The Great Global Warming Swindle

[kandrathe]

Except, you forget the other things that have been mentioned (and I already pointed to earlier in this thread) that while the Chinese are increasing the number of coal plants, they also putting in more efficient and less climate impacting plants (by using carbon scrubbers to remove as much CO2 from the exhaust as possible).

I'm more focused on the speed of lines going up, and down.

Reaching Peak Emissions

It's coming from those that would lose a lot in profits if they had to actually build infrastructure that was more climate friendly.

Knowing what I know...

Sure. Knowing what I know, 800 times seems like a number yanked from the air. I don't dispute your experience with decommissioning existing aged infrastructure. I just like to deal with facts, not conjecture. Is there a study that shows all the money spent on clean energy research, and by whom? I believe you will find much of it is being done by fossil fuels giants looking ahead 30-40 years.

No they're not. That's the furthest thing from the truth when it comes to energy output. The typical combusion process (converting some fossil fuel to energy and bi-products) is about 2 to 3 eV (electron volt) per interaction. The typically fission reaction (splitting Uranium, Plutonium, or Thorium) is 200 MeV (Mega electron volt) which is ~100,000,000 times higher. Even the fusion reaction of H2 and H3 to He4 + n is about 12 MeV (4,000,000 to 6,000,000) more per interaction.

Again, in theory... Nuclear powered cars didn't meet the condition necessary for wide spread consumer adoption. Is there even a prototype? Personal nukes sounds like a good plan... on some other planet not populated with angry apes.

Even recombining Hydrogen and Oxygen is just as good for power output as a fossil fuel and the bi-product is water.

"Hydrogen is not a readily accessible energy source like coal or wind. It is bound up tightly in molecules such as water and natural gas, so it is expensive and energy-intensive to extract and purify. A hydrogen economy–a time in which the economy’s primary energy carrier would be hydrogen made from sources of energy that have no net emissions of greenhouse gases–rests on two pillars: a pollution-free source for the hydrogen itself and a fuel cell for efficiently converting it into useful energy without generating pollution." -- JJ Romm

Simply, fossil fuels is a dead end for power production.

Literally. You don't need to sell it to me. I'm all "Elon Musk YAY!" In a hundred, to a few hundred years from now, people will look back at our squandering of natural mineral resources the way we look back at the senseless extermination of the passenger pigeon, or old growth forests. Oil is useful for things more useful than burning it.

More important is how soon and what we need to do to limit those changes.

I think we are at the point of choosing the form of the destructor. Unless we all coordinate to sequester the last 100 years of excess CO2 in the atmosphere, you aren't going to roll back changes in the global climate system. If we gave up fossil fuels completely now, we'd starve, freeze, and die in social upheaval uprisings.

Everyone is going to get things wrong on occasion, but the fact that there's more right than wrong says something about those that refuse to think that Humans are having an effect on the climate.

The alarmism, based on that NASA paper, gave fuel to the normal ostrich, or denial response. Being imprecise, then selling it, them being wildly wrong because you didn't understand the mechanism fully is science, not politics. The issue is not that a scientist was wrong, but that it spawned a "Chicken Little" (Kylling Kluk) political movement which ends up with the full belly of Foxy Loxy (Ræv Skræv).

It isn't just what we're doing with power production, but the sheer numbers of us. With the increase in temperatures and increase in population have gone hand in hand. In 1950 there were 2.5 Billion Humans on Earth, now in 2016 it's estimated to be around 7.4 Billion Humans on Earth, almost 3 times as many and the overall change in climate started as the population has exploded over the past 60 years.

This was my original point in calling out China, and India. It seems clear that new technology can increasingly green the energy in the US, Canada, and Europe while not shocking the economy into free fall. For the West, the prospects of reducing and eliminating most fossil fuel consumption has a glimmer of hope (maybe 4 decades away, but do-able).

But, as consumer demands for stuff, and energy increases in Asia, we risk vastly increasing the amount of annual carbon contribution to the atmosphere for decades. Now, I feel it is and has been patently unfair to their people that backwards economies have been kept down, but their emergence puts pressure on limited resources, and sustainability. That is to say, as Asia's people finally rise to enjoy the comforts we've enjoyed in the West for the past century, they'd be short lived as the planet slowly dies under the weight of our combined excess consumption.