If this does happen it would represent a win for everyone, but a substantial intellectual victory for the people who delayed action against climate change in the '00s and '10s. If we're all going to switch to renewables in the '20s for economic reasons then it would have been madness to force their adoption 10 years earlier to deal with a threat that materialises in 2050+.
The switch can't just happen in an eye blink. The push through the 00's and 10's for renewables are the precise reason we have enough renewable infrastructure that the balance can begin tipping. Saying the actions weren't justified is basically saying "See? We got the effect! We didn't need the cause at all!"
It's also possible that an even bigger push to get to this tipping point earlier would have saved even more money that will be spent mitigating the extra years of ecological harm, but counterfactuals like that are admittedly hard to prove and we're not at a point in history where that judgment could be assessed.
You have this completely and utterly backwards. Please understand these issues better before spreading this kind of misinformation. Delaying carbon mitigation has only meant that necessary measures are much more severe than they would have been. Not only that, but we are way past the point of being able to prevent many horrible effects of climate change. Fast action now will only stave of even worse things.
If you haven't noticed, climate change is already here, and it hurts.
a) The economic snowball we're finally starting to see for renewables is largely driven by governments finally being forced by the undeniable reality to take real regulation steps.
b) The economic cost of waiting 10 years to address an exponential process is going to far outweigh the cost there would've been to give an extra "oomph" to action, I'm sure.
Well you very quickly run out of mass, space, hosts etc so on a long enough timescale...
Like an exponential process that starts at 1 atom with a 1 year doubling time would affect all the matter in the universe in less than a century (lets pretend it happens spookily at whatever distance).
On a long enough timescale they may burn themselves out, but on a long enough time scale everything comes to an end. Things happen, and then they stop happening. Exponential growth occurs, and then it stops occurring. Its eventual end does not disprove its prior existence.
Sure, we can agree it's exponential until it's not.
And then we can start to think about whether it's going to be a logistic curve or oscillate and what factors might amplify or damp and our model is much more interesting.
Like, the original statement is about systems that people study and model, and how the exponential condition can really only exist for brief periods relative to the lifetime of almost all systems of interest.
> largely driven by governments ... tak[ing] real regulation steps
Which ones? I'm only aware of serious efforts in Germany and they basically torpedoed their own electricity use (their per-capita trends aren't good). There aren't that many governments who could stomach doing that to their people.
I think a lot of it has been driven indirectly by vehicle regulation. The past few years have seen several major countries establish end-dates for gasoline powered vehicles. This has spurred development of battery technology - very important for wind and solar - and also sent a market signal about the future role that fossil fuels play in global society. Even if a country hasn't explicitly banned fossil fuels yet for electricity generation, the writing is on the wall and it's only a matter of time. Investors and corporations are seeing that renewables are an inevitable future, and adjusting their strategies accordingly.
Governmental regulations are not merely proscriptive, i.e., "You shall not pollute above these levels or we will fine you/shut you down". They are also prescriptive: "If you build renewable infrastructure we shall provide direct subsidies/indirect tax breaks to support it."
What the heck are you talking about? We see the issues globally for last 20 years at least. Droughts, heatwaves in Europe killing tens of thousands, Islands in pacific being flooded due to sea rising and so on and on.
The models did not predict those things, and sea level has only risen 3.3mm since 1995 according to NOAA data. While the examples listed are certainly tragedies, we must be careful about attributing them post-hoc, as it weakens credibility for longer-term political optics.
I think you misread the data. NOAA says sea level is rising 3.3mm each year. 3.3mm is almost exactly an eighth of an inch. [1]
“In 2014, global sea level was 2.6 inches above the 1993 average—the highest annual average in the satellite record (1993-present). Sea level continues to rise at a rate of about one-eighth of an inch per year.”
> then it would have been madness to force their adoption 10 years earlier to deal with a threat that materialises in 2050+.
Unless the economic cost of switching in the 2000s would have been substantially lower than the extra damage of 20 years of pollution will inflict in the 2050s.
In the past 20 years, we've added 50 PPM of CO2 to the atmosphere. That's one third of all CO2 emissions that humanity has produced in its history.
