Bought 2ha of fertile land in a remote area forecast to be positively affected by climate change. Rebuilding the holiday home there. Nice to have now. Dirt cheap insurance against so many things going south elsewhere later.
Quite a few things need to line up for this to make sense, but for us, they do.
Let's leave the only planet to have an atmosphere that we can survive in for a planet that is no longer holding onto any atmosphere at all. Sounds like a winner to me
There have been calls to put sulfur dioxide into the air above the artic to reduce sunlight about 2% and limit the amount of energy that reaches it. Sounds like we'll need to do something like that if we don't want to turn places like Florida and southern Vietnam into ocean
- Global agreement and partnership, since you need to decrease temperature globally to make a dent
- Convince everyone that injecting aersols into the atmosphere is the only alternative to catastrophic warming (view in contrast to convincing people of the efficacy of vaccines etc.)
Both of these are incredibly challenging undertakings, even without trying to address the issue of continually acidifying oceans.
And yet, sadly I feel like this is the only most realistic option out of them all.
Yes, there's exactly 0% chance that this ends badly. I don't know why the lady swallowed the dog to chase the cat to catch the bird to eat the spider...
I'm not saying it's a good idea, just that it's a proposed solution. We'll need to do something rather drastic if we want to have any chance of saving the world as it is today
SciFi theories say diseases like COVID-19 are only supposed to thin out the herd, not eradicate it. It's like an evolutionary test or something. I'm still waiting for the Monolith to show up to start zapping the members of the species that can't evolve to the next step.
1) Get the White House (and the rest of the state) under non-climate denying control. The USA has to do better - per capita emissions are something like 4 or 5 times worse than the UK (for example). Any form of moral leadership would be nice from the Republican Party would be nice (The Statistics are depressingly split over party lines https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-vi...)
2) Carbon Taxes everywhere
3) Eliminate coal power from the developing world, even if it means switching to gas in the short term.
There is at least some evidence of success in the UK (combined with other policy + economic reality). Our climate policy is probably the only thing the government have done well recently - dwarfed by the impending iceberg of Brexit.
Your article specifically says that emissions would have risen faster without the carbon tax.
The article also clearly mentions that the ineffectiveness is caused by the fact that the carbon tax is too low.
Come on if you're going to link an article then don't pick one that is showing a different picture than your comment. All it showed is that governments refuse to implement effective policies, not that the concept of a carbon tax itself is flawed.
> The Arctic has been warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the world for the last 30 years, an observation referred to as Arctic amplification.
I didn't realize this (or at least, am surprised it's _twice_ as fast). Apparently the key factor is loss of sea ice. Can anyone ELI5?
I'm not sure this is the reason for this specific observation, but one mechanism I've read of was that arctic air is very dry relative to equatorial, and any heating up increases its humidity, and in turn water vapor is a much more intense greenhouse gas than many other things, so it can cause more localized warming, which feeds a cycle. Why it isn't a complete runaway process i don't know, and I may be misremembering the details.
Not sure if this explains it because it would require ice melting enough in areas to become just water with no remaining ice underneath, but albedo of ice and water is fairly different. Snow covered ice in particular. The change in the amount of solar radiation reflected vs. absorbed as ice / snow covered ice becomes water will drastically heat up an area.
I feel like people saying 'who cares' haven't been looking. And also like affected places aren't crying loud enough. I was driving through Daytona earlier this year, and stopped just to see their coast. It was gone. The wooden steps leading down to the non-existent beach were half covered. That is, you couldn't even get to the bottom of the stairs. This is a beach people used to park on.
I feel like too many people report 'facts' without experience. I'm reporting experience without 'facts'. Maybe you're right, I just wanted to give a real life account from a low lying area.
I don't mean to be anti-science, I'm just reporting what I saw with my own eyes. And it wasn't just Daytona. I saw a fisherman in Indian River County standing on what had to be 2 foot of beach. Erosion happens, but why is the water so high to even erode it?
Water doesn't have to be high to erode the shore. It'll slowly sink into the water as the lower ground is washed away, regardless of whether the water level is rising.
I did not. Then again, I have trouble believing that a public park would build a stairway that led into the ocean, even during high tide. That said, this is completely observational.
Search for "king tide", it's a relatively exceptional event and South Florida infrastructure is notorious for flooding during them.
When you build static stairs to a beach, you build them to access the beach under the prevailing conditions for most of the year.
This leads to submerged stairs during exceptional king tides, unless you want to make an articulated ramp to a floating dock. Guess which one costs more to build and replace every hurricane season.
If you build stairs to simply stop at the height of the highest king tide, you'll have a hazardous drop to the beach under normal conditions.
Beaches are constantly being worn back: the sea advances and the shoreline retreats. Trying to build structures on a beach is a costly battle that cannot be won.
Please explain this logic. I'm not being facetious, but if that's just what happens over thousands or millions of years, why is there any coastline left at all?
b/c new land is constantly being created by the clash of the tectonic plates and by upwelling of volcanic activity. Once all geological activity ceases (several billions of years in the future) then land might eventually erode away and the Earth's surface might briefly be covered completely with water. However, eventually all water will escape the planet's gravitational field and Earth will become, like Mars, a dead planet. See
"Here's What'll Happen When Plate Tectonics Grinds to a Halt":
You brought up Daytona. Florida's an interesting case where discussions of plate tectonics may be off the mark. Seems like it was formed mainly by deposition of seashells, shellfish, corals and sand and clay over the past 30 million years.[0] Looks like water levels were higher over most of that time period (p.71), so sea life could exist there and steadily build up a mineral base over time. It's also been much lower recently. Over the past 18,000 years sea level has risen 120m[1]. p. 71 in that book shows more detail for sea level over the past 5 million years than the wikipedia link.
Here are some color renderings of what florida probably looked like from LEO over the past 40 million years[2]
It seems that in places where magma is not pushing up new continental landmass (e.g. Florida), new land is created by sedimentation only underwater, while water levels are high. Then it's exposed when water levels recede, but when water levels rise again, that land is eroded and reclaimed until it is completely underwater, at which point it may grow again if there is an abundance of shellfish and coral.
Right now we seem to be at the "rising sealevel, quickly-eroding shoreline" part of the cycle, which is inconvenient for human development.
“widespread retreat between 2000 and 2005 resulted in a step-increase in discharge and a switch to a new dynamic state of sustained mass loss that would persist even under a decline in surface melt.“
There's a Reuters article about this topic which states:
> Greenland’s ice sheet may have shrunk past the point of return, with the ice likely to melt away no matter how quickly the world reduces climate-warming emissions, new research suggests.
The fact that we were just saying, as recently as 2016, that things hadn't become "catastrophic" yet, only to four years later make yet another correction that vastly accelerates past existing predictive models is why climate change continues to be seen as debatable. We need to either admit that we don't know or start acting consistently like we do know.
Pushing out an article with a headline like, "Major-global-feature is past the point of return," is not exactly selling the idea of a carbon tax. And the only argument against the critics has been, "Well, it could get even worse!" You mean in 60 days, when we announce something like "China will be underwater by February 2022?" Investments to curb climate change start to look like snake oil when we're saying something can be fixed by it but then announcing 30 days later that it no longer can.
This is like the 538 election models that swing wildly as more polling data comes in. A model that is so sensitive to new data is a pretty poor model since it should have roughly predicted that new data in the first place.
When you combine that with the fact that it is anathema to question Climate Science orthodoxy and this is wielded for massive political and financial ends, the only rational approach is to be extremely skeptical.
Central to this discussion is the point that climate science is not science in the same way that physics is. There are no repeatable experiments that can be run.
You point out a key fault in the approach people employ to derive inferential outputs vs. descriptive outputs. I feel like I could rant about the obvious wide MOE and high alphas that have to be employed for inferential models. But I also feel like it's a matter of convenience. Incredibly smart, well-learned data scientists are either subject to their own bias, to their employer's bias, to the audience's popular appeal, and a number of other skews to usable inferences.
Let's say we have 10 models of Greenland's ice sheet predicting non-linear declines in total ice at 10 different progressive rates. If those 10 models have an MOE in the top quartile, and the rate of change for the relevant variables meets high confidence, I'd say we can reasonably infer melt will progress similar to some of those models. I wouldn't shell out a publication declaring it an accurate model, or even one professionals should use to guide decisions. But, given additional precautions are taken, I would expect a sound decision to consider inferences from the 10 models.
I'm talking a whole different script and procedure for handling inferential outputs, communicating them to stakeholders, and setting fair expectations. It's an approach that people don't use, even though it is necessary. At the very least, it averts the kind of surprise conflicts in data that undermine productive, preventative planning and action.
Instead, like you point out, the approach and the bias inherent to the outputs necessitates extreme skepticism. I remind myself a lot of that line from Rick & Morty, when Rick says, "Sometimes science is more art than science." Data is the same kind of beast, especially as you attempt to work around rudimentary entropy. Physics isn't any less subject to the same context. We already have proof that the thermodynamics we see here on Earth are not uniform across the entire Universe. If you and I were standing at different ends of the Universe, I could as easily call you a quack for your declaration that a dropped ball's speed and trajectory can be predicted by your equation.
Anyway, I could keep going, but we both know the downvotes are self-righteous, self-aggrandizing people who have to be right to as deep an extreme as necessary. It's the only way they can sleep at night, so they can wake up and compound the mess they already compounded the previous day.
> The fact that we were just saying, as recently as 2016, that things hadn't become "catastrophic" yet, only to four years later make yet another correction that vastly accelerates past existing predictive models is why climate change continues to be seen as debatable.
So they got the speed wrong, but it was still in the same direction.
Scientists have for years been worried about the state of the Greenland ice sheet, and have repeatedly said it's diminishing ever more quickly and that's not good.
It's absurd I have to reply with this: Climate change continues to be seen as debatable because climate change models keep being corrected past the degree of correction most people understand invalidates similar models in other fields of science.
So, using a pharmaceutical as an example: If Pfizer published findings that stated an HBP pill permanently reduced blood pressure by a specific amount after 60 days, then four years later came out and corrected that to 10 days, most people would be concerned that the extra 50 days of treatment carried significant risk of lowering blood pressure too far, and would ask whether Pfizer did enough to prevent such a significant risk of lowering blood pressure too far. And almost everyone would be more cautious about taking other Pfizer medications. Makes sense, right?
That's what people do with climate science models in the general public. When someone asserts confidence in a model one year then publishes a significant correction to that model the next, skepticism over the integrity of all of their models is reasonable. If they messed up so bad here, we need to know whether it's isolated in scope.
That said, the entire model was about speed. No one inferred a general direction of decline. They asserted high confidence in a model that, given additional data, completely changed. There is a rule of logic in data that as new records are added, each record becomes an increasingly smaller proportion of the overall dataset, and save for extreme anomalies, the expected rate of change for the model given each additional record declines on a curve. That is why random sampling of a population is used instead of the population. After a certain number of records, the relevance of any N new records are insignificant to the output. If the addition of new data completely threw off their model, even as a time series, they're overfitting or underfitting, but either way, they are not going to be trusted as a source of reliable information.
What I'm saying is we need to stop doing that. If we talk about the models as just being marginally accurate, we're more likely to stem attempts to debate the entirety of climate science. Regardless of how smart or stupid you think those who debate climate change are, they do influence barriers to act.
Here is a quote from a related report that explains the "point of no return":
"The ice sheet is now in this new dynamic state, where even if we went back to a climate that was more like what we had 20 or 30 years ago, we would still be pretty quickly losing mass," Ian Howat, co-author of the study and a professor at Ohio State University, said.
SMB (surface mass balance; blue) describes mass that is gained or lost from the surface of the ice sheet, presumably due to weather/climate conditions of that particular year, such as the air temperature, precipitation, etc. D (discharge; red) describes the mass that is lost by the flow of glaciers, which reflects thermal and mechanical stresses within the ice sheet. As you can see, D doesn't change very much with the year, but around 2005 it became "macroscopic". The ice sheet was already shrinking by 2005, but both the SMB and D drivers have increased dramatically since then.
A poster above quotes one of the researchers saying that if we went back to a climate that we had 20-30 years ago, the mass loss would not stop. What I infer that he means is that if we went back to the atmospheric conditions of 30 years ago, then SMB would quickly return to its prior behavior, but we have no way of knowing how long it would take D to return to normal, if it would do so at all. A corrigendum is that the climate of 30 years ago was already much warmer than the preindustrial norm; in order to return to "normal" we should go back 100 years, and because of this it may be possible that the ice sheet was already warming internally 30 years ago and would have reached this point albeit more slowly had those conditions been maintained.
There is already a pile of canary bodies on the mine floor. Just toss this one on top of it.
Oil and gas is a multi-trillion dollar industry. It’s not just an industry that a few companies rely on, or a few cities, or a few states: the economies of more than a few wealthy countries rely fully or partly on oil and gas revenue.
Consequently, there has been a massively-funded multi-decade disinformation campaign w.r.t. climate change, calling itself “climate skepticism.”
But: the brilliant part of this disinformation campaign was to politicize it.
If it were just: “we have questions about the science”, well, once those questions are resolved, then climate skeptics have nothing left to stand on.
But once you politicize it: now it’s more than the science. It’s about your tribe and your team.
The part that makes it difficult is that so much of modern life depends on that industry.
It’s not as if the countries that depend on the revenue are the only interested parties. Lots of people enjoy global shipping, travel, local shipping, plastics, etc.
It’s only in the last few years that Tesla and other autos have provided an actual feasible alternative, and that’s only one tiny slice of the market.
That's difficult, I believe. I'm not against doing so, but unless you're massively redistributing wealth in societies, that would primarily hit the poor. And I'm not a fan of massive wealth-redistribution.
Why would it primarily hit the poor? With smart policies like revenue neutral CO2 taxes they will be the ones that profit because they are the ones who pollute less than an average citizen. Unfortunately people just won't understand even if the policy is meant to help them.
Massive funding of battery, solar, and storage technologies needs to be undertaken.
BEV recharging stations should be incentivized at every gas station with a one-time $50000 tax credit, decreasing $5000/year. Gas stations that do not install them should be subjected to a tax per year starting at $4000/year, increasing $1000/year to $20000/year.
EVs should have an immediate $15,000 tax credit regardless of volume decreasing by $1,500/year.
PHEVs of 80 mile all-electric range should receive a $10,000 tax credit regardless of volume decreasing $1,000/year.
Non-hybrid cars should be subject to a $2,000 tax, increasing $200 per year until it reaches $5,000.
A gasoline carbon tax commensurate with $100/ton of CO2 should be imposed on gasoline, phasing in 25% per year.
Policies as aggressive as these will appear when oil/gas loses its lobbying power, which will accelerate as funding and financing dry up.
Unfortunately, this should have been done decades ago. China is far ahead of the US in funding supply side/production side of BEVs, solar, and wind.
That's an oddly specific plan that effectively transfers trillions of dollars to people who drive cars. Even in the USA, car dependence is not so universal that this makes sense.
Measures that would actually be effective are much cheaper. Allowing Americans to build in and move to existing urbanized areas is the #1 most effective tool we have. If you must throw a lot of cash around, just giving everyone an electric bicycle will cost much less than your gas station idea. You save a lot more carbon per dollar with a bike giveaway than you do by subsidizing electric cars.
It addresses maximizing rates of switchover to EVs based on current transportation patterns for the "near term" of 10 years. "Near term" from the standpoint of transportation infrastructure investment.
Charging infrastructure for EVs will piggyback on the massive switchover infrastructure to support Wind/Solar and power transport from rural areas where those generate the best to population centers
Alternative transportation hopes basically are the "EV bike" or "long range EV scooter". I'd argue for lots of investment there as well.
When “scientists” are openly pushing for particular solutions (always involving massive government control and global wealth redistribution), they are politicizing it too.
When the “green” movement also opposes the best alternative energy, nuclear, it’s worth being very suspicious.
That is of course all orthogonal to whether it’s actually real and preventable and worth acting on. Though that last question requires expertise beyond climate science. It also requires a fine understanding of economics and international power politics. When climate scientists pretend to have those too, people should be skeptical.
> When “scientists” are openly pushing for particular solutions (always involving massive government control and global wealth redistribution), they are politicizing it too.
Man the number of times I see climate change presented as a racial justice problem is nauseating
It depends on what you mean - climate change is already affecting some regions of the world significantly while not affecting others at all. Climate change was a significant factor in causing the Syrian civil war [1], while I haven't been affected other than having some hot summers and mild winters. So yes, some areas - and thus some ethnic groups - are more affected. On top of that, people who are poorer are disproportionately affected by any negative effect because they have fewer resources and are thus less able to deal with it.
A country with hyper-growth in population with a very strong group-identity culture that's internally fractured into a large majority being brutally ruled by a small minority, surrounded by regional powers that are happy for any opportunity to wage proxy wars, becoming the focal point for global powers to wage proxy wars...
The drought certainly didn't help and it may well have been the straw the broke the camel's back, but it wouldn't have been a major issue had they not quadrupled their population within 50 years, had a more modern economy that allowed for wide-spread participation, had a less tribal society with a democratic government and weren't in the neighborhood of Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
I personally believe in manmade climate change but when I read about things like the "global warming pause" I get concerned.[1]
About 5 years ago there was a lot of discussion about the "pause" in the warming trend between 1998 and 2012. Nature devoted an entire issue to it.[2]
But then I start reading that the pause never happened.[3]
And if you read the wikipedia page, it sounds like there is still a lot of controversy within the climate change community whether or not global warming actually paused.
I'm not a climate scientist, so maybe I'm missing something (happy to be educated), but shouldn't we be able to tell pretty definitively whether or not the planet had been warming over that decade? Isn't there a standard way to measure global temperatures? It seems like it would be difficult to spot trends if how you're measuring it is changing over time.
I read about how "if you interpolate arctic temperatures" or "account for ocean temperatures" the "pause" disappears. But how do we know the new analysis is right and the old one was wrong? What's if it's the opposite?
I would think us engineers would appreciate the complexity of accurately measuring total net energy absorbed by a whole damn planet. It's not just raw temperature readings from buoys. Incremental improvement of models and some debate to sort out the reasons for temporary inconsistencies is to be expected in science.
None of this is really any excuse to be doubting climate change in general, or the severity thereof. All of that is just politics, not science. Scientists know that our models are just as likely to underestimate the effects of climate change as they are to overestimate them. It is only politically motivated opinionistas that focus exclusively on one of those possibilities.
I had a career in science so I completely understand how models that predict the future are refined over time, that isn't concerning at all. Saying "we predict temperatures will rise between 0.5C and 2.0C this century" is just smart science.
But my comment isn't around a future prediction, this is measuring the temperature right now. You mention "the complexity of accurately measuring total net energy absorbed by a whole damn planet", which I can understand is complex, but ignore "net energy absorption" for now, let's just focus on "what was the average temperature last year". Would I be correct saying we're still not sure how best to get that data?
The best way to get the data would be to measure how much energy the planet absorbs vs how much it emits. The earth just wants to be in equilibrium so if these amounts aren't equal the climate is changing and the difference can tell you to what degree (excuse the pun).
The problem is that the earth transfers energy between many of its systems (think Ocean conveyor belt) and it's incredibly difficult to keep track of the energy. So any measurements of the earth directly that don't measure all the systems are likely to be inaccurate.
Edit: yes there is a global average surface temperature but due to the reasons above it's not a great indicator.
>So it’s over, the planet will likely be rendered uninhabitable probably within the next century.
I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion but the planet won't be uninhabitable. Certain areas will be uninhabitable and there will probably be massive displacement of people paired with food shortages. But complete resignation is not only unhelpful but also unwarranted.
"Massive displacement" is a tepid euphemism in sight of current politics around human migration, which will only get worse as resources become scarce. Should Canadians be as cruel as Americans have been to their southern neighbors. Hope ya like toilet water, eh.
It's a tepid phrase because the effect just won't be as big as you're thinking. Nobody in the United States is going to need to escape to Canada - the primary displacement problem is that the specific places which support effective agriculture will change.
Maybe uninhabitable is the wrong. Surely life finds a way, what I’m saying is what will be left is a shitty world where survival is tough and life is crude, short, and brutish.
Uninhabitable? Highly unlikely. Incapable of supporting... checks notes... 7.6 billion people? Probably. I probably wouldn't have chosen to have kids in any universe, but especially as a US citizen, I certainly won't be having kids in this one.
Is there some specific information you're referring to? I don't know of any reason why a hotter world would become less capable of producing human needs.
> I don't know of any reason why a hotter world would become less capable of producing human needs.
Didn't you get the memo? The hottest continent on Earth is expected to be completely devoid of humans by 2100. Somehow we can't seem to proliferate when it's warm. /s
This is hyperbolic. The article was about ice in Greenland, not about the habitability of the planet. Yes, the planet is becoming less hospitable, but we aren't talking about an extension level event for humanity yet.
No scientific arguments exist that would support this claim. Some land area might be lost, but other areas will become accessible through warming (think Siberia, Greenland, Canada).
On the contrary, we should expect the planet to become more hospitable, with higher crop yields, more plants and better average climate for human life on land mass.
The human population increase is the real problem.
Children population in the world is already constant, which will lead to overall population becoming constant at 10b in about 40 years, iirc
Moreover, in many places of the world food is produced inefficiently, so there is a lot of additional food that can be grown even without increasing land use.
(currently there is enough food grown to feed everyone, it is logistics problem now)
What I find most interesting is that we, the Human species, do not know what this means. We estimate heavy losses, maybe near extinction, but we do not have a reference. We are imaginative but we collectively can not imagine the worst and act accordingly. This is perhaps why the worst will actually happen.
I am typing this on a keyboard, when I should be getting out there, convincing others to stop our immediate actions and brace for impact. But I will not do that because some unclear calamity is 30 years away. And I know most people around me will not change anything either.
Do you mean human extinction or extinction of certain animal species? I can definitely see certain animal species dying out, I couldn't see a scenario where humans die out though. If you mean human extinction could you provide some further reading?
Might not be the most likely scenario, but a runaway green house effect is certainly possible.
If a positive temperature feedback loop happened to the earth’s atmosphere we could definitely end up like Venus, where no living thing can survive.
And as engineers we understand that positive feedback loops cause changes in exponential progression. It can be “almost fine” for a while and then suddenly “there’s nothing we can do” even in human timescales.
And it could happen fast enough that humans don’t develop tech robust enough to survive other planets unsupported, so game over for humanity, better luck next time.
I personally don’t think thats going to happen, but to be honest I wouldn’t want to risk it.
Earth survived way higher co2 levels and we don’t emit nearly enough sulfides. There is essentially zero chance of Venus event happening. I’m more inclined that climate change can cause catastrophic war than runaway to ultra high temperatures.
Past CO2 levels aren't relevant because over time things like solar irradiance change as well. The amount of CO2 needed to maintain a certain global temperature shrinks over long time frames (hundreds of millions of years) as the sun gets hotter and hotter until it finally dies.
Except sun hasn’t become meaningful hotter in the past hundred mil years. Also, we would need lots of sulfer dioxides to get emited, which isn’t happening.
Will earth suffer over the next billion years and lose atmosphere? Sure, but that’s not what’s happening now.
> but a runaway green house effect is certainly possible
Could you go into detail about how this could happen? My understanding is that this would require lots of greenhouse gasses getting pumped into the atmosphere somehow (Something like all the forests in the world burning down). I remember hearing one theory regarding methane calthrate [1] causing this effect, however I haven't read any studies going into the specifics of how large this effect could be.
If not direct human extinction, it could certainly mean complete collapse of advanced civilization.
Even if humans manage to survive for millions of years into the future, we've already burned all the easily accessible fossil fuels. What we're burning now takes a lot of technology to extract. It's not immediately obvious that we'll ever be able to become a space faring civilization without cheap fossil fuels to bootstrap us there. Eventually, we'll go extinct by some asteroid impact or supervolcano.
We should probably assume it's now or never for intelligence to spread off this rock.
If I'm understanding you correctly, your argument is that if we don't become a multi-planetary species, extinction is assured. And we don't stand a chance of going multi-planetary if we don't take advantage of cheap fossil fuels within the next several years.
Why do think we need to leverage fossil fuels to build rockets? My impression was that solar and wind are already out-competing coal in terms of electricity production, and are close to beating natural gas too.
I also don't think fossil fuels are required to build rockets. Hydrogen can easily be generated from electrolysis (although a bit more expensive than from methane), Methane can be produced from plants, and while I haven't heard it tried yet I imagine a fuel similar to RP-1 could also be synthesized from plants, similar to how we make ethanol.
Do you think we won't be able to switch to renewables in time, or is my analysis on how effective renewables are off?
My reading of the comment you were responding to is that they were saying "We needed to leverage fossil fuels to get to the state of development where we can build rockets, and if we didn't have that fuel in the ground, we'd be stuck pre-industrial. Future societies won't have that fuel, so we're the only chance (for millions of years) of becoming multiplanetary"
Exactly this. Before the oil age, we were already rapidly decimating forests for fuel. In a way, the discover of fossil fuels averted that ecological disaster and there are more trees now (in America at least) than 100 years ago [1].
Solar and wind energy generation are great, but don't have a high ERoEI in early development. Oil that's gushing out of the ground has an insanely high ERoEI and we used that to advance our technology very quickly.
Also remember that we probably have only a few hundred million years left before the sun expands and heats the planet to the point were complex life can't exist. There will be no liquid water in 1 billion years.
This is all conjecture. It certainly could be possible that future civilizations can become space faring by a different path than we took, but that's a terrible gamble to make if you think intelligence in the universe is worth preserving and expanding.
“We gotta go to space!” is an impractical and frustrating response to climate change. Getting the human population off this planet and finding somewhere else for us to live is orders of mangnitude harder than fixing things on the planet for which we’re already perfectly adapted.
Getting to space is absolutely NOT a solution to climate change. We have to solve climate change SO THAT we can continue on our path to become space faring. If we can't manage to survive on an Earth decimated by climate change, then we obviously have no chance in space or any other planet in this solar system.
We 100% will go extinct eventually if we don't expand beyond Earth. And my point is that if climate change destroys our civilization now and we get flung back into a new dark age, I don't think it's likely that we'll ever manage to spread beyond Earth.
Climate change is an existential threat to our species because it threatens our ability to become space faring.
I think the idea is that if we burn our fossil fuels now then if something wipes out 99% of all humans there won't be another industrial revolution after we have rebuilt civilization and therefore no space exploration ever.
It doesn’t take much. A small disruption in the intricate supply chain of essential food is all it takes. We may not go extinct, but we will be set back a few thousand years of development.
PS: Current humans probably won’t survive without internet for a month. May be a few will survive without going crazy and killing each other
> A small disruption in the intricate supply chain of essential food is all it takes.
During the start of COVID the supply chain of food got disrupted quite a bit. Large restaurant suppliers no longer had customers because the restaurants were closed and grocery stores didn't have enough supply to keep up with customers. However, I didn't even have to dig into my emergency rice stash at all, and I haven't heard of anyone else actually going hungry.
Do you think a larger disruption might cause a cascading effect, or how exactly would that play out? The COVID example appears to show the opposite: our food supply chain is rather robust.
You are correct that the “end of world” predicted in initial months didn’t play out... yet. However, I feel even this is mostly luck. We got lucky with something that can be reasonably controlled with masks and hand washing.
Next pandemic will have countries hoarding masks and essentials even more early.
All that said, I was still talking about non-pandemic events.
The pandemic example was just an argument that our food supply system is robust in the face of some unexpected events. What do you think could happen during non-pandemic events which could topple it?
Antagonistic relations. During COVID-19 pandemic, most nations took the "we're all in it together" stance (despite being mostly busy handling things domestically). Climate change will create lots of opportunities for war - migration pressure, resource shortage pressure, new lands being suddenly available and competed for, etc.
That depends on whether or not economies will collapse across the globe.
If they do, or the migration pressure throws countries into war, then all bets are off. You could plausibly raise that estimate to 60-70% (entire urban population + some margin). Cities aren't self-sufficient wrt. food. Many countries aren't either. So if, for some reason, national transport and power infrastructure goes down for good, you can scratch city dwellers off the map.
It’s only taken the last 25 years to add 30% to the human population, and the rapid increases of the last 50 years owe a lot to reduced infant mortality and people living longer.
So a rapid decline might come from a reversal of those trends.
The consequences of climate change might not be as bad as the consequences of preventing it. That's a pretty important thing to figure out because what if you end up creating a bigger calamity than you prevent?
What does "heavy losses" mean? If you don't quantify it, it means the same as "light losses". Is it worse than WWII? Worse than WWI? Worse than Communism? Worse than the Spanish Flu? Worse than AIDS? Worse than malaria? Worse than smoking? These things each killed many millions in the past century and somehow civilization has never been better!
So before worrying about preaching, first figure it out yourself. Otherwise you're nothing more than an amplifier for some other activist's arbitrary emotions.
Do you not think you are doing the same, just in reverse? I am at least trying my best to get out of "my" selfish being and ask a question for our entire planet. And what you want to do is kill that very question because you want to go to the grocery store and buy milk, right?
Think, for once, what if this is actually happening like every climate scientist says. What if the oil cos actually wanted to squash all evidence? What if you are their agent? What do they have to lose if we start listening to the scientists - everything.
You're missing my point. It is that you don't know what the consequences of climate change will be. Not even any kind of estimate at all. So how can you be sure it's worth the cost of preventing?
Even scientists hardly have any idea. I'm not saying they're wrong, I'm saying they don't know.
What if we really do get increased flooding, storms, etc. like every climate scientist says, and we cope just fine?
I'm not trying to kill any question. I'm trying to ask a question! What will the consequences of climate change be? It's a pretty important one. If you can only speak in emotional language like "calamity" then you don't have any idea at all.
Just check what the representatives from island nations have to say and I think you will have a clearer idea. It is easy to disregard evidence when it stares at you.
The problem with this argument is that climate change presents an existential risk for our current global civilisation and ability to support the numbers of people currently living on earth. If climate change (along with the other types of environmental destruction we are currently reaping) is as bad as predicted (and scientists are actually fairly certain of the likely impacts. Read the IPCC reports and then remember that these are the outcome of a process designed to produce the most conservative estimates) then we face an enormous die off of the world's population as large swathes of the planet become essentially uninhabitable at current densities. The costs of mitigating climate change are, in comparison, tiny. A few percent of GDP if we don't replace current polluting industries with cleaner ones. Given this it makes sense to mitigate against climate change, even if it turns out that the predictions are overly pessimistic, because the risks are so high. It's similar to taking out fire insurance. Sure the chances of your house or business burning down are pretty low, but the impact on you if they do is so high that it makes sense to pay the relatively low cost.
I don't claim an existential risk to humanity, I claim there's an existential risk to our current global civilization which manages to feed, cloth and shelter almost 8 billion people in largely tolerable conditions and which will need to find room for another 1.5 billion before global population peaks. If parts of the world where large numbers of people live become heat stressed to the extent that living in them is impossible without air conditioning and agriculture starts to become a lot less productive in currently fertile areas then the secondary effects of billions of people trying to find somewhere else to live in a short space of time are likely to be not good. I don't think we face extinction. I do think we face having to transition to a low carbon lifestyle. We can either do that in a peaceful way and maintain and even increase the standard of living for the majority of the human race or we can do nothing and face decades of major disruption that kills huge numbers of people.
Just thinking something doesn't make it true. Why can't they just use air conditioners like everyone else in hot climates does? They'll all be rich soon afterall, with poverty due to be effectively extinct by the end of the century.
Who are these billions of people? I haven't seen predictions of anywhere near a billion people needing to migrate.
You need to stick to the science here because there's so much misinformation spread by activists.
You're surely right that it's a risk to civilization but lots of things are and we still have to try. Falling birth rates are a risk, spread of Islam is a risk, meteor strike is a risk, nuclear war is a risk, pandemic is a risk, and importantly, suddenly stopping using fossil fuels is a risk! But these are just unquantified imaginary risks so we don't need to drop everything and solve them or we'd never get anywhere.
> enormous die off of the world's population as large swathes of the planet become essentially uninhabitable at current densities
Can you provide any more details to go on for that? I can't find such predictions in an IPCC report but they're huge so any extra specifics would help.
I can't imagine a place being essentially uninhabitable. Las Vegas and Israel are both full of people, for instance. Almost everywhere is uninhabitable without shelter.
I'm pretty sure nobody is predicting existential risk to civilization. You really need a reference for that.
"2°C warming would imply [...] average
GDP per capita would be reduced by 13% by 2100.
By comparison, economic impacts at 1.5°C on GDP
growth would be almost indistinguishable from
current conditions (1°C)." https://350.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The_Peoples_Dossi...
13% is like setting the global economy back 10 years by 2100. If we stop using oil, how much will it reduce GDP?
Other predictions are pretty tame, like a 60% increase in fires by 2100. So what? That's not as bad as HIV or cigarettes.
Ray Dalio, the investing guru, says he’s been most surprised by events that hadn’t happened before in his lifetime, but have happened repeatedly if you look a century or two back in history. Global warming is not only new in our lifetimes but also in recent recorded history which makes it particularly hard to anticipate and plan for.
The "Medieval Warm Period" is well-documented, as is the "Roman Warm Period". Sadly, they and their significance as well as positive effects are being downplayed by activists lately.
Even if the world is warm enough to melt the sheet completely, that would take centuries, if not millennia; Greenland's ice is thousands of meters thick. In a bad scenario, the IPCC forecasts 21st century sea level rise to be a bit under a meter (https://www.climatecentral.org/news/zeroing-in-on-ipccs-sea-...). This will certainly cause problems, but is nothing like the complete and rapid destruction some pundits describe.
Major action on carbon emissions is long overdue, and it's great that people are taking it more seriously now. But an overly-pessimistic scenario has the same problems as an overly-rosy scenario; if we're all doomed anyway, why do anything? Michael Mann, the climate scientist who famously brought global warming to public attention, now also spends time fighting doom scenarios which also discourage action:
Normally I like to say that HN has some of the best discussion on the internet, but the pessimism here is rivaling the political Facebook groups that everyone's racist uncle's share posts from.
Even so - I'm reminded of the post the other day about the NYC street view photos from the 1940s [0]
So little has changed in 80 years. Even given centuries of ice melt - how much cultural heritage do we lose with a 10m rise in sea levels that would devastate NYC?
Then again, a century from now, maybe we're all living in personal generative VR paradises, ensconced in an anonymous room somewhere in a city unknown where power is cheap and proximity to a datacenter determines real estate pricing.
They're also a wealthy, densely packed, small country that had foresight and has been consistently building forever now.
I think most places will just deny, deny, deny until they're ankle-deep then say there's nothing that can be done. Other places will acknowledge the problem, but not have the materials and people to do much.
New York is one place with the wealth and people to build a sea barrier, but whether it'll be politically viable against the focus-on-the-economy-of-today opponents is another matter.
> They're also a wealthy, densely packed, small country that had foresight and has been consistently building forever now.
And they've done most of it with primitive technology compared to today's options.
I agree though: it's a political decision, the engineering and building isn't the problem, and, I believe, neither is the budget. If your 16th century farming community could afford to build dikes, so can the 21st century techo-dystopian mega-cities.
Fifteen meters is a bit too much, the lowest point is about 22 feet below (6.7m). Quoting Wikipedia:
The Netherlands is geographically very low relative to sea level and is considered a flat country, with about 26% of its area and 21% of its population located below sea level, and only about 50% of its land exceeding one metre above sea level.
I live below sea level myself. Most Dutch don't feel too worried, and think that with rising sea levels we'll just fix things on our shores and dikes. And good chance we will, by throwing huge amounts of money at infrastructure projects.
And here you have the problem with climate change, and destruction of our world in general: the richer you are, the less affected you are.
The poor fall from the map first. It is places like Bangladesh and inhabitants of tropical islands that'll fall victim before us rich folks do.
For the absolute biggest polluters, the big barons, oligarchs and plutocrats, this problem does not exist. There will always be a tropical paradise island to own, bluefin tuna to eat, and elephants and lions to hunt.
> And here you have the problem with climate change, and destruction of our world in general: the richer you are, the less affected you are.
I see it the other way around: climate change is only going to increase by a few percentage points the misery of populations that already live in unacceptable conditions. Of course those few percentage points make huge absolute numbers when projected on the global population. But by focusing on the increase in misery, we lose sight of the baseline misery, which constitutes the bulk of the issue and that has entirely non-climate change dependent origins, and can be entirely solved with much less expensive local actions.
Example: years ago a WHO "Global Burden of Disease" report projected 400k excess deaths due to climate change every year. A huge number, right? But reading the report it turns out that the vast majority of those come from a few percentage points increase in the incidence of diarrhea, which already kills almost a million people a year and is preventable by vaccinations and better sanitation. So it turns out that by investing our energies on fighting climate change, we can prevent the excess deaths caused by it, without making a dent in the larger baseline. While by investing in local and specific action, we can raise out of poverty billions, ending also the problem of diarrhea.
Medicine doesn't lift people out of poverty. Government programs that focus on economic activity do. China simply declared certain areas to be economic development zones and then the rest happened automatically. Those areas weren't even anything to write home about before government intervened. They were just some poor fishing villages.
Totally agree. Medicine doesn't lift people out of poverty, and cutting our own emissions doesn't cure diseases. Creating economic development does both, and incidentally economic development means more CO2 emissions, at least on the short term.
If you're interested in a healthy dose of climate change skepticism, there's also Richard Lindzen, but he's also derided by the climatologist community. I've found the most intelligent of the entire community is skeptical, but the rest of them are convinced of their mission for ethical means, and are willing to forecast doomsday scenarios based on essentially what boils down to linear regression or maybe some very simplified model that has no chance of being reality. The more complex models are still extremely rudimentary, with fluid sims in movies and games being more robust than GCM in terms of simulation size which has a massive effect on the prediction quality. And there are gaping holes--the ocean's fluid flow effects and clouds. (edit: apparently there are some simulations with these now, but they are very rudimentary, see below)
Listen to him if you're interested though, his videos are all around YouTube.
> Typical AGCM resolutions are between 1 and 5 degrees in latitude or longitude: HadCM3, for example, uses 3.75 in longitude and 2.5 degrees in latitude, giving a grid of 96 by 73 points (96 x 72 for some variables); and has 19 vertical levels.
From Wikipedia. I don't think clouds fit into such a coarse grid. Climate is exceptionally chaotic and there are definitely processes that can't be approximated with such a low-parameter model. I dunno if the latest models are more refined, but six months ago they were still dealing with water vapor.
Let's just say a combination of a few essentially computational factors--memory, conscientiousness, and scholarship and/or expertise through experience over a significant period of time in varied contexts. But really it's just my intuition, and I'm not the most intelligent person in the world so maybe I'm wrong.
I don't really mean intelligence in the technical or usual sense, just in the sense that it applies to a climatologist that makes good predictions in this context.
Anyways, I'm just here to deliver the message, I don't really pretend to know either way--but I do tend to agree with certain experts over others because their arguments are much more robust, given my math background it appeals to my reasonable side.
edit: I thought about it some more. I think I can boil it down to one thing--high information entropy in their written work.
Yes, it's my opinion, and I've presented it as such, but it's entirely based on his point of view. I think the opinions of non-experts are very valuable due to the effects of group-think.
The basis for my claim I could lay down, but this is not the ground for that battle.
Do you have any reason to disbelieve certain experts over others? When they are the foremost in their field, consistently? No one is denying climate change.
In any case, I don't claim its truth, just its existence. It's obviously important to any scientific process to consider alternative theories which have better predictive power, and to criticize our existing ones, however close to reality they ultimately are.
In any case, if reasonable discussion is not permitted here maybe it's not the place for me.
edit:
> That's not a good look.
Maybe I'm just in the wrong neighborhood. Okay maybe I'll stay, seems like there's a mixed response.
> Do you have any reason to disbelieve certain experts over others?
What is important, I think, is that we shouldn't believe anyone just because they're an expert. What we believe or not should not be based on who says it, but ultimately on the data that supports it (or not).
So find the studies that (are supposed to) support a given opinion, have a look them, and have a look at how other studies in the field react to it. That last point is very important: it often reveals flaws in the study that a layman could never spot.
> In any case, I don't claim its truth, just its existence. It's obviously important to any scientific process to consider alternative theories which have better predictive power, and to criticize our existing ones, however close to reality they ultimately are.
If you go look at the climate science literature, you'll find that all different kinds of models and explanations have been proposed and studied. Those alternatives have been looked at in detail by people in the field, just like any other study. None of them have been found to better match the data.
>If you go look at the climate science literature, you'll find that all different kinds of models and explanations have been proposed and studied. Those alternatives have been looked at in detail by people in the field, just like any other study. None of them have been found to better match the data.
Because the system is chaotic and we can't predict it beyond a week. Maybe a day at best. Once you can predict hurricanes, volcanoes, and tropical storms, then let me know.
You can over-fit any data. I guess ML still has to learn this basic concept from statistics 101.
Anyways, I appreciate the discussion, thank you. I'm a bit irate this week.
You can harness chaos in space because things are really far apart. It doesn't work on Earth, or our stock market would be linear.
Because the system is chaotic and we can't predict it beyond a week. Maybe a day at best. Once you can predict hurricanes, volcanoes, and tropical storms, then let me know.
You're confusing weather and climate. We can't model the weather very well. It's hard. We can model the climate reasonably well (our models fit historical data really well), but the models turn out to be bad at predicting the future because we underestimate how much of an impact we're having (the article is a good example).
I'm not a reductionist so I don't conflate the weather and climate, but I'd consider hurricanes, volcanoes, tropical storms, and fluid flows in the ocean to be part of climate, not weather.
Hurricanes have a huge impact on animal populations, volcanoes have a huge impact on atmosphere and temperature of the core, and tropical storms are still big enough that the sum total of them is not negligible at the climate scale.
Chaotic systems sometimes don't have higher level descriptions--sufficiently chaotic systems can't be predicted at any level, and you can actually measure this. Look into the mathematical theory of chaos.
>The Guardian reported in June 2016 that Lindzen has been a beneficiary of Peabody Energy, a coal company that has funded multiple groups contesting the climate consensus.
Have you verified the other experts who are part of this "consensus" everyone always talks about but never measures? I would guarantee they're connected directly to the journalism / media industry, in fact it's blatantly obvious, the sources for all of those claims are not scientific in that Wikipedia section.
I mean, if there's nothing we can do about climate change and CO2 has no effect, none of them have a job either. The cycle goes [University PR] -> [Funding for the University] -> [Funding for anti-C02 efforts] -> [Paper] -> [University PR]. The process doesn't exist without the PR component which supports an entire industry. No wonder they have a consensus.
Also, I wouldn't trust the Guardian on something like this, as they're directly connected to these climatologists. You could probably prove it, but I'll have to sleep so no one will, and I'm not likely to come back here, I prefer to exist in reality, goodbye! Enjoy the coming economic doom in Silicon Valley.
> "healthy dose of climate scepticism". Beyond embarrassing and straight up evil in my eyes.
I don't take any point of view here ultimately, I keep having to reiterate that, there's a certain uncertainty to science. If it's evil in your eyes, maybe you're caught up in the middle of it. I think skepticism is important in any context as it's the opposite of dogmatism.
Anyways, I do have credentials, but it's a Friday night, if you're still interested in having a reasonable discussion I'd be happy to learn why I'm wrong.
No, I don't, but you've missed the point. It's not the people who program the models who are at risk, just the one who command armies of masters students to do the trick for them and who can't do it anymore, who also take most of the pie. Not only that, there's a whole industry around writing news articles and selling ads (google) around this climate alarmism. People will literally pay a significant margin for certain products just due to its supposed greenhouse gas impact (it's usually not co2 strangely enough to me). I've seen their arguments on YouTube, and some of them are very very rudimentary and incomplete. It's perverse and real people suffer today. Not imaginary people in the future.
These models are incomplete and unscientific, it's worse than pseudoscience. We can't verify these models until we've had 100s of years of this, and by then we'll have better models we won't need to verify. The entire world is complicated, 10000 or 100000 or even 1000000 parameters is not going to cut it. And it's chaotic, so there's no reason that even if we could measure everything to that degree of accuracy precision and resolution that we'd even be able to predict anything at all. This is a mathematical topic, not even science.
edit: I drank a coffee. I gave up my valuable sleep for this. I hope you're happy ;)
Honestly, at a personal level, I kind of wish I believed you were right. I'd have more friends. People would have more jobs.
You can find articulate and sometimes convincing “skeptics” to suit any scientific viewpoint you want - for example evolution denialism or Holocaust denialism - but that’s just an example of using selection bias to confirm your belief. No reasonable person, I believe, approaching the subject with an honest desire to learn about a subject would chose to ignore the 95%+ scientific consensus in order to form a balanced opinion of it.
Well evolution is really not entirely certain so it's important to take that point of view scientifically just in-case we've made a mistake. Of course it's obviously true but who knows, I'm sure humanity has said that before.
Holocaust denialism is another topic completely unrelated to science, and this discussion.
You can't deny all denialism just by lumping it all in a big category. Skepticism is the foundation of science.
I’m talking about non-experts approaching a subject with genuine curiosity and an honest desire to form a balanced perspective. I don’t have a PhD in climate science nor biology nor history so I believe the most reasonable starting point is to try to understand the expert consensus. Scientific skepticism on the part of non-experts is just a form of cynicism or - more generally - a form of confirmation bias.
Fair enough, I don't think it's a good way to convince people to simply claim your excellence however. I'm not interested in arguments from authority. If there's a big spat in a scientific field, usually you get this distribution. It's hard to be a skeptic in science, but that's where all the action is.
Typically useful scientific fields are based in the hard sciences where this doesn't happen, I guess.
This is a point that we need to think carefully. The melting projections are only as good as our understanding of our planet's systems. Just look at weather, are we really good at predicting it?
We have come a long way but if we are not certain about next week's weather, how do we know what chain reactions are going to start, that can in-turn melt Greenland (Antarctic, etc.) ice way faster?
We are literally scratching the tip of the iceberg (no pun intended). Our scientific models have changed recently and I am sure they will change again, soon. So why are we so sure that the melt will not accelerate to catastrophic levels?
No it isn't. Your tone policing undermines the cause by making people afraid of even considering worst-case scenarios in case they get labeled as alarmists.
Undermines what and how? I am really interested in understanding this topic. I am an engineer by profession, I do not take things just because someone says so. And history is proof that humans barely have understanding of things.
Every single recent study shows that things are accelerating. There is not a single scientific study showing a slow down of the melting process - not 1 study among hundreds. If anyone can share one, I would love to read.
Truly catastrophic would be a sudden plunge in temperatures. A glacial period like what happened in the Younger Dryas would cause severe famine and crop shortages, loss of habitable land, and extreme pressure on habitats everywhere:
As far as i know, no model predicts a glacial period in the next decades.
Also, inhabitable land & crop failure will happen with an increase of 3 to 4 degrees (and this is the optimistic outcome), so i don't see why it's not worth or your "truly catastrophic" characterization.
No model for weather or climate is reliable out to a few decades. Uncertainty is an exponential function of time in chaotic systems. One good super volcano and the earth would plunge into a glacial period. A series of large volcanoes over many years would keep us there for a long, long time. We have absolutely no way to predict supervolcanoes or general volcanic activity over the next several decades.
But that was not a super volcano. It was just one large eruption.
We have only increased by about 1 degree in the past 100 years. We are still cooler than the Medieval Warm Period when Vikings were farming parts of Greenland, and cooler than the Roman Warm Period, when they were growing wine grapes in Scotland. It's doubtful that CO2 increase of even doubling would cause catastrophic crop failure. After all, the CO2 levels were thousands of PPM for most of Earth's history, and plants evolved under those conditions before the Pliestocene. Dinosaurs were very large creatures that were supported by a rich ecosystem of plant life. CO2 is plant food. Only at extremely high levels of 7000+ ppm (20x modern levels) has there ever been any geological evidence of catastrophe and even that event is hard to disentangle cause and effect.
Careful mixing weather with climate. Depending on the model used, the Lyapunov time[0] for such a model is a couple of days. The whole climate system is a different beast, so no use comparing our predictions in one with the other.
The 'its bad' section could use some work; it isn't immediately obvious why it is bad. It says things like 10% decrease in grain yield. World population has increased by ~40% in my lifetime; so a 10% grain yield is not the biggest problem we're facing for food security.
Ditto the 10 million migrant number. Australia has 7 million migrants living here right now; 10 million globally spread over many years is not particularly devastating.
Climate change is supposed to be a threat significant enough for people to abandon their way of life, not those so-so numbers.
Is there any evidence at all that global warming is causing any migration? I look at the problems in Syria and I’m definitely not saying “Yep global warming causes that.”
The World Bank's Groundswell Report [0] from 2018 may be a useful resource for you:
"Internal climate migrants are rapidly becoming the human face of climate change. According to the new World Bank report "Groundswell - Preparing for Internal Climate Migration", without urgent global and national climate action, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America could see more than 140 million people move within their countries’ borders by 2050."
Ok. So that infographic mentions 147 million migrants, of which 86 in sub-saharian Africa. It also says that the population of sub-saharian Africa is projected to double in the same timeframe, but of course it's easier and less expensive to decarbonize the entire world than to introduce family planning practices in Africa?
Given that one of the 10 biggest countries in the world has virtually no elevation and is already having drinking water problems (Bangladesh), a migrant crisis is certain.
The water problems of Bangladesh seem to have little to do with climate change. It's a mix of political problems with neighboring countries, arsenic contamination of the soil, lack of sanitation.
Sure, it's not the fact that the US, UK and Saudi Arabia financed, trained and armed the rebels with 1 billion dollars a year [1].
Noo, it's climate change. Imagine what would happen in your country if any group of rebels or terrorists where given weapons and training for several billions to take down the government.
The "Arab Spring" kicked off in response to escalating bread prices following droughts in Russia, Ukraine, China and Argentina and torrential storms in Canada, Australia and Brazil. All major wheat and grain producers.
I might or even probably would have happened anyway but climate change probably accelerated it.
Crop yields have trended up for the past century. CO2 fertilization improves crop yields.
Edit reply: Yes, it has. This macronutrient myth has to do with the profile of carbs to proteins shifting by single digit percentages, whereas crops will produce more carbs per gram and less protein per gram under higher CO2. The effect is extremely minimal. In soy beans, it's just 2% difference. Either way, when your yields double and you lose 2-10% protein per gram, you are still producing more food overall. This has nothing to do with GMOs. It's just a natural effect of photosynthesis. Most plants are C3 plants, which means genetically they are optimized for CO2 levels that are at least 3x higher than modern levels. It is theorized that this is because plants evolved under these conditions for millions of years. Only very recently in geological terms, did Earth's CO2 levels drop to sub-1000 ppm.
> 10 million globally spread over many years is not particularly devastating.
While I personally agree with you, the UK (news and opinion polls) regularly regard ten thousand on that island (1/10th of a fair share of 10 million worldwide) as an existential threat. Most recently, the addition of half a dozen bailing out a rubber dinghy with Tupperware are seen as so dangerous that the Royal Navy is considered an appropriate response by a majority.
> The 2011 census recorded that 2,998,264 people or 36.7% of London's population are foreign-born [0]
The politics of the situation would be brutal; but the UK has a pretty reasonable tolerance for migrants. Strategically the numbers in the article are not a global threat.
Same all around EU. The very mention of "ten thousand refugees" = immediate EU-wide political shit storm. I can easily imagine the sudden pressure of 10 million refugees on the border could end the EU and cause atrocities to happen.
And with climate changes accelerating and yielding areas around the equator uninhabitable, I don't believe it'll stop at 10 million. Not to mention, some parts of EU itself are close to equator.
Not actually true. UK is considering offering citizenship to 3 million HK citizens. So it’s really not about immigration in general, but the kind of immigrants (e.g. “immigrans taking our jobs” or “importing terrorists”).
How are 3 million HK citizens not going to be "immigrants taking our jobs"? When you are thinking about something like the economical impact of immigration then lower numbers always mean lower impact.
There’s a big difference between immigrants that are willing to take low-paid jobs for even less money than the least educated locals (such as construction, fruit picking, ...), vs immigrants that are highly educated and can contribute to the society in novel ways (e.g. by performing research, invention, entrepreneurship, ...).
"It's us" could use much more work. Suppose you could make the case
1. It's warming.
2. It's not us.
3. We're sure.
4. It's bad.
5. We can fix it.
What would be different? That point speaks exclusively to the morality of the issue (It's us: environmentalists are noble! - It's not us: environmentalists are evil!), not to what's happening or what should be done.
It would be incorrect, the evidence is clear that it is a man made problem. This has nothing to do with the morality or lack of, that's your projection.
> It would be incorrect, the evidence is clear that it is a man made problem.
This isn't how you do hypotheticals. If, in the hypothetical world, it isn't us, the claim that it isn't us is correct, not incorrect by virtue of disagreeing with the non-hypothetical world.
And you didn't even address my point that this bullet point is completely irrelevant to what's happening and to what should be done. All the recommendations are identical in either case. Why is the bullet point present in the list? Wouldn't it make more sense to have a four-item list?
If you don't say "it's us", you generally mean that it's a natural occurring phenomenon / cycle. And with that generally comes the assumption "...therefore we don't need to fix it, because it will fix itself.".
That really isn't an assumption that people make about natural phenomena. Let's compare a swamp, anywhere:
1. It's causing disease.
2. It's not us.
3. We're sure.
4. It's bad.
5. We can fix it.
And we do! Draining swamps is an important way to make uninhabitable land habitable. But there's no one out there saying "why bother, just wait for the swamp to go away on its own".
One thing to consider when you're reading anything about the predicted effects of climate change: The effects will not be uniform in space or time.
For example, warming itself has been highly nonuniform. It's not that every day, every location on earth is X degrees warmer. Rather, that's an average; some days in some places are a lot hotter, and on other days in other places, it's less hot. This means that in addition to the average temperature increasing, extremes are also more common (has to be).
I expect that "10% decrease in average [time and space] grain yields" would also be spiky, in time and space. That means some places and times will experience significantly more than a 10% drop.
> For example, warming itself has been highly nonuniform. It's not that every day, every location on earth is X degrees warmer.
What is happening is this:
For a location and a time somewhere on earth plot a curve depicting the probability of it's temperature. The highest point in the middle is the average, typical temperature for that day, but of course there are less probable outliers left and right, like in a normal distribution.
What climate change does is
a) it flattens that curve, meaning more varying temperatures, unusually hot or unusually cold days, become more likely and
b) it moves that entire curve to the right, so that the average overall temperature becomes hotter, even though there are more cold outlier-days than before.
Just the other day I read a long and detailed article about a predicted number of 200 million "climate migrants" by 2050, 86 million from Africa alone.
Nowhere in the long article was ever mentioned that in the same timespan Africa's population is predicted to double, adding 1.2 billion people to the current number. But of course, hey, "climate change".
10 million migrants just from sea level rise. Sea level rise is actually one of the smallest threats that arise from climate change. There are some specific countries like Bangladesh that will suffer heavily from flooding but the vast majority of countries can deal with it. Climate change involves much bigger threats than that.
Highlighting the cost alone is not sufficient. Entire Maldives and big parts of Bangladesh going underwater thus resulting in millions of refugees will generate at most a few outraged tweets and a touching article in some news outlet in USA (something similar in China).
For climate change to be taken seriously, one needs to find the lever which will move the powerful actors. For example, leaving oceanfront homes' insurance to market forces. Swing states of Florida and North Carolina will instantly propel this to a big political issue, leaving the party of Free Markets and Climate Change Denial (TM) in an awkward position.
Sadly, the politicians on all sides are way too smart to let this happen - they will instead prefer driving issues which sap electorate's attention but affect <5% of the population (transgender bathroom access, extreme cases of the spectrum of abortion issue, marginal tax rate on 0.1% of people etc).
It is not true it must take centuries. We don't know how climate responds to changes but we know the response is highly nonlinear.
Just yesterday I read how diminishing cloud cover can very rapidly tip Earth couple degrees up. Clouds reflect large portion of sunlight back to space. Less clouds equals less reflected energy equals more absorbed energy equals hotter environment equals less clouds.
Ice takes decades to melt but clouds do not require to sink huge amount of energy and can vanish practically overnight as soon as atmosphere warms up enough.
Once atmosphere warms up due to diminishing cloud cover the ice will melt very quickly, accelerated through external stimulus versus current slow feedback loop (less ice cover, etc).
The atmosphere can warm much faster than that, but even "very quick" melting would take forever, because it's hard-packed ice that's over a mile thick. At a melting rate of two meters per summer (which is a lot, that's the equivalent of melting ~800 inches of snow), it would take over a thousand years to get to the bottom.
The center of Greenland is below sea level and covered by about two miles of ice. Perhaps there could be a sudden collapse from below and two mile high icebergs strand somewhere along Florida's coast?
Sadly I am rather pessimistic but I learnt something from my wife's cancer: we all die sooner or later, so in a special way it doesn't matter if humanity is dying.
I do hope for my children that we find a way to salvage ourselves. Perhaps world-wide carbon capture and a giant freezers where neccessary?
Covid-19 has exposed how almost all world leaders are useless when faced with big challenges - any action taken will be far too late; too little and often times plain wrong.
So as I read about Greenland’s ice sheets I can only conclude that we are all doomed. Raising awareness won’t really help; the leaders who could do something about it simply won’t.
It’s sad and it’s depressing and I’ve no idea what any of us can do to actually prevent this next global catastrophe.
BUT, this is a hair on fire emergency. We are fully and truly fucked and until enough people wake up to this reality, we'll continue with the glacial pace we've had addressing the problem for the past several decades and wake up one day realizing there really is nothing we can do fast enough to matter.
It's entirely possible we've already passed this threshold and we're already dead.
The Old World is making noises about a "greener" recovery as long as we have to make adjustments for Covid. If that happens or not remains to be seen.
Personally, I spend most of the year between 250-1'750 metres over sea level, in a country that (at least in the past) has prized food security over cheap eats, and (until Fukushima) ran our rail system on mostly nuke+hydro power. That said, our glaciers have also retreated noticeably over my lifetime.
(I had thought eliminating Covid would be a good warm-up exercise for tackling climate change, but it appears that even though when it comes to clothing fashions, humans herd like sheep, when it comes to effective concerted effort, humans herd like cats.)
>Covid-19 has exposed how almost all world leaders are useless when faced with big challenges
Many countries have done pretty well coordinating a useful response against this virus. The US has done terribly, but there are plenty of examples of other nations responding well to it.
I think you’re mistaken. No one started to care until Italy happened weeks after the WHO warnings. China locking down 11m people didn’t ring any alarm bells in the west.
Even when Italy happened not all countries reacted, instead thinking ‘oh we don’t have that problem we’re fine’
And then as cases did go up other countries for ‘creative’ with their handling - the UK totally gave up on testing in March and was secretly thinking to ‘ride it out’ and go for herd immunity.
So the few examples where it was handled well (say Taiwan and South Korea) are irrelevant when considering the strength of the overall global response.
Now, for dealing with melting ice sheets we need more than a majority of countries working together to prevent an event that will displace millions of people but right now the response is similar to how we responded to COVID - but imo the stakes are higher now.
My point is that not all countries did bad. Many countries did poorly, but many others responded well to the crisis and have either kept cases down, had very few deaths, or managed to suppress their outbreaks.
> China locking down 11m people didn’t ring any alarm bells in the west.
Yes it did. Australia and NZ started preparing very early for this outbreak. The results are very evident. The US and the UK responded terribly, and their people should be very angry.
I don't think Covid-19 has shown that. A lot of world leaders maybe took a bit longer to react than they should have, but once it was clear that the virus was spreading they acted sensibly to prevent widespread contagion and those countries now have rather low infection rates.
Some other leaders (i.e. Bolansaro, Modi, Putin, Trump, and probably some other leaders of countries where we don't even know how bad the situation is) have reacted poorly, leading to less good results.
Even in places like the United States which has been doing a terrible job, I am amazed at the scope of sacrifice that has been made to prevent the potential of millions of deaths, and by the generally high level of compliance with social distancing. It's not good enough, mind you, and those sacrifices will be for naught if we don't eventually get things under control, but having 90% of people in stores wearing masks is a lot higher than just about anyone would have guessed if one were to suggest this scenario as a hypothetical a year ago. I think most health experts expected about 50%.
Really, the whole world has been quite united I think on average despite poor leadership when you look at the actions of individual people. On the other hand, as pandemic fatigue sets in that early solidarity seems to be getting weaker.
> but once it was clear that the virus was spreading
Yes, once it was ostensibly too late to prevent a huge economic hit and significant loss of human life. The European response was atrocious, let’s not rewrite history - Italy happened because no one took action. And while Italy was happening the rest of Europe was debating whether its a violation of Schengen to be closing borders. And then as Spain happened finally other countries started locking down. Yes, once they too could no longer pretend it wouldn’t be a problem for them.
If the same approach is taken with ice sheets then no country will care until they’ve lost a city or two. And no other country will care unless the ‘problem’ becomes obvious for them. And by then it will be FAR too late - a vaccine won’t exist to make seas levels fall again and undo all that damage.
The way I see it climate change could be awful but it's never going to be catastrophic as long as we're alive. All we have to do is send up hella reflectors to block the sun and we can be cool again.
The real risk IMO is making the oceans acidic with all this co2. That has the potential to be really really catastrophic.
I was referring to "making the ocean acidic". If you meant to write "making the ocean more acidic", you should have done so! But then it won't sound like we're turning it into acid soup.
As far as many marine organisms are concerned we are doing just that though. I said it for effect and I stand by its use.
The way I see it when talking about our oceans they are systems rather than a liquid. The system has a preferred pH range and therefore can become acidic regardless of whether it's <7.
> The system has a preferred pH range and therefore can become acidic regardless of whether it's <7.
It's alkaline and will stay that way whether it sounds dramatic enough to you or not. What the preferred pH range is and how the complex system of the oceans works, we don't fully understand yet.
It's hyperbole not alarmism and are you kidding? The ocean is currently acidifying at a rate 100x anything in the last 20 million years. Oceanography may be a relatively young science but we certainly know this kind of change is outside of what would be preferred.
> All we have to do is send up hella reflectors to block the sun and we can be cool again.
The amount of reflectors required would necessitate literally millions of conventional rocket launches. At 1 launch per day it comes out to thousands of years to accomplish a project like this- far too slow to effectively address climate change.
We don't need to block all of it or anywhere near. We have hundreds of years to do this, why wouldn't we make them in space?
If you read my comment you would realise I didn't say we could use it to address climate change but that climate change would never become catastrophic (read runaway greenhouse effect) because we could do it as a last resort.
Catastrophic for 2100 is not the same as catastrophic climate change. Catastrophic climate change is much worse than even the worst case scenarios for the change between now and 2100.
What I was saying is if we get to a point where we are facing real catastrophic climate change then off course we will do whatever to stop it and it will be easy because we can stop the energy before it enters the system. Ocean acidification is a direct result of our carbon dioxide entering the ocean, unlike climate where sunlight is the primary input the carbon dioxide is the primary input. This is why it will be so much harder to stop catastrophic effects of ocean acidification compared to those of climate change once enough carbon dioxide has been emitted to make them happen.
Obviously we should still lower emissions. The thought I was saying we shouldn't is ridiculous. In fact what I'm arguing is we should be doing it far more aggressively because of the effects it has on ocean acidification and the difficulty in reversing those effects.
Greenland just had several days of record gains in ice in the middle of the melt season. 3 of the last 4 years were net gains in ice mass for Greenland. This is sensationalism. Climate shifts can absolutely occur in both directions.
Original paper Dynamic ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet driven by sustained glacier retreat [1]
> We show that widespread retreat between 2000 and 2005 resulted in a step-increase in discharge and a switch to a new dynamic state of sustained mass loss that would persist even under a decline in surface melt.
Given the record early and massive snowfall this year [1] the alarm can be reset - 5,5 gigaton fell on the 12th of august, 2,5 gigaton on the 11th and 4 gigaton on the 10th. Greenland is accumulating ice mass about a month earlier than normal.
Of course this is just as sensationalist as the Reuters article so take it with as much salt as you did when you read Reuters.
The irony that maybe our ancestors escaped Mars eons ago after similarly destroying the planet to seed earth and start afresh. Untrue but plausible based on how we've handled things this far. Self-interest and the tragedy of the commons.
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[ 7.0 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadQuite a few things need to line up for this to make sense, but for us, they do.
- Global agreement and partnership, since you need to decrease temperature globally to make a dent
- Convince everyone that injecting aersols into the atmosphere is the only alternative to catastrophic warming (view in contrast to convincing people of the efficacy of vaccines etc.)
Both of these are incredibly challenging undertakings, even without trying to address the issue of continually acidifying oceans.
And yet, sadly I feel like this is the only most realistic option out of them all.
2) Carbon Taxes everywhere
3) Eliminate coal power from the developing world, even if it means switching to gas in the short term.
4) CCS - current efforts already seem surprisingly doable (single digit trillions IIRC)
Which was locally recently show to be ineffective - https://biv.com/article/2020/08/bc-carbon-tax-ineffective-ce...
https://phys.org/news/2020-01-british-carbon-tax-coal-fired-...
There is at least some evidence of success in the UK (combined with other policy + economic reality). Our climate policy is probably the only thing the government have done well recently - dwarfed by the impending iceberg of Brexit.
The article also clearly mentions that the ineffectiveness is caused by the fact that the carbon tax is too low.
Come on if you're going to link an article then don't pick one that is showing a different picture than your comment. All it showed is that governments refuse to implement effective policies, not that the concept of a carbon tax itself is flawed.
I couldn't care less.
I didn't realize this (or at least, am surprised it's _twice_ as fast). Apparently the key factor is loss of sea ice. Can anyone ELI5?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Passage
Sea level rise can’t account for that drastic of a change.
Have you confirmed this didn't just happen to be a very high tide?
When you build static stairs to a beach, you build them to access the beach under the prevailing conditions for most of the year.
This leads to submerged stairs during exceptional king tides, unless you want to make an articulated ramp to a floating dock. Guess which one costs more to build and replace every hurricane season.
If you build stairs to simply stop at the height of the highest king tide, you'll have a hazardous drop to the beach under normal conditions.
Do you recall what month it was?
It's a broad area of study, but tl;dr, the planet's landmasses move and rise/fall independently of above-ground forces like erosion.
"Here's What'll Happen When Plate Tectonics Grinds to a Halt":
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/08/news-happ...
Here are some color renderings of what florida probably looked like from LEO over the past 40 million years[2]
It seems that in places where magma is not pushing up new continental landmass (e.g. Florida), new land is created by sedimentation only underwater, while water levels are high. Then it's exposed when water levels recede, but when water levels rise again, that land is eroded and reclaimed until it is completely underwater, at which point it may grow again if there is an abundance of shellfish and coral.
Right now we seem to be at the "rising sealevel, quickly-eroding shoreline" part of the cycle, which is inconvenient for human development.
0: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=The+Geology+of+the+Ever...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level
2: https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/teachers/lessonplans/Mate...
Interestingly, Sandwich, UK used to be a major port with a navigable waterway to the North Sea. It's now 3km inland.[1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandwich,_Kent
> Greenland’s ice sheet may have shrunk past the point of return, with the ice likely to melt away no matter how quickly the world reduces climate-warming emissions, new research suggests.
Pushing out an article with a headline like, "Major-global-feature is past the point of return," is not exactly selling the idea of a carbon tax. And the only argument against the critics has been, "Well, it could get even worse!" You mean in 60 days, when we announce something like "China will be underwater by February 2022?" Investments to curb climate change start to look like snake oil when we're saying something can be fixed by it but then announcing 30 days later that it no longer can.
The fact that people actually deny warming let alone the consequences of said warming does not bode well either - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTk8Dhr15Kw
When you combine that with the fact that it is anathema to question Climate Science orthodoxy and this is wielded for massive political and financial ends, the only rational approach is to be extremely skeptical.
Central to this discussion is the point that climate science is not science in the same way that physics is. There are no repeatable experiments that can be run.
Let's say we have 10 models of Greenland's ice sheet predicting non-linear declines in total ice at 10 different progressive rates. If those 10 models have an MOE in the top quartile, and the rate of change for the relevant variables meets high confidence, I'd say we can reasonably infer melt will progress similar to some of those models. I wouldn't shell out a publication declaring it an accurate model, or even one professionals should use to guide decisions. But, given additional precautions are taken, I would expect a sound decision to consider inferences from the 10 models.
I'm talking a whole different script and procedure for handling inferential outputs, communicating them to stakeholders, and setting fair expectations. It's an approach that people don't use, even though it is necessary. At the very least, it averts the kind of surprise conflicts in data that undermine productive, preventative planning and action.
Instead, like you point out, the approach and the bias inherent to the outputs necessitates extreme skepticism. I remind myself a lot of that line from Rick & Morty, when Rick says, "Sometimes science is more art than science." Data is the same kind of beast, especially as you attempt to work around rudimentary entropy. Physics isn't any less subject to the same context. We already have proof that the thermodynamics we see here on Earth are not uniform across the entire Universe. If you and I were standing at different ends of the Universe, I could as easily call you a quack for your declaration that a dropped ball's speed and trajectory can be predicted by your equation.
Anyway, I could keep going, but we both know the downvotes are self-righteous, self-aggrandizing people who have to be right to as deep an extreme as necessary. It's the only way they can sleep at night, so they can wake up and compound the mess they already compounded the previous day.
So they got the speed wrong, but it was still in the same direction.
Scientists have for years been worried about the state of the Greenland ice sheet, and have repeatedly said it's diminishing ever more quickly and that's not good.
It's not like they went 180 on this.
So, using a pharmaceutical as an example: If Pfizer published findings that stated an HBP pill permanently reduced blood pressure by a specific amount after 60 days, then four years later came out and corrected that to 10 days, most people would be concerned that the extra 50 days of treatment carried significant risk of lowering blood pressure too far, and would ask whether Pfizer did enough to prevent such a significant risk of lowering blood pressure too far. And almost everyone would be more cautious about taking other Pfizer medications. Makes sense, right?
That's what people do with climate science models in the general public. When someone asserts confidence in a model one year then publishes a significant correction to that model the next, skepticism over the integrity of all of their models is reasonable. If they messed up so bad here, we need to know whether it's isolated in scope.
That said, the entire model was about speed. No one inferred a general direction of decline. They asserted high confidence in a model that, given additional data, completely changed. There is a rule of logic in data that as new records are added, each record becomes an increasingly smaller proportion of the overall dataset, and save for extreme anomalies, the expected rate of change for the model given each additional record declines on a curve. That is why random sampling of a population is used instead of the population. After a certain number of records, the relevance of any N new records are insignificant to the output. If the addition of new data completely threw off their model, even as a time series, they're overfitting or underfitting, but either way, they are not going to be trusted as a source of reliable information.
What I'm saying is we need to stop doing that. If we talk about the models as just being marginally accurate, we're more likely to stem attempts to debate the entirety of climate science. Regardless of how smart or stupid you think those who debate climate change are, they do influence barriers to act.
No, because it's an entirely different scenario. It's not at all similar to making some blood pressure medication.
"The ice sheet is now in this new dynamic state, where even if we went back to a climate that was more like what we had 20 or 30 years ago, we would still be pretty quickly losing mass," Ian Howat, co-author of the study and a professor at Ohio State University, said.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/14/weather/greenland-ice-she...
https://i.postimg.cc/g29fzpW1/sustained-mass-loss.png
SMB (surface mass balance; blue) describes mass that is gained or lost from the surface of the ice sheet, presumably due to weather/climate conditions of that particular year, such as the air temperature, precipitation, etc. D (discharge; red) describes the mass that is lost by the flow of glaciers, which reflects thermal and mechanical stresses within the ice sheet. As you can see, D doesn't change very much with the year, but around 2005 it became "macroscopic". The ice sheet was already shrinking by 2005, but both the SMB and D drivers have increased dramatically since then.
A poster above quotes one of the researchers saying that if we went back to a climate that we had 20-30 years ago, the mass loss would not stop. What I infer that he means is that if we went back to the atmospheric conditions of 30 years ago, then SMB would quickly return to its prior behavior, but we have no way of knowing how long it would take D to return to normal, if it would do so at all. A corrigendum is that the climate of 30 years ago was already much warmer than the preindustrial norm; in order to return to "normal" we should go back 100 years, and because of this it may be possible that the ice sheet was already warming internally 30 years ago and would have reached this point albeit more slowly had those conditions been maintained.
Oil and gas is a multi-trillion dollar industry. It’s not just an industry that a few companies rely on, or a few cities, or a few states: the economies of more than a few wealthy countries rely fully or partly on oil and gas revenue.
Consequently, there has been a massively-funded multi-decade disinformation campaign w.r.t. climate change, calling itself “climate skepticism.”
But: the brilliant part of this disinformation campaign was to politicize it.
If it were just: “we have questions about the science”, well, once those questions are resolved, then climate skeptics have nothing left to stand on.
But once you politicize it: now it’s more than the science. It’s about your tribe and your team.
It’s not as if the countries that depend on the revenue are the only interested parties. Lots of people enjoy global shipping, travel, local shipping, plastics, etc.
It’s only in the last few years that Tesla and other autos have provided an actual feasible alternative, and that’s only one tiny slice of the market.
Massive funding of battery, solar, and storage technologies needs to be undertaken.
BEV recharging stations should be incentivized at every gas station with a one-time $50000 tax credit, decreasing $5000/year. Gas stations that do not install them should be subjected to a tax per year starting at $4000/year, increasing $1000/year to $20000/year.
EVs should have an immediate $15,000 tax credit regardless of volume decreasing by $1,500/year.
PHEVs of 80 mile all-electric range should receive a $10,000 tax credit regardless of volume decreasing $1,000/year.
Non-hybrid cars should be subject to a $2,000 tax, increasing $200 per year until it reaches $5,000.
A gasoline carbon tax commensurate with $100/ton of CO2 should be imposed on gasoline, phasing in 25% per year.
Policies as aggressive as these will appear when oil/gas loses its lobbying power, which will accelerate as funding and financing dry up.
Unfortunately, this should have been done decades ago. China is far ahead of the US in funding supply side/production side of BEVs, solar, and wind.
Measures that would actually be effective are much cheaper. Allowing Americans to build in and move to existing urbanized areas is the #1 most effective tool we have. If you must throw a lot of cash around, just giving everyone an electric bicycle will cost much less than your gas station idea. You save a lot more carbon per dollar with a bike giveaway than you do by subsidizing electric cars.
https://www.outsideonline.com/2399731/to-save-environment-su...
Charging infrastructure for EVs will piggyback on the massive switchover infrastructure to support Wind/Solar and power transport from rural areas where those generate the best to population centers
Alternative transportation hopes basically are the "EV bike" or "long range EV scooter". I'd argue for lots of investment there as well.
When the “green” movement also opposes the best alternative energy, nuclear, it’s worth being very suspicious.
That is of course all orthogonal to whether it’s actually real and preventable and worth acting on. Though that last question requires expertise beyond climate science. It also requires a fine understanding of economics and international power politics. When climate scientists pretend to have those too, people should be skeptical.
Man the number of times I see climate change presented as a racial justice problem is nauseating
Addressing that is social justice.
[1]: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/02/23/1421533112.abs...
The drought certainly didn't help and it may well have been the straw the broke the camel's back, but it wouldn't have been a major issue had they not quadrupled their population within 50 years, had a more modern economy that allowed for wide-spread participation, had a less tribal society with a democratic government and weren't in the neighborhood of Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
About 5 years ago there was a lot of discussion about the "pause" in the warming trend between 1998 and 2012. Nature devoted an entire issue to it.[2]
But then I start reading that the pause never happened.[3]
And if you read the wikipedia page, it sounds like there is still a lot of controversy within the climate change community whether or not global warming actually paused.
I'm not a climate scientist, so maybe I'm missing something (happy to be educated), but shouldn't we be able to tell pretty definitively whether or not the planet had been warming over that decade? Isn't there a standard way to measure global temperatures? It seems like it would be difficult to spot trends if how you're measuring it is changing over time.
I read about how "if you interpolate arctic temperatures" or "account for ocean temperatures" the "pause" disappears. But how do we know the new analysis is right and the old one was wrong? What's if it's the opposite?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatus [2]https://www.nature.com/collections/sthnxgntvp [3]https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18122018/global-warming-h...
None of this is really any excuse to be doubting climate change in general, or the severity thereof. All of that is just politics, not science. Scientists know that our models are just as likely to underestimate the effects of climate change as they are to overestimate them. It is only politically motivated opinionistas that focus exclusively on one of those possibilities.
But my comment isn't around a future prediction, this is measuring the temperature right now. You mention "the complexity of accurately measuring total net energy absorbed by a whole damn planet", which I can understand is complex, but ignore "net energy absorption" for now, let's just focus on "what was the average temperature last year". Would I be correct saying we're still not sure how best to get that data?
The problem is that the earth transfers energy between many of its systems (think Ocean conveyor belt) and it's incredibly difficult to keep track of the energy. So any measurements of the earth directly that don't measure all the systems are likely to be inaccurate.
Edit: yes there is a global average surface temperature but due to the reasons above it's not a great indicator.
I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion but the planet won't be uninhabitable. Certain areas will be uninhabitable and there will probably be massive displacement of people paired with food shortages. But complete resignation is not only unhelpful but also unwarranted.
"...It became part of the larger Zuiderzee Works in which four polders totaling 2,500 square kilometres (965 sq mi) were reclaimed from the sea."
Didn't you get the memo? The hottest continent on Earth is expected to be completely devoid of humans by 2100. Somehow we can't seem to proliferate when it's warm. /s
No scientific arguments exist that would support this claim. Some land area might be lost, but other areas will become accessible through warming (think Siberia, Greenland, Canada).
On the contrary, we should expect the planet to become more hospitable, with higher crop yields, more plants and better average climate for human life on land mass.
The human population increase is the real problem.
Moreover, in many places of the world food is produced inefficiently, so there is a lot of additional food that can be grown even without increasing land use.
(currently there is enough food grown to feed everyone, it is logistics problem now)
I am typing this on a keyboard, when I should be getting out there, convincing others to stop our immediate actions and brace for impact. But I will not do that because some unclear calamity is 30 years away. And I know most people around me will not change anything either.
Do you mean human extinction or extinction of certain animal species? I can definitely see certain animal species dying out, I couldn't see a scenario where humans die out though. If you mean human extinction could you provide some further reading?
If a positive temperature feedback loop happened to the earth’s atmosphere we could definitely end up like Venus, where no living thing can survive.
And as engineers we understand that positive feedback loops cause changes in exponential progression. It can be “almost fine” for a while and then suddenly “there’s nothing we can do” even in human timescales.
And it could happen fast enough that humans don’t develop tech robust enough to survive other planets unsupported, so game over for humanity, better luck next time.
I personally don’t think thats going to happen, but to be honest I wouldn’t want to risk it.
Will earth suffer over the next billion years and lose atmosphere? Sure, but that’s not what’s happening now.
Could you go into detail about how this could happen? My understanding is that this would require lots of greenhouse gasses getting pumped into the atmosphere somehow (Something like all the forests in the world burning down). I remember hearing one theory regarding methane calthrate [1] causing this effect, however I haven't read any studies going into the specifics of how large this effect could be.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate#Methane_clat...
Even if humans manage to survive for millions of years into the future, we've already burned all the easily accessible fossil fuels. What we're burning now takes a lot of technology to extract. It's not immediately obvious that we'll ever be able to become a space faring civilization without cheap fossil fuels to bootstrap us there. Eventually, we'll go extinct by some asteroid impact or supervolcano.
We should probably assume it's now or never for intelligence to spread off this rock.
Why do think we need to leverage fossil fuels to build rockets? My impression was that solar and wind are already out-competing coal in terms of electricity production, and are close to beating natural gas too.
I also don't think fossil fuels are required to build rockets. Hydrogen can easily be generated from electrolysis (although a bit more expensive than from methane), Methane can be produced from plants, and while I haven't heard it tried yet I imagine a fuel similar to RP-1 could also be synthesized from plants, similar to how we make ethanol.
Do you think we won't be able to switch to renewables in time, or is my analysis on how effective renewables are off?
Solar and wind energy generation are great, but don't have a high ERoEI in early development. Oil that's gushing out of the ground has an insanely high ERoEI and we used that to advance our technology very quickly.
Also remember that we probably have only a few hundred million years left before the sun expands and heats the planet to the point were complex life can't exist. There will be no liquid water in 1 billion years.
This is all conjecture. It certainly could be possible that future civilizations can become space faring by a different path than we took, but that's a terrible gamble to make if you think intelligence in the universe is worth preserving and expanding.
1. https://www.treehugger.com/more-trees-than-there-were-years-...
We 100% will go extinct eventually if we don't expand beyond Earth. And my point is that if climate change destroys our civilization now and we get flung back into a new dark age, I don't think it's likely that we'll ever manage to spread beyond Earth.
Climate change is an existential threat to our species because it threatens our ability to become space faring.
PS: Current humans probably won’t survive without internet for a month. May be a few will survive without going crazy and killing each other
During the start of COVID the supply chain of food got disrupted quite a bit. Large restaurant suppliers no longer had customers because the restaurants were closed and grocery stores didn't have enough supply to keep up with customers. However, I didn't even have to dig into my emergency rice stash at all, and I haven't heard of anyone else actually going hungry.
Do you think a larger disruption might cause a cascading effect, or how exactly would that play out? The COVID example appears to show the opposite: our food supply chain is rather robust.
Next pandemic will have countries hoarding masks and essentials even more early.
All that said, I was still talking about non-pandemic events.
Even if it is very good for the environment.
Some people mention an extinction level event.
I mention a number that is horribly catastrophic, just to show that even that huge number is very far from an extinction level event.
If they do, or the migration pressure throws countries into war, then all bets are off. You could plausibly raise that estimate to 60-70% (entire urban population + some margin). Cities aren't self-sufficient wrt. food. Many countries aren't either. So if, for some reason, national transport and power infrastructure goes down for good, you can scratch city dwellers off the map.
So a rapid decline might come from a reversal of those trends.
What does "heavy losses" mean? If you don't quantify it, it means the same as "light losses". Is it worse than WWII? Worse than WWI? Worse than Communism? Worse than the Spanish Flu? Worse than AIDS? Worse than malaria? Worse than smoking? These things each killed many millions in the past century and somehow civilization has never been better!
So before worrying about preaching, first figure it out yourself. Otherwise you're nothing more than an amplifier for some other activist's arbitrary emotions.
Think, for once, what if this is actually happening like every climate scientist says. What if the oil cos actually wanted to squash all evidence? What if you are their agent? What do they have to lose if we start listening to the scientists - everything.
Even scientists hardly have any idea. I'm not saying they're wrong, I'm saying they don't know.
What if we really do get increased flooding, storms, etc. like every climate scientist says, and we cope just fine?
I'm not trying to kill any question. I'm trying to ask a question! What will the consequences of climate change be? It's a pretty important one. If you can only speak in emotional language like "calamity" then you don't have any idea at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change_on_i...
I’m worried about climate change, but activists like extinction rebellion are far from telling the truth, and the doomsaying is preventing action.
Who are these billions of people? I haven't seen predictions of anywhere near a billion people needing to migrate.
You need to stick to the science here because there's so much misinformation spread by activists.
You're surely right that it's a risk to civilization but lots of things are and we still have to try. Falling birth rates are a risk, spread of Islam is a risk, meteor strike is a risk, nuclear war is a risk, pandemic is a risk, and importantly, suddenly stopping using fossil fuels is a risk! But these are just unquantified imaginary risks so we don't need to drop everything and solve them or we'd never get anywhere.
Can you provide any more details to go on for that? I can't find such predictions in an IPCC report but they're huge so any extra specifics would help.
I can't imagine a place being essentially uninhabitable. Las Vegas and Israel are both full of people, for instance. Almost everywhere is uninhabitable without shelter.
I'm pretty sure nobody is predicting existential risk to civilization. You really need a reference for that.
"2°C warming would imply [...] average GDP per capita would be reduced by 13% by 2100. By comparison, economic impacts at 1.5°C on GDP growth would be almost indistinguishable from current conditions (1°C)." https://350.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The_Peoples_Dossi...
13% is like setting the global economy back 10 years by 2100. If we stop using oil, how much will it reduce GDP?
Other predictions are pretty tame, like a 60% increase in fires by 2100. So what? That's not as bad as HIV or cigarettes.
Major action on carbon emissions is long overdue, and it's great that people are taking it more seriously now. But an overly-pessimistic scenario has the same problems as an overly-rosy scenario; if we're all doomed anyway, why do anything? Michael Mann, the climate scientist who famously brought global warming to public attention, now also spends time fighting doom scenarios which also discourage action:
https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/summer-2020/...
So little has changed in 80 years. Even given centuries of ice melt - how much cultural heritage do we lose with a 10m rise in sea levels that would devastate NYC?
Then again, a century from now, maybe we're all living in personal generative VR paradises, ensconced in an anonymous room somewhere in a city unknown where power is cheap and proximity to a datacenter determines real estate pricing.
[0] - https://1940s.nyc/map#13.69/40.7093/-73.99397
I think most places will just deny, deny, deny until they're ankle-deep then say there's nothing that can be done. Other places will acknowledge the problem, but not have the materials and people to do much.
New York is one place with the wealth and people to build a sea barrier, but whether it'll be politically viable against the focus-on-the-economy-of-today opponents is another matter.
And they've done most of it with primitive technology compared to today's options.
I agree though: it's a political decision, the engineering and building isn't the problem, and, I believe, neither is the budget. If your 16th century farming community could afford to build dikes, so can the 21st century techo-dystopian mega-cities.
The Netherlands is geographically very low relative to sea level and is considered a flat country, with about 26% of its area and 21% of its population located below sea level, and only about 50% of its land exceeding one metre above sea level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands
I live below sea level myself. Most Dutch don't feel too worried, and think that with rising sea levels we'll just fix things on our shores and dikes. And good chance we will, by throwing huge amounts of money at infrastructure projects.
And here you have the problem with climate change, and destruction of our world in general: the richer you are, the less affected you are.
The poor fall from the map first. It is places like Bangladesh and inhabitants of tropical islands that'll fall victim before us rich folks do.
For the absolute biggest polluters, the big barons, oligarchs and plutocrats, this problem does not exist. There will always be a tropical paradise island to own, bluefin tuna to eat, and elephants and lions to hunt.
I see it the other way around: climate change is only going to increase by a few percentage points the misery of populations that already live in unacceptable conditions. Of course those few percentage points make huge absolute numbers when projected on the global population. But by focusing on the increase in misery, we lose sight of the baseline misery, which constitutes the bulk of the issue and that has entirely non-climate change dependent origins, and can be entirely solved with much less expensive local actions.
Example: years ago a WHO "Global Burden of Disease" report projected 400k excess deaths due to climate change every year. A huge number, right? But reading the report it turns out that the vast majority of those come from a few percentage points increase in the incidence of diarrhea, which already kills almost a million people a year and is preventable by vaccinations and better sanitation. So it turns out that by investing our energies on fighting climate change, we can prevent the excess deaths caused by it, without making a dent in the larger baseline. While by investing in local and specific action, we can raise out of poverty billions, ending also the problem of diarrhea.
Listen to him if you're interested though, his videos are all around YouTube.
> Typical AGCM resolutions are between 1 and 5 degrees in latitude or longitude: HadCM3, for example, uses 3.75 in longitude and 2.5 degrees in latitude, giving a grid of 96 by 73 points (96 x 72 for some variables); and has 19 vertical levels.
From Wikipedia. I don't think clouds fit into such a coarse grid. Climate is exceptionally chaotic and there are definitely processes that can't be approximated with such a low-parameter model. I dunno if the latest models are more refined, but six months ago they were still dealing with water vapor.
I'd be interested to know how you measured that.
I don't really mean intelligence in the technical or usual sense, just in the sense that it applies to a climatologist that makes good predictions in this context.
Anyways, I'm just here to deliver the message, I don't really pretend to know either way--but I do tend to agree with certain experts over others because their arguments are much more robust, given my math background it appeals to my reasonable side.
edit: I thought about it some more. I think I can boil it down to one thing--high information entropy in their written work.
So you're really just using "intelligent" as a proxy for "says things I agree with", with no real basis for the claim. That's not a good look.
The basis for my claim I could lay down, but this is not the ground for that battle.
Do you have any reason to disbelieve certain experts over others? When they are the foremost in their field, consistently? No one is denying climate change.
In any case, I don't claim its truth, just its existence. It's obviously important to any scientific process to consider alternative theories which have better predictive power, and to criticize our existing ones, however close to reality they ultimately are.
In any case, if reasonable discussion is not permitted here maybe it's not the place for me.
edit:
> That's not a good look.
Maybe I'm just in the wrong neighborhood. Okay maybe I'll stay, seems like there's a mixed response.
What is important, I think, is that we shouldn't believe anyone just because they're an expert. What we believe or not should not be based on who says it, but ultimately on the data that supports it (or not).
So find the studies that (are supposed to) support a given opinion, have a look them, and have a look at how other studies in the field react to it. That last point is very important: it often reveals flaws in the study that a layman could never spot.
> In any case, I don't claim its truth, just its existence. It's obviously important to any scientific process to consider alternative theories which have better predictive power, and to criticize our existing ones, however close to reality they ultimately are.
If you go look at the climate science literature, you'll find that all different kinds of models and explanations have been proposed and studied. Those alternatives have been looked at in detail by people in the field, just like any other study. None of them have been found to better match the data.
Because the system is chaotic and we can't predict it beyond a week. Maybe a day at best. Once you can predict hurricanes, volcanoes, and tropical storms, then let me know.
You can over-fit any data. I guess ML still has to learn this basic concept from statistics 101.
Anyways, I appreciate the discussion, thank you. I'm a bit irate this week.
You can harness chaos in space because things are really far apart. It doesn't work on Earth, or our stock market would be linear.
You're confusing weather and climate. We can't model the weather very well. It's hard. We can model the climate reasonably well (our models fit historical data really well), but the models turn out to be bad at predicting the future because we underestimate how much of an impact we're having (the article is a good example).
Hurricanes have a huge impact on animal populations, volcanoes have a huge impact on atmosphere and temperature of the core, and tropical storms are still big enough that the sum total of them is not negligible at the climate scale.
Chaotic systems sometimes don't have higher level descriptions--sufficiently chaotic systems can't be predicted at any level, and you can actually measure this. Look into the mathematical theory of chaos.
from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen#Views_on_clima...
Straight up evil in my eyes, anti science.
I mean, if there's nothing we can do about climate change and CO2 has no effect, none of them have a job either. The cycle goes [University PR] -> [Funding for the University] -> [Funding for anti-C02 efforts] -> [Paper] -> [University PR]. The process doesn't exist without the PR component which supports an entire industry. No wonder they have a consensus.
Also, I wouldn't trust the Guardian on something like this, as they're directly connected to these climatologists. You could probably prove it, but I'll have to sleep so no one will, and I'm not likely to come back here, I prefer to exist in reality, goodbye! Enjoy the coming economic doom in Silicon Valley.
> "healthy dose of climate scepticism". Beyond embarrassing and straight up evil in my eyes.
I don't take any point of view here ultimately, I keep having to reiterate that, there's a certain uncertainty to science. If it's evil in your eyes, maybe you're caught up in the middle of it. I think skepticism is important in any context as it's the opposite of dogmatism.
Anyways, I do have credentials, but it's a Friday night, if you're still interested in having a reasonable discussion I'd be happy to learn why I'm wrong.
Sure they would. Sorry, but this argument is simply void, and to be frank, stupid.
Do you really think these people are so dumb that the only job they can do is program massive climate models?
These models are incomplete and unscientific, it's worse than pseudoscience. We can't verify these models until we've had 100s of years of this, and by then we'll have better models we won't need to verify. The entire world is complicated, 10000 or 100000 or even 1000000 parameters is not going to cut it. And it's chaotic, so there's no reason that even if we could measure everything to that degree of accuracy precision and resolution that we'd even be able to predict anything at all. This is a mathematical topic, not even science.
edit: I drank a coffee. I gave up my valuable sleep for this. I hope you're happy ;)
Honestly, at a personal level, I kind of wish I believed you were right. I'd have more friends. People would have more jobs.
Holocaust denialism is another topic completely unrelated to science, and this discussion.
You can't deny all denialism just by lumping it all in a big category. Skepticism is the foundation of science.
Typically useful scientific fields are based in the hard sciences where this doesn't happen, I guess.
How can you even know what the consensus is?
We have come a long way but if we are not certain about next week's weather, how do we know what chain reactions are going to start, that can in-turn melt Greenland (Antarctic, etc.) ice way faster?
We are literally scratching the tip of the iceberg (no pun intended). Our scientific models have changed recently and I am sure they will change again, soon. So why are we so sure that the melt will not accelerate to catastrophic levels?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet#Recent_obs...
This is the sort of remark that undermines the cause.
Every single recent study shows that things are accelerating. There is not a single scientific study showing a slow down of the melting process - not 1 study among hundreds. If anyone can share one, I would love to read.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
Also, inhabitable land & crop failure will happen with an increase of 3 to 4 degrees (and this is the optimistic outcome), so i don't see why it's not worth or your "truly catastrophic" characterization.
For an example of what can happen from simply a large volcanic eruption, see the Year Without a Summer in 1816: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
But that was not a super volcano. It was just one large eruption.
We have only increased by about 1 degree in the past 100 years. We are still cooler than the Medieval Warm Period when Vikings were farming parts of Greenland, and cooler than the Roman Warm Period, when they were growing wine grapes in Scotland. It's doubtful that CO2 increase of even doubling would cause catastrophic crop failure. After all, the CO2 levels were thousands of PPM for most of Earth's history, and plants evolved under those conditions before the Pliestocene. Dinosaurs were very large creatures that were supported by a rich ecosystem of plant life. CO2 is plant food. Only at extremely high levels of 7000+ ppm (20x modern levels) has there ever been any geological evidence of catastrophe and even that event is hard to disentangle cause and effect.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time
Ditto the 10 million migrant number. Australia has 7 million migrants living here right now; 10 million globally spread over many years is not particularly devastating.
Climate change is supposed to be a threat significant enough for people to abandon their way of life, not those so-so numbers.
[0] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/infographic/2018/03/19/gro...
Noo, it's climate change. Imagine what would happen in your country if any group of rebels or terrorists where given weapons and training for several billions to take down the government.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore
I might or even probably would have happened anyway but climate change probably accelerated it.
Edit reply: Yes, it has. This macronutrient myth has to do with the profile of carbs to proteins shifting by single digit percentages, whereas crops will produce more carbs per gram and less protein per gram under higher CO2. The effect is extremely minimal. In soy beans, it's just 2% difference. Either way, when your yields double and you lose 2-10% protein per gram, you are still producing more food overall. This has nothing to do with GMOs. It's just a natural effect of photosynthesis. Most plants are C3 plants, which means genetically they are optimized for CO2 levels that are at least 3x higher than modern levels. It is theorized that this is because plants evolved under these conditions for millions of years. Only very recently in geological terms, did Earth's CO2 levels drop to sub-1000 ppm.
https://www.cropsreview.com/c3-plants.html
While I personally agree with you, the UK (news and opinion polls) regularly regard ten thousand on that island (1/10th of a fair share of 10 million worldwide) as an existential threat. Most recently, the addition of half a dozen bailing out a rubber dinghy with Tupperware are seen as so dangerous that the Royal Navy is considered an appropriate response by a majority.
The politics of the situation would be brutal; but the UK has a pretty reasonable tolerance for migrants. Strategically the numbers in the article are not a global threat.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_London
And with climate changes accelerating and yielding areas around the equator uninhabitable, I don't believe it'll stop at 10 million. Not to mention, some parts of EU itself are close to equator.
People more frequently oppose the former.
It would be incorrect, the evidence is clear that it is a man made problem. This has nothing to do with the morality or lack of, that's your projection.
This isn't how you do hypotheticals. If, in the hypothetical world, it isn't us, the claim that it isn't us is correct, not incorrect by virtue of disagreeing with the non-hypothetical world.
And you didn't even address my point that this bullet point is completely irrelevant to what's happening and to what should be done. All the recommendations are identical in either case. Why is the bullet point present in the list? Wouldn't it make more sense to have a four-item list?
Question is whether this helps the debate or not. It could help.
Wikipedia has a good article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_and_agriculture
One thing to consider when you're reading anything about the predicted effects of climate change: The effects will not be uniform in space or time.
For example, warming itself has been highly nonuniform. It's not that every day, every location on earth is X degrees warmer. Rather, that's an average; some days in some places are a lot hotter, and on other days in other places, it's less hot. This means that in addition to the average temperature increasing, extremes are also more common (has to be).
See the first picture at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming, or this video: https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/139/video-global-...
I expect that "10% decrease in average [time and space] grain yields" would also be spiky, in time and space. That means some places and times will experience significantly more than a 10% drop.
What is happening is this:
For a location and a time somewhere on earth plot a curve depicting the probability of it's temperature. The highest point in the middle is the average, typical temperature for that day, but of course there are less probable outliers left and right, like in a normal distribution.
What climate change does is
a) it flattens that curve, meaning more varying temperatures, unusually hot or unusually cold days, become more likely and
b) it moves that entire curve to the right, so that the average overall temperature becomes hotter, even though there are more cold outlier-days than before.
Just the other day I read a long and detailed article about a predicted number of 200 million "climate migrants" by 2050, 86 million from Africa alone.
Nowhere in the long article was ever mentioned that in the same timespan Africa's population is predicted to double, adding 1.2 billion people to the current number. But of course, hey, "climate change".
For climate change to be taken seriously, one needs to find the lever which will move the powerful actors. For example, leaving oceanfront homes' insurance to market forces. Swing states of Florida and North Carolina will instantly propel this to a big political issue, leaving the party of Free Markets and Climate Change Denial (TM) in an awkward position.
Sadly, the politicians on all sides are way too smart to let this happen - they will instead prefer driving issues which sap electorate's attention but affect <5% of the population (transgender bathroom access, extreme cases of the spectrum of abortion issue, marginal tax rate on 0.1% of people etc).
Just yesterday I read how diminishing cloud cover can very rapidly tip Earth couple degrees up. Clouds reflect large portion of sunlight back to space. Less clouds equals less reflected energy equals more absorbed energy equals hotter environment equals less clouds.
Ice takes decades to melt but clouds do not require to sink huge amount of energy and can vanish practically overnight as soon as atmosphere warms up enough.
Once atmosphere warms up due to diminishing cloud cover the ice will melt very quickly, accelerated through external stimulus versus current slow feedback loop (less ice cover, etc).
Quite frankly, I don't see it. Globally we emit over 36 billion tonnes of CO2 per year – this continues to increase[1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Sadly I am rather pessimistic but I learnt something from my wife's cancer: we all die sooner or later, so in a special way it doesn't matter if humanity is dying.
I do hope for my children that we find a way to salvage ourselves. Perhaps world-wide carbon capture and a giant freezers where neccessary?
So as I read about Greenland’s ice sheets I can only conclude that we are all doomed. Raising awareness won’t really help; the leaders who could do something about it simply won’t.
It’s sad and it’s depressing and I’ve no idea what any of us can do to actually prevent this next global catastrophe.
Obviously still support any possible measures to mitigate the damage. Maybe we can still work together to avoid complete catastrophe.
Don't vote for morons.
There are some providers in Russia, China and South Korea who do deliver on time and on buget.
With energy less dependent on climate, we can further proceed to atmospheric CO2 capture and reuse [1]
Putting it here for another direction of hope...
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/01/22/climate-ch...
BUT, this is a hair on fire emergency. We are fully and truly fucked and until enough people wake up to this reality, we'll continue with the glacial pace we've had addressing the problem for the past several decades and wake up one day realizing there really is nothing we can do fast enough to matter.
It's entirely possible we've already passed this threshold and we're already dead.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/trumps-war-on-blue-s...
Even if the linked article is a complete fabrication, the actions of the Trump administration so far have been deliberately harmful let alone useless.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/covid-forecasts/ Hopefully the American Electorate are tired of winning at this stage.
Edit: downvotes but no counterargument?
Personally, I spend most of the year between 250-1'750 metres over sea level, in a country that (at least in the past) has prized food security over cheap eats, and (until Fukushima) ran our rail system on mostly nuke+hydro power. That said, our glaciers have also retreated noticeably over my lifetime.
(I had thought eliminating Covid would be a good warm-up exercise for tackling climate change, but it appears that even though when it comes to clothing fashions, humans herd like sheep, when it comes to effective concerted effort, humans herd like cats.)
Many countries have done pretty well coordinating a useful response against this virus. The US has done terribly, but there are plenty of examples of other nations responding well to it.
Even when Italy happened not all countries reacted, instead thinking ‘oh we don’t have that problem we’re fine’
And then as cases did go up other countries for ‘creative’ with their handling - the UK totally gave up on testing in March and was secretly thinking to ‘ride it out’ and go for herd immunity.
So the few examples where it was handled well (say Taiwan and South Korea) are irrelevant when considering the strength of the overall global response.
Now, for dealing with melting ice sheets we need more than a majority of countries working together to prevent an event that will displace millions of people but right now the response is similar to how we responded to COVID - but imo the stakes are higher now.
> China locking down 11m people didn’t ring any alarm bells in the west.
Yes it did. Australia and NZ started preparing very early for this outbreak. The results are very evident. The US and the UK responded terribly, and their people should be very angry.
Some other leaders (i.e. Bolansaro, Modi, Putin, Trump, and probably some other leaders of countries where we don't even know how bad the situation is) have reacted poorly, leading to less good results.
Even in places like the United States which has been doing a terrible job, I am amazed at the scope of sacrifice that has been made to prevent the potential of millions of deaths, and by the generally high level of compliance with social distancing. It's not good enough, mind you, and those sacrifices will be for naught if we don't eventually get things under control, but having 90% of people in stores wearing masks is a lot higher than just about anyone would have guessed if one were to suggest this scenario as a hypothetical a year ago. I think most health experts expected about 50%.
Really, the whole world has been quite united I think on average despite poor leadership when you look at the actions of individual people. On the other hand, as pandemic fatigue sets in that early solidarity seems to be getting weaker.
Yes, once it was ostensibly too late to prevent a huge economic hit and significant loss of human life. The European response was atrocious, let’s not rewrite history - Italy happened because no one took action. And while Italy was happening the rest of Europe was debating whether its a violation of Schengen to be closing borders. And then as Spain happened finally other countries started locking down. Yes, once they too could no longer pretend it wouldn’t be a problem for them.
If the same approach is taken with ice sheets then no country will care until they’ve lost a city or two. And no other country will care unless the ‘problem’ becomes obvious for them. And by then it will be FAR too late - a vaccine won’t exist to make seas levels fall again and undo all that damage.
The real risk IMO is making the oceans acidic with all this co2. That has the potential to be really really catastrophic.
This is pretty much impossible. Catastrophic scenarios for 2100 expect pH = 7.8 (now: 8.0). pH is logarithmic and acidity would start below 7.
The way I see it when talking about our oceans they are systems rather than a liquid. The system has a preferred pH range and therefore can become acidic regardless of whether it's <7.
That's alarmism.
> The system has a preferred pH range and therefore can become acidic regardless of whether it's <7.
It's alkaline and will stay that way whether it sounds dramatic enough to you or not. What the preferred pH range is and how the complex system of the oceans works, we don't fully understand yet.
The amount of reflectors required would necessitate literally millions of conventional rocket launches. At 1 launch per day it comes out to thousands of years to accomplish a project like this- far too slow to effectively address climate change.
If you read my comment you would realise I didn't say we could use it to address climate change but that climate change would never become catastrophic (read runaway greenhouse effect) because we could do it as a last resort.
Ah, ok. Just a complete scifi fantasy plan will just happen to sprout out of nowhere in the future(tm). Guess we'll just do nothing now.
Catastrophic for 2100 is not the same as catastrophic climate change. Catastrophic climate change is much worse than even the worst case scenarios for the change between now and 2100.
What I was saying is if we get to a point where we are facing real catastrophic climate change then off course we will do whatever to stop it and it will be easy because we can stop the energy before it enters the system. Ocean acidification is a direct result of our carbon dioxide entering the ocean, unlike climate where sunlight is the primary input the carbon dioxide is the primary input. This is why it will be so much harder to stop catastrophic effects of ocean acidification compared to those of climate change once enough carbon dioxide has been emitted to make them happen.
Obviously we should still lower emissions. The thought I was saying we shouldn't is ridiculous. In fact what I'm arguing is we should be doing it far more aggressively because of the effects it has on ocean acidification and the difficulty in reversing those effects.
To see latest Greenland ice charts:
http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/
> We show that widespread retreat between 2000 and 2005 resulted in a step-increase in discharge and a switch to a new dynamic state of sustained mass loss that would persist even under a decline in surface melt.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-020-0001-2
FIRST LINE OF ARTICLE: "Greenland’s ice sheet MAY have shrunk past the point of return..."
[my emphasis]
So f--king sick of clickbait headlines!
Of course this is just as sensationalist as the Reuters article so take it with as much salt as you did when you read Reuters.
[1] http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/