Originally published at: How Mainstream Climate Science Endorsed The Fantasy Of A Global Warming Time Machine
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation. When the Paris agreement on climate change was gavelled into being in December 2015, it briefly looked like that rarest of things: a political victory for climate activists and delegates from the poorest regions of the…
More good news. Frist!!! I don’t have a cat, I’ll add a picture of Penny in a minute.
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We really need to work on this attitude:
IT SUCKS TO BE YOU!
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Are we the only people who read this article? Sheesh.
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More and more it looks like we are going to de-carbonize the atmosphere via total collapse of industrialized civilization.
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A Win-Win saturation. Temperatures up, Dow is up, Hurricane rebuilding stimulates the economy almost as much as a war.
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We will not mitigate climate change without confronting and defeating fossil fuel interests. We should expect climate scientists to be candid about this.
It isn’t the job of climate scientists to confront and defeat fossil fuel interests, it is the job of public policy makers. We need public servants with vision and courage who serve the public and not the rich who control all of the powerful countries in the world and profit off of fossil fuels. I doubt they will be confronted until we, especially the affluent we, are all suffering from the ravages of climate change.
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We will not mitigate climate change without confronting and defeating fossil fuel interests.
That’s so vague as to lack meaning. It contains nothing useful. There’s no plans there to implement. Zero methodology. What do we say to these fossil fuel interests?
“Stop selling us fossil fuels!”
“No I didn’t mean stop selling me gasoline, I mean stop selling somebody else gasoline… or something.”
There’s one way to reduce the use of fossil fuels and do it relatively quickly. One way. Reduce consumption by means of carbon fuel taxes. This has the added beneficial effect of reducing those fuel prices to the consumer longterm. If we reduce our fuel useage the carbon fuel companies have to reduce their production because they don’t have storage for it (there’s about a months worth, worldwide). Fuel taxes create a buyers market, and a fairly stable one.
You could force them to reduce production but that would raise consumer fuel prices while yielding no increase in income to the goverment. Shutting down production creates a sellers market, and usually an unstable one.
Pretty simple.
If you want to reduce fossil fuel use, then do that. Tax it. By how much? Just my opinion but I think taxing hydrocarbon fuels by an additional 25% of its present price per gallon will reduce the combustion of those fuels and provide a healthy tax base for renewables research, construction, whatever is deemed most beneficial.
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Good thing we have capitalism and President Trump and general American awesomeness to help us tackle this problem!
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As long as the carbon fuel tax revenues are dedicated to very low to no carbon energy production, this approach will go some distance toward carbon neutrality. Consider for moment the increasing need for air conditioning in places on earth where the temperatures are rising to unbearable levels while the denizens of those places are coming into relative prosperity. India is a case in point. The yearly power needs for AC in India over the next two decades will require energy sources enough to power 6 billion cars yearly. Most of the increased low to no carbon energy sources will be consumed by the unabated ravages of rising temperatures so the demand for carbon fuel will remain steady even at a 25% increase. Forget the growing crypto & AI demands on the grid.
We are in deep shit without shovels. Things will get worse before they get better.
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1.5°C is a political target and the overshoot scenarios frankly seem more like a way to accommodate the Davos crowd than a likely outcome if global mean temps exceed that boundary as they likely will; i.e, 2°C here we come, 2.5°C next.
Rich people probably think they can evade even worse case scenarios and for some decades unfortunately they will be right until they aren’t. Hard to get people, particularly those with limited empathy, to take a bad situation seriously if they believe they can successfully avoid it.
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I envision these taxes on gasoline and diesel to be in the USA as there’s zero utility in my proposing them for anywhere else.
This article misunderstands the role of scientists in this whole process. I’m an Earth scientist, and as far as I’m aware, no respectable scientists are advocating for an “overshoot” strategy. It’s just a scenario that they’re evaluating along with all the others. Everyone agrees, very openly and explicitly, that the vastly more effective approach would be to cut carbon emissions immediately and drastically. But scientists don’t control policy. Suppose you’re a scientist, and policymakers come to you and say “let’s assume we reduce carbon emissions more slowly than you say is necessary to avoid immediate warming — might it be possible to geo-engineer a cooling mechanism later?” It would be irresponsible for scientists to say “we refuse to consider that scenario”. Absent any serious scientific analysis, the information vacuum would be filled by the usual charlatans touting their science fiction solutions and assuring everyone that there’s nothing to worry about, magical technology will solve everything, just like it always has, etc.
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I don’t know if I got my head around this article.
Don’t know if I’m lacking intelligence or the background reading needed to follow this.
Reversing global warming is just a slightly more sophisticated version of the mindset that suffuses Republican ideology: turning the clock back to 1954, or to the antebellum era, or (if they’re Bible thumpers) to the Salem witch trials.
I don’t think scientists can be completely let off the hook.
The remedy for the overshoot was generally considered to be BECCS. WHICH WAS AN ABSURD IDEA REQUIRING LAND THE SIZE OF INDIA TO GROW CROPS AND THEN TO BURN THE RESIDUE CAPTURE THE CO2 AND BURY IT.
What is not a fantasy and which is absolutely doable is directly cooling the climate through a variety of approaches including sunshine reflection and large scale ecosystem restoration.
But unfortunately and tragically the world is still committed to an ERA approach alone - Emission reductions alone - which might’ve worked 25 years ago but it’s way too late to avoid irreversible tipping elements being activated essentially taking the climate out of humanities control and dooming all of us probably by mid century to a dystopian existence.
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This overshoot risk has been discussed for decades. Indeed, we are already overshooting. The Bruce Dern movie Silent Running introduced this idea that somehow earth would protect its natural legacy by keeping greenhouses in space. More recently great minds like Elon Musk have been suggesting our future lies off planet, perhaps on Mars. Bottom line, though, most of humanity is not going anywhere soon and certainly not to Mars. Space is very big, very empty and interstellar travel will require colony ships or faster-than-light travel, which is still going to have extensive local time implications. Just buying a private spaceship with a warranty of 500,000 light years or 200 millennia, whichever comes first, is going to be a tough sell. Even if I’m taken in by that new spaceship smell, how can I be sure I’ll ever live to see the enforcement of this warranty? And say we can cryogenically store people for long space trips. Who’s to say cryo or suspended animation doesn’t end up like Ozempic being used for entirely different purposes, like freezing a portion of humanity for several centuries and storing them remotely in a facility in the Oort cloud where chances of tampering are low. Or even a cryo-lottery, where the lucky few get to use the “get out of the next few centuries” card while the rest of us face a major extinction event (don’t want to get reanimated too soon of course, as in the classic Luke Wilson vehicle Idiocracy). But there it is, a lot of this “space” business is really about reengineering the future here on Earth. If so, space isn’t just an emerging major industry, it’s the only industry.
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Hydrocarbon (fossil) fuels produce heat energy with two primary technologies: internal combustion engines and furnaces. No one has even begun to propose how the hundreds of millions of residential, commercial, and industrial furnaces can be replaced. The multiple quadrillions of joules of heat energy now produced by gas and oil fueled furnaces
around the world cannot realistically be met by replacing them with electrical heating systems. Not even nuclear fission can solve this problem. Probably why no one wants to talk about furnaces. Overshoot is unstoppable and there will be no going back.
Big tech. is going to doom us with AI and other “advances” by restarting retiring coal fire power plants. Mankind is dooming this planet.