Ray on that climate deal

Obama’s U.S.-China climate agreement: Carbon budget and exponential curves show why this is a fair deal.

Ray Pierrehumbert, who has posted a lot at Real Climate, explains why he is cautiously optimistic about China reducing its emissions in a helpful way.

I would make the observation that it seems that energy forecasting is always subject to a hell of a lot of guesswork and ideological motivation.   The great pessimism of the 1970's in terms of oil has been completely replaced by great optimism; the enormous influence of fracking technological change seems to have gone more or less unexplained until it was actually happening; solar and energy efficiency seems to have become cheaper faster than was expected.

What I'm hoping for is that the ability to increasingly incorporate renewables in the energy mix in a reliable way has been underestimated by the pessimists.