"Green" policies are destroying this country

Is this not the regulators' job?

Maybe she needs to be sacked and we install someone who actually gives crap about improving the grid and regulating the energy resellers

I think Ryan has flipped : https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/politics/arid-40958870.html

"We have to fast-track investment and resources in wind and solar to secure our energy independence and create an Ireland 100% powered by renewable energy."

He's been at too many expense account dinners listening to the BS from the wind industry, I read a few months ago they were saying they could supply all of Irelands needs if only planning rules were relaxed.

Lol, good old gaslightiing. Half the people on this thread blame Eamon Ryan every time they stub their toe or stand on a piece of lego.

And if a zinc battery did 'burst' it causes local damage to a small area.

What happens if a nuclear reactor 'bursts'?

Or there's an oil spill, What about the millions of metric tonnes of methane that escapes from coal mining or flaring from oil and gas wells....

Climate change is already causing extinctions of species, and the study below says warming greater than 5.2c could trigger a mass extinction event in the worlds oceans.

Obviously I'm not in favour of poorly constructed batteries 'bursting' and causing local environmental damage, but the context is that failing to tackle climate change, failing to prevent the tipping points means we are increasing the risk of much more catastrophic consequences

Lol. There has never been a failure of a Zinc Air battery, so Zinc Air is winning.

The fake concern is hilarious.

How many oil spills have there been? How many times have nuclear waste been dumped or leaked from poorly contained storage? Sellafield was fined for sending radioactive waste to landfill less than 10 years ago

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/14/sellafield-fined-waste-landfill

And in case you haven't been following the news, the biggest nuclear facility in Europe is currently in critical danger of being breached due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time

Cutting backup power to a nuclear power station is the reason Fukushima melted down.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/09/offsite-power-supply-to-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-destroyed

I don't need to spin it, your statement above is factually wrong. Would you care to check the actual numbers (like I have), or are you just going by a second-hand article by BoJo?

I hopes you have factored in the cost of building and decommissioning nuclear, along with the reprocessing and longterm storage of the spent fuel?

That was Three Mile Island, right?

An IPCC press release is not "science" no matter who writes it. It's a press release. It carries no more weight than the UN Secretary General blathering about "code red for humanity" and "millions at imminent risk from climate change" in response to the release of AR6. My consistent experience is that whether it's news media or the UN Chief Alarmist, the perennial doom mongering never matches what the science actually says. That's why I only read original sources. (Disclaimer: I am decidedly not a scientist; however I do have three degree and advanced degree qualifications in hard sciences, none of them climate related. I point this out only as evidence that, although this subject area is outside my expertise, I'm well used to reading and assessing academic papers generally).

You say you "referenced" a brand new study. To me, a reference is a link to an actual paper. You linked to a summary in the journal Science. Even though their website says they've made the article generally available "as a service to the community", their login mechanism appears to be broken. So I'm going to hazard a guess you didn't actually read this paper yourself? Your fellow alarmist on this thread, Da Cor, also linked a press release version of it. You're going to have to excuse me for not accepting press release versions -- those are generally sensationalist and rely on the general public not being able to make their own assessment. No, I want to stick my finger in the wound. Fortunately, I've managed to dig up the pre-print version that was submitted for peer review -- follow the PDF link here. (You're welcome).

So, does this paper point to a newly discovered existential crisis based on climate tipping points? In a word, no. It's not very different from what was already in AR6. Nor does it contain any new evidence -- it is primarily a literature review with a mind-numbing 312 references. (112 of them were added between the pre-print and the publication in Science, so I acknowledge that the version I'm reading is probably substantially different from the final one, but it's all I've got). A not inconsiderable number of the references list at least one of the current paper's contributors as an author, so there is some self-referential citing going on. Some are also explicit inputs to AR6, being some of the working groups' contributions. Obviously it's utterly impossible to chase up every reference but I tabulated their years of publication -- 2012 or earlier (45 references), 2013 (23), 2014 (10), 2015 (22), 2016 (23), 2017 (18), 2018 (20), 2019 (23), 2020 (45), 2021 (50), 2022 (16), uncertain date (17).

So a lot of these papers were around well before AR6 and are presumably not "news". About a quarter were published after 2020, probably too late for AR6 to take note of. Again, the volume is too large to chase up but I went through the titles of all 66 papers from 2021-22, and didn't notice anything especially remarkable. There's a few on Antarctic ice loss, which one of authors (Winkelmann) seems to have a special interest in and has contributed to several of the referenced papers herself. More on this below.

I think it's worth quoting the "Rationale" section of the article in Science:

These authors are "experts" on tipping points. We can be sure of this because quite a few of the references are to their own previously published work! For instance, Lenton et al., 2019 mentioned above is here:

One of the things that I doubt almost any member of the general public realises from the breathless press releases is that imminent tipping points do not mean imminent consequences. We are talking about things that could unfold over the next ten thousand years. Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet collapses occur over a period of one to several thousand years under high warming conditions. I don't know about you, but treating events that will unfold over the next several thousand years as an "existential crisis" seems like idiocy to me. The adaptive capabilities of humanity over those timeframes are utterly unknowable. It would be like trying to predict 21st century technology back in the late Bronze Age.

Curiously, one of the references added in the final version of the paper is Lowry et al., "The influence of emissions scenarios on future Antarctic ice loss is unlikely to emerge this century", Commun. Earth Environ.2, 221 (2021):

From the abstract of that paper:

In case it's not obvious, what this is saying is that we're not going to know this side of 2100 what the eventual fate of the Antarctic Ice Sheet will be over thousands of years. Because this reference was added in the final Science article, I can't tell what Armstrong McKay et al. have to say about it. However, for me it adds to the folly of their whole endeavour. In effect they are saying we have to take urgent mitigating actions against something we won't even know is a problem for another century, and then will unfold over thousands of years.

In summary:

• We don't actually know if any of these so-called tipping points are even real;
• None of them are news -- they are all covered in AR6 under the heading of Carbon Cycle Feedbacks;
• AR6 did not consider any of them likely during the 21st century;
• The scientists pushing for urgent action on mitigation seem very coy about considering the economic impacts of that;
• We don't yet even know the most basic input to all climate change models -- the sensitivity of the climate to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. However, the evidence points to the low end of the range of possibilities.

If this was just a case of being prudent about a low-likelihood-high-impact event, I would fully embrace it. But the cost of mitigation may very well be economy-wrecking. For me, that completely changes the picture. We face the certainty of ruinous economic outcomes versus the extreme uncertainty of consequential climate impacts. I am entirely open to somebody coming up with a realistic summary of the economic implications, but the Greens won't bloody do it! Quite apart from that, their narrow-focused --some would say blinkered -- approach to mitigation using renewables is practically guaranteed not to work.

You can read the rest of the Science article pre-print at the link I provided. Again, I am not seeing a vast difference from what was published about tipping points in AR6. I am definitely not seeing an existential crisis. And even if I did, I wouldn't support the Greens' ham-fisted policies which won't work anyway.