A bimonthly thread on societal responses to climate change. Note that there is another open thread for climate science topics. Please stick to specifics as opposed to arguments about ethics, politics or morality in general.
Climate science from climate scientists...
Some Scientific and Quantitative Reasoning Applied to Reducing CO2,
(Copied from the end of the previous FR, with a bit more at the end.)
Gavin tells us in a recent inline response that, ceteris paribus, a reduction of 80% of emissions would be necessary to stabilize atmospheric CO2; the energy in the system would continue to increase, but more slowly.
Sounds like a good thing eh.
So, first approximation, with per capita emission remaining the same, that condition could be achieved with a population of about 1.5 billion.
But let’s say we explore zebra’s function T=f(P), where T represents human population’s (P) effects on climate, primarily CO2 of course. What kinds of numbers would we be dealing with?
Since nobody disagrees with what I have said about my initial value of .3 billion– that CO2 would be negligible due to pragmatically induced changes in practices– we should probably feel confident that 1.5 would result in a very substantial reduction in CO2 emissions per capita. In addition, of course, there would be a very substantial increase in sequestration of CO2 because of substantial changes in agriculture and infrastructure– more grasslands, forests, and so on. That combination could well be sufficient to return the planet to pre-industrial levels of CO2 fairly rapidly.
But, if that is the case, then we might well be able to achieve stable CO2 at a higher level of population– let’s say 3 billion– but take longer to actually reduce the CO2 level. Still, such a condition would almost certainly vastly reduce harm to humans (H) from whatever T, because populations could still adjust to local changes with much less conflict over water, arable land, and so on. [H=f(T,P)]
So, the obvious question would be… how does the function function as we move closer to current P? It is worth remembering that it does not have a term for “Ecological consciousness” at this point; the results follow from rational economic choice alone.
That would mean that we end up with H determined by T,P, and E, which would include choices exclusively intended to reduce CO2 emissions. Pick a number, and calculate the difference between BAU population and that, at some near future point. And remember, poor people don’t produce much CO2.
What Jared Diamond Said,
Great reference from Mal Adapted in previous FR; worth reading the whole thing.
http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race
I’ve said in the past that people tend to forget Diamond’s most important contribution with GG&S, which is that environment shapes culture (culture in the anthropological sense). H-G limited population, conditions may have changed (e.g. drought) so population to resources ratio went up, agriculture was adopted, higher population was an advantage, yadda yadda.
What we have now is the result, because to paraphrase Al Bundy, “you don’t farm marginal, energy and chemical-sucking land, unless you have lots of hungry boys to feed”. And you need hungry boys to fight over the land; round and round it goes.
Diamond’s GG&S illustrated that we’re all humans. Differences in cultures are not about genetics, and they aren’t about some “morality” handed down from either God or Allah or some of the all-knowing Olympians who comment here.
Doh! My quip @ 670 (27 Jan 2019 at 4:26 PM) omitted its Author: Carl Jung.
{Getting Old! [ ? :) / :( ? ] }
I should add, that The KNOWLEDGE that Earth is so Fantastically Sensitive to the CO2 “Perturbation,” is both Secure & In-Hand. Ergo, the Idea that we will collectively Fail, over the very Long Run, to arrive @ some Global Consensus, and take collective action to adjust, what Greenland Ice Student Dr. Richard Alley has described in AGU Talks as an exquisite “Planetary Thermostat,” may underestimate the Humans. For, in coming centuries, I believe we almost certainly WILL “Tune Down” that airborne Carbon.
Re: T=f(P), H=f(T,P)
1) Quantitative reasoning is nice. Lets get some units:
What are the units of T ? T is described as an “effect on climate”. Are the units degrees K ? or sumpn else ?
H=f(T,P)
What are the units of H ? lives ? dollars ?
2) What is the evidence that these are functions at all ? what is the evidence that we cannot have multiple values of T for a given P, or multiple possible values of H for given T,P ?
sidd
sidd
Differences in cultures are not about genetics, and they aren’t about some “morality” handed down from either God or Allah or some of the all-knowing Olympians who comment here.
I fail to see what 1. lying and 2. being an asshat for no reason whatsoever gets any of us. There’s been a real effort in recent weeks to make things more collegiate. You are one of two notable exceptions. Why don’t you stop with this kind of a horse manure?
25 – Al Bundy in the Ocean Heat Content Thread
“The borehole could easily be activated into an unmoderated scrum. Let folks post directly and send denialist stuff there, with a standard placeholder/link in the original thread.
That lets those who want to rattle each other’s cages without mucking up the site. Heck, I’d probably let off some steam there. Thoughts?”
The Bore Hole would take over the site. People love to talk politics, bash their political enemies, call names and demonstrate their evil wit. It happens on all web sites that don’t moderate the comments.
Did somebody mention this on RC recently? I just stumbled across it: Mapped: How every part of the world has warmed – and could continue to warm on The Carbon Brief. It’s something I’ve long wished for: click-through graphical access to observations to date, as well as projections through 2100 CE, for temperatures in specific locations.
While the temperature mapping is brilliant IMHO, what I’d still love to have is a similar tool for certain moisture indices, e.g. precipitation and potential evapotranspiration. I realize those are rather trickier to model, to be sure, and trust that patience will be rewarded 8^}.
Regarding Zebras [H=f(T,P)] and E added in.
I’m not maths expert, but this equation seems very compelling, but also rather obvious. I’m not sure where hes going with it all, but I firmly agree smaller population is desirable and has a range of environmental benefits beyond simply less pressure on the resource base.
I agree environment does indeed shape culture to some extent, however its only one factor probably a smaller one. Morals are primarily a human invention to enable groups to work cohesively together. I would say smaller populations and small tribal groups might have a different ethical structure from large ones simply because everyone knows everyone in tribal groups.
Regarding Jared Diamond and why humans first adopted a farming culture.
We don’t really know with certainty why hunter gatherers changed to a farming culture. I read about this years ago. Research suggests is happened in several places independently, and had varied causes. In fact hunter gatherers had quite a good life in many respects, and farming as a sole means of getting food was very hard work back then, so its was not an obvious thing to choose or at least not obvious why things changed from a semi farming culture to a permanent one.
In some places it was hunter gatherer groups getting large enough to put pressure on resource, according to research, but this doesn’t appear to explain all cases. In most cases hunter gatherers had ample resources.
In some cases climate change issues promoted changes towards farming as the natural wilderness changed and certain planted crops became more viable.
Its also been suggested adoption of farming was caused by a desire for a more varied diet, and that it was almost an accident that abundant seeds were planted and gradually lead to permanent settlements. Permanent settlements made child rearing easier.
This stuff is all easily googled. Adoption of farming has also been linked status seeking and people desiring to own property.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/05/13/183710778/why-humans-took-up-farming-they-like-to-own-stuff
We like simple explanations, and single causes, but sometimes there just aren’t any.
However it looks like the invention of farming set the scene for some of our environmental problems as MA suggests.
4 – sidd
Sidd nailed it. What are the units? Show us a graph of the function. Can you use differentiation to find maxima and minima?
On the simple life and living like those of the past:
People are not going to choose the simple life unless forced to do so by some kind of violence – economic or physical. Lot of CO2 being belched to create the electricity to type all this blather about it.
I am struck by how theoretical the discussion is. Also the mentioned estimate of emissions reductions needed really caught my eye. “ceteris paribus, a reduction of 80% of emissions would be necessary to stabilize atmospheric CO2”. Meanwhile in today’s NY Times there is an article about the development of the Permian basin by advanced fracking techniques, with many billions in new investments in drilling, and the article mentions that there was an increase in US oil production this year by 2 million barrels a day, increased to 11.9 million barrels a day, a 16.7% annual increase. US fossil fuel production over the next two years, at least until after 2020, looks likely to increase substantially. This makes an 80% reduction from today’s fossil fuel consumption even more of a distant target rather than a near term one. Finally the assumed condition of ceteris paribus is not fulfilled since that would mean no positive feedback loops. We know that is not the case, and they are significant. Reality is we are exceeding the Business As Usual trajectory.
#4 sidd,
Sidd, it’s just like the climate change discussion we’ve been having here for who knows how long.
IPCC uses a value T, in degrees, to represent the varied effects of increased energy in the climate system, like drought, SLR, and so on. As in, “we should try to avoid an increase of 2 degrees C”.
We’ve all also discussed multiple times the negative impacts (H) those changes could have on humans– starvation, warfare, displacement, and so on.
As for the quantitative relationships themselves, again, it’s like modeling climate. There isn’t some high-school-algebra single equation that describes what CO2 does to the system; we start with underlying principles and sound qualitative conclusions, and work towards constraining the values.
If you think the relationships I’ve suggested are incorrect, I’m interested to hear the mechanisms that would contradict them. It’s certainly possible that complex interactions could result in anomalous local (space, time) variations, but I haven’t come up with anything general.
For example, do you think that there would be more harm to humans from (the same amount of) CO2 if there are, say, 6 billion instead of 12 billion?
Or, do you think the USA could use more gasoline for transportation if there were two large coastal population centers, rather than the current network of smaller cities and towns?
All the many different effects seem to point in the same direction, to me.
#10 Don Condliff,
Don, perhaps you didn’t read past the first sentence of my comment #1?
The fact that, as you say, there are strong forces acting against the “E” factor (decisions motivated exclusively by the desire to reduce CO2), is exactly why I propose leveraging the effects of population to reduce Harm.
Basic to designing critical systems is the avoidance of wishful thinking.
But anyway, what’s your plan?
On farming vs. hunting-and-gathering–
It’s not a strict binary choice by any means. Many indigenous cultures in North America combined significant cultivation of crops with hunting and gathering. So you get a sort of continuum, quantifiable in principle by metrics like percentage of calories derived from one set of activities vs. the other.
The implication there would be that rather than a clear and decisive moment of choice, there may be a gradual process–a transition. In theory at least, it could be gradual enough that any single generation might not see much change at all over their lifespans.
1) I ask again, what are the units of harm, is H expressed in dollars, or lives, or years of life expectancy or … ? IN reports like the Stern or Nordhaus, harm is expressed in dollars. Is that to be the case here ?
2) Climate models use concepts of RCPS or SSPs, which assume certain population and economic trajectories. These then define a radiative forcing which then drives the models to give temperature trajectories and other climate parameters.
3) I can easily, for example imagine a future where population is entire stable, but carbon intensity per person doubles (or halves) with corresponding impacts on climate. In such a case, P is constant but T and H are quite different. So you need more than just P in the equations, something must be said about other factors.
sidd
Kevin McKinney @13, yes many hunter gatherer groups cultivated some food and I think the reasons and benefits are fairly obvious. However moving to a total or near total farming culture involved harder work than the hunter gatherer lifestyle and the risk of droughts and shortages, so there had to be a good motivating reason. Perhaps because the process was slow as you pointed out they simply forgot the past, and as Zebra pointed out the environment may have changed making it harder to go back to hunter gathering, but neither reason seems to fully explain the issue.
The literature talks about farming and stable settlements making it possible to provide a better environment for raising children and I would say this sounds crucial because humans are so driven to provide the best for their children. Religious worship also benefits from developing fixed settlements, and there may have been an innate drive to establish ownership over property, as in the link I posted, although this is speculative. These sorts of things give psychological satisfaction, and a sense of security, that might justify the hard work and other downsides of a farming culture.
Its analogous to our dependence on fossil fuels. We have got used to it and its embedded in many aspects of our lives so it’s challenging to unpack the habit. But change we must.
ClimateBall was the name of the game at Superbowl LIII,
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-only-brew-for-brave-and-true-is-not.html
KillingInaction: The Bore Hole would take over the site.
AB: It matters not whether the Bore Hole enlarges to a thousand times that of the rest of the site. It’s behind closed doors and frankly, the other comment sections would improve drastically if the number of posts declined significantly.
———
Nigel,
Hunter/gatherers can’t defend the good spots. Farmers simply occupy the best land as soon as the hunter/gatherers move on to the next season’s spot. It matters not which is better or more fun, only which wins during conflict.
Al Bundy @17, that is a sensible suggestion that farmers started to crowd out hunter gatherers. (a feedback loop?)It does not explain why hunter gatherers became farmers in the first place, and persisted with what is a hard lifestyle! Refer my previous comment.
#14 sidd,
You seem to be using the same kind of arguments we hear from Denialists all the time about climate change– making up some arbitrary criteria that have no practical function.
I answered your question 1 already. There are no “units” of climate change; the models tell us about a variety of effects. Likewise, we would all probably agree on a list of the negative consequences to humans caused by those effects, and use that to measure Harm.
I have never considered claims about predicting changes in GDP to be very useful; considering individual concrete phenomena gives a clearer picture.
As for 3, well, obviously we can imagine different levels of CO2 production with a given population. This sounds like when the Denialists say “but it could be caused by…”, and invoke some forcings real or imagined.
You say “you need more than P”. Yes, we have E. The whole point of the exercise is to understand the relationships among what I see as first-order inputs; perhaps you haven’t read any of the long discussions previously about how quickly emissions can be reduced solely directly through concern for future consequences.
I observe, by the way, that you haven’t answered my questions. Doing so would be a sign that you wish to have a serious discussion.
#17 Al Bundy,
Correct Al, the issue isn’t farming v HG, it’s the positive feedback loop created by the need to have a surplus of males to fight and die for land, in order to have more land to feed the surplus of males, on and on, causing the population to grow without constraint. (Other than disease, maybe.)
This article is extremely interesting, but I suspect it will cause some here to get a little “hysterical”, as they say:
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-45201725
Mmmm… on population. Just some fun with numbers.
If you killed the highest yearly guestimate for deaths during WWII from direct and indirect causes, @ 17,0000,000, it would take 529 years to kill off 9 billion. Of course, given far more than 17M are being born every year, well, population control might not be our best bet.
It will come down when we have a more equitable world, as has been noted repeatedly. That is maybe the best argument for both egalitarian decision-making and Commonsing.
The z-man:
You also need to farm marginal land because the local Big Man tells you to. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (reviewed in the New Yorker), author James C. Scott argues that intensive cultivation of cereals (i.e. annual grains and pulses) arose because they’re easy to collect and store as taxes, compared with bulkier or more perishable crops such as roots. The Big Man collects the taxes to feed the hungry boys that support him in power over you. If he shows up with a crew of dudes carrying spears and says “plant more lentils”, that’s what you do, even if you have to use marginal land. The same rough dudes, of course, guard the Big Man’s granaries from your efforts to obtain tax refunds.
Like Diamond’s GGS, it’s an intriguing theory, but remains unproven, to be sure.
1) “There are no “units” of climate change”
o dear. so much for “quantitative,” no units for T
2)”never considered claims about predicting changes in GDP to be very useful”
ok, so H is not in dollars. Does H have any units ?
3)”Yes, we have E”
I suspect we have no units for E …
I think i am done with this quantitative discussion until we have some units.
sidd
Zebra, try not to speak like a child.
End of comment.
One problem with theories of the past is there is no way to be sure. The second is there is more than one way societies developed. All your theories are likely both right and wrong; right here, wrong there.
It’s just big men and warfare, eh? Sorry, wrong. It was all peace, love and happiness? Sorry, wrong.
Caral-Supe tells us one thing, the empires of Eurasia another, the Amazon another, the Inca and Aztecs and Maya still another. And what of Australia? Seems conflicts were small in scale with modes of resolution.
Caral was a large society with zero evidence of warfare and trade with far-flung societies. The Iroquois Confederacy showed all was not war and bloodshed much later. Still extant groups with big men aren’t hierarchical and the big man could no more order who to plant what than turn the sky fluorescent yellow.
None of this much matters except to know one thing: Which patterns were sustainable? And, which patterns can be adapted to the current situation? And that is a conversation none of you have any tolerance for, rather maladaptively.
K 21: If you killed the highest yearly guestimate for deaths during WWII from direct and indirect causes, @ 17,0000,000, it would take 529 years to kill off 9 billion. Of course, given far more than 17M are being born every year, well, population control might not be our best bet.
BPL: Population control is best achieved with birth control, not by killing people.
I just wanted to put a plug in for Mike’s recent “Guardian” article for anyone who hasn’t seen it . I think the article gets to the crux of all our environmental problems, not just climate change.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/02/using-the-big-freeze-to-deny-climate-change-stupidity-or-cynicism
The following appears in this week’s Nature:
Right, let’s hope for more domestic economic impacts of climate change, to help persuade conservative voters of the need to curb emissions. Yet another of the proliferating ironies of US climate politics!
Why no Diamondesque uproar over why the ideology driven demographic disasters of the 20th century failed to inflect CO2 levels as much as the Great Dying after Renaissance Europe’s arrival in the the Americas?
Re #18 nigelj said It does not explain why hunter gatherers became farmers in the first place, and persisted with what is a hard lifestyle!
They really didn’t for tens of thousands of years. What they were, really, were food foresters who managed the landscape to enhance what they wanted and minimize what they didn’t beginning in the 50k to 35k ybp time frame.
We can theorize about why people slowly (@ 8kBCE to @ 2BCE) *mostly* (remember, some never really did and still haven’t. Note: I suspect the Amazonian societies of today regressed somewhat after first contact and 90% or more of their people died off making it difficult to maintain the complex structures we are finding hidden by the jungle these days) changed over to more sedentary systems, but I don’t think it had anything to do with some asshat telling everyone to start growing certain kinds of things. These were egalitarian groups that slowly became non-egalitarian. When did this magical Big Man as God thing happen, eh, folks? If it were some kind of paradigm shift based on such boneheaded selfishness it seems it should have happened more pervasively over a shorter period of time.
Like most change, I suspect it was highly variable as to why and likely never began from one guy saying, “Grow grasses more. Booyah!” Far more likely was a group decision that things were getting a bit complex and this person here seems smarter than the rest of us, more reliable, more conscientious, wiser. Let’s trust him to manage things well, with our input.
Why do I say this? Because this is what we see today. The Big Man is often (usually?) not a chief, but merely a trusted manager answerable to the community. Why would it have been any different then?
Certainly there seems to be a tipping point into more hierarchical structures, but I suspect that has far more to do with complexity than someone exerting personal power, at least until people stupidly decided one guy at the top would make things easier to manage things thus making a chiefdom or kingdom and near certainty because, well, power-seekers are largely selfish asses. If it were not thus, Caral would not exist. How did they create such a complex society without violence?
*****************************
Re #26 Bart said nothing.
This is the problem with being a pedant: One never knows if they missed the point intentionally or unintentionally.
#29, Russell–
Uh, maybe because the differences between the two scenarios are quite obvious?
Starting with the fact that the “demographic disasters of the 20th century” didn’t do much to dent global population–specifically, none of them actually got ahead of population growth?
https://worldpopulationhistory.org/map/1/mercator/1/0/25/
Russell,
Got any data to support your claim? I’m betting that if you did the work your conclusion would be, “Never mind”.
I think BPL was clear, given the context. We’ve been pondering the consequences of a very low birth rate. Think about it. With a lifespan of 75 and a late-bearing birth rate percapita emissions would plummet because there’d be less “I just bought you those shoes” “who ate all the” “We need to get out of this apartment and into a large house with a big carbon-spewing lawn” “get your gear. Man, I do nothing but spew carbon shuttling you everywhere”.
You’ve done grandly lately, but you’re the one who said nothing this time. BPL was spot on. We could halve the population every seventy-five years quite easily (after the cohort distribution figures itself out). And perhaps 5 billion in 2100 as opposed to 9 billion, combined with a lower percapita energy consumption per capita is nothing to dismiss, even if reality is only half as rosy.
Killian says “Like most change, I suspect it was highly variable as to why and likely never began from one guy saying, “Grow grasses more. Booyah!” Far more likely was a group decision that things were getting a bit complex and this person here seems smarter than the rest of us, more reliable, more conscientious, wiser. Let’s trust him to manage things well, with our input.
Yes change is probably variable with different factors. Just to be clear I didn’t say that bit about “grow more grasses boyo!” but anyway I agree it was more likely a group decision for one person to manage things but in cooperation with others, and bossy and more self serving rulers probably came later in the evolution of some societies.
This bossiness might have related to need for defence of large communities leading to the most ruthless people being managers, and this goes hand in hand with greed and personal ambition for power and ignoring of input from other people in the community. Apparently a disproportionate number of chief executives are psychopaths according to an Australian research study.
Farming society also became increasingly complex and organising this probably lead to more hierarchies and levels of command until be get the European Union level of complexity.
Humans are descended from monkeys (more or less) and chimps have very hierarchical and violent societies (just watching David Attenboroughs series on this) and so there’s probably some of this in human’s gene pool. For some reason hunter gatherer society managed to supress it for a long time, on the whole, but it came back more strongly with farming culture in some places.
Re #29 Russell said Why no Diamondesque uproar
I don’t recall Diamond being in an uproar.
…over why the ideology driven demographic disasters of the 20th century failed to inflect CO2 levels as much as the Great Dying after Renaissance Europe’s arrival in the the Americas?
Ummm… what part of the planet was left virtually uninhabited and unmolested for 100 to 200 years after having been partially cleared by humans, thus creating an expected pathway for forest expansion over two continents?
#29 Russel,
There was more burning, not less, and less growing, not more, so it wouldn’t make sense to compare.
Look at the pictures.
#23 Victor,
No problem… I didn’t really expect you to attempt a serious discussion.
#28 Mal Adapted,
This is a good example of why assigning “units” to overall CC effect is ineffective (heh), all around.
What matters to people are things that they can relate to. “Economic losses” is a meaningless abstraction in the first place, and it certainly isn’t going to influence Trump voters, for heaven’s sake.
What we can measure usefully are effects like e.g. flooding; we are getting to the point of making attributions for events, so we can certainly assign a number for the the excess infrastructure damage due to climate change.
That number, of course, would be expressed as a percentage increase.
(Apparently, though, for some people with a limited education in math and science like sidd, the idea of a dimensionless quantitative change is difficult to grasp.)
Anyway, yes, it will probably take more fires, floods, and so on if those R-voting people are ever going to accept reality.
K: Re #26 Bart said nothing.
This is the problem with being a pedant: One never knows if they missed the point intentionally or unintentionally.
BPL: This is the problem with Killian. He calls for “civility,” then completely ignores it his own hypocritical self.
Killian @ 30 “suspecting” what shaped human cultural/societal evolution isn’t paying attention to Forced Responses to climate
I spoke of easily driving reproduction to 1.0 while delaying birth. Well, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Eliminate all foreign aid from the first world to other governments. Instead, give $100/month to each childless woman on the planet under the age of 25, $150/month to each childless woman on the planet 25 or over, $75/month to each woman over 25 with a single child, and $100/month to any dude who hasn’t been incarcerated.
It’s strange how full-humans think that solving stuff is hard. My guess is that their inability to fathom how Others live prevents any chance of rational ideas being formed. But, hopefully, they can recognize solutions.
https://climatecrocks.com/2019/02/07/return-of-the-methane-bomb-squad/
Because it’s not fair to point out the denial wackos without equal opportunity given to pointing out the ‘pocalypse wackos.
Russell:
Uhmm, if we knew what a “Diamondesque uproar” was, we might raise one. Do your “ideology driven demographic disasters” include all 20th century wars? By one estimate, those account for at least 108 million people. Another author estimates that 187 million people were “killed or allowed to die by human decision” between the beginning of the First World War in 1914 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Those numbers are comparable to death tolls from the Black Plague in Europe and the decimation of the Americas after 1492. The 20th century figures represent a smaller fraction of the contemporary global population, however, and their climate impacts are obscured by the rapid expansion of per-capita greenhouse gas emissions after 1945, hence they provoke less uproar. Do demographic disasters really compete for uproar, though?
PS I am especially referring of course to #1 zebra says:
2 Feb 2019 at 7:37 AM
Some Scientific and Quantitative Reasoning Applied to Reducing CO2,..
Listen zebra old fellow, it’s not scientific, it’s not quantitative, and it’s not reasoning either. Time to let it go?
#38, zebra–
“…for some people with a limited education in math and science like sidd…”
An unworthy and inaccurate slur.
Re #33 Al Bundy said I think BPL was clear, given the context.
You appear to ne very confused. His post said nothing about any of that. The question now is, were you so eager to scote a point against me you missed the point, or did you just m8ss the point?
I know Bart “missed” it intentionally. Are yiu also?
Anyone care to enlighten these two?
Hint: My post had nothing to do with killing as population control.
Haven’t had time to read this, won’t for a while, but a subject line that should be of interest and figured I’d drop it in here.
Open access article “Analysing the feasibility of powering the Americas with renewable energy and inter-regional grid interconnections by 2030”
Aghahosseini et al – Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews May 2019
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2019.01.046
Highlights
• A 100% renewable energy based system is analysed for the Americas for the year 2030.
• Interconnected Americas show slightly more benefit than North and South America.
• Long distance transmission lines cannot compete with energy storage technologies.
• Renewable energy variability can be resolved at a cost-effective manner.
• 100% renewable energy systems are lower in cost than a business-as-usual scenario.
Zebra says “the idea of a dimensionless quantitative change is difficult to grasp.”
This sounds like a complete contradiction in terms. Doesn’t pass the sniff test :)
now we are getting somewhere, but not quite all the way
excess harm dH is measured a percentage; excess damage over some historical norm H_0 in some measure of exchange, account or store of value.
dH/H_0 = f(T,P,E)
T is temperature I take it, population is an integer. What is E ?
sidd
31, 32:
Killian says:
5 Feb 2019 at 10:29 AM
Mmmm… on population. Just some fun with numbers.
KMCK:
Uh, maybe because the differences between the two scenarios are quite obvious?
Starting with the fact that the “demographic disasters of the 20th century” didn’t do much to dent global population–specifically, none of them actually got ahead of population growth?
And neither did population shrink durin the age of exploration: World population – see your own demographic history link- grew in the 16th century just as it did in the 20th.
Hence my question- where’s the signature?
Do you think the mid- 20th Century warming hiatus corresponds to the decimation of agricutural populastios in the USSR and PRC ?
It’s not a subject Diamond cares to discuss-