The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[RedDevil]

If renewable technology is expected to get cheaper in the near future nobody will invest in it now. As that investment will depreciate in value faster than its earnings, at least in the first few years.
'Old' technologies don't evolve that fast, so they don't depreciate in value as fast either.

That is - as long as renewables don't get much cheaper than non-renewables, because then the gains get too big to worry about depreciation.
We're not there, not yet, maybe never.
If we want to go green we may need to pay for it all the way.

[oil pan 4]

I'm like the United states most of the believers fall about where Europe or canada is.
How many believers drive electric vehicle, provide almost all their home heating with wood stoves and plant trees?

[Xist]

Yet supposedly China is helping: https://unfccc.int/news/china-meets-...ad-of-schedule

[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by Xist

Yet supposedly China is helping: https://unfccc.int/news/china-meets-...ad-of-schedule

China is doing their part to make snowy winters a thing of the past. At least some is meeting their Paris climate accord goals.
So what are all the belivers going to say as everyone and their cousin pumps out ludicrous amounts of CO2 and the planet cools off faster than the "scientists" can produce fake warming data?

[jakobnev]

1. Reduce global wealth
2. Reduce global population

Neither sounds particularly appealing,

Why would reducing the population not be appealing?

[redneck]

.

Here’s something to ponder...


Overpopulation: The Fallacy Behind The Fallacy Of Global Warming

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/...lobal-warming/

The Numbers

The world is not overpopulated. That fallacy is perpetuated in all environmental research, policy and planning including global warming and latterly climate change. So what are the facts about world population?

The US Census Bureau provides a running estimate of world population. It was 6,994,551,619 on February 15, 2012. On October 30, 2011 the UN claimed it passed 7 billion; the difference is 5,448,381. This is more than the population of 129 countries of the 242 listed by Wikipedia. It confirms most statistics are crude estimates, especially those of the UN who rely on individual member countries, yet no accurate census exists for any of them

Population density is a more meaningful measure. Most people are concentrated in coastal flood plains and deltas, which are about 5 percent of the land. Compare Canada, the second largest country in the world with approximately 35.3 million residents estimated in 2013 with California where an estimated 37.3 million people lived in 2010. Some illustrate the insignificance of the density issue by putting everyone in a known region. For example, Texas at 7,438,152,268,800 square feet divided by the 2012 world population 6,994,551,619 yields 1063.4 square feet per person. Fitting all the people in an area is different from them being able to live there. Most of the world is unoccupied by humans.

The world is not overpopulated. Malthus began the idea suggesting the population would outgrow the food supply. Currently food production is believed sufficient to feed 25 billion people and growing. The issue is that in the developing world some 60 percent of production never makes it to the table. Developed nations cut this figure to 30 percent primarily through refrigeration. In their blind zeal those who brought you the IPCC fiasco cut their teeth on the technological solution to this problem – better and cheaper refrigeration. The CFC/ ozone issue was artificially created to ban CFCs and introduce global control through the Montreal Protocol. It, like the Kyoto Protocol was a massive, expensive, unnecessary solution to a non-existent problem.

TCOR and later UNEP’s Agenda 21 adopted and expanded the Malthusian idea of overpopulation to all resources making it the central tenet of all their politics and policies. The IPCC was set up to assign the blame of global warming and latterly climate change on human produced CO2 from an industrialized expanding population. They both developed from false assumptions, used manipulated data and science, which they combined into computer models whose projections were, not surprisingly, wrong. The result is the fallacy of global warming due to human CO2 is a subset built on the fallacy of overpopulation.

From the comment section.

Population is on track to level off at ~ 9B by 2050, a UN calculation no less.
U.N. estimates for 2050 are down from 9.4 billion to 8.9 billion. The population is expected to stabilize at 9 billion by 2300.
USATODAY.com - World population to level off
As an engineer, I like to size up “problems” rather than stare at a big number. Some years ago, I calculated that 6B people could fit into Lake Superior, each with 15sqm to tread water in – not a nice thought but it did quantify the problem. The rest of the math was that 90B people could fit into the lake with a square meter to tread water in. Now spread them out over the globe…. and think about it.

The declining fertility rate with economic development is well known. If, instead of blocking economic development in Africa by denying them fossil-fired or even the hated clean hydro electrical power, plus the activities the anti-development NGOs and their minions who frustrate development of mineral resources and other prosperity avenues, the peak would probably come earlier (I’ve seen NGOs in action from fledgling beginnings in Africa from as far back as the 1960s and in later visits a decade ago, I was appalled to see so little real development – apparently by 2000, over $50 trillion had been spent and this is what they got out of it!)

There is no lack of resources, just lack of imagination by the naysayers.

>

[sendler]

Every study I see still projects 11 billion.
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And still projects resource depletion
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[Xist]

"Population is on track to level off at ~ 9B by 2050 [...] The population is expected to stabilize at 9 billion by 2300."

Leveling off isn't stabilizing?

"There is no lack of resources, just lack of imagination by the naysayers."

Telling people they lack imagination is not useful, it is criticizing without offering a solution.

As I recall, we would have reached peak oil had scientists not figured out how to extract oil from sand, but they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could [get paid], they didn't stop to think if they should [get paid].

It seems like most people here believe that burning petroleum is bad, right?

Unless mad scientists come up with another evil plan to take over the world, at some point it will start costing too much to produce.

Remember when gas prices rose and people started trading in [paid off] trucks and SUVs [CUVs] for [brand new] fuel-efficient cars, but traded them back in for more gas guzzlers?

Did fuel prices really go down or did the dog at the table just decide "This is fine."

I do not know why I am using Titlemax as a source, but here you go:
https://i.imgur.com/zTZra6e.png
(rehosted on Imgur in case Titlemax takes it down)

For some reason Titlemax has an article about how economists always thought that the global economy was tied to gas prices, but oil has gone down faster than the economy has improved.

Perhaps everyone is expecting another boom. There is always another boom.

The national average gas price is $2.445, down two cents from a year ago, but who thinks we can maintain that? It seems that gas prices can increase 50% without affecting most people's behavior, but again, without some scientific discovery, the price will increase indefinitely.

There are zero replacements. Sunshine and unicorn kisses will not do it. I bought my car for $250, but have paid hundreds in repairs, although averaged out over a couple of years, I still think I got an awesome deal. Would anyone like to guess what kind of interest rate I would be charged to purchase a Leaf? I might be able to put down $1,800. Let's say that I buy a Leaf for $7,200 total. If I finance for five years at 5% interest, my payments would be $101.90, which is not bad, but still three times what I pay to maintain Hondas from the turn of the millennium.

Which would last longer, the loan, or the $7,200 Leaf? I can still drive the Civic that I have had for five years. Will I be able to use a 2013 Leaf in 2023?

So, I buy the world-saving tree-hugging car, and power it with coal, which pollutes more than gasoline, but at least the plants are in the middle of nowhere, not in the greater metropolitan Show Low area--which many people consider the middle of nowhere.

The hippies keep promoting sunshine. I left at nine to see a client, had another in another city at eleven, a third at 1:30, and a fourth at 3:30. I was supposed to see a fifth at 4:30, but they canceled. That would have been an awesome day, making enough to make a couple payments on a $7,200 Leaf (or Civic).
However, if I spent $7,200 installing a 3 KW solar array (a little more than estimated here, but that is for the Phoenix area. This guy said that his 3,240 KW solar array was more than enough to power his Leaf over 12,000 miles. However, I would not be home to use that solar power.

I would not have 25% down for that array, so if we consider another five-year loan at 5%, the payment would be $135.87 a month, or $237.77 total for the car and solar, although the latter would out-last the former.

At current prices, it would cost about $70 to drive my Accord a thousand miles monthly.

I could power this theoretical Leaf with a wind turbine, but Consumer Reports installed an $11,000 unit in 2011 that they calculated would require millennia to pay for itself: https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/...time/index.htm

One of the selling points is that traditional systems require 7.5 MPH wind speeds to generate electricity. This one works as low as .5 MPH, but when a representative verified the system was installed correctly, they mentioned they needed wind speeds of 6 MPH to just power the inverter.

I am sure another selling point was that you did not need to put it on a tower, it would work on your roof. It did, it just did not do much there. Their roof was thirty-three feet. For optimum performance, it needed to be at 164 feet.

I cannot imagine receiving permission to install something twice as tall as the property is wide.

Wouldn't a $7,200 Civic pollute less than a coal-powered Leaf? I could get at least ten years out of one of those!

[NeilBlanchard]

Originally Posted by redneck

Here’s something to ponder...

Overpopulation: The Fallacy Behind The Fallacy Of Global Warming

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/...lobal-warming/

Anthony Watts has zero credibility on climate change. He is a long time FUDster - i.e. he spreads lies.

[redpoint5]

You've just shown why wind is not popular for residential and why solar is. CR picked the worst product and the worst installation method, so their results will be the worst.

Solar probably doesn't make sense for most people financially because you could be earning 7% investing the money you saved on not buying solar. Payback on solar when considering opportunity cost is probably closer to 50 years, if not infinite.