Roger, I think "fixing this problem" means acknowledgment that the problem is a political one and not a physical/chemical one that can or should be modeled in the way that is being done in the first place. I think you referenced the Cointe/Guillemot 2022 article, https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wcc.824, the only public domain analysis I've ever read that is honest about where the 1.5 deg notion came from in the first place. (For those of us with some knowledge of the "back room" @ Paris COP their take is verifiable.) And it all goes to the key questions in your 2023 review of "Model Land" - models for whom, for what purpose/intent, to what end (I paraphrase).
I'm halfway through an excellent book, "Reading the Glass" by Elliot Rappaport, a Master Mariner with a lifetime's experience skippering sail training ships and sail-powered research ships. Sailing ships literally live or die by weather forecasts. Rappoport states flatly that he never trusts the GFS model weather forecasts or its European competitor for more than 72 hours ahead. My wife is asking me, "If weather models can't predict the future more than 72 hours in advance, why should we trust climate model predictions for 100 years hence?" I started to rap about Lorenz uncertainty in chaotic systems and compounding error in projections when I stopped and told my lady wife "I'll ask The Honest Broker crowd. Maybe someone there will know." So like Ferris Buehler's teacher I pose the question. "Anyone with an answer? Anyone? Anyone?"
The standard answer to this is that weather is an "initial value" problem and climate is a "boundary condition" problem. Though some (like Pielke Sr.) argue that climate also has elements of an initial value problem.
In plain English, weather prediction seeks to predict the weather, while climate projections seek to project the statistics of weather, not the weather.
Dear Roger, It is clear that, unlike Ferris Buehler, you are not taking the day off to put miles on the family Ferrari!!
Many thanks for the lucid answer regarding climate change projections depending on whether they are initial value problems versus boundary condition problems.
Roger, correct me if I am wrong, but are not climate models based on weather prediction models, with additional parameterizations to account for long-term effects? If that is true, are not the uncertainties in weather predictions already embedded in climate change models? This is what I take away from Pielke Sr's persuasive letter where he describes climate change projections as sensitivity studies rather than valid predictions.
The Giorgi paper points out that since climate change projections are probabilistic, the uncertainties in the projections must be specified for any hope of analytical precision. Yet how often is that done when such projections are presented to the public? By the time USA Today gets hold of it, climate change projections become predictions, and we are all gonna die from climate catastrophe.
Agree with this piece Roger. IAM's are functional to what some of us call the "economics of techno-scientific promises" that goes with the European Green and Digital narrative. With the introduction of digital twins of the earth this narrative will go on steroids.
One overarching fact that needs to be considered is that “The Public” is completely ignorant of the actual work product of the IPCC today. As Roger’s weather attribution series and others have demonstrated, there exists almost zero ability to communicate broad understanding of the current climate science. Instead “The Public” knowledge comes almost exclusively from, “hair on fire”, activists who simply impose lies in place of “the science. As flawed as the modeling is today, if there exists no ability to broadly communicate actual results to “The Public” then until we can fix this problem everything else is secondary.
"almost all IPCC scenarios that project growing inequities are produced in rich parts of the world" Here in the UK we are working very hard to reduce those inequities by making the UK poorer.
An excellent article. I had never considered the soft power potential accruing to those controlling climate modelling. Makes perfect sense. There is an analogy with the power that Europe wields - under Trump that might be more 'attempts to wield' - over the social media and AI industry despite being a backwater for its development.
How about this, we quit committing enormous amounts of time and resources to developing complex climate models, realize that we don’t yet have the knowledge to predict long term weather and concentrate on cost effective adaptation to whatever weather we encounter. The whole climate change industry is the largest single grift in history.
The IAMs and their progenitors suffer from a horrible lack of transparency. Every other modeling exercise I have witnessed or been a part of has required explicit statement of assumptions. What confidence can you have in a model if its bases are not known?
A concomitant problem lies in these model's uncertainties. We often see these models with error bars, but the error bars apparently (we don't know the uncertainty of the assumptions themselves!) only reflect the uncertainty in known quantities. History should have taught us that the farther out we go in time, the poorer our ability to predict future social, cultural and technical evolutions and especially abrupt changes. Further exacerbating this, we know that the pace of change is accelerating, i.e., the time period over which we can expect to make relatively accurate predictions about the future is shrinking. At what point in time do these models lose all credibility? Fifteen years? Fifty? I don't know but I'm willing to bet that emissions in 2100 AD won't be anything like those we're predicting now.
I also find the evolution of these models squirrelly (technical term). What is most often done outside the climate community is to test a model against reality, evaluate its adequacy and then tune the model, repeating until its results are "good enough" for the decision/policy-maker. Climate models seem to be accepted uncritically until a new set of assumptions (scenarios) lead to new results from untuned models. This is a perversion of the scientific method, and of good policy-making.
My conclusion - let the Europeans waste their money on meaningless models. Let's turn our modeling efforts toward better predicting the weather!
One day—assuming we escape the cultish insanity of the RCP8.5 conspiracy that triggered this bizarro world, anthropologists will write volumes about the cultural, economical, and dare I say religious mechanisms that allowed such obviously fake “settled science” destroy countless economies and artificially stymie the progress that a more honest and accountable science and a truly free market ensure for their adherents. Sadly, I’ll be dead and gone before we shake ourselves free—like a particularly dark drug habit.
Thank you very much sir, this is a great post. Two huge questions, and one mediocre question.
First, you cite vdV24 as saying “Since 2010, remaining carbon budgets have shrunk by ~400 GtCO2 (~0.5 °C), yet the achievability…” What exactly is the meaning of the parenthetical statement? Is this saying that 400 GtCO2 is equivalent to 0.5°C? Is it saying that a reduction of 400 GtCO2 will produce a temperature differential of 0.5 °C? As an aside, Our World in Data shows 2023 releases of CO2 to be about 40 billion tons, which I believe is also 40 gigatons. How can reductions be an order of magnitude greater that what was released, or is the author suggesting that the 400 Gt came from an initial budget of approx. 3000 GT now present in the atmosphere?
My second question is more philosophical. Towards the end of your essay, you say that “[c]limate scenarios desperately need to be kept up-to-date.” The wisdom of that statement is obvious and beyond question. But, does “up-to-date” mean that updated scenarios will also incorporate direct evidence of climate impact? If the temperature of 1.5 °C is exceeded without global catastrophe or massive climate destruction or massive climate-related death and despair, will those new scenarios incorporate revise risk assessment and cost/benefit analysis? Churchill has written that "no matter how beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." This prudent suggestions seems to be absent from the modeling process.
Finally, during the interim period where we are waiting for the 1.5°C to happen (in other words, moving forward from now), will meaningful and objective research be undertaken looking into the benefits of CO2? The literature abounds with assumptions of negative risk (though never quite quantifying them), yet peer-reviewed literature on CO2 benefits is sparse. Is this because of the prejudice in grant institutions, or because there are none?
I look forward to your 2025 postings! Thank again for your work.
There are studies of the benefits of higher atmospheric CO2 and higher temperatures, mainly better agricultural productivity from the former, and lower death rates for humans and other life from the latter. I've copied some relevant information from a paper of mine from ~15 months ago:
--------------------------------------------
"A working paper by Richard S.J. Tol, Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex and at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and their Institute for Environmental Studies, estimates the private benefits of the use of fossil fuels at $411/ton of CO2*. And a research paper analyzes the uncertainties in the social cost of carbon (SCC) and shows that the cost can be positive or, using current scientific knowledge and more plausible economic assumptions, the cost can be negative, which means that there is a real benefit to an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.**"
"Much research on human mortality shows that cool/cold temperatures cause far more deaths than warm/hot temperatures. A 2015 paper in The Lancet studied data on 74 million deaths in 13 countries worldwide and found that 7.0% were caused by cool/cold but only 0.5% by warm/hot temperatures."***
There have been many other papers studying a variety of parts of the world. Examples:
D. Onozuka and A. Hagihara, “Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest risk attributable to temperature in Japan”, Scientific Reports (2017), 7:39538 DOI: 10.1038/srep39538. http://www.nature.com/articles/srep39538
Y. Chung, et al., “Temporal changes in mortality related to extreme temperatures for 15 cities in northeast Asia: Adaptation to heat and maladaptation to cold” (2017) American Journal of Epidemiology, 185 (10), 907-913. DOI: 10.1093/aje/kww199
S .H. Fu, A. Gasparrini, P.S. Rodriguez, and P. Jha, “Mortality attributable to hot and cold ambient temperatures in India: a nationally representative case-crossover study” PLoS Medicine (2018) 15: e1002619, doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1002619.
Y. Zhang, et al., “Socio-geographic disparity in cardiorespiratory mortality burden attributable to ambient temperature in the United States”, Environ. Sci. and Pollution Res. (2019), 26, 694-705.
Thank you for this post. The issue mortality due to cold vs heat combined with the fertilization effect (ie greening) of CO2 is immediately where my mind goes when the "cost of carbon" is discussed. Combine that with the Roger’s work on extreme weather events and it's very difficult to understand how high COC values can be credibly calculated. As a Canadian, the issue of economic damage due to mildly increased temperatures is very difficult to believe, at least locally, and our current government's fixation on climate alarmism is frustrating to behold.
Climate models are based on scenarios. Scenarios are if ...then .... statements. The then part is about modelling, but the if part is an act of human imagination.
There is no objective way of assessing the if part. We use plausibility, as in Roger's critique of RCP 8.5, but that scenario has not been abandoned and is still being used, e.g. by the Canadian government. And what is plausible is a matter of judgment, not empirically verifiable or falsifiable until much of the if part has already happened.
That is why a change in who is our Canadian Prime Minister or the US President who then changes the if assumptions is critical. A new President imposes tariffs or other powerful policies that can change assumptions about the carbon budget or discontinue their use entirely. At bottom,the if statements in the scenarios on which models are built are political guesses that have at least some political advocacy purposes.
Good input.... But.. Its very clear that the UN will get the attention of national politics far less going forward.
And the IPCC reports will continue to be disregarded especially when the models are not fit for purpose and don’t predict reality.
So far the reality metrics on climate impact show the need for far less mitigation and only a need for some focused adaption.
Its clear we all need a reset on the science planning and funding so we maintain a far more realistic view of any future climate impact assessments and policy actions..
A good example of localized political subjugation of science is the choice by region between nuclear and W&S. It has zero to do with science but a lot about who has the future funding and the emotional political views of the past.
Its clear to many that CO2 has a very small impact on climate other than it’s greening the planet to our benefit… many scientists are suggesting only focused adaption.
Of course, we still need total sustainability of resources and consumer waste and other forms of pollution and better management of forests etc. and how we build on flood plains etc,
But lets unleash affordable and abundant energy to develop prosperity.
The policy on energy is that it should be the lowest cost solution in concert with a long-term roadmap for pollution reduction…. More like Nuclear and not W&S and FF for a long time yet.
If you want a population to be interested in sustainability, they have to be prosperous and that means affordable energy!... go figure.
It will also mean moving to shorter and more circular supply chains that will focus on resource waste reduction.
Plastics are essential but the current technology is very wasteful and unlike most metals cannot be recycled economically….
We are going to run out of fresh water if we don’t re-design our existing usage processes.
Consumers need to be retrained on a better balance between need and want and dispense with the throwaway society that our capitalistic society has encouraged.
In the western world we waste more than 60% of our food from land or sea to fork…!!!!!
These are far far better challenges to spend our wealth than a waste on climate mitigation on a non problem.
The planet is just fine if we just adapt a little bit.. its us that needs to be mitigated not the climate.
My money is on France (nuclear) over renewables plus batteries. It baffles me that these two strategies are seen as comparable in terms of overall cost and benefit.
Fortunately, the required nuclear technology exists, while the required battery storage technology (mid- and long-duration) does not. The use of "Green Hydrogen" for long-duration storage is too inefficient to be practical.
Roger, I think "fixing this problem" means acknowledgment that the problem is a political one and not a physical/chemical one that can or should be modeled in the way that is being done in the first place. I think you referenced the Cointe/Guillemot 2022 article, https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wcc.824, the only public domain analysis I've ever read that is honest about where the 1.5 deg notion came from in the first place. (For those of us with some knowledge of the "back room" @ Paris COP their take is verifiable.) And it all goes to the key questions in your 2023 review of "Model Land" - models for whom, for what purpose/intent, to what end (I paraphrase).
I'm halfway through an excellent book, "Reading the Glass" by Elliot Rappaport, a Master Mariner with a lifetime's experience skippering sail training ships and sail-powered research ships. Sailing ships literally live or die by weather forecasts. Rappoport states flatly that he never trusts the GFS model weather forecasts or its European competitor for more than 72 hours ahead. My wife is asking me, "If weather models can't predict the future more than 72 hours in advance, why should we trust climate model predictions for 100 years hence?" I started to rap about Lorenz uncertainty in chaotic systems and compounding error in projections when I stopped and told my lady wife "I'll ask The Honest Broker crowd. Maybe someone there will know." So like Ferris Buehler's teacher I pose the question. "Anyone with an answer? Anyone? Anyone?"
Hi Dale,
The standard answer to this is that weather is an "initial value" problem and climate is a "boundary condition" problem. Though some (like Pielke Sr.) argue that climate also has elements of an initial value problem.
In plain English, weather prediction seeks to predict the weather, while climate projections seek to project the statistics of weather, not the weather.
Here is a good, and technical, overview:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-005-6857-4
Pielke Sr. discusses this here:
https://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/r-210.pdf
Please follow up.
When my dad is back from vacation I'll get him involved here also!
Dear Roger, It is clear that, unlike Ferris Buehler, you are not taking the day off to put miles on the family Ferrari!!
Many thanks for the lucid answer regarding climate change projections depending on whether they are initial value problems versus boundary condition problems.
Roger, correct me if I am wrong, but are not climate models based on weather prediction models, with additional parameterizations to account for long-term effects? If that is true, are not the uncertainties in weather predictions already embedded in climate change models? This is what I take away from Pielke Sr's persuasive letter where he describes climate change projections as sensitivity studies rather than valid predictions.
The Giorgi paper points out that since climate change projections are probabilistic, the uncertainties in the projections must be specified for any hope of analytical precision. Yet how often is that done when such projections are presented to the public? By the time USA Today gets hold of it, climate change projections become predictions, and we are all gonna die from climate catastrophe.
All models are wrong, some models are useful…and most are political.
Agree with this piece Roger. IAM's are functional to what some of us call the "economics of techno-scientific promises" that goes with the European Green and Digital narrative. With the introduction of digital twins of the earth this narrative will go on steroids.
One overarching fact that needs to be considered is that “The Public” is completely ignorant of the actual work product of the IPCC today. As Roger’s weather attribution series and others have demonstrated, there exists almost zero ability to communicate broad understanding of the current climate science. Instead “The Public” knowledge comes almost exclusively from, “hair on fire”, activists who simply impose lies in place of “the science. As flawed as the modeling is today, if there exists no ability to broadly communicate actual results to “The Public” then until we can fix this problem everything else is secondary.
"almost all IPCC scenarios that project growing inequities are produced in rich parts of the world" Here in the UK we are working very hard to reduce those inequities by making the UK poorer.
An excellent article. I had never considered the soft power potential accruing to those controlling climate modelling. Makes perfect sense. There is an analogy with the power that Europe wields - under Trump that might be more 'attempts to wield' - over the social media and AI industry despite being a backwater for its development.
How about this, we quit committing enormous amounts of time and resources to developing complex climate models, realize that we don’t yet have the knowledge to predict long term weather and concentrate on cost effective adaptation to whatever weather we encounter. The whole climate change industry is the largest single grift in history.
The IAMs and their progenitors suffer from a horrible lack of transparency. Every other modeling exercise I have witnessed or been a part of has required explicit statement of assumptions. What confidence can you have in a model if its bases are not known?
A concomitant problem lies in these model's uncertainties. We often see these models with error bars, but the error bars apparently (we don't know the uncertainty of the assumptions themselves!) only reflect the uncertainty in known quantities. History should have taught us that the farther out we go in time, the poorer our ability to predict future social, cultural and technical evolutions and especially abrupt changes. Further exacerbating this, we know that the pace of change is accelerating, i.e., the time period over which we can expect to make relatively accurate predictions about the future is shrinking. At what point in time do these models lose all credibility? Fifteen years? Fifty? I don't know but I'm willing to bet that emissions in 2100 AD won't be anything like those we're predicting now.
I also find the evolution of these models squirrelly (technical term). What is most often done outside the climate community is to test a model against reality, evaluate its adequacy and then tune the model, repeating until its results are "good enough" for the decision/policy-maker. Climate models seem to be accepted uncritically until a new set of assumptions (scenarios) lead to new results from untuned models. This is a perversion of the scientific method, and of good policy-making.
My conclusion - let the Europeans waste their money on meaningless models. Let's turn our modeling efforts toward better predicting the weather!
Roger, this will surprise no one but the region least represented in global models: Africa. See Blimpo et al (2023)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421524000648?ssrnid=4509563&dgcid=SSRN_redirect_SD
Fortunately, my colleagues are on the case:
https://energyforgrowth.org/article/who-decides-africas-net-zero-pathways/
And a new org was just launched in response to try to close the gap:
https://africanclimatefoundation.org/news_and_analysis/new-initiative-to-accelerate-african-led-energy-transition-launched-during-cop29/
Excellent, thanks. These three links are together worth their own THB post.
A growing body of people (perhaps, not including academics) are saying, "Oh, that prediction is based on modeling? Never mind. I don't trust you."
One day—assuming we escape the cultish insanity of the RCP8.5 conspiracy that triggered this bizarro world, anthropologists will write volumes about the cultural, economical, and dare I say religious mechanisms that allowed such obviously fake “settled science” destroy countless economies and artificially stymie the progress that a more honest and accountable science and a truly free market ensure for their adherents. Sadly, I’ll be dead and gone before we shake ourselves free—like a particularly dark drug habit.
Thank you very much sir, this is a great post. Two huge questions, and one mediocre question.
First, you cite vdV24 as saying “Since 2010, remaining carbon budgets have shrunk by ~400 GtCO2 (~0.5 °C), yet the achievability…” What exactly is the meaning of the parenthetical statement? Is this saying that 400 GtCO2 is equivalent to 0.5°C? Is it saying that a reduction of 400 GtCO2 will produce a temperature differential of 0.5 °C? As an aside, Our World in Data shows 2023 releases of CO2 to be about 40 billion tons, which I believe is also 40 gigatons. How can reductions be an order of magnitude greater that what was released, or is the author suggesting that the 400 Gt came from an initial budget of approx. 3000 GT now present in the atmosphere?
My second question is more philosophical. Towards the end of your essay, you say that “[c]limate scenarios desperately need to be kept up-to-date.” The wisdom of that statement is obvious and beyond question. But, does “up-to-date” mean that updated scenarios will also incorporate direct evidence of climate impact? If the temperature of 1.5 °C is exceeded without global catastrophe or massive climate destruction or massive climate-related death and despair, will those new scenarios incorporate revise risk assessment and cost/benefit analysis? Churchill has written that "no matter how beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." This prudent suggestions seems to be absent from the modeling process.
Finally, during the interim period where we are waiting for the 1.5°C to happen (in other words, moving forward from now), will meaningful and objective research be undertaken looking into the benefits of CO2? The literature abounds with assumptions of negative risk (though never quite quantifying them), yet peer-reviewed literature on CO2 benefits is sparse. Is this because of the prejudice in grant institutions, or because there are none?
I look forward to your 2025 postings! Thank again for your work.
There are studies of the benefits of higher atmospheric CO2 and higher temperatures, mainly better agricultural productivity from the former, and lower death rates for humans and other life from the latter. I've copied some relevant information from a paper of mine from ~15 months ago:
--------------------------------------------
"A working paper by Richard S.J. Tol, Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex and at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and their Institute for Environmental Studies, estimates the private benefits of the use of fossil fuels at $411/ton of CO2*. And a research paper analyzes the uncertainties in the social cost of carbon (SCC) and shows that the cost can be positive or, using current scientific knowledge and more plausible economic assumptions, the cost can be negative, which means that there is a real benefit to an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.**"
* R.S.J. Tol, “The Private Benefit of Carbon and its Social Cost” Working Paper Series #07-2017, University of Sussex. https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=wps-07-2017.pdf&site=24
** K. Dayaratna, R. McKitrick, and D. Kreutzer, “Empirically-constrained climate sensitivity and the social cost of carbon”, Climate Change Economics, (2017). http://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/empirical_scc_cce_preprint.pdf
-----------------------------------
"Much research on human mortality shows that cool/cold temperatures cause far more deaths than warm/hot temperatures. A 2015 paper in The Lancet studied data on 74 million deaths in 13 countries worldwide and found that 7.0% were caused by cool/cold but only 0.5% by warm/hot temperatures."***
*** A. Gasparrini, et al., “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study”, The Lancet (2015) DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(14)62114-0 http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2814%2962114-0.pdf
There have been many other papers studying a variety of parts of the world. Examples:
D. Onozuka and A. Hagihara, “Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest risk attributable to temperature in Japan”, Scientific Reports (2017), 7:39538 DOI: 10.1038/srep39538. http://www.nature.com/articles/srep39538
Y. Chung, et al., “Temporal changes in mortality related to extreme temperatures for 15 cities in northeast Asia: Adaptation to heat and maladaptation to cold” (2017) American Journal of Epidemiology, 185 (10), 907-913. DOI: 10.1093/aje/kww199
S .H. Fu, A. Gasparrini, P.S. Rodriguez, and P. Jha, “Mortality attributable to hot and cold ambient temperatures in India: a nationally representative case-crossover study” PLoS Medicine (2018) 15: e1002619, doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1002619.
Y. Zhang, et al., “Socio-geographic disparity in cardiorespiratory mortality burden attributable to ambient temperature in the United States”, Environ. Sci. and Pollution Res. (2019), 26, 694-705.
R. Brázdil, et al., “Fatalities associated with the severe weather conditions in the Czech Republic, 2000–2019”, Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.” (2021), 21, 1355-1382, 2021. https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/21/1355/2021/nhess-21-1355-2021.pdf
Thank you for this post. The issue mortality due to cold vs heat combined with the fertilization effect (ie greening) of CO2 is immediately where my mind goes when the "cost of carbon" is discussed. Combine that with the Roger’s work on extreme weather events and it's very difficult to understand how high COC values can be credibly calculated. As a Canadian, the issue of economic damage due to mildly increased temperatures is very difficult to believe, at least locally, and our current government's fixation on climate alarmism is frustrating to behold.
Climate models are based on scenarios. Scenarios are if ...then .... statements. The then part is about modelling, but the if part is an act of human imagination.
There is no objective way of assessing the if part. We use plausibility, as in Roger's critique of RCP 8.5, but that scenario has not been abandoned and is still being used, e.g. by the Canadian government. And what is plausible is a matter of judgment, not empirically verifiable or falsifiable until much of the if part has already happened.
That is why a change in who is our Canadian Prime Minister or the US President who then changes the if assumptions is critical. A new President imposes tariffs or other powerful policies that can change assumptions about the carbon budget or discontinue their use entirely. At bottom,the if statements in the scenarios on which models are built are political guesses that have at least some political advocacy purposes.
Good input.... But.. Its very clear that the UN will get the attention of national politics far less going forward.
And the IPCC reports will continue to be disregarded especially when the models are not fit for purpose and don’t predict reality.
So far the reality metrics on climate impact show the need for far less mitigation and only a need for some focused adaption.
Its clear we all need a reset on the science planning and funding so we maintain a far more realistic view of any future climate impact assessments and policy actions..
A good example of localized political subjugation of science is the choice by region between nuclear and W&S. It has zero to do with science but a lot about who has the future funding and the emotional political views of the past.
If (as Roger says) we reach 1.5C increase in a few years with very little other climate impact, that may convince most that less mitigation is needed.
Its clear to many that CO2 has a very small impact on climate other than it’s greening the planet to our benefit… many scientists are suggesting only focused adaption.
Of course, we still need total sustainability of resources and consumer waste and other forms of pollution and better management of forests etc. and how we build on flood plains etc,
But lets unleash affordable and abundant energy to develop prosperity.
The policy on energy is that it should be the lowest cost solution in concert with a long-term roadmap for pollution reduction…. More like Nuclear and not W&S and FF for a long time yet.
If you want a population to be interested in sustainability, they have to be prosperous and that means affordable energy!... go figure.
It will also mean moving to shorter and more circular supply chains that will focus on resource waste reduction.
Plastics are essential but the current technology is very wasteful and unlike most metals cannot be recycled economically….
We are going to run out of fresh water if we don’t re-design our existing usage processes.
Consumers need to be retrained on a better balance between need and want and dispense with the throwaway society that our capitalistic society has encouraged.
In the western world we waste more than 60% of our food from land or sea to fork…!!!!!
These are far far better challenges to spend our wealth than a waste on climate mitigation on a non problem.
The planet is just fine if we just adapt a little bit.. its us that needs to be mitigated not the climate.
Roger, The concept of a renewables plus storage electric grid has not been the subject of either a rigorous demonstration or a thorough and detailed engineering analysis and execution plan. The experiences of El Hierro Island (https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-12-14-climate-advocacy-incompetence-or-intentional-fraud?rq=El%20Hierro%20Island) and Broken Hill NSW (https://judithcurry.com/2024/12/05/wind-and-solar-cant-support-the-grid/#more-31718) should encourage one or the other prior to committing entire societies to a massive experiment. France, on the other hand, has conducted a national demonstration of a nuclear electric grid with great success.
My money is on France (nuclear) over renewables plus batteries. It baffles me that these two strategies are seen as comparable in terms of overall cost and benefit.
Fortunately, the required nuclear technology exists, while the required battery storage technology (mid- and long-duration) does not. The use of "Green Hydrogen" for long-duration storage is too inefficient to be practical.