Report on the frequency of billion dollar disasters now
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/calculat ... M_KcsKJ9Ug
Over the cliff
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Rideback
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Rideback
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Re: Over the cliff
I kind of suspect that the $80,000 figure came from a figure quoted in this article talking about Ontario, Canada or CA which is not California.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ ... -1.6224159
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ ... -1.6224159
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Fun CH
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Re: Over the cliff
source please for that $80,000 number to hook up to the grid.mister_coffee wrote: ↑Tue Apr 05, 2022 9:10 am How it adds up:
As an example of the absurdities we are living in, the average cost for connecting a home to the grid in California is now over $80,000. You can build yourself an excellent and more than adequate off-grid system for quite a bit less than that.
What's so funny 'bout peace love and understanding--Nick Lowe
Can't talk to a man who don't want to understand--Carol King
Can't talk to a man who don't want to understand--Carol King
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mister_coffee
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Re: Over the cliff
How it adds up:
- There appear to be multiple technological pathways to a sustainable, carbon-free future economy. It is unlikely that resource limitations will make all of them impractical.
- Of those technological pathways, many appear to be less expensive (and sometimes far less expensive) than our current energy system. Many of them are less mature technologies where future dramatic cost reductions are probable.
- At least some of these technologies are likely to scale extremely large, and make it possible for more people to live and get fat and lazy like Americans.
- Incumbent players, notably fossil fuel companies and utilities, are likely to fight most of these changes to the very end. And they have formidable political and institutional allies.
David Bonn 
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Over the cliff
From Inside Climate News, reporting
'Whatever words and phrases the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may have been parsing late into Sunday night, its new report, issued Monday, boils down to yet another dire scientific warning. Greenhouse gas emissions need to peak by 2025 to limit global warming close to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), as targeted by the Paris Agreement, the report says.
In a way, it’s a final warning, because at the IPCC’s pace, the world most likely will have burned through its carbon budget by the time the panel releases its next climate mitigation report in about five or six years.
Even with the climate clock so close to a deadline, it’s not surprising that the IPCC struggled to find consensus during the two-week approval session, said Paul Maidowski, an independent Berlin-based climate policy researcher and activist. The mitigation report may be the most challenging of the three climate assessments that are done every five to seven years under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, he said.
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The first two reports of each IPCC assessment cycle, one on the physical basis of climate science, and another about impacts and adaptation, are mostly based on unyielding physics, like how much global temperature goes up for every added increment of CO2, and how fast and high sea level will rise based on that warming.
But the mitigation report, which outlines choices society can make to affect the trajectory of climate change, has to reconcile those scientific realities with economic and political assumptions that are not constrained by physics, Maidowski said. Other researchers have described the IPCC report as a mechanism to determine what is politically possible, he added. If those assumptions—for example about future availability of carbon dioxide removal technology—don’t materialize, “then you are left with illusions, essentially,” he said.
The IPCC has “blinded itself” to deeper questions of sustainability and is thus asking the wrong questions, like how to decouple economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions, he added. Instead, it should be more up front about acknowledging the physical limits of the planet, and start asking how to downscale current resource consumption to a sustainable level.
The report found that “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5°C is beyond reach.”
On the hopeful side, the panel noted that renewable energy costs have dropped by as much as 85 percent in the past decade, and that new policies in many countries have accelerated deployment of wind and solar power.
Deforestation rates are dropping in some regions, which leaves more trees to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, showing that improved agriculture and forestry practices can deliver “large-scale” emissions reductions. However, land cannot compensate for delayed emissions reductions in other sectors,” the panel warned.
An Unrealistic Leap of Faith
The contradictions between scientific reality and hopeful political assumptions identified by Maidowski are clear in the new report, which says, on the one hand, that greenhouse emissions need to peak in the next three years, while also finding that average annual greenhouse gas emissions from 2010 to 2019 were higher than in any previous decade.
Believing that emissions can peak by 2025 on that trajectory requires an enormous and unrealistic leap of faith, and many climate scientists, including NASA researcher Peter Kalmus, are not buying it.
“This IPCC report is absolutely harrowing. Wake up everyone,” Kalmus wrote on Twitter. “Brief summary of the new IPCC report: We know what to do, we know how to do it, it requires taking toys away from the rich, and world leaders aren’t doing it,” he continued.
Kalmus supports Scientist Rebellion, researchers who say the climate crisis requires much more drastic action than world leaders have been willing to take so far. The group marked release of the report with scientist-led protests at universities worldwide. University protests are part of a growing wave of activism aimed at disrupting normalcy to try and generate more public awareness of the need for transformative change, according to the Climate Emergency Fund, a nonprofit that funds climate protests.
Kalmus also focused on how much more carbon dioxide can be emitted before missing the Paris Agreement target. He said there are only about 400 gigatons left in the carbon budget, and the new report shows that the world is on a path to produce more than twice as much, with projected emissions from energy production, industry, transportation, development and land use adding up to about 850 gigatons of carbon by 2100.
“If just the currently planned stuff is built and used, we’ll blow past that budget by a factor of two,” he said. “The numbers are there, the policy makers are completely ignoring them. They’re saying, ‘we have to listen to the scientists,’ but they’re not. And actually, they’ve stopped saying that now.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the messaging has changed, he added.
“They are talking about building more fossil fuel infrastructure,” he said. “The way it’s going right now, we’re equally dead with Republicans or Democrats. What that says is, we need an uprising. This report doesn’t quite spell that out, but you only have to read between the lines a little bit.”
The most optimistic path identified in the new report shows that it is possible to limit global warming, but only with deep emissions cuts in all economic sectors and in all parts of the world, said climate scientist Bill Hare, who has worked on IPCC reports for decades and is now CEO of Climate Analytics, a nonprofit international climate think tank.
'Whatever words and phrases the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may have been parsing late into Sunday night, its new report, issued Monday, boils down to yet another dire scientific warning. Greenhouse gas emissions need to peak by 2025 to limit global warming close to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), as targeted by the Paris Agreement, the report says.
In a way, it’s a final warning, because at the IPCC’s pace, the world most likely will have burned through its carbon budget by the time the panel releases its next climate mitigation report in about five or six years.
Even with the climate clock so close to a deadline, it’s not surprising that the IPCC struggled to find consensus during the two-week approval session, said Paul Maidowski, an independent Berlin-based climate policy researcher and activist. The mitigation report may be the most challenging of the three climate assessments that are done every five to seven years under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, he said.
Newsletters
We deliver climate news to your inbox like nobody else. Every day or once a week, our original stories and digest of the web’s top headlines deliver the full story, for free.
ICN Weekly
Saturdays
Our #1 newsletter delivers the week’s climate and energy news – our original stories and top headlines from around the web.
Get ICN Weekly
Inside Clean Energy
Thursdays
Dan Gearino’s habit-forming weekly take on how to understand the energy transformation reshaping our world.
Get Inside Clean Energy
Today’s Climate
Twice-a-week
A digest of the most pressing climate-related news, released every Tuesday and Friday.
Get Today’s Climate
Breaking News
Daily
Don’t miss a beat. Get a daily email of our original, groundbreaking stories written by our national network of award-winning reporters.
Get Breaking News
The first two reports of each IPCC assessment cycle, one on the physical basis of climate science, and another about impacts and adaptation, are mostly based on unyielding physics, like how much global temperature goes up for every added increment of CO2, and how fast and high sea level will rise based on that warming.
But the mitigation report, which outlines choices society can make to affect the trajectory of climate change, has to reconcile those scientific realities with economic and political assumptions that are not constrained by physics, Maidowski said. Other researchers have described the IPCC report as a mechanism to determine what is politically possible, he added. If those assumptions—for example about future availability of carbon dioxide removal technology—don’t materialize, “then you are left with illusions, essentially,” he said.
The IPCC has “blinded itself” to deeper questions of sustainability and is thus asking the wrong questions, like how to decouple economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions, he added. Instead, it should be more up front about acknowledging the physical limits of the planet, and start asking how to downscale current resource consumption to a sustainable level.
The report found that “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5°C is beyond reach.”
On the hopeful side, the panel noted that renewable energy costs have dropped by as much as 85 percent in the past decade, and that new policies in many countries have accelerated deployment of wind and solar power.
Deforestation rates are dropping in some regions, which leaves more trees to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, showing that improved agriculture and forestry practices can deliver “large-scale” emissions reductions. However, land cannot compensate for delayed emissions reductions in other sectors,” the panel warned.
An Unrealistic Leap of Faith
The contradictions between scientific reality and hopeful political assumptions identified by Maidowski are clear in the new report, which says, on the one hand, that greenhouse emissions need to peak in the next three years, while also finding that average annual greenhouse gas emissions from 2010 to 2019 were higher than in any previous decade.
Believing that emissions can peak by 2025 on that trajectory requires an enormous and unrealistic leap of faith, and many climate scientists, including NASA researcher Peter Kalmus, are not buying it.
“This IPCC report is absolutely harrowing. Wake up everyone,” Kalmus wrote on Twitter. “Brief summary of the new IPCC report: We know what to do, we know how to do it, it requires taking toys away from the rich, and world leaders aren’t doing it,” he continued.
Kalmus supports Scientist Rebellion, researchers who say the climate crisis requires much more drastic action than world leaders have been willing to take so far. The group marked release of the report with scientist-led protests at universities worldwide. University protests are part of a growing wave of activism aimed at disrupting normalcy to try and generate more public awareness of the need for transformative change, according to the Climate Emergency Fund, a nonprofit that funds climate protests.
Kalmus also focused on how much more carbon dioxide can be emitted before missing the Paris Agreement target. He said there are only about 400 gigatons left in the carbon budget, and the new report shows that the world is on a path to produce more than twice as much, with projected emissions from energy production, industry, transportation, development and land use adding up to about 850 gigatons of carbon by 2100.
“If just the currently planned stuff is built and used, we’ll blow past that budget by a factor of two,” he said. “The numbers are there, the policy makers are completely ignoring them. They’re saying, ‘we have to listen to the scientists,’ but they’re not. And actually, they’ve stopped saying that now.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the messaging has changed, he added.
“They are talking about building more fossil fuel infrastructure,” he said. “The way it’s going right now, we’re equally dead with Republicans or Democrats. What that says is, we need an uprising. This report doesn’t quite spell that out, but you only have to read between the lines a little bit.”
The most optimistic path identified in the new report shows that it is possible to limit global warming, but only with deep emissions cuts in all economic sectors and in all parts of the world, said climate scientist Bill Hare, who has worked on IPCC reports for decades and is now CEO of Climate Analytics, a nonprofit international climate think tank.
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