Arkane posted:

So I initially didn't get this, but I think you are misreading status quo.

In the year 1985, we emitted about 18 Gt of CO2 and world GDP was about 12.5 trillion, a ratio of .7 trillion per gigaton. In 2000, we emitted around 23 Gt of CO2 and world GDP was 33.5 trillion, a ratio of 1.5 trillion per gigaton. In 2017 , the world GDP was ~78 trillion, and there were 32.5 Gt of CO2 emitted, 2.4 trillion per gigaton. We're using less and less carbon as a component of how wealthy the world is, and the ratio of how wealthy the world is to the amount of carbon emits has changed dramatically over time.

The RCP 8.5 "alarmist" pathway that has us shooting past 2C of warming also has us emitting 70 Gt of carbon a year in 2050 (and 100 Gt of carbon a year in 2100). This is "status quo" thinking of the mix of wealth to carbon emissions staying relatively the same, conditioned on the assumption that in order to grow the economy, we need to grow emissions. That they are coupled.

In reality, though, it is very possible that we're *VERY* close to peak carbon emissions, that economic growth and emissions growth will completely decouple:



(2017 was 32.5)

spf3million posted:

So going forward, the cumulative emissions are going to increase linearly instead of exponentially?

StabbinHobo posted:

i can't believe i made the mistake of an effortpost reply to arkane, i feel like i've been rickrolled and goatse'd in one and its all my fault because i knew better

Conspiratiorist posted:

Erstwhile? Arkane very much maintains that even if the Earth is measurably warming, the impact is insignificant, and additionally our carbon emissions might be good for the environment.

Papal Infallibility posted:

TL can you explain your assessment of the feasibility of the 2.0C pathways laid out by the IPCC, and more specifically how BECCS on a vast scale seems to be strictly required for nearly all of them?

Arkane posted:

Well you did talk about peak oil

quote:

You also said wind power would be 8% and solar 4% in 2050 when we're very near those numbers RIGHT NOW in the US (6 and 2). Guess I just had trouble grappling with someone who thought humans were going to make basically 0 progress on energy in the next 32 years.

Thug Lessons posted:

Thug Lessons posted:

I don't actually believe it's feasible. It might be, were the political will there, and you could convince governments to build nuclear on a mass scale a la France. We'll likely exceed 2C. That won't destroy the world though, it will just create more needless suffering, which we already have in spades.

Papal Infallibility posted:

So given that you are ostensibly arguing that RCP 8.5 is the most likely concentration pathway we will hit, can you elaborate on what you think the environment will be like around 2100? I’m assuming crop failures in developing countries and a significant reduction in marine life that’ll stress the ability to extract food from the ocean but I’m curious as to what you believe the human impact of that will be and/or how it would be mitigated.

AceOfFlames posted:

So where is a good place for me, a Portuguese citizen to escape to? I currently live in the Netherlands which will likely end up underwater and apparently most of Portugal will become desert. As mentioned earlier in this thread, most of Europe will become fascist so one single mention of my name will be enough to send me to a camp. What are my options?

9-Volt Assault posted:

And no, you wont be send to a camp. Nobody, not even Geert Wilders, cares about people from Portugal. They are all seen as genuine European, so it's all a-ok.

Thug Lessons posted:

He's right, of course. Doomsters rely on nothing changing, even though it already is. I don't believe wind and solar will ever be capable of replacing fossil fuels, and will instead lock in a ton of natural gas, but we're not going to stop building them just because some people are very committed to seeing the world end.

StabbinHobo posted:

- wind will continue its rapid growth, but that will still only move it from 2% of the total supply to like 8
- similarly the price of solar will keep dropping and capacity will grow very fast, but that still only means its share will go from <1% to like, 4

StabbinHobo posted:

I said wind would quadruple and solar would grow an order of magnitude, and somehow your broken stupid brain read that as "we're going to stop building them".


Seriously what is wrong with you? What makes you yearn so hard for people to say things they're not saying that your brain has to edit it in to what you read when its not there? Like, either you lack middle school reading comprehension skills, or you are one of the most disingenuous assholes I've ever come across, and I've been a member of the Something Awful forums since 2002.

StabbinHobo posted:

Seriously what is wrong with you? What makes you yearn so hard for people to say things they're not saying that your brain has to edit it in to what you read when its not there? Like, either you lack middle school reading comprehension skills, or you are one of the most disingenuous assholes I've ever come across, and I've been a member of the Something Awful forums since 2002.

Ovenmaster posted:

You're vastly underestimating solar, though. Capacity has likely already exceeded 2% globally (1.8% at the start of the year), and it's growing at a staggering 40% annually (and has been since the turn of the century). Current trends holding, you'd see your 4% in 2019-2020.

Currently six doublings away from all global capacity, at 40% growth it would reach that in 2030. That's the futurist take, and obviously very optimistic, but even fairly linear growth would have it dominating global energy production within a lifetime.

Considering those numbers, 2% to 4% in 32 years and "will grow very fast" aren't really compatible.

Arkane posted:

I suppose the basic point is that we're becoming wealthier and more advanced faster than we're feeling the ill effects of any impacts we are having on the climate. Carbon emissions are growing, but the global economy is growing much faster than carbon emissions, because we're decarbonizing.
...

Ovenmaster posted:

You're vastly underestimating solar, though. Capacity has likely already exceeded 2% globally (1.8% at the start of the year), and it's growing at a staggering 40% annually (and has been since the turn of the century). Current trends holding, you'd see your 4% in 2019-2020.

StabbinHobo posted:

Thank you, its nice to know there are still sane people reading.

Can you source some of your numbers though? I don't believe current global electricity production by solar is anywhere near 1.8% today, but good grief would I be happy to be wrong. Maybe by nameplate capacity not consumption?
Its surprisingly hard to find clear answers on this stuff, you wind up having to napkin-math back it out from a bunch of lobbyist and oil-co presentations. Also most stuff is 2011 or 2014 at best, so again if you got something I can read please share.

edit: also remember solar (or wind) can grow very fast, but since the overall production/consumption pie is *also* growing their relative percentage won't climb as fast.

quote:

sufficient to supply 1.8 percent of the world's total electricity consumption.

Thug Lessons posted:

He's right, of course. Doomsters rely on nothing changing, even though it already is. I don't believe wind and solar will ever be capable of replacing fossil fuels, and will instead lock in a ton of natural gas, but we're not going to stop building them just because some people are very committed to seeing the world end.

quote:

“Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up,” Brooks said, according to the report.

Ovenmaster posted:

This wikipage says it's:
Which admittedly doesn't have to mean that it does? But as Nocturtle says, it doesn't have to provide baseline power yet.

Joule posted:

Bitcoin's Growing Energy Problem
16 May 2018

The electricity that is expended in the process of mining Bitcoin has become a topic of heavy debate over the past few years. It is a process that makes Bitcoin extremely energy-hungry by design, as the currency requires a huge amount of hash calculations for its ultimate goal of processing financial transactions without intermediaries (peer-to-peer). The primary fuel for each of these calculations is electricity. The Bitcoin network can be estimated to consume at least 2.55 gigawatts of electricity currently, and potentially 7.67 gigawatts in the future, making it comparable with countries such as Ireland (3.1 gigawatts) and Austria (8.2 gigawatts). Economic models tell us that Bitcoin's electricity consumption will gravitate toward the latter number. A look at Bitcoin miner production estimates suggests that this number could already be reached in 2018.

StabbinHobo posted:

I said wind would quadruple and solar would grow an order of magnitude, and somehow your broken stupid brain read that as "we're going to stop building them".

Nocturtle posted:

On the subject of bitcoin:


Bitcoin is a rogue AI that's trying to kill us by accelerating global warming. Don't stare into the blockchain, it stares back.

Thug Lessons posted:

These are made-up numbers from charlatan Alex de Vries. The actual energy usage from bitcoin is maybe 5% of what he claims.

Thug Lessons posted:

These are made-up numbers from charlatan Alex de Vries. The actual energy usage from bitcoin is maybe 5% of what he claims.

Trabisnikof posted:

Really? Joule is a peer-reviewed journal and a sister journal of Cell. That's a pretty big claim that they punished made-up numbers. Cell Press is a great publisher, so it seems unlikely they'd completely whiff on publishing made up numbers.

Do you have any other peer-reviewed studies that refute this one?

quote:

Description:

Commentary articles are a platform for topical, evidence-supported opinions related to energy and of pressing interest across Joule’s broad readership.
Commentary articles will usually be single-author articles commissioned by the Editorial Office, but unsolicited contributions and multi-author contributions (for example from a coalition of experts) will be considered.
Length:

A Commentary article is limited to 2000 words, 3 figures, and 12 references.
Biography:

Authors of Commentary articles should include a short 100-word biography.
Peer Review:

Commentary articles may not be subject to peer review, at the discretion of the editorial team.

hobbesmaster posted:

That a commentary, not an article.

quote:

With publicly available Bitcoin mining machines achieving advertised efficiencies of 0.098 joule per gigahash (Table 1), and the total Bitcoin network producing 26 quintillion hashes per second, we find that this lower bound should be around 2.55 GW.

Trabisnikof posted:

Ah, my bad, but still it would be nice to have a better source to the claim it was all made up.

hobbesmaster posted:

The most advanced ASICs are not publicly available so thats how you'd claim that the true power consumption is much lower than reported. Most of those are probably being produced for alt coins though.

Trabisnikof posted:

Really? Joule is a peer-reviewed journal and a sister journal of Cell. That's a pretty big claim that they punished made-up numbers. Cell Press is a great publisher, so it seems unlikely they'd completely whiff on publishing made up numbers.

Do you have any other peer-reviewed studies that refute this one?

quote:

Nomura noted that power used to mine bitcoin is estimated at 33.2 terawatt hours. That figure came from the bitcoin energy consumption index, which is updated daily on the cryptocurrency website Digiconomist.

Digiconomist's index has emerged as something of an authority recently. The index was developed by Alex de Vries, a 28-year-old consultant for PwC with a background in data and risk analysis who now specializes in blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin. He founded Digiconomist as a hobby in 2014 and acknowledges he has no previous experience in energy economics.

...

Koomey, the Stanford University lecturer, says there are a lot of assumptions baked into the Digiconomist model. But he also claims it is fundamentally flawed because it backs into bitcoin's power consumption by estimating miners' revenues and expenses.

"Any time you do that, you introduce multiple layers of error and uncertainty," he told CNBC. "It's a completely unreliable way to do the analysis, and no credible energy analyst would ever do that."

...

"I think we need more correct figures," said Malmodin, who has created estimates of energy consumption and carbon emissions in the information and communications technology industry since 2005. "This is wrong and an unrealistic figure."