What can be done (climate change debate)?

Great Debates
281

I just don’t think all-electric tractor trailers are feasible at all. 40% lower battery weight won’t do it.

One of the problems with current batteries is that they have to carry all the chemicals required for the reaction, while gasoline or diesel fuel can pull oxidizer right from the air. This is possible to do with batteries as well - zinc-air batteries are looking promising. But I don’t know enough about their specific characteristics to know if they could ever be used in an application like this.

Long-haul trucking is probably the last commercial vehicle type you’d want to convert to electric. First you’d want to convert the myriad service vehicles and other light commercial vehicles. As for trucks, I think we’ll see efficiency gains from new engine, transmission, and hybrid technology. But at some point you just need so much energy per mile to push something that large through the air and overcome all the rolling resistance of all those tires.

One good thing about the U.S. regarding transportation efficiency is that it has one of the most advanced and effective rail freight systems in the world - largely because there aren’t that many passenger trains to accommodate on the rail network, but also because it’s a private system that has evolved over the decades to be extremely efficient in routing. In Europe, passenger rail has pushed a substantial amount of freight onto the highways, which is not a good thing for energy efficiency.

I think we make a mistake when we’re always looking for the ‘one big thing’ that’s supposed to save us. Electric cars, fuel cell cars, etc. In fact, what seems to be happening is that many technologies are improving in many areas, all of which are contributing to a revolution in vehicle efficiency. It’s not so bad to have a gas or diesel engine if it gets 70 mpg and is tied to an electric motor in a hybrid configuration that gets an equivalent 150 mpg. At those kinds of efficiencies we can afford to burn a little bit of fossil fuel. Transportation is a small part of the carbon footprint of the U.S in the first place.

Look at what Mazda is doing. Their ‘Skyactiv’ technology includes not just more efficient engines, but high-strength steel to limit weight, new aerodynamics, etc. And I just read about their next-gen Skyactive here, which sounds pretty cool. They’re looking for 30% gains in fuel economy over the previous generation, which was already one of the most fuel efficient engines around.

Is it really so bad to burn gas if it’s in a small vehicle with an advanced powertrain that gets 70mpg on gas and perhaps triple that in combination with a plug-in hybrid powertrain with an extended battery?

For commuter cars, it gets much better. The large majority of commutes are within 20 miles from home. That’s a reasonable range for a plug-in hybrid to go and come back home before being plugged in. And if you need to take longer trips you can fire up the gas engine. But the majority of drives would be all-electric, and some people might only see their gas engine turn on a few times per month. The equivalent MPG might be 200-300 mpg. At those kinds of fuel consumption values, we can afford to burn gas, both economically and environmentally.

For trucks, if we can add a battery or capacitor system that recovers energy from braking and uses it to power vehicle systems or add low-end torque, that will be a pretty big boost in efficiency. Add in the new turbodiesels with other new features, coupled with new tire technology and new aerodynamics, and you could see big truck mileage increase substantially.

Mazda says they can reach CO2 emission levels comparable to electric vehicles with the next gen skyactiv, and that’s without any electric assist.

282

What about an even more fundamental shift in the way the industry is arranged - maybe self driving vehicles? A road train system (like Australia), some form of “third rail” electric?

Nobody said we have to stick with the current Semi doing 1000 mile plus trips right?

283

When the future Virginia legislators are underwater from ACC, they’ll blame the current legislators for the pickle they are in. The current legislators will be long gone.

And that’s kind of the point.

We kick problems we don’t want to deal with down the road, or we re-write their fundamental nature so it looks like we are doing something when we are not.

The ACC core dilemma is that greenhouse gas emissions are already too high and already precipitating catastrophic change. Therefore any effort which does not substantially change this trend immediately is not going affect our future. The trend shown is that all energy produced from all sources will be consumed. That is, renewable energy added to the mix does not reduce fossil fuel use over current levels because the demand for total energy from a burgeoning world population trying to live better consumes all the energy we can produce from all sources.

We are not good at thinking through consequences of “doing something” and we are not good at predicting what actually happens. For example, we establish CAFE standards for cars in the name of environmentalism. The unintended consequence is that cars become cheaper to operate on fossil fuels, many more people can afford to drive them, and the world vehicle population is now over a billion cars. The outlook is not very encouraging that we can swap out the car energy type grid fast enough to simply keep up the current level of GHGs from cars.

To change the overall world energy trend means actual, substantial sacrifice. It doesn’t mean finding efficiencies here and there. It doesn’t mean rich people like me and Al “strawman” Gore buying renewable energy but continuing to live very very high off the hog. There isn’t enough renewable energy for everybody, and aside from that, it’s overall consumption of everything required to live well that drives up the world’s carbon footprint.

The IPCC Press Release has a catch 22. If things are so horrible they already are catastrophic, the public (and it’s not “the Republican legislators,” it’s the public) will decide it’s pointless to sacrifice because disaster is already upon us. OTOH, if things will simply be catastrophic in the future, well we’ve never sacrificed for the future, and we never will. Not for the cause of the environment any more than we sacrifice for the cause of leaving our children debt-free.

What is required for “the legislators” to be moved to action is a series of accurately-predicted, specific, reasonably catastrophic and reasonably local ACC consequences. All politics is local, after all.

A bad hurricane here and there won’t do it. We’ve had high ACE storms long long ago, there’s no obvious long-term trend, and we are lousy at predicting(NOAA thought the North Atlantic hurricane season would be 120-190% above average, and it was one of the feeblest ever).

General crop doom and gloom won’t do it, unless it’s crops in the breadbasket part of the world, and I’m not sure the IPCC press release even suggests that’s going to happen.

Ocean fish stock depletion predictions won’t do it. We are fishing the oceans so aggressively now that it will be impossible to sort out what is causing what, and we’ll just continue to eat the oceans no matter what. We’ll start eating whales before we let the world population actually starve.

Political instability…are you kidding me? The world is already a crappy place to live for a bunch of its people, and that crappiness has zippo to do with ACC. Warning about ACC causing political instability is such a pitiful land-grab for significance that it damages the credibility of the rest of the report. Like a warning that peeing into the pool might cause a disease outbreak when the pool has an open sewer running into it.

Floods and droughts. Hotter and colder spells. I don’t think this kind of “it’s all ACC” will ever be truly effective messaging until we can accurately model in advance that this winter will be the most brutal in memory for this part of the world, and here’s why. Pasting after the fact the sudden realization that AGW caused a polar vortex meander to hang around (instead of saying, “Whoa! That surprises us.”) is the kind of thing that makes me draw parallels to the way religions are promoted, where post-event proclamations for why the unexpected should have actually been expected all along are de rigueur.

Anyway, you’re right that I find the IPCC press release from this working group “unpersuasive” because of a larger suspicion that we are are lousy at predicting. But beyond that, the tone of it suggests to me that internally there was a demand to ratchet up the rhetoric. And I personally suspect part of that ratcheting was an effort to retain significance for the group.

But the basic cause of (relative) inaction will not be because of suspicion that the report is over-hyping. It won’t be because of “Republican legislators.” The cause of inaction will be because the majority of the public are not going to demand anything that causes real sacrifice in the name of protecting future generations, and real sacrifice is what is required.

I’m not saying we’ll do nothing. I am saying we won’t do anything to substantially change the path we are on until calamity is upon us (should it be coming). In other words, we’ll muddle through. Or suffer. Or, at least, our kids will suffer.

284

The conflict in Syria appears to be caused largely by climate factors. ACC? I don’t know. But the basic timeline was- big drought. Everyone moves to the city. No jobs, prices rise, people riot. Assad slaughters the rioters -> civil war. More conditions like Syria’s will likely result in more outcomes like Syria’s.

And what happens if/when Bangladesh floods? We will see millions of refugees flooding the surrounding areas. That can only cause conflict. Add some version of this to every region with a coastline and yeah, the political consequences are genuine.

Except that religions claim that hurricanes &etc are caused by gay sex and the like, while climate explanations add up. Here is the explanation of the polar vortex. It makes sense. They don’t say, ‘yes, this is definitely ACC, ACC just makes this stuff statistically likelier’. That’s why you don’t get pinpoint predictions- maybe the effects will be more concentrated in the Southern hemisphere for some reason that we can’t predict, but we can tell for sure that it is coming.

I could tell by the tone of Einstein’s paper on relativity that he was under a lot of pressure to ratchet up his rhetoric to retain significance for the field of physics. See how silly that sounds? This is peer-reviewed work. Targeting the tone out of suspicion doesn’t make sense.

Judging by your tone, ISTM that you are ratcheting up your rhetoric to retain relevance for your do-nothing-about-it position. And as has been pointed out, you embrace predictions that support your position and poo-pooh all predictions on the other side.

285

I think that the point that “we are lousy at predicting” is the ones that is.

It is also made to avoid the point that, as Try2B Comprehensive noted, we already have evidence of the changes in climate causing unrest even with the changes already observed. This is not really a prediction but more like an observation that shows that the lousy prediction was from the ones that claimed that we can ignore the changes or the costs of that change.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2013/09/13/syrias-crisis-was-sparked-by-global-warming-and-drought

It is really folly to bet that more human unrest will not come thanks to the changes that are almost certain or very likely to come.

286

I don’t have a “do nothing” position. My position is that we won’t do anything substantive because we are unwilling to collectively sacrifice enough to make a difference. ACC is fun to embrace as a cause, but any significant mitigation won’t happen for the reasons I’ve outlined above.

If you think climate is “largely the cause” of Syria’s conflict, we’re so far apart on what constitutes evidence for cause and effect linkage that I think I’ll just let you indulge yourself in seeing ACC behind every catastrophe. Perhaps if you can persuade enough other people, they’ll forget about the catastrophes that have happened in the past and ascribe every subsequent one to ACC. And perhaps they’ll forget the 2013 North Atlantic hurricane non-season and remember only Katrina and Sandy. Or maybe no one will show them graphs like this one.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is your friend for droughts in Syria and floods in the Ganges delta, just as is post-event analysis showing how obvious it is–in retrospect–that the spectre of ACC “could be” the cause of every catastrophe, and every non-event “could be” a weather variation.

PS: Bangladesh has flooded, many times. In recent years the most catastrophic floods were in the late 1980’s, when the CO2 level at Mauna Loa was about 350. But I’m sure the next catastrophic ones will be ACC harbingers just like the next hurricane, right? Then you can post back and tell me you told me so. Their problem is not so much floods as it is too many people trying to live on land that floods.

287

If you look at that graph more carefully, there is a definite uptrend, though it tends to be obfuscated by the wild variations. The strong uptrend in hurricane power is a lot more clear on this smoothed plot of the North Atlantic PDI.

So your argument about no uptrend and quiet hurricane seasons is without merit. There are a number of reasons for individual years to be exceptionally quiet even when hurricane power is trending upward, as already explained. There are reasons to expect fewer hurricanes but more powerful ones; in some seasons, there have been a normal number of strong hurricanes but few that have made landfall, leading to the illusion of low activity; in other seasons, hurricane formation is discouraged by factors like dry air from the south (like last season) or by wind shear. What’s important is the overall multi-year trend in total hurricane energy.

It won’t happen in terms of predicting specific, individual events – the climate system is much too chaotic for that. But it absolutely will happen in terms of predicting statistical trends. It’s already been done, and many of the predictions are already coming to pass. Read the new IPCC Working Group 2 report.

288

So, besides reframing the issue as a faith-based endeavor, mischaracterizing statistical projections as specific predictions, stawmanning everyone with responses to arguments no one is making and bringing up Al Gore again and again, do you have anything to offer re the question: “What CAN be done?”, or are you just going to threadshit every goddamn page?

289

Calm down

290

That is clear to me, what Chief Pedant is doing is still a hijack too. As per the OP the point is to accept that the issue is real and that also assumes that we will have to deal with very expensive adaptations if we go for the scenarios where we will not do much.

As some of the people involved with the latest IPCC it is not their job to figure out who is going to pay for all the costs that are worse than the ones that we should pay if a concerted effort to prevent the worse is made now. But that is one of the items that the ones that predict that nothing much will happen are avoiding dealing with.

291

That would not be appropriate.

292

To be clear, the mandate of the IPCC is to lay out the facts that are relevant to making climate policy, but to steer clear of making any policy recommendations at all. Even Working Group 3, which deals with mitigation, is chartered only to assess options and weigh their relative merits, not to recommend strategies. In that sense the IPCC can be thought of as a policy neutral educational body.

293

This latest IPCC report is far less alarming than the previous reports, which is good. It reflects the science: It has recently been shown that greenhouse gas sensitivity is significantly lower than it was calculated in the 90’s and 00’s, which is fantastic - we aren’t all going to die via wheezing burning air into our lungs circa 2050. :smiley: But it also means that we maybe won’t hear the tired refrain of “ignoring” this or that for the next six years.

WG2 Section 8.4.3 says “The average GDP reduction in most of the stabilization scenarios reviewed here is under 3% of the baseline value (the maximum reduction across all the stabilization scenarios reached 6.1% in a given year).” and goes on further to say that the average cost across scenarios for adaption is under 2% through 2100, noting a peak of about 1.45% of GDP.

I take this to mean that the more aggressive and centrally controlled options that have been proposed for years aren’t necessary and that our current course of action will bear fruit over a longer time table without sending us to the aforementioned lung burning.

So I think that we can continue our current course and pace with retiring old power plant systems, cleaning up what we produce, and trying to find a suitable alternative to fossil fuels (I’m still sweet on thorium reactors) that we can’t presently drive out of solar, wind, or bio despite our best attempts - even if our attempts only signify as a “yet” statement.

294

I’d love to see a cite for any of that. I don’t know where you’re getting this stuff but it just simply isn’t true. Prior to around the late 90’s we really had no good idea about equilibrium climate sensitivity at all. We only had relatively rudimentary atmosphere global circulation models (AGCMs) coupled to limited ocean models that didn’t reflect long-term equilibrium at all. Ever since the advent of fully coupled AOGCMs, climate sensitivity estimates (as expressed, for example, in the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment) have been pretty much where they are today. The main difference between the 2007 AR4 and the present AR5 is the likely range has changed from 2.0 to 4.5 in the AR4 to 1.5 to 4.5 in the AR5 and the probability density functions look almost exactly the same. I would hardly characterize this as “significantly lower”. I would characterize it as almost exactly the same.

I would also be interested to see a cite for why you think this report is “far less alarming” than the previous one. Or why you think, if I’m interpreting your comment correctly, why this is the first assessment to “reflect the science”, presumably meaning the previous ones didn’t.

295

That does not quite follow. The point is that the centrally controlled options that have been proposed for years are still good to consider as they will reduce the risk even more and they are less expensive than what the contrarians (that are the real alarmists here) claimed and continue to claim.

296

And yet, climate scientists were still not only saying that it existed, they were assuming it was positive by upto 4x, depending on many factors they were trying to account for, the rate of CO2’s contribution. And this is what was reflected in the climate models at the time. There is no argument that we’ve refined the models since then, and the refinements started to drop sensitivity down beginning with the 2006 paper by Gregory and Forester, which have been followed up by Andrews and Allen in 2008 and Aldrin et al in 2012. There are more, but I think these are some of the more central works in the area of climate sensitivity. They all explore and refine our understanding of the sensitivity of the climate system, which helps models be more accurate.

Yes, the range of possible temperatures still contains the high side, but most of the focus is at the 1.5 to 2.5 change range.

You want a cite for what I think after reading the IPCC AR5 WG3 report and comparing it to the AR4 WG3 report (to refresh my memory after six years)? You are either hoarding technology we would all like to have or you wish me to start a blog so you can subscribe to my newsletter. :slight_smile:

Additionally, you aren’t interpreting my comment correctly. I said what I said: The changes they made in assessments reflects a greater understanding of climate science since 2007. I wouldn’t imply they aren’t paying attention to the science, I would say it openly if I thought so.

But, to the point, the concentration in this WG3 is that the change for the next 100 years will be around 2.5C instead of the previous target of the extreme side (4-4.5C change), such as melting glaciers and other fun doom and gloom.

I disagree, but we always disagree on this point. To the point, they are more expensive than the ways I prefer and that are already in progress.

297

The point was that nowhere does the IPCC advices on what you claimed, they do not mean to say “that the more aggressive and centrally controlled options that have been proposed for years aren’t necessary”.

298

I have to say that you are referring to the expected temperature** if **we do a good effort at reducing our emissions in a concerted effort, doing very little or not doing what is suggested does lead to the high emission scenarios where 4 or more degrees are discussed also in the IPCC report.

299

I never said that the IPCC said that. I said

which is quite a bit different from “The IPCC says”

Actually, the reference I made was to the adaption to the climate change and not preventing what’s coming. Prevention is out the window. We reached the 400ppm average line in the sand. They guesstimate that the warming target will be about 2.5 C and discuss what the adaptions to this will cost as well as what impacts they expect to see and how much this will be costing us over time, which maxed at 6.1% of GDP in one year for one scenario.

This is good because the changes the US has been making for over a decade have been paying off the last couple of years and our emissions have reduced overall. If we can find a solid alternative, either by making solar highly effective with a storage mechanism that isn’t toxic or by moving to something like thorium reactors, we can continue that trend.

Which is why I also opine that needing drastic changes as has been advocated to curb emissions isn’t necessary. Our current trajectory towards a better tomorrow will deliver us with a modest fee for dragging our feet. The only way we can actually prevent (which, I suppose should now be “reverse”) climate change at this point is to get those technologies that have been researched over the last 15-20 years to fruition that will effectively pull carbon out of the atmosphere and store it somewhere.

300

Oh…sorry. I thought I was clearer upthread somewhere.

Nothing, really. The answer is that we can’t really do anything to avoid whatever is coming, except sacrifice collectively, and sacrifice severely.

Specifically, we’d need to stop consuming until such time as the energy grid is swapped out, and the degree to which we’d need to stop consuming is enormous.

We won’t be doing that, due to the Tragedy of the Commons (even if we accept that our collective behaviour is damaging, we won’t band together because we don’t trust the next person over to do their part). Beyond that, we prefer to live well now (Al “strawman” Gore being the archetypical consumer, like me, of the good life) to the extent that we can afford to do so. And beyond that, we have a long history of enjoying life now at the cost of our children (to whom we are passing along a massive debt for our current largesse, for example). And beyond that, there are too many people who want a chance to live like we in the west already do.

I’m not trying to threadshit; I’m just trying to explain why nothing “can” be done, practically speaking. I’ve sort of had it up to here getting lectured about what should be done to prevent ACC by those without a shred of evidence that any of the above is an inaccurate representation. It’s like sitting in church week after week hearing how about hell is coming and recognizing the preacher has no clue how to avoid it.

The fact that ACC is real does not mean there is a way to prevent it.