lurker
1mo ago
Unfortunately that guy is right that we could've solved global warming decades earlier but wrong about how it would've been done. The most maddening thing about old school environmentalists is their opposition to nuclear. We could have a totally decarbonized electric grid right now but lead ladden boomers and genxers heard nuclear and thought of bombs.
lurker
1mo ago
I would say solved being peak CO2 emissions. You're right about ICE cars but even at the levels we're at right now it's helping to slow the rate of car emissions. ICE car sales peaked in 2017 and it's been nothing but down since. I'd estimate that by 2030 over 80% of new cars sold will be EVs and the transition from mostly ICE to mostly EV will be quicker than you think. Norway is well ahead of everyone and is already at a third of cars on the road being EVs, hell even china is at one in ten and they started way later.
Also are renewables significantly reducing the amount of absolute energy that's being produced from fossil fuels
Well, if the amount of electricity being generated from fossil fuels is going down, and the number of cars burning fossil fuels is going down, then I don't see how it couldn't be?
lurker
1mo ago
I'm not gonna defend runaway global warming because I don't believe in it. As far as I can see if it wasn't dug out of the ground and burned then it doesn't contribute to global warming in a meaningful way. Main reason I'm skeptical about the agriculture stuff on that pie chart I linked.
lurker
1mo ago
Luckily with that you can just check vs reality to see the magnitude. CO2 levels are currently at 427 ppm over the 280 is was before the industrial revolution, and temps are at about 1.5℃ above pre-industrial. So pretty damn close to 0.01 degrees per ppm.
lurker
1mo ago
Respectfully, water vapor feedback is the (or at least A) central issue in the global warming controversy.
No it isn't? This is legit the first time I've ever heard about water vapor feedback being a major issue. I assure you, in climate activist circles this is just not a thing we talk about. The main catastrophic feedback mechanisms climate activists worry about are clathrate gun, ice albedo feedback and permafrost gas releases. Not water vapor feedback.
Ok, then please give me examples of a few arguments made by a few prominent global warming skeptics
Did you just not see the two I mentioned in the post you're replying to?
They could admit that CO2 is a greenhouse gas but take the position that the effects of CO2 have been exaggerated.
Sure they could but "global warming is happening and caused by humans, just a lot slower than believed" is not a track I ever see anyone take.
lurker
1mo ago
I feel like I must exist in a very different bubble to you cause I rarely hear about water vapor feedback. The only catastrophic feedback mechanisms I hear about are the clathrate gun and permafrost gas releases. I'm skeptical of both, especially clathrate gun, but thats besides the point.
lurker
1mo ago
Well, it's pretty easy to explain why humans are getting fatter, it's because we're eating too much. In fact the changing fad diets all seem to be based on the idea that you can somehow eat your way into not being fat. I suspect this idea might hold some blame as to why people are getting fatter.
Regardless one and two does indeed imply three and adapting to a warmer planet has no bearing on whether the planet is warming, on the contrary it kinda requires it.
I've never heard either this objection or anything about water vapor feedback being anything more than a minor contributor. Regardless this doesn't really matter for my point that global warming is nearly solved anyways so I won't focus on it.
As for the second, I remember quite clearly we had someone here that denied greenhouses gases existed, @dale-cloudman, wow it's been 2 years since this guy posted here. Anyways I don't really have any specific examples of popular skeptics explicitly denying greenhouse gases exist but pretty much all of them commonly make arguments that don't make any sense unless greenhouse gases don't exist. Mainly quibbling over solar irradiance or how the climate is constantly changing. Since they readily admit to two then the only other way they can argue anything else is causing global warming is by denying CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
The case for climate optimism.
Last thread I got in a discussion about global warming and I got a few responses that encouraged me to turn it into a top level post, in the hopes of brightening the day of some doomers and maybe convincing some skeptics of the reality of global warming. Now I don't expect there to be many climate skeptics here but I did get one person seemingly heavily implying it last time so lets quickly go over the basic logic of global warming.
- Greenhouse gases exist. It's easy to verify that certain gases absorb wavelengths of light that would normally reflect off the earth and go back into space. Absorbing this light causes the gas to heat up.
- We've been pumping greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, into the atmosphere.
- Therefore the planet will heat up.
Most people who dispute global warming typically deny the existence of greenhouse gases. Point two is just indisputable and three just follows if one and two are true. Disputing the existence of greenhouse gases is really your only avenue of attack. I'll gladly defend point one of anyone disputes it in the comments but I won't belabor the point here.
Before getting into the meat of my argument I do want to give the skeptics their due. Climate activists often make incredibly misleading arguments they think will promote climate activism but once people find out they've been mislead it just sows distrust in the entire field. Probably the most infuriating one is fossil fuel subsidies. You'll see the claim going around that governments spend 7 trillion dollars subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. But once you look into the numbers you see that the vast majority of these 'subsidies' are not from governments spending money but actually from governments failing to tax externalities. Now, I realize that economists do call these things implicit subsidies but climate activists rarely mention the implicit part and regardless this is not what anyone else uses the term subsidy to mean. Not only does this misleading stat sow distrust in climate activism but it also misdirects it. Most climate activists take it as it's face meaning and think governments are pointlessly shoveling cash into fossil fuels for no reason and all they have to do is to stop that. I hate this argument and wish it would stop being made. Sadly with even wikipedia's own article burying the lede on it I doubt I'll stop hearing it anytime soon.
Okay, so I've been waffling for a bit, what exactly is my argument? I fully believe that by 2030 global warming will be largely solved and by 2040 the issue will be essentially forgotten like the hole in the ozone layer. Now, if you haven't been keeping up with the clean energy and EV industry this might be a very surprising claim, global warming fixed in 4 years? Too good to be true! However I have what I think are good reasons for believing this. First thing to note is what most of our oil goes towards. About 85% goes towards making fuels of some kind and a good chunk of the remaining 15% goes towards things that don't get converted to CO2 like plastics and lubrication. As you might expect from the previous number, the vast majority of CO2 emissions also come from energy. This chart I linked actually massively understates the how much global warming is caused by energy emissions because I'm fairly certain most of the agriculture and forestry slice on that pie is bullshit but I already gave the skeptics their due so I won't go into it.
So, since the vast majority of global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels for energy, either for transportation or electricity, then to fix global warming you'd have to get both transport and electricity off of fossil fuels. I am therefore happy to report that significant and rapid progress is being made on both fronts. For EVs last year about a quarter of all new cars sold were EVs, while the full stats for 2026 aren't in yet for some reason the preliminary numbers are putting it at about a third. It looks pretty clear to me that EV adoption is a standard industry S-curve and we're hitting the nearly vertical section of it. Oh and before you ask, yes, it is mostly full EVs, not hybrids. Even if it were to end here this would already take a substantial chunk out of our CO2 emissions, since 100% of ICEVs emit CO2 citation needed but already about 40% of our electricity is clean.
But speaking of electricity, how has that been going? Pretty well actually, the share of global electricity thats renewable has nearly doubled in since the great recession, even nuclear is having a renaissance, and the rate of growth only seems to be accelerating. All the increase in electricity has come from clean sources, indeed the total amount of fossil fuel electricity is now declining. Why? Mainly thanks to the growth of solar and wind which is mainly thanks to the plummeting price of wind and solar. It's gotten so cheap that developing countries are skipping coal and gas and going straight to solar and wind. Not just are the share percentages similar to EVs but they now seem to be even be growing at similar rates!
You only need to extrapolate these curves out to see that by 2030 the vast majority of cars will be electric and we'll be approaching majority clean energy. All we must do to fix global warming is to keep on the path we're going down.
So, if global warming is mostly solved then what will there be for climate activists to do? Perhaps they'll try to find some other catastrophe to panic about like @JTarrou said, maybe AI. However, notice I said only mostly solved. Transport and energy is huge but theres still going to be a few tough holdouts that'll be difficult to decarbonize. Air travel is the big one, unless solid state batteries pan out in which case it'd be easy, with concrete, steel and nitrogen fertilizer being most of the rest. The latter three are particularly vexing problems but with a ~90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions we'll have plenty of time to figure them out. Regardless of any caveats I hope you dear reader learned something from all this and perhaps even made the future seem a little less bleak for you.
lurker
1mo ago
Pretty easily, it's easy to train yourself out of a disgust reaction but almost impossible to train yourself into one.
lurker
1mo ago
Not nature is not the same as socially conditioned though. Theres other options.
Not to mention I don't think you can socially condition people into finding things gross, well besides on an individual basis like a clockwork orange but that wouldn't scale. Disgust reactions seem very visceral and deep seated.
lurker
1mo ago
It's somebody redrawing some anime characters as trans
Besides the point but it seems that the redraw wasn't intended to be trans but rather "more realistic" which I suppose is more indicative of the artists reality then anything. Or perhaps she's doing that typical artist thing where they declare their own personal aesthetic preferences as scientific or realistic or whatever word will make their preferences sound objectively correct. I have some creative hobbies and meeting these kinds of people in them is never a pleasant experience.
lurker
1mo ago
Hey thanks for giving me an excuse to sperg out about my interests. In fact, if you wanna do me a favor could you keep arguing with me so I can sperg out some more please?
lurker
1mo ago
I don't know if you just didn't read my post but my entire point was that people are in fact doing something about it. They're doing so much about it that the issue is gonna be fixed relatively soon. Not to mention we solved it with capitalism, not communism. Very strange reply.
lurker
1mo ago
I dare say it's probably net green on EVs but tbh I don't care to look up exact numbers as I expect the effect from this to be small potatoes.
lurker
1mo ago
I was talking about the big surge in coal from 2000 to 2011
I don't understand why you thought a surge from more than a decade and a half ago would be proof of much of anything about the modern energy market. Technology has changed a lot. Theres a reason why the all the globes growth last year came from clean energy. Sorry about the bulverism. I will refrain from further assumptions about you.
(my suspicion is that this is to juice the numbers.) I therefore found it difficult to find a good source
I did not find it difficult for either europe or china. As you'll see it's mostly BEVs in both markets. America is once again the odd market out. You really shouldn't be using american stats as representative of anywhere else. Although there is a lot of variation between markets, with some having a lot of hybrids and others being completely dominated by BEVs.
Reform UK had great growth last year
This a particularly poor analogy. It's the nature of politics to blunt growth curves. In technology the kind of growth curve I'm talking about is the norm with the only notable exceptions being when a tech got cockblocked partway by an even better tech. Any if the curve ends because we find something even better than gas or electricity I'll be plum happy to eat salt on that one.
What did happen?
People anticipated the crunch and dug more lithium mines to meet expected demand. In fact supply increased so much that in spite of sky rocketing demand prices have continued to fall.
lurker
1mo ago
Forgive me
Apology accepted, don't let it happen again ;)
Since electricity generation is your main point of contention, let me address that. I can't understand how you can look at that graph you posted and say there's been a surge in coal power. Over the span of 10 years coal went from 42000 to 45000 tw/h, which is actually misleadingly positive about coal cause that 42000 is after a dip from 44000, whereas over the same timespan solar when from 800 to 5000, growing more both in absolute and relative terms. Overall coal looks pretty stagnant to me. Also, about the 2.8% market share, to put that into perspective, the electric car market share was pretty damn close to that in 2019. It went from just under 3% to over a third in seven years. These kind of transitions happen faster than you may believe possible and the solar curve looks pretty similar to the electric car curve to me. As for the resource issues, I remember during covid when people where freaking out over a lithium shortage due to EVs that turned out to never happen. Capitalism is actually pretty good at solving these supply issues if you let it do it's thing.
Now, if I may engage in bulverism on why you think coal power is surging, conveniently the energy institute recently released it's world energy report for last year. To give the relevant numbers, global energy generation grew by 855 tw/h and renewables grew by 861 tw/h, yes you read that right, renewables grew more than global energy did. Part of the reason is because coal declined by 58 tw/h, which doesn't sound like a boom to me. However despite that co2 emissions rose by over 300 million metric tons. Where did this increase come from if globally fossil fuels are stagnant? Well, just under half of that increases is coming from the US and pretty much entirely from coal. If you are american I can therefore understand why you think coal is booming, based on your personal experience it probably is. But america is the only place is it booming and everywhere else it declined so much that americas coal boom wasn't enough to offset it (in energy terms if not in c02).
Finally, ever if the above was not true and clean energy never grew from where it is now EVs would still help reduce co2 because ~20% of electricity generation is clean energy which better than gas cars which are 0% clean energy.
I will never apologize for being a climate bloomer.
lurker
1mo ago
I'm gonna come at this from a different angle and talk about climate change instead.
I'm actually fairly optimistic about our progress on fixing it. Already a third of new cars sold are electric and growing fast. Similarly solar is also on quite the rapid growth curve. I'm in the firm belief that in 20 years climate change will be treated like how we treat the hole in the ozone layer.
So, perhaps if climate change isn't so intractable, then neither is fertility?
lurker
1mo ago
I'm not gonna bother continuing this especially as I now realize you aren't even the same person. If you genuinely can't understand why the timespan of the data doesn't support his point there's no use continuing this conversation.
lurker
1mo ago
It certainly seems like whether iran is shooting at ships or not would have a substantial effect on how many ships are transiting the strait. Surely you understand this right? Surely you understand why it's dumb to use data from when it isn't to infer about transits when it is?
lurker
1mo ago
I feel like you're trying to worm your way out of the fact you presented week old data as if it were representative of now.
lurker
1mo ago
If you did see it then I don't understand why you presented data from a week ago, when iran wasn't shooting at tankers, as if it were representative of now, when iran is shooting at tankers.
I gotta go to work very soon so I'll respond to the rest of this later but
This is incredibly misleading. The last time Antarctica was a jungle was when it was way further north, part of pangea and also when CO2 levels were way higher.
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