Climate change causes more extreme weather, that doesn't imply this summer will be one of the coolest for the next 100 years?
Higher temperature air has less capacity to carry water, 7% less for every degree Celcius IIRC. So there could very well be a link.
EDIT: Nope, I had it completely backwards, which makes much more sense too. Colder = less capacity for water. I need a drink. Can't delete my misinformed comment unfortunately.
That doesn't mean that this increase will be uniform. The rain may very well come in Sahara, Arabia or Central Asia.
I'd not predict the future like that. No one knows certainly what will happen if the Gulf stream collapse
Are there any examples on the climatic record of the Gulf Stream collapsing to help shed some light on the potential outcomes?
But forget the Gulf Stream, you should learn more about the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC)[0], which also could be shut down. There is geological evidence that such a shut down would turn the Atlantic ocean anoxic, literally turning the ocean toxic.
This isn't some wacky, doomer fantasy scenario, this has happened multiple times in Earth's history when CO2 levels and temperatures have risen and been responsible for multiple mass extinction events[1]. It's also worth pointing out that the AMOC is already showing evidence of weakening [2]
A good overview of this paleontologist Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
[0] http://www.angel.net/~nic/jegers-mentoen-annihilator.html
I can already hear them screeching.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/g7-countries-agree-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Relation...
Dependence of European countries on Russian gas, oil (data until 2020):
Gas: https://www.statista.com/chart/26768/dependence-on-russian-g...
Oil: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1298031/dependence-on-ru...
It's not getting gas that's indicative. It's getting gas intentionally bypassing the other EU countries and Ukraine with Nordstream 1&2. Thus enabling Russia and Germany to squeeze eastern EU.
Honest question: do you generally follow world events and not know this? I always wonder what the political and historical consciousness is in the west.
Being independent of Russian energy resources would also "bypass" Poland and Ukraine. Germany should and could have been there ten years ago, hopefully we will be ten years from now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falin-Kvitsinsky_Doctrine
The goal was not to be independent but to become a hub of Russian gas to resell.
Subsidize carbon free electricity generation in developing countries.
Help women in developing countries access education and family planning => reduces population growth and so energy requirements.
Simple enough, but there is absolutely no will to do it.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-u-s-is-pr...
do it then
Russia invading Ukraine and China pursuing a zero COVID policy, threw a spanner in this monetary house of cards the west economy was based.
Maybe we in the west should focus more on being more energy independent from hidrocarbures and more manufacturing independent from China instead of just focusing on increasing the price of stonks and housing.
The inflation was perhaps "triggered" by covid and the Ukraine invasion, but it was not "caused" by it. It was caused by monetary policy designed to keep asset prices inflated (and shaft the working class as a side-effect).
I don't like the idea that monetary policy is the only determiner of prices.
The US is so corrupt, so in the pockets of industry I honestly have little confidence in this bill being in good faith toward climate action.
* https://www.xrebellion.nyc/news/statement-on-inflation-reduc... * https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/manchi...
Just because you call yourself green doesn't mean you know what you're doing.
And let's not forget how several former high ranking German and Austrian politicians are on the boards of various Russian oil and gas companies, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence and not in any way related to the countries' energy policies. /s
The ranking German politician is former chancellor Schröder and indeed, this is very much critisized throughout Germany.
Stop trying to shift the blame off the greens.
Merkel (or rathr her minister Altmaier) shortened the life time of nuclear and more importantly curbed the buildup of renewables. Of course the exit of nuclear can only work with enough renewables being built up and that they not only failed but held back. Add to that the complete one sided dependence of Russian gas - they even sold the German gas storage to Gazprom. Guess why the German storage happened to be empty just at the beginning of the invasion of the Ukraine.
Where are you getting this 1gwh number? I am seeing 5gwh in 2021. I also am not seeing 10gwh any year. Perhaps I am not looking at the correct numbers?
If solar had its peak in 2012 that means it had its peak under Merkel's time as Chancellor? Which policy do you think Merkel was involved with that caused the drop? I assume you will say the change in feed in tariff? If so then why did the peak occur after years of the tariff continually dropping?
If it is the tariff, then why didn't we see a similar continual decline in the US when the tax credit ended at the end of 2016? There was a few year decline, but solar adoption is now higher than ever.
Would 5 years been enough that nuclear could have been shut down without causing any issues? Nuclear appears to be a large supplier of power in Germany. It doesn't seem likely that 5 years could have allowed solar to displace nuclear. Germany would still be having issues.
Do you have proof that roll out of solar would have continued at the same rate without the change in tariff (or whatever you are blaming Merkel for)?
You can see that solar collapsed from 8.2GW/a[1] in 2012 to 1.2GW/a in 2015. Wind collapsed from 4.9GW/a in 2017 to 0.9GW/a in 2019.
I cannot exactly "proove" which decision was exact killer, but of course any decision takes some time to have the full impact, as larger installations usually are planned years ahead, so any change in politics will take years to take full effect. But the collapse of both wind and solar are difficult to miss - and we rather should have a steady growth in both rates or at least maintain the peak rates on a constant level. At minimum one can blame politics not to have acted to keep up with installations. But there were a lot of decisions taken which were clearly impacting the roll out of renewables. And that with a known deadline for the nuclear power plants.
Some decisions taken I can remember:
- the feed in tariff was lowered. Even if that is a constant process, when it crosses the threshhold of no longer being profitable, there will be a steep drop in new installations
- solar started to recover in recent years, probably because due to the cells becoming cheaper so it began to be more profitable again
- as far as I know there was an upper limit for any subsidy, so another reason for a stop of new installations
- for wind power the whole system was changed, leading to a deep decline. Subsidies were auctioned off, but unfortunately not including a time limit for actually installing new capacity. So many projects "won" auctions and were never realized.
The 5 years alone wouldn't probably not suffice to replace the nuclear power plants, but you have to count in as well all the missed capacity after 2012. If we had just continued at 8GW/a and above, solar capacity would almost be double of what it is today. Pretty much the same with wind.
[1] Sorry, might have mistaken the total number on top of the solar bar with the number on the bar. But over 8GW/a is still pretty much it.
(And ironically on the French nuclear power plants failing due to wear and heat, so that Germany had to produce an additional 20TWh of electricity to keep the grid alive)
Frances issue aren't with nuclear, but with funding.
Rare events can be backed up with hydrogen-burning turbines. A simple cycle turbine power plant has 5% of the capital cost of a nuclear power plant of the same output, so this doesn't cost much compared to the all-nuclear solution.
If we are going to have hydrogen turbines how much should we have? Enough to cover a quarter of a city?
We can look at a model to see how much long term storage is optimal (under various cost assumptions) to deliver a constant output, using historical weather data.
For the US, the minimum cost model using 2011 weather data and 2030 cost assumptions uses 6 hours of battery storage and 106 hours of hydrogen storage. For someplace at high latitude, more hydrogen gets used, since it becomes economical to save energy from summer to winter. In Finland, for example, the optimal solution has 2 hours of batteries and 275 hours of hydrogen. On the other side, the solution for Saudi Arabia uses 10 hours of batteries and 48 hours of hydrogen.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/04/Global-CO2-emissi...
and no party seems to push for shutting down imports from Asia, etc.
That's harsh.
Surely not enough, but it's a start.
- Air travel: The carbon footprint per person is similar to burning your trash for a full year. Did you recycle bottles for a year, planted a tree, donated to WWF, rescued a bird from an oil spill then traveled to an environment conference on another continent? Congratulations, you now pollute more than someone drives monster trucks to work and on burns all of their trash.
- Pollution holidays: Wow, it's that non-descript holiday again. I need to buy lots of single-use decorations made out of plastic and then throw them away days later. For this, I will go to a party store that sells only those items. Most of them are made out of toxic stuff like phthalates, PVC, vinyl, and stuff that will poison me, but hey... It's the non-descript holiday again! If I do this, people will encourage me to do the same every year because I am contributing to the creation of trash that will not degrade for thousands of years, and I will do the same for Halloween, my birthday, Christmas, and every minor holiday in the calendar including my dog's birthday!
- Technology: Oh, look, this hardware runs 5% faster than my current one. I need to dispose the one I have and buy the new one for an absurd amount of money, then discard it again when the next one comes out. It's all sealed and glued inside so that you can't repair it, and no replacement parts are sold. That's a really good idea. I am going to support the companies that do this so that they can continue to sell things that cannot be repaired and will become trash in less than 5 years! Look how fashionable I am with my soon-to-be piece of trash! Surely software companies will make the most out of my new hardware by rewriting everything in BloatedScript to save development costs and adding useless eyecandy that requires a supercomputer.
- Burning man. Need to deal with your emotional problems in a pyromaniac way? just watch a video of a previous burning man burning instead of burning shit every goddamn year, or get into a Minecraft game in VR (preferably your own server) and set all shit on fire, or, even better, work for the fire department and see shit burning all the time, how about that? Fuck...
Edit: corrected wrong info about leaded fuel in aviation. Thanks for the correction
Overwhelmingly, anything that you bought a ticket for (and certainly anything that you took to another continent on a ticket) is burning Jet-A, which does not have a material amount of lead content.
Oh no, I won't be able to spend the money I don't have to impress people that do not care about me in the slightest via Instagram.
Oh no, I won't be able to attend that conference that's 100% recorded and available in video format where I see the material and the presenter in better detail than in person with the ability of replaying, pausing and resuming at any time I want, where 90% of the time the content talked about is an abridged version of what can be learned from a used book, free online documentation or a PDF I can buy for a few dollars.
Oh no, I won't be able to visit some random distant place while there are plenty of nearby places that are just as nice.
Oh no, I won't be able to visit some snobby establishment that sells overrated products such as fermented fruit juice that I don't even really like that much and can't even distinguish from a boxed product sold at 1/100th of the price at my local grocery store.
Surely in 2 generations where everyone is living in a ruined planet eating diseased vermin people will care about my pointless traveling. I am such an important person! I am surely more important than the environment that sustains the life of everyone in the planet that's why I am so entitled to such things.
Among them: it gives you a better perspective on life, it gives you a better understanding of what is there to improve in your own community that you didn't notice before because "we have always done it this way", and it tends to make people less judgemental and/or racist.
People won't care about droughts in Africa they see on TV, but if you could bring them there and see it with their own eyes I can guarantee you they would.
There's a humongous difference between your average Ibiza tourist and someone visiting Asia to study the culture. From experience, the majority is far closer to the former than the latter.
... but that's true of everything that we could ever consider banning in the name of combatting climate change.
But for 99% of the people it's like:
- "white sand good. clear water good. sun good."
- "yum, food."
- "tee hee. disney."
There are those who move to new countries and have an entirely reasonable desire to still see their families from time to time.
For business deals and diplomacy, meeting in person remains a far more effective way of building rapport and good working relationships than anything tech can provide just yet.
And travel for tourism, while arguably unnecessary, does contribute to producing more educated & empathetic segments of the population who are more likely to see themselves as part of the world rather than identifying only with their tiny corner of it. It’s a difficult one to quantify, but something we’d notice if it ended. There are also parts of the world that would become much poorer if not for tourism.
I’m all for finding ways to reduce the need for travel, asking people to travel less where possible, and of course pouring investment into decarbonising aviation. We’re at the point where it’s one of the necessary actions society needs to accept.
But don’t pretend these are not very real and in many cases very painful sacrifices we’re asking people to make.
If that means you have to travel on a donkey for 5 years to make it to a really important conference then so be it. If that's too much then do it online.
My point is attacking the central belief in this civilization, which is that human convenience is more important than everything else.
What is more important: a) the extinction of a mammalian species, or b) a few people not being able to see their family? To me the response is very clear: a)
If a) is more important then if 2% of humanity cannot see their family that's OK. It's the cost of sharing the planet with other species that also need to survive.
I don't care if a few million people cry at night, that's better than a species going extinct. Extinction is forever.
In perspective, none of the stuff you mention really matters. Your convenience is not as important because there's 8 billion of you. You are not as special as you think.
Perhaps we should ration the population to 2 Billion or so, to give everyone who lives a better life, mean, median, and mode, than we can at 8 Billion. Perhaps 8B is OK, but only if those 8B each make deeper sacrifices than the 2B would have to…
I’d expect that other improvements sort far, far higher on the return over expense scale, but are not as symbolic.
Your comment claimed all travel is ‘pointless’ and without any reasonable justification. It was filled with invective for anyone who might have chosen to travel at some point. It was an argument lacking in perspective or empathy.
You’re now trying to turn this into a question of whether these might be justifiable sacrifices but that was never a point of contention. In fact, it’s something I raised first.
As I said, not a good faith response.
When almost everything (except food) that you need to buy comes from China, it is impossible to not be a part of the problem.
Fortunately, we moved to EVs and now all but the particularly resistant to reality accept they are better than ICE, in quality, efficiency, cost and carbon.
Meanwhile, we also passed some regulations to stop the cargo ships burning really dirty fuel which we were just letting them do for no good reason.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/at-last-the-shipping-industry...
> Public health experts estimate that once the 2020 sulfur cap takes effect, it would prevent roughly 150,000 premature deaths and 7.6 million childhood asthma cases globally each year.
> “There are very few examples of air quality regulations that have as broad a reach of benefits as this one,” said James Corbett, a professor of marine science and policy at the University of Delaware, who has conducted seminal research on international shipping emissions. “This is going to benefit children and adults in coastal communities located along major shipping lanes — not only [near ports] where ships are delivering cargo.”
So now cargo is both efficient and clean. And people are working on ways to make it even better, usually involving global regulations.
When almost everything (except food) that you want to buy comes from China
I'd love to buy UK-made stuff but the country sold out to cheap sweatshop nations decades ago
The vast majority of airplanes in operation - be it per passenger numbers or cargo tonnes - aren't piston engined but turboprops, turbofans and turbojets.
So I think the reply was accurate.
There is no reasoning with them; they see this as a one-off and it'll be 50 years before the next summer like this.
Younger people should vote more but tbh by the time I was old enough to vote it was already too late to avert what’s happening.
I don’t see any sentiment of “whoops we got it wrong, let’s do what we can now!”. (Or any gratitude for the sacrifices younger people made during lockdowns, but I digress…)
I have the same experience with so many boomers as the parent. "Hottest summer on record? Aw, I love hot weather". "When I was a kid, it was so hot the tar on the road would stick to me feet?!" etc.
Consequently, an appropriate response to this summer should far exceed what is required to cope with the droughts and heatwaves that we have just seen.