other than perhaps nuclear, nothing comes close to fossil fuels when it comes to the combination of cost, energy density, transportability, availability they are more responsible for human flourishing in the last century than anything else whatever impact they have on climate are far outweighed by the benefits (some climate impacts are positive, and negative climate impacts can be adapted to)
True fossil fuels have a lot of advantages but lead has a lot of advantages as a lubricant and binding agent yet we still have largely phased it out.
Don't need to defend or impugn the honor of fossil fuels. Sure, harnessing the energy from fossil fuels has helped humanity flourish. Now we've invented other ways to get energy without some of fossil fuels' negative side effects and there is advantage in transitioning. Domesticating the horse was once a huge boon to civilization, but it was okay to move on.
I don’t this will change many minds but for others the new Information from IPCC is very alarming and matches a lot of what we’ve been seeing recently. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/08/world/extreme-weather-climate-change/
Denialists have convinced themselves that scientific bodies simply can't be trusted. So, no, it won't change minds. Sadly.
There is a considerable difference between "unlikely" and "implausible". If those scenarios are merely "unlikely", but not "implausible", I don't understand the point being made. Say there is just a 10% chance a giant meteor will strike the Earth, causing immense catastrophe for human life. Should we complain if more than 50% of the news coverage is centered on this "unlikely" scenario?
there's more detail about the specific problem in the article he cites elsewhere in the thread: https://issues.org/climate-change-scenarios-lost-touch-reality-pielke-ritchie/ the full version of which is here if you have institutional access: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629620304655?via=ihub
from the first overview article: This remarkable continuity of characteristics among different generations of climate scenarios facilitates the comparison of research conducted over many decades using the different scenarios. But it also creates a problem. The emissions scenarios the climate community is now using as baselines for climate models depend on portrayals of the present that are no longer true. And once the scenarios lost touch with reality, so did the climate, impact, and economic models that depend on them for their projections of the future. Yet these projections are a central part of the scientific basis upon which climate policymakers are now developing, debating, and adopting policies. and on why it matters: Why does this matter? Because RCP8.5—the most commonly used RCP scenario and the one said to best represent what the world would look like if no climate policies were enacted—represents not just an implausible future in 2100, but a present that already deviates significantly from reality. We know this because we have studied RCP8.5 (as well as other climate scenarios) for years and have evaluated many of its inputs and assumptions against how the world has actually developed since 2005, where RCP8.5 begins. We have also evaluated hundreds of IPCC scenarios against near-term projections of global energy assessments. Our work (including collaborations with Matthew Burgess and other colleagues), as well as studies by other researchers published in many papers, clearly shows that most IPCC scenarios are already off track and some, like RCP8.5, significantly so. As summarized by two scenario experts in a January 2020 commentary in Nature, “the world imagined in RCP8.5 is one that, in our view, becomes increasingly implausible with every passing year.” For instance, RCP8.5 projects to 2100 a six-fold growth in global coal consumption per capita, while the International Energy Agency and other energy forecasting groups collectively agree that coal consumption has already or will soon peak. Also, RCP8.5 foresees carbon dioxide emissions growing rapidly to at least the year 2300 when Earth reaches more than 2,000 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. But again, according to the IEA and other groups, fossil energy emissions have likely plateaued, and it is plausible to achieve net-zero emissions before the end of the century, if not much sooner. Today, projections that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels will increase dramatically for the next 50, 100, or 300 years are simply implausible. Why, then, did the IPCC choose RCP8.5 as its only business-as-usual baseline? Not because it explicitly judged it the world’s most likely or even plausible future, although the designation implies both. Rather, it selected RCP8.5 in part to facilitate continuity with scenarios of past IPCC reports, both SRES and earlier baseline scenarios, so that results of climate modeling research across decades could be comparable. It also chose RCP8.5 to help climate modelers explore the differences between climate behavior under hypothesized extreme conditions of human-caused climate forcing and natural variability. The difference between the high (8.5 W/m2) and low (2.6 W/m2) RCP forcing pathways created, as scenario developers explained, “a good signal-to-noise ratio for evaluating the climate response in AOGCM [atmospheric-oceanic general circulation model] simulations.” The technical requirements of climate modeling, and not climate policy, drove the design of IPCC scenarios. These decisions might be justifiable if climate models were simply scientific tools aimed at exploring a variety of conditions as a way to test hypotheses and researchers’ understanding of the climate system. But scientists, policymakers, the media, environmentalists, and the public now widely justify and interpret climate models as providing predictive information about plausible futures. By choosing RCP8.5 as one of only four forcing scenarios to be used by modelers, and compounding this choice by labeling it as the business-as-usual scenario, the IPCC promoted a scenario useful for scientific exploration but highly misleading when applied to projecting the future to inform decision-making. In our research on the plausibility of IPCC scenarios, we have discovered it is not just RCP8.5 that is implausible, but the entire set of baseline scenarios used by the IPCC. In some ways this is unsurprising. As events unfold in a complex world, even the near-term futures anticipated by scenarios will drift away from reality. As a matter of scientific integrity, however, the reputation of science as a source of uniquely reliable knowledge depends on its internal capacity for self-correction. In the case of the RCPs (as with the example of breast cancer research after 2007), what we are seeing instead amounts to a stubborn commitment to error. This wouldn’t matter if climate scenarios had no implications for the world outside of science. But they lie at the heart of scientific efforts to understand the future of climate change and society’s decisions about how to respond.
