Tod Hynes

Helping others help the climate.

[Prof. Ryan Katz-Rosene @ryankatzrosene]

Wow, how many people out there knew that the carbon intensity of World GDP is at the same level is was back in the 1870s?

[Tod Hynes @TodHynes]

@jspujji AI

[Jesse Pujji @jspujji]

All CRMs suck.

They turn you into a data entry slave.

+ Leave a meeting: enter data.

+ Get an email: enter data.

+ Text on Slack: enter data.

My friend is building an AI-based CRM that does it for you.

RT & comment “AI” and I’ll DM you early access.

[Tod Hynes @TodHynes]

This is an important discussion. Scientists need 95+% certainty to publish and make decisions, while the entire economy operates on much lower certainties all the time. We must move bigger and faster with solutions while balancing risks. Waiting for the perfect will doom us all.

[Robert Höglund @RobertHoglund]

Hey Marty, as you know there is still no scientific consensus on the effects of biomass sinking with for example a large group of researchers calling for moratorium etc. You advanced the science more than anyone on macro algae. The way you described your deployments early on as "research tonnes" made a lot of sense to me. For commercial deployments, I would like to see some more scientific consensus.

[Sabine Hossenfelder @skdh]

The next three months will be decisive for climate change. It's because most climate scientists expect the global average temperature to decrease. If that doesn't happen, that makes it likely that the existing projections are underestimating future warming.

The past year has been in an above-average temperature phase partly because of a natural quasi-periodic climate cycle called the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). You might also have heard of it as the El Nino-La Nina years.

According to a recent report (June 17) from NOAA, we are just out of the warmer El Nino phase and now in a neutral, intermediate phase, that is expected to turn to the colder La Nina towards the end of the year. Report here: https://t.co/sa4T4wBmqA

One of the consequences of this transition will probably be a very active hurricane season.

That 2023 was so hot on the global average might have been a statistical outlier. My impression is that most climate scientists at the moment think it was. Or maybe it's just what they hope.

Some are worried there is more to it and that the models have gotten something wrong, that the climate sensitivity has been estimated to be too low or that the impact of declining aerosol levels has been underestimated.

The scary truth is that no one really knows.

[Altaeros @AltaerosInc]

Altaeros Aerostats can carry a wide variety of payload types, when flying at 1000ft the ST-Flex can provide a 25 mi (40km) coverage radius. If you have specific requirement our team will work with you on a custom payload. Learn more here https://t.co/ARwQGuCjD3

[Ajit Niranjan @NiranjanAjit]

two ipcc authors wrote a paper for kids that was peer-reviewed by some teenagers and the level of frankness is something a lot of climate scientists could learn from

[Tod Hynes @TodHynes]

Oil & gas companies will produce as long as goverments allow them to and somebody buys their product. We need to stop buying their products because governments won't take real action. This is difficult, will take decades, and won't happen fast enough to avoid #ClimateEmergency

[Tod Hynes @TodHynes]

It's important to note that you can't look at this chart and say which technology scaled and when it took off. GE wasted $1 billion betting on the wrong line. Efficiency is important, but not the key metric. It's not even cost. It's IRR and how it compares to cost of capital.

[Kyle Chan @kyleichan]

Amazing chart of who has held the world record for most efficient solar cell by type over time.

In the 1970s, it’s American firms like Boeing, RCA, Kodak.

Then you see Japanese names like Sharp, Sanyo, Panasonic.

Finally you see Chinese names like Longi, Jinko, Nanjing U. 1/

[Matthew Todd 🌏🔥 @MrMatthewTodd]

We aren’t winning - but because of the media, the public don’t understand, or understand what it means to lose.
Leading climate scientist Prof @KevinClimate

[Tod Hynes @TodHynes]

Geological Hydrogen and/or H2 produced underground in FF fields. (Enhanced Geothermal and Nukes will grow elswhere but will be too expensive in this part of the country to be a meaningful wave)

[Joshua D. Rhodes @joshdr83]

In ERCOT:

wave 1: wind
wave 2: solar
wave 3: storage

What's the 4th wave in this set?

data: https://t.co/WJKFVcgN3w

[Joshua D. Rhodes @joshdr83]

In ERCOT:

wave 1: wind
wave 2: solar
wave 3: storage

What's the 4th wave in this set?

data: https://t.co/WJKFVcgN3w

[Prof. Carl Sagan @ProfCarlSagan]

How much do you think?

[MIT Sloan School of Management @MITSloan]

The annual list recognizes talented young professors teaching in MBA programs. The honorees are chosen based on the quality of their teaching and research. https://t.co/pr8tPv9UiY

[Tod Hynes @TodHynes]

A 20-year average is a pretty round number. Average is not defined in the Paris Accord. Wouldn't it make more sense to use an average El Niño cycle of 4-5 years?

[Prof Michael E. Mann @MichaelEMann]

The fallacy that we've already crossed 1.5C turned up in this @Youtube event I did earlier today: https://t.co/SMr9wZPhdF
(some of the bad actors promoting this myth even turn up in the Youtube comment thread)

[Tod Hynes @TodHynes]

We shouldn't be worried about years 50 to 1,000+. We'll have the clean energy solutions at scale needed to decarbonize energy & industry as well as plenty of clean energy to reduce atmospheric emissions. The problem is whether we can adapt our civilization over the next 50 years.

[Leon Simons 🌍 @LeonSimons8]

@JayHightmanJr Not over a 1000 year timescale it isn't!

/s

[Tod Hynes @TodHynes]

...and this will be a small amount of batteries compared to the amount of batteries in EVs. The generating capacity if the U.S. vehicle fleet is 25x the generating capacity of the U.S. grid.

[Jesse Peltan @JessePeltan]

The grid needs a lot of batteries, even if we never built a single wind turbine or solar panel.

Batteries smooth out demand and improve utilization for generators and grid infrastructure.

It's not solar and wind that's driving current battery deployments, it's falling battery costs. The latent demand for batteries is massive.

Cheap, scalable energy storage has been a missing piece in grid design since the beginning. There are countless applications where a battery can lower costs and improve performance.

We are in the very early days of battery deployments. Batteries will be as ubiquitous as transformers.

[Tod Hynes @TodHynes]

EXACTLY! This is impressive, and it is a log scale! I've lived through several dramatic cost reductions in the climate and energy space. They are obvious to people in the respective sector and a surprise to everyone else.

[Tim Latimer @TimMLatimer]

A good reminder that there is no iron law that costs have to follow the historic trend, especially when projections are coming from incumbents. There will be multiple sectors in climatetech that look like this chart in a few years.

[Tod Hynes @TodHynes]

With about $2K and 10 hours, I helped put together a tool that can do (in 10 seconds and infinity times) what consultants charge $10K per report. Software and a lot of expertise is/will be essentially free (and this is a good thing).

[Tod Hynes @TodHynes]

Supposedly, the original script had the matrix using humans for efficient compute as part of a neural network, but the studios didn't think people would get it... so they changed it to batteries (which makes no sense).

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Pitch for updated version of The Matrix: rather than AI keeping humans captive as batteries (which never made sense), they keep humans as token generators for training data

We each produce 140k to 2.6M words a year. Thats a good 20 quadrillion tokens or so for the whole Earth.