What if we don't "cool" the planet

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
21

At any rate, my point is that the avoidance of less than 0.02 degrees of warming (seven plus decades from now) is commensurate with the amount of money to be spent.

DB2,

Did you miss the point on purpose? Or just not see it?

This can be extremely profitable for the US.

The north Atlantic froze over on the early Vikings stranding their North American settlements. The difference in the ocean water was 1 degree.

BTW it does not just stop at .02 degrees…anyway were did you get that number 0.02 degrees? By when the end of the decade? Human life goes on without any of us.

22

*On warmer Earth, most of Arctic may remove, not add, methane*

DB2,

I get the feeling you are just worried you personally will be billed? LOL

I can see us having dinner together…me running off mid way through just to leave you with the bill. Normally my manners are a bit better than that. In your case I’d make an exception. LOL

23

At any rate, my point is that the avoidance of less than 0.02 degrees of warming (seven plus decades from now) is commensurate with the amount of money to be spent.
—
Did you miss the point on purpose? Or just not see it? This can be extremely profitable for the US.

If true, I like that. I have been trying to point out that the temperature difference (the warming part of global warming) won’t be changed much. That does seem to bother some people.

BTW it does not just stop at .02 degrees…

No, the warming isn’t 0.02°C. The <0.02 degrees is the difference in global temps by the end of the century from the IRA.

…anyway were did you get that number 0.02 degrees? By when, the end of the decade?

No, that’s by the end of this century. See this thread from a couple of weeks ago:
https://discussion.fool.com/inflation-reduction-act-to-reduce-gh…

DB2

24

*On warmer Earth, most of Arctic may remove, not add, methane*
—
DB2, I get the feeling you are just worried you personally will be billed?

Not, just trying to introduce more facts into the hype and disaster porn. From a few years ago in Science:

Arctic Armageddon’ Needs More Science, Less Hype
www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/329/5992/620
So to scientists, the methane threat looks less like a catastrophe than an aggravation of a problem that already scares them. But “media people are all the time trying to have a doomsday story” about methane, says Walter Anthony. Not that scientists are blameless. “Quite a few scientists have maybe exaggerated a bit,” Heimann acknowledges.

“Is now the time to get frightened?” Archer asked rhetorically on the blog Real Climate in March. His answer: “No. CO2 is plenty to be frightened of, while methane is frosting on the cake. … Methane sells newspapers, but it’s not the big story.”

DB2

25

Oh, that WSJ opinion piece with some facts.

DB2,

The problem is in how you are framing that. The slight reduction assumes only one of these congressional acts. Others will follow for our industrial purposes, to profit in other words. And other countries will try to compete.

The reduction is as opposed to an unbearable increase in temperature. You are skipping that part.

26

“Is now the time to get frightened?” Archer asked rhetorically on the blog Real Climate in March. His answer: “No. CO2 is plenty to be frightened of, while methane is frosting on the cake. … Methane sells newspapers, but it’s not the big story.”

DB2,

That is piss poor logic in answering the question.

Frightened? Or gain common sense? Lets make a hell of a lot of money here with deflationary energy sources.

27

Some climate change effects are already baked into the system. New estimates of sea level rise are getting worse.

https://grist.org/science/the-best-case-scenario-for-greenla…
Greenland’s melting ice sheet will raise global sea levels by at least 10.6 inches, twice as much as previous estimates, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. That’s even if everyone stopped burning fossil fuels today.

This is expected to happen by the end of the century or by 2150. Since the planet both can’t and won’t stop using fossil fuels tomorrow, I think that sea level rise will be much sooner

28

I hope that study proves to be correct.

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29

The <0.02 degrees is the difference in global temps by the end of the century from the IRA.

As has been pointed, this is a seriously flawed analysis as it fails to take into consideration the most important impacts of the IRA on climate change. There are two.

  1. The U.S. approaching zero-carbon status by 2050 is essential for the establishment of a global commitment to solve the climate change problem. The world’s largest economy has enormous political influence. The international effort required to control climate change can only happen if the U.S. leads. The IRA makes continued and increased global cooperation on climate change far more likely.

  2. The technologies and practices developed as a result of the economic incentives for clean energy embodied in the IRA will likely have an exponential impact on reducing greenhouse gases. As one example, the IRA provides tax credits for nuclear energy development, including that of small modular nuclear reactors that could be a game changer. From Forbes:

"“The Inflation Reduction Act puts nuclear on the same playing field as renewables,” says Doug True, the chief nuclear officer at the Nuclear Energy Institute, during a symposium hosted by the United States Energy Association, in which this reporter was a panelist. “It will stimulate more interest in nuclear. Adding 300 reactors that generate 90 gigawatts over 30 years might be on the low end once this plays out.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2022/08/22/the-i…

Export of such technology could result in much faster reductions in greenhouse gas emissions than currently estimated.

In short, the calculations done by Lonborg do not take into account the political and technological impacts of the IRA.

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30

The reduction is as opposed to an unbearable increase in temperature.

Leap, you are still missing the picture. The temperature increase projected for the end of the century range from 1 to 5 degrees depending upon one’s assumptions. Going with a midrange value we have a projected temp increase by the 2090s:

Before IRA: 2.5°C
After IRA: 2.48°C

An improvement, but…

DB2

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31

DB2,

This is not the only spending corporate or public that will happen. The battle is never ending.

Remember if the globe is going to spend $9 tr per year on this eventually as private and public spending, mostly in the form of consumption, then this pays for itself over time.

I am not sure if you intend to state the IRA results as the end all of the discussion. It just feels like you are.

I get you are asking why so much money for such a small dent? The companies that start to profit from these efforts will go much further.

32

On warmer Earth, most of Arctic may remove, not add, methane
—
I hope that study proves to be correct.

Several years ago McGuire et al. looked at modeled changes in the permafrost over a half century (1960-2009).
http://kaares.ulapland.fi/home/hkunta/jmoore/pdfs/McGuire_Gl…

The 15 models they looked at had enormous differences in the rate of permafrost lost, varying by almost a factor of 300! (0.2 to 58.8 thousand km per year). However, all of the models showed increased carbon storage over the 50 years because of greater gross primary production (GPP) due to warmer temperatures and CO2 fertilization.

The authors write:
“All of the models indicate that both vegetation and soil C storage together have increased by 156 to 954 TgC/yr between 1960 and 2009 over the permafrost region even though model analyses indicate that warming alone would decrease soil C storage.”

DB2

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33

Careful there, Notehound. Ten days ago I posted that the temperature difference (by 2100) from the IRA reductions will be less than 0.02°C, and several here were shocked (although nobody produced an alternate figure).

I was shocked…at the mental gymnastics used to come up with that conclusion. Technically correct, but pretty silly.

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34

The 15 models they looked at had enormous differences in the rate of permafrost lost, varying by almost a factor of 300! (0.2 to 58.8 thousand km per year). However, all of the models showed increased carbon storage over the 50 years because of greater gross primary production (GPP) due to warmer temperatures and CO2 fertilization.

The simple fact - and the really-long-term problem - is that biological processes collectively tend to remove carbon from the atmosphere and bury it. And so do some geological processes, particularly in the presence of liquid water.

So far, the processes we know of for getting significant quantities of buried carbon into the atmosphere are (a) volcanoes and (b) humans burning fossil fuels. The former is definitely insufficient to keep up with the rate at which the stuff is currently getting buried. Even back in early days when there weren’t multicellular animals running or swimming around, and the volcanoes were much more active, biology sucked enough carbon out of the atmosphere to produce multiple periods of “snowball Earth”.

How are the humans doing? Well, we’ve gotten the atmospheric CO2 level back up to where it was when the dinosaurs were on the verge of extinction - well under what it was during their prime.

(By “really-long-term” I mean something that will be a big issue in a few million years. Not something we need to worry about this week.)

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35

I am reminded of the California law a few years ago that demanded a special light socket in houses so that the standard incandescent bulb could not be used. They were a complete waste of money. The socket encouraged the use compact fluorescent bulbs. These bulbs use more electricity than the now ubiquitous super bright LED’S and added a lot of mercury to landfills.

When we built our house (not in CA) they put lighting in our crawlspace which is about 3 feet deep. Long story short, just now found out that those fixtures are GU24, the dreadful socket you mentioned. Have no idea why instead of a regular light socket. I’m sure some dumb, poorly thought out regulation. Fortunately Home Depot has an adapter so those sockets can handle LEDs. So the dead CFLs are headed to the recycling drop off, if they still take them. Home Depot used to take CFLs.

JLC

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36

When we built our house (not in CA) they put lighting in our crawlspace which is about 3 feet deep. Long story short, just now found out that those fixtures are GU24, the dreadful socket you mentioned. Have no idea why instead of a regular light socket. I’m sure some dumb, poorly thought out regulation. Fortunately Home Depot has an adapter so those sockets can handle LEDs.

You can buy LEDs at Home Depot Wal-Mart that fit the GU24.

37

“I have little confidence that anyone will be inclined to hit the brakes on their economies or lifestyles until the bus is already plunging over the cliff by which time it will be too late.”

And so ends capitalism.

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38

NH7

The long-term result of Russia’s war on Ukraine will be to render it politically impossible for leaders to impose upon the masses repressive energy prices sufficient to meet the “zero emissions by 2050” goal.

I’m not buying this.

First, we have no idea what the long-term result will be. The long term result might be WWIII and Armageddon, so climate concerns will not be of concern anymore. It could be revolution in Russia, instability, and collapse of their oil business. It could be victory for Russia across Europe, a dictator coming to power in the US and worldwide totalitarianism. It could be a lot of things.

More seriously, I think the challenge with the war in Ukraine creates a temporary disconnect between climate objectives and political objectives–the EU needs to find as much oil and gas as quickly as they can to survive the next few winters.

Longer term, political and climate objectives are much more aligned. Europe has learned that they cannot rely on cheap Russian gas to power the economy. They have proven for as long as Putin (or his like-minded successor) is in power, they cannot be trusted and they are not a reliable supplier. Are the Europeans then going to turn around and put their fate in the hands of the Iranians, Saudis, or some other dictatorship? Unlikely.

Cutting hydrocarbon consumption is the best way for the Europeans to create optionality of supply–if their need for hydrocarbons diminishes, then there are a lot of countries which can either fill or partially fill the gap left when Russia shuts down the pipeline–Algeria, Nigeria, USA, Canada, Qatar, Australia to name a few countries which can export LNG.

What can we do now and in the future to prepare for what may be an inevitable period of global warming?

Without getting dystopian about it, I do suspect that the warming will happen:

  • Global cooperation on the issue is so far from reality that there is no evidence it will happen in 30 years to the point of stopping CO2 emissions. If we can get annual emissions to start falling in 30 years, that will be an amazing acheivement.
  • There are way more hydrocarbons being used than just automobiles and power generation. Just lots of solar panels and Teslas in every garage will only reduce CO2 emissions by like 30%. Air travel, trucking, and shipping are even farther from electrifying than cars. Fertilizer, cement production, steel and aluminum production, and a host of other industries rely on hydrocarbons to either generate cheap power or create high temperatures. CO2 neutral pilot plants to replace existing designs are nowhere near ready for widespread deployment.

So, I think the answer is that the world will muddle through like it always has:

  • I do think the wealthy nations should be pushing zero-CO2 technologies. When will the developing world have a widespread adoption of electric cars? When they are cheaper and more convenient than ICE cars.
  • I also think we should be planting trees and restoring as much desert land as possible. Planting a trillion trees probably isn’t the solution on its own, but it might help, and it certainly won’t hurt.
  • And if it gets really bad, I think some form of geoengineering is inevitable–maybe there will be a magic breakthrough in mechanically/chemically removing CO2 from atmosphere. Or, as others have suggested, some kind of aerosols in the atmosphere or other mechanism to reflect sunlight back into space. (This was actually suggested in one of the Freakonomics books–create a mechanism that is reversible. You don’t want to put something up there that will last 2000 years only to find that you’ve tipped the world too far the other way.)

What am I doing to mitigate the impact? Well, my dream of a beach house looks a lot more affordable–I’m not interested in buying one.

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39

NH7

The long-term result of Russia’s war on Ukraine will be to render it politically impossible for leaders to impose upon the masses repressive energy prices sufficient to meet the “zero emissions by 2050” goal.


Does that mean with your vote and your voice you are now insisting on not doing it? Or you are still insisting on doing it?

If the latter my you are a pessimist.