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Quark Blast wrote: It’s time to end subsidies for burning wood from forests
”CCN” wrote: Many are surprised to learn the scale of the problem*. But with nearly €7 billion per year being spent on subsidizing the burning of wood in Europe, it is little wonder that wood pellet use has exploded from 17 Mt in 2013 to 26 Mt in 2018, a 50% jump in five years. If nothing is done, there are worrying signs that this huge growth will accelerate, as European coal plants look to shift to wood burning….
This leads to a large initial increase in carbon emissions, creating a “carbon debt,” which grows over time as more trees are harvested for continuing bioenergy use. Regrowing trees and displacing fossil fuels may eventually pay off this “carbon debt”, but regrowth is slow and the world does not have long to solve climate change. As numerous studies have shown, this burning of wood will increase warming for decades to centuries. This is true even when the wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas. Overall, for each kilowatt-hour of heat or electricity produced, using wood initially is likely to add two to three times as much carbon to the air as fossil fuels.
Sadly, and totally expected, is the fact that these^ facts were known well before the recent push for biomass fuel expansion.
Will these 500 petitioners have their day at COP26? Or will moneyed interests continue to rule the GND?
My money is on the latter. Let’s hope I lose this bet.
Raj Kumar Singh understands the issue.
”CCN” wrote: Raj Kumar Singh described net zero goals as “pie in the sky” during a global summit hosted by the International Energy Agency (IEA) designed to create global momentum for achieving net zero emissions by the middle of the century.
The virtual ministerial dialogue was attended by more than 40 ministers from large emitting nations.
“You have countries whose per
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Gravy
If we say you won the forum how long before you post again?
Ok, I'm standing with QB at this point. He makes a substantive post with links and everything and your only response is to just insult QB.
If that is the best you've got, I declare victory for QB.
Just report posts you think don't meet the community guidelines. Much better than your moral grandstanding.
So for the non-QBs here, how are you all feeling about life, the climate, and everything?
For my part the general attitude of pessimism (as distinct from cynicism) about the future of the climate hasn't improved since the last time I posted much in this thread, circa 2017.
To the non-QBs here: I recall someone said we'd lose ~90-95% of species. Is that mostly going to be a chain reaction from losing a few keystone species, like wasps and bees, and the like?
james014Aura wrote: To the non-QBs here: I recall someone said we'd lose ~90-95% of species. Is that mostly going to be a chain reaction from losing a few keystone species, like wasps and bees, and the like? Well if you manage to turn your rainforests into a desert without having a rainforest the critters can move into that's going to lose a lot of biodiversity on its own. 95% seems a little high to me but catastrophic wouldn't be an understatement. On the geological record humans already look like a mass extinction event.
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I suspect someone who had expertise on the subject would say "it depends".
1. Some species are very sensitive to temperature changes. A couple degrees difference one way or the other and they either explode in population, or rapidly decline. In the Caribbean for example, some islands are seeing a lack of cooler temps at higher elevations, so various insects are seeing population growth as you go up a mountain, but at the same time other insects aren't tolerant of those higher temps or lose to these new neighbors.
2. There are many other types of environmental damage people can do. Habitat fragmentation is one that doesn't get as much hype. One of the best studied examples though is lyme disease. As forest fragments get smaller, the most common mammal species to survive in them is the white-footed mouse. The white-footed mouse is likely to be a carrier of lyme disease. Ticks that feed off white-footed mice are more likely to catch lyme disease. The more ticks with lyme disease, the more likely humans come into contact with lyme disease. Bigger forests mean that a lower % of animals that ticks feed on are white-footed mice, and those other animals are less likely to carry lyme disease. What does this mean for extinction? As humans carve up the landscape for housing, roads, even farms, natural habitats get smaller. Not just reduced in overall size, but reduced in contiguous size. It's this contiguous size that is very important to the diversity of species. Not just the raw number of total animals, but what species are represented. Building a road through a forest doesn't just make the forest smaller by the area of the road, it can turn it into two separate and smaller forests.
3. Some animals or plants are dependent on specific animals or plants. As extinctions from other sources increase, then this category will necessarily cause a cascade. How deep this one will go, I have no clue. As lone as large portions of the Earth's surface are still habitable by some form of plant and bacterial life, it won't completely wipe out life, but it might come close.
I suspect that #2 is a much larger problem that we've realized. In the US and Europe, something like 95% of the wetlands that existed 200 years ago are now gone, but half of that happened in just the last 60 years. Fewer smaller wetlands is a form of habitat fragmentation. It led to an amazing agricultural boom, but I think this has played a large role in the disappearance of species like bees. Those former wetlands were often lacking forest cover, which means smaller flowering plants would have thrived there. Fewer flowering plants for bees? Fewer bees.
So it seems we’re Living in a Climate Emergency yet it’s not certain we can stop selling PHEV vehicles by 2025 even though they are openly acknowledged to have CO2 emissions higher than the conventional cars they were purportedly designed to replace.
It will be interesting to witness if something aside from yet more tedium-on-paper will come out of COP26 this November in Scotland. If they can’t universally agree to testable and actionable requirements for a Net Carbon Zero 2050 I’ll need to research how much over a +2.5°C year 2100 we’re in for. And by “we” I mean to speak metaphorically as all present company is apt to be well and permanently dead by then.
Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Quark Blast wrote: So it seems we’re Living in a Climate Emergency yet it’s not certain we can stop selling PHEV vehicles by 2025 even though they are openly acknowledged to have CO2 emissions higher than the conventional cars they were purportedly designed to replace.
It will be interesting to witness if something aside from yet more tedium-on-paper will come out of COP26 this November in Scotland. If they can’t universally agree to testable and actionable requirements for a Net Carbon Zero 2050 I’ll need to research how much over a +2.5°C year 2100 we’re in for. And by “we” I mean to speak metaphorically as all present company is apt to be well and permanently dead by then.
Your first linked article that you use as “evidence” that we are in some form of crisi begins with the heading “Opinion” and your second linked article doesn’t contain the statement you claim it ‘acknowledges’ in your post but does include the caveat: “ This is a change in the group’s position from as recently as 2018, when it saw PHEVs as a transition technology.” No mention of hard science is made, since the article is about an NGO urging a change in standards to expedite adoption of Fully Electric Vehicles by outclassing plug in hybrids.
I thought you were "[hear] to discuss climate change and how global humanity might effectively go about mitigating AGW." This doesn't seem to be a dialogue about we might effectively mitigate so much as it is yet more monologuing about how we can't.
In TX all indicators of Coronavirus infection have decreased since the mask mandate was lifted despite all the fear-hype. Imagine that, science worked! Same thing happened in FL!
Deep Cleaning Isn’t a Victimless Crime
The CDC has finally said what scientists have been screaming for months: The coronavirus is overwhelmingly spread through the air, not via surfaces.
As if we didn't already know this. Like takeout has been ok virtually everywhere since the pandemic began but it took over a year for the CDC to acknowledge this. Yeaaaah.... "follow the science", uh huh. At least they finally did. Eventually is better than never, right?
Speaking of science and the failure to heed it:
BI wrote: Indian Point's closure is being celebrated as a long and hard-fought win for environmentalists.
In reality, it's a pyrrhic victory.
It's very simple: No nuclear power means more fossil fuel burning, and more carbon emissions.
....A 2017 study by Environmental Progress - a pro-nuclear advocacy group of climate scientists and activists - found that Indian Point's shutdown would cause "power sector carbon emissions to skyrocket 29 percent" and that New York's dependence on fossil fuels to produce electricity will rise from 44 percent to 56 percent."
In the brilliant plan to posture for better climate optics no one involved thought to consider the consequences. As the article says, "Add up all the energy produced by all of New York's solar and wind turbines combined, and it still doesn't produce enough juice to match just one of Indian Point's three reactors".
How do intelligent people miss seeing a problem that large?
Same way as this I imagine:
There has been lots of "Ra-ra!" ahead of the virtual climate summit later this week but, as has been noted, there's not likely anything new to come out of it.
politico wrote: India’s environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, underscored that challenge in remarks Wednesday reported by the Hindustan Times, saying his country will not bow to pressure from the wealthier nations that have done the most to warm the Earth. “We are not responsible for the climate change that is happening,” he said. India, China and other nations seem oblivious that though they technically may not be responsible for much of the climate change that is happening at present, they are undoubtedly going to be largely responsible for the increased climate change impacts that will happen later this century. I look at this week's summit as a preamble for COP26. I expect lots of words and little action. If we do get action this week it will be against coal financing but really how much faster will that get pushed out? Maybe a little. Working against that is the push to definance natural gas projects. If you do that China will be financing coal in the developing world because no one else will.
We have a quickly vanishing carbon "budget" and we have a limited time to get to Net Zero Carbon. The shot-callers are banking in a big way, in part, on wind power.
Can we build that much wind power capacity in the time we have left?
How much of the carbon "budget" gets spent to do so?
Are there better (read: lower CO2 emissions) options than wind power?
Habitat fragmentation is a very large problem for industrial scale wind power projects. Looking past the copious hype to build wind power and there is very little consideration of what all that habitat fragmentation will do to various endangered and threatened species.
How many lawsuits and delays do you think there will be for consideration of things like Sprague's Pipit, Baird's Sparrow, or various Longspurs?
Or seguing back to the "reforestation" effort in the Saudi Peninsula. No doubt it's worth some investment but nothing like the hype it is receiving. I looked into it as best as I was able and I come up with nothing like the thoughtful scientific approach we see here:
Tackling Climate Change in the Mantiqueira Mountains of Brazil
Does the Saudi effort compare favorably?
The near miss incidents and environmental concerns, decades old, that prompted the eventual closure of Indian Point. I thought if QB wanted to point out how dumb closing the plant was, we should at least have the whole picture for why this is happening. Quark Blast, here's some words on a screen reminding you, ONCE AGAIN, to actually show all context for your points.
See yes - it is widely acknowledged that NYC will have to now rely on more carbon-emitting energy generation until the state's ambitious 70% of all energy generated by renewables plan is fully in effect. However, when parts are obsolete, the Hudson is being irradiated, millions of fish or aquatic organisms are dying off and the spent fuel pools are one seismic event away from becoming a lake of nuclear waste fire, there MIGHT be some other environmental reasons why moving away from a plant originally commissioned in the late 50's might be prudent.
I'm not sayin, I'm just sayin.
Also... WHO ever said that following the science re: Covid and mask mandates was bad? Folks freaked out on the TX decision b/c the fear at the time was with no mask mandate and businesses/schools open, the disease would surge... BECAUSE there was no mask mandate to follow the science. The reason the numbers are the way that they are is due in part to businesses in TX doing their OWN mask mandate.
In other words, we have no idea if there's vindication for the doomsayers who predicted a surge in TX b/c of no mask mandate b/c the mask mandate just shifted from the governor's office to the local businesses/facilities.
I frankly have no idea what the Co2 budget left for India and China's upcoming climate efforts. I have no idea if we can build out wind and solar fast enough. I don't have the numbers on the destruction of habitats re: wind and solar farm builds.
I do know from the piece I linked to that Indian Point is contributing to the desctruction of the Hudson and any habitats that would impact, though again I don't have the numbers. Is there more impact leaving that plant in place versus removing it and building off-shore wind farms? I have NO idea.
I DO however know however that literally nothing I just said matters to you Quark Blast. You will not adjust your point of view. This is not a discussion or even a debate. This entire thread is a museum of your opinions and we are as worthless as words on a page.
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I've just removed a very large number of posts. Please stick to the topic, and stop insulting each other.
The belief that automakers will continue selling ICE vehicles for decades becomes more and more difficult to maintain as they move up their dates to stop making them... and now this;
Cadillac ends development of new ICE models, effective immediately
Meanwhile, NOAA is updating US weather maps based on another decade of data (i.e. up to 2020);
Change in US temperature since 1901
Change in US temperature and precipitation over past decade
These clearly show increasing temperatures and shifting precipitation. The southwest US continues to dry out, increasing the incidence of wildfires and the expansion of desert areas.
Finally, the US and China are both expected to announce significant new efforts to reduce emissions today. These two countries represent roughly 43% of global emissions and the major forces behind modern emissions (i.e. consumer culture and rapid economic growth) and thus are key to establishing an effective global strategy.
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