Strange to live in a world that failed to incentivise it's own survival.

You would think that trillion dollar companies like Amazon would care about not being able to operate at all in a few decades.

I get it from behavioral science why it all works like this, but one still wonders if it's the same for every other civilizations out there, if there are any.

> You would think that trillion dollar companies like Amazon would care about not being able to operate at all in a few decades.

Lawmakers are the issue, not big tech companies.

I know it’s popular to hate on big tech companies, but many of them are actually doing a lot more to improve the climate impact of their own operations than average or required by law.

Amazon has committed to switching to 100% renewable energy in the next few years and also going completely carbon neutral before the date proposed in the Paris Agreement: https://www.aboutamazon.com/planet/climate-pledge

They’ve also created a program to coordinate with other companies to join the same climate pledge and funded research in the area to the tune of $2 billion (so far): https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/about/the-climate-ple...

I don’t understand why Amazon is the first target that comes to mind when they’re doing more than required to reduce their own and others climate impacts.

It’s not the big tech companies we need to be angry at. It’s the lawmakers who are failing to put appropriate regulations in place and the voters who continue to enable them.

This is it.

Anytime a politician complains about companies not doing their part or not paying their taxes all I can hear is you can’t do your own job.

The first rule of leadership is that everything is your fault. If there’s loopholes, close them. If companies are polluting or emitting change the law.

The function of a company is to make money for it’s shareholders. The function of government is to keep them in check.

Also known as the Friedman doctrine. Look how far it got us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

The focus on short-term shareholder value is contraproductive. It's bad for the company, it's bad for society.

I disagree.

If there are two rival companies, and one of the two focuses on social initiatives to the detriment of it’s financial competitiveness, then logically the result is that it falls behind it’s less moral competitor until being crushed completely or subsumed.

In this scenario, you’re defacto punishing social initiatives rather than supporting them.

It’s illogical to expect companies to behave in a way that they’ll be punished for.

You clearly blame Milton Friedman.

I blame a political class with no morals or consequences for betraying their electorate. They’re at best too lazy to do what they’re paid to do and at worst utterly corrupt. Either way, they’re responsible.

Why would Amazon care more than others (which, in average, is not caring enough)? If anything, with the wealth/asset they have, they would likely do better than most of other company/people/entity when things went south.

Don't get me wrong, I wish they would, I just don't find it's hard to understand why they don't.

For what it’s worth, Amazon does care about doing more than required about climate change. They’re moving to 100% renewable energy within the next few years and funding alternative energy and sustainability research on the order of billions of dollars: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/about/the-climate-ple...

You can find similar commitments from other big tech companies like Apple: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/07/apple-commits-to-be-1...

Let’s focus on the lawmakers who are failing us, not the big tech companies who are already doing more than required by law to reduce their footprint.

Thanks, good to know.

I don't find it hard to understand either, as I said behavioral science 101. I just find it disappointing.

Amazon is investing quite a bit in this space.[1] It may not be enough by the UN committee estimates (edit: I think it actually is sufficient according to IPCC's scenarios [2]), but I don't think it's fair to say Amazon doesn't care.

[1] completely carbon neutral by 2040, carbon-neutral shipments by 2030, 100% renewable power for their operations by 2025, $2 billion pledged for decarbonizing tech, $100 million invested in reforestation https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/.

[2] carbon-neutral by 2050 meets the Paris agreement goal-- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7007533/

Amazon is making a switch to low-carbon products and services because it makes sense economically. However the problem is that these solutions are often only low-carbon on paper. Reforestation and carbon capture are not feasible solutions either.

This is disappointing because in a few years companies will be sustainable on paper. This will make a coordinated effort to fight climate change even harder to achieve.

You can see Amazon not walking the talk on their political lobbying.

Perhaps you could expand on those points/cite some sources? It's just that Amazon's sustainability program looks quite reasonable (even better if it makes economic sense), and that they'll obtain neutrality 10 years before it'd be necessary by standards in the Paris agreement.

I don't know if your conclusions apply to a set of businesses s/Amazon/businesses in a broader sense, but it's hard to see how they apply to Amazon.

This is a failure of politics, not of companies.

The former is a superset of the latter. Companies are political entities. At the most obvious level they are legal entities, and law is politics.

But the mistake here (and some other comments) of drawing "lawmakers", "politics", etc as being conceptually distinct from private corporations is particularly absurd from a historical view. The Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment forged political battles with substantial effort, debate, human cost that over centuries invented the concept you take granted as "companies", but which no other human civilization previous would have been familiar with. That there are "companies" at all is political, and so the OP is already pointing to a failure of politics.

Ok, let me rephrase then: it's a failure of governments.

Putting it like that makes it easy to distance oneself from responsibility.

Government is just a function of agreed upon values, rules and principles.

It's really a failure of our society. We're all failing.

No it is not distancing from responsibility. Governments are democratically elected by everyone. So it is clear everyone is to blame.

When you put the blame on big companies, like the person I replied to, that is distancing! Because we cannot influence those decisions.

Except politics failed mostly because of the sway those companies had over the government.

Fossil fuels are an absolute cornerstone of the world geopolitical order. The US dollar is at least partly backed by oil in that the oil trade is used to ensure its dominance. You are not wrong but Amazon is not the influencer you should be thinking about. The link between oil and the political order is deeper than that.

I obviously wasnt thinking of amazon. i was thinking of multibillion dollar companies just like them.

> I get it from behavioral science why it all works like this, but one still wonders if it's the same for every other civilizations out there, if there are any.

I'm pretty sure that this is the great filter: a species evolving under the constraints of competition for resources inevitably fails as soon as it steps on the land mine of global dominance.

Joking aside; it's kinda tragic to see this happening. The worst thing about it is the willful blindness of many people that should know it better; we're at the brink of extinction and still people find ways to close their eye and go "lalala".

It's fantastic. As in; beyond believable...

My take on it, this has been the status quo for 200 years. Native American Indians warned about this hundreds years ago. From the natural world it has been obvious for a looong time!

If you say that the current photo is not so bad, you are forgetting that you are seeing a movie, the very start of it. The next frame may not be so bad? That doesn't matter if the movie keeps running, you will get increasingly worse frames next, it won't magically stop because you want.

Think that the warming you are seeing is a second+ level consequence of our action. We emit GHG, the planet keeps more energy than the one it emits because the excess of GHG, the global average yearly temperature increases. Emitting less GHG will keep increasing that excess of GHG. Emitting zero will keep that excess in its place (because the carbon cycle last around 100 years or more). Doing a massive capture managing to do more carbon capture than what we emit will keep having an excess of GHG until we reach the preindustrial levels. All the way till that fantasy point the global average temperature will keep increasing.

And your emissions are not the main drive of that anymore. We reached already a lot of tipping points that triggered a lot of positive feedback mechanisms. Less ice means less albedo and so getting more heat from the sun. Hotter northern regions are releasing methane that were frozen there for millenia. Forest fires emits even carbon and cause even more heat. And there are several more.

And the problem is not just heat. It is energy to fuel extreme weather events, that happens from the equator to the poles. Is disrupting previously stable climate features that made the world livable as it were for thousands of years, the polar vortex seem to be disrupted, the atlantic ocean current seem to be going in the same direction too.

And we depend on more life, in direct and indirect ways. Agriculture doesn't mix well with extreme weather. We are in one of the biggest extinction events on Earth history. Its just not sustainable in the long term.

Thank you for taking the time to type out your response, I appreciate that you cared enough to help me. I understand all of what you wrote, and already agree with it. I wrote out a long response, but this isn't the place for the tangent.

The people who caused it will continue to thrive in and profit from the chaos. Why would climate change make them less powerful? They're best positioned to prepare for it.

Your comment seems to be at odds with the one I replied to stating "strange to live in a world that failed to incentivise it's own survival."

Either OP meant the whole world, or the circumstances which are leading to what is happening, which would include "the people who caused it". It would be difficult for the to "thrive in and profit" from it if they "failed to incentivise it's own survival."

Mars isn’t a short term solution. The best we’ve had so far is a human in space for a year and he said it was hell. I can’t imagine mars would be any different, it will take a gigantic effort to construct a colony that is better than a climate-change-destroyed earth.

Not saying we won’t manage it eventually, I just don’t think it’s very likely in Elon Musks lifetime. Perhaps he should start with building a mars colony... here on Earth first. Some kind of habitat dome thing perhaps.

That more impressive that he has started with something that may not pay off in his lifetime, but be vital for future generations down the road.

I agree. It takes a lot to create something that you know you likely won't see the fruits of. Its certainly a great thing to strive and work towards, but many people seem to think he'll have us on Mars in a decade such that we can just trash the earth because we won't need it anymore.

That is the problem with publicly traded companies. They exist a fiscal year at a time. No past on January 1, no future December 31st.

The underlying cause of this in western society is well explained in ‘Voltaire’s Bastards’ by John Ralston Saul. Good reading to understand our collective problem with some ideas on what to do about it. The answer isn’t clear.

I am not remotely religious, but it is a powerful force. Islam is the fastest growing religion, and while that alarms some people, it has a wonderful innovation that I think is key to our survival. Maybe it is from playing too many hours of Civ, but if I was playing with a pending climate catastrophe, I would double down on this:

‘Caring for the environment is an important teaching of Islam. The Qurʾān describes mankind as being stewards of the earth and therefore Muslims must care for the earth. It is our responsibility to care for the earth and environment. The reality of climate change requires us to rethink our lifestyles and actions and we must reflect on how our actions impact our environment. The Qurʾān highlights this point: Corruption has appeared on land and sea because of that which men’s hands have done (Q. 30: 41).‘

It's less obvious now maybe but for a while Amazon was pretty infamous for focusing on long-term investment and ignoring people's expectations for nice-looking numbers in annual reports.

And that's why the Saudis built a shiny golden city on top of the decaying corpses of dinosaurs? I'm sorry, but this can motivate individual action at best, and we really need the opposite.

The west bought the decaying dinosaurs that paid for the shiny city. I wouldn’t consider Saudi’s royal family to be particularly good example of anything but despots.

Which tipping point? We’ve passed so many tipping points by now that it’s just so much noise when someone announces we’re going to pass one 10 years earlier.

The second paragraph of that page says "Climate scientists have identified over a dozen possible tipping points".

From the article first paragraph "with temperatures set to punch through the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius *threshold* by the early 2030s, a decade earlier than anticipated just three years ago."

13 Misconceptions About Global Warming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWXoRSIxyIU

The Last Time CO2 Was This High, Humans Didn’t Exist https://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-last-time-co2-was-th...

CO2 – Why 450 ppm is Dangerous and 350 ppm is Safe https://sustainabilityadvantage.com/2014/01/07/co2-why-450-p...

And of course this one: https://skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm

Thanks for the links!

Supposedly the world’s first trillionaire will be minted in the ESG revolution. Part of me struggles to see how we link the economic incentives with urgently needed action, without government support.

There’s a nice SciFi book about this: one person got incredibly rich, because he invented artificial trees that capture a lot of CO2. Good book, unfortunately only available in German: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38356981-hologrammati...

I often have this thought. If only one could bioengineer some kind of device that replicates itself and captures CO2 using sunlight.

Oh right. We already have those. That’s a tree. We just need to stop cutting them down maybe.

Actually cutting them down is fine as long as we re-plant and slow down the decomp of the wood (by, e.g., using it in manufacturing or building.) Bamboo's also a good candidate for this cycle. Locking up atmospheric carbon in material that's going to be around for dozens or hundreds of years is a good thing.

Bamboo is interesting, both for strength-to-weight ratio and speed of growth. Is there a side-by-side comparison on how well it performs in this respect relative to other tree species?

We do not need to find a use for the wood if we were determined that this is our carbon sequestration method and that it would be paid for by the public, i.e. that no otherwise viable business model is needed. We could put it into mines that we digged the carbon out from before - consider it paying back the carbon loans we took in the past. Or maybe use other mines for that: cavities of salt mines can be truly gigantic for example which might help with handling the material.

Edit: I did some calculations and to sequester 1 Gt of carbon we would need to bury approximately 1.7 km^3 of (fresh) oak wood. That‘s a lot, especially since emissions were over 30Gt/a in 2020.

It's not quite that simple.

Forests, as we're seeing right now, burn. Global trade has made this worse by spreading various pathogens and invasive creatures around the planet.

Even the ones which don't burn reach a steady state (takes centuries, but gets close in decades), where rot releasing carbon and uptake into new growth balance out.

To really fix carbon with plants, we want to grow something fast and woody, char it, and bury the char. Doesn't have to be deep, in fact working it into topsoil is a pretty good solution.

This isn't anywhere close to sufficient, but it's necessary and we should be doing a lot of it.

Especially because trees have a pretty slow start on the carbon capture curve over their lifetime, the amount of CO2 they can fixate is (roughly) proportional with the total surface of the leaves assuming sufficient water is present.

Why needlessly hamstring yourself by specifying that any solution needs to be done without any government involvement? Governments are difficult to work with and slow to get moving, but they wield a level of resources unmatched by any company. It'd be like insisting on transporting oil across the ocean but disqualifying the use of oil tankers beforehand because they are expensive and can't dock in every port.

I think you misunderstood my comment.

In other words. Speculative forecasting replaces other speculative forecasting.

I would urge anyone who gets worried every time they see these kind of headlines based on modelling, to spend some time reading about how modelling and prediction actually work to understand what is really going on.

Any critically thinking person should take notice when you only hear about how the models have been underestimating the severity even though they are constantly wrong both ways.

Yes the temperature is changing, no it's not something we can't handle.

The thing about these models is that they are not necessary if you want to understand the magnitude of change.

For example, we can estimate correctly (within the same order of magnitude) the emissions of CO2 equivalent gases a year that we do as humanity.

Then we can estimate correctly (within the same order of magnitude) the CO2 equivalent gases stored in permafrost or ice. [0]

Now we can ask a question. What if the ice melts? How many years of 2020 human activity is stored there. It ends up being more than 100 years of 2020 emissions.

It does not really take that much modelling to realize that a temperature increase that melts the permafrost can result in completely unpredictable outcomes, that are very probably not positive.

That is of course, if one believes in human caused climate change. The amount of CO2 equivalent gases that is emitted by everything else (not humans) is magnitudes more, but obviously it was not a problem for the Earth to handle before. Now, the n-th order effects will increase the rate of warming and will cause new invisible effects.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions

I don't care about models. I care about variance. The additive nature of climate change means that there is no variance in the other way. The effect size does not need a model of time for it to be determined worrisome.

Permafrost is speculation when it comes to time, not the size of the effect. There's no natural process that will reverse the release of 100 years of 2020 greenhouse emissions in a short amount of time.

There's no scientific way to demonstrate that human activity increases the planet's temperature -> therefore no reason to worry, but there's also no scientific way to demonstrate that there are interventions that work to stop the increase -> so no reason to worry?

Of course, the question of risk is asked before additive intervention, so in a way, combustion of oil should have never been done in the way it was, similarly raising of livestock (global pandemics), but the way unscientific think -> no data that demonstrates risk -> no risk at all. Then after the risk surfaces, we ask the question "Why should we change the way we live just because we became aware of the risk?". Sounds worrying to me too.

I don't care about models either exactly because there IS variance and because the climate is a dynamic system.

We also know that to be true historically.

Climate itself varies over time. So to the extent that permafrost is time specific speculation it's not really useful for anything.

The only thing I worry about is to which extent the current hysteria ends up pushing catastrophic political decisions which will kill millions of people not in 80 years but today. Trying to push for alternatives to oil, gas and coal when there is no real contender besides nuclear is going to make everything much more expensive.

When everything becomes more expensive it means people can afford less. This will especially hit the poorest. So when faced with that kind of choice I choose.

Combustion was done in the way it was because it solved a problem which was much bigger than the ones it created. The problem of how to make combustion engines cleaner is a much better problem to have than coming up with a reliable, clean and plentiful energy resource.

You most certainly wouldn't be around and the internet certainly wouldn't if it wasn't for combustion engine freeing up time for humans to focus on other things than just surviving.

So again. I am unconvinced by the revisionist historical logic at display here. The world is like it is for a reason the combusting engine have saved many many many many more lives than it's taken.

To me it sounds like:

1. anything humans decide to do should be accepted because of invisible positive outcomes (who could have predicted Internet from oil combustion),

2. the moment negative outcomes become visible, let's wait until it becomes a problem, any attempts at prediction when it will become a problem are futile and fearmongering,

3. humans can solve any problem they encounter.

All three can be used to create an argument for solar/wind. Who knows what kind of positive stuff will solar/wind create (let's see), whatever happens (due to inherent volatility and energy storage problem of solar/wind) let's wait until it happens and then see, we are entirely capable of solving the issue.

I am not sure why you think it does but let me then be more precise.

1. All choices have consequences. The choice to not use combustion engines would have meant that most of us would not be alive, we wouldn't have the internet or 99% of all the things we take for granted today. The use of combustion engines have positive and negative externalities. The positive far outweighs the negatives. The problems we have to deal with because of our use of combustion engine are better problems to have than those we had before the combustion engine was invented.

2. Said no one ever. Coming up with better alternatives that pollute less is an ongoing project humans have been involved with since the combustion engine was invented.

The issue is when there is no better alternatives and inferior solutions like wind and solar (which btw cannot be created without fossile fuels) is pushed as a better solution even though it means less reliable energy supply. It's one thing to solve with something like fusion or nuclear but what we are seeing currently is creating worse not better problems because it's trying to solve something it can't solve.

3. Humans have the potential of solving any problem they encounter with enough knowledge. There is no guarantee though and the history of the world is that 99.9999% of all species went extinct, but the fact that we can come up with something like a combustion engine makes us able to potentially solve the problems the climate have always presented us with.

With regards to wind and solar. No, just know, even in principle it can't be a better solution. It's simply a question of physics and energy density.

For some things it's great but it's unreliable and completely depending on the weather which means that we have to create backup systems of coal, gas, oil and nuclear to deal with it just as we are doing today which only makes the entire sytem more complex, less reliable and more expensive.

So lets get alternatives to fossil fuels as fast as possible, but they have to be better not worse in terms of reliability, price and scale.

"it's not something we can't handle"

The climate models are improving, but they all paint the same picture.

Between your non-speculative forecasting of "it's all going to be better" and our imprecise, albeit improving scientific models I choose science.

No critically thinking person would do otherwise in this case.

The climate models aren't really improving and to the extent they have the IPCC is getting less and less concerned. There is still quite a big spread between the predictions from no problem at all to world is ending.

You don't have to choose between my forecasting or the climate models you just have to understand how models work to realize that you aren't being as critically thinking as you might think you are.

Is anywhere getting better? It seems the whole world is either flooding or burning right now, it seems pretty bleak. Surely some places will become nicer places to live. My friend in Chicago said winters are getting milder but summers staying the same. Eastern Canada & Greenland maybe too?

I think we become victim to selection bias in reporting. There’s not much reporting when it’s just a beautiful day. Or even better than average over a longer than average time. That leads one to conclude it’s all going to hell, when in fact the real problem is we have increasingly real time knowledge of all the disasters everywhere across the globe.

Good point. I don't doubt climate change or anything like that but the world seeming bleaker now than in previous times is, at least partly, a function of selection bias. In the past, even a news-hungry person would consume a daily news show and a daily newspaper at most. News consumption was very constrained even for the news fiends. Now we have realtime global news 24/7 coming at us from everywhere. Furthermore some of this tech is bi-directional so it amplifies the negative catastrophic stuff as it increases engagement / eyeballs and therefore money. It's a classic vicious circle (or a virtuous one if you're on the side making money from it!). It's an insane information environment out there if you choose to over indulge. If you're not careful you're constantly assaulted by an avalanche of negativity, and the world can start to feel very dark indeed. It's really not though.

People from my generation (old millenial / young gen X) often hark back to the 1990s as some sort of halcyon age, but imagine if we had today's tech then. Imagine the 90s refracted through today's tech / media landscape. I bet we'd have felt differently about it.

It's not just "increasingly real time knowledge" though.. The number of disasters are actually up.

Or is it just because there are more people now? Someone posted the other day about how number of people dying is much lower than 100 years ago.

Weather isn't felt in a vacuum: you have to account for centuries of architecture and customs.

Weather in London has become nicer in the last decade, with winters that are milder on average and summers that are warmer and sunnier (except this one). However, inside of London's thick stone houses you don't notice any difference in winter while you also are cooked alive in the summer heat.

Retrofitting heat pumps is completely tractable.

This has two advantages: it's more energy efficient than any other way of heating buildings, and they can be run in reverse for air conditioning.

A lot of those buildings didn't come with indoor plumbing or electricity, after all.

Just turn off the news. They feed on fear.

So we can fear monger all we want into forcing change in the west with alternative energy. But you can’t change how fossil fuels make things much easier and affordable in the rest of the world which is where a lot of the pollution exists at this point (India and China). To go through the amount of energy it takes to become a 1st world nation you need massive amounts of energy that is cheap to acquire and cheap to use. And right now that is fossil fuels. Alternative energy is a luxury.

Hopefully someday the tech becomes more affordable for poor countries and can supply enough energy for them to get through an Industrial Age.

Also note that much of the pollution in India and China is created in the process of manufacturing goods which are then exported to the west, so it’s not like you and I have no influence at all.

Most of the growth in Chinese carbon emissions (>90%) is due to growth Chinese consumption, not exports.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china

Right. We could choose not to buy from them, helping them stay in poverty. That's always an option.

Currently Dollars only serve the Chinese government as a way to put pressure on the competition (USA). They are still eating their own food and living in their own technology based buildings built from their local resources by their local workforce. America doesn't help keep Chinese from poverty, because China isn't incapable of it in the first place. If anything, the political pressures just created perverse incentives there.

That's not even remotely true.

China isn't self-sufficient in calories, be they fuel or food. If they don't get dollars for foreign trade, they starve in the dark.

Correction: Dollars only serve the Chinese government as a way to put pressure on the competition, and means to buy microelectronics

Not buying new stuff so often would be a start.

Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’

https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-is-now-cheapest-electricit...

New solar is now often cheaper than keeping a coal plant running

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/23/most-new...

And we should expect solar to get even cheaper.

Can you explain to me then why China is still building new coal based power plants? If solar is cheaper, why would anybody build something else?

Because solar energy is not cheapest form of 24/7 energy source.

Baseload is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over some timespan. Providing that baseload with solar or wind is not as cheap as hydro, coal, natural gas or nuclear.

Because solar only works when it’s sunny.

The quoted prices for cheap solar energy don’t include storage. Solar plus storage is still expensive.

Inertia.

Solar is cheapest in a similar way that fish is the cheapest food on an island.

If you only look at the days when catches are high then it is the cheapest method to produce food. If fish are your primary source of food, and every day you don't get enough you will have to eat expensive imported food, you food cost over the year can be quite high for a primary fishing nation. The fish will still be cheapest, but as a strategy it is somewhat expensive or carry a high risk of starvation.

Nations will build as much solar/wind as there is peak demand, because it is the cheapest energy when it produce. Nation will also build coal, oil and gas power plants in order to be there when those solar and wind aren't producing. Economically that is the cheapest way to produce a stable energy grid. Environmentally it is far from the best. Falling solar and wind prices reinforces this model.

And yet coal and natural gas prices reach multiyear highs due to unsatiated demand...

Actually you'll find the economies of scale probably help keep the costs down.

Square miles of land are pretty common. Blanketing them with something useful is a good thing.

If you had ever driven from Shaniko to Maupin in early June when the prairie lupine is blooming, I doubt you’d be so cavalier.

Both yes and no. If renewables and buffer storage become raw cheaper than fossils, then they will just be adopted.

But as of now coal is cheaper. And nuclear which is the natural bridge gap tech is politically unfeasible.

> But as of now coal is cheaper.

do you have a reference for that? Citation needed as to where and by how much coal is cheaper.

About what? Does 1gw base load capable renewable installation with grid storage that can work 24/7, 365 days per year even exist?

And this is fairly trivial to start with coal.

Ah, you didn't mention base load or scale, just "coal is cheaper". Thank you for clarifying.

It's becoming clear that (see links that I posted upthread, and the replies) that _any_ blanket statement of "_x_ energy is cheaper" is going to be wrong in some cases, at present. And things are changing year by year.

Since we were talking about emerging and developing economies I assumed that we were talking about base load since this is what they mostly need.

As we can see by Itaipu and Three Gorges Dam - people prefer renewables to coal when it makes economic sense and is cheaper.

Also switching to alternative energy has a huge upfront cost in CO2 - producing all those windmills and solar panels costs a lot of energy.

If the time to turn things around is really so short, maybe that upfront CO2 explosion is not the right way to go.

Similar things hold for other things like energy neutral buildings - actually building them has a huge upfront cost in CO2.

This. And to be honest, luxury solution discussions and their waste of public discussion bandwidth are part of the problem. Financially support the building of thorium reactors in china and india- is part of the solution. Solar at home- is nice, but not part of the solution - as most of the carbon cost in the west has been carted off into the east.

Geez, you'd think there were no alternatives to continuing to burn fossil fuels or something ?

It's not true, solar is very cost effective, cheaper than coal. But there are industries build around extracting coal from the ground and they have an interest to continue to push coal.

All up installed cost of solar per kWh is now cheaper than fossil fuel fired power plants but it's only been that way for a couple of years. Power plants are build based on a 30-50 year lifecycle. It's like trying to steer an oil tanker (hah) - we ARE turning, it just takes a while.

So why do companies continue to buy electricity made from coal if solar is cheaper?

..and it seems like these guys got more power than the politicians.

I’ve heard no predictions though about what will happen to society.

If you took each IPCC report and made every number 20% worse (larger or smaller depending on the context), would you end up with a better set of predictions?

These doomsday prophecies are always conveniently distant. You can tell people any scary nonsense as long as it's far enough away that everyone will have forgotten the details of your prediction by the time it fails to come to pass.

It's just the same as how we can show people today any number of doomsday prophecies from the past about how the world was definitely going to be wrecked by 2020, or 2010, or 2000, or 1990, but somehow nobody thinks they were serious back then... but then they take the doomsday prophecy about 2030 seriously.

They are probably slightly different prophecies and the nuances get lost by the media and/or by readers.

1990: We are 10 years from being unable to stop climate change. -- Happened.

2000: We are 10 years from coral reefs being killed. -- Happened.

2010: We are 10 years from farms being permanently scorched. -- Happening.

The Branch Davidians said the world is ending in 1993. That doesn't render our understanding of climate change 'scary nonsense'.

The issue OP is making is that climate scientists have forecasted "tipping points"[0] for years on end now, and none of them have come true. It ruins the credibility of these "point of no return" articles.

[0] https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...

Not sure what sort of "coming true" you guys are expecting. We're looking at a pretty unusual level of drought, fires, and flooding disasters all over the world, new temperature records almost every year, and faster temperature increases and ice loss than the IPCC had projected.

Back in 2007 the book Six Degrees was published, with one chapter per degree of warming, summing up the science of what results we would see. We're at one degree and everything in that chapter is happening now.

No-one’s arguing a cliff edge other than media spinning drama for clicks.

The direction of travel has been clear, understood and consistent for decades, as has the messaging from the scientific community around it.

You seem to be confusing a bunch of cherry-picked newspaper clippings with scientific research.

Exactly.

That you would just batch up any amount of cultish astrological nonsense and equate it with science because they both make predictions is ridiculous.

By this logic you might as well insist the Earth is flat because Columbus didn’t end up in India.

I think this is why young people think boomers are dumb when in reality boomers have just been burned over and over with doom predictions and by political lies obviously said to earn votes. These doom predictions are always conveniently 10 years away, long enough that it feels close and urgent but so it also feels that we still have time to fix. My high schooler came home one day just last year and said they learned that we are going to run out of fossil fuels in 10 years so we have to convert everything to renewable right away. I told him 25 years ago I ‘learned’ in high school that we would run out of fossil fuels in 10 years also. They even explained the models in my day not just showed the results to you. They had the total available stores, usage rate over time, predicted finding of new resources, and it was all neatly organized into charts perfectly that made it look impossible to be wrong to a high schooler whose only knowledge on the topic came from school.

And these prophecies are always of the 'worse than previously thought' kind. It really just makes me question how sophisticated climate modelling actually is/was.

This is totally absurd and unjustifiable fearmongering.

Wishful thinking. You either don’t think climate change will have life and death consequences or you have a lot of hope that humanity will get its shit together and solve it in the next decade.

Life expectancy isn’t going to go up, and quality of life won’t improve after the tipping point. It’s all downhill beyond that.

It don't consider the parent's scenario to be likely, but it's on the table. We are in deep shit.