The Cost Of Running The World On Renewable Power | The Resilient Earth

Perhaps the best way to look at running the world exclusively on renewable power is that it would cost $33,500 for every man, woman and child on Earth. People in developed nations might be willing to invest this much, but what of those living in under developed economies, where per capita yearly income can be less than $300? Nobody but deep green zealots would call this a reasonable deal.

The Reference Frame: Models are wrong: ice sheets grow from the bottom, too

But let me return to the climate models. Even if one fixes the directions from which the ice may grow and retreat, it will still be far from being certain that the ice sheets are described correctly. There are lots of other things that the ice sheets are doing and we (and surely James Hansen) understand many of them incorrectly. Some of the flawed assumptions are known to some people; other flawed assumptions are not known to anyone.

The same shocks are repeatedly shattering with our ideas about mundane phenomena such as cloudiness as well as rarer phenomena such as lightnings - which produce positrons, among other things. In some sense, each of those comparable breakthroughs may change the predictions of important climatic variables in the future by dozens of percent.

What do you think that happens with our climate models after 10 such modifications? Just if you need the following identity, 10 times 10 percent is equal to 100 percent.