Celebrating irony: with the Iran war choking the Strait of Hormuz, China's oil and gas imports plunged and its coal plants fired back up, so this year's much-praised EV growth (in charging) is running on increased coal-fired generation.
Now, a serious question for those familiar with climate modeling:
Business as usual is the key word.
Do RCP8.5 scenarios account for billions of people remaining trapped in extreme poverty, or do they assume rapid global development? If they assume a rapid climb up the development ladder, the energy source chosen- whether fossil fuels, uranium, or hypothetical solar capacity, would change the projected emission factors by almost orders of magnitude. By simple extrapolation, 150 Gt/year of emissions wouldn't even be a high-end estimate in a fossil-fuel-dominated growth scenario. It can change everything.
Business as usual assumes pretty unbalanced world.
I consider myself a humanist. I want the global population to be prosperous while preserving the environment as much as possible. High-density energy sources and high-density food production are the keys to achieving that balance. Business as usual is not recipe for developed world though.
It’s the net zero and no carbon and no oil and gas and no coal goifbalks that are the true deniers. Listen to them and what they accuse you of doing is what they’ve already done and continue to do. Hypocrisy is their middle name and they use but hourly not only daily. Truly dishonest and if they actually hold those beliefs then they fall into the uneducated and incapable of rational thought category. And we let them vote and drive ICE vehicles on public roadways!
The WEF organization is full of these hypocrites, and their behavior is detestable and borders on intolerable.
Most actually hold those beliefs but don't know any better. The steady diet they've been fed and all.
A small percentage may or may not believe any of it but their ulterior motive is EcoStatism and all that begets. They figured out around 2005 that even if they could not achieve Statist at the polls swiftly or certainly enough, controlling energy under the auspices of a planetary crisis that's just around the corner accomplishes the same thing. Since their ultimate goal is dismantling capitalism, economic growth, resource consumption, and choice/freedom and once you control energy you have all of those by the short hairs.
The larger group casts more votes. Maybe their minds can be changed over time.
The smaller group are philosophical and human prosperity assassins. And we're trying to snipe them from rooftops with words.
Seems like the climatards burn a lot of carbon lambasting deniers. Maybe they should consider that in next policy update. Thanks for the details on this topic. Gives me great ammo for discussions with my greenie friends!
If my physics teacher was right, Einstein said entropy was the inescapable factor in reality. Energy only flows from a higher to a lower potential. If conduction wasn’t the only way energy transfers at temperatures below the radiation level (about 780 Fahrenheit) then radiative forcing might be feasible. If infrared radiation was generated at temperatures much below visible light why would extraterrestrial planets only be visible in the occult?
I think it pre-dated him by a few years but don't quote me.
He was one of the authors of one of the "studies" that found a "97% consensus" to a non-scientific question.
Naomi Oreskes 2004. Doran & Zimmerman (2009). Cook, etal (2013). Cook's group analyzed ~12,000 abstracts, found 66% expressed no view, and of the 33% that did reported 97% consensus to a non-scientific question.
Well written and to the point. I do have a question.... I read numerous articles that say globally, $16 trillion has been spent on renewables, but you say $5 trillion. Why the Delta?
Great question. We haven't seen the $16 trillion figure.
The $5 trillion figure is a widely cited estimate based on the aggregate expenditures (spent and committed) spent mostly by the G7 nations. Much of it comes from publicly available reports.
For example, early one, more than 12 years before we started this publication, in 2010 the U.S. Congressional Budget Office produced a report pegging U.S. expenditures on "climate policy" at ~$100 billion just between 1998 - 2009. "From 1998 to 2009, appropriations for agencies’ work related to climate change totaled about $99 billion (in 2009 dollars); more than a third of that sum was provided in fiscal year 2009." (link here > https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/111th-congress-2009-2010/reports/03-26-climatechange.pdf).
And that $100 billion was before the real fun began around 2010.
We've dug the rest out of various and sundry U.S. CBO, DOE and other reports and similar publicly available reports from the EU, Canada, Japan, Australia, Italy, Germany, and France over the years.
If we had to guess, the $16 trillion figure likely includes Chinese govt. subsidized spend on solar, wind and other "renewables" if we had to guess, and maybe even some Chinese nuclear subsidies.
I have engaged in discussions as a ‘denier’ since before the term was fashionable. Thirty years of pointing out the obvious flaws in AGW, in the face of religiosity, grift, and fear.
At the same time, environmental degradation through inefficient agricultural practices, especially deforestation, is an obvious problem that technology can solve.
But the same charlatans pushing AGW are now marching against AI, which has already shown the capacity to solve formerly intractable problems.
So, my new target will be fear mongering AI deniers.
Land degradation is a real environmental issue, and ag practices are great areas for improvement. Please see "Crying Fowl" from our freshman campaign on Substack, link here > https://envmental.substack.com/p/crying-fowl
We crap up the planet in various ways, including the atmosphere (as environmental professionals with decades in the field, we have seen this first hand). GHG's may some day reach dangerous levels and create real problems but the danger was badly oversold, and for a reason(s).
As for the AI aspect, they tie together. AI needs two things (for now). Electricity and land for data centers.
Now, a data center ain't applying fertilizers and other chemicals rendering the soil nothing more than a medium for chemicals and not regenerating quality soil and nutrients. But on the other hand, the land under is also not going back to farm land either.
Everything in life is a tradeoff. We don't have to like it, just deal with that reality.
I like your new target. Meanwhile, we're having fun watching local communities give the Big Tech pretend environmentalists the finger.
Some places they'll have no choice if they have to be there.
But other places the RTOs or even monopoly utilities like GA Power will make the case for "growing demand" and "economic development" without naming data centers directly, all while negotiating behind the scenes with them directly (see our last post for reference).
It's going to be a shit show but there is a chance a bunch of dispatchable power gen comes online because of data centers and that some will never be built as planned (local land use blockage, economic, other reasons) which could leave residential rate payers either benefitting or holding the bag. Too early to tell.
Michael Mann, Al Gore, and all the other green grifters got rich selling apocalyptic “climate change.” At the same time, much of the legacy news media were paid to hire “climate change” and “energy transition” “reporters,” more accurately described as propagandists. Add to all of them the socialists who saw the whole “climate change” agenda as an avenue to impose socialism/Marxism/communism, and you’ve got a lot of people who had a vested interest in the worst case scenario. No way they’re giving up the gravy train without a fight, denial, and outright lies.
After what, fifty years of this sh*t, should we really be surprised?
We do give some credit to Andy Revkin, the former NY Times Climate Desk head.
It might be fair to say he began as one of those. And he still believes it is a real problem.
But his apocalyptic media activism is gone. And he has demonstrated acceptance of arguments and data that counter the apocalyptic narrative and even called out some green crazies who are off the deep end.
But generally, they're all a shit show as a group.
Indeed, most of them aren’t journalists. They’re propagandists paid to tell one side of a made up story and generate the narrative that more socialism is necessary or we will all perish. And you know that’s true because few if any of them have ever offered a solution that didn’t include more government, more taxes, and more controls on businesses and individuals.
It strikes me that these deniers are ripe for a lawsuit. after all, without RCP8.5, would the world have wasted $5 trillion on this nonsense? every taxpayer in the US should sue the UN and each of those organizations for that $5 trillion in wasted resources in a giant class action.
And a judge says we don't have standing and asks us to prove our damages.
We wrote early on "what good could have been done for the lot of humanity with $5 trillion?" The question is not rhetorical and the green movement won't answer it.
I think it is possible to make the economic case. how much did the US spend, both federal and state, between subsidies and tax benefits, and how much did that raise the debt. then the calculation of how much higher interest rates the governments pay because of that debt, and you can come up with a numeric answer. then we simply need a class action. this is a rare case where I would be happy to have lawyers get 1/3 of the action if the proponents of all the lies were paying the freight. it could bankrupt all the NGO's, the UN, and every climate scientist who went along for the money. bring Al Gore in as well!!
I can’t stop thinking about the actual natural resources that have been wasted on all this either. It just seems unfathomable but it happened 🥲. Those resources (including the money) could have likely saved millions and millions of lives in energy poor countries.
RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 have been characterized in some contexts as 'no-policy' scenarios. Detlef van Vuuren, lead author of the 2011 paper presenting the RCPs, and of the most recent Scenario-MIP paper, told climate blog Carbon Brief in 2019 that "Clearly, RCP8.5 is a possible no-climate policy world."
Carbon Brief, in that same article, stated "This high-emissions scenario is frequently referred to as 'business as usual,' suggesting that is a likely outcome if society does not make concerted efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions."
What these descriptions leave out is that the trajectories set out in RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 are not "no-policy" scenarios. In fact the underlying assumptions of ~five-fold increases in coal use would have required a *deliberate* set of policies to consciously set out to use more coal. Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi’s 2017 paper pointed this out. So this would not be an outcome arising from society *not* making concerted efforts to cut greenhouse gases. It would be an outcome arising from society *making* a concerted effort to actually increase GHG emissions by using more coal.
If I try my best to straw man their arguments, I could envision a way out there scenario under which the developing world said "f#%k it. We'll burn the cheapest stuff to make electricity we can. And when some day someone figures out a cheaper Fischer Tropsch process, we'll turn the dirty sh#t into liquid fuel, too."
Could that result in 5-6X coal consumption? Doubtful. Physical limitations and economics might have cut that well short before it ever got that far.
But even still, and to your point, ever portraying that as "business as usual" or even remotely likely was misinformation/malinformation/disinformation before punks like Imran Ahmed ever dreamed up CCDH.
…”The model with the weighted rank closest to 1 across all metrics and both RCPs (4.5 and 8.5) is HadGEM2-ES, the “warm/dry” model. The model with the weighted rank closest to the average value across all metrics/RCPs is CanESM2, the “average” model. The model with the weighted rank closest to 10 is CNRM-CM5, the “cool/wet” model. The final selected model, MIROC5, is the one that has the pattern of rankings that is most unlike the other three models and is chosen to give better coverage of the full spread of 10 California GCM model results.”…
and recalled that it took a lot of effort to type out punch cards long ago to run a program.....
Too many things/interactions going in a system we don't understand well enough yet to reduce to model equations as currently constructed, especially given giant geographic data gaps, parameterization to fill those gaps, etc.
Celebrating irony: with the Iran war choking the Strait of Hormuz, China's oil and gas imports plunged and its coal plants fired back up, so this year's much-praised EV growth (in charging) is running on increased coal-fired generation.
Yeah, we tried to make that up but failed. Instead it just happened. 🤷♂️😉
Glad to be labeled a denier.
Now, a serious question for those familiar with climate modeling:
Business as usual is the key word.
Do RCP8.5 scenarios account for billions of people remaining trapped in extreme poverty, or do they assume rapid global development? If they assume a rapid climb up the development ladder, the energy source chosen- whether fossil fuels, uranium, or hypothetical solar capacity, would change the projected emission factors by almost orders of magnitude. By simple extrapolation, 150 Gt/year of emissions wouldn't even be a high-end estimate in a fossil-fuel-dominated growth scenario. It can change everything.
Business as usual assumes pretty unbalanced world.
I consider myself a humanist. I want the global population to be prosperous while preserving the environment as much as possible. High-density energy sources and high-density food production are the keys to achieving that balance. Business as usual is not recipe for developed world though.
It’s the net zero and no carbon and no oil and gas and no coal goifbalks that are the true deniers. Listen to them and what they accuse you of doing is what they’ve already done and continue to do. Hypocrisy is their middle name and they use but hourly not only daily. Truly dishonest and if they actually hold those beliefs then they fall into the uneducated and incapable of rational thought category. And we let them vote and drive ICE vehicles on public roadways!
The WEF organization is full of these hypocrites, and their behavior is detestable and borders on intolerable.
Most actually hold those beliefs but don't know any better. The steady diet they've been fed and all.
A small percentage may or may not believe any of it but their ulterior motive is EcoStatism and all that begets. They figured out around 2005 that even if they could not achieve Statist at the polls swiftly or certainly enough, controlling energy under the auspices of a planetary crisis that's just around the corner accomplishes the same thing. Since their ultimate goal is dismantling capitalism, economic growth, resource consumption, and choice/freedom and once you control energy you have all of those by the short hairs.
The larger group casts more votes. Maybe their minds can be changed over time.
The smaller group are philosophical and human prosperity assassins. And we're trying to snipe them from rooftops with words.
Seems like the climatards burn a lot of carbon lambasting deniers. Maybe they should consider that in next policy update. Thanks for the details on this topic. Gives me great ammo for discussions with my greenie friends!
You bet.
Don’t let ‘em get any of that on ‘ya.
😉
So Mark Carney’s premise is discredited?
Which premise? The Ottawa-Alberta deal?
If my physics teacher was right, Einstein said entropy was the inescapable factor in reality. Energy only flows from a higher to a lower potential. If conduction wasn’t the only way energy transfers at temperatures below the radiation level (about 780 Fahrenheit) then radiative forcing might be feasible. If infrared radiation was generated at temperatures much below visible light why would extraterrestrial planets only be visible in the occult?
Why would any sane human believe an ideologue?
Who is John Galt?
;)
John Galt is in favour of AB separation. :)
Wasn't it John Cook who cooked up the phrase, "97% of climate scientists agree that humans are the main cause of global warming"?
I think it pre-dated him by a few years but don't quote me.
He was one of the authors of one of the "studies" that found a "97% consensus" to a non-scientific question.
Naomi Oreskes 2004. Doran & Zimmerman (2009). Cook, etal (2013). Cook's group analyzed ~12,000 abstracts, found 66% expressed no view, and of the 33% that did reported 97% consensus to a non-scientific question.
He's a dedicated activist.
Well written and to the point. I do have a question.... I read numerous articles that say globally, $16 trillion has been spent on renewables, but you say $5 trillion. Why the Delta?
Thank you!
Great question. We haven't seen the $16 trillion figure.
The $5 trillion figure is a widely cited estimate based on the aggregate expenditures (spent and committed) spent mostly by the G7 nations. Much of it comes from publicly available reports.
For example, early one, more than 12 years before we started this publication, in 2010 the U.S. Congressional Budget Office produced a report pegging U.S. expenditures on "climate policy" at ~$100 billion just between 1998 - 2009. "From 1998 to 2009, appropriations for agencies’ work related to climate change totaled about $99 billion (in 2009 dollars); more than a third of that sum was provided in fiscal year 2009." (link here > https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/111th-congress-2009-2010/reports/03-26-climatechange.pdf).
And that $100 billion was before the real fun began around 2010.
We've dug the rest out of various and sundry U.S. CBO, DOE and other reports and similar publicly available reports from the EU, Canada, Japan, Australia, Italy, Germany, and France over the years.
If we had to guess, the $16 trillion figure likely includes Chinese govt. subsidized spend on solar, wind and other "renewables" if we had to guess, and maybe even some Chinese nuclear subsidies.
I have engaged in discussions as a ‘denier’ since before the term was fashionable. Thirty years of pointing out the obvious flaws in AGW, in the face of religiosity, grift, and fear.
At the same time, environmental degradation through inefficient agricultural practices, especially deforestation, is an obvious problem that technology can solve.
But the same charlatans pushing AGW are now marching against AI, which has already shown the capacity to solve formerly intractable problems.
So, my new target will be fear mongering AI deniers.
Land degradation is a real environmental issue, and ag practices are great areas for improvement. Please see "Crying Fowl" from our freshman campaign on Substack, link here > https://envmental.substack.com/p/crying-fowl
We crap up the planet in various ways, including the atmosphere (as environmental professionals with decades in the field, we have seen this first hand). GHG's may some day reach dangerous levels and create real problems but the danger was badly oversold, and for a reason(s).
As for the AI aspect, they tie together. AI needs two things (for now). Electricity and land for data centers.
Now, a data center ain't applying fertilizers and other chemicals rendering the soil nothing more than a medium for chemicals and not regenerating quality soil and nutrients. But on the other hand, the land under is also not going back to farm land either.
Everything in life is a tradeoff. We don't have to like it, just deal with that reality.
I like your new target. Meanwhile, we're having fun watching local communities give the Big Tech pretend environmentalists the finger.
It looks like datacentres will need to bring their own power.
New power gen could benefit the locals to compensate them.
Some places they'll have no choice if they have to be there.
But other places the RTOs or even monopoly utilities like GA Power will make the case for "growing demand" and "economic development" without naming data centers directly, all while negotiating behind the scenes with them directly (see our last post for reference).
It's going to be a shit show but there is a chance a bunch of dispatchable power gen comes online because of data centers and that some will never be built as planned (local land use blockage, economic, other reasons) which could leave residential rate payers either benefitting or holding the bag. Too early to tell.
Michael Mann, Al Gore, and all the other green grifters got rich selling apocalyptic “climate change.” At the same time, much of the legacy news media were paid to hire “climate change” and “energy transition” “reporters,” more accurately described as propagandists. Add to all of them the socialists who saw the whole “climate change” agenda as an avenue to impose socialism/Marxism/communism, and you’ve got a lot of people who had a vested interest in the worst case scenario. No way they’re giving up the gravy train without a fight, denial, and outright lies.
After what, fifty years of this sh*t, should we really be surprised?
Yup.
We do give some credit to Andy Revkin, the former NY Times Climate Desk head.
It might be fair to say he began as one of those. And he still believes it is a real problem.
But his apocalyptic media activism is gone. And he has demonstrated acceptance of arguments and data that counter the apocalyptic narrative and even called out some green crazies who are off the deep end.
But generally, they're all a shit show as a group.
Indeed, most of them aren’t journalists. They’re propagandists paid to tell one side of a made up story and generate the narrative that more socialism is necessary or we will all perish. And you know that’s true because few if any of them have ever offered a solution that didn’t include more government, more taxes, and more controls on businesses and individuals.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, amigo.
In all fairness, they have nails, but prefer to always use a hammer 🤣
It strikes me that these deniers are ripe for a lawsuit. after all, without RCP8.5, would the world have wasted $5 trillion on this nonsense? every taxpayer in the US should sue the UN and each of those organizations for that $5 trillion in wasted resources in a giant class action.
We love the idea.
And a judge says we don't have standing and asks us to prove our damages.
We wrote early on "what good could have been done for the lot of humanity with $5 trillion?" The question is not rhetorical and the green movement won't answer it.
Aren't there "damages" owing regarding the supply of nonsense tech (solar panels etc) coming from our obvious nemesis, China?
all part of the equation
Proving that before a court is an uphill climb is the problem. Not that it didn't happen!
arguably, the damages are the higher taxes and larger debt that was incurred to buy all this crap
Oh we agree.
We just doubt you'll find a judge to agree with the two of us! ;)
I think it is possible to make the economic case. how much did the US spend, both federal and state, between subsidies and tax benefits, and how much did that raise the debt. then the calculation of how much higher interest rates the governments pay because of that debt, and you can come up with a numeric answer. then we simply need a class action. this is a rare case where I would be happy to have lawyers get 1/3 of the action if the proponents of all the lies were paying the freight. it could bankrupt all the NGO's, the UN, and every climate scientist who went along for the money. bring Al Gore in as well!!
Blood and Gore (and a whole lot more!) > https://envmental.substack.com/p/blood-and-gore-shown-the-door
;)
I can’t stop thinking about the actual natural resources that have been wasted on all this either. It just seems unfathomable but it happened 🥲. Those resources (including the money) could have likely saved millions and millions of lives in energy poor countries.
Of course you would find a bird all the other pointers ran past, Dave.
;)
Ha ha! Going birdless is no fun!
Behind your nose?
Ain't happenin'....
Hardly! I’m fortunate to have found SubStack and the ability to filter through the propaganda.
💯.
RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 have been characterized in some contexts as 'no-policy' scenarios. Detlef van Vuuren, lead author of the 2011 paper presenting the RCPs, and of the most recent Scenario-MIP paper, told climate blog Carbon Brief in 2019 that "Clearly, RCP8.5 is a possible no-climate policy world."
Carbon Brief, in that same article, stated "This high-emissions scenario is frequently referred to as 'business as usual,' suggesting that is a likely outcome if society does not make concerted efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions."
What these descriptions leave out is that the trajectories set out in RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 are not "no-policy" scenarios. In fact the underlying assumptions of ~five-fold increases in coal use would have required a *deliberate* set of policies to consciously set out to use more coal. Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi’s 2017 paper pointed this out. So this would not be an outcome arising from society *not* making concerted efforts to cut greenhouse gases. It would be an outcome arising from society *making* a concerted effort to actually increase GHG emissions by using more coal.
If I try my best to straw man their arguments, I could envision a way out there scenario under which the developing world said "f#%k it. We'll burn the cheapest stuff to make electricity we can. And when some day someone figures out a cheaper Fischer Tropsch process, we'll turn the dirty sh#t into liquid fuel, too."
Could that result in 5-6X coal consumption? Doubtful. Physical limitations and economics might have cut that well short before it ever got that far.
But even still, and to your point, ever portraying that as "business as usual" or even remotely likely was misinformation/malinformation/disinformation before punks like Imran Ahmed ever dreamed up CCDH.
Years ago I played around with the CAL Adapt model used by various state agencies.
https://cmip5.cal-adapt.org/help/faqs/which-rcp-scenarios-should-i-use-in-my-analysis/
This morning I noticed this-
https://www.energy.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2019-11/Projections_CCCA4-CEC-2018-006_ADA.pdf
…”The model with the weighted rank closest to 1 across all metrics and both RCPs (4.5 and 8.5) is HadGEM2-ES, the “warm/dry” model. The model with the weighted rank closest to the average value across all metrics/RCPs is CanESM2, the “average” model. The model with the weighted rank closest to 10 is CNRM-CM5, the “cool/wet” model. The final selected model, MIROC5, is the one that has the pattern of rankings that is most unlike the other three models and is chosen to give better coverage of the full spread of 10 California GCM model results.”…
and recalled that it took a lot of effort to type out punch cards long ago to run a program.....
GCM's perfectly fit the old quip about models:
"All models are wrong. Some are useful."
Too many things/interactions going in a system we don't understand well enough yet to reduce to model equations as currently constructed, especially given giant geographic data gaps, parameterization to fill those gaps, etc.