Project 1619 has shown their lack of desire of being objective, in particular lack of their wish to admit mistakes.
That article might be good, but I would have to fact check every statement, and still not be sure they did not hid some facts not fitting their narrative.
It is encouraging that this sort of article is upvoted on HN. Probably worth coming to terms with the fact that COVID19, GPT-3 and one's favourite flavour of Lisp maybe don't matter quite as much as the fact that much of the planet will likely be uninhabitable before many on HN reach middle age.
You mean that IPCC predictions based on climate models have been replaced by different predictions based on newer models as more data became available over time?
Unfortunately (for us) it does look like newer predictions predict worse outcomes with higher confidence [1].
PS: yes scientific consensus changes over time as a function of available measurement data and understanding. That's not a sign of failure but of improved scientific insight.
So you're saying some places are uninhabitable is the same as the planet being uninhabitable? Tell that to the Sahara.
Seriously, it's going to suck and cause many, many issues. But the planet won't be completely uninhabitable for many centuries, if it ever even happens, through man made climate change.
Do you remember the Syrian refugee crisis and how it destabilized pretty much all of Europe and how we're still dealing (or failing to deal) with the political consequences of these upheavals?
How do 1.5 billion migrations by 2050 sound to you? Yeah. Many many issues.
And I'm not even going into the discussion that the whole planet will be toast once we reach +5 degrees celsius, which looks more and more not only like a extreme outlier but a real possibility instead.
It would be helpful if we spoke about highly uncertain estimates like these differently, as the 2 degree rise is a middle-of-the-road "best guess" scenario in a complex system.
Their "best guess" isn't very good. What's your best guess for the number of COVID cases in your area in 2 months?
Things could be significantly worse than IPCC's estimate, or not that bad. We really don't know. From that uncertainty we should begin to think about things we can do to limit risk.
When there's relatively unbounded downside, you buy insurance (of various forms, financial, operational and other).
> The IPCC predict 2 degree rise by 2050, and a 6% reduction in gbp growth, not gbp.
IPCC models don't take into account the feedback loops.
Also , things are moving faters alredy that they have been anticipating, so expect these predictions to be completely obsolte in few years.
* The models are continuously updated. Recent measurements of land surface temperatures and polar ice sheets have been tracking worst case scenarios, not the previous expected mean (see e.g. Arctic ice sheet melt-off in 2020).
* There are considerable confidence intervals around predicted temperature increases and related forecasts, e.g. GDP growth.
* There are considerable nonlinear dynamics such as thawing permafrost or sea-floor deposits of methane, or death of carbon sinks such as forests. This means that the outcomes of the models can diverge wildly from the mean expected outcome.
* I believe IPCC models do not take into account the political upshot of massive loss of farmland and habitable land in the tropics (i.e., refugees and wars).
The IPCC's 2 degree rise is rather optimistic and -- as others have pointed out -- doesn't take into account feedback loops and tipping points, mostly because the models are not sophisticated enough.
Add that to the massive ecosystem disruptions that are already taking place, add the political unrest that will follow from the tsunami of migrants that are trying to just survive and you have the perfect ingredients for an pretty much uninhabitable planet.
Maybe not in the next 25 years. The next 25 years we will just have massive unrest, political upheaval, wars, ecosystem collapse and genocides.
I'm not so optimistic about the 25 years after that, though.
> That is hardly an uninhabitable world. It might be a very different world, with all sorts of new issues to deal with. But not uninhabitable.
Statements like this can be problematic because while the world in general may still be inhabitable, there could be particular regions that are not, or the damage cause by climate change can be too much for the people living there to deal with.
For example: right now Karachi, Pakistan, population 15M, seems to be basically totally underwater:
Some regions may not have the fiscal/political capital to deal with the changes wrought by climate change, and it is often the regions that did the least cause climate change that suffer the most. Most of the historical emissions that got us here were produced by the industrialized West (especially US), but they'll probably be bit the least-hard.
Last time I checked HN prided itself on being engineer and science based. The OP claimed things that are simply not true. I corrected him based on the UNs own findings that “99% of scientists” support or something similar. What I said is not problematic, but a fairly scientific and authority based view.
Just because certain political factions make climate change into a hysterical issue, doesn’t mean that this is actually scientifically accurate.
HN is a place for tech and computer science. I think most of the HN crowd will agree that the climate change situation is more important, as is the coming US election, racism, inequality, certain geopolitical developments, and so on. But I also think that if the front page and discussion panels of HN would be dominated by these issues, then most of the current HN audience would stop coming here. I know I would.
My favorite threads are debates like this on science aspects of global warming other issues as well as ask/showme's. I think it's good to have a decent mix of tech before political, but a few sprinkled posts that are more scientific leaning or to spark debate from the people with a lot of the power to enact change via business/tech is def. beneficial.
Global warming it's, not doubt, a serious problem, but I don't think it will be a direct extinction thread to humanity.
On the other hand, global warming, probably will have second order effects that make humanity extinction more probably. For example: it would make nuclear war more probable or investment in space more difficult.
70% of species on the planet have become extinct in 100 years. If insects collapse, who will pollinate plants?
A warming planet as we've seen also makes viruses more prevalent as we invade natural habitats and expand to more food sources... (we may need to hunt all animals for food someday, including apes, tigers, monkeys, etc.. )...
Honestly, I think the best solution is a full stop on consumerism, and all industries and combine forces and resources to find a solution that will work like - a big effing huge solar shade that can cool off the planet and maybe put us in a small mini-ice-age to bring back some polar ice, and ice in antarctica and essentially reboot the global temps.
Carbon capture tech and methane capture will be important too, but the feedback loops are going to be what really speeds things up.
Warming planet also means more water evaporation, so we'll need to desalinate water just to be able to have drinking water for everybody. Water wars are going to be the biggest fights of the next 40 years.
I see the solution to Californians fires is upvoting stories about Climate Change, no need to even read it!
Not like the old days when you had to work hard towards fixes to hard problems. Thank god for the internet.
I also see California burning "Locked in" "Climate Disruption". A cynic might say that's a little coincidental it wasn't in Africa or somewhere boring, it's always the USA.
Judging by covid I wonder if climate change will have to begin to affect every state, not just the coastal ones, before the U.S. has the political capital to take true action.
Not just the US. There's currently only a single country that seems serious about reducing climate change, which is China (based purely on what they're saying). And looking at history, we always tend to only react when things impact all of us, or at least many of us. Some examples:
- Vehicle safety
- Smoking
- Asbestos
- Lead
All of this stuff only got limited when it killed many people and even then a lot of proof was necessary to convince countries to do something.
A counterexample would be the ozone layer depletion, that should give us some hope, but it's true that the problem was orders of magnitude easier to solve.
The fact that ozone depletion was orders of magnitude easier to solve than climate change is precisely why it doesn't give me much hope. It's not a counterexample; it's a whole different level of problem.
* CFCs are used in relatively few products. Greenhouse gasses are integral to how we get food, build, make gadgets, move around, and keep the lights on.
* There is considerable cheating on CFCs in China (source: widely reported)
> The findings suggest that China, which was thought to be the source of most of the rogue emissions of the chemical, CFC-11, has made strides in clamping down on illegal production of the gas. CFC-11 is used to make insulating foams.
CFC concentration in the atmosphere has only gone down since the Montreal treaty so it's still a success so far. (edit: I should have said "since 2000", the treaty was a phase-out to zero emissions by 1996)
What happened was that the rate of decline of CFC concentration slowed down[1] after 2012. This was an indication that there were new emitters. China then found the emitters and shut them down. [2]
I would argue that lead and asbestos were regulated well before the general public was pushing for the regulation. (And lead’s effects are generally not fatal effects.) Ethanol in auto fuel is another example where the general public definitely didn’t want that outcome (and it’s not even clear to me today the balance between farm subsidy and climate aid on ethanol.)
This website tracks the compatibility of climate policy with climate goals: https://climateactiontracker.org/ China doesn't appear very serious in this dataset.
Note that the actual implementation often lags behind the policy goals by quite a bit.
EU is on track (past 10 years and future 10 years) of reducing emissions by about 10% per decade. India is on track of increasing emissions by about 50% per decade. Yes EU is classified as "insufficient" and India as "2 degrees compatible". I guess that has to do with India's emissions being smaller in absolute terms at the moment, even though they are on an increasing track.
It has become clear that a pandemic is the only way to handle climate change. Covid-19 is not enough. It needs to wipe out 40-60% of the world's population. This percentage should be even higher in the developed world, which is overwhelmingly responsible for most CO2 emissions.
It shouldn't have to be this way, but humanity has had decades to get it's shit together and has failed relentlessly. It will continue to fail until it is too late.
I hope a bioengineer / virologist / communicable disease specialist reads this and does what needs to be done.
Some pop up appears after scrolling down the first few lines of the article. Ctrl+a, ctrl+c:
---
America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.
This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action.
“I’ve been labeled an alarmist,” said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist in Los Angeles, where he and millions of others have inhaled dangerously high levels of smoke for weeks. “And I think it’s a lot harder for people to say that I’m being alarmist now.”
Last month, before the skies over San Francisco turned a surreal orange, Death Valley reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature ever measured on the planet. Dozens of people have perished from the heat in Phoenix, which in July suffered its hottest month on record, only to surpass that milestone in August.
Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign. The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?
The Times spoke with two dozen climate experts, including scientists, economists, sociologists and policymakers, and their answers were by turns alarming, cynical and hopeful.
“It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects, said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”
Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.
The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.
That price — more vicious heat waves, longer wildfire seasons, rising sea levels — is now irretrievably baked in. Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.
‘Twice as Bad’
“What we’re seeing today, this year, is just a small harbinger of what we are likely to get,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan. Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”
Earth has already warmed roughly 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century. The most optimistic proposals made by world governments to zero out emissions envision holding warming to below 2 degrees Celsius. Nations remain far from achieving those goals.
Usually, each passing year’s records are framed by the past — the hottest temperatures ever observed, the biggest wildfires in decades. However, as Cristian Proistosescu, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, noted on Twitter, it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.
“Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”
Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life: how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind. It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change.
One hope raised by some experts is that the current onslaught of fires and storms — the death, the destruction, the apocalyptic skies — might motivate people to unite behind calls for action. “Those orange skies — I mean, that was scary,” said Kris May, a climate scientist and coastal engineer in San Francisco, referring to the midday tangerine glow over Northern California this month, a consequence of smoke from wildfires.
Yet she wondered if they would have been even more powerful had they had struck places like Washington, D.C. Perhaps there, she said, “they’d bring about more change.”
When Lightning Strikes
The issue of climate change might have been back of mind for most Americans when a dramatic, rain-free lightning storm swept across Northern California in August. In a region that gets little rain in summer or early fall, the most destructive fires, like those that swept through Wine Country in 2017 and the town of Paradise in 2018, have come in October and November.
But one August night’s spectacular lightning show became the next day’s emerging disaster, as hundreds of fires were sparked, mostly in hard-to-reach terrain. Three of those blazes now rank among the four biggest California fires since record-keeping began in 1932 — part of the 3.6 million acres that have burned in the state so far.
And the traditional fire season is just beginning.
The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.
There was no place to escape. Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.
For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,” said Katharine Mach, an associate professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”
Recent events, she said, are a vivid reminder that “we’re all in this together.”
That notion raises a counterintuitive bit of hope: The more people who are affected, particularly the affluent and influential, the more seriously the issue gets addressed.
First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. That means cleaning up every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.
It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels. So far, the world has made only halting progress.
But experts also made a point they say is often underappreciated: Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.
“In terms of being reversible, I can only think of things in sci-fi films — Superman trying to spin the earth in the other direction so Lois Lane doesn’t die,” said Juan Declet-Barreto, a social scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Serious...
“The human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary — not unlimited, but extraordinary,” said Greg Garrard, professor of environmental humanities at the University of British Columbia. He added, “I’m much more concerned for the future of the nonhuman than I am for the future of humans, precisely because we’re just very, very good at adaptation.”
But as the case in Bangladesh illustrates, adaptation is usually a reactive measure, not a preventive one. Adapting to climate change means envisioning bigger disasters to come — again, flipping the framing away from history and into the future.
If You Can’t See It, Is It Real?
“Humans have difficulty imagining things that we haven’t experienced yet,” said Alice Hill, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who oversaw resilience planning on the National Security Council during the Obama administration.
“After every major catastrophe, whether it’s Pearl Harbor or 9/11, people always look back and say it was a failure of imagination. That also applies to climate change,” she said. “It’s hard to visualize the entire West Coast aflame until you actually see it. And if we can’t see it, we tend to discount the risk.”
There are concrete steps that can be taken today. Consider wildfires. After a deadly spate of Western blazes in 1910, the United States government scaled up its firefighting force, committing to extinguish wildfires wherever they occurred. For decades, that worked, giving Americans confidence that they could move into forested areas and remain safe.
But that policy led to a buildup of dense vegetation in the nation’s forests, which, when combined with a warmer and drier climate means that those forests are increasingly primed to burn bigger and hotter, overwhelming the nation’s firefighting capacity.
Going forward, experts said, the country will have to shift its mentality and learn to live with fire. States and communities will need to impose tougher regulations on homes built in fire-prone areas. Federal agencies will have to focus on managing forests better, selectively thinning some areas and even preventively setting controlled fires in others to burn off excess vegetation that can fuel runaway blazes.
“There’s a lot we can do,” said Jennifer Balch, a wildfire expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “We’ve just been stuck in an emergency response rather than thinking and looking ahead.”
Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.
“We’ve often heard the argument that it will be too expensive to cut emissions and it will just be easier to adapt,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But we’ve now had decades of warnings, he said, “and we’re not even adapted to the present climate.”
Cascading Disasters
Adaptation can quickly become bogged down in a tangle of competing motivations and unintended consequences. Proposals for stricter building codes or higher insurance premiums face opposition from builders and voters alike.
And there’s the moral hazard problem, which is when people are shielded from the costs of their decisions and thus make bad ones. For instance, local communities reap increased property taxes from allowing buildings to rise in disaster-prone areas, but they don’t pick up most of the tab for disaster recovery — the federal government does.
Another challenge to adaptation is that, as climate change intensifies, it increases the risk of “compound hazards,” when numerous disasters strike simultaneously, as well as the risk that one disaster cascades into another.
In late 2017, large wildfires scorched Santa Barbara, Calif., burning away vegetation that stabilized hillside soils. Heavy rainfall followed a month later. The result: devastating mudflows that killed 23 and injured 163.
In Houston in 2017, Hurricane Harvey shut down gasoline refineries, strained hospitals and spread toxic substances and pathogens as floodwaters swamped the city. And when the Camp Fire de...
There is plenty of evidence of global warming without making it seem mainly about the wildfires. Because certainly record temperatures and wildfires are evidence of global warming, but also a policy of fire supression has contributed. The fact that they didn't mention that and also didn't get into other evidence of global warming in much detail makes me feel that the article might have mainly been designed to manipulate Californians rather than make an honest and comprehensive argument for everyone.
At this point the greatest hurdle to action on climate change is Republican obstruction backed by the apathy of the conservative base. I regularly see conservatives on /r/conservative use the lack of burn control and a rise in arson cases as talking points to dismiss these wildfires entirely. If an article like this is going to present a strong argument for climate action that can win over conservatives it will need to be scientifically precise and grapple specifically with conservative talking points.
This NYT article did not even come close to meeting that bar, it confidently attributed complex multi factor phenomenon entirely to climate change without creating the groundwork of data & evidence needed to authoritatively establish those claims. When actors, politicians, and NYT journalists make dramatic claims and fail to meet that bar, then the intent backfires and only serves to entrench the common conservative belief that climate change is a product of liberal fear mongering.
For an absolute masterclass on how to properly communicate about the science of climate change, and how to slowly win over moderate conservatives, I know of no better source than Potholer54. We can only hope that one day New York Times journalists will regularly exercise the scientific and journalistic diligence of this retired youtuber.
Even if we intentionally blow a nuclear power plant, it will not be an extinction event, not even close.
But so far nuclear power statistically is safer than any other source (wind, solar, hydro, coal), deaths per Wh, including the worst events like Chernobyl.
There’s no dark black magic inside nuclear power plant. It just burns uranium and heats water to spin turbines. Uranium burning happens all the time on Earth, in fact, if Uranium did not burn, the Earth would be much colder place.
(Technically, it is not burning of course, it’s fission.)
Well, Chernobyl did narrowly miss a much worse outcome: poisoning the water table in a thousand mile radius with corium. There is a real threat of catastrophic outcomes with fission reactors that don’t exist with other reactors. These are issues that can be prevented, but the inherent danger cannot be denied.
> Chernobyl did narrowly miss a much worse outcome: poisoning the water table in a thousand mile radius with corium
Poisoning water does not make extinction event.
It would render some area unsuitable for living, big economic loss, so don’t operate knowingly flawed reactors, and don’t let Soviets operate nuclear reactors, and it will be fine.
> the inherent danger cannot be denied
As well as dangers of flying, taking a shower, operating a hydro power plant and everything else.
Even accounting for these dangers, nuclear is the safest option.
> Even if we intentionally blow a nuclear power plant, it will not be an extinction event, not even close
The parent commenter did not call for 1 more nuclear power plant.
Increasing the scale of reactors to "replace fossil fuels", increases the chances, that some of them even a dozen would cause environmental destruction for which no known method of cleanup exists.
May I call you lightgreen and other fission-proponents to move to Chernobyl or Fukushima and live there as an example to others?
> Increasing the scale of reactors to "replace fossil fuels", increases the chances
Sure, from very small to ten times that, still very small.
> some of them even a dozen would cause environmental destruction for which no known method of cleanup exists
OK, we can accept that eventually one or two small regions will be not suitable for living. We already do a lot of that when we build hydro power plants for example. Hydro power plants consume a lot of land.
> May I call you lightgreen and other fission-proponents to move to Chernobyl or Fukushima and live there as an example to others?
Chernobyl, no, it is radioactive and dangerous. Fukushima surrounding is very safe, it was evacuated only because there were ignorant people in Japanese government.
Anyway, what's the point of the question? Nobody is supposed to live where it is not safe, like nobody lives in Chernobyl exclusion zone.
How long will it take to build all those nuclear plants? Not sure there’s enough time. It seems rapid deployment of solar where its most effective would be the quickest route to effect change.
Quickest route to any change. Quickest route to a complete solution, probably not. Solar is nice but it still requires factories being built too. I don’t think we have all the factories in place to just build out solar to where we could replace most everything with solar.
We do have lots of solar panels and lots of solar panel manufacturing capacity. I don’t think we have the nuclear resources we need to produce as fast.
How convenient this “climate change” thing excuses so many state government failures of land management. Climate change didnt stop anyone from clearing forests around LA or Sacramento, the Sierra Club did. Climate change didn’t cut CalFire’s budget or replace 90% of its trained firefighters with prison labor, CA’s state government did.
We don't control the climate. We don't control the ocean currents or cycles. We don't control the clouds or cloud cover albedo. We don't control precipitation. We don't control deep sea geothermal venting. We don't control volcanic activity. We don't control solar cycles. We don't control trade winds or any winds for that matter. We don't control the climate.
Just to counter some of your claims with publicly available sources:
- We do control clouds and cloud cover albedo [1].
- Human-induced changes to composition of earth's athmosphere result in about 3 Watts of additional heating per square meter of earth's surface [2]. That's almost 1% of the normal solar heating, or > 2K of (eventual) equalibrium temperature increase, so maybe we should call that "climate control" after all?
Cirrus clouds are an extremely small fraction of the overall surface area of clouds on planet earth. That is not an indication of controlling clouds.
Clouds are the result of the condensation of water on particulates in the atmosphere. Over 65% of Earth's surface area is liquid water. Oceans have deep currents that fluctuate in cycles and influence climate dramatically and have done so for billions of years and before humans even existed.
This article by NASA covers that story well. "One study based on nearly a decade of satellite data estimated that about 67 percent of Earth’s surface is typically covered by clouds. This is especially the case over the oceans, where other research shows less than 10 percent of the sky is completely clear of clouds at any one time. Over land, 30 percent of skies are completely cloud free."
Cirrus clouds from airplanes could slightly influence local conditions, but would not even come close to having a global effect. The magnitude of change is not significant when compared to the ocean cloud cover.
From above "(the net effect of clouds is to cool the Earth by about 20–30 W/m2)" That is, clouds have an order of magnitude higher effect than trace greenhouse gases. That means even a 10% change in average cloud cover would more than exceed (on the downside) any radiative forcing caused by greenhouse gases. And this makes sense when you think about it. Clouds are capable of almost completely reflecting solar energy back into space.
This is where volcanism comes into play. When stratospheric injection of sulfates occurs from large volcanic explosions, an increase in cloud cover happens and a subsequent decrease in global temperatures occurs. This process we do not control, and volcanoes are perfectly capable of inducing ice ages on their own and we are powerless to stop that:
At any rate, NASA has admitted as much that our understanding and modeling of clouds and their effect on climate is extremely poor and that current climate models do not accurately account for their influence. Here's a great interview from JPL on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra9AFNco3lI
The earth is a self stabilizing system over long time frames. If you disrupt that balance in the short term expect to wait a long time for things to get better on their own.
If we disrupt the balance, after some time we will reach a different equilibrium state. It currently looks like we are going to cause a cascade of tipping points which will result in the earth reaching a new stable equalibrium called "Hothouse Earth" some 4-5 degree celsius above pre-industrial levels [1].
In such a climate, earth would possibly not be able to sustain a large multi-billion human population.
First of all, this 'hothouse earth' theory is on extremely thin ice. The CO2 levels have increased almost 33% since the mid 1800s and we have not observed runaway warming of any kind. With each passing year the percentage of the increase in CO2 levels decreases. We will see diminishing returns on CO2's influence on radiation as time goes on.
We have already observed several periods in the modern climate era, the Holocene, that have been warmer than modern temperatures with nothing but positive implications for humanity during those times. These periods include the Medieval Warm Period (aligned with the Viking Age and the conquering of Iceland and Greenland), the Roman Warm Period (aligned with Rome's golden age) which saw the Mediterranean as being 2C hotter than modern temps [1], the Minoan Warm period (which was also a boomtime for humanity until the Santorini explosion plunged temperatures worldwide) [2] and of course the Holocene Climate Optimum (about 9000 to 5000 years before present, also associated with booms in human populations in China and elsewhere [3]. In fact, the most devastating events to occur to humans and life on earth tends to be associated with global plunge in temperatures, like the Younger Dryas event just before the onset of the Holocene, that saw temperatures plunge to ice age levels, and is associated with numerous extinctions. Cold episodes in earth's climate are really to be feared. They cause drought, famine, and widespread misery. Warmth and CO2 are good for plants. I hope we continue to warm, but Earth can always revert back into a glacial phase and we are powerless to stop it.
Very well crafted hokum, congratulations.
CO2 is not good for plants that burn because the weather's been too dry. Very local adapted low population environments cannot be compared to what's going on now, all your examples in the same temperature range as now are pure coastal populations with no sea level rise, the earlier era examples are warming from much lower temps, basically recovery from the glaciation of 20k years ago.
You write "With each passing year the percentage of the increase in CO2 levels decreases." It is absolutes that matters, each carbone dioxyde molecule added contributes to greenhouse just like all the previously spewed ones there is no diminishing returns on that, and tipping points are indeed waiting. And we have not observed what? We have observed already a lot of runaway chaos you know full well.
- "On-Topic: [...] anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
- "Off-topic: [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
- "If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did."
Though I appreciate that I'm not paying much attention to the last point.
I understand that it may satisfy the Off-topic requirement in that these natural disasters are typically covered on TV news, but I think (for me at least) that it does gratify one's intellectual curiosity. Climate change is based on complicated climate science and these articles that are written about it are describing all of the predictions of climate science coming true in front of our eyes. Its horrible to see, but intellectually, it is stimulating.
At this point the greatest hurdle to action on climate change is Republican obstruction backed by the apathy of the conservative base. I regularly see conservatives on /r/conservative use the lack of burn control and a rise in arson cases as talking points to dismiss these wildfires entirely. If an article like this is going to present a strong argument for climate action that can win over conservatives it will need to be scientifically precise and grapple specifically with conservative talking points.
This NYT article did not even come close to meeting that bar, it confidently attributed complex multi factor phenomenon entirely to climate change without creating the groundwork of data & evidence needed to authoritatively establish those claims. When actors, politicians, and NYT journalists make dramatic claims and fail to meet that bar, then the intent backfires and only serves to entrench the common conservative belief that climate change is a product of liberal fear mongering.
For an absolute masterclass on how to properly communicate about the science of climate change, and how to slowly win over moderate conservatives, I know of no better source than Potholer54. We can only hope that one day New York Times journalists will regularly exercise the scientific and journalistic diligence of this retired youtuber.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] thread[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/22/1619-s22.html
Edit: it’s not possible to trust a newspaper with reputation that bad. (Also, the story of doxxing Scott Alexander.)
That article might be good, but I would have to fact check every statement, and still not be sure they did not hid some facts not fitting their narrative.
That is hardly an uninhabitable world. It might be a very different world, with all sorts of new issues to deal with. But not uninhabitable.
Unfortunately (for us) it does look like newer predictions predict worse outcomes with higher confidence [1].
PS: yes scientific consensus changes over time as a function of available measurement data and understanding. That's not a sign of failure but of improved scientific insight.
[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/18/the-ipccs-worst-case...
Things have pretty much been consistently worse than predicted.
Seriously, it's going to suck and cause many, many issues. But the planet won't be completely uninhabitable for many centuries, if it ever even happens, through man made climate change.
Do you remember the Syrian refugee crisis and how it destabilized pretty much all of Europe and how we're still dealing (or failing to deal) with the political consequences of these upheavals?
How do 1.5 billion migrations by 2050 sound to you? Yeah. Many many issues.
And I'm not even going into the discussion that the whole planet will be toast once we reach +5 degrees celsius, which looks more and more not only like a extreme outlier but a real possibility instead.
Fun times ahead.
Their "best guess" isn't very good. What's your best guess for the number of COVID cases in your area in 2 months?
Things could be significantly worse than IPCC's estimate, or not that bad. We really don't know. From that uncertainty we should begin to think about things we can do to limit risk.
When there's relatively unbounded downside, you buy insurance (of various forms, financial, operational and other).
IPCC models don't take into account the feedback loops. Also , things are moving faters alredy that they have been anticipating, so expect these predictions to be completely obsolte in few years.
* The models are continuously updated. Recent measurements of land surface temperatures and polar ice sheets have been tracking worst case scenarios, not the previous expected mean (see e.g. Arctic ice sheet melt-off in 2020). * There are considerable confidence intervals around predicted temperature increases and related forecasts, e.g. GDP growth. * There are considerable nonlinear dynamics such as thawing permafrost or sea-floor deposits of methane, or death of carbon sinks such as forests. This means that the outcomes of the models can diverge wildly from the mean expected outcome. * I believe IPCC models do not take into account the political upshot of massive loss of farmland and habitable land in the tropics (i.e., refugees and wars).
Add that to the massive ecosystem disruptions that are already taking place, add the political unrest that will follow from the tsunami of migrants that are trying to just survive and you have the perfect ingredients for an pretty much uninhabitable planet.
Maybe not in the next 25 years. The next 25 years we will just have massive unrest, political upheaval, wars, ecosystem collapse and genocides.
I'm not so optimistic about the 25 years after that, though.
Statements like this can be problematic because while the world in general may still be inhabitable, there could be particular regions that are not, or the damage cause by climate change can be too much for the people living there to deal with.
For example: right now Karachi, Pakistan, population 15M, seems to be basically totally underwater:
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/26/pakistan-flood...
* https://www.dw.com/en/flooding-causes-havoc-in-karachi/a-547...
Tuvalu and the Marshal Islands are predicted to basically disappear:
* https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/may/16/o...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change_on_i...
Some regions may not have the fiscal/political capital to deal with the changes wrought by climate change, and it is often the regions that did the least cause climate change that suffer the most. Most of the historical emissions that got us here were produced by the industrialized West (especially US), but they'll probably be bit the least-hard.
Just because certain political factions make climate change into a hysterical issue, doesn’t mean that this is actually scientifically accurate.
On the other hand, global warming, probably will have second order effects that make humanity extinction more probably. For example: it would make nuclear war more probable or investment in space more difficult.
A warming planet as we've seen also makes viruses more prevalent as we invade natural habitats and expand to more food sources... (we may need to hunt all animals for food someday, including apes, tigers, monkeys, etc.. )...
Honestly, I think the best solution is a full stop on consumerism, and all industries and combine forces and resources to find a solution that will work like - a big effing huge solar shade that can cool off the planet and maybe put us in a small mini-ice-age to bring back some polar ice, and ice in antarctica and essentially reboot the global temps.
Carbon capture tech and methane capture will be important too, but the feedback loops are going to be what really speeds things up.
Warming planet also means more water evaporation, so we'll need to desalinate water just to be able to have drinking water for everybody. Water wars are going to be the biggest fights of the next 40 years.
Not like the old days when you had to work hard towards fixes to hard problems. Thank god for the internet.
I also see California burning "Locked in" "Climate Disruption". A cynic might say that's a little coincidental it wasn't in Africa or somewhere boring, it's always the USA.
- Vehicle safety
- Smoking
- Asbestos
- Lead
All of this stuff only got limited when it killed many people and even then a lot of proof was necessary to convince countries to do something.
I am however very pessimistic about our (as a species) ability to deal with something that's even more long-term than i.e. CFCs or SO2.
> The findings suggest that China, which was thought to be the source of most of the rogue emissions of the chemical, CFC-11, has made strides in clamping down on illegal production of the gas. CFC-11 is used to make insulating foams.
-- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/climate/china-cfcs.html
What happened was that the rate of decline of CFC concentration slowed down[1] after 2012. This was an indication that there were new emitters. China then found the emitters and shut them down. [2]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0106-2.epdf
[2] https://nationalpost.com/news/world/china-makes-arrests-shut...
Note that the actual implementation often lags behind the policy goals by quite a bit.
EU is on track (past 10 years and future 10 years) of reducing emissions by about 10% per decade. India is on track of increasing emissions by about 50% per decade. Yes EU is classified as "insufficient" and India as "2 degrees compatible". I guess that has to do with India's emissions being smaller in absolute terms at the moment, even though they are on an increasing track.
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/eu/ https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/india/
Compare that to what they've been doing since 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
It shouldn't have to be this way, but humanity has had decades to get it's shit together and has failed relentlessly. It will continue to fail until it is too late.
I hope a bioengineer / virologist / communicable disease specialist reads this and does what needs to be done.
---
America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.
This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action.
“I’ve been labeled an alarmist,” said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist in Los Angeles, where he and millions of others have inhaled dangerously high levels of smoke for weeks. “And I think it’s a lot harder for people to say that I’m being alarmist now.”
Last month, before the skies over San Francisco turned a surreal orange, Death Valley reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature ever measured on the planet. Dozens of people have perished from the heat in Phoenix, which in July suffered its hottest month on record, only to surpass that milestone in August.
Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign. The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?
The Times spoke with two dozen climate experts, including scientists, economists, sociologists and policymakers, and their answers were by turns alarming, cynical and hopeful.
“It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects, said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”
Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.
The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.
That price — more vicious heat waves, longer wildfire seasons, rising sea levels — is now irretrievably baked in. Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.
‘Twice as Bad’ “What we’re seeing today, this year, is just a small harbinger of what we are likely to get,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan. Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”
Earth has already warmed roughly 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century. The most optimistic proposals made by world governments to zero out emissions envision holding warming to below 2 degrees Celsius. Nations remain far from achieving those goals.
Usually, each passing year’s records are framed by the past — the hottest temperatures ever observed, the biggest wildfires in decades. However, as Cristian Proistosescu, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, noted on Twitter, it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.
“Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”
Climate change is more a slope than a cliff...
Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life: how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind. It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change.
One hope raised by some experts is that the current onslaught of fires and storms — the death, the destruction, the apocalyptic skies — might motivate people to unite behind calls for action. “Those orange skies — I mean, that was scary,” said Kris May, a climate scientist and coastal engineer in San Francisco, referring to the midday tangerine glow over Northern California this month, a consequence of smoke from wildfires.
Yet she wondered if they would have been even more powerful had they had struck places like Washington, D.C. Perhaps there, she said, “they’d bring about more change.”
When Lightning Strikes The issue of climate change might have been back of mind for most Americans when a dramatic, rain-free lightning storm swept across Northern California in August. In a region that gets little rain in summer or early fall, the most destructive fires, like those that swept through Wine Country in 2017 and the town of Paradise in 2018, have come in October and November.
But one August night’s spectacular lightning show became the next day’s emerging disaster, as hundreds of fires were sparked, mostly in hard-to-reach terrain. Three of those blazes now rank among the four biggest California fires since record-keeping began in 1932 — part of the 3.6 million acres that have burned in the state so far.
And the traditional fire season is just beginning.
The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.
There was no place to escape. Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.
For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,” said Katharine Mach, an associate professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”
Recent events, she said, are a vivid reminder that “we’re all in this together.”
That notion raises a counterintuitive bit of hope: The more people who are affected, particularly the affluent and influential, the more seriously the issue gets addressed.
First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. That means cleaning up every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.
It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels. So far, the world has made only halting progress.
But experts also made a point they say is often underappreciated: Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.
“In terms of being reversible, I can only think of things in sci-fi films — Superman trying to spin the earth in the other direction so Lois Lane doesn’t die,” said Juan Declet-Barreto, a social scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Serious...
“The human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary — not unlimited, but extraordinary,” said Greg Garrard, professor of environmental humanities at the University of British Columbia. He added, “I’m much more concerned for the future of the nonhuman than I am for the future of humans, precisely because we’re just very, very good at adaptation.”
But as the case in Bangladesh illustrates, adaptation is usually a reactive measure, not a preventive one. Adapting to climate change means envisioning bigger disasters to come — again, flipping the framing away from history and into the future.
If You Can’t See It, Is It Real? “Humans have difficulty imagining things that we haven’t experienced yet,” said Alice Hill, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who oversaw resilience planning on the National Security Council during the Obama administration.
“After every major catastrophe, whether it’s Pearl Harbor or 9/11, people always look back and say it was a failure of imagination. That also applies to climate change,” she said. “It’s hard to visualize the entire West Coast aflame until you actually see it. And if we can’t see it, we tend to discount the risk.”
There are concrete steps that can be taken today. Consider wildfires. After a deadly spate of Western blazes in 1910, the United States government scaled up its firefighting force, committing to extinguish wildfires wherever they occurred. For decades, that worked, giving Americans confidence that they could move into forested areas and remain safe.
But that policy led to a buildup of dense vegetation in the nation’s forests, which, when combined with a warmer and drier climate means that those forests are increasingly primed to burn bigger and hotter, overwhelming the nation’s firefighting capacity.
Going forward, experts said, the country will have to shift its mentality and learn to live with fire. States and communities will need to impose tougher regulations on homes built in fire-prone areas. Federal agencies will have to focus on managing forests better, selectively thinning some areas and even preventively setting controlled fires in others to burn off excess vegetation that can fuel runaway blazes.
“There’s a lot we can do,” said Jennifer Balch, a wildfire expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “We’ve just been stuck in an emergency response rather than thinking and looking ahead.”
Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.
“We’ve often heard the argument that it will be too expensive to cut emissions and it will just be easier to adapt,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But we’ve now had decades of warnings, he said, “and we’re not even adapted to the present climate.”
Cascading Disasters Adaptation can quickly become bogged down in a tangle of competing motivations and unintended consequences. Proposals for stricter building codes or higher insurance premiums face opposition from builders and voters alike.
And there’s the moral hazard problem, which is when people are shielded from the costs of their decisions and thus make bad ones. For instance, local communities reap increased property taxes from allowing buildings to rise in disaster-prone areas, but they don’t pick up most of the tab for disaster recovery — the federal government does.
Another challenge to adaptation is that, as climate change intensifies, it increases the risk of “compound hazards,” when numerous disasters strike simultaneously, as well as the risk that one disaster cascades into another.
In late 2017, large wildfires scorched Santa Barbara, Calif., burning away vegetation that stabilized hillside soils. Heavy rainfall followed a month later. The result: devastating mudflows that killed 23 and injured 163.
In Houston in 2017, Hurricane Harvey shut down gasoline refineries, strained hospitals and spread toxic substances and pathogens as floodwaters swamped the city. And when the Camp Fire de...
There is plenty of evidence of global warming without making it seem mainly about the wildfires. Because certainly record temperatures and wildfires are evidence of global warming, but also a policy of fire supression has contributed. The fact that they didn't mention that and also didn't get into other evidence of global warming in much detail makes me feel that the article might have mainly been designed to manipulate Californians rather than make an honest and comprehensive argument for everyone.
This NYT article did not even come close to meeting that bar, it confidently attributed complex multi factor phenomenon entirely to climate change without creating the groundwork of data & evidence needed to authoritatively establish those claims. When actors, politicians, and NYT journalists make dramatic claims and fail to meet that bar, then the intent backfires and only serves to entrench the common conservative belief that climate change is a product of liberal fear mongering.
For an absolute masterclass on how to properly communicate about the science of climate change, and how to slowly win over moderate conservatives, I know of no better source than Potholer54. We can only hope that one day New York Times journalists will regularly exercise the scientific and journalistic diligence of this retired youtuber.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0x46-enxsA - The cause of Australia’s bushfires – what the science says
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D99qI42KGB0 - A conservative solution to global warming (Part 1)
But so far nuclear power statistically is safer than any other source (wind, solar, hydro, coal), deaths per Wh, including the worst events like Chernobyl.
There’s no dark black magic inside nuclear power plant. It just burns uranium and heats water to spin turbines. Uranium burning happens all the time on Earth, in fact, if Uranium did not burn, the Earth would be much colder place.
(Technically, it is not burning of course, it’s fission.)
Poisoning water does not make extinction event.
It would render some area unsuitable for living, big economic loss, so don’t operate knowingly flawed reactors, and don’t let Soviets operate nuclear reactors, and it will be fine.
> the inherent danger cannot be denied
As well as dangers of flying, taking a shower, operating a hydro power plant and everything else.
Even accounting for these dangers, nuclear is the safest option.
The parent commenter did not call for 1 more nuclear power plant.
Increasing the scale of reactors to "replace fossil fuels", increases the chances, that some of them even a dozen would cause environmental destruction for which no known method of cleanup exists.
May I call you lightgreen and other fission-proponents to move to Chernobyl or Fukushima and live there as an example to others?
Sure, from very small to ten times that, still very small.
> some of them even a dozen would cause environmental destruction for which no known method of cleanup exists
OK, we can accept that eventually one or two small regions will be not suitable for living. We already do a lot of that when we build hydro power plants for example. Hydro power plants consume a lot of land.
> May I call you lightgreen and other fission-proponents to move to Chernobyl or Fukushima and live there as an example to others?
Chernobyl, no, it is radioactive and dangerous. Fukushima surrounding is very safe, it was evacuated only because there were ignorant people in Japanese government.
Anyway, what's the point of the question? Nobody is supposed to live where it is not safe, like nobody lives in Chernobyl exclusion zone.
And solar only covers half of the day anyway.
About 7.5 years if you start them all at the same time.
http://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucle...
How long would it take to deploy that solar energy system, as well as figuring out a storage solution to overcome the problem of the duck curve?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
Solar farms can be deployed at large scale in less than three years. Here’s India adding 7 MW in that timeframe: https://www.greenlaunches.com/alternative-energy/less-three-...
We do have lots of solar panels and lots of solar panel manufacturing capacity. I don’t think we have the nuclear resources we need to produce as fast.
- We do control clouds and cloud cover albedo [1].
- Human-induced changes to composition of earth's athmosphere result in about 3 Watts of additional heating per square meter of earth's surface [2]. That's almost 1% of the normal solar heating, or > 2K of (eventual) equalibrium temperature increase, so maybe we should call that "climate control" after all?
[1] https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ap...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing
Clouds are the result of the condensation of water on particulates in the atmosphere. Over 65% of Earth's surface area is liquid water. Oceans have deep currents that fluctuate in cycles and influence climate dramatically and have done so for billions of years and before humans even existed.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/85843/cloudy-earth
This article by NASA covers that story well. "One study based on nearly a decade of satellite data estimated that about 67 percent of Earth’s surface is typically covered by clouds. This is especially the case over the oceans, where other research shows less than 10 percent of the sky is completely clear of clouds at any one time. Over land, 30 percent of skies are completely cloud free."
Cirrus clouds from airplanes could slightly influence local conditions, but would not even come close to having a global effect. The magnitude of change is not significant when compared to the ocean cloud cover.
At any rate, even something like cosmic ray flux can induce increase in cloud cover albedo as noted by Svensmark: http://apreat.ovh/henrik-svensmark-force-majeure-the-suns-ro...
From above "(the net effect of clouds is to cool the Earth by about 20–30 W/m2)" That is, clouds have an order of magnitude higher effect than trace greenhouse gases. That means even a 10% change in average cloud cover would more than exceed (on the downside) any radiative forcing caused by greenhouse gases. And this makes sense when you think about it. Clouds are capable of almost completely reflecting solar energy back into space.
This is where volcanism comes into play. When stratospheric injection of sulfates occurs from large volcanic explosions, an increase in cloud cover happens and a subsequent decrease in global temperatures occurs. This process we do not control, and volcanoes are perfectly capable of inducing ice ages on their own and we are powerless to stop that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
At any rate, NASA has admitted as much that our understanding and modeling of clouds and their effect on climate is extremely poor and that current climate models do not accurately account for their influence. Here's a great interview from JPL on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra9AFNco3lI
In such a climate, earth would possibly not be able to sustain a large multi-billion human population.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-08-earth-hothouse-state.html
We have already observed several periods in the modern climate era, the Holocene, that have been warmer than modern temperatures with nothing but positive implications for humanity during those times. These periods include the Medieval Warm Period (aligned with the Viking Age and the conquering of Iceland and Greenland), the Roman Warm Period (aligned with Rome's golden age) which saw the Mediterranean as being 2C hotter than modern temps [1], the Minoan Warm period (which was also a boomtime for humanity until the Santorini explosion plunged temperatures worldwide) [2] and of course the Holocene Climate Optimum (about 9000 to 5000 years before present, also associated with booms in human populations in China and elsewhere [3]. In fact, the most devastating events to occur to humans and life on earth tends to be associated with global plunge in temperatures, like the Younger Dryas event just before the onset of the Holocene, that saw temperatures plunge to ice age levels, and is associated with numerous extinctions. Cold episodes in earth's climate are really to be feared. They cause drought, famine, and widespread misery. Warmth and CO2 are good for plants. I hope we continue to warm, but Earth can always revert back into a glacial phase and we are powerless to stop it.
[1] Persistent warm Mediterranean surface waters during the Roman period https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67281-2
[2] Swedish tree rings provide new evidence in support of a major, widespread environmental disruption in 1628 BC https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/1999...
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10406...
[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...
You don't have to have full control over a complex dynamic system to wreak it.
Can you rephrase your argument?
- "On-Topic: [...] anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
- "Off-topic: [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
- "If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did."
Though I appreciate that I'm not paying much attention to the last point.
This NYT article did not even come close to meeting that bar, it confidently attributed complex multi factor phenomenon entirely to climate change without creating the groundwork of data & evidence needed to authoritatively establish those claims. When actors, politicians, and NYT journalists make dramatic claims and fail to meet that bar, then the intent backfires and only serves to entrench the common conservative belief that climate change is a product of liberal fear mongering.
For an absolute masterclass on how to properly communicate about the science of climate change, and how to slowly win over moderate conservatives, I know of no better source than Potholer54. We can only hope that one day New York Times journalists will regularly exercise the scientific and journalistic diligence of this retired youtuber.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0x46-enxsA - The cause of Australia’s bushfires – what the science says
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D99qI42KGB0 - A conservative solution to global warming (Part 1)