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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.
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 reasonthe 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 CO2citation neededbut 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.
I believe that global warming is essentially a hoax. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but the main thing I dispute is that warming due to mankind's emissions will be amplified by a positive feedback mechanism.
So in a sense, I don't dispute global warming. What I mean is that (1) there is little or no dispute that atmospheric CO2 levels are rising due to mankind's activities; (2) since CO2 is a greenhouse gas, one can reasonably expect measurable warming due to mankind's activities. The issue is that according to climate activists, alarmists, warmistas -- whatever you want to call them -- this baseline warming will be amplified to dangerous levels by water vapor feedback. However this claim of amplification, in my opinion, does not stand up to scrutiny. Which means we are left with modest warming as opposed to dangerous warming.
Anyway, as I said, I can't speak for anyone but myself but I suspect that you are attacking a bit of a strawman here. Are you able to identify a few prominent global warming skeptics who "deny the existence of greenhouse gases"?
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.
What? This is basic stuff. Water vapor are even as of now contributing over 50% of heating. There are other heat trapping substances such as clouds (liquid atmospheric water) is another 25%, methane is 5% and CO2 maybe 20%. There are other important things in the models such as albedo effect stemming from disappearance ice replacing it with earth with different reflection rates. There is a thing of 4,000 gigatons of CO2 trapped in permafrost and microbes etc. in soil.
All these things are part of climate models, they act in nonlinear and unpredictable way, they have their own natural cycle often with different branches etc. Some of them provide some solution, for instance you can trap atmospheric carbon by growing woods, burning them via pyrolysis and producing biochar that can be used as fertilizer, replacement for some construction material such as asphalt or you can use lignin from wood to produce carbon fiber etc.
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