Cities Are Scolding Countries at UN Climate Conference To Cut Emissions (vice.com)

A reader shares a report: An alliance of major cities including New York, Toronto, and London challenged nation states attending the United Nations climate talks in Bonn, Germany this week "to kick dirty carbon to the curb" and immediately "commit and work straightaway towards carbon neutrality, 100 percent renewable energy, zero-waste and zero-carbon." The Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance is a new collaboration of 20 international cities (other members include Washington DC, San Francisco, Oslo, and Sydney). All are striving for carbon neutrality and cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050. "Dirty fuels and climate disruption are killing and displacing millions of citizens around the world," the Alliance stated in a strongly-worded letter sent to every country's delegation at climate talks, known as COP 23. "Cities are on the frontline of climate impacts. We see the urgency of climate action and need nation-states to be as committed as we are," Johanna Partin, the director of the Alliance and former advisor to the mayor of San Francisco, told Motherboard by phone.

Comments

100% Renewable is not feasible

[atomicalgebra]

There is already an established scientific consensus that nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change. Germany has spent 100 of billions on renewables and have not made a dent in their carbon carbon emissions. Germany pollutes 10x as much as France. The New York times recently posted an analysis of the cleanest countries in the world, and they all use a combination of hydro and nuclear.

Re:On high

[Hal_Porter]

Can you prove that is the Scientific Consensus?

Right now it's just as possible that the lukewarmers are right. E.g. as Matt Ridley put it

http://www.rationaloptimist.co...

I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue but I no longer think it is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future. That last year was the warmest yet, in some data sets, but only by a smidgen more than 2005, is precisely in line with such lukewarm thinking.

As he points out here the lukewarmer case - global warming is real but not catastrophic is compatible with the range of predictions the IPCC made. And in fact looking at satellite and surface data we find that warming has been slower than the best case predictions from models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The climate models have so far failed to get global warming right. As the IPCC confirmed in its latest report for the period since 1998 - I quote - "111 of the 114 available climate models show a surface warming trend larger than the observations". In other words the models have overestimated warming. And here's a chart that illustrates that point.

https://imgur.com/a/ZNDbY

That is to say there is actually a consensus - if you like that word - that models are exaggerating the rate of global warming. The warming has so far resulting in no significant changes in the frequency or intensity of storms, tornadoes, floods, droughts or winter snow cover as I said. As two climate scientists, Richard McNider and John Christy put it "We might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the beginning of climate modeling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate. Back in 1990 the first IPCC assessment included this statement forecasting - no predicting - a temperature increase of 0.3 degrees C per decade with an uncertainty of 0.2 to 0.5 degrees C per decade. In fact, in the two and half decades since, even though emissions have risen faster than in the 'business as usual' scenario of that year the temperature has rise at an average rate of 0.15 degrees per decade based on surface measurements or 0.12 degrees based on satellite data. That is less than half as fast as expected and below the bottom of the uncertainty range.

That was a talk at the Royal Society, and as you can see he's quoting from the IPCC itself when he claims 111 of 114 - 97% - of models have had a best case warming prediction which exceeds what has been seen experimentally.

So you could say there's a 97% consensus that models have over estimated how bad warming will be in the past. Which would make me very sceptical that unless we pump billions into renewable energy the planet will turn into Venus.

Not to mention Germany did pump billions into renewables and didn't cut its CO2 emissions as he points out at 36:43.