2014 was hotter than 1998. 2015 data in yet?

You mean we should all give up the only source of energy we know to be capable of improving our lives (clean water, abundant food, health care, personal - and, by extension, economic and political - freedom, warm houses and general good times) out of what may be an insanely irrational fear?If solar could give us what we needed, I'd say 'fuck, man, let's switch tomorrow'. But as it cannot - as no other energy source can - we need to ask the tough and honest questions, such as: is it worth giving up the food on your table and the clothes on your kids' backs just to stave off a few meters of sea water a couple hundred years in the future?Is it?

That's not what I was referring to as an "irrational fear". For a hint see the subtitle of this post, your post, and the one you replied to. Indeed. It's just unfortunate no one here is advocating such real alternatives to fossil fuels. Well. France's production is below the U.S.That's the thing with looking at small countries - it's easy to distort the reality of the situation with large percentages of rather small wholes.It is a step though.

But will it?Where's your evidence that it will? It's what I've been asking about for most of this thread and asked about for a good portion of the thread on fusion.Do you know how many serious replies I got? How many attempts to present the math? How many folks stepped up to demonstrate the real-world feasibility of renewables to replace fossil fuels?Exactly zero.Maybe you care to change that? Or maybe you just care to bitch and proselytize?

A fear is irrational if the things feared are unlikely.We know the mechanisms that create killer clowns. Yet we also recognize a fear of clowns to be irrational. Like I said, the problem with percentages and all...Whether it's scalable or not I don't know. I also don't know if we'd just find somewhere else to burn all the coal if we stopped sticking it in power plants. History tells me we probably would...

If you're talking about the report I think you're talking about, then you still haven't produced anything.Where's the numbers? Where's the data?How about you try again?Give us the link. Describe what it is. Quote some relevant portions. Show how they support your position.

Yes. Where have I either said or implied that we should "take no action"? You mean do the research for someone else's argument?No thanks.

That was my mistake. I missed that you were talking about capacity. I'm not interested in talking about capacity. I'm interested in talking about electricity actually generated because that's what matters. More laughs.The sun doesn't shine at night. So take a guess at what's actually charging all those electric cars while their drivers sleep.

No they don't.Every modern society generates the majority of its energy from fossil fuels.

I think what ringo - and definitely myself - is looking for is a plan.How much electricity does NYC use? (This will require you to use words like watts and watthours in your reply.)How much electricity can you reliably get from a solar panel in NYC - on good days and bad?How big are the solar panels? How big is NYC? (This requires words like square feet or meters.)How much storage capacity will you need and how much space will it require?What backup capacity will you need and what type will it be?Are any additions needed to the current delivery system and how will delivery and distance from the source of generation impact the other factors?Let's start here with the basic physics of it all. We can move on to costs next...

That's nice. I'm still right, though. The power behind electric cars is almost all FF.It's not the carbon-free dream folks like LNA are peddling it as. Not really. If there were, folks in Columbia, MD, would simply store all the wind and solar power they are producing and use it as needed instead of selling it off when they make extra and relying on FF-derived grid power when the winds ain't blowing and the sun ain't shining.

How do you know?You can't even tell me how much FF we'd have to burn to get to the 216 feet.

I am absolutely sure of that. And you should be too. I care a great deal for the future generation and for the one after it and the one after that and all of them to come.That is why I want to do whatever it takes to keep the lights on in the hospitals, the tractors running through the fields, the rain off our heads, and all the other things that will make sure the future generations inherit a world with less sickness, more food, and the best possible quality of life we can give them.If that requires fossil fuels, that requires fossil fuels. But maybe someone in this thread will be able to show us how it can happen without them.

If the use of fossil fuels is really going to cause such problems, then we should all be very sad. Because we know what a world without access to the cheap, plentiful, and reliable energy provided by fossil fuels looks like: it's the world inhabited by humanity everywhere for most of its existence and in underdeveloped societies today - a world of scarce food, death by even minor illnesses, hard and brutal labor, and short lives, where folks live at the mercy of nature waiting to die by flood, drought, and plague.It's a world that doesn't look very good. And that's the world that happens tomorrow if we give up our fossil fuels.Unless... unless... Is there an alternative? Can we have a serious discussion on how it might happen? One involving evidence with real numbers and real math?How will we get to a renewable energy world? How does it work?We can start with the city of New York. What will it take to make it 100% renewable? (Let's focus on electricity for now.)

I was moreso talking about a world without energy. And right now a world without fossil fuels is a world without energy.But if we can generate the energy some other way, that's great. The question I've asked repeatedly though is: Can we? And how?Lots of eager responses to the first part of that question.Mostly silence on the second part. I'm curious as to what you mean by this.I'm not disagreeing - yet - ; this just sounds like a history I've never heard before.