I think the statement that energy density is the key metric for batteries is wrong. It of course used to be, but it's a metric that only matters for EVs, electric planes, laptops, wearables, etc. all of which are either good enough or will never be good enough (electric planes), even with the theoretically optimal lithium-air battery. In general transportation isn't that large a % of global emissions anyway; we should offset it with carbon capture.
On the other hand, the application that really matters nowadays is grid storage, which doesn't care about gravimetric energy density at all -- it cares a little bit about volumetric energy density, but not that much since the cost of batteries to fill a grid storage facility is so much larger than the cost of the facility or the land it sits on. The metric that really matters is dollars per unit energy stored over the lifetime of the battery. A close approximant is dollars per unit energy stored in a battery -- the difference is that the former doesn't allow a battery maker to cheat by making a battery that dies after a small number of recharge cycles. Currently promising technologies (as far as I know -- I'm not a battery expert) for this are sodium-ion, iron-sulfur, and liquid electrode batteries. I think in general we're a lot farther down the learning curve for energy density than cost, which is exciting for grid storage.
Yeah, $/kWh is the much better metric. Lithium ion is getting much better for this, but it's probably never going to be good enough for more than ~day-long grid storage. That could still work, but we would need to massively overbuild in solar/wind capacity in order to be ready for stretches of high demand and low supply (i.e., cold, cloudy, winter days). What we really need is grid-scale storage than is < 1/10 the price of lithium ion. I think iron air batteries and heat batteries are the two farthest in development that could reach that range.
Electric motors use less energy. Efficiency gain. grid integration of RE/BESS, and lower PM/health cost are all compelling rationale, in addition to <GHGs, for LDV EVs. Given manufacturing/mining lead times, the tipping point of LDV ICE decline might come sooner than people realize
I don't think battery energy density in consumer goods has reached good enough yet. My Steam Deck (depending on what game I'm playing) only gets a couple of hours of battery life on a full charge! My phone hardly lasts the day. Obviously it's not very consequential compared to utility-scale storage but if battery technology continues on its current trajectory, worrying about your phone running out of charge could be a thing of the past relatively soon.
You made some claims that are well-supported by data (such as high temperatures in 2023), but then followed that up with the unsupported claim that climate chance is causing a steep rise in diasters. You say, "A steep rise in disasters over just a couple of decades has to be almost entirely due to a more dangerous natural environment." That claim so thoroughly lacks support in your post that it's hard to believe you made it. You have so thoroughly swallowed the scientifically unsupported claim that climate change is a disaster you aren't even questioning the claims being made.
The problems with that chart are numerous. Let's assume the data is accurate, which is hardly a given. The US inflation-adjusted GPD has nearly tripled, which explains most of the growth in the graph. As cities get bigger and more expensive (even on an inflation-adjusted basis), you would expect more isolated incidents to pass an arbitrary high threshold that was just barely being reached in 1980. That, of course, is what happened. So I have done a better job than Noah explaining that chart, without any reference to climate change!
Has it occurred to you that "number of billion-dollar disasters" seems like kind of an odd metric? Wouldn't we care more about total disaster cost or, even better, total disaster cost per GDP? Why focus on "number of billion-dollar disasters"? A cynic might think its because it's an arbitrary threshold that shows huge growth that doesn't reflect reality. Climate alarmists surely wouldn't act in bad faith like that, right?
Well, let's look at what climate.gov has to say! They should be a reliable source, right? This page includes a similar claim as Noah: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2023-historic-year-us-billion-dollar-weather-and-climate-disasters . A glance at the graph shows the growth in number of events is almost entirely due to an increase in billion dollar storms. The site even says, "Severe storms have caused the highest number of billion-dollar disaster events (186), but they have the lowest average event cost ($2.4 billion), not surprising given their localized nature." In other words, the growth of billion-dollar natural disasters is due to storms slightly eclipsing that threshold as urban density has increased. No link to climate change needed!
If you want to convince people that climate change is a problem for humanity, you're going to have to do better than that. I think the reason the arguments for climate change being a calamity are so weak is because there is no good science-based and data-based argument that climate change is particularly dangerous, or even a net negative. If you want a level-headed analysis of the overall effects of climate change on humanity, I suggest https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/a-climate-science-textbook.
"In fact, the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts were this high was more than 3 million years ago, during the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period, when global surface temperature was 4.5–7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5–4 degrees Celsius) warmer than during the pre-industrial era. Sea level was at least 16 feet higher than it was in 1900 and possibly as much as 82 feet higher."
Here is a scientific paper that supports their claim about sea level rise, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay3701 . Here is a relevant excerpt on sea level, " A new reconstruction of global mean sea level during the mid-Pliocene warm period indicates a rise of ∼17 m, implying near-to-complete loss of Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet with some additional contribution from East Antarctica (34)." 17 m = 56 feet.
Under a scenario of 2°C of global warming, sea levels are projected to rise by 0.3-0.93 meters by 2100 according to the IPCC, with continued rising from there. That is enough of a change and a fast enough change to matter around the margins, but it's hardly catastrophic. There will be a tiny amount less land available, which will be greatly offset by currently frozen land that is essentially unutilized. Long-term sea level rise that happens over the course of centuries is simply not a problem at a civilizational level. Even if an 82 foot increase in sea level happens by the year 3000, no one going about their lives between now and then will notice or care about any change that happens during their lifetime.
None of these claims are anywhere near as robust as presented. Look at actually sea level rise and nothing of note is happening.
The levels of fraud in climate science are so high that you unfortunately cannot take anything they say at face value. Doing so is the boat common mistake people make in these debates. Which is a pity because it would be nice to understand the climate, even if not very useful.
Thanks for the rational summary. Just the fact that Texas leads in this country in "green energy" production should help emphasize the story behind the charts. It isn't politics, it is economics and profits.
I have wondered for a while how much the climate debate in the US is harmed by the fact that it happens in Celsius.
Once this came up among my very red-state family, and on a whim I just converted units. They said something about who cares about three degrees. Since 3 degrees Celsius is about 6 degrees Fahrenheit, I just said “well if you convert to Fahrenheit that’s the summer high averaging 104 instead of 98. The reaction was shocked silence, then a subject change.
Washington DC last hit 100F in 2016, this is an unusually long stretch without hitting that benchmark.
I would recommend "Unsettled : what climate science tells us, what it doesn't, and why it matters" by Steven Koonin's(Obama's top climate scientist), a book which can be summarized as "THE DATA DOESN'T SAY THAT!"
Do red-state families not understand math or temperature scales? You obviously are biased since you first round up 2.5°C by 20% to 3° and then again round up 5.4°F to 6°F and average temperatures are not the same as average high temperatures, so maybe they were shocked at your exaggerated catastrophe sales pitch. If your summer high red-state temp average is 98°F that’s 36.7°C, so with 2 degrees of expected warming 75 years from now that makes the high increase to 38.7°C which is only 101.7°F, not 104 so your math is off in any case.
It comes from Gene Amdahl to describe his former employers sales strategy after leaving IBM in 1975. When I was at Apple in the 80s, management there still accused IBM of continuing it, at least until the short lived IBM/Apple joint collaborations shortly thereafter.
Love it ! One more set of charts you may want to add to your formidable set of today is the impact of electronics technology on efficiency. There are two levels of interest:
1) Smart infrastructure: buildings, appliances, ...... the net impact is a jump in energy efficiency (advanced)
2) Electrification of Transportation: Yes... this is EVs, but stretches into autonomy+micro mobility (early stage)
Finally, the big issue are the utilities...they more slowly, but are getting there.
Great column Noah! I think the effect from remote work is being underestimated. It’s really going to help in reducing the amount people drive. To prove that it should be one of the data points that get tracked and given equal billing with EV adoption.
Your analysis is utterly misleading as it ignores the reality of the all but inevitable catastrophic future facing humanity and the natural world.
First global warming will not stop even if net 0 is somehow reached in the coming decades.
You ignore the most critical new research in recent years which demonstrates the high likelihood that catastrophic multiple reinforcing largely irreversible tipping points are being activated at temperatures around 1.5° C to 2° C in places like the Amazon, ocean ice, permafrost the AMOC and more.
As recently as a decade or so ago scientists believed that these planetary scale critical ecosystems would not tip over until temperatures reached 3 or 4° above pre-industrial levels
So while the likelihood of higher temperatures may be somewhat less the impacts generated at lower temperature increases will doom humanity and the natural world.
One has to be willfully blind to not acknowledge that for example wildfires in the Canadian forests this past summer were multiple times more destructive than any previous year demonstrating that impacts will not increase linearly but much faster than that.
The only hope is if the world community comes together and commits to massively remove the CO2 from the atmosphere that is the direct cause of the climate crisis and also directly cools the planet through sunshine reflection massive ecosystem restoration and similar means.
This approach that I have labeled as the climate triad - accelerated emission reductions, large scale removal and direct cooling of the climate - is the only way to avoid climate catastrophe.
The statistics and trends that you mention are irrelevant in the context of the new and tragic reality as shown by recent climate science
This paper by the world’s leading tipping point researchers at Exeter University presents these grim tipping point conclusions.
Climate science has also concluded that even if tipping points are not activated at temperatures near to what the world is experiencing now the sharply elevated temperatures in existence when the world reaches net zero will remain sharply elevated for literally CENTURIES along with Accelerated sea level rise and continuing ecosystem collapse.
I guarantee that no one on the planet would look forward to living such a dystopian existence.
I haven’t even talked about the ecological collapse that is devastating the world’s oceans and much of the world’s non-human life and will only get relentlessly worse.
You have a very influential voice Noah and I hope and trust that you will take off your rose colored Climate glasses and investigate the unthinkable reality that faces humanity and the natural world in the coming years.
You're probably not wrong about the tipping points. In particular, we have what looks like a feedback loop in methane levels, and several scary things happening with climate models re: cloud feedback.
The optimistic case here is not just that we'll develop vast amounts of renewable energy, but probably that we'll also (1) be capable of deploying CO2 removal that works on a century timescale. And (2) that we'll implement geoengineering in a timely way before these tipping points become irreversible. Point (2) is the number one reason I vote: I cannot imagine a climate-denying administration stepping up decisively if scientists rang the alarm, even if addressing it was easy and the costs were manageable.
Exactly. I have written about what I called the Climate Triad - which is the only way humanity and the natural world have a chance to avoid planetary dystopia- accelerated emission reductions, large scale CO2 removal and direct cooling of the climate through sunshine reflection ecosystem restoration and other means
I encourage you to think through what the environment would look like under the "catastrophic" scenarios you proposed. There would still be farmland. There would still be a wide range of natural environments. The worst effects would be things like some people displaced due to rising sea levels and increased heat waves. At the ecosystem level, a lot of rapid local changes in climate could cause extinction of a lot of species. All of that would be bad! But the earth has experienced far hotter and higher-CO2 times in the past, and it will again. Life will live on just fine. Humanity will live on just fine. The likelihood of total environmental collapse and total civilizational collapse due to climate change is zero. For your own peace of mind, I encourage you to consider that.
Kevin. I’m afraid that your description of a future world with multiple tipping points activated is utterly devoid from reality.
Multiple breadbasket failures would be highly likely bringing starvation to billions.
Mass migration of hundreds of millions of people would de stabilize every country on the planet as we’re already beginning to see with the right wing backlash in the United States and elsewhere against even a tiny amount of migration.
The integrity of supply chains upon which civilization depends upon would collapse.
We’re already seeing the drought in Panama significantly degrade the capacity of the Panama Canal.
Farmers construction workers and others who work outside would be affected by bulb temperatures so that morbidity and mortality would skyrocket disabling workforces.
"Multiple breadbasket failures would be highly likely bringing starvation to billions."
Let's start with this one. What science-backed scenario would lead to not being able to grow crops so suddenly (within say, 5 years) in so many critical areas that there would be mass starvation? Please be specific.
One issue that people ignore is that rapid shifts in climate zones is pandemics. You're shaking a bunch of animals with a bunch of viruses with a lot of people near them.
You also have to factor in people suddenly realizing they're screwed when things have been gradually changing. See any financial crisis.
Maize yields would rise because of increased C02 concentrations, the charts in the article indicate increases in rainfall and warmer temperatures would increase growing seasons in temperate climates like Canada. The US could easily avoid a maize shortage by eliminating the Renewable Fuels Standard which now wastes 40% of US maize production for ethanol. This catastrophic tipping point scenarios are paranoid delusions.
I am not sure that I would say, "catastrophic tipping point scenarios are paranoid delusions." Believing that those scenarios are guaranteed or even highly probably despite basically all the experts believing otherwise, is, on the other hand, delusional, indeed.
Put a single bullet into a revolver, spin the barrel, and point it at your head. "You'd be delusional" to think death is guaranteed. But you'd sure be stupid to play the game. Even if there were 100 chambers in the barrel.
"They found that a strong meandering' of the jet stream ... , has particularly significant impacts on key agricultural regions ..., with a reduction in harvests of up to seven percent."
I would not characterize "up to seven percent" reduction as "multiple breadbasket failures."
You and all the other bright siders refuse to acknowledge that scientists have consistently dramatically underestimated the scale and scope of climate impacts and virtually every climate model is unable to take into account the high likelihood of multiple reinforcing climate tipping points being activated.
Take this New York Times article just published today that indicates the likelihood that the Amazon may collapse yours earlier than expected with the potential to release up to 20 years worth of worldwide carbon emissions. That would be a catastrophe the world could never recover from but I’m sure you’ll find a way to minimize it or ignore it.
And I can guarantee that the article on multiple breadbasket failures did not and cannot take into account research such as the one described in the article below.
From your paper: “Here we find an increased likelihood of concurrent low yields during summers featuring meandering jets in observations and models. …
We find that years with more than one wave event are associated with regional crop yield anomalies of up to −7% in EAS for, −6% to in NA and −3% in EEU for wave-7 with an average response across the selected regions of −2% to −3%.”
These yields are only 10% lower, while in America 40% of maize is now used for ethanol to add to gasoline, which is enough to cover shortages in other regions.
Here is yet another article with the same refrain faster than expected scientist can’t believe it this time about the death of coral reefs from unprecedented ocean temperatures.
Will the ocean be able to even survive after coral reefs disappear when we reach something like 2.0 ?
Will humanity survive with a dead ocean - not without total and utter collapse .
But you and Noah and so many others choose to once again ignore minimize wish away these and so many other catastrophes happening day after day
Here’s a paper that concludes the likelihood of multiple breadbasket failures of 18% by 2030.
But I’m sure you’re well fed so you’ll find a way to minimize or dismiss it or quote an Al Gore movie from many years ago is if that’s of any relevance whatsoever.
I thought even climate deniers had moved on from attempting to justify their denial by Cherry picking a comment or two that Al Gore made. But I guess you haven’t gotten the message yet.
The increase in heating may stop but only if tipping points are not activated and they’re all but guaranteed to be activated as temperatures climb towards 2.0 C.
As I point out in an earlier post how livable would the planet be if temperatures say are 2.5° C for centuries to come with accelerating sea level rise and absolutely catastrophic Eco system collapse continuing unabated ?
That’s literally the most optimistic scenario.
Commentators like Noah do everything they can to avoid acknowledging this reality as it utterly refutes their Bright sider reality based projections of a world where climate change becomes relatively benign.
Hundreds of millions of people mass migrating, agricultural productivity decimated, Global supply chains collapsed, disease vectors spreading, wildfires destroying ecosystems that humanity and all of life depends upon and on and on and on. Wetbulb temperatures so high that 100s of millions of people couldn’t be outside at midday or work outside
The charts showing 3,500,000 gigawatt/hours of intermittent solar/wind in 2023 make the one showing 100 gigawatt/hours of battery storage installed in 2023 look ridiculously minuscule in comparison.
If all that solar production were in one place with 12 hours average sunshine, the batteries would provide about 7.5 minutes of “backup”, so not enough for a large cloud to pass.
We manufactured nearly 1TWh of batteries in 2023, across all applications (cars, storage, devices.) Global electricity production is a little under 3TW. But capacity is expected to increase by 50% in 2024, and probably by several-fold by 2030. The human ability to manufacture things at large scale in factories, given enough time for the scaling, is basically a super-power.
Human and technological progress are great superpowers, and batteries are getting cheaper, but are not keeping up with the cost reductions in solar, as evidenced by the 35000 times more productive capacity installed versus battery capacity installed. The cost curves don’t show battery costs ever getting as cheap as solar on a $/gwh basis unless new technologies are developed. Batteries aren’t really holding solar back, since gas peaker plants exist and gas is still cheap (and will stay cheap here now that Biden halted export licenses for LNG). Transmission line and grid interconnection and transformer supply chains are bigger issues. A way around that is the Muskian design of rooftop solar with house/parked car storage since it reduces the power that house needs while putting less stress on the grid, but Model Ys and PowerWalls are still pretty expensive.
Can you provide a reference to how global surface air temperature is actually estimated? I imagine it’s somehow an area-weighted average of actual measurements at meteorological stations, but the distribution of stations is highly irregular and of course there are few in the oceans. Perhaps satellite measurements are used, but those were not available until recently so then there’s the problem of integrating older and newer data from different sources.
As I suspect you know already, he can't and won't because the moment you ask questions about how climatologists actually operate the whole thing falls apart. The methodologies they use are far worse than anything found in the social sciences and would be trivially considered fraud in other fields (physics, corporate accounting etc).
The idea that "the right" were ever "denying" climate change is a standard leftie trope of the sort I imagine Noah thinks he is beyond. Dig in and you'll discover that the people who pick fights with climatology are non ideological and simply want science to be done properly, they also AGREE that the climate changes all the time, something that ironically self declared climate change activists do not believe. Instead they think the climate was perfectly stable up until fossil fuels came along, something that's contradicted by mountains of evidence. The people saying these things actually never went away because they lost any arguments, they won the arguments completely; instead they were simply censored into oblivion by an ever more extreme establishment that realised the media had become captured.
The reality is there is no climate crisis, the world is warming somewhere between very slowly and not at all, CO2 doesn't seem to have much effect on anything and there are certainly much bigger environmental problems to think about, like plastic trash in the ocean. This is what you conclude when you look at climatology in detail instead of trusting academics and government agencies.
This is an expected weakness of this blog, unfortunately, and I write that as a subscriber. One of the things I've learned over the years is that people who build their identify around the idea that they are the moderate centrists are very easily misled, because they tend to assume data is sacrosanct and the interpolated middle "reasonable" position is always the closest to being correct. This is a heuristic and isn't bad exactly but it fails the moment you have a sophisticated enough con.
You could listen to this quack or you could just look online to see how it's actually measured. They divide the world into a grid with smaller grid size near the equator where temperature variation is greater.....
Now cover how they constantly change the historical records, creating new warming where there previously wasn't any visible and cause records to be "unbroken". Then look at where the thermometers actually are (airport runways), and the algorithms that are applied to the raw data without which there is virtually no warning at all, etc. Like how their gridding process spreads urban heat around incorrectly
They were still making radical changes to the historical data as recently as 2015, so for most of the history of the field they were by their own admission studying incorrect data. The much studied pause in warming, reported on so much in the first decades of the century, was eventually explained by the clever expedient of releasing a new version of history in which it never happened at all. Thousands of papers - all invalidated overnight with no retractions. The trend in the data fundamentally changed by modeling, no self reflection or condition!
You know, in most fields changing the data to fit the theory is fraud. In climate nothing is ever bad enough to be fraud.
Then look at all the other problems, of which there are dozens, and realize that these guys have no clue how to even measure temperature reliably, let alone predict what it will do next or how that affects weather. And that's all before you even get to policy.
I think there's an incredible cultural blindspot in posts like yours, where maybe you recognize that e.g. social studies or medicine might have serious replicability and methodology problems, but any suggestions that climatology also does is casually dismissed. The incentives are identical.
Many factors account for the possibly temporary increase in 2023. in addition to SuO2 particulates reduction from the shipping fuel standards, there is also the beginning of a new El Niño and the current sunspot cycle which began in 2019 and is expected to peak next year. Climate, the earth and the sun, as well as politics and technology invariably keep changing.
I think the effect of maritime shipping on the rapid rise in temperature in 2023 is still speculative and up for debate. I recommend reading the discussions by Dr. Robert Rhode and Dr. Zeke Hausfather,
This is great. I'm about to publish a coffee table art book LEFT BEHIND by a photographer who works as a global energy consultant specializing in the decommissioning of coal power plants. Everything you say is what he has been teaching me over the last three years. You’re inspiring me to market the hell out of this stunning and beautiful book.
Solar and wind energy are no longer intermittent because of a significant increases in battery energy density (silicon anodes) and safety (technology mitigating thermal runway). Solid state batteries (greater energy density a safety) may be commercially available in another five years. Super-conductivity technologies will enhance wind turbine electrical systems as well as mitigate loss of electricity in transmission lines.
Nuclear energy is DOA because of protracted timeline of both development and outrageous cost overruns. Creating another massive toxic waste threat via generation of nuclear waste is not a solution but a problem handed to millennia of future generations. Contrary to green-washing of nuclear power history, the industry has a shitty record in just 75 years. There are climate-deniers and nuclear waste hazard-deniers.
“Managing” the forests is likely also DOA. Fifty years of fire suppression can’t be fixed without a much greater scale of prescribed burning for 50 years. The problem is this would generate significant air pollution. I have fought wildfires in Oregon, as well as done fieldwork in wildfire smoke for almost entire six-month seasons. In fact, my residence burned down in 2015 when I was away in a Spike Fire Camp fighting this same 110,000-acre fire. All firefighters have particles in their lungs, as well as residents in communities near forests. I doubt the AMA would support burning on an even greater scale. The best policy would be to let nature “manage” forests. But the problem is the same: the public doesn’t like it when wildfires are allowed to burn.
Climate change also presents a problem. NOAA’s long-term forecast for the Northwest calls for wetter winters/early springs followed by record heatwaves and extended droughts. In short, this significantly increases the ground cover/fuel load on the forest floor, making for even more intense wild fires. In the 2023 USFS Fire Refresher, double vortexes and fire tornadoes were addressed. These rare events are increasingly more common as are firefighter deaths.
What’s really insane is building-out more new electrical transmission lines over hundreds of miles of desiccated forests. The wind and heat generated by today’s wildfires can easily snap transmission lines, whether they be new or old. Decentralizing power stations/energy generation would require smaller electricity transmission distances, reducing fire danger and saving electricity loss over great distances. From a national security standpoint, it also makes sense to differentiate into hundreds of smaller AltGreen energy power stations.
Building concentration into the grid makes about as much sense as rebuilding a beach house after the latest tropical storm or Hurricane has washed/blew it away. In the long term, the insurance companies will dictate policy (literally). Large swaths of the country are becoming uninsurable because of climate change-induced disasters. The number of days between billion-dollar natural disasters. Insurance companies answer not to property owners, but to huge pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. They are not in the business of paying out billions for insurance policies that should not be written. The insurance models go out 20 years, aren’t based on the situation on the ground in 2024. As with most problems, economics will dictate decision-making in re climate change.
Long term, big picture: for the first time in 2008 more people lived in metropolitan areas than the countryside. The majority of people poured in to coastal cities, where globalization infrastructure created the most jobs and economic opportunity. With rising oceans, a massive retreat from coastal cities is likely. Climate change and civil unrest has created the largest number of migrants/refugees in modern history. No one country and it’s border policies and walls is the solution. It’s an international problem that can only be solved via international cooperation.
Time will tell if the world is up to the challenge. My fellow Baby Boomers have blown it and are whining about the succeeding generations. So cliche. I have confidence in Millennials, Gens X, Y, Z, and Alpha. They are so much more advanced than Baby Boomers were at their stages of life. They are also more tolerant of other people. I work in fieldwork related to silviculture and wildlife and I’m blown away in re how talented, technologically adept, and diligent are the coming generations. Okay, Boomer!
No longer intermittent? The charts in the article show 100 GWh of storage versus 3,500,000 GWh of solar and wind generation in 2023, so your exponential curve needs to start growing pretty quickly.
I think the statement that energy density is the key metric for batteries is wrong. It of course used to be, but it's a metric that only matters for EVs, electric planes, laptops, wearables, etc. all of which are either good enough or will never be good enough (electric planes), even with the theoretically optimal lithium-air battery. In general transportation isn't that large a % of global emissions anyway; we should offset it with carbon capture.
On the other hand, the application that really matters nowadays is grid storage, which doesn't care about gravimetric energy density at all -- it cares a little bit about volumetric energy density, but not that much since the cost of batteries to fill a grid storage facility is so much larger than the cost of the facility or the land it sits on. The metric that really matters is dollars per unit energy stored over the lifetime of the battery. A close approximant is dollars per unit energy stored in a battery -- the difference is that the former doesn't allow a battery maker to cheat by making a battery that dies after a small number of recharge cycles. Currently promising technologies (as far as I know -- I'm not a battery expert) for this are sodium-ion, iron-sulfur, and liquid electrode batteries. I think in general we're a lot farther down the learning curve for energy density than cost, which is exciting for grid storage.
A very important point!
Yeah, $/kWh is the much better metric. Lithium ion is getting much better for this, but it's probably never going to be good enough for more than ~day-long grid storage. That could still work, but we would need to massively overbuild in solar/wind capacity in order to be ready for stretches of high demand and low supply (i.e., cold, cloudy, winter days). What we really need is grid-scale storage than is < 1/10 the price of lithium ion. I think iron air batteries and heat batteries are the two farthest in development that could reach that range.
Electric motors use less energy. Efficiency gain. grid integration of RE/BESS, and lower PM/health cost are all compelling rationale, in addition to <GHGs, for LDV EVs. Given manufacturing/mining lead times, the tipping point of LDV ICE decline might come sooner than people realize
I don't think battery energy density in consumer goods has reached good enough yet. My Steam Deck (depending on what game I'm playing) only gets a couple of hours of battery life on a full charge! My phone hardly lasts the day. Obviously it's not very consequential compared to utility-scale storage but if battery technology continues on its current trajectory, worrying about your phone running out of charge could be a thing of the past relatively soon.
We’ll probably just make phones that use more power.
You made some claims that are well-supported by data (such as high temperatures in 2023), but then followed that up with the unsupported claim that climate chance is causing a steep rise in diasters. You say, "A steep rise in disasters over just a couple of decades has to be almost entirely due to a more dangerous natural environment." That claim so thoroughly lacks support in your post that it's hard to believe you made it. You have so thoroughly swallowed the scientifically unsupported claim that climate change is a disaster you aren't even questioning the claims being made.
The problems with that chart are numerous. Let's assume the data is accurate, which is hardly a given. The US inflation-adjusted GPD has nearly tripled, which explains most of the growth in the graph. As cities get bigger and more expensive (even on an inflation-adjusted basis), you would expect more isolated incidents to pass an arbitrary high threshold that was just barely being reached in 1980. That, of course, is what happened. So I have done a better job than Noah explaining that chart, without any reference to climate change!
Has it occurred to you that "number of billion-dollar disasters" seems like kind of an odd metric? Wouldn't we care more about total disaster cost or, even better, total disaster cost per GDP? Why focus on "number of billion-dollar disasters"? A cynic might think its because it's an arbitrary threshold that shows huge growth that doesn't reflect reality. Climate alarmists surely wouldn't act in bad faith like that, right?
Well, let's look at what climate.gov has to say! They should be a reliable source, right? This page includes a similar claim as Noah: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2023-historic-year-us-billion-dollar-weather-and-climate-disasters . A glance at the graph shows the growth in number of events is almost entirely due to an increase in billion dollar storms. The site even says, "Severe storms have caused the highest number of billion-dollar disaster events (186), but they have the lowest average event cost ($2.4 billion), not surprising given their localized nature." In other words, the growth of billion-dollar natural disasters is due to storms slightly eclipsing that threshold as urban density has increased. No link to climate change needed!
If you want to convince people that climate change is a problem for humanity, you're going to have to do better than that. I think the reason the arguments for climate change being a calamity are so weak is because there is no good science-based and data-based argument that climate change is particularly dangerous, or even a net negative. If you want a level-headed analysis of the overall effects of climate change on humanity, I suggest https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/a-climate-science-textbook.
Yes, let's look at what climate.gov has to say,
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide .
"In fact, the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts were this high was more than 3 million years ago, during the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period, when global surface temperature was 4.5–7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5–4 degrees Celsius) warmer than during the pre-industrial era. Sea level was at least 16 feet higher than it was in 1900 and possibly as much as 82 feet higher."
Here is a scientific paper that supports their claim about sea level rise, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay3701 . Here is a relevant excerpt on sea level, " A new reconstruction of global mean sea level during the mid-Pliocene warm period indicates a rise of ∼17 m, implying near-to-complete loss of Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet with some additional contribution from East Antarctica (34)." 17 m = 56 feet.
Under a scenario of 2°C of global warming, sea levels are projected to rise by 0.3-0.93 meters by 2100 according to the IPCC, with continued rising from there. That is enough of a change and a fast enough change to matter around the margins, but it's hardly catastrophic. There will be a tiny amount less land available, which will be greatly offset by currently frozen land that is essentially unutilized. Long-term sea level rise that happens over the course of centuries is simply not a problem at a civilizational level. Even if an 82 foot increase in sea level happens by the year 3000, no one going about their lives between now and then will notice or care about any change that happens during their lifetime.
None of these claims are anywhere near as robust as presented. Look at actually sea level rise and nothing of note is happening.
The levels of fraud in climate science are so high that you unfortunately cannot take anything they say at face value. Doing so is the boat common mistake people make in these debates. Which is a pity because it would be nice to understand the climate, even if not very useful.
I also want to see a chart of the number of climate-motivated soup attacks on artistic masterpieces per year.
Thanks for the rational summary. Just the fact that Texas leads in this country in "green energy" production should help emphasize the story behind the charts. It isn't politics, it is economics and profits.
I have wondered for a while how much the climate debate in the US is harmed by the fact that it happens in Celsius.
Once this came up among my very red-state family, and on a whim I just converted units. They said something about who cares about three degrees. Since 3 degrees Celsius is about 6 degrees Fahrenheit, I just said “well if you convert to Fahrenheit that’s the summer high averaging 104 instead of 98. The reaction was shocked silence, then a subject change.
It's complicated.
Washington DC last hit 100F in 2016, this is an unusually long stretch without hitting that benchmark.
I would recommend "Unsettled : what climate science tells us, what it doesn't, and why it matters" by Steven Koonin's(Obama's top climate scientist), a book which can be summarized as "THE DATA DOESN'T SAY THAT!"
Do red-state families not understand math or temperature scales? You obviously are biased since you first round up 2.5°C by 20% to 3° and then again round up 5.4°F to 6°F and average temperatures are not the same as average high temperatures, so maybe they were shocked at your exaggerated catastrophe sales pitch. If your summer high red-state temp average is 98°F that’s 36.7°C, so with 2 degrees of expected warming 75 years from now that makes the high increase to 38.7°C which is only 101.7°F, not 104 so your math is off in any case.
"FUD — for the non-finance types, that’s “fear, uncertainty, and doubt”"
That's also an ancient IT term.
It comes from Gene Amdahl to describe his former employers sales strategy after leaving IBM in 1975. When I was at Apple in the 80s, management there still accused IBM of continuing it, at least until the short lived IBM/Apple joint collaborations shortly thereafter.
I remember hearing this in the 1980s, but without the source. Thank you, Buzen!
Love it ! One more set of charts you may want to add to your formidable set of today is the impact of electronics technology on efficiency. There are two levels of interest:
1) Smart infrastructure: buildings, appliances, ...... the net impact is a jump in energy efficiency (advanced)
2) Electrification of Transportation: Yes... this is EVs, but stretches into autonomy+micro mobility (early stage)
Finally, the big issue are the utilities...they more slowly, but are getting there.
Great column Noah! I think the effect from remote work is being underestimated. It’s really going to help in reducing the amount people drive. To prove that it should be one of the data points that get tracked and given equal billing with EV adoption.
Hannah Richie’s new book and interview:
https://news.mongabay.com/2024/01/its-not-the-end-of-the-world-book-assumptions-omissions-spark-debate/
Your analysis is utterly misleading as it ignores the reality of the all but inevitable catastrophic future facing humanity and the natural world.
First global warming will not stop even if net 0 is somehow reached in the coming decades.
You ignore the most critical new research in recent years which demonstrates the high likelihood that catastrophic multiple reinforcing largely irreversible tipping points are being activated at temperatures around 1.5° C to 2° C in places like the Amazon, ocean ice, permafrost the AMOC and more.
As recently as a decade or so ago scientists believed that these planetary scale critical ecosystems would not tip over until temperatures reached 3 or 4° above pre-industrial levels
So while the likelihood of higher temperatures may be somewhat less the impacts generated at lower temperature increases will doom humanity and the natural world.
One has to be willfully blind to not acknowledge that for example wildfires in the Canadian forests this past summer were multiple times more destructive than any previous year demonstrating that impacts will not increase linearly but much faster than that.
The only hope is if the world community comes together and commits to massively remove the CO2 from the atmosphere that is the direct cause of the climate crisis and also directly cools the planet through sunshine reflection massive ecosystem restoration and similar means.
This approach that I have labeled as the climate triad - accelerated emission reductions, large scale removal and direct cooling of the climate - is the only way to avoid climate catastrophe.
The statistics and trends that you mention are irrelevant in the context of the new and tragic reality as shown by recent climate science
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950

This paper by the world’s leading tipping point researchers at Exeter University presents these grim tipping point conclusions.
Climate science has also concluded that even if tipping points are not activated at temperatures near to what the world is experiencing now the sharply elevated temperatures in existence when the world reaches net zero will remain sharply elevated for literally CENTURIES along with Accelerated sea level rise and continuing ecosystem collapse.
I guarantee that no one on the planet would look forward to living such a dystopian existence.
I haven’t even talked about the ecological collapse that is devastating the world’s oceans and much of the world’s non-human life and will only get relentlessly worse.
You have a very influential voice Noah and I hope and trust that you will take off your rose colored Climate glasses and investigate the unthinkable reality that faces humanity and the natural world in the coming years.
You're probably not wrong about the tipping points. In particular, we have what looks like a feedback loop in methane levels, and several scary things happening with climate models re: cloud feedback.
The optimistic case here is not just that we'll develop vast amounts of renewable energy, but probably that we'll also (1) be capable of deploying CO2 removal that works on a century timescale. And (2) that we'll implement geoengineering in a timely way before these tipping points become irreversible. Point (2) is the number one reason I vote: I cannot imagine a climate-denying administration stepping up decisively if scientists rang the alarm, even if addressing it was easy and the costs were manageable.
Exactly. I have written about what I called the Climate Triad - which is the only way humanity and the natural world have a chance to avoid planetary dystopia- accelerated emission reductions, large scale CO2 removal and direct cooling of the climate through sunshine reflection ecosystem restoration and other means
I encourage you to think through what the environment would look like under the "catastrophic" scenarios you proposed. There would still be farmland. There would still be a wide range of natural environments. The worst effects would be things like some people displaced due to rising sea levels and increased heat waves. At the ecosystem level, a lot of rapid local changes in climate could cause extinction of a lot of species. All of that would be bad! But the earth has experienced far hotter and higher-CO2 times in the past, and it will again. Life will live on just fine. Humanity will live on just fine. The likelihood of total environmental collapse and total civilizational collapse due to climate change is zero. For your own peace of mind, I encourage you to consider that.
Kevin. I’m afraid that your description of a future world with multiple tipping points activated is utterly devoid from reality.
Multiple breadbasket failures would be highly likely bringing starvation to billions.
Mass migration of hundreds of millions of people would de stabilize every country on the planet as we’re already beginning to see with the right wing backlash in the United States and elsewhere against even a tiny amount of migration.
The integrity of supply chains upon which civilization depends upon would collapse.
We’re already seeing the drought in Panama significantly degrade the capacity of the Panama Canal.
Farmers construction workers and others who work outside would be affected by bulb temperatures so that morbidity and mortality would skyrocket disabling workforces.
I could go on and on and on.
"Multiple breadbasket failures would be highly likely bringing starvation to billions."
Let's start with this one. What science-backed scenario would lead to not being able to grow crops so suddenly (within say, 5 years) in so many critical areas that there would be mass starvation? Please be specific.
One issue that people ignore is that rapid shifts in climate zones is pandemics. You're shaking a bunch of animals with a bunch of viruses with a lot of people near them.
You also have to factor in people suddenly realizing they're screwed when things have been gradually changing. See any financial crisis.
Maize yields would rise because of increased C02 concentrations, the charts in the article indicate increases in rainfall and warmer temperatures would increase growing seasons in temperate climates like Canada. The US could easily avoid a maize shortage by eliminating the Renewable Fuels Standard which now wastes 40% of US maize production for ethanol. This catastrophic tipping point scenarios are paranoid delusions.
I am not sure that I would say, "catastrophic tipping point scenarios are paranoid delusions." Believing that those scenarios are guaranteed or even highly probably despite basically all the experts believing otherwise, is, on the other hand, delusional, indeed.
Put a single bullet into a revolver, spin the barrel, and point it at your head. "You'd be delusional" to think death is guaranteed. But you'd sure be stupid to play the game. Even if there were 100 chambers in the barrel.
https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-weve-underestimated-the-risk-of-simultaneous-crop-failures-worldwide
"They found that a strong meandering' of the jet stream ... , has particularly significant impacts on key agricultural regions ..., with a reduction in harvests of up to seven percent."
I would not characterize "up to seven percent" reduction as "multiple breadbasket failures."
You and all the other bright siders refuse to acknowledge that scientists have consistently dramatically underestimated the scale and scope of climate impacts and virtually every climate model is unable to take into account the high likelihood of multiple reinforcing climate tipping points being activated.
Take this New York Times article just published today that indicates the likelihood that the Amazon may collapse yours earlier than expected with the potential to release up to 20 years worth of worldwide carbon emissions. That would be a catastrophe the world could never recover from but I’m sure you’ll find a way to minimize it or ignore it.
And I can guarantee that the article on multiple breadbasket failures did not and cannot take into account research such as the one described in the article below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/14/climate/amazon-rain-forest-tipping-point.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
From your paper: “Here we find an increased likelihood of concurrent low yields during summers featuring meandering jets in observations and models. …
We find that years with more than one wave event are associated with regional crop yield anomalies of up to −7% in EAS for, −6% to in NA and −3% in EEU for wave-7 with an average response across the selected regions of −2% to −3%.”
These yields are only 10% lower, while in America 40% of maize is now used for ethanol to add to gasoline, which is enough to cover shortages in other regions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/14/coral-bleaching-alerts-ocean-warmth/
Here is yet another article with the same refrain faster than expected scientist can’t believe it this time about the death of coral reefs from unprecedented ocean temperatures.
Will the ocean be able to even survive after coral reefs disappear when we reach something like 2.0 ?
Will humanity survive with a dead ocean - not without total and utter collapse .
But you and Noah and so many others choose to once again ignore minimize wish away these and so many other catastrophes happening day after day
Here’s a paper that concludes the likelihood of multiple breadbasket failures of 18% by 2030.
But I’m sure you’re well fed so you’ll find a way to minimize or dismiss it or quote an Al Gore movie from many years ago is if that’s of any relevance whatsoever.
I thought even climate deniers had moved on from attempting to justify their denial by Cherry picking a comment or two that Al Gore made. But I guess you haven’t gotten the message yet.
https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functions/sustainability/our%20insights/will%20the%20worlds%20breadbaskets%20become%20less%20reliable/mgi-will-the-worlds-breadbaskets-become-less-reliable.pdf
It is consensus of the scientific community that global warming will stop when we get to net zero. https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached/ . Actually, it could cool some if you include short lived GHGs like methane.
The increase in heating may stop but only if tipping points are not activated and they’re all but guaranteed to be activated as temperatures climb towards 2.0 C.
As I point out in an earlier post how livable would the planet be if temperatures say are 2.5° C for centuries to come with accelerating sea level rise and absolutely catastrophic Eco system collapse continuing unabated ?
That’s literally the most optimistic scenario.
Commentators like Noah do everything they can to avoid acknowledging this reality as it utterly refutes their Bright sider reality based projections of a world where climate change becomes relatively benign.
Why would the world be unlivable if it stayed at 2.5 C elevation?
Hundreds of millions of people mass migrating, agricultural productivity decimated, Global supply chains collapsed, disease vectors spreading, wildfires destroying ecosystems that humanity and all of life depends upon and on and on and on. Wetbulb temperatures so high that 100s of millions of people couldn’t be outside at midday or work outside
Coral reefs will have long collapsed before 2.5 C and they are the key Eco system that supports ocean life
Tipping points and catastrophic visions in the next century have no basis in reality or science.
https://open.substack.com/pub/discoursemagazine/p/despite-climate-change-today-is-the
Which ecosystems have catastrophically collapsed so far?
I hate tipping points, especially at the self-service gas station where I fill up my SUV.
Great piece full of common sense, untainted by politics. Thank you.
The charts showing 3,500,000 gigawatt/hours of intermittent solar/wind in 2023 make the one showing 100 gigawatt/hours of battery storage installed in 2023 look ridiculously minuscule in comparison.
If all that solar production were in one place with 12 hours average sunshine, the batteries would provide about 7.5 minutes of “backup”, so not enough for a large cloud to pass.
We manufactured nearly 1TWh of batteries in 2023, across all applications (cars, storage, devices.) Global electricity production is a little under 3TW. But capacity is expected to increase by 50% in 2024, and probably by several-fold by 2030. The human ability to manufacture things at large scale in factories, given enough time for the scaling, is basically a super-power.
Human and technological progress are great superpowers, and batteries are getting cheaper, but are not keeping up with the cost reductions in solar, as evidenced by the 35000 times more productive capacity installed versus battery capacity installed. The cost curves don’t show battery costs ever getting as cheap as solar on a $/gwh basis unless new technologies are developed. Batteries aren’t really holding solar back, since gas peaker plants exist and gas is still cheap (and will stay cheap here now that Biden halted export licenses for LNG). Transmission line and grid interconnection and transformer supply chains are bigger issues. A way around that is the Muskian design of rooftop solar with house/parked car storage since it reduces the power that house needs while putting less stress on the grid, but Model Ys and PowerWalls are still pretty expensive.
Can you provide a reference to how global surface air temperature is actually estimated? I imagine it’s somehow an area-weighted average of actual measurements at meteorological stations, but the distribution of stations is highly irregular and of course there are few in the oceans. Perhaps satellite measurements are used, but those were not available until recently so then there’s the problem of integrating older and newer data from different sources.
As I suspect you know already, he can't and won't because the moment you ask questions about how climatologists actually operate the whole thing falls apart. The methodologies they use are far worse than anything found in the social sciences and would be trivially considered fraud in other fields (physics, corporate accounting etc).
The idea that "the right" were ever "denying" climate change is a standard leftie trope of the sort I imagine Noah thinks he is beyond. Dig in and you'll discover that the people who pick fights with climatology are non ideological and simply want science to be done properly, they also AGREE that the climate changes all the time, something that ironically self declared climate change activists do not believe. Instead they think the climate was perfectly stable up until fossil fuels came along, something that's contradicted by mountains of evidence. The people saying these things actually never went away because they lost any arguments, they won the arguments completely; instead they were simply censored into oblivion by an ever more extreme establishment that realised the media had become captured.
The reality is there is no climate crisis, the world is warming somewhere between very slowly and not at all, CO2 doesn't seem to have much effect on anything and there are certainly much bigger environmental problems to think about, like plastic trash in the ocean. This is what you conclude when you look at climatology in detail instead of trusting academics and government agencies.
This is an expected weakness of this blog, unfortunately, and I write that as a subscriber. One of the things I've learned over the years is that people who build their identify around the idea that they are the moderate centrists are very easily misled, because they tend to assume data is sacrosanct and the interpolated middle "reasonable" position is always the closest to being correct. This is a heuristic and isn't bad exactly but it fails the moment you have a sophisticated enough con.
You could listen to this quack or you could just look online to see how it's actually measured. They divide the world into a grid with smaller grid size near the equator where temperature variation is greater.....
https://granthaminstitute.com/2015/10/16/taking-the-planets-temperature-how-are-global-temperatures-calculated/
Now cover how they constantly change the historical records, creating new warming where there previously wasn't any visible and cause records to be "unbroken". Then look at where the thermometers actually are (airport runways), and the algorithms that are applied to the raw data without which there is virtually no warning at all, etc. Like how their gridding process spreads urban heat around incorrectly
They were still making radical changes to the historical data as recently as 2015, so for most of the history of the field they were by their own admission studying incorrect data. The much studied pause in warming, reported on so much in the first decades of the century, was eventually explained by the clever expedient of releasing a new version of history in which it never happened at all. Thousands of papers - all invalidated overnight with no retractions. The trend in the data fundamentally changed by modeling, no self reflection or condition!
You know, in most fields changing the data to fit the theory is fraud. In climate nothing is ever bad enough to be fraud.
Then look at all the other problems, of which there are dozens, and realize that these guys have no clue how to even measure temperature reliably, let alone predict what it will do next or how that affects weather. And that's all before you even get to policy.
I think there's an incredible cultural blindspot in posts like yours, where maybe you recognize that e.g. social studies or medicine might have serious replicability and methodology problems, but any suggestions that climatology also does is casually dismissed. The incentives are identical.
Have you looked at the abnormal warming of 2023 being related with the reduction of so2 emissions as a result of change in policy of marine fuel mix?
https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unforeseen-test-geoengineering-fueling-record-ocean-warmth
Many factors account for the possibly temporary increase in 2023. in addition to SuO2 particulates reduction from the shipping fuel standards, there is also the beginning of a new El Niño and the current sunspot cycle which began in 2019 and is expected to peak next year. Climate, the earth and the sun, as well as politics and technology invariably keep changing.
I think the effect of maritime shipping on the rapid rise in temperature in 2023 is still speculative and up for debate. I recommend reading the discussions by Dr. Robert Rhode and Dr. Zeke Hausfather,
https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2023/
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/
This is great. I'm about to publish a coffee table art book LEFT BEHIND by a photographer who works as a global energy consultant specializing in the decommissioning of coal power plants. Everything you say is what he has been teaching me over the last three years. You’re inspiring me to market the hell out of this stunning and beautiful book.
Go get that bag
Solar and wind energy are no longer intermittent because of a significant increases in battery energy density (silicon anodes) and safety (technology mitigating thermal runway). Solid state batteries (greater energy density a safety) may be commercially available in another five years. Super-conductivity technologies will enhance wind turbine electrical systems as well as mitigate loss of electricity in transmission lines.
Nuclear energy is DOA because of protracted timeline of both development and outrageous cost overruns. Creating another massive toxic waste threat via generation of nuclear waste is not a solution but a problem handed to millennia of future generations. Contrary to green-washing of nuclear power history, the industry has a shitty record in just 75 years. There are climate-deniers and nuclear waste hazard-deniers.
“Managing” the forests is likely also DOA. Fifty years of fire suppression can’t be fixed without a much greater scale of prescribed burning for 50 years. The problem is this would generate significant air pollution. I have fought wildfires in Oregon, as well as done fieldwork in wildfire smoke for almost entire six-month seasons. In fact, my residence burned down in 2015 when I was away in a Spike Fire Camp fighting this same 110,000-acre fire. All firefighters have particles in their lungs, as well as residents in communities near forests. I doubt the AMA would support burning on an even greater scale. The best policy would be to let nature “manage” forests. But the problem is the same: the public doesn’t like it when wildfires are allowed to burn.
Climate change also presents a problem. NOAA’s long-term forecast for the Northwest calls for wetter winters/early springs followed by record heatwaves and extended droughts. In short, this significantly increases the ground cover/fuel load on the forest floor, making for even more intense wild fires. In the 2023 USFS Fire Refresher, double vortexes and fire tornadoes were addressed. These rare events are increasingly more common as are firefighter deaths.
What’s really insane is building-out more new electrical transmission lines over hundreds of miles of desiccated forests. The wind and heat generated by today’s wildfires can easily snap transmission lines, whether they be new or old. Decentralizing power stations/energy generation would require smaller electricity transmission distances, reducing fire danger and saving electricity loss over great distances. From a national security standpoint, it also makes sense to differentiate into hundreds of smaller AltGreen energy power stations.
Building concentration into the grid makes about as much sense as rebuilding a beach house after the latest tropical storm or Hurricane has washed/blew it away. In the long term, the insurance companies will dictate policy (literally). Large swaths of the country are becoming uninsurable because of climate change-induced disasters. The number of days between billion-dollar natural disasters. Insurance companies answer not to property owners, but to huge pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. They are not in the business of paying out billions for insurance policies that should not be written. The insurance models go out 20 years, aren’t based on the situation on the ground in 2024. As with most problems, economics will dictate decision-making in re climate change.
Long term, big picture: for the first time in 2008 more people lived in metropolitan areas than the countryside. The majority of people poured in to coastal cities, where globalization infrastructure created the most jobs and economic opportunity. With rising oceans, a massive retreat from coastal cities is likely. Climate change and civil unrest has created the largest number of migrants/refugees in modern history. No one country and it’s border policies and walls is the solution. It’s an international problem that can only be solved via international cooperation.
Time will tell if the world is up to the challenge. My fellow Baby Boomers have blown it and are whining about the succeeding generations. So cliche. I have confidence in Millennials, Gens X, Y, Z, and Alpha. They are so much more advanced than Baby Boomers were at their stages of life. They are also more tolerant of other people. I work in fieldwork related to silviculture and wildlife and I’m blown away in re how talented, technologically adept, and diligent are the coming generations. Okay, Boomer!
No longer intermittent? The charts in the article show 100 GWh of storage versus 3,500,000 GWh of solar and wind generation in 2023, so your exponential curve needs to start growing pretty quickly.