What's more current than the weather?

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Rate of technology development is not intrinsically tied to reduction in pollution.

It isn't. But



We should be eating 14k KWh per household by now -- but we're only using 12k. Compact fluorescents and LED lighting, says NYT.

NYT story (paywall warning)

20% of the world's electricity is used for lighting. Eventually it will be 4%, because LED.

How huge is this? Massive! During the day, energy for lighting is needed exactly as solar becomes unavailable. (thanks again to glatt for linking that CA daily energy supply/demand website)

The electricity saved from this will now be able to power more electric cars, without additional coal plants. Then oil use goes down. And due to globalization, all these innovations take effect in a decade, and are shared worldwide as quickly as possible.

Why not be optimistic?

(cue music) ♪ This is how we do it ♫

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

During the day, energy for lighting is needed exactly as solar becomes unavailable.

Say what?
Hmm... At the end of the day... At night... During the dark part of the day... During the night part of the day?
Nevermind, just awkward.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

20% of the world's electricity is used for lighting. Eventually it will be 4%, because LED.

That transition caused a lot of complaints and bellyaching, and Trump is moving backwards on it.

Why not be optimistic?

Because a lot of the reasons for optimism are things pushed for, advocated for, incentivized, and subsidized by policies intended to combat climate change.


Like the carbon recapture plants you mentioned earlier. One of their sources of funding (I have no idea what percentage) is from the Climate Change and Emissions Management Corporation (CCEMC), which is technically privately funded, but:

Funding for CCEMC is collected from industry. Since 2007, Alberta companies that annually produce more than 100,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over a baseline are legally required to reduce their greenhouse gas intensity by 12 per cent. Companies have three options to meet their reduction target: improve the efficiency of their operations, buy carbon credits in the Alberta-based offset system or pay $15 into the Climate Change and Emissions Management Fund for every tonne over the reduction limit. The CCEMC invests the money collected in clean technology.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Because planning for the worst helps make the best more likely.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

20% of the world's electricity is used for lighting. Eventually it will be 4%, because LED.

One would think so using some assumption - that were used for over a century. IEEE Spectrum (long ago) debunked that assumption. What happens when lights and electricity get cheaper? The number of lights increase drastically. Ironically, as the cost of lightning went down (all through history), then mankind spend same or more on lighting.

The LED is not expected to reduce energy consumption. It is expected to increase the amount of lights we use, need, and leave on.

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by Undertoad, pointing out that RCP8.5 is unlikely

RCP 8.5 "assumes the fastest population growth (a doubling of Earth’s population to 12 billion), the lowest rate of technology development, slow GDP growth, a massive increase in world poverty, plus high energy use and emissions."

World poverty is decreasing rapidly... innovation in solar and storage and efficiency continue. Emissions in developed countries are kinda flat.

NY Mag Intelligencer now agrees, with a very thorough and well-researched article: We’re Getting a Clearer Picture of the Climate Future — and It’s Not as Bad as It Once Looked.

It finds that RCP8.5 is now highly unlikely, in light of a new International Energy Agency report which puts warming at, most likely, about 3 degrees by end of 2100.

Author has conversations with climate scientists about this, and from his POV, there's a developing consensus on it (bold mine):

I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to wrap my head around all of this, speaking with energy analysts and climate scientists (including Hausfather) about just what these projections mean for our understanding of where we are headed. Nearly every one has told me the IEA projections, while limited in ways, nevertheless represent a more plausible projection of the medium-term energy future than is contained in RCP8.5. Most — though not all — told me that they did not see RCP8.5 as a plausible scenario, even in the absence of meaningful climate policy. Honestly, this surprised me; while objections to RCP8.5 have been around for a decade or more, those who view it skeptically now seem to outnumber those who see it as useful — at least as a vision of a “business as usual” future.

This doesn't mean it's not a problem; three degrees of warming still has a large impact, just not the nightmare scenarios of RCP8.5.

[tw]

So don't worry; be happy.

[Undertoad]

Judith Curry is one of the most prominent skeptical scientists on AGW. Cherry-pick the page at will I considered linking it but didn't have the audacity to do it! I'm not linking the top skeptics!

Still, anyone just reading this exchange about it, will now understand a few things they didn't know before:

A) RCP 8.5 is an economic and social model, more than a climate model.

B) It's one of several models about how the world may go in the future.

C) It's the most pessimistic model; which, according to the Curry page, paragraph #1, is "a useful worst-case scenario, but not 'business as usual'".

D) All media stories and infographics and similar "climate porn" will invoke the shit out of it, and not mention the other models.

E) Doing that is disrespectful to the science, and anti-informative to the reader.

Good thread!

[Happy Monkey]

E is false and does not follow from any of the previous items.

[Undertoad]

eat up your tasty helpings of FaKe NeWs

Here's a balanced Atlantic article on RCP 8.5.

[Happy Monkey]

The current definition of "fake news" is "news Trump doesn't want to be broadcast", which, to the extent it has any relationship to accuracy at all, is a positive relationship.

Yes, I saw that Atlantic article when googling for articles that had criticisms of RCP 8.5, but went with the one that had more explicit criticisms.

This stood out to me, though:

Originally Posted by Rob Jackson via the Atlantic

“Even some [of the scenarios] for 3 degrees Celsius assume that at some point in the next 50 years, we will have large-scale industrial activities to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere,” he said. “It’s a very dangerous game, I think. We’re assuming that this thing we can’t do today will somehow be possible and cheaper in the future. I believe in tech, but I don’t believe in magic.”

It's all fine and dandy to assume that technology will improve, but to build into the model that a particular technology will be possible, developed, and funded by future people at a worldwide scale is a pretty big assumption in itself. If that assumption is built into any RCPs <8.5, then I don't see how 8.5 any less realistic than them. Trump is reducing efficiency standards and deleting the words "climate change" from scientific reports.

And, of course, just as with the "we'll run out of fossil fuels" criticism from the Wikipedia page, it's not a critique that can be used effectively by AGW skeptics. If the claim is that we don't need to do something, you don't use a model where the assumption is that we do it.

[Undertoad]

My definition of fake news is news that applies a biased, bogus, or activist narrative. If you ever see me use the term, that is what I mean by it.

to build into the model that a particular technology will be possible, developed, and funded by future people at a worldwide scale is a pretty big assumption in itself

You'll be stunned, then, to learn how well this is coming along, and how quickly. It's easily possible, a simple chemical reaction does it, and this has been developed already. It's a hair away from a business model at this stage.

NPR Story on one company who does it, Carbon Engineering

[Undertoad]

BBC story on Carbon Engineering, the Canuck company removing CO2 from the air

They got the cost down to $100 per ton of CO2

They got $68M in investments from fossil fuel companies

[Happy Monkey]

The term already has too many definitions; Before Trump co-opted it, it was actual fake news, i.e. stuff Romanian teens made up and put on websites designed to look like real newspapers, and before that, it was stuff like "the Onion", and now it's just news that Trump doesn't like.

There's nothing stopping you from making up your own definition, I guess (like Humpty Dumpty using 'glory' to mean 'a nice, knock-down argument'), but "biased' and 'fake' are not synonyms in common parlance.

[Undertoad]

i'm sure my definition will find its way into the parlance

Columbia Journalism Review: "How much confidence do you have in the press?"

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

"How much confidence do you have in the press?"

So where is the study once obvious propaganda sources (National Inquirer, Fox News, the local (5 and 6 PM) gossip, etc are removed? Real news never appeals to the emotional. It states facts that are confirmed. Many so called new sources (scandal sheet, News of the World, talk show hosts, etc) did not and are not required to do that.

Eliminating many news source that clearly are only propaganda should massively change those numbers.