Elecgric Vehicles - F250 Lightning - Event Date: 16 Mar 2022

Well I've certainly met people who deny the climate is changing. There are also people who deny the earth is round. So they exisf, all the physical evidence to the contrary. It is not perjorative to say that someone denies physical evidence if they do, just a statement of fact.

I haven't heard anyone on this forum say they believe either of those things. But really its ok with me if they did, I've long since learned that people believe all sorts of things which are contrary to evidence. We all have sent that.

In any event, I've been well aware of the need to make a shift in the energy economy as soon as possible since the late 1970s, hence my choice of a career in photovoltaics. That is not hubris and arrogance, it is my assessment of the implications of the climate science. I assure you that it had nothing to do with government funded pronouncements or the media hype, none of which existed then. Hardly anyone even knew what photovoltaics was.

I completely agree thst it's all about the economics. We had commercially available solar in the late 1970s, you could buy all you wanted for a mere $15 per watt (in 1980 dollars). Now it's about 50 cents a watt, in 2022 dollars. The work over that 40 plus year period was to achieve that cost reduction so that solar became economically competitive with fossil fuel alternatives. Once the basic economics were in place customers were able to excercize their emotions which in the end are critical to making a buy decision.

So as I said, I really don't mind if someone buys an EV because it's faster, quieter, cheaper, more convenient, gives what you feel is higher community status. reduces your exposure to price fluctuations, or even because its greener. All those attributes are the result of a lot of hard work by many smart people to make EVs attractive to a broad audience.

As for climate change, discussions regarding the science behind it are not political just because someone perhaps might want to make them so. Science is science, we should be able to discuss it here. Decisions regarding public policy are by definition political and so are out of bounds.

One cannot reasonably argue that a scientific development should not be actionable because the science might change. That simply becomes a justification for inaction. If a business leader took that viewpoint his board of directors would fire him immediately. Leadership requires making timely decisions without all the data you would like. Point in a direction and go based on the best data available. If you have to adjust your course later when more info turns up then you do that. The keys to success are being out in front, being right more often than wrong, and being able to quickly make course adjustments as more data becomes available.

As I said before, there are a lot of very smart engineers and scientists actually working now on solutions to reduce and eventually eliminate the use of fossil fuels.  The are coming up with new ideas all the time, even using concepts that may have been previously rejected as impractical because they found ways around the impediments.  In every form of alternate energy there are problems that have to be overcome, whether it is serious environmental damage from lithium and nickel mining, energy storage and portability, and so on.  I am optimistic that most of these problems can be overcome and am not going to reject any ideas until they have been fully explored and proven to be unworkable. 

I would like to point out that what we think of as established science today might not be tomorrow as we find out more. Is the climate changing? Yes. It is always changing. We have everything from the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period to the Ice Ages. Which is the perfect climate? These happened long before our industrial age. Then there is the Little Ice Age ( https://instaar.colorado.edu/research/projects/cause-and-onset-of-little-ice-age/ ). How much of our warming is due to coming out of that still? Where is the equilibrium point that is the one for which we should aim? How do we get to it? If we were to have a couple of large volcanic eruptions of the Krakatoa scale, we would be back to talking about global cooling and how to keep that from happening. That was back in the 70's when talk was of spreading carbon on the ice to promote solar absorption to keep the earth from cooling. That appears to be quite foolish today. What we are being told today might appear to be equally foolish a few years down the road.

Ciberpine, the atmospheric physics of carbon dioxide heat trapping have been well understood for long over a century, no modelling required. That has nothing to do with whether plants like CO2 or not. Of course they do, photosynthesis can't work without it.

The point is that if you increase the amount of heat being trapped in the atmosphere the Earth's average temperature goes up until a new equilibrium is reached where the heat getting radiated back into space again balances with the heat being absorbed from the sun. Has to, the heat has to go somewhere, energy is not created or destroyed, just moved around.

So more CO2 means higher temps which means the glaciers melt more which means sea levels go up. That is happening now (measured, not modeled) and has happened in the past. Last time CO2 levels were this high was about 3 million years ago and sea levels were about 30-50 feet higher than now. That is called the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period.

Since about 10 percent of the world's population lives on low lying sea coasts all those folks will need to find somewhere else to live, make a living and get their food. I did exactly that 4 years ago, moved from Hatteras NC which is flooding more and more often, to SW VA at 2700 ft elevation. But we were lucky enough to have the resources to be able to do that proactively. Most people around the world do not.

Sea level rise is just one effect, others are stronger storms (because a warmer atmosphere contains more energy in the form of water vapor) and droughts in some areas and floods in others, as the climate shifts around.

None of the above takes elaborate modeling to understand. All you have to do is look at the actual temps, actual sea level changes, actual CO2 level changes, weather pattern changes, and the geological record. Where the modelling comes in is in trying to predict how soon, how much change, and which areas are going to be effected by what change.

That modeling is certainly imperfect but gets better all the time. And real scientists can't get away with lying because the whole point of science is to be able to demonstrate repeatability. If others can't replicate one scientists results then it ain't science and gets thrown out. So yes there are cases of scientists faking their data but that is a career ending event when discovered so it's quite rare.

But the big picture effect is not in doubt because you can measure it and it's happened before. Will it end the human race? Of course not, unless we do it to ourselves by fighting wars over resources or transmitting new diseases during the migrations.

Will it result in loss of biodiversity as many species die off? Of course. Plants and animals are adapted to live where they live. When things change they either have to be able to change too or move, same as the people. Some species will be able to do that but many others won't.

Will it change the world for some folks it in some really devastating ways? Yes absolutely. Will some folks be better off? Probably.

So what we need to do is decide to what extent we want to slow down and manage the changes. That's a political process which is out of bounds on this forum so I'll stop there. But the rest of the above is straightforward to understand without recourse to complex modeling.

In any event I'm happy even if climate change deniers (not saying you are one) adopt EVs and/or solar for other reasons. There are plenty of things to like about them and the result is the same regardless of the reasons. So it's all good

I'm of the firm belief that no single thing will solve the energy issue. It will take all of the "solutions" we know of today, plus probably ones that none of us can think of. Solar and wind have the intermittency issue. Nuclear has safety and political issues (with the possible exception of fusion; but that is perpetually 10 years in the future). Geothermal has probably not been explored enough, plus it turns out there is a tremendous amount of lithium in at least "some" geothermal sites. I heard an operator of one geothermal site saying they can extract 20 thousand tons of lithium annually from just that one geothermal site. Fossil fuels have all the pollution issues we are all familiar with. Don't get me started on coal.