I guess you think the possibility of nuclear war or dying in a deadly accident on the freeway are also fake because they haven't happened specifically to you yet, right?
Heck might as well tack on your next birthday or the year of 2021 to that list, the sun rising tomorrow is also just a merely theoretical postulation...
I don’t believe it’s fake. The earth’s climate has been changing since the plant was created, without humans. It’ll change regardless of what we do. Do you think humans could have prevented the ice age by using plastic straws?
My beef with the media is the pointless fear mongering
areas currently home to a third of the world’s population will be as hot as the hottest parts of the Sahara within 50 years, the paper warns. Even in the most optimistic outlook, 1.2 billion people will fall outside the comfortable “climate niche” in which humans have thrived for at least 6,000 years.
Or we could start now with more remote work, less driving, etc. The pandemic has shown us just how much pollution levels can drop in a short time if we just feel adequately motivated to make such changes instead of our usual talking smack and doing nothing.
And this may not be the last pandemic.
We do not have to take this sitting down, so to speak. We can vote with our feet and our pocketbooks and begin creating a more pedestrian-friendly world and more human-friendly culture and so forth.
Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is set in stone.
If mankind is the cause of global warming, mankind can fix it. We just have to stop making excuses and pretending we are helpless because "Well, I'm just one person and there are 7 billion other people, so what I do doesn't matter, so why bother?"
Affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods. We know how to build this. We used to do it all the time. We just zoned it out of existence.
Mixed use areas with residential above commercial.
Good public transit.
Passive solar design.
Vernacular architecture.
Support remote work and small time operators instead of actively crapping all over them and trying to drive them out of existence.
Institute universal health care in the US, like most developed countries have. That would go a long way towards protecting people from poverty. So would making affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods.
I've studied this stuff for a lot of years. I just don't get listened to because I was a homemaker and homeschooling mom and I spent years homeless.
I've lived without a car for over a decade. I currently do remote work. I currently live in a small space in a walkable downtown area with good public transit.
I would love to further enhance the downtown area I live in, but, hey, I don't have a driver's license and yadda, so no one is going to hire me to do that kind of work.
But this can be done. And it doesn't have to involve pushing people into poverty, though we would all benefit if we would stop wallowing in North American Affluenza. Less is more and all that.
Exponential growth doesn't work forever. As recently as 100 years ago there were less than 2 billion people in the whole world. At 7.8 billion and growing 80M [1 Germany] each year, we're running out of room to breathe.
There are a great many places where people live that regularly exceed 45 C in the summer. However, these places also tend to be very dry. So it's misleading to think "it only hits 105 in Memphis but it crosses 120 in Las Vegas, so Memphis will be fine". In reality the wet-bulb temperature in Vegas is usually lower than in Memphis.
Human beings cannot survive when the wet-bulb temperature goes above 35 C. There are a number of cities that occasionally see wet-bulb temperatures above 32 C, which could become deadly heat waves in a severe warming scenario. This is particularly true near the warmest seas -- the Gulf of California, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. (Mazatlan in June is absolutely miserable.) There was a recent study published in Science about it:
Could it not be the case that there are surprising mechanisms or feedback loops that we do not currently know about; mechanisms that could put a damper on these predictions?
More generally: aren't these multi-decade predictions simply hubris? The climate is a very complex non-linear system with tons of inputs and interactions. There's many examples of these types of systems for which our predictions fall short or are extremely inaccurate: weather over multi-week timescales, the economy, even the recent Covid-19 models.
Am I the only one that thinks we should be a little more careful and conservative when putting out these sorts of dire predictions?
Isn't this Russell's Teapot? It's impossible to prove that there aren't mechanisms or feedback loops that could dampen climate change. It's an unfalsifiable claim. You have to prove the existence of mechanisms that could reverse climate change without human interaction.
Otherwise, what we're operating on is known mechanisms that are currently causing climate change. One of the facts is that there are already places in the world which are reaching unlivable wet bulb temperatures.
I was merely claiming that we have an incomplete understanding of the climate system, and because of that we shouldn't make these types of claims and state them with absolute certainty like the article is doing.
I was specifically countering your argument because it is impossible to disprove. No matter how accurate our climate simulations or understanding can get, there's always the possibility for something we've missed. That's why we create these models, refine them and adjust our behavior accordingly.
I'm afraid I can't agree with you here because if your claim is that 'we don't know fully how climate works, then things might not be as bad as we think', the opposite claim is also true. That is, 'we don't know fully how climate works, therefore things might be worse than we think'.
It's entirely possible that there are other mechanisms or feedback loops we don't know about which when triggered could cause a massive cascading effect making the global temperature rise rapidly.
You are right when you say: it could also be worse.
I concede that it's impossible to disprove my assertion, but it might still be true: we just don't know. I'm arguing that we should embrace the uncertainty and accept that we can't know certain things.
These sorts of articles can cause immense stress in people and are therefore doing harm.
The uncertainties involved are fundamentally unquantifiable. We think we can know, but we make only educated guesses. We should keep doing that, but communication about the results should be honest. A title that states "one billion people will suffer" isn't that.
Has anyone ever reviewed the code and analyzed the software engineering practices behind the climate models?
I used to take these things for granted and just believe articles and studies like this one but after humongous public failure of Imperial College Coronavirus model I'm not so sure anymore.
We need code and tech reviews in addition to peer review.
Now, is perhaps the best time to do something about climate change if that is something we seriously want to defeat. Right now, we have already laid off and forced so many people to stay home and stop working. We are in the perfect position to evaluate what jobs are actually necessary and cut off as much fat as we can in our society. Pay a basic income so that these people don't have to forever drive to their wage slave jobs that they hate and then drive back home and sleep, only to repeat again the next day. Kill off huge industries that have been kept alive by low wages and poor working conditions that people have no choice but to endure at the threat of poverty and death. Let people live their lives and if even one person, who would've originally been working at McDonalds to pay rent, can invent something like the cure for cancer or a solution to increasing CO2 levels, then it will all pay off. If not, at least you get a nicer society who won't be a few meals away from rioting and killing each other on the streets.
Let people live their lives and if even one person, who would've originally been working at McDonalds to pay rent, can invent something like the cure for cancer or a solution to increasing CO2 levels, then it will all pay off.
If you are suggesting that UBI will give us this, this is highly unlikely.
I have been getting myself well with a very deadly condition for 19 years. I spent nearly six years homeless.
The biggest barrier I face to disseminating this information boils down to credibility and connections. No one wants to hear what I have to say. I'm a former homemaker, not a "scientist."
I don't think UBI will lead to what people think it will. Money is not the biggest barrier. That's not the problem poor people have.
Mostly: The problems they have lead to a lack of money, not the other way around.
Are you sure? I don't have any numbers on it, but I like to think the amount of homeless who are truly lost causes where money would not help is very small. I'm poor and if money was not a priority, I'd be able to work on stuff like programming and pursuing writing as a hobby. That's pretty much what I've been doing now that I can justifiably take UI and stay home for some time without worrying about how to pay rent and buy food. For me, hell yeah money is the biggest barrier. And the only options in front of me are to work at shitty minimum wage food service jobs which are now destroyed.
One of the things driving poverty and homelessness in the US is a lack of affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods. If you could work a shitty minimum wage job part-time while living without a car and cover the cost of a room while getting free medical care through the US government, you could write or program or whatever.
Poor people have no voice in things like what kind of housing gets built or how healthcare is paid for. Corporations and rich people design that and they design stuff that works for them and that increases pressure on the masses.
It doesn't have to be that way.
Money follows rights and power, not the other way around. If money gave people power, lottery winners would run this world. They don't. About 2/3s of them end up bankrupt within five years.
Edit: I've had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I still write about homelessness, such as:
I grew up in a very poor family and the other poster is right... many people living the degenerate lifestyle have entirely bizarre understandings of reality, acceptable social behavior, mortality and ethics, quality and efficiency... We're creatures of habit and keeping your mind in the gutter long enough will soak it full of crud that can't be reversed simply by dishing out cash.
It's my opinion that these people would be most helped if they were given work. Work gives incentive, teaches values, gives opportunity, creates a foundation of something to be proud of, gives a platform to build a resume from...
When I read things like this, my first though is that we will live in climate controlled buildings, like they do in desert countries or near the arctic circle.
I think about humanity surviving and being more uncomfortable.
But the thing is, this kind of thing will decimate birds and fish and insects and crops and more, and it might not come back.
HN discussed [1] this topic three years ago when New York Magazine published "The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallace-Wells.
In section II, Heat Death, he states, "At seven degrees of warming, that [human cooling] would become impossible for large portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem." He adds, "At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35 degrees. What is called heat stress comes much sooner."
The annotated version of that article [2] cites the 2010 paper, "An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress" [3] by Steven C. Sherwood and Matthew Huber for these claims.
(Sections IV, Climate Plagues, and VII, Permanent Economic Collapse, from Wallace-Wells' article anticipate our current situation.)
Wallace-Wells expanded his article into a book published last year, "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming." [4] I found the book informative, relentless, and somewhat depressing. Recommended. But don't take my word for it. [5]
39 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadhttps://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/28/1910114117
Heck might as well tack on your next birthday or the year of 2021 to that list, the sun rising tomorrow is also just a merely theoretical postulation...
Don’t even bother they are not here to discuss they’re here to stuff the thread with their garbage, so just downvote and move on ..
My beef with the media is the pointless fear mongering
Or we could start now with more remote work, less driving, etc. The pandemic has shown us just how much pollution levels can drop in a short time if we just feel adequately motivated to make such changes instead of our usual talking smack and doing nothing.
And this may not be the last pandemic.
We do not have to take this sitting down, so to speak. We can vote with our feet and our pocketbooks and begin creating a more pedestrian-friendly world and more human-friendly culture and so forth.
Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is set in stone.
If mankind is the cause of global warming, mankind can fix it. We just have to stop making excuses and pretending we are helpless because "Well, I'm just one person and there are 7 billion other people, so what I do doesn't matter, so why bother?"
Bill Gates is investing in it about the same way he called a pandemic. He’s doing something but not making enough noise about it.
Vote for a carbon tax to pay for these plants, put them in areas that used to mine coal or drill for gas.
Affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods. We know how to build this. We used to do it all the time. We just zoned it out of existence.
Mixed use areas with residential above commercial.
Good public transit.
Passive solar design.
Vernacular architecture.
Support remote work and small time operators instead of actively crapping all over them and trying to drive them out of existence.
Institute universal health care in the US, like most developed countries have. That would go a long way towards protecting people from poverty. So would making affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods.
I've studied this stuff for a lot of years. I just don't get listened to because I was a homemaker and homeschooling mom and I spent years homeless.
I've lived without a car for over a decade. I currently do remote work. I currently live in a small space in a walkable downtown area with good public transit.
I would love to further enhance the downtown area I live in, but, hey, I don't have a driver's license and yadda, so no one is going to hire me to do that kind of work.
But this can be done. And it doesn't have to involve pushing people into poverty, though we would all benefit if we would stop wallowing in North American Affluenza. Less is more and all that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
There are a great many places where people live that regularly exceed 45 C in the summer. However, these places also tend to be very dry. So it's misleading to think "it only hits 105 in Memphis but it crosses 120 in Las Vegas, so Memphis will be fine". In reality the wet-bulb temperature in Vegas is usually lower than in Memphis.
Human beings cannot survive when the wet-bulb temperature goes above 35 C. There are a number of cities that occasionally see wet-bulb temperatures above 32 C, which could become deadly heat waves in a severe warming scenario. This is particularly true near the warmest seas -- the Gulf of California, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. (Mazatlan in June is absolutely miserable.) There was a recent study published in Science about it:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838
Sure they can, and just by pressing a button on their AC remote.
More generally: aren't these multi-decade predictions simply hubris? The climate is a very complex non-linear system with tons of inputs and interactions. There's many examples of these types of systems for which our predictions fall short or are extremely inaccurate: weather over multi-week timescales, the economy, even the recent Covid-19 models.
Am I the only one that thinks we should be a little more careful and conservative when putting out these sorts of dire predictions?
Otherwise, what we're operating on is known mechanisms that are currently causing climate change. One of the facts is that there are already places in the world which are reaching unlivable wet bulb temperatures.
Surely we can agree there?
I'm afraid I can't agree with you here because if your claim is that 'we don't know fully how climate works, then things might not be as bad as we think', the opposite claim is also true. That is, 'we don't know fully how climate works, therefore things might be worse than we think'.
It's entirely possible that there are other mechanisms or feedback loops we don't know about which when triggered could cause a massive cascading effect making the global temperature rise rapidly.
I concede that it's impossible to disprove my assertion, but it might still be true: we just don't know. I'm arguing that we should embrace the uncertainty and accept that we can't know certain things.
These sorts of articles can cause immense stress in people and are therefore doing harm.
The uncertainties involved are fundamentally unquantifiable. We think we can know, but we make only educated guesses. We should keep doing that, but communication about the results should be honest. A title that states "one billion people will suffer" isn't that.
I used to take these things for granted and just believe articles and studies like this one but after humongous public failure of Imperial College Coronavirus model I'm not so sure anymore.
We need code and tech reviews in addition to peer review.
https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/lockdown-and-mathematic...
If you are suggesting that UBI will give us this, this is highly unlikely.
I have been getting myself well with a very deadly condition for 19 years. I spent nearly six years homeless.
The biggest barrier I face to disseminating this information boils down to credibility and connections. No one wants to hear what I have to say. I'm a former homemaker, not a "scientist."
I don't think UBI will lead to what people think it will. Money is not the biggest barrier. That's not the problem poor people have.
Mostly: The problems they have lead to a lack of money, not the other way around.
Are you sure? I don't have any numbers on it, but I like to think the amount of homeless who are truly lost causes where money would not help is very small. I'm poor and if money was not a priority, I'd be able to work on stuff like programming and pursuing writing as a hobby. That's pretty much what I've been doing now that I can justifiably take UI and stay home for some time without worrying about how to pay rent and buy food. For me, hell yeah money is the biggest barrier. And the only options in front of me are to work at shitty minimum wage food service jobs which are now destroyed.
One of the things driving poverty and homelessness in the US is a lack of affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods. If you could work a shitty minimum wage job part-time while living without a car and cover the cost of a room while getting free medical care through the US government, you could write or program or whatever.
Poor people have no voice in things like what kind of housing gets built or how healthcare is paid for. Corporations and rich people design that and they design stuff that works for them and that increases pressure on the masses.
It doesn't have to be that way.
Money follows rights and power, not the other way around. If money gave people power, lottery winners would run this world. They don't. About 2/3s of them end up bankrupt within five years.
Edit: I've had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I still write about homelessness, such as:
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/
http://writepay.blogspot.com/
It's my opinion that these people would be most helped if they were given work. Work gives incentive, teaches values, gives opportunity, creates a foundation of something to be proud of, gives a platform to build a resume from...
Who's this "We" you're talking about? 'Cause if it's me then I think this is a great idea. If it's you than I think it's maybe not the best idea ever.
And if it's "experts" all I would say is that that it better be an expert of my choosing not yours.
I think about humanity surviving and being more uncomfortable.
But the thing is, this kind of thing will decimate birds and fish and insects and crops and more, and it might not come back.
In section II, Heat Death, he states, "At seven degrees of warming, that [human cooling] would become impossible for large portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem." He adds, "At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35 degrees. What is called heat stress comes much sooner."
The annotated version of that article [2] cites the 2010 paper, "An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress" [3] by Steven C. Sherwood and Matthew Huber for these claims.
(Sections IV, Climate Plagues, and VII, Permanent Economic Collapse, from Wallace-Wells' article anticipate our current situation.)
Wallace-Wells expanded his article into a book published last year, "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming." [4] I found the book informative, relentless, and somewhat depressing. Recommended. But don't take my word for it. [5]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14734865 [2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth... [3] https://www.pnas.org/content/107/21/9552 [4] https://penguinrandomhousehighereducation.com/book/?isbn=978... [5] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/27/the-uninhabita...