Solar PV and wind are on track to replace all coal, oil and gas within two decades (define “all”)

Solar PV and wind are getting so cheap and more abundant that they are on track to entirely displace fossil fuels worldwide by 2032. This remarkable claim is made in The Conversation article titled Solar PV and wind are on track to replace all coal, oil and gas within two decades.

It is a remarkable claim because the last figures that I found show that solar PV plus wind generated only a tiny fraction of total energy compared to fossil fuels. So I would doubt that solar PV and wind suddenly could replace all coal, oil and gas in just a couple decades. Two decades seems like an awfully short time to go from (almost) zero to hero.

That made me really curious about the principle behind this claim. To clarify their case, the authors showed two graphs. This is the first one:

Advertisement

Finding unprecedented high resolution values in a low resolution dataset

In previous post, I discussed a graph that suggested that the CO₂ and CH₄ levels in the atmosphere are unprecedented in the last 800,000 years and proposed that it is misleading to compare high resolution data with low resolution data. After I published that post, I wondered whether I could illustrate this with an example. It should be possible if I had some detailed dataset. Then I could make a detailed graph, see how that looks like, then sample this dataset in the same way as a proxy dataset and again make a graph. Comparing both graphs should make clear what the effect is.

The good old times when carbon dioxide and methane levels as well as temperatures were low

The previous post was about “the most popular contrarian argument” according to skepticalscience (“climate changes before, so current climate change is natural”) and what they seem to consider a live example of such a claim. I then proposed in that post that it actually was not a good example of what they want to prove.

What I didn’t discussed yet was how skepticalscience “debunked” this most popular contrarian argument. They did this in the “Climate’s changed before” myth page that was apparently based on this example.

They “debunked” this “myth” by stating that the climate is indeed always changing, but the difference is that it is changing much faster now than in the past because of our increasing emissions. This is how it starts: