not dip below it for "many generations". Is this at all reversible? I presume not. The real problem is that lots of people and putting a lot of effort and money into reducing emissions - where if the above is correct seems very very difficult (with a growing developing world) and likely a waste of time. Surely we should be trying harder to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and spend less time on reducing emissions?

grhino 10y ago
The path to reducing emissions is much clearer than the path to efficiently scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. Also, scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere gets harder and harder as CO2 emissions grow. There is some research to sequester CO2, but I don't think we have an ideas that are better than planting trees.
czechdeveloper 10y ago
We release it because it allows us to produce energy (burn something). To remove it from atmosphere would require to put it some higher energy state so that we can store it and that require again some source of energy. Pumping pure CO2 in some mine will probably not do the job. In reality, we will try to just reduce temperature without removing CO2, but CO2 causes problems other than tempterature rise. See ocean acidification. There seems to not be any good solution really.
- ep103 10y ago
  yeah, but we release it because burning things is an easy way of releasing energy whenever / wherever we need it. Reducing CO2 can be done pretty much anywhere in the world. So if we needed to build a nuclear powerplant somewhere just to power our CO2 scrubbers, so that our cars and planes could burn fuel, that's completely doable.
- collyw 10y ago
  Plant a hell of a lot of trees?
  - lisper 10y ago
    That is actually the most effective way of scrubbing CO2. The problem is that trees take up a lot of valuable real estate.
    - the8472 10y ago
      Lots of unused land are shrubs, grass and hillsides. The mediterranean coast used to be all trees a little more than two millenia ago[0]. Some semi-arid zones around deserts could also support reforestation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman...
- madshiva 10y ago
  Just stop growing is the solution itself.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    If we were to "just stop growing", it would pretty much collapse the entire civilization on the spot. Unfortunately, the assumption of growth is the basis of not just the economy, but a lot of things in the society. Sure, I think we should move away from the growth-based economy. But this needs to be a gradual process.
Brakenshire 10y ago
> Surely we should be trying harder to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and spend less time on reducing emissions? It's simply a matter of cost. While we are continuing to put CO2 into the atmosphere, preventing one gram of CO2 from being emitted is equivalent to scrubbing one gram of CO2 from the atmosphere, and at present the former is far, far cheaper than the latter, and there is a huge amount of low hanging fruit still to be gathered. In fact, a lot of the emissions abatement is profitable - for instance an LED lightbulb might cost $5-10, but saves you 500-750 kWh over its lifetime, which is $50-100 worth of electricity even without pricing in carbon. The hope is if you introduce a carbon price (for instance by cutting other taxes and introducing a revenue neutral carbon tax) that you can further spur investment so that the market will make more of these technological developments towards resolving the problem. That may involve scrubbing carbon, for instance the recent process which has got a lot of publicity, using renewable electricity to turn CO2 into ethanol. But you're looking to resolve things at the lowest cost, and it may be that scrubbing is unnecessarily costly, and you can do everything through other means. We need to just price in the externality and let the market do what it does best.
- rb808 10y ago
  Sure maybe cutting emissions can be cheaper than scrubbing - but the article says the CO2 levels are already too high. If we magically stop all emissions right we should be scrubbing as well. So maybe we should be reducing emissions where its easy - and scrub
  - Brakenshire 10y ago
    > Sure maybe cutting emissions can be cheaper than scrubbing - but the article says the CO2 levels are already too high Ah, I see what you mean. It's a bit like national debt and deficit I suppose. At the moment, debt is high, and the deficit is high. CO2 abatement measures can reduce the deficit, but not the debt. You'd need CO2 scrubbing to actually push the deficit into surplus, and reduce the debt, rather than just stabilize it. In an ideal world, you're right that we want to be getting the total concentration down, not just stabilizing it by reducing the rate of increase. But I think that stabilization would be such a major challenge for the foreseeable future that we should be looking to that first. Prioritizing more expensive ways of trying to reduce the total concentration in 30-50 years, over cheaper ways of stabilizing the concentration right now would, in my opinion, be making the perfect the enemy of the good. Also, I'm not sure stabilization at 450 or 500 ppm (equivalent to 2-3C warming) would be that bad, what we're trying to do is avoid the definitively atrocious outcome of warming above the 2-3C range.
jamesblonde 10y ago
The elephant in the room that people don't talk about is population growth. If we don't get that under control, there really is no chance of us avoiding catastrophic consequences, like melting of the methane clathrates.
- Scarblac 10y ago
  The vast majority of the CO2 is produced by only a small part of the population (the rich people in the west), and they aren't the ones whose population is growing.
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    Actually China is #1, triple the USA. Have they stopped growing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
    - Scarblac 10y ago
      How much of that is by factories producing things for consumers in the west?
      - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        Its mostly charcoal cooking fires if I understand right.
    - _ph_ 10y ago
      China has a birth rate distinctively under the one necessary for a constant population. But as people keep living longer, the total population is going to grow slightly for some years to come. The bigger environmental impact is, that the energy consumed per citizen is still growing as prosperity develops.
- WhoBeI 10y ago
  Education, prosperity and equality can solve that. TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...

mrb 10y ago

Here the scary chart in question: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/mlo_full_record.png https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/pl... The last 2 years where it can be seen the level never returned under 400 ppm: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/mlo_two_years.png https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/pl...

avar 10y ago

For context here's the Earth's level of CO2 over geologic time periods: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.g...

_ph_ 10y ago
While this diagram shows, that the current CO2 content is lower than in many historic phases of the earth climate, this has little impact on the seriousness of our current situation. The biggest problem we have with the change of the CO2 content of the atmosphere is the speed by which it changes, and consequently the speed of the warming up. Eco systems change way quicker than they can adapt too. And dying eco systems and their input on our life are the big problem humanity is facing in the next 100 years.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  I can't help but to think that it will solve the problem by putting pressure on its source, aka Humans.
  - briandear 10y ago
    Are humans the primary source? Would love a reputable citation.
    - idlewords 10y ago
      You can prove it to yourself by asking what happened to all the carbon in coal and oil extracted since the 18th century. It tracks the rise in atmospheric CO2, as you would expect, since we burned it.
      - TillE 10y ago
        I've been pointing this out to obstinate nerds for years. This really isn't complicated: human-generated CO2 does not magically disappear, and we know exactly how it interacts with infrared radiation. Just put these two simple facts together.

diafygi 10y ago

If you're wondering what software entrepreneurs can do about it, here's a reply I recently wrote: ---- I'm in a climate change startup, and here's how I look at it: 87% of the energy sources we use are fossil-based[1] and will need to be replaced with non-fossil alternatives in the next 30 years. That's trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure and technology growth opportunity for clean energy and energy efficiency[2]. The next Google will be an energy company[3]. To answer your question more specifically, in order to actually pull the 87% energy transition off, clean energy sources face huge financial and engineering challenges. This presents a lot of business opportunities for tech startups that can improve efficiencies for those clean energy companies. Energy efficiency, electric self-driving vehicles, solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, public transit, etc. all need to grow by 100x in 30 years, and a huge chunk of that growth will be software driven. The advanced energy industry is already a $1.4 trillion industry (larger than airlines and fashion industries)[4]. So there is, right now, a ton of market size for climate change tech, and it will grow by several orders of magnitude over the next few decades. Now is one of those rare moments where you can save the planet and have a business model. For example, my startup is a SaaS company that is used by tons of distributed clean energy resources to smooth out the process of collecting energy data for feasibility analyses. We shave about 5-10% off the installed cost of energy audits and distributed solar, and make money doing it. So if you're interested in doing tech startup in climate change. Do it! We need all the help we can get. If you're interested in the Bay Area professional clean energy scene, check out the calendar https://bayareaenergyevents.com/ https://bayareaenergyevents.com/ (I run it) and start showing up to stuff! [1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11951 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11951 [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/aug/31/citi-report-slowing-global-warming-would-save-tens-of-trillions-of-dollars https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... [3]: http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/ http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/ [4]: http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/advanced-energy-hits-record-revenue-nearly-1-4-trillion-2015/ http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/advanced-energy... From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12344113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12344113

melling 10y ago

Without nuclear power, there's no stopping global warming: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_nuclear_power_is_hurting_the_environment?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_... We squandered the past 3 decades, now we're screwed.

_ph_ 10y ago
Nuclear certainly keeps the CO2 emissions down. France has a pretty low CO2 footprint based on 80+% nuclear electric power. However, nuclear is not only controversial, but going forward, expensive. For new installations, wind and solar installations are cost competitive if not even cheaper, with little environmental or economic risks attached.
- hacker42 10y ago
  > For new installations, wind and solar installations are cost competitive if not even cheaper, with little environmental or economic risks attached. Citation needed.
  - Recurecur 10y ago
    Exactly. If subsidies are removed from the equation, solar in particular is quite a bit more expensive. Wind and solar also lack the 24/7 reliability of nuclear.
    - _ph_ 10y ago
      No, solar is about 100€/MWh without subsidies. Indeed, the one big problem remaining with wind and solar is constant supply over the day. But the larger the connected grids are, the better this balances out. While a nuclear power plant delivers a constant output 24/7 (this is also not ideal as we are lacking consumption in the late evening and night, thats why Belgium put lights onto their highways), nuclear power plants regularly get pulled of the grid entirely, if there is a technical problem. A new one should of course have less downtimes than an older one, but one needs to plan in a certain amount of replacement capacity.

_ZeD_ 10y ago

Sigh... https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/

grondilu 10y ago

"[...] all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. [...] There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans." Freeman Dyson, heretic thoughts about science and society. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xFLjUt2leM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xFLjUt2leM https://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-heretical-thoughts-about-science-and-society https://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-heretical-th...

idlewords 10y ago
The scary thing about global warming is that it happens on a timescale that our political institutions aren't equipped to handle, and requires concerted effort by countries that are not equally affected. It's also hard to model and has outcomes that range from "mild disruption" to "Earth turns into Venus". The precautionary principle suggests that we take it seriously.
- grondilu 10y ago
  > Earth turns into Venus Unfortunately I don't remember where I did read it, but I do recall reading a paper rejecting the idea that Earth could follow a runaway green-house effect as on Venus. I don't know if people seriously see that as a real possibility or not, but at the very least I've never heard any scientist mentioning it seriously. EDIT: well, apparently it wasn't so hard to find. It's right in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article about runaway greenhouse effect[1] "For instance, a “runaway greenhouse effect”—analogous to Venus-- appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities."[2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect 2. http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session31/inf3.pdf http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session31/inf3.pdf