April 8, 2015 Buried Fuel and a Much Warmer World Scientists predict global disaster at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over pre-industrial temperatures; there is enough fossil fuel extracted and within reach to raise temperatures 16.2 degrees. ******************************************************* World leaders are once again racing to avert disastrous levels of global warming through limits on greenhouse gas emissions. An agreement may be in reach, but because of the vast supplies of inexpensive fossil fuels, protecting the world from climate change requires the even more difficult task of disrupting today’s energy markets. The White House last month released a blueprint to reduce United States emissions by as much as 28 percent by 2025. The plan lays the groundwork for the formal international climate talks this December in Paris, where the goal is a treaty on emissions that will seek to limit the rise in global temperatures to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. Beyond 3.6 degrees, scientists say, the most catastrophic climate consequences will occur, possibly including the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Forging a treaty in Paris would be no small task, yet would be just the beginning of a solution. The greater challenge will be deciding how much of the world’s abundant supply of fossil fuels we simply let lie. (Bill McKibben and more recently The Guardian have taken a maximal position in their Leave It in the Ground campaign.) There are essentially only three long-run solutions to the climate challenge. The first is to price carbon emissions to reflect the damages from climate change. In practice, this means pricing carbon in as many parts of the world as possible — and ideally, globally — so that there is a level playing field for all energy sources. There has been important progress in this area, including in the European Union, individual American states and regions (for example, California and the Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative), and parts of China. The second way to disrupt the energy market is to have low-carbon energy sources like nuclear, wind and solar become cheaper than their fossil fuel competition. Although there has been much progress in reducing the costs of wind and solar recently, they generally remain more expensive than fossil fuels. Further, the fracking revolution makes it clear that there will be continued technical advances that reduce the costs of recovering fossil fuels. The third approach is to continue using those fuels, but capture and store the carbon before it is released or pull it out of the atmosphere after its release. Neither approach has yet been proved to work at scale, and costs remain high. Even if costs come down, it will very likely remain more expensive than using fossil fuels without capture and storage, so a carbon price would be necessary for it to be applied broadly. A related idea is to reflect sunlight away from the earth so temperatures do not rise as much. This approach does not reduce the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and there is agreement that further research is necessary. If we use all of the fossil fuels in the ground, the planet will warm in a way that is difficult to imagine. Unless the economics of energy markets change, we are poised to use them. Michael Greenstone, the Milton Friedman professor of economics at the University of Chicago, runs the Energy Policy Institute there. He was the chief economist of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/u...bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&abt=0002&abg=1
" If We Dig Out All Our Fossil Fuels, Here’s How Hot We Can Expect It to Get" Great, then what are we waiting for? Let's get started!!
Every once in a while, he tries on the whole gun debate, but he gets rather hilariously beat up over that. Not that climate change is his forte', but at least he can regurgitate charts and other nonsense. Oh, and we're douchebags for saying this. I think.
There was guy named "Free Thinker" who likewise would wake up every day with a new thread bashing religion; another crazed leftist...probably raped by a priest or something similar... This fc clown can't go a few hours without another crazed "the sky is falling" post...mental illness on full display.
Yes there are so much more important things like how some liberal has done some dumb thing somewhere. Sorry to burden you with real problems and difficult thinking. I know how righties hate that.