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Study Links Human Actions To Specific Arctic Ice Melt (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes from a report via Science Magazine: Since at least the 1960s, the shrinkage of the ice cap over the Arctic Ocean has advanced in lockstep with the amount of greenhouse gases humans have sent into the atmosphere, according to a study published this week in Science. Every additional metric ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) puffed into the atmosphere appears to cost the Arctic another 3 square meters of summer sea ice -- a simple and direct observational link that has been sitting under scientists' noses. If current emission trends hold, the study suggests the Arctic will be ice free by 2045 -- far sooner than some climate models predict. The study suggests that those models are underestimating how warm the Arctic has already become and how fast that melting will proceed. And it gives the public and policymakers a concrete illustration of the consequences of burning fossil fuels. For instance, a U.S. family of four would claim nearly 200 square meters of sea ice, based on U.S. emissions in 2013. Over 3 decades, that family would be responsible for destroying more than an American football field's worth of ice.
We don't need nukes to feed the grid, I'm sure we can do it with wind, solar, and a global HVDC power grid. Problem solved, 'cuz if its midnight and the wind stops blowing, we'll get our power from the Ukraine... or maybe some windy place is Argentina.
What we _don't_ have a solution for is transportation. We cannot power cars, trucks, ships, planes, and locomotives on battery or grid power. We might be able to eventually electrify all the locomotives but not any time soon. Otherwise, 18 wheelers and riverboats and such all require big batteries that do not exist. They don't exist because they need to be cheap and small and cheap and high capacity and cheap and rugged enough for automotive use and cheap and quickly rechargeable and cheap. They need to be cheap so Joe Blow can buy a $12K electric car that does everything that a $12K gasoline powered car can do now. And that's no small feat. For instance, in the 1987 1 Lap of America rally a 1987 Yugo drove 9000 miles in 10 days to circumnavigate the USA. No electric car can do that right now, not even the Tesla because those doing that rally chose their own routes between certain identified points, so there needed to be gas stations pretty much everywhere, and not even Tesla has enough "supercharger" battery exchange stations to do that. And, of course Teslas are not cheap, and will not serve the lower classes with little disposable income.
So there's no electric solution for transportation, and we're forced to keep burning fossil fuels until there is. We can't stop, because stopping the travel, even a little, will have an outsized economic impact from people not being able to purchase and spend as they otherwise would, so those involved in the businesses they would otherwise patronize will go out of business, go on welfare roles, and the economy will be greatly harmed with much human suffering for those cast into poverty until the whole thing becomes completely unsupportable and collapses. We MUST continue burning fossil fuels.
I suggest to those that want to continuously whine about CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere suspend their protesting and marching and seeking new laws, but instead get their PHD's in electrochemistry and materials science, get their butts into a lab somewhere, and invent for us the magic battery that will make gasoline cars more expensive to buy and run than electric cars because the electric cars are so cheap, and not because you've done something to tax gasoline cars. Do that, and we can fill in everything else with wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, etc. and the world will be saved, maybe even cast into pre-industrial temperature ranges eventually. But no LAW you can pass will do anything to make this happen, and will likely have unintended consequences that end up impeding the move to electric cars.