June is the month when the Arctic Sea Ice outlook gets going, when the EPA releases its rules on power plant CO2 emissions, and when, hopefully, commenters can get back to actually having constructive and respectful conversations about climate science (and not nuclear energy, impending apocalypsi (pl) or how terrible everyone else is). Thanks.
flxible (#185),
Wow, where do you get your news? The US is cutting emissions. Australia is back on board with Kyoto. Canada is rogue but NAFTA probably shields them.
So, if we had stopped using fossil fuels in 1960, would you be concerned about cumulative emissions?
Chuck Hughes #116,
“I don’t know but I think our future depends on the next couple of elections in the United States. I can’t see how a Republican elected President, Senate and Congress gets us anywhere toward our goal of capping CO2 emissions.”
Don’t hold your breath. Look at yesterday’s GOP primary results in VA. A leading far right Congressman (Eric Cantor) got beat by a person even further to the right. That’s not a good omen for the future. or for radical action on climate change.
But, you know what? Even if one of the hard line climate advocates had won, it would make little difference in the larger picture. We need double-digit FF demand reduction NOW! We would get 0 with Cantor or his replacement, and maybe 1% from the more radical opponent. Look at the vaunted Ceres Clean Trillion plan, SA’s centerpiece, estimated to cost ~$44 TRILLION dollars from now until 2050. It is being pushed by the IEA and other climate advocacy support groups, as well, of course, by the renewables investors. As I showed in my detailed analysis of this ‘plan’, it would provide ~1.5% per annum FF reduction, AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE LESS THAN WHAT WE NEED TO AVOID ULTIMATE DISASTER. That’s the very best we could expect from Washington, and it’s an order of magnitude below what we need.
@179: I made a mistake. -70 Gt/yr is Thwaites’s _net_ mass loss due to melting. Because of accretion, its _gross_ loss due to melting is larger. The upshot is that geothermal melting contributes less than the 5.1% ceiling that I calculated in @179. Does anyone know Thwaites’s accretion rate?
Congratulations to Gavin on his new post as head of NASA GISS!
My earlier response to Dio (#191) was probably too cryptic, upon reflection. So, slightly more elaborated: Energy substitution may not be sufficient to ‘solve the problem.’ However, it *is* necessary to solve the problem.
Further, it ought to be our priority right now, because 1) there’s more work to do, and 2) it can be usefully done right now.
For demand reduction, the main useful activity right now is education. The public isn’t ready for massive cutbacks, either here or in the developing world. But that will change as the need for them becomes more obvious. If the case for demand is well-prepared and disseminated, and if low-carbon energy is more widely available, it will be much, much better when that moment does arrive.
IEEE Spectrum on flow batteries
Hat tip to Pipedot with more links.
This is now in operation.
Gavin: Copy James Hansen when you get there.
Where some of the problems come from in the energy discussion:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/06/11/germany-energiewende-oz-critical-review/
“This use of loaded language is prevalent in renewable revolution discussions. For example, “intermittent” is frequently replaced with “variable” or VRE (variable renewable energy) since “variable” carries connotations of user adjustment, volume, or control. We could perhaps use the more accurate term “uncontrollable variable” in place of intermittent, but of course this improved linguistic accuracy would be counterproductive to those seeking to promote intermittent power.
Another home-grown example is the so-called “base load myth” and the idea that “intermittency can also be baseload”. This was first promulgated in Australia by Mark Diesendorf [27], but picked up by the environmental community. This demonstrates a corruption of well-established technical jargon, with the purpose of confusing rather than clarifying. Yet even here, the corruption of language is highly context specific”
“Perversely, the democratisation of the grid is also sometimes framed around the language of social justice, yet this is an inversion of logic – a large-scale exodus from the grid would lead to the dilemma of a smaller revenue base to recover the high fixed cost of networks, leaving low income households, renters, pensioners, schools, hospitals, and others carrying a higher cost burden. In Germany, Spain and the UK, the concept of fuel poverty has already become a serious social problem. Furthermore, an off-grid PV system has a lifetime net-energy return of little better than unity, implying that a large-scale community shift to off-grid would be economically and environmentally disastrous. So the themes of democratisation, social justice, and distributed energy have been imported from Germany and adopted by the Green-left for their universal virtues, yet they lead to what Frank Furedi calls “shallow opinions held strongly”.”
” greenhouse intensity for German electricity remains stubbornly high at 10 to 20 times the best performing European nations”
“The recent signs from Angela Merkel and Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel seem to point to a dawning realisation that reality might be catching up ”
The Greens invented the perversion of language that now traps the Greens into being against the reduction of CO2 production. Now I know where a lot of the problem came from.
Chris Dudley:
Talking about the US government imposing a GHG “tariff” on China, while the USA’s exports of coal to China are at an all-time high and increasing — much of it coming from public lands where coal mining corporations pay royalties far, far below the market value of the coal — is just ridiculous.
Besides, the US government is more concerned with imposing a punitive 35 percent tariff on imported Chinese photovoltaic panels.
Neven has done it again. Terrific stuff:
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2014/06/the-day-the-ice-cap-died.html
references this:
http://paulbriggs.net/The_Day_The_Icecap_Died.php
Now since this is a work of fiction, it doesn’t do to be too hard on the various commissions and omissions, but there’s a lot of interesting scientific work in there, and like Neven I’m interested in what is likely or unlikely. It is particularly useful in talking about the breakdown of the earth’s circulatory system. As a part-time resident of New Jersey, the winter just past did a lot of harm, and I think we can expect more of the same, seasonal variation off the charts wreaking havoc on normal systems.
—
I’m thrilled about Dr. Schmidt’s new job, and hope he can influence staffing and projects to stop the fake economies being practiced on all our futures.
ps. captcha has become impossible, and my eyes are good.
meow @ 179,
Thanks for that great, brief analysis!
Tool kit: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/aerial-robots/small-drone-probes-antarctic-ice-with-radar
184 Chris D speaks of targets:
Lots of people have targets. Even China. Call me when China’s per capita emissions exceed the USA’s in Real Life. Your fantasy apples and oranges comparison does not impress.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/06/03/3444105/china-carbon-cap-2/
#203: … and a big hug for hug a climate scientist day:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cartoon/2014/jun/12/first-dog-scientist
Firstly I’ll add my sincere congratulations to Gavin’s well deserved appointment to Prof Jim Hansen’s old post. Thanks for all those who responded to my question re: Thwaits glacier and for Hanks homework assignment. Cheers!
Gavin,
First, congratulations!
Second, a sort of narrow question I’m hoping to get in edgewise before you’re swamped with admin duties… I’ve appreciated your “Reconciling Warming Trends” paper, but I’m wondering how to, uh, reconcile it with AR5 (Box 9.2, p. 770). AR5 already notes that increasing stratospheric aerosol loading after 2000 and the unusually low solar minimum in 2009 helping to explain the “hiatus”, but still finds (albeit with low confidence) that effective radiative forcing in the CMIP5 mean was lower than the AR5 best estimate, and concludes: “…there are no apparent incorrect or missing global mean forcings in the CMIP5 models over the last 15 years that could explain the model–observations difference during the warming hiatus.” Your paper suggests that understated forcings can account for a considerable part of the difference. What accounts for the different conclusions? Is it mainly that you have more recent and sufficiently different forcings updates (Santer et al. volcano paper) that the AR5 might have reached conclusions similar to yours if that information had been available? Or is it down to a different approach to that behind the AR5 statement?
[Response: I can’t speak for the AR5 authors, but we quantified (approximately) the impact that updated forcings would have had, and when that is combined with the impacts of ENSO phase, and improved estimates of observations, it fits quite well. In defense of AR5, ours was the first quantification of those combined effects, and so their statement was made without anyone showing anything differently. – gavin]
Chris Dudley,
As others have pointed out, decreasing emissions does not help stabilise the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Also, as others have pointed out, the US increased its emissions last year, significantly. So, with recent behaviour, the US is contributing to an accelerating concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Willian Geoghegan,
Why do you think that Arctic-News blog pseudo paper has any validity that needs commenting on?
#198–“First, again you refuse to identify any targets that your proposed actions would achieve, despite the fact that I have asked you to do so in a number of posts.”
Don’t be ridiculous. We are speaking in a context which takes *your* DAAP™ targets for granted–such as they are. I add the last, since you’ve never actually broken down what the ‘sacrifices’ you call for mean quantitatively.
“…the numbers are sufficiently small to be irrelevant…”
With all due respect, no, they are not. According to REN21’s most recent status report, global renewable energy capacity reached 1560 GW in 2013, and total final energy use was about 10% renewable. Overall growth was about 8%, with non-hydropower sources growing at 17%, and solar at 55%. Could these rates be maintained, they would yield doubling times of 9.01, 4.41, and 1.58 years, respectively. Five doublings would give us more than the current global TFEC, yielding ‘total replacement times’ of 45.05, 22.5, and 7.9 years.
http://www.ren21.net
Of course, indefinite exponential growth isn’t sustainable over the longer term, but I’d say that it’s now pretty clear that we could, if we really tried, add more than 150 GW of renewable capacity annually. That would mean reaching 1/3 carbon-free in 23 years–2035. (That neglects any additional contributions from nuclear generation replacing fossil fuels.) As I calculated earlier, that would enable human survival if your ‘just say no to energy’ strategy were able to reduce overall energy use by 75%.
Better get cracking on that–renewable energy may still be a stretch away from where we’d like it to be, but it’s still way, way ahead of your strategy–again, such as it is. When you’ve shown some success in, say, shutting down the entertainment and travel industries, I’ll concede that you’ll have made some progress in your agenda. In the meantime, the DAAP™ remains an exercise in deep irony.
Kevin McKinney #204,
“My earlier response to Dio (#191) was probably too cryptic, upon reflection. So, slightly more elaborated: Energy substitution may not be sufficient to ‘solve the problem.’ However, it *is* necessary to solve the problem.”
The problem with your responses is not the crypticity, but the substance. You need to separate ‘solving the problem’ from ‘making life more bearable’. The central problem is that GHG concentrations in the atmosphere are too high, and global mean temperatures are consequently too high, Both must be reduced as rapidly as possibly, in a manner that will not destroy the biosphere in the process. ‘Solving the problem’ has three central components: stringent demand reduction for FF, rapid removal of GHG from the atmosphere and, perhaps, the possibility of having to use some form of geo-engineering in the interim to cap the temperature peak due to aerosol elimination. That’s it!!! Nowhere have I used the words ‘energy substitution’.
Now, if we have no energy substitution (in the modern sense) during this FF demand reduction process, we basically would start reverting to lifestyles that existed centuries previously. So, in order to make life ‘bearable’ during this solution process, we introduce some low carbon technologies. My plan calls for the minimum necessary, adequate to cover only the most essential uses of energy. How much is that; whatever the traffic will bear!
The more we relax any of these required conditions, the greater the risk that we go over the cliff. That’s my interpretation of the science and the numbers. I have seen no other competitive plan that will deliver the results of my plan with a commensurate level of risk. So, be clear in your language. ‘Substitution’ is not ‘necessary’ to solve the problem. It is probably necessary to make life more bearable, especially for people in the developed nations who have become essentially dependent on external energy sources for many of their daily activities.
Steve Fish #194,
“Won’t countries that already have clean energy sources in place be better off without any fossil energy?”
Your question is simplistic and irrelevant to the extreme, and the answer is obvious: Yes! But, why not expand the question, to see the absurdity more clearly? If, in 1976, when Carter was elected, we had initiated a global effort to cap population at 1976 levels, and a global effort to embark on wide-scale transformation to low carbon sources, wouldn’t we be in vastly better shape than we are now with the high FF path we chose? Yes!!! So what? We did what we did, and the only issue confronting us today is what to do from here on out that will maximize our chances for surviving as a species. We are well past the point where the energy substitution approaches that would have worked forty years ago are the optimal approaches today. What you and the ‘tag team’ propose are sure-fire recipes for ultimate disaster!!!
DIOGENES: I agree with your stance 100%. Even business as usual as we are currently at 0.8C is proving disastrous. Artic/Antarctic ice melt/tundra melt/greenland/ocean heating etc etc is all happening rapidly with only 0.8C global average temp increase. A 2.0C limit is an absolute furphy. Natural restorative mechanisms will under that level of forcing completely overwhelm any mitigation efforts that we could possibly implement…it’s happening already. With a 2.0C increase the north and south polar regions would probably be experiencing 8-10C increases. 2.0C cap is a blatant lie!!
Off topic but supporting your renewable interest. You may have heard that the univ of Illinois had creased ultra efficient photo-voltaic cells using a multi sandwich technique, each layer working on a different part of the solar spectrum leading to 30-40% energy efficiency. This method had the potential to replace the use of fossil fuels for power and industry on a global scale. So we have the means….question is do we have the backbone? do we have the will?
189 James@CAN. By what I can gather by your comment a perfect coalescing bringing all the regions with different rates of warming into unity would much resemble the atmosphere and conditions of venus. The highest rates of warming are the poles and generally those of the greater latitudes. In between them the various countries tend to have their own unique climatic fingerprint, based upon their geography, topography, winds, mountain ranges, river systems etc. But indeed as the atmosphere gets thicker with water vapour and CO2, CH4 and so forth due to global heating, regional differences will begin to become less obvious.
Jim (#211),
How sad you have such delusions. If China had a target, the US would have ratified Kyoto. You are completely lost in this subject.
Lawrence Coleman #220,
Appreciate your comments; they are right on target.
Your point about problems at 0.8 C is well taken. We set these integer limits as targets: 1 C, 2 C, etc. Why would we think an integer would be most appropriate? All we need do is look around us, as you have pointed out, and we see disaster in some regions already. And, the 0.8 C has not yet played itself out.
“question is do we have the backbone? do we have the will?”
The past may not always be the best predictor of the future, but absent any new perturbations entering the system, it may be the best we have. Based on our past performance and motivations, how would you answer the questions you posed? My answer would be a resounding NO!! I have seen no indications that there are any discernible movements in the direction toward necessary change.
Tony (#215),
You, like Steve, don’t understand how the rate of carbon dioxide emissions affects the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air. Consider RCP6 (chosen for clarity) in figs. 3 and 4 here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0156-z
Fig. 3 shows the emissions profiles that produce the atmospheric concentrations in fig. 4, We need only look at the top panel of fig. 3 and notice that the thin grey line has still not quite reached zero emissions in the year 2300 while the atmospheric concentration in fig 4. is rock steady at that time. Note that the x-axis extends to the year 2500 in fig. 4. You can do a more detailed comparison with fig. 5.
Very clearly. cutting emissions stabilized the concentration contrary to your or Steve’s assertions.
For you second issue, it is irrelevant to Article XX of GATT if we had an up tick in emissions in one or a few years. What matters is that we have stronger environmental laws than China. So, under the Clean Air Act, CAFE standards are rising, New source Regulations are about to be promulgates and existing source regulations are available for public comment. We are cutting emissions on purpose. That is why we can impose a tariff.
Since there has been some discussion of China’s contribution to global CO2 emissions some numbers might be useful:
Year 2012
Total CO2 Emissions (10^9 Tons CO2) USA: 5.1 China: 9.6
Emissions per Person (Tons) USA: 16 China: 7
The website http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org has very good graphics, including time-series for CO2 emissions by country. The plot of Chinese emissions shows a rate of increase that is frankly scary. That may be the reason that (according to the June 4th edition of the China Daily) the Chinese government has decided to cap emissions at the 2016 level, whatever that might be. This may also be part of the reason for the 30 year natural gas deal with Russia.
The Chinese data also raises another worrying point. What happens if India finally gets its economic act together and follows the Chinese free-market capitalist path?
Since there has been some discussion of China’s contribution to global CO2 emissions some numbers might be useful:
Year 2012
Total CO2 Emissions (10^9 Tons CO2) USA: 5.1 China: 9.6
Emissions per Person (Tons) USA: 16 China: 7
The website http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org has very good graphics, including time-series for CO2 emissions by country. The plot of Chinese emissions shows a rate of increase that is frankly scary. That may be the reason that (according to the June 4th edition of the China Daily) the Chinese government has decided to cap emissions at the 2016 level, whatever that might be. This may also be part of the reason for the 30 year natural gas deal with Russia.
The Chinese data also raises another worrying point. What happens if India finally gets its economic act together and follows the Chinese free-market capitalist path?
Congrats to Gavin, although I suspect he will miss being in the trenches.
Chris @223. So if China had agreed to play ball the US would have gone along with Kyoto. From my perspective the gripes about China were simply a justification for doing nothing.
In any case China is seriously proposing a cap in 2016, they are way ahead of us in terms of actually dealing with the problem.
SA (#208),
The US has export restrictions on oil. It should do the same with natural gas and coal. However, we can’t cut China’s coal imports that way since there are other sellers. We can cut their coal use by imposing tariffs on their imports to us.
The article you linked is interesting. A German company is using US trade rules to get tariffs on Chinese products. I’m not persuaded China is dumping. Their lax environmental and labor laws may explain their price advantage as it does for so many products. Applying Article XX of GATT is probably the best way to bring about reform in the former.
Regarding the latter, a world that is tolerant of slave labor and sweatshops is likely unstable to resumption of BAU emissions growth should we get that under control, so reform is needed there too, but making a start on controlling emissions does not have to wait for that.
Edward Greisch asked earlier in this thread for a realclimate article on WAIS. There is a first rate explanation of the issues provided by Patrick Lynch of NASA’s Earth Science News Team, crediting also Steve Cole and Alan Buis.
Check out The “Unstable” West Antarctic Ice Sheet: A Primer at jpl’s web pages.
Kevin McKinney #218,
“We are speaking in a context which takes *your* DAAP™ targets for granted–such as they are.”
Just to get you to commit to a numerical climate target for once in your life, my targets have been specified in no uncertain terms: under 1 C with reasonable chance, and under 350 (preferably 300) ppm, with reasonable chance. Are those the targets with which you are agreeing?
D‘oh
finds among much else
http://cel.webofknowledge.com/full_record.do?product=CEL&search_mode=CitingArticles&qid=3&SID=1EFXOv2HmYIrvlgsGeo&pReturnLink=&pSrcDesc=&page=1&doc=5&cacheurlFromRightClick=no
The economics of targeted mitigation in infrastructure
By:Lecocq, F (Lecocq, Franck)[ 1,2,3 ] ; Shalizi, Z (Shalizi, Zmarak)[ 4 ]
CLIMATE POLICY
Volume: 14, Issue: 2, Pages: 187-208
DOI: 10.1080/14693062.2014.861657
Published: MAR 4 2014
Been there, got the bumper sticker, and parked the car.
New ad campaign takes a novel approach, it links carbon pollution to poisoning babies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwDd9FVzQx8
The focus is now on limiting carbon pollution, not just carbon dioxide. Hopefully, this will make it harder to stop the EPA’s plan to cap carbon pollution.
Dave (#227),
China may be considering announcing a cap in 2016, but that is uncertain. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/09/chinese-official-plays-down-emission-cut-expectations
Some encouragement in the form of a GATT Article XX tariff may be helpful to them.
Thomas (#228),
No they are far behind us. If (big if) they announce a cap in 2016, it is unlikely to stop their emissions growth before 2025 or perhaps 2030. We are already cutting emissions.
The US Senate was very clear under what conditions it would ratify Kyoto. China was the sticking point.
@200:
No. First, this is true only if we radically cut emissions. Second, holding concentration steady at 400 ppm is not without bad consequences.
To elaborate on the first point, I understand CO2’s half-life under current conditions to be > 500 years. Thus (approximately), if we were to cease all emissions immediately, in 500 years we’d be half-way to 280 ppm; i.e. concentrations would decrease, on average [1], about (400-280)/2/500 = 0.12 ppm/yr. To SWAG, current emissions are adding ~2.0ppm/yr, so to reach stability, we’d need to cut emissions to 0.12/2.0 = 6% of current levels. And that’s assuming that we haven’t triggered any positive feedbacks. As I said, “radically cut”.
[1] The concentration curve is not linear, but rather something like 1/k.
Here is a more productive link to Gavin et al.’s article mentioned above:
http://www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/182h/Climate/Reconciling%20Warming%20Trends.pdf
Tony (#16)
We need a 80-100% reduction in emissions in order to stabilize concentrations. See this NAS report.
Gavin @215,
Thanks for the reply! Since AR5 was an assessment of the available science, if yours was the first published paper to actually try to do the math on this, I guess that resolves it for me. (Also, as an afterthought, perhaps AR5 should be taken to say merely that different forcings cannot explain all the model-observation difference, though it sounded more sweeping.)
free (for AGU members), full text:
Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica, from 1992 to 2011 (pages 3502–3509)
E. Rignot, J. Mouginot, M. Morlighem, H. Seroussi and B. ScheuchlArticle first published online: 27 MAY 2014
DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060140
Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica, from 1992 to 2011 (pages 3502–3509)
E. Rignot, J. Mouginot, M. Morlighem, H. Seroussi and B. Scheuchl
Article first published online: 27 MAY 2014 DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060140
Chris D,
You sound like a glutton who when faced with a food shortage demands that the starving reduce their food consumption at the same rate or pay the glutton a fine.
There are plenty of reasons to put tariffs on Chinese goods. CO2 ain’t one of them.
What we need, as CD says, is a more agressive US in international affairs. I mean, what could go wrong?
Re- Comment by Chris Dudley — 12 Jun 2014 @ 7:52 AM, ~#225
I think you may be confused about how RPCs are used in modeling but I am not a climate physicist. I suggest that you try to start a conversation with Gavin and, before you do, start here:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/06/climate-change-commitment-ii/
It appears that constant emissions, starting at 2001, result in temperatures heading for the sky out to 2400.
Also, I would appreciate it if you could redo your EROI for solar photovoltaic comment to Chris Korda. I can’t understand what you are saying at all.
Steve
236,
You’ve got you math wrong. A couple of years ago I posted some IDL here code to calculate the required additional emissions to hit various target concentrations. It’s been checked by a few people. For a 400 ppm target (no overshoot), we need about a 50% immediate cut in world emissions followed by ongoing decreasing emissions for another 100 years or so. For RCP6 with a target of 750 ppm for carbon dioxide, cuts start around 2070 and are pretty gentle with some emissions still occurring in 2300. You can see that in the link I posted for Tony. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0156-z
Even RCP2.6 has a cushion of 270 GtC future emissions and its target is just about 370 ppm in 2300. Obviously overshoot is built into that one.
Jim (#241),
You are being very rude. I respond to you, although with little patience for you inability to get you ignorance fixed by reading links or following mathematics, because Susan thinks you heart is in the right place.
You want much much more warming than can really be tolerated. That is a position that you seem to think is fair to an unelected regime with huge human rights violation that are ongoing. Please, unless you have a question, don’t respond to my posts. Just assume what you are about to write is incorrect and save us the time.
I’m happy to answer questions, especially if I am covering new material. But you are just coming back with the same old wrong stuff after you have already been corrected.
Re- Comment by DIOGENES — 12 Jun 2014 @ 5:23 AM, ~#220
So, you admit that Germany would be in much better shape than other nations with less renewable infrastructure if your “plan” is implemented. In the past you have refused to explain how a nation without any renewable infrastructure can survive after your “plan” takes effect. I suggest that trying to feed 7 to 10 billion people with Medieval agriculture would appear to be a sure-fire recipe for ultimate disaster!!! Explain why all nations shouldn’t get going with renewables, and don’t refer to some previous comment because you have never given an answer except for some vague reference to the possibility that some business might make some money in the process. Also, stop calling names (e.g. tag team); I am beginning to wonder how old you are.
Steve
“I don’t think people quite appreciate the gravity of what is going on [with regard to global warming] or just how much inertia the climate has,” Musk said during a conference call. “We really need to do something. It would be shortsighted if we try to hold these things close to our vest.”
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-12/why-elon-musk-just-opened-teslas-patents-to-his-biggest-rivals#r=rss
Tesla goes open-source (12 June):
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
“Musk named his company for Nikola Tesla, a famous inventor who became so exasperated with the legal system that he finally stopped patenting his ideas.”
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/tesla-opening-access-electric-car-patents-24114358
The future you are planning for (engineering) depends upon the future you are planning on (concept).
Chris (238),
It is worth mentioning that in fig. S.4 of that report, stabilization occurs at about a doubling of carbon dioxide over preindustrial. Emissions grow from about 9 GtC/yr now to about 17 GtC/yr around at around 2055. Stabilization starts about then with a cut that takes another 45 years to cut emissions by 80%, with concentration holding stable during that period.
Holding a stabilization target requires ongoing but reducing emissions. Cutting to zero without that period of reduction leads to a falling concentration rather than a stable concentration.
As mentioned in a much earlier post: I do not believe for a second that at this stage of the game due democratic process can come to the party in time. When in the future global mechanisms are set firmly into play to address climate change eg: drastically cut emissions 80-100%/ control population/ renewables/preserve native forest then we can return to democracy again. Until then strong and binding unilateral sweeping reforms have to take place NOW. I still think that educating the public from the grassroots up is the best way to go as I have little faith in democracy in effectively dealing with this issue. So in answer to my above question, I shudder, but honestly have to agree with you..NO! it seems we currently have neither the will nor the courage. I know what my head is telling me and it is at odds with my heart as I have an 8y/0 son. My head says we’ve left it far far too late but for the sake of my son my heart keeps battling on.