[freebeard]

This is the kind of thinking we need:

reddit.com/r/Futurology:The $3 Billion Plan to Turn Hoover Dam Into a Giant Battery

Hoover Dam helped transform the American West... Now it is the focus of a distinctly 21st-century challenge: turning the dam into a vast reservoir of excess electricity, fed by the solar farms and wind turbines that represent the power sources of the future.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, an original operator of the dam when it was erected in the 1930s, wants to equip it with a $3 billion pipeline and a pump station powered by solar and wind energy.

And here's why:

www.reddit.com/r/Futurology:Global warming accelerates at triple the past rate: IPCC. By 2040, Earth's temperature will be 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels.


But wait, from the comments:

Translation: In 2016, somebody said "Hey, what would happen IF this thing happened?" To which IPCC responded, "yeah sure...we can do a study on that scenario IF it were to happen. Expect it in 2018."

Nowhere does it say anything about the likelihood of that outcome, and if you look at IPCC's most recent assessment report, there's very little reason to think it's likely at all. Even scenarios that do involve 1.5 or more degrees typically involve timeframes closer to 2081-2100, SOURCE: IPCC 5th assessment report, table 2.1, page 60.

Here is the outline for the report being discussed by the article: http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session4...tline_sr15.pdf

They make it very clear that this is a report on a specific requested scenario, and not necessariliy a thing they think will happen

"Things might be getting a little bit better, but it's kind of hard to know for sure and it could really go either way still, but yeah...it kind of looks like there's been some improvement, we think." That doesn't make a very good news article. But when you have years of that going on, it adds up.

That IPCC report I linked earlier was from 2014. China's 3-year decline was years ago. The UK actually peaked decades ago. Even US emissions peak was over ten years ago. Yet have you heard about any of that?

Check my sources. Do you own google searches. Have you only been hearing rhetoric about Trump dooming us to fiery doom? Nonsense. US emissions peaked years before even Obama was in office.

[sources]

Every source agrees on this, and it's been this way for ages, but you don't hear about things like this because "things are becoming marginally better, very slowly" doesn't get you to click on links or watch news reports. But every time somebody decides to run a worst case "what if" scenario through their models, journalists flock to it, and that's all that you see.