Climate change/oblivion: breaking point or slow death spiral?

I  haven’t given up Dazh, read my post. It’s not the politicians who a making the most damaging choices, it’s the poeple, and any governement that tires to do anything gets protests and a kicking. Macron tried for a few months. The truck driver stopped the country when toll barriers for transport were installed, flyers from the yellow vests were anti-EV pro carbon, protests about energy prices led to subsidies.

It’s not the politician who are the problem, it’s the populace – it’s the STW memebers who have for years rubbished those of us who have been promoting low carbon homes, transport and lifestyles. They still do, see the las heat pump thread, there’s a load of anti-heat pump propaganda in there, and a general refusal to insulate to the point a heat pump is viable -with a couple of exceptions. We need those exceptions to become the majority.

Wall-E was prescient

I see everyone’s given up. You all know this thing is fixable right?

How?

Almost no models of climate change can accurately predict what a combination of technology, economics and social will, can do to change the picture.  A significant amount of climate impact modelling is based on variations of the DICE model and whilst their trends have thus far been accurate, that’s because they’re predicated on past events and gradual change.   I don’t think we’re going to see that.

I think just as we’re seeing a snowball effect in climate change, you’ll see a snowball effect in climate sensitivity and action in the coming years.  So whilst I don’t think we’ll avoid massive damage, I do think we’ll avoid a total catastrophe.  I just wish we’d have reached the human snowball effect long before we reached the climate snowball effect, not the other way around.

People focusing on air travel is the wrong target.  Data centres now produce 50% more emissions and almost 300% more waste heat than aviation, but we don’t see people railing against Netflix.  The global CO2 footprint of the Trainer industry (sneakers) is 50% more than aviation and almost 400% more damaging.  Aviation  also has significant positive effects in terms of food distribution which enables growth and energy stability by growing food where it’s actually best to grow it rather than using huge amounts of power to MAKE it row elsewhere.

You could cut aviation emissions almost in in half if you removed business class.  You could cut them by a further 10-15% if Air Traffic Control (ATC) were centralised and continuous descent vectors were allowed.  You could cut it be a further 10% if you adopted formation flight patterns through co-ordinated ATC.  Aviation is an easy target, but not even close to the biggest problem.  It’s also possibly toughest nut to crack due to weight and performance being so closely intertwined with safety and regulation.

Trust me – I’m a Dr and I do this for a living.  🙂

As long the Gulf Stream doesn’t weaken.

Might be quite useful it did, as it would effectively cool the UK off a bit. We’re going to get hit my more and more heat waves from Europe over the next few decades….

love the it’s the third world population thing, the average yank has 32 times the carbon footprint of the average african…. the population of Africa would need to be 11.5 billon to match the US

I reckon there are about 10 of us on this forum who’ve done the minimum, in my case:

I’d bet there are more – but you are right in that few folk are wiling to make the lifestyle changes needed and then there is the issue that even a lifestyle like yours Edukator or mine is still not sustainable

Massive lifestyle change now worldwide will only alleviate it – at least 2C is baked in.  Thats going to cause major disruption right across the population.  There is no political will let alone among the population at large to make those lifestyle changes so its going to be much worse than 2C

Until we start spending 100s of billions building atmospheric modification plants (eg as with LV-426), and start sucking millions of tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere, we’re basically going to cook ourselves to death…

No government would survive making the changes necessary to make their country carbon neutral, they’d just be voted out at the next election.

Ah. Never gonna happen.

It already is happening, just not fast enough. You may feel you can’t do anything but you can. Vote for the right people. Demand that your political representatives do what is required. When Just Stop Oil and others appear on the television, don’t sneer and complain, support them. Tell your friends you support them, heck even join them! Then when you’ve got your head around the politics, start looking at what you can do. Accept that you’ll be a hypocrite but make changes, and tell others what you’re doing and encourage them to do the same. Individual action won’t solve climate change but it will change mindsets, and that will lead to political change as it’s already doing. The worst thing we can do is say ‘ah f*** it, we’re doomed, might as well give up and enjoy ourselves’.

Individual action won’t solve climate change but it will change mindsets, and that will lead to political change as it’s already doing.

And yet we’ve flown past 1.5C at breakneck speed, 2C isn’t far off and still we have our foot flat on the accelerator….

Truthfully – the best outright solution right now is to put all our money into renewables and into carbon capture technology and to continue using FF whilst other technologies (H2, NH3, Fusion, etc) progress . We need MORE power.  More cheaper, green energy unlocks so many potential avenues for change.

The Physical Risk from Climate Change is pretty well known but the modelling has a huge sigma. Initial models were built assuming a stationarity of the systems in play but newer models are much more sophisticated and do take into account the climate change that has taken place to date.

The Transition Risk which includes migration, mitigation, adaptation etc is not being ignored but there is a huge amount of uncertainty around this piece. The finance sector is all over this at the moment due to it’s ESG responsibilities but it’s like the wild west in terms of the quality of what’s being done. Some companies are taking this very seriously whilst others are just paying rogue consultants to give them the answer so they can demonstrate to the ExCo of their company that they’ve ticked this off.

You might be a doctor but your stats are suspect, Daffy. Five seconds with Google says the world total footware indsustry is 1.4% of CO2 and aviation is 2-3%.

Business class seats are only 12% of seats, unless your talking about business aviatin rather than just seats, really your figures need links because it takes seconds to contest them.

Just stop flying.

Truthfully – the best outright solution right now is to put all our money into renewables and into carbon capture technology and to continue using FF whilst other technologies (H2, NH3, Fusion, etc) progress

Meanwhile, all the right-wing social media sockpuppet accounts are railing against renewables and insisting we don’t affect the climate.

Five seconds with Google says…

I had no idea we had an expert in the house! 🙂

Trust me – I’m a Dr and I do this for a living.

Don’t you know we’re sick of experts?

And carbon capture isn’t the answer, Daffy, it’s energy intensive and on the basis of efforts so far wholly inadequate even if massively adopted.

FFs whose side are you on ? your posts are a  greenwashing fantasy.

your posts are a  greenwashing fantasy.

And yet we wonder why nothing happens…

“I had no idea we had an expert in the house!”

Will a geologist with peer reviewed work on atmospheric polution do ?

I think a large part of the problem is that we’ve accidentally created a media environment where large parts of the media are absolutely terrified of upsetting their audience by challenging their beliefs, because an inherent part of their (the media) business model is maintaining audience attention at any cost.

Plus you’ve got various plutocrats like Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay brothers etc who a) sound like deeply damaged human beings and b) are so old that they don’t give a shit about this stuff because it isn’t going to effect them.

Fusion is decades/centuries away from being viable. We’ve only just proved experimentally that it may work, after about 80 years of effort FFS.

And yet we wonder why nothing happens…

The answer to that is simple, no one votes for governments which will make the necessary changes.

Climate Extinction, Just Stop Oil etc, they’re just pissing in the wind, a complete irrelevance.

Sure, it was nice while it lasted. Almost reached peak everything, cars, bikes, TV’s etc. It all has to end somehow.

Truthfully – the best outright solution right now is to put all our money into renewables and into carbon capture technology and to continue using FF whilst other technologies (H2, NH3, Fusion, etc) progress . We need MORE power. More cheaper, green energy unlocks so many potential avenues for change.

Fantasy.  The only solution is massive lifestyle change.  Technology can help but lifestyle change is what is needed

Whats your timescale for this stuff compared to the timescale to disaster?

My real worry is that, as climate change gets worse, politics will get more authoritarian and nationalist

Somewhere like the UK, people may be more fearful of climate migrants than actual warming, thus voting for the hard-border, climate-sceptical nationalists rather than politicians than may actually commit to proper mitigation

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-sustainability/article/why-the-impacts-of-climate-change-may-make-us-less-likely-to-reduce-emissions/EEB33A2E7ED25E621872DF39122D7A52

My real worry is that, as climate change gets worse, politics will get more authoritarian and nationalist

Yep, we’ve not seen anything yet. Migration from Africa to Europe will turbo charge. Governments will move to the right, human rights will go out the window. And CO2 emissions will continue to rise….

Carbon capture could be an important component,  but with that we need a massive overproduction of very cheap renewable energy.

If we can make a huge amount of cheap clean energy then a lot of things become possible.

Trouble is our gov don’t seem interested

Trouble is our gov don’t seem interested

None of the G20 are making any meaningful changes.

We’ve all got our foot on the accelerator…

It’s basically a massive car crash in slow motion.

But don’t worry, just stop oil caused a 5 minute delay to a Tennis match, so we’re all going to be fine….

“Sure, it was nice while it lasted. Almost reached peak everything, cars, bikes, TV’s etc. It all has to end somehow.”

About a hundred years ago, didn’t the US patent office declare that everything useful that could be invented had been?

Will a geologist with peer reviewed work on atmospheric polution do ?

It was the “five seconds on Google” that made me chuckle – don’t sweat it. 🙂

You might be a doctor but your stats are suspect, Daffy. Five seconds with Google says the world total footware indsustry is 1.4% of CO2 and aviation is 2-3%.

Business class seats are only 12% of seats, unless your talking about business aviatin rather than just seats, really your figures need links because it takes seconds to contest them.

Just stop flying.

As this is my sector, not yours, perhaps you should listen and read rather than skimming facts.

Business class is 12-14% of the seats but almost 1/3>1/2 of the aircraft volume.  If you removed that equipment and volume and filled it with economy seats, your emissions per passenger decrease and the number of flights you need also decreases.

That 1.4% is emissions though direct manufacturing, it doesn’t include waste (which is enormous) and chemicals required to make the vast variety of different types/styles of materials for the trainers.

And carbon capture isn’t the answer, Daffy, it’s energy intensive and on the basis of efforts so far wholly inadequate even if massively adopted.

It is energy intensive, which is why I ALSO SAID, that we need massive investment in renewables as ENERGY WAS THE KEY!

CC is a viable, scaleable technology which can be applied in myriad ways.  It’s also available NOW.  Coupled with vast renewable energy investment, it can be made to work effectively if not efficiently at industrial scale, worldwide in 5 years.  Nothing else can.  NOTHING.  So, do you want action, fantasy or catastrophe?

FFs whose side are you on ? your posts are a  greenwashing fantasy.

LOL.  You might have peer reviewed journals on the study of atmospheric pollution, but you’re no expert on the interactions of climate change, technology, innovation, economics, social change, societal tipping points, etc, etc. It’s all of them.  If you fail to take into account the system-of-systems (SoS),  your approach will ALWAYS be a fanciful one.

Do I like the solution I propose?  No.  not really, but I have modelling data (SoS) substantially more advanced than anything published which shows that when considering people, energy, economics, policy and their effects on climate change, this is one of the most promising short term avenues if pursued aggressively.

The sad thing is that the technology for anything more aggressive simply doesn’t exist and won’t for 10-15y.  There’s also less social will to change that you might hope and what there is is substantially linked to economic capability and social mobility.

You might think of it as greenwashing, but I assure you it’s not – much of this work has been at least partially funded by the Linux Foundation as part of os-climate.org.

In reality haven’t we passed the tipping point ?

People in countries which were regarded as 3rd world but now have growing economies have aspirations. They don’t want to cycle or use a small moped,they want a car. And it won’t be electric. Income may increase giving them the opportunity to fly abroad. Do we,the perceived wealthy,tell them and their governments that they can’t have our standard of living.

Over population equals over consumption.

Consumption needs resources and with it comes friction between states for those resources. The downward spiral will get worse until we get to a Mad Max scenario.

Trouble is our gov don’t seem interested
None of the G20 are making any meaningful changes.

We’ve all got our foot on the accelerator…

It’s basically a massive car crash in slow motion.

But don’t worry, just stop oil caused a 5 minute delay to a Tennis match, so we’re all going to be fine….

But governments of any side left or right wing only do stuff that they know will win them votes. So as long as the public dont see this as a priority, no government will.

What might start to force some stage is business lobbying. ie If you run a holiday company and you can no longer sell holidays to southern Europe, then those business leaders may be able to leaver some pressure on the government.

Last years World Cup was a joke, it was all about money. Lets blow air con over an open air pitch to cool the players !

Fantasy.  The only solution is massive lifestyle change.  Technology can help but lifestyle change is what is needed

And what’s our success rate at getting people to alter their lifestyles?  You think technology is hard to crack – heck people couldn’t even behave properly during the Pandemic, you think you can get them to change their ways for the better, FOREVER in less than 5 years?

Whats your timescale for this stuff compared to the timescale to disaster?

The technology for underground storage or chemical capture works now, we even have substantial storage sites well known thanks to almost a hundred years of oil and gas drilling.

The problems are to do with investment and energy (also investment) but both of these are issues which can be addressed by governments and borrowing, which means that social will is easier and will allow for a more gradual change in peoples attitudes and lifestyles.  It’s almost a way of greasing the skids.  it allows people to get on-board without having to initially do much, they get a good feeling from that and will slowly be willing to do more.

The best thing is, it’s enactable now.  It can be starting to work whilst other solutions come online and people come around (or die off).  It will, as I said, slowly snowball.  Perhaps its too slow, but I honestly cant see another way unless you enforce it and for that to work, it would have to be done on a level, global playing field.  THAT’S Fantasy.

Do we,the perceived wealthy,tell them and their governments that they can’t have our standard of living.

They are not the problem, we are. The developing world getting richer doesn’t have to require higher carbon emissions. They can develop sustainably just as we haven’t, but that’s not going to happen unless we make the changes in our own economies first. So stop trying to shift the blame on poor people getting richer, and start focusing on how we got rich instead and change that.

And whilst we’re on the subject of other countries, and before someone comes out with the good old ‘what about China’ excuse. Have a read of this.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/29/china-wind-solar-power-global-renewable-energy-leader

Daffy – the problem you face is these supposed technological fixes that will appear are too late and too little.  Much more radical solutions are needed.  Its pure fantasy to think that technology will do this without massive lifestyle change.

If we had taken those steps 25 years ago maybe but now?  You claim expertise – whats your timescale given collapse looks a handful of decades away?

What about developing countries?

I’m not looking for A solution – I’m looking for pathways to mitigation and maybe, eventual success.  In almost all of history, those pathways that led to the greatest successes happened when people were actively engage with the goal whilst increasing prosperity.  People are the key in the long term, but they’re also the biggest source of inertia. What we need is to harness that inertia by making decisions which place that people inertia on the right track- and then their own inertia will keep it going though government cycles and changes.

If anyone wants to know more about this research than I can discuss on a public forum, please PM me.

I think a large part of the problem is that we’ve accidentally created a media environment where large parts of the media are absolutely terrified of upsetting their audience by challenging their beliefs, because an inherent part of their (the media) business model is maintaining audience attention at any cost.

Plus you’ve got various plutocrats like Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay brothers etc who a) sound like deeply damaged human beings and b) are so old that they don’t give a shit about this stuff because it isn’t going to effect them.

I was flicking through the channels one morning arrived @ talk TV Dr Bull ? and his other female Dr friend were on… So yeah there’s man made climate change but why go on about it and why make it so scary and make me feel guilty.

Panic over.

What about developing countries?

Christ not you as well. Developing countries are the one place where all the tech stuff can work. They really aren’t the problem.

They can develop sustainably just as we haven’t, but that’s not going to happen unless we make the changes in our own economies first.

Again this is pure fantasy.  Developing nations are going to increase their energy consumption massively in order to develop. This comes with a  CO2 penalty What is needed is massive reductions in energy usage worldwide not increased consumption

this is all the pale green myth that somehow technology can save us.  It cannot.  only massive reductions in energy usage and in population can