Without any feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 (which amounts to a forcing of 3.7 W/m2) would result in 1 °C global warming, which is easy to calculate and is undisputed. The remaining uncertainty is due entirely to feedbacks in the system, namely, the water vapor feedback, the ice-albedo feedback, the cloud feedback, and the lapse rate feedback.

A committee on anthropogenic global warming convened in 1979 by the National Academy of Sciences and chaired by Jule Charney estimated climate sensitivity to be 3 °C, plus or minus 1.5 °C. Only two sets of models were available; one, due to Syukuro Manabe, exhibited a climate sensitivity of 2 °C, the other, due to James E. Hansen, exhibited a climate sensitivity of 4 °C. "According to Manabe, Charney chose 0.5 °C as a not-unreasonable margin of error, subtracted it from Manabe’s number, and added it to Hansen’s.

Various empirical models and inverse models suggest doubling CO2 gives a 1.3 to 1.4 degree warming.



This means at least maybe three doublings compared to 4 degree sensitivity warming. This means eight times as much CO2 could be emitted.

There is also research that the net benefits (good effects less bad effects) are positive up to 2 to 3 degrees of warming.

Here is a links to positive versus negative effects with links to research papers.

If both the lower sensitivity and the net positive effects up to 3 degrees of warming were correct then it would be a net positive up until about 2080 to 2180.

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On the low estimate for 1.5C degree change, the world is about 14 months away from using up the permitted CO2 emissions. On the low estimate for 2C degree change, the world is less than ten years away from using up the permitted CO2 emissions.

China added 5% more power generation in 2016. This was 240 TWh more to 5920 TWh. Almost half of this was coal or other fossil fuel power.


India, Africa and south Asia will be developing and many of them will depend upon coal power for their development.

Japan, Germany and many other developed nations are building more coal power. These are new plans for the 2020s or already happened a few years ago when the population freaked out about nuclear power. Nuclear power does not emit CO2. Under most assumptions a few life cycle analysis shows nuclear is about ten to twenty times less emitting than coal.



Notice even super hyper deep green environmentalists at the Mercator Research Institute who project and assume full solar, electric car and other conversion have to use other techniques to get rid of CO2 from the atmosphere to get back to 2 degree world climate change. Plus they are looking at a scenario where the world immediately and radically reduces CO2 emissions. We can start counting on some kind of sustained reduction when the world is dropping over one billion tons per year of CO2 emissions every year for at least five years in a row.



Look at the median and minimum values for different power generation technology. Even with carbon capture, under life cycle analysis coal power technology would still have half of the emissions of unimproved natural gas. It would be four times better than the worst coal power.

If all coal power in the world was replaced by natural gas, then there would be about 8 billion tons less CO2 (slightly higher coal usage now for electricity and industrial usage and some cooking and heating in underdeveloped places than in the 2011 graphic). There would still be 8 billion tons of CO2 assuming no increase in power usage. If there was double the overall power in the decades it would take then it would still leave 16 billion tons of CO2.

If all coal power in the world was replaced with carbon sequestered coal, then there would be about 12 billion tons less CO2. There would still be 4 billion tons of CO2 assuming no increase in power usage. If there was double the overall power in the decades it would take then it would still leave 8 billion tons of CO2.

If all coal and gas power in the world was replaced with carbon sequestered gas, then there would be about 14 billion tons less CO2. There would still be 2 billion tons of CO2 assuming no increase in power usage. If there was double the overall power in the decades it would take then it would still leave 4 billion tons of CO2.

BTW - the traditional carbon sequestering idea seems like a scam. This would require national systems of pipelines to move the gas to massive underground caves or reservoirs or it would involve trying pump it deep into the ocean and hoping hundreds and then trillions of tons of CO2 did not screw up the oceans or end up emitting too soon.

If all electrical power in the world was replaced with solar or nuclear or wind then there would be about 16 billion tons less CO2. There would still be 1 billion tons of CO2 assuming no increase in power usage. If there was double the overall power in the decades it would take then it would still leave 2 billion tons of CO2.

There is currently only the hope that scaling of solar power would remain in everyway exponential in order for the solar everywhere and for everything to come into being. Current funding and supply chain efforts and plans do not have a complete elimination of fossil fuel as a possibility unless the only analysis is to extend an exponential line on a graph.

It would take heroic efforts to get power generation CO2 production down to 10-25% of the emissions per KWh of todays power. China, Africa, India and other parts of Asia will not accept energy poverty. Any environmentalist in the west who is flying around on planes and in a neighborhood full of SUVs will be laughed at and ignored for trying to force that as a plan. So there will be double to four times the global per capita power usage in the coming decades.

However, agriculture and industry sources of CO2 would be mostly untouched unless there was other mitigation of those sources.

Agriculture will need conversion to mostly factory grown meat to get away for methane from cows and other animals.

Industry would need twin rolled steel and various green cements and other innovations.

Electrification of all cars would only address part of the transportation CO2. Planes are another growing source and those emissions near the stratosphere are more impactful on the climate. Large ships would have to go to nuclear power or some other non-fossil fuel source.

So let us say over 40 years, we get to 15% of the emissions per KWh and double the overall power and all the other innovations in industry and agriculture. We are still at 30% of todays emissions at 12 billion tons per year. We would have blown through 2 degree CO2 over 20 years prior. 30% of todays emissions seems massively optimistic. Even hold todays 40 billion tons is a stretch and getting to 20 billions tons per year would be a massive success. A more realistic scenario would be to where emissions go beyond 40 billion tons up to 50 billion tons and then slowly get brought back to 40 billion tons and then maybe get to 30 billion tons per year in a few decades.

So we will need big negative emissions projects and geoengineering. It will be very tough to scale up and sustain negative emission projects at 12-30 billion tons per year. The various global scale carbon sinks will get filled up.

The world will have to look at geoengineering even if all electricity went solar and all cars are electric.

Temperature geoengineering looks the easiest and most affordable. Altering the oceans acidification looks like a tougher one to maintain.

Higher temperatures would not kill many humans if the world had predominantly become globally middle class and have affordable and environmentally sustainable air conditioning and had safe sanitation and water and housing.








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Coal is undergoing a renaissance in emerging and developed countries in Asia, buoyed by technical breakthroughs and looming questions about squaring development with energy security. Japan, India and China will try to blunt the air pollution effects from the use of coal which cause millions of premature deaths in India and China and tens of thousands in Japan. However the "low emissions" coal technology is still 30% worse than natural gas for CO2 emissions even though "low emissions" is improved over several decades old coal plants.

BTW- the economic and technological forces in the USA are causing an increase in natural gas power generation in the USA. Any political rhetoric or shutting down of the EPA may slow the decline of the US coal industry but coal power in the US will still decline. US coal mines will then ship more coal to Asia. For the full year of 2016 in the USA, coal made up 30.4% of total US power generation, which is the lowest annual total since EIA records started for the calculation in 1950. For comparison, coal made up 33.2% of US generation in 2015 and 49% of US generation in 2006. Gas plants produced 33.9% of US power in 2016, which was the highest total yet for the fuel, after contributing 32.7% of US power generation in 2015 and 20.1% in 2006.

US electricity generation was 4300 TWh in 2016. This is 40% less than China 5920TWh. India is at about 1400 TWh and Japan at 1000 TWh.

For Japan, coal has emerged as the best alternative to replacing its 54 nuclear reactors, which are deeply unpopular with the population and seen as symbols of devastation after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster six years ago. Mindful of the public mood, the government of Shinzo Abe has completely given up on the country’s dream of nuclear self-sufficiency, and pulled the plug in December on the $8.5 billion experimental reactor project at Monju. On February 1, the government pledged to decommission all reactors and replace them with 45 new coal-fired power plants equipped with the latest clean coal technology.

Japan is turning to coal power due to attempts to transition the country away from nuclear power. Officials promised to replace nuclear power with wind or solar, but this caused the price of electricity to rise by 20 percent. Japan’s government currently aims to restart at least 32 of the 54 reactors it shut down following the Fukushima disaster, and wants nuclear power to account for 20 percent of the nation’s total electricity generated by 2030.

Japan will use high energy, low emissions (HELE) technology that use high-quality black coal.

Japan plans to build ultra-super-critical plants in the 650 MW range. 45 new coal-fired power-generation units with total capacity of as much as 20,884 MW, would come online in the next decade or so. Japan had a total 90 coal-fired units at the end of March 2015, with total capacity of 40,695 MW. Coal power already made up 31 percent of Japan’s energy mix in 2015 but under the current plan, the fossil fuel will become the country’s primary power source by 2019.

Japan is the largest overseas market for Australian coal producers, taking more than a third of all exports.

In the wake of the Tsunami which caused the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, Japan started importing more liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Australia. The move to more coal fired power was because coal was cheaper than LNG, and the energy security was priority for the government.






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