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> we are warming up and should/can solve this Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate cha

> we are warming up and should/can solve this Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent. No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point. It's time for the "we can save the world" people to stop leading everyone on, unless they can present facts and real scenarios that back up their claims (hint: they can't and never do). You'll notice that technologically we didn't come remotely close to doing anything in the past decade that will enable us to move as fast as we'd have to. Where are the great energy & resource breakthroughs? They don't exist and by the numbers we needed them yesterday. The world will add 2 billion people in the next ~30 years. Nearly all of those births will be in the developing world where emissions are going to continue to skyrocket. Solar, wind and electric vehicles aren't going to solve that problem. The emissions that the US + EU cut, India will add. China will add an entire US-worth of emissions in just the next 10-15 years. If you had a magic wand and could put the US to zero emissions tomorrow morning it wouldn't make a bit of lasting difference to the situation. This single fact of reality makes all the "we can save the world" arguments false. And that's merely two countries. Then you have parts of Latin America, Africa and developing Asia, where emissions and population are going to continue to rise substantially. It seems increasingly clear that the so called experts claiming this can be stopped know they're lying, and they keep lying anyway. What's their plan for immediately stopping all emissions increases across all of the developing world? There is no such plan, they have no intention of implementing or calling for such a plan. Thus, they're lying. There is no scenario where anybody can get the math to work out on what's happening. And you'll find that nobody even attempts to, they just issue empty statements about how we need to take urgent action and then we can save the world. They'll never present you the real scenarios for the actions necessary to immediately turn back all emissions increases. It's fraudulent intellectually, it takes a small amount of time to analyze the context and know that.

adrianN 5y ago
It's really just a matter of money. Wind and solar are enough to produce energy; add in nuclear if you like. We also know how to make Hydrogen and Methane to store large amounts of energy over long time periods, so storage is not a technical problem either. It's just very expensive right now. WW2 was a bigger manufacturing challenge that what we would need to do to become carbon neutral. There are several studies with roadmaps to net zero emissions published. They tend to be very long and technical, so they don't get much media attention.
gmadsen 5y ago
you aren't presenting any data. I don't have the faintest idea what you mean by "thats just math". You say so confidently it can't be solved, which I'm going to infer you mean impossible and not just hard. We could without a doubt drastically reduce co2 emmissions to near zero by switching to nuclear, and paying for nuclear plants in developing countries, banning gas vehicles. Require any current and needed hydro carbon power plants to implement carbon capture. That is hard, very hard. Might start a war. But it is not impossible like you are stating.
omegaworks 5y ago
Climate nihilism is the next stage of climate denial. We CAN do much to manage growth and encourage sustainable development. Wealthy western nations need to concretely embrace technology transfer and infrastructure investment. As nations develop their infant mortality decreases, people naturally invest in the children that they have and their birthrates decline to replacement level. Already we're seeing a difference in how technology infrastructure has been distributed in developing countries. People are coming to depend upon their cellular phone and wireless data connections to be more reliable than their electricity infrastructure.
CuriousSkeptic 5y ago
Here is a plan from The International Energy Agency https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050 https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050 Edit: One interesting facet is that it’s adding an extra 0.4 percentage point a year to annual global GDP growth, which is encouraging On the other hand annual per capita income from oil and natural gas in producer economies falls by about 75%, which sounds like something that can cause political issues
webmaven 5y ago
> Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent. > No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point. So, I am seeing this set of ideas getting pushed a lot more these days, which means that a lot of the effort being put into climate change denial has started shifting to climate delay and outright fatalism (which used to mostly be a feature of evangelical "who are we to question God's plan for us?" arguments). The fact of the matter is that there is a lot we can do in terms of slowing the growth and even reducing global CO2 (and CH4, methane) output, and a lot more we can do in terms of carbon capture, and a lot we can do in terms of mitigation and adaptation (which we will have to do regardless of how successful we are at reduction and capture) that is only going to get more expensive the longer we put it off. This isn't a case of "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it". Every proposal is competing with every other in terms of cost, feasibility, externalities, and impact, it isn't the case that committing to spending money on the problem results in checks being handed out indiscriminately. If you have a criticism of some specific intervention, please make it, but it isn't feasible to throw up our hands and do nothing. Because even if the cost/benefit analyses are so incredibly bad that just means that ultimately we only do things in the mitigation and adaptation buckets.

adrianN 5y ago

It's really just a matter of money. Wind and solar are enough to produce energy; add in nuclear if you like. We also know how to make Hydrogen and Methane to store large amounts of energy over long time periods, so storage is not a technical problem either. It's just very expensive right now. WW2 was a bigger manufacturing challenge that what we would need to do to become carbon neutral. There are several studies with roadmaps to net zero emissions published. They tend to be very long and technical, so they don't get much media attention.

gmadsen 5y ago

you aren't presenting any data. I don't have the faintest idea what you mean by "thats just math". You say so confidently it can't be solved, which I'm going to infer you mean impossible and not just hard. We could without a doubt drastically reduce co2 emmissions to near zero by switching to nuclear, and paying for nuclear plants in developing countries, banning gas vehicles. Require any current and needed hydro carbon power plants to implement carbon capture. That is hard, very hard. Might start a war. But it is not impossible like you are stating.

omegaworks 5y ago

Climate nihilism is the next stage of climate denial. We CAN do much to manage growth and encourage sustainable development. Wealthy western nations need to concretely embrace technology transfer and infrastructure investment. As nations develop their infant mortality decreases, people naturally invest in the children that they have and their birthrates decline to replacement level. Already we're seeing a difference in how technology infrastructure has been distributed in developing countries. People are coming to depend upon their cellular phone and wireless data connections to be more reliable than their electricity infrastructure.

CuriousSkeptic 5y ago

Here is a plan from The International Energy Agency https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050 https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050 Edit: One interesting facet is that it’s adding an extra 0.4 percentage point a year to annual global GDP growth, which is encouraging On the other hand annual per capita income from oil and natural gas in producer economies falls by about 75%, which sounds like something that can cause political issues

webmaven 5y ago

> Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent. > No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point. So, I am seeing this set of ideas getting pushed a lot more these days, which means that a lot of the effort being put into climate change denial has started shifting to climate delay and outright fatalism (which used to mostly be a feature of evangelical "who are we to question God's plan for us?" arguments). The fact of the matter is that there is a lot we can do in terms of slowing the growth and even reducing global CO2 (and CH4, methane) output, and a lot more we can do in terms of carbon capture, and a lot we can do in terms of mitigation and adaptation (which we will have to do regardless of how successful we are at reduction and capture) that is only going to get more expensive the longer we put it off. This isn't a case of "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it". Every proposal is competing with every other in terms of cost, feasibility, externalities, and impact, it isn't the case that committing to spending money on the problem results in checks being handed out indiscriminately. If you have a criticism of some specific intervention, please make it, but it isn't feasible to throw up our hands and do nothing. Because even if the cost/benefit analyses are so incredibly bad that just means that ultimately we only do things in the mitigation and adaptation buckets.