Many pieces have been written on here by myself and others regarding climate change, how rapid it is and what is the cause. In a way this is immaterial, the climate is changing, has changed and will continue to change and we will have to deal with it. The world population will also continue to increase for the foreseeable future, we will also have to deal with that.
I have recently read Carl Sagen’s Cosmos from around 1980 and Bjørn Lomberg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist from around 2000.
Cosmos was written at the end of the global cooling period in the 1970s and the major concerns were pollution and nuclear war. Global warming wasn’t an issue then.
The Skeptical Environmentalist tries to look at all the numbers behind the various ‘scares’ of the time, pollution, food shortages, lack of water and disease. The very well refenced text shows that overall things are improving, life expectancy is increasing and there is more food available in spite of the population increase. Global warming is discussed with the comment that all the scenarios are based on the worst case predictions, equivalent to today’s RPC8.5. It also notes that the IPCC and other environmental bodies stopped carrying out value analysis and just demand change regardless of cost.
Where do we stand today after another 20 years? I will take this to be before the Ukrainian invasion as this has created a lot of changes that need to be separately discussed.
As I see it very little has changed. A huge amount of hot air has been spoken (maybe the cause of the temperature increase) lots of expensive global conferences have taken place for the not so god and not so great. Nothing concrete has changed. There are no real engineered solutions on offer. There are various ‘renewable’ energy sources, wind, solar PV and biomass which are currently unable to function without subsidies (maybe the currently increasing energy prices will allow self-sufficiency??) The intermittent sources also rely on existing thermal or hydro power generation when they are unable to supply which is a further subsidy.
What should we do, what can we do? As has been suggested on here before a good start point would be to build some more nuclear power plants using more modern designs with good load following rather than the older Pu factories, reinforce the electricity distribution system and improve the insulation of existing buildings. I agree with Insulate Britain’s concept but not with their implementation. Loft insulation is one of the simplest improvements with a good payback (maybe less than one year in the current situation). Why did Insulate Britain simply cause disruption rather than looking for the roadblocks (information, regulations, lack of trained installers etc.) and clearing them?
The governments seem to jump from one idea to the next with no real thought or planning. Diesel is Good, Diesel is Bad, Subsidise Renewables, Don’t Subsidise Renewables, Fit Heat Pumps, etc.
As a side thought would it be a better use of resources to insulate my house to reduce the heat loss to 1/3 and use direct electric heating than to just install a heat pump with an average COP of 3? Please discuss.
Is there a population limit? According to the data in the Skeptical Environmentalist as developing countries develop and become more wealthy the birth rate drops, maybe we reach 10 Billion people as a maximum. Can we deal with this? Just burning more finite resources is probably not the solution. Thanos’s solution is probably also not acceptable.
Lots of questions and lots of engineering opportunities to be taken up but I don’t see any real work being done. The IET posts various politically correct position statements but doesn’t seem to do any actual engineering. Questions that they should be answering are ones like:
If we migrate 50% of our transport to EVs how much new power generation is required?
If we migrate 50% of our domestic heating to electricity, either directly or through heat pumps, how much new power generation is required?
How much of that power is simultaneously required? Will people charge their vehicles and heat their houses at the same time?
How can we reinforce the local electrical distribution system without digging up every street? (Maybe feed the existing cables from both ends??)
Do you have any other realistic engineering solutions?
