Just 5 years left to stop climate change

[Human No More]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

This is conspiracy thinking. The IPCC is merely the institution that tries to bring scientific results to politics. It does that job not perfectly, but the underlying science is not depending on the IPCC for the overwhelming majority of projects. The studies about climate, climate change and human impact are incredibly numerous and funded by all kinds of agencies. There were even some funded by "climate change deniers" that came up with the same results as the others ones. Overall, the measured impacts and changes in climate do match or even exceed the estimates of scientific modelling done many years ago. One constant is that "it happens faster than we thought".
And re this article - it is from the freaking IEA - a bunch of guys who always used to tell us that there is no problem in the next few years.

You can't claim they're squeaky clean. There is still a lack of transparency and cases of data manipulation no matter the integrity of the actual data.

I dont think NIMBY is a problem so much. Actually people next to nuclear power plants do not always mind it - in some cases they are well paid. But the impact of it ranges farther. Honestly I think those who profit from something should also have to live with the impact. If someone wants nuclear power, they should not mind living next to a nuclear plant and nuclear waste storage. If someone wants solar or wind, they should not mind those contraptions built next to where they live. There is no clean and no-impact source of energy. And if one actually experiecnces the impact of it oneself, one may be much less inclined to waste energy or to create stuff that uses even more energy. This is only too easy if one can drop the trash on someone elses land or on everyone elses land.

About right. The problem is that for less educated people, nobody wants ANY production near them of any kind.

Interestingly it seems that despite those power levels never thought of do not make that 20 years timeframe decline. Seriously - the mean value of predictions of when fusion power will be available is always 20 years over the past 25 years or so that I can remember (and possibly even before that).

Yes, it's subject to upward revision, but you're overstating it, ironic in the same breath as promoting the latest upward revision of your own belief
Reactions can today be contained, and work is on improving the necessary conditions and energy return. I agree that it would be extremely stupid to go 'well, things SHOULD be able to be replaced in 20-30 years so we shouldn't renew infrastructure now', as a lack of renewal would price consumers out of the market entirely unless governments are forced to regulate, and perhaps even directly set energy prices. Decommissioning some now-obsolete infrastructure before the end of its lifetime is a small cost in comparison.

On the other hand, remember that advancement is exponential. It took humans millennia to go from bashing rocks together to working simple metals, or hundreds of years to go from hot air balloons to aeroplanes, then only 44 years to break the sound barrier, then merely another 22 years to humans walking on the moon, while today, the number of transistors on a chip regularly doubles by the year. The vast majority of classic scifi underestimates progress when showing or referencing events that are now in the past, and indeed, the perception that something should be doable is an extreme drive towards its actual accomplishment.