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posted by chromas on Monday October 08 2018, @10:40AM   Printer-friendly

Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040

A landmark report from the United Nations' scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has "no documented historic precedent."

The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.

The report "is quite a shock, and quite concerning," said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. "We were not aware of this just a few years ago." The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming.

The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for the most severe effects of climate change. The new report, however, shows that many of those effects will come much sooner, at the 2.7-degree mark.

Scientists Call for $2.4 Trillion (per year) Shift From Coal to Renewables

The world must invest $2.4 trillion in clean energy every year through 2035 and cut the use of coal-fired power to almost nothing by 2050 to slow the quickest pace of climate change since the end of the last ice age, according to scientists convened by the United Nations.

[...] To limit warming to 1.5 degrees [Celsius] would require a roughly fivefold increase in average annual investment in low-carbon energy technologies by 2050, compared with 2015. The $2.4 trillion needed annually through 2035 is also an almost sevenfold increase from the $333.5 billion Bloomberg NEF estimated was invested in renewable energy last year.

Also at Reuters and CBS.

See also: IPCC climate change report calls for urgent action to phase out fossil fuels - live


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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 09 2018, @04:33AM (7 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday October 09 2018, @04:33AM (#746282) Journal

    > Some people try to break it down into "natural" climate change and "man made" climate change, but I don't see the distinction, as man is itself a piece of nature, so our changing of the environment is as natural as anything else.

    There is such a thing as taking responsibility for our actions. Calling everything we do "natural" is a cop out. No one wants to ride in a car in which the driver takes his hands off the wheel and declares he's going to let nature take its course. Might be natural to have us another total war, but it could be the death of us all, with nuclear weapons now in the picture. To repeat what I said earlier, we pulled a lot of carbon out of the ground. We are causing this climate change. It's not good. We must choose what to do about it, and one of the choices is to do nothing, make no changes to our lifestyles and habits. If we take that course, it's going to get ugly. Very likely will lead to war. The total cost to us all is less if we get busy trying to reverse the changes we've set in motion.

    > When I was looking to buy my first place, almost all the "new construction" buildings were eco-friendly and energy efficient. This quite frankly made them awful, and I will now list why.

    Home builders will take anything and bloat the hell out of it. That's what they did to New Urbanism, which among other things was supposed to produce highly affordable housing. All that so-called eco-friendy stuff you describe is builders using that as an excuse to add all kinds of expensive nonsense to homes. The blinds you describe are way too active. What they should have done is calculate the best angle for louvers to let sunlight through in the winter and block it in the summer, all based on how high the sun is in the sky, no need to move them.

    In Canada in particular, they discovered that making a house too air tight, to reduce heat loss, caused all kinds of other problems-- sick building syndrome, moisture buildup, stuff like that. Now they make sure homes are well ventilated, and use other means to reduce heat loss.

    > In my experience, people really like the sound of engines.

    We're just going to have to get over that. Combustion engines haven't been around that long.

    > I sure never heard of anyone going deaf from engine sounds.

    Talk to some old farmers. Many have more severe hearing loss in the left ear, because they are right handed, and naturally turn to the right to look behind them. Tractors typically have an upright exhaust pipe in the front. Also, tractors, especially older ones, tend to be very poor at muffling the engine. So when the farmer turned to the right to look behind, his left ear was facing the exhaust.

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  • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 09 2018, @08:24AM (1 child)

    by Unixnut (5779) on Tuesday October 09 2018, @08:24AM (#746331)

    There is such a thing as taking responsibility for our actions. Calling everything we do "natural" is a cop out. No one wants to ride in a car in which the driver takes his hands off the wheel and declares he's going to let nature take its course.

    That isn't really relevant. The situations are completely different. One is a deliberate abdication of control of a system which was designed to require human input to be safe. If cars driving by themselves was natural and worked for hundreds of millions of years, then having people take their hands off the wheel would be perfectly fine (and in some cases preferred).

    Indeed, we had such a thing before, we called them horses, and it was in fact perfectly fine to take your hands off the reins and let nature take its course when you felt like it.

    The climate, on the other hand, is not human designed, and doesn't require humans. It is a huge, complex, chaotic and dynamic system, one that only the most arrogant of humans would think we currently fully understand and can control it. A system that would function just fine if we all vanished tomorrow.

    Might be natural to have us another total war, but it could be the death of us all, with nuclear weapons now in the picture. To repeat what I said earlier, we pulled a lot of carbon out of the ground. We are causing this climate change. It's not good. We must choose what to do about it, and one of the choices is to do nothing, make no changes to our lifestyles and habits. If we take that course, it's going to get ugly. Very likely will lead to war. The total cost to us all is less if we get busy trying to reverse the changes we've set in motion.

    War is natural, or rather, it is the human social formalisation of the laws of natural competition between lifeforms. It will be with us for as long as life is on this earth, whether the climate changes to something less habitable to humans or not. Thinking that reversing climate change would bring peace on earth is just wishful thinking.

    Saying that, I don't think total war would break out over the climate. You are more likely to have more small scale conflicts over land. In fact I don't think you would even really have such conflicts. More like mass migration as people move to places where there is a better environment for living.

    Now having some nuclear holocaust occur is possible, just not over climate. There are certain humans on this planet that seek dominion over all. The kind of people who would rather be king of smouldering ruins than an equal amongst men in a rich and happy world. They are a million times more likely to trigger a self extinction event than the climate ever will.

    As for pumping out carbon from the ground, most of that carbon was once in the atmosphere anyway, before it got sequestered away. That means that in the past, there was far more CO2 in the atmosphere then nowadays, and life still flourished (indeed some more than others, plants in particular like more CO2). Humans are not adding to the system, the system is more or less closed, all we can do is affect how fast it happens.

    Home builders will take anything and bloat the hell out of it. That's what they did to New Urbanism, which among other things was supposed to produce highly affordable housing. All that so-called eco-friendy stuff you describe is builders using that as an excuse to add all kinds of expensive nonsense to homes. The blinds you describe are way too active. What they should have done is calculate the best angle for louvers to let sunlight through in the winter and block it in the summer, all based on how high the sun is in the sky, no need to move them.

    Yes, I agree. I felt those houses were architectural masturbation more than anything else, but it does go to show that if you want to make eco-friendly houses, you have to make them more desirable than the current housing stock. The developers probably thought they could ride the "green fashion wave" and sell them easily, but reality slapped them around the face.

    Fact of the matter is, for around 90% of the human population, something being "eco friendly" is not that important. Some percentage of that 90% will pretend to care and be "green", but this is more fashion/virtue signalling, done mostly by people who have a lot of time and are wealthy enough to be "green" without it affecting their quality of life.

    Actual proper environmentalists, who would sacrifice their current quality of life for the environment, are a small minority. Most people look at costs primarily.

    In Canada in particular, they discovered that making a house too air tight, to reduce heat loss, caused all kinds of other problems-- sick building syndrome, moisture buildup, stuff like that. Now they make sure homes are well ventilated, and use other means to reduce heat loss.

    Good, lets hope they continue improving. Like I said above, they have to make eco-friendly houses more desirable than the current housing stock by some measure other than environmental footprint. If they can make an eco friendly house that is cheaper to run and maintain (e.g. low heating/electricity bills compared to the old stock), people will buy them, not because they are environmentalists, but because it makes financial sense to do so.

    We're just going to have to get over that. Combustion engines haven't been around that long.

    They haven't, I think around 150 years, but doesn't change the fact people like them. I am pretty sure they will be around for a long time to come. Battery Electric Vehicles have been around even longer than ICE vehicles, and despite their shortcomings, they are still around to this day as well.

    Battery electric cars suffer from the same problem as eco-friendly housing does at the moment. They are worse than IC cars in every metric except environmental footprint. And even there, if you look at the combined environmental cycle, from the toxic batteries, to the larger energy input required to build them, to the shorter lifespan of the cars, the environmental credentials of BEVs is not much better (and could even be worse) than simple IC cars.

    This can be seen in the fact that BEVs are only bought when subsidised by the government. In Europe electric car purchases have been driven by four things:

    1) A lump sum grant from the government to subsidise the initial purchase cost
    2) Free electricity charging for electric cars. The government here actually gives electricity away to electric car owners. This is a big deal, basically your fuel costs are 0, or near 0.
    3) Exemption from registration/road taxes, and other costs burdened on other vehicles.
    4) Privileged "electric car parking only" in the most desirable spots

    The above makes electric cars attractive, not the cars themselves. It is a distortion of the market that lets them be sold, but those distortions cannot hold forever. Indeed in one of the Nordic countries, where BEVs as a share of total cars was the largest in the EU, the government started struggling to afford the subsidy, and felt the market penetration was enough to carry on without it. So they shut down the subsidy, and to their surprise electric car sales collapsed to almost nothing. People just were not interested in them when they cost as much as a normal car would.

    Even Elon Musk weighed in and berated the government for cancelling the subsidy, but it does not bode well for your company if your business plan relies on government basically bribing people to buy your goods.

    In the UK, there were the "free charging points" round my area, where you could park and charge for free for 2 hours, then at a heavily subsidised rate for longer. When the local council decided to scrap that perk, the electric car forums were livid. People were complaining how they bought electric cars for the "free fuel", and were thrown "under the bus" by the government, and how now the cars were more expensive to run than an ICE car. Many swore that they will go back to eco-diesels or other ICE cars, while conspiracies of "Big Oil" being behind the scrapping to make electric cars less desirable abounded. It all sounded a bit whiny and entitled, but it shows that for many people who bought electric vehicles, it wasn't due to environmentalism, but the financial benefits.

    Fact is, anything that becomes popular because of subsidies will only be popular as long as the subsidies persist. Governments must be careful with subsidies, because they are harder to remove the longer they exist. Latin America found this out the hard way. Many leftist governments subsidised petrol and other fuel for so long, that now, when the governments are struggling for money, every attempt to cancel the subsidy is met with riots. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place, until they run out of money, collapse, and shit hits the fan.

    Talk to some old farmers. Many have more severe hearing loss in the left ear, because they are right handed, and naturally turn to the right to look behind them. Tractors typically have an upright exhaust pipe in the front. Also, tractors, especially older ones, tend to be very poor at muffling the engine. So when the farmer turned to the right to look behind, his left ear was facing the exhaust.

    I got to admit, I didn't think of that. However you are talking about the state of the art 50 or so years go. Pretty much every tractor now is properly muffled, and even the old tractors have had mufflers retrofitted. However "old farmers" is a very very small percentage of the population. Your original comment was about how our children will be denied the "pleasure" of hearing loss, as if it is a widespread and ongoing concern.

    I don't know about you, but in my experience most children don't spend a lot of time around old unmuffled tractors. For the vast majority of people (children included), vehicle exhausts will never be loud enough to cause hearing loss. A far higher chance their hearing will be damaged by concerts or earphones.

    • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday October 10 2018, @01:23PM

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Wednesday October 10 2018, @01:23PM (#746937) Journal

      The point of government incentives for BEV is to give the technology a leg up so it can develop until it can stand on its own, not to support it forever. But when incentives are too abruptly ended, canceled more like, and a lot of people are left holding the bag, yeah, the conspiracy theorists could be right for once, that Big Oil is behind it. They certainly have motive and means, and plenty of opportunity with excuses showing up frequently.

      The way I think of BEV is that the electric motor is ten times better than a combustion engine. It's more reliable and longer lasting, takes less maintenance, is more efficient, delivers more power in less space, is smoother at power delivery, is less costly to build, and is simpler, lighter, and quieter. None of that has anything to do directly with the environment, but fact is, it is also better for the environment. The problem is that the humble gas tank is, or was, twenty times better than a battery at energy storage. I'm sure you've heard of studies that show the cost and pollution of battery manufacturing and disposal can be so high that a BEV might actually be worse for the environment. So the ICE wins. There's been a lot of work on batteries and they have closed the gap, but still not enough to make the electric motor and battery combo the better deal. Maybe the Tesla model 3 can do it. There are other energy storage technologies that have been considered, such as, the flywheel, the fuel cell, and compressed air, and there's of course various hybrid systems, and direct energy harvesting via solar panels. Compressed air just isn't enough energy storage to do much, but the other two still have potential, and a new development could make them best again. Perhaps a combo flywheel and battery energy storage could make the electric car best, but we shy away from such complexity.

      I have wondered why BEVs don't come with solar panels, and the answer is that they don't add much. I did some back of the envelope calculations and concluded they increase range by about 3% at best, if your do your driving during daylight hours of course. As for being an emergency means of recharging, they're so extremely slow it could actually be faster to walk than wait on them.

      Anyway, I am no blindly propagandizing environmentalist, ready to leap on anything just because someone claimed it is greener, not with all the hype and misinformation out there. When I think BEV is good enough, I'm in. I think BEV is close, and if they ever become widely available, I may buy a Tesla model 3. Or, who knows, maybe another BEV will look good by then. For instance, there's this new Kia Niro model, which is a hybrid but there is an all electric version. There's the Chevy Bolt, some small Fords (Focus and Fiesta), the Hyundai Ioniq and Kona, and BMW has this i3, Mitsubishi has their i-MiEV, and of course big bad Toyota has their Prius.

      Meantime, I rather enjoy bashing auto manufacturers with the fact that the 1960s Ford Anglia gets 40 mpg, and in all the years since, they've done very little to improve on that and today's best ICE cars are still around 40 mpg, with a few models in the 50s.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 09 2018, @11:21AM (4 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 09 2018, @11:21AM (#746377) Journal

    To repeat what I said earlier, we pulled a lot of carbon out of the ground. We are causing this climate change. It's not good.

    On that last point, why do we pull carbon out of the ground if it's not good? It's dishonest to speak of an action as good or bad without considering why the action happens. We're definitely not pulling carbon out of the ground because we want to warm the planet.

    • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 09 2018, @12:57PM (3 children)

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday October 09 2018, @12:57PM (#746413) Journal

      Cost benefit analysis shows that going forward, rising sea levels will cost us a lot more than the value of that energy we obtained. We have a lot of coastal infrastructure that will be rendered useless if it goes underwater. Over 1 billion people may have to pick up and move to higher ground, or drown. If the people already on higher ground won't or can't make room, then there will be war. Changes in rainfall patterns will cause crop failures and starvation. If there's anything that sets off war, it's desperation for food. That's what really set off the Arab Spring. It wasn't a sudden longing for democracy, as our media implies.

      I couldn't say where that line was, perhaps some time in the 1990s is when the cost of the carbon became higher than the value we could obtain from it. Or maybe the line is much more recent, about 2015 when the costs of various alternatives became competitive. In the past decade, solar cells have improved tremendously, especially in cost.

      Most certainly Big Oil knew trouble was coming, and made one of the all time evilest and stupidest decisions ever, to deny the problem existed and even spread propaganda to that end. We know there are business leaders who would choose such a course of action, who are greedy and short-sighted enough to send us all over a cliff a short while later in exchange for a little more profit now. If we do end up in a nuclear war over this, and anyone survives, that act will stain Capitalism forever.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 09 2018, @01:26PM (2 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 09 2018, @01:26PM (#746425) Journal

        Cost benefit analysis shows that going forward, rising sea levels will cost us a lot more than the value of that energy we obtained.

        No, it doesn't.

        We have a lot of coastal infrastructure that will be rendered useless if it goes underwater.

        In decades or centuries by which time most of the present day value will be justified. Meanwhile the value of real estate and infrastructure further uphill will become more valuable. The real loss here is from that less valuable uphill land being repurposed as urban real estate plus the slight decline in present day value from land that would eventually be submerged or protected at great cost. Time value matters here. A building that would be destroyed by global warming a century or two from now has almost as much value as a building that wouldn't.

        I couldn't say where that line was, perhaps some time in the 1990s is when the cost of the carbon became higher than the value we could obtain from it. Or maybe the line is much more recent, about 2015 when the costs of various alternatives became competitive. In the past decade, solar cells have improved tremendously, especially in cost.

        Or maybe you're just making shit up. I favor that interpretation.

        Most certainly Big Oil knew trouble was coming, and made one of the all time evilest and stupidest decisions ever, to deny the problem existed and even spread propaganda to that end.

        Where's the evidence?

        We know there are business leaders who would choose such a course of action, who are greedy and short-sighted enough to send us all over a cliff a short while later in exchange for a little more profit now

        And yet, they're not bothering. You should think about that. They can afford billions a year of propaganda, if they were so inclined. But it's just not there.

        • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 09 2018, @11:03PM (1 child)

          by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday October 09 2018, @11:03PM (#746688) Journal

          I could cite all sorts of evidence, but there's no point, doubt you'd accept it no matter how good it is. I note that you didn't make any citations to back up any of your assertions either.

          Instead, why don't you consider this? Early in my career I once worked for a major HVAC company, and attended an after hours meeting in which we had the privilege of hearing our glorious leader give a speech. And what he said was real disappointing and shocking. I was expecting a bit of cheerleading and propaganda, and there was some of that. But the important parts were something very different:

          1. He whined that if he had sold the company and invested the proceeds in the stock market, he'd be a lot richer. We just weren't working hard enough to equal the stock market. We were falling down on him.

          2. Then he got all paternalistic, and said that he stuck with us, and didn't sell the company so that we would all have jobs. Gee, what a swell guy, huh?

          3. Next, he said he didn't believe in all this Global Warming talk.

          4. But he went on to say that if Global Warming was true, then good! Because then the company would get to sell more air conditioners.

          Don't think that was atypical. Those are the kinds of short sighted morons we have running our large companies. No employee dared to stand up and talk back to any of that. For the most part though, they didn't feel particularly insulted, they were indifferent, wary, and bored. It was like most everyone regarded the leader as sort of a clownish mascot with no real power, a mouthpiece and not a very good one at that, though of course he did have all the powers of ownership, and certainly could have fired anyone he wished on the spot, for any or no reason at all. But it was of course impossible for him to exercise such powers in a constructive way without lots more knowledge than it would be reasonable to expect anyone to have. You might wonder why such a mediocre person was running a major company, and the answer is very pedestrian, ordinary, and pathetic. His grandpa or great grandpa (I forget which) bought the company almost a century before, and he was the grandson who ended up, with the consent of his relatives, inheriting control. That's all. I have often wondered how the heck the company managed to prosper with management like that, and there too the answer is sad: the competition is also rather pathetic. What would have happened if the Japanese had entered the HVAC market, like they did the automotive market? Probably would have forced the company to cut a lot of the crap and get a lot better, or die.

          With a leader like that, what sorts of company moves do you suppose are likely? Why not cause even more Global Warming, at the least egg it on, because the leader thinks it'll be good for the company's business? I can't speak from personal experience with Big Oil's upper management, but there's no reason to suppose those Captains of Industry behave much differently. The culture of upper management in American companies, particularly in large established businesses, is fairly uniform.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 10 2018, @07:09AM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 10 2018, @07:09AM (#746847) Journal

            I could cite all sorts of evidence, but there's no point, doubt you'd accept it no matter how good it is.

            Currently, it's nonexistent. I think I won't accept that.

            Instead, why don't you consider this? Early in my career I once worked for a major HVAC company, and attended an after hours meeting in which we had the privilege of hearing our glorious leader give a speech. And what he said was real disappointing and shocking. I was expecting a bit of cheerleading and propaganda, and there was some of that. But the important parts were something very different:

            1. He whined that if he had sold the company and invested the proceeds in the stock market, he'd be a lot richer. We just weren't working hard enough to equal the stock market. We were falling down on him.

            2. Then he got all paternalistic, and said that he stuck with us, and didn't sell the company so that we would all have jobs. Gee, what a swell guy, huh?

            3. Next, he said he didn't believe in all this Global Warming talk.

            4. But he went on to say that if Global Warming was true, then good! Because then the company would get to sell more air conditioners.

            Global warming doesn't have to be true in order for it to sell more AC.

            Don't think that was atypical. Those are the kinds of short sighted morons we have running our large companies. No employee dared to stand up and talk back to any of that. For the most part though, they didn't feel particularly insulted, they were indifferent, wary, and bored. It was like most everyone regarded the leader as sort of a clownish mascot with no real power, a mouthpiece and not a very good one at that, though of course he did have all the powers of ownership, and certainly could have fired anyone he wished on the spot, for any or no reason at all. But it was of course impossible for him to exercise such powers in a constructive way without lots more knowledge than it would be reasonable to expect anyone to have. You might wonder why such a mediocre person was running a major company, and the answer is very pedestrian, ordinary, and pathetic. His grandpa or great grandpa (I forget which) bought the company almost a century before, and he was the grandson who ended up, with the consent of his relatives, inheriting control. That's all. I have often wondered how the heck the company managed to prosper with management like that, and there too the answer is sad: the competition is also rather pathetic. What would have happened if the Japanese had entered the HVAC market, like they did the automotive market? Probably would have forced the company to cut a lot of the crap and get a lot better, or die.

            While it's off topic I do have ideas on how to improve that. It would involve a lot of "sucks to be you".

            With a leader like that, what sorts of company moves do you suppose are likely? Why not cause even more Global Warming, at the least egg it on, because the leader thinks it'll be good for the company's business? I can't speak from personal experience with Big Oil's upper management, but there's no reason to suppose those Captains of Industry behave much differently. The culture of upper management in American companies, particularly in large established businesses, is fairly uniform.

            Again, where is this denialist propaganda? Why aren't we inundated with it? It's tiresome to have people repeatedly speak of imaginary moves by Big Oil. I think there's a simple answer. They're among the many businesses that profit from the current state of affairs, probably due to a combination of public funding and barrier to entry.