Arguments
Climate Adam: Is it Game Over for the 1.5 Degree Climate Limit?
Posted on 10 February 2025 by Guest Author
This video includes personal musings and conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any).
Wherever you look, you'll hear headlines claiming we've passed 1.5 degrees of global warming. And while 2024 saw record breaking climate change, this might not actually be true. So what does the 1.5 degree limit actual mean for the climate? Have we already passed this global warming threshold? And what do we do now, to combat climate change?
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I have recently written to the UK Prime Minister:
Dear Sir Keir Starmer
Enhanced Napalm Energy
Wind and solar leave our power grids particularly vulnerable to surging energy bills due to spikes in the price of gas. We need a cheap steady source of energy that is not gas and I have just the thing.
Napalm burns at temperatures ranging from 800 to 1,200 °C (1,470 to 2,190 °F) whereas
Petrol burns at 280 °C (536 °F)
[snip]
While the chemical structure of napalm is complicated it is easy to make, one part polystyrene to two parts petrol. I experimented as a school boy and found just one small sphere of polystyrene with a little petrol in an ash tray heated our sitting room to such a degree that clothes had to be taken off until the room gradually cooled. Each ash tray could only be used once, I did think to test this. I got a team to help a lady in Canada whose heating had failed during winter. She had to keep warm and not sleep for ten days, and we kept her talking and heated by napalm. Fortunately the lady had enough ash trays, or I would have had to find out how many times a saucepan could be used before failing. Another contact, from the Ukraine this time, again in an online newspaper asked about heating, and napalm in saucepans (ten times only) is now used all over war-torn Ukraine. Because napalm burns at much higher temperatures lower quantities of fuel could be used in converted fossil fuel power stations to create cleaner energy for times when renewable energy is in short supply, even with back up batteries. The Soviet Union added various chemicals to the napalm that each multiplied each others burning temperatures, to get up to the heat of a nuclear explosion, 100 million degrees Celsius, so this could replace the forever twenty years away dreams of fusion energy, and much more cheaply. Reports suggest that it has been used by Russia in the Ukraine war. Napalm was invented as a weapon, now we can use it for peace time energy, turning swords into ploughshares.
All the infrastructure is already in place to generate electricity in this way, we just need to convert are fossil and nuclear power stations, which is cheaper than building new.
It would not be possible for me to get the kind of security I need in order to produce Enhanced Napalm, but the government can form a team of chemists to let you know what the additives are.
[BL] While sending letters to your Prime Minister to urge action on climate change is a good idea, burning napalm at home does not seem like such a good idea.
And burning napalm at home is certainly off-topic for this thread. The video does not look at anything remotely related to the contents of your letter.
RedRose,
Your suggestion is potentially very dangerous and risky for anyone to try, particularly in an indoor environment due to the extreme deoxygenation and carbon monoxide properties of burning napalm in an enclosed room. Why didn't you mention that in conjunction with your very dangerous experiments and when talking about it being used in warzones by people with no other alternatives? People could die playing with your fire, even if they are far enough away from the burning napalm to not get burned. For a hint of napalm's dangers, check out https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/books/NBK537127/
It might be worth considering removing your comment, or at least removing your careless experimenting with it from your comment.
[BL] RedRose's comment has been edited, courtesy of your local moderator...
For all readers, please do not try burning napalm at home. Or at work. Or anywhere else, for that matter,.
Red Rose:
Do you realize you are proposing to replace fossil fuels with napalm when napalm is also a fossil fuel? It is tough to lower carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning using a more refined and energy intensive fossil fuel. Good luck!
Buy solar panels instead.
Napalm doesnt look like a great idea for backing up renewables. Napalm is a mixture of petrol or diesel and a gelling agent and burns much hotter than petrol. But its not providing more energy than petrol would just by adding a gelling agent. I assume it burns hotter but not for as long as petrol (?) so has no advantage in power as a fuel source for generating electricity. And dealing with that high temperature and flammability would be a nightmare.
Its also higher carbon than gas fired backup power so its even worse for the climate. It looks like it would be higher cost than petrol or diesel, due to the manufacturing process.
Napalm might have more stable availability than gas, but this looks like it would be negated by the downsides. I just think its a classic example of a crank solution, where people see "higher temperatures" but fail to look at all the related issues.
[BL] Please, let's drop the napalm stories. It's not really something that smells all that great in the morning...
From yale.edu: “The world is set to blow past its goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C, new research shows.
“Last year was the first to measure roughly 1.5 degrees warmer than the preindustrial era, though the world has not yet officially surpassed the 1.5-degree target set forth in the Paris Agreement, which will be judged according to the average temperature over 20 years. But with emissions hitting new highs, this target is almost certainly out of reach, according to two new papers published in Nature Climate Change.
“Scientists used modeling to show that just one year at 1.5 degrees C likely heralds a future breaching of the Paris goal. The papers suggest that last year’s record temperatures mean world will probably exceed the 1.5-degree threshold over the next 20 years.”
e360.yale.edu/digest/1.5-goal-threshold-research
www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02247-8
www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02246-9
I copied and pasted all this from a comment over at RC by SA. I don't think the author would mind.