I would add that many farmers and ranchers appear to not believe the hype. Common question: Were the Dirty 30s caused by human-driven climate change? (Or words to that effect.)
A First Nation friend told me a few weeks ago that things were just as hot when he was growing up and the elders talk about things being just as hot pre- and early contact. That's anecdotal evidence, no more, no less.
The wildfires across North American this summer, especially in eastern Canada, are indeed impressive. Then there were several years of massive wildfires in western North America during the early part of 20th century. On top of that, satellite data apparently suggests that the proportion of the earth burning up in wildfires has been steadily trending down over the past few decades. Media coverage has dramatically climbed.
You treat some scientific consensus like it was a religious certainty and all you will do is provoke significant blowback. Thus slowing the transition even more.
Straw man echoes of "climate religion" by the other people. I thought denier dinosaurs had gone extinct by now...
R_P: A no-regret climate policies were proposed by economists towards the beginning of the century. It took into account the significant uncertainty regarding climate forecasts but called for radical reductions in fossil fuel consumption primarily for health reasons but also for other economic reasons.
Nobody listened.
You treat some scientific consensus like it was a religious certainty and all you will do is provoke significant blowback. Thus slowing the transition even more.
Letâs face it. The claim of uncertainty is a common argument against taking action on any prediction of future harm. âHow do you know, for sure?â. âThat might not happen.â âItâs possible that it will be harmlessâ, etc. It takes on many forms, and it can be hard to argue against. Usually, it takes a lot more time, space, and effort to debunk the claims than it takes to make them in the first place.
Acronym of Fear, uncertainty, and doubt, a marketing strategy involving the spread of worrisome information or rumors about a product.
During the times when the tobacco industry was discounting the risks of smoking and cancer, the phrase âdoubt is our productâ was purportedly part of their strategy. And within the climate change discussions, certain individuals have literally made careers out of waving âthe uncertainty monsterâ. It has been used to argue that models are unreliable. It has been used to argue that measurements of global temperature, sea ice, etc. are unreliable. As long as you can spread enough doubt about the scientific results in the right places, you can delay action on climate concerns. (...)
Yes, as an investor I do specialize in investing in overseas oil & gas exploration and production companies. For a number of reasons. The US federal excise taxes on gasoline and diesel have not budged since the 1990s which means in real terms the excise taxes on gasoline and diesel have constantly declined over the past 3 decades.
The cheap energy entitlement continues to prevail particularly in the USA. That bet is reinforced every time the Biden regime acts like cheap fuel at the pump is his biggest political priority. Americans are willing to kill for this cheap energy entitlement.
Another reason includes your anti-data, anti-science, anti-expertise attitude that is remains widely shared in the USA and other rich democracies.
We both know that you are not an economist but clearly you behave as if you are smarter than all the economists. Are you familiar with the concept of net tax? Not surprising, seeing how you apparently know more than all kinds of experts in the fields of electrical generation, storage and distribution as well as mining. The current limitations of solar and wind are staring you in the face yet you refuse to see them.
Another reason is that poor developing countries who avoid the pitfalls of the Resource Curse can use the rich rents from oil and gas activities to 1) accelerate socio-economic development through better financed education, health, public infrastructure and 2) promote health through cleaner air by advancing natural gas as an energy source both industrial and domestic. Colombia, for example, has done relatively well (though it has stumbled as of late). Guyanese management of its offshore oil & gas boom has been stellar.
You may not care about pulling large numbers of people out of poverty No_end_to... but many people do.
If you are looking for a quick and lazy way of effecting a quick transition to a lower carbon-emitting world, limited, regional nuclear war is your only option. Your choice to support Israel's nuclear weapons arsenal and great US efforts to maintain Israel's regional nuclear weapons monopoly will certainly help with this option. More nuclear weapons proliferation is almost guaranteed.
In passing, congratulations for helping Germany to put all those coal-fired electrical generation plants back into use. Well played. Many believe that nuclear energy is key to effecting any kind of effective transition going forward.
oh, I totally agree with you about it being a mistake for Germany to take working nuclear plants offline and upping generation from coal. You may have missed it in older posts, but I am a fan of nuclear power as a last resort until viable storage solutions are developed and come online. I'd take nuclear over fossil fuels any day.
.. and thanks for the somewhat back-handed compliments about my economics nous. I hadn't realised I was coming across as that erudite, but hey, I'll take it.
As for developing countries selling off their oil reserves to climb the social ladder.. I have my doubts about the wisdom of that approach. Sounds like an even more perverse version of trickle-down economics to me because it basically gives large foreign corporations and their paid local cronies a ticket to cream it big time and actually just enables your North American profligacy that you seem so addicted to. I can't see any necessary benefits for the "little people" in that. Much better would be a decentralised power infrastructure that literally empowers rural communities - and wind and solar do that.
And as for the limitations of renewables, I don't dispute these in the least. It is why I still see a need for gas-fired power plants, which I would prefer to be shut-down, but there is no ready alternative that can rapidly top up any deficit in generating capacity at that scale in order to keep the grid stable, as I - in my ever so humble understanding of the matter - see it. That doesn't mean that there isn't still huge potential for renewables to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
DISCUSSION
issued by
CLIMATE PREDICTION CENTER/NCEP/NWS
10 August 2023
ENSO Alert System Status: El Niño Advisory
Synopsis: El Niño is anticipated to continue through the Northern Hemisphere winter
(with greater than 95% chance through December 2023 -February 2024).
—————————————
Take a careful look at Figure 6 in order to get an idea of the uncertainty that characterizes climate science.
Yes, as an investor I do specialize in investing in overseas oil & gas exploration and production companies. For a number of reasons. The US federal excise taxes on gasoline and diesel have not budged since the 1990s which means in real terms the excise taxes on gasoline and diesel have constantly declined over the past 3 decades.
The cheap energy entitlement continues to prevail particularly in the USA. That bet is reinforced every time the Biden regime acts like cheap fuel at the pump is his biggest political priority. Americans are willing to kill for this cheap energy entitlement.
Another reason includes your anti-data, anti-science, anti-expertise attitude that is remains widely shared in the USA and other rich democracies.
We both know that you are not an economist but clearly you behave as if you are smarter than all the economists. Are you familiar with the concept of net tax? Not surprising, seeing how you apparently know more than all kinds of experts in the fields of electrical generation, storage and distribution as well as mining. The current limitations of solar and wind are staring you in the face yet you refuse to see them.
Another reason is that poor developing countries who avoid the pitfalls of the Resource Curse can use the rich rents from oil and gas activities to 1) accelerate socio-economic development through better financed education, health, public infrastructure and 2) promote health through cleaner air by advancing natural gas as an energy source both industrial and domestic. Colombia, for example, has done relatively well (though it has stumbled as of late). Guyanese management of its offshore oil & gas boom has been stellar.
You may not care about pulling large numbers of people out of poverty No_end_to... but many people do.
If you are looking for a quick and lazy way of effecting a quick transition to a lower carbon-emitting world, limited, regional nuclear war is your only option. Your choice to support Israel's nuclear weapons arsenal and great US efforts to maintain Israel's regional nuclear weapons monopoly will certainly help with this option. More nuclear weapons proliferation is almost guaranteed.
In passing, congratulations for helping Germany to put all those coal-fired electrical generation plants back into use. Well played. Many believe that nuclear energy is key to effecting any kind of effective transition going forward.
R_P: I don't believe your conservative, right-wing Republican approach to fighting anthropogenic climate disruption will be very effective. You want to disrupt production. Just like the highly ineffective War on Drugs.
Why are you and other world savers incapable of persuading people to simply use LESS fossil fuels? Why are you worried about oil when more coal is being burned to generate electricity than at any other time in the world's history?
Tell us how import substitution will accelerate the transition to a lower fossil fuel usage future.
Tell us how crushing the Canadian economy help Canadians to accelerate to a lower carbon emitting future.
Are you implying that the wealth of the state has no role to play in this technologically uncertain transition?
Battery storage and grid capacity currently appear to be insurmountable obstacles in order to affect the transition. Do you have a magic wand you carved out of a tree limb to help out here? Or do you believe that R&D falls from the skies as form of divine gift that costs taxpayers nothing?
Are you planning of forcing millions upon millions in the Global South to starve to death in the name of zero emissions? For the benefit of the virtuous in the rich north?
gee, it almost sounds like you've got money in the oil business
ok, aside from that cheap shot, to your points from my perspective (rich European economy heavily dependent on cars powered by ICEs):
Disrupting or even outright banning the production of a commodity (for which not just zero tax is paid on the opportunity costs incurred in its extraction and use but that is literally subsidised by government money) simply restores a level playing field for alternative technologies creating parity for renewables sources that don't exhibit these opportunity costs. Your point, though, was that this will be ineffective. This doesn't hold true in Germany.
-QWw
2. "Why are you and other world savers incapable of persuading people to simply use LESS fossil fuels? Why are you worried about oil when more coal is being burned to generate electricity than at any other time in the world's history?" - this point is invalidated by the above chart. Renewables have been booming and consumption of fossil fuels is declining.
Of course the consumption of coal is alarming and needs urgent action.
3 - 6 Economies have always suffered from shocks, periods of sudden change, due to all kinds of historical contingencies. The best thing about capitalism is its ability to respond so quickly to them. What is one sector's loss normally proves to be another sector's gain and opens up new fields of opportunity. I don't see how the current transition to renewables is any different.
Sure, storage remains a critical issue. The main problems as I understand it are related to grid security - securing a base load and quickly handling peak consumption, which explains the popularity of small gas-fired cogen plants here in Germany (our residential park has one). The main thing is to get away from coal.
7. Sacrificing the World's south? Really? Distributed energy generation in the form of solar and wind is EXACTLY what developing nations need.
R_P: I don't believe your conservative, right-wing Republican approach to fighting anthropogenic climate disruption will be very effective. You want to disrupt production. Just like the highly ineffective War on Drugs.
Why are you and other world savers incapable of persuading people to simply use LESS fossil fuels? Why are you worried about oil when more coal is being burned to generate electricity than at any other time in the world's history?
Tell us how import substitution will accelerate the transition to a lower fossil fuel usage future.
Tell us how crushing the Canadian economy help Canadians to accelerate to a lower carbon emitting future.
Are you implying that the wealth of the state has no role to play in this technologically uncertain transition?
Battery storage and grid capacity currently appear to be insurmountable obstacles in order to affect the transition. Do you have a magic wand you carved out of a tree limb to help out here? Or do you believe that R&D falls from the skies as form of divine gift that costs taxpayers nothing?
Are you planning of forcing millions upon millions in the Global South to starve to death in the name of zero emissions? For the benefit of the virtuous in the rich north?
Here in south western Australia we have been witnessing changes in the forests resulting from rapid rainfall decline.
Consequently large trees, mainly eucalypt species many hundreds of years old, are rapidly dying off as they cannot reach the falling water table along with a new inability to fight off common pests and diseases.
What we witnessed on our little land plot at the time was these trees shedding tons of litter onto the forest floor adding greatly to the fire fuel load creating the basis of an eventual crown fire. We collected literally tons of the stuff and burnt it off during the shortened rainy season.
Wonder if the current Hawaii fires have something in common with our experience?
For what it's worth, partner was listening to an interview with a climate scientist (so knowledgeable and strong believer in climate change) who said that the Maui fires couldn't really be pinned on the climate, unlike the mainland fires. Sorry I don't have a link, however this seems consistent with the rainfall trend data where that part of Maui has seen little change compared to the Big Island.
As scientists weigh the influence climate change may have had in fueling Hawaiiâs wildfires, there isnât one standout factor they point to. Rising temperatures likely contributed to the severity of the blaze in several ways. But global warming could not have driven the fires by itself.
Maui is facing a compound disaster, where many different agents acted together to make the fires so horrific. As human influences on the climate and environment grow, the risk of these disasters is escalating. (...)
For what it's worth, partner was listening to an interview with a climate scientist (so knowledgeable and strong believer in climate change) who said that the Maui fires couldn't really be pinned on the climate, unlike the mainland fires. Sorry I don't have a link, however this seems consistent with the rainfall trend data where that part of Maui has seen little change compared to the Big Island.
Apart from having one of the coolest names for a volcano out there, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haâapai was a truly amazing eruption. No one expected anything of that intensity from it and it has rewritten the book on shallow submarine eruptions, though there is still some debate as to whether the main force of it was from phreatomagmatic interaction (basically water flashing to steam) or from a more conventional evacuation of a shallow magma chamber. Given the amount of water erupted and the low SO2 I would expect the former but some of the papers I have read suggest it was more the latter as it ejected more Dense Rock Equivalent than Pinatubo for instance. It was a whopper by any measure.
But whatever, yes, over the short-term, volcanic eruptions can explain certain climate outliers, like this year. But over the long-term the effect smooths out and volcanos don't explain the current pace of global warming. Volcanic activity is if anything rather quiet at the moment.
EDIT: List of holocene eruptions.. note that the big eruptions (VEI 6+) are orders of magnitude bigger than the smaller ones (VEI 5 or less). If you then correlate these to the chart from Michael Mann, it is pretty evident that volcanoes don't play any significant role in radiative forcing.
As for aerosol cooling (SO2) from volcanoes the same can be said. The effects wane after ten years or so. You would have to have a truly mega event like an igneous province (Decca Traps, etc.) to see a comparably extreme impact on the climate (in this case cooling) as what we are seeing now (the inverse, warming). And even then, such events unfold over a very long time. What we are witnessing now can only be described as climate shock. A massive sudden change.
"hey earthlings, nothing says you've bad and i'm calling your number like a super volcanic eruption
except maybe when i toss my texas sized asteroid fastball"
