Climate Change

[Alan V]

You will notice on the for side of the argument, Mario Molina says the chance of 5°C warming if we do nothing from 2000-2100 is "maybe 1 in 5 it will happen" and that he says that's an "unacceptable risk" and therefore we must act on CO2 emissions. This is precisely the problem I have - I don't think it's worth trashing the global economy because there is a 1 in 5 chance of an unacceptable level of warming due to anthropogenic GHGs. You will also notice that they (again the "for" side not the against side) agree we do not have presently have large scale replacements for fossil fuels and that we will remain dependent on them for at least another 100 years. Again, I agree with them and that's what the alarmists I think never admit to - battery storage would be an ecological disaster - batteries last up to 20 years then become toxic waste; nuclear waste is also an unacceptable ecological disaster IMHO and even if it isn't we do not have enough water in Australia to make use of it.

You seem to think that our choices are between continuing as usual and taking drastic action against climate change.  The real choices are between taking drastic action and having climate change trash our economies and kill millions of people in the process.  Even 2°C of warming is unacceptable, because above that point many positive feedbacks kick in which will almost guarantee excessive climate change over the long run, no matter what we do.  Because of delayed effects, we are almost committed to 1.5°C already, so at the rate of 2.5 ppm increase per year we only have a few decades to lower our emissions below the 80% recommended by 2050.

People are working on new batteries, like flow batteries mentioned above.  Any batteries would be less of an ecological disaster than a business-as-usual scenario.  We don't have the luxury of the choices we would prefer.

Again, it will not trash the economy to fight climate change any more than it will trash the economy to do nothing.  In fact, it might save the economy because there are massive amounts of work to do worldwide.  Australia may be inconsequential comparatively, but that doesn't mean that all efforts worldwide, added together, couldn't make a huge difference.  Even without climate change, we will have to shift to renewables this century because, from what I have read, we will be running out of economic fossil fuels this century.

From post #122:

Running out of fossil fuels

Another reason we need to act now is that we are running out of fossil fuels. This seems a paradox because burning them is at the heart of our problems with climate change. We have more than enough fossil fuels left in the ground to spell real trouble if we dig them all up and burn them. One estimate is that our fossil fuels would emit 2.5 trillion tons of CO₂e, if all of them were burned. That’s 1,470 CO₂e from coal, 530 CO₂e from oil, and 520 CO₂e from gas.

We’ve heard that we are running out of fossil fuels for some time now, and it still remains true even if we have extended what we can recover by new methods like fracking. While new reserves may be discovered, resources always go down. New discoveries would have to be big to maintain the rate of consumption. A part of the problem is our increasing rate of demand from the developing world, and especially from such countries as China and India. Demand is projected to grow 50% by 2050. Yet one estimate is that we will see oil production peak and then begin to slowly decline by 2030. Venezuela, Russia, and the U.S. have already peaked. Coal and natural gas will peak before 2040.

Fossil fuels become more expensive to extract over time. This is because we picked the low hanging fruit first, the best-quality and cheapest, leaving the more expensive to refine and the harder to access for later. And later is coming fast.

It requires energy to produce energy. The Energy Returned On Investment (EROI) number keeps getting lower and lower until, at last, more energy would have to be spent than the amount which could be recovered by spending it. Even before that point, the energy will no longer be economical to extract. This means that we will never burn all of our proven reserves. By one author’s estimate, it will be unlikely for supply problems to crop up until the second half of this century, though there may be price problems before then. However, the dropping costs of renewables like solar and wind power will likely spell the end for fossil fuels long before that happens.

By 2100, economical oil and gas will be gone. They will last us for 40 to 70 years, depending on our rate of consumption. Much of what will be left in our reserves, in oil shales, tar sands, and under the oceans, will be too costly to recover. They will become what are called stranded assets. Minable coal reserves have been substantially overestimated. U.S. coal production could peak in the next decade.

Today we are burning over 90 million barrels of oil a day. With a business-as-usual scenario, that number could increase significantly by 2100 – if we had it to burn. Because of accelerating demand, a business-as-usual scenario will likely cause us to run out of economic fossil fuels in this century. So we are headed toward renewables one way or another.

Nevertheless, it is very important to note that since renewables will require building up new infrastructure in the form of solar installations, wind turbines, electric storage capacity, a smart distribution network, and so on, we need to use our remaining fossil fuels to do so while we have them in cheap supply. Otherwise we may run our economies off a cliff later this century.