Global warming - an urgent problem requiring radical solution (no politics or religion)

It is not Elrochs opinion or my opinion that is right or important. It is the scientific consensus - the 97% of experts who have spent their whole career studying all the relevant data and who have concluded that there is no doubt - human co2 emissions are causing warming.

We have to trust in them. 

So why did you try and make the point, in your first post, that human welfare and the environment are somehow different objectives? 

@NoahDr 

You said in #8051

"The thing I don’t like is when the environment or nature is placed above human lives". 

Which implies that they can be separated out as objectives. 

Not trying to rouse anything, just to establish what you mean so I know whether to agree or disagree. 

The environment must be above everything. Always.

I think different priorities need to be balanced. People matter a lot. Other species matter too. The environment we all share matters a great deal.

Fortunately it is not a matter of either/or, it is a matter of finding ways of living that respect all priorities.

It's really a bit like thinking about the rights of individual people. You could say these rights are in conflict: you having things means someone else doesn't have them. They would be better off if they could just take your things! But respecting rights needs to be extended beyond those of people: the world we live in is not just something suitable for exploitation in any way we want.

You could choose to take the view that it is literally only the rights of people that matter and everything else only has value only as a means to the desires of people, but that seems a shallow, crass and inaccurate view of a world from which we arose.

If there`s one thing I know it is that at any given time 95% of the population is always wrong.

Global warming can fit into this nicely, some Hoaxes are very cleaver and believable and the people that get caught in them are gullible, followers and need to have a ''golden calf'' to look up to. 

Yes I agree with most of that. Thought you were trying to make the point that giving up fossil fuels will cause too much hardship but you weren't. If I'm combative it's because I think there is a strand of US thinking that because the past economic successes have been built on fossil fuels, then all future developments have to be as well. And I think it is worth challenging that thinking because we really do have to change in order to protect future development of not just the US but everywhere. 

Well that makes it a strong likelihood that you are wrong doesn't it? And like you say, some hoaxes are very clever - for example the oil companies that deliberately sought to create the impression that the science was not settled when their own experts were telling them (back in the 1980/90's) that there were going to be consequences to polluting the atmosphere with co2. 

"MICHAEL_SCHMIDT_GM" has not posted a single iota of rational basis for his opinion despite multiple requests, which indicates just how vacuous it is. He sticks to the notion that all opinions on a scientific question are equally valid, regardless of whether they have any scientific basis!

He genuinely doesn't understand how basing understanding of the world on objective scientific reasoning is the best approach and is a victim of pathological thinking in believing there has been a long term global conspiracy of the world's scientists (all those who understand the scientific method, not just climate scientists) and joined unanimously by the entire world's governments (for no conceivable reason).

Some people are simply incapable of applying common sense to their world view, and lack the rationality and objectivity to motivate this.

Very good and balanced article explaining the challenges facing renewables and how we can overcome them. 

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23831810-100-how-to-keep-the-lights-on-without-burning-the-planet/?cmpid=ILC|NSNS|2018_webpush&utm_medium=ILC&utm_source=NSNS&utm_campaign=webpush-Roost-renewablesSun

@Michael

You haven't made a single statement expressing your opinion (except that you think AGW is a hoax).

All you have done is criticise other people's opinions while getting offended when people contradict you.

How about actually posting some data that supports your argument - oh yeah - I forgot - there isn't any.

He is an opinion with nothing behind it.

I don't have a New Scientist subscription, so can't see most of that article, unfortunately. Do summarise! I am interested in the precise technology to which they are referring.

Here is the new scientist article copied and pasted - 

By Peter Fairley

TO STAND any chance of halting runaway climate change, we need to squelch carbon emissions down to near zero by mid-century. That means getting off filthy fossil fuels – and fast. Few scientists would disagree with that, but there is precious little consensus on how to do it. Nuclear fission power is expensive and mired in controversy. Nuclear fusion, directly harnessing the kind of reactions that power the sun, remains a distant dream. Meanwhile, renewable energy is too unreliable to meet all our power demands.

Or is it? Clean energy technologies have come on leaps and bounds in the past decade or so. More recently, an impassioned debate has broken out among energy experts as to whether “100 per cent renewables” is now within our grasp and, if so, how we get there. “We can really mess this up,” says Dan Kammen, an energy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “Just because we can make the shift doesn’t mean we will.” But the path we need to take – and the hurdles we face – are increasingly clear.

The renewables revolution has gathered momentum in recent years thanks to free-falling prices. And as clean becomes cheap, installation is surging. The world added 98 gigawatts (GW) of solar energy last year – more than any other energy source. Over half of that, 53 GW, was in China, which has long been the world’s biggest consumer of dirty coal.

In California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, renewables already provide over a third of electricity and will surpass 50 per cent well before 2030. Germany is aiming to get at least 80 per cent of its power renewably by 2050. Even oil and gas nations are setting ambitious renewables goals – the United Arab Emirates, for instance, plans to shift 44 per cent of its power to renewables by 2050.

That’s great, but not enough. Tackling climate change requires more than just revamping the power grid. Converting services that currently run on fossil fuels, from transportation and heating to heavy industry, is also crucial. After increasing energy efficiency across the board, electrifying as many fuel-guzzlers as possible is the cheapest way to limit global warming to the target of 2°C above pre-industrial levels, according to the International Energy Agency.

That is a huge undertaking, and it is only just getting started (see “Electrifying!”). Even if you just bring a few of the sectors that rely on burning fossil fuels onto the grid, the figures are daunting. Right now the world gets just a quarter of its electricity from renewables. In Europe, grid experts estimate that renewable generation must quadruple by 2050 (see “New generation”).

Such a transition brings economic challenges. Renewables cost many times more to install than fossil generators, and workers will be dislocated as fossil industry jobs disappear. Low operating costs and reduced wholesale prices will also undercut the business case for flexible power sources, which means the way electricity is traded on the wholesale market will have to change. Ultimately, however, renewables deliver economically by slashing spending on fossil fuel and avoiding environmental catastrophe, which hurts economic growth.

In 2015, Mark Jacobson of Stanford University took the bull by the horns, publishing a blueprint for shifting the US exclusively to wind, solar and hydro power by 2050 – not just for electricity, but for all of the country’s energy needs. He and his colleagues calculated that it would require a 25-fold increase in renewable capacity over the next 35 years. They subsequently extended the award-winning roadmap to 139 countries, accounting for 99 per cent of global emissions.

Not everyone was convinced. Last summer, a group of researchers led by Christopher Clack, founder of a company called Vibrant Clean Energy, published a stinging riposte, arguing that Jacobson’s plan rested on “implausible and inadequately supported assumptions”. Jacobson sued Clack and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which published the original paper and the rebuttal, for libel. He argued that the Clack pack’s attack mischaracterised his modelling assumptions as errors, and that the journal had violated its own publishing rules. It didn’t go down well. After taking flak for what many saw as an effort to stifle debate, Jacobson dropped the lawsuit in February.

What that spat and the whole 100-per-cent renewables argument really revolves around is one inescapable fact: the most abundant sources of renewable energy, namely wind and the sun, are capricious. The sun goes down, the wind drops, and seasons vary every year. The supply of renewable energy can plummet inconveniently just when local demand is peaking.

We can cope with that up to a point by tweaking today’s grid. But the variability challenge really starts to bite when renewables exceed about 70 to 80 per cent, according to modelling by the Hawaiian Electric Company. Hawaii is the only US state that’s already mandated to get to 100 per cent renewable power by mid-century (see “Success stories”) – an ambition the company’s vice president Colton Ching calls “big, hairy and audacious”.

That’s why Clack and some of his colleagues prefer not to rule out other low-carbon sources designed to produce power on demand: nuclear reactors and coal or gas generators that capture the CO2 they produce. But both are punishingly expensive to build and operate and nuclear in particular enjoys precious little public support. “I was a nuclear-trained officer in the US Navy,” says Doug Houseman, a smart grid expert who has consulted for more than 100 major energy companies. “I’m a big fan. But the political climate is such that the chances that we’re going to be able to build sufficient nuclear [plants] are negligible.”

For a growing number of energy companies, then, there is no option but to aggressively pursue 100 per cent renewables. “There is no future for anything that isn’t renewable,” says Ernesto Ciorra, the chief innovation officer at power and gas giant Enel. Everyone admits that it will be challenging. So how do we do it?

One way to deal with daily fluctuations in renewable energy supply is by finding clever ways to shift demand to take up surplus wind and solar when supply is running hot, and to defer consumption when it is not (see “Managing expectations”). The other way to cope, of course, is simply to stockpile the surplus so we can use it when demand peaks.

Supercharged batteries such as the sprawling lithium-ion facility Tesla recently installed in Jamestown, Australia, are the most obvious option. Boasting a capacity of 100-megawatts, this is the world’s most powerful battery, for now at least. It can power up to 30,000 homes – albeit just for an hour.

In fairness, the Tesla battery was built as backup for South Australia, which has suffered a series of recent blackouts. Even so, its limitations go to show that although batteries could plausibly hold enough juice to cope with day-to-day peaks in demand, their cost makes them a prohibitively expensive answer to monthly and seasonal fluctuations, which are by far the biggest block in the road to 100 per cent renewables.

Pumped up

We don’t yet have devices capable of storing several months’ worth of renewable energy at a reasonable price, which is what we will need. But some well-tested solutions can take us a long way, and we have a raft of more innovative options that could be scaled up.

One trusty storage technology capable of doing a lot more is hydropower. Hydro reservoirs are giant reserves that store rain and meltwater, ready to be released through energy-generating turbines when demand peaks. Some hydropower plants can also use excess off-peak energy to pump water back uphill, where it recharges the reservoir, ready for another run through the power turbines. This pumped hydro technology accounts for the vast majority of global electricity storage and yet there is plenty of room to grow.

No wonder it’s back in fashion big time in some parts of the world. China more than doubled its pumped hydro capacity over the last decade and is in the process of more than doubling this again. Technology upgrades, meanwhile, are letting places that lack hilly geography or plentiful fresh water get in on the act. Australia, for instance, is evaluating a massive coastal plant to store power by raising seawater from Spencer Gulf to a reservoir 260-meters above sea level on the adjacent plateau.

But tapping hydropower for storage is complicated by other environmental concerns. Most of the water that drives the power-generating turbines must also sustain river ecosystems, irrigate crops and slake the thirst of cities. Then there’s the need to flood tracts of land for reservoirs, often displacing settled communities.

Perhaps the most promising alternatives are rapidly improving techniques that convert surplus electricity into combustible hydrogen, methane or even synthetic diesel – fuels that, unlike electricity, lend themselves to bulk storage. Power to Gas (PtG), as it is known, begins by using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The energetic hydrogen gas can then cleanly fuel cars and trucks or fire-up industrial boilers.

A limited amount of hydrogen can also be compressed and fed into gas pipeline networks and their large storage sites, ready for delivery when demand peaks. The hydrogen can even be reacted with CO₂ to produce renewable methane, which could replace fossilised natural gas altogether.

Unlimited storage

In a world brimming with depleted gas fields, the storage potential is essentially unlimited. Ireland’s gas distributors already keep several weeks’ supply on hand by injecting natural gas into the depleted Kinsale gas field off shore from Cork, says Jerry Murphy, a bioenergy researcher at University College Cork. There is no reason we can’t take advantage of similar sites to store renewable gas.

PtG remains an emerging technology, and some experts dismiss it because hydrogen electrolysers – the devices that use electricity to split water – are less energy efficient and several times more expensive than batteries. Then again, others think this may be misreading the economics of long-term power storage. Battery costs explode as you multiply the amount of energy to be stored, says Ken Dragoon, who runs Flink Energy Consulting in Portland, Oregon. You have to buy twice as much battery capacity to store twice as much energy, whereas with electrolysers, doubling the gas produced from surplus power simply means operating the same equipment for twice as long. “At some point it becomes cheaper to use the electrolyser,” says Dragoon. The amount of storage needed for a 100 per cent renewable energy system is way beyond that economic crossover.

These sorts of solutions could overcome short-term variations in renewables’ generating capacity over hours or days, and even take some of the strain from inter-seasonal variability. The rest will require a different approach: rather than hoarding electricity locally, share it widely. After all, the wind is always blowing somewhere, and where it’s not there may be sunshine. If you can zap enough wind and solar power from one place to another, you need less on reserve. That will require continental supergrids that move power more efficiently than we do today.

The technology exists: unlike conventional AC power lines, where electricity flows near the surface of a power line, high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission uses its full cross-section and thus encounters less resistance along the way. It can transmit big power without big losses over thousands of kilometres, and it can do so whenever we are ready. Continental supergrids can be built as soon as the power companies give the green light, says Rajendra Iyer, at General Electric’s HVDC business unit. “The DC grid solutions are there. They can be deployed any time.”

They already are in China, which has built a series of massive lines to supply its coastal megacities. This year, the State Grid Corporation of China expects to deploy its first 1,100,000-volt DC technology: a 3324-kilometre line capable of carrying 12 GW, roughly half of Spain’s average consumption, that will put idled wind and solar farms in China’s north-west back in operation. This “ultra-high voltage” tech also underpins its proposal to create a global supergrid that would make renewable energy relatively steady, cheap and bountiful. Imagine solar power from the Sahara available across Asia and Europe and you get an idea of China’s ambition.

It sounds like a no-brainer. For inter-continental supergrids, however, the challenges are geopolitical and cultural. Nations must be willing to place their trust in imported energy – not so different from today’s dependence on oil and gas produced in only a few parts of the world, but also not a minor complication at a time of increasing international tension. The discord that delayed the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, and which now plagues its sequel, foreshadows the geopolitical hurdles facing supergrids.

The other barrier is public resistance. Opposition from communities that new DC power lines would traverse is one of the main reasons why Europe’s transmission operators have, to date, stopped short of planning a continental supergrid.

Europe can probably get by without one. A technical study called the eHighways 2050 project, completed in 2015, suggests that Europe could shift to 100 per cent renewable power by expanding links between neighbouring countries rather than sending long lines across them. But foregoing a supergrid may raise energy costs, and even the smaller links Europe is planning face concerted local opposition. In 2013, Germany’s grid regulator approved a trio of HVDC links to balance North Sea wind power against solar energy from southern Germany. Grid operators vowed they would be ready before the last nuclear power plants in the country shut down, planned for 2022. But under public pressure the German government dictated the power cables should run underground, delaying the project until at least 2025.

That sort of conflict, together with the technical and economic challenges for both super-charged storage and supergrids, makes the shift to 100 per cent renewable power seem daunting in the extreme. Yet many scientists are more optimistic than ever. Jacobson remains bullish, and others see change in the wind too. “This is no longer just people like me who have been arguing for a renewable future for a long time, but also sceptics and more real-world focused engineers who thought it was a fiction,” says Kammen, who was among the authors on the paper criticising Jacobson’s blueprint.

The real question, they say, is not whether we can get to 100 per cent renewable energy, but whether we will do it in time. Moving fast means saying no to new fossil fuel generators, accelerating renewable installations, sustaining innovation to continue cutting storage and transmission costs and rethinking power markets.

As Jean-Baptiste Paquel, senior advisor for ENTSO-e, the Brussels-based consortium of European grid operators, says: “If you want to make this change and make it affordable, you need to push for all of these solutions.”