Climate change in 2016: the good, the bad, and the ugly
This past year had so many stories involving human-caused climate change – it will be forever in our memories. Here is a summary of some of the high points, from my perspective. When I say “high points” I don’t necessarily mean good. Some of these high points are bad and some are downright ugly. Let’s do the good first.
The Good
The best news of all, in my opinion, is the continued cost reductions and huge installations of clean energy both in the US and around the word. Wind, solar, and other renewables have been on an incredible run of decreasing costs and creative financing, which has made them economically competitive with dirty fossil fuels. Improvements and expansion of grid-based power storage has also advanced. These storage abilities are needed to allow intermittent power sources (like wind and solar) to play an even larger role in delivering power to the grid. In the end, clean power will win out based on simple dollars and cents – regardless of the fact they will also help save the world. On an international scale, the US, China, and other countries ratified the Paris climate agreement, which gives us a reasonable chance at avoiding the worst effects of climate change. In the lead up to that ratification, the US took major actions domestically to reduce its own emissions through steps like the Clean Power Plan. Emissions have been reduced in some countries like the US for a variety of reasons. First, very cheap natural gas is displacing dirtier coal-based power. Secondly, renewable energy sources like wind and solar are expanding, and people are using energy more wisely. All of this happened with a major reduction in energy costs in the US. This shows you can have clean energy that is also cheap. In court, it was a good year. A rag-tag group of pro-bono climate scientists beat a bunch of high-paid contrarians in court. We showed that their science was nonsense and the smart judge gave a very harsh judgement to the funded deniers. And last in this part of the list, I think this is the year we can say the climate deniers and the contrarians who downplay global warming threats finally lost the science war. In the past, there were a dwindling few scientists each year that attempted to find evidence that the world was not warming, or wasn’t warming much. Each year, the number of scientists in this group got smaller and smaller. This year, they were virtually nonexistent. The contrarians have almost given up looking for contrarian evidence – it just isn’t there. They have ceded the scientific field because their research was found to be wrong. Now, these contrarian scientists only appear in blogs, op-eds in newspapers, sometimes in pay-for-play journals – but rarely in competitively reviewed scientific venues. After being wrong for decades, they have seemingly just given up.
Posted by admin
on Jan 3 2017. Filed under Climate change.
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