The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[redpoint5]

No security force has ever bailed me out, except perhaps for holding other nations and enemies of the state at bay. I sleep soundly because there is a sphere of protection and dedication to act against evil around me. That, and most people are not malevolent most of the time. If the police announced a walkout tomorrow, I'd be just fine, as well as any neighbor within my observation.

The real trick is knowing if you've been bitten by a rattlesnake, or pricked by a thorne. They have different levels of urgency.

Just because there has been loss of life does not mean a new code or requirements are necessary. Ladder falls are among the most deadly things we face, yet we don't place a ban on ladders. Their utility outweighs the loss we suffer, not to diminish the tragedy of those who have lost loved ones.

The salient fact of Turing isn't that he was gay, but his many accomplishments, just as the fact that I'm straight has nothing to do with anything except for the gender I find attractive.

My Japanese-American ancestry likewise is not of any interest with regard to my accomplishments (or failings). I consider myself Native (US) American culturally. The group I most closely identify with is the collection of cells comprising my body; that is to say myself, being the smallest minority group there is; an individual.

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by aerohead

The first web-browser,MOSAIC, was created at the publicly-funded,National Center for Supercomputing Applications,and became what you know as 'Netscape'.

What an inspiring piece of history. First Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN, open-sourced the protocol, and then

...even though Netscape was a company, Netscape Navigator was freely available. It was therefore one of the first examples of viral distribution, whereby people were encouraged to download a program and pass it on to their friends and colleagues. Netscape was able to do this because it hoped thereby to establish its browser as the de facto standard for both ordinary and business users, and then to sell support to the latter.

In other words, Netscape was one of the first to adopt on a massive scale the business model used today by most open source companies: give away the code, and make money on services.
....
But then the company began to stumble. The rise of of the free Apache Web server, and the fact that Microsoft was giving away its own Internet Information Server (IIS) with Windows NT, severely stunted sales of Netscape's overpriced servers. Things went from bad to worse when Microsoft finally woke up to the importance of the Internet and began aggressively pushing its Internet Explorer browser, which was free for everyone, not just end-users, until Netscape began to lose its critically-important market dominance.
....
Desperate situations call for desperate measures, and in this case it was decided to release most of the Netscape Navigator code as open source (not all, since some was licensed from other parties).

I remember it being like a ship headed for the rocks and they throw a message in a bottle overboard.

[redpoint5]

I used Netscape before IE was a thing. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for Microsoft's antitrust lawsuit if I recall correctly. Microsoft's claim was that IE was an integral part of their Windows OS, and the claim by Netscape and the government was that Microsoft was engaged in monopolistic practices by offering the browser for "free", and not providing a provision to remove it.

Netscape lives on as Firefox, a browser which I used early on until finally switching to Chrome (again, I hear the cringes from freebeard).

What does freebeard use, Torbrowser?

As an aside, I listened to a podcast that said if you choose to use a browser other than the default, you're more likely an independent thinker.

[freebeard]

Waterfox v56.2.13

If you use a browser other than the default, you stick up like a sore thumb in the metadata. I guess I'm hunger for attention.

[sendler]

Originally Posted by aerohead

Jason is revealing the impoverishment of his intellect.He could be the poster child for Donald Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns.
He doesn't even know the conditionality of everything he reports.There are caveats galore.Perhaps he's a young person, unacquainted with history.
It get sick and tired of reading these perspicacity-devoid arguments.He probably actually thinks he's helping but I doubt that he is,only keeping alive extinct notions about energy, technology,and government power.

Interesting how whenever anyone tells you something that you don't want to hear, you tend to attack them personally.
.
The IPCC is apparently even waking to the reality that wishful thinking about the timeline for decarbonization or hoping for the future possibility of massive bioenergy with carbon capture and storage does not make it pragmatically possible. There is new discussion promoting a required degrowth of the world economy.
.
https://mronline.org/2019/08/30/degr...cal-abundance/
.
"The primary reason for this problem is that economic growth is projected to drive energy demand up at a rate that outpaces the rollout of clean energy capacity (Raftery et al., 2017). This has already presented a problem in the 21st century. Today the world is producing 8 billion more megawatt hours of clean energy each year than in 2000, which is a significant increase. But over the same period, energy demand has grown by 48 billion megawatt hours. In other words, new clean energy capacity covers only 16% of new demand. It is of course technically possible to scale up clean energy output to cover total global energy demand (Jacobson and Delucchi, 2011). But the question is whether it is feasible to do so at a rate that is fast enough to respect the carbon budget for 1.5 or 2°C, while at the same time growing the global economy at the usual pace.

We can assess this question by looking at projected rates of decarbonization. If we assume that global GDP continues to grow at 3% per year (the average from 2010-2014), then decarbonization must occur at a rate of 10.5% per year for 1.5°C, or 7.3% per year for 2°C. If GDP slows down and grows at only 2.1% per year (as PWC predicts), then decarbonization must occur at 9.6% per year for 1.5°C, or 6.4% per year for 2°C. All of these targets are significantly beyond what existing empirical models indicate is feasible (see Hickel and Kallis, 2019). A few brief examples will serve to illustrate this point. Schandl et al. (2016) indicate that decarbonization can happen by at most 3% per year under highly optimistic policy conditions. The C-ROADS tool (developed by Climate Interactive and MIT Sloan) projects decarbonization of at most 4% per year under the most aggressive possible abatement policies: high subsidies for renewables and nuclear power, plus high taxes on oil, gas and coal. In a recent review of existing evidence, Holz et al. (2018) find that the rate ofdecarbonization required to meet the Paris targets is “well outside what is currently deemed achievable, based on historical evidence and standard modelling.”

IPCC scientists and authors have been aware of this problem for some time. In the Fifth Integrated Assessment Report (AR5), they dealt with it by assuming the future existence ofspeculative “negative emissions” technologies. The theory is that while business-as-usual growth will cause emissions to exceed the carbon budget in the medium term, that is fine so long as we find a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere later in the century. The dominant proposal for achieving this is known as BECCS, or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. BECCS entails developing large tree plantations around the world to absorb CO2from the atmosphere, harvesting the biomass, burning it for energy, capturing the emissions at source and storing the waste underground. In AR5, the vast majority of scenarios for 2°C (101 of the 116) rely on BECCS to the point of achieving negative emissions.

BECCS is highly controversial among scientists, however. There are a number of concerns. First, the viability of power generation with CCS has never been proven to be economically viable or scalable (Peters, 2017). Second, the scale of biomass assumed in the AR5 scenarios would require plantations covering land two to three times the size of India, which raises questions about land availability, competition with food production, carbon neutrality, and biodiversity loss (Smith et al., 2015; Heck et al., 2018). Third, the necessary CO2 storage capacity may not exist (De Coninck and Benson, 2014; Global CCS Institute, 2015).

Anderson and Peters (2016) conclude that “BECCS thus remains a highly speculative technology” and that relying on it is therefore “an unjust and high stakes gamble”: if it is unsuccessful, “society will be locked into a high-temperature pathway”. This conclusion is shared by a growing number of scientists (e.g., Fuss et al., 2014; Vaughan and Gough, 2016; Larkin et al., 2017; van Vuuren et al., 2017), and by the European Academies’ ScienceAdvisory Council (2018).

Responding to these concerns, the IPCC (2018) has for the first time published a scenario for reducing emissions in line with the Paris Agreement that does not rely on speculative negative emissions technologies. Developed by Grubler et al. (2018) and known as Low Energy Demand (LED), the scenario works by reducing global energy consumption by 40% by 2050, which makes it much more feasible to achieve a transition to 100% clean energy. The key feature of this scenario is that global material production and consumption declinessignificantly: “The aggregate total material output decreases by close to 20 per cent fromtoday, one-third due to dematerialization, and two-thirds due to improvements in materialefficiency.” LED differentiates between the global North and South. Industrial production and consumption declines by 42% in the North and 12% in the South. Given improvements in energy efficiency, this translates into industrial energy demand declining by 57% in the North and 23% in the South.

The LED model represents a “degrowth” scenario–a planned reduction of the material and energy throughput of the global economy. Its inclusion in the IPCC report as the only scenario that does not rely on questionable negative emissions technologies suggests that degrowth may be the only feasible way to achieve the emissions reductions required by the Paris Agreement. This is a major milestone in climate mitigation theory. What is appealing about this approach is that it not only addresses emissions and climate change, but also reduces ecological impact across a range of other key indicators, including deforestation, chemical pollution, soil depletion, biodiversity loss, and so on (Rockstrom et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015)."

[NeilBlanchard]

Speaking Truth to Power

Interview - Greta Thunberg - Inspiring Others to Take a Stand Against Climate Change - Extended Interview - The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (Video Clip) | Comedy Central

[redpoint5]

The US has had a negative replacement birth rate since 1971. Most of the developed nations, especially those with higher population density have negative replacement birth rates. The nations with higher energy consumption are also declining in population, while the nations with lower energy consumption are increasing their consumption and have relatively rapid population growth.

I wouldn't be surprised if governments put some sort of incentive/disincentive on having children. Maybe there are economic incentives for the first 2 children, and none after that.

The US birth rate is below 1.8 per woman, with the replacement rate being 2.1. It's the lowest it's been in 32 years.

Originally Posted by sendler

the IPCC (2018) has for the first time published a scenario for reducing emissions in line with the Paris Agreement that does not rely on speculative negative emissions technologies. Developed by Grubler et al. (2018) and known as Low Energy Demand (LED), the scenario works by reducing global energy consumption by 40% by 2050...

This is consistent with what you've been saying, that "clean" energy isn't even covering the increase in demand, so that overall emissions due to energy generation are still increasing.

I like to take a "don't count your chickens before they hatch" approach. It seems the only reasonable way to plan for the future.

My wife is more diligent to clean up in the kitchen, but I'm more diligent to not make a mess in the first place. I'm of the mind that it's easier to not make the mess in the first place than to deal with the relative carelessness later. It seems to me a better idea to not emit CO2 in the first place than to try to capture it later after it's dispersed into the atmosphere.

[freebeard]

duckduckgo.com/?q=greta+thunberg+autism

Autists rule. But where did she get that sailboat? She and Soph are similar age with the same condition, but they have diametrically opposed viewpoints.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

duckduckgo.com/?q=greta+thunberg+autism

Autists rule. But where did she get that sailboat? She and Soph are similar age with the same condition, but they have diametrically opposed viewpoints.

Greta seems to have politics figured out already. You get ignored by the politicians until you're useful for advancing their political career.

This is why I'm always on about the danger of politics being a career rather than a term of service.

...Greta doesn't fly... which can achieve 100 passenger miles per gallon of fuel. Her alternatives had better be more than 100 passenger MPG then.

[freebeard]

I can't view this without subscribing (unlike B*tchute), but here's the description:

Greta

A cinematic epic about another highly opinionated child - although a less funny one at that - and her silly ideas about global warming. But, despite the good intentions and innocent demeanors surrounding climate change, there are some pretty insidious things involving politicians taking advantage of the public's trust in what scientists say and how much cash you can bleed out of the average joe if you tell him his kids are gonna die if you don't open your wallet.

Sep 02nd, 2019

https://freespeech.tv/watch/shows/soph/episode/greta