[Sivad]

Environmentalists have long promoted renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind farms to save the climate. But what about when those technologies destroy the environment? In this provocative talk, Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and energy expert, Michael Shellenberger explains why solar and wind farms require so much land for mining and energy production, and an alternative path to saving both the climate and the natural environment.

[ThirdTerm]

I think climate change is real and we are dying out as H. sapiens as a whole. No matter what we do, we cannot stop climate change. Scientists predicted that Australians will no longer enjoy winter as they know it today by 2050. Probably Australia will be largely uninhabitable for modern humans in 30 years from now except for coastal areas, while Aboriginals would manage to survive in their continent that their Denisovan ancestors first discovered.

Academics from the School of Art & Design have teamed up with colleagues from the ANU Climate Change Institute on a design project, which takes existing data and communicates the impacts of climate change in a way that people can engage with and better understand.

The resulting new climate tool visualises data which shows by 2050, Australians will no longer enjoy winter as they know it today and will experience a new season the designers are calling "New Summer".

New Summer represents a period of the year where temperatures will consistently peak in many cases well above 40ºC for a sustained period.

Using the tool, people can click on thousands of locations across Australia to see how the local weather in their home town will change by 2050.

"We looked at the historical average temperatures of each season and compared them to the projected data and what we find everywhere is that there's really no period of a sustained or lasting winter," said Dr Geoff Hinchliffe, Senior Lecturer (SOA&D).

"In 30 years' time winter as we know it will be non-existent. It ceases to be everywhere apart from a few places in Tasmania," he said.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-03-australia ... r.html#jCp

[Pants-of-dog]

What does it mean when people say renewables cannot save the planet?

[annatar1914]

What does it mean when people say renewables cannot save the planet?

About as much as when ''conservatives'' say they don't want to conserve anything for the benefit of future generations. True Conservatives preserve and conserve.

[Hindsite]

What does it mean when people say renewables cannot save the planet?

It is impractical.
Here is a reference to the text below:

Published on February 27, 2019
Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet
written by Michael Shellenberger

https://quillette.com/2019/02/27/why-re ... he-planet/

We would be better off praying to God. That does not mean we should just stop working on new technologies to better our lives.
HalleluYah

[Pants-of-dog]

As far as I can tell, that article simply listed some of the problems associated with renewables.

Since every form of electricity production has some environmental drawbacks, merely citing some of them does not show that renewables cannot replace traditional fossil fuels. And this is because traditional fossil fuels also have negative environmental impacts.

In terms of long term sustainable energy production, the people claiming that renewables will not work would need to show that the negative environmental impacts of renewables were worse than fossil fuels.

If the focus is on logistics, then I am not surprised that the article ignored hydro-electricity, which has a far cleaner environmental impact record than fossil fuels and has been shown to provide enough electricity to run a modern industrialised country.

Of xourse, the main problem with this article (like many other criticisms of things we can actually do) is that it thinks renewables have to be a magic bullet in order to be part of the solution. By that I mean that he expects everything to stay exactly the same except we would use renewables instead of fossil fuels to make electricity and that 5his would solve cliamte change. This is an incorrect assumption.

Climate change is a complex, widespread, diverse series of problems that will almost certainly require an even more complex, widespread, and diverse set of solutions. Pinning all our hopes in renewables or any other single step solution is magical thinking, and this is true for any action we could possibly take on climate change. So, the mere criticism that renewables will not save the planet all by themselves is true but not very intelligent.

Will renewables save the planet all by themselves allowing us to live a consequence free life otherwise? No.

Will renewables be a part of the huge number of solutions we use to deal with some of the problems associated with climate change? Almost certainly.