I bet my developers in Novosibirsk, Siberia are looking forward to this. It seems like this issue is cared about mostly by people privileged with Mediterranean climates.
Is there a service that helps identify property in northern climates (Canada/Russia/Alaska/etc.) that will be significantly more 'livable' in say 10-30 years time as the climate continues to warm? Would be a lucrative opportunity/ help young people plan for a more realistic future.
Michigan looks pretty good but moving people and infrastructure will be unlikely. Cities will likely adapt and build it into their cost. Miami for example will be underwater but levies and sea walls can be constructed. I don't imagine Miami moving to upstate Michigan.
That is not always the case. If they have industries that depend on the cold, they may not wish it warmer. If their livelihood depends on glaciers that retreat they may not wish it warmer. If they depend on animal life that would migrate or go extinct, they may not like it. If they are on the coast that will end up flooded, they may not like it.
It is probably the case that there will be some people who "win" a bit as the planet warms, but on the whole I'm not sure anyone will be entirely better off for it in the long run.
I know you're being snide, but a warming planet is a profound concern for billions of low-income people across south and southeast Asia, Africa, Central America and low-lying Pacific territories.
I am not being snide. I am being wary of politically motivated Westerners demanding massive societal and economic changes in the name of protecting “billions of low income people.” This is exact same reasoning that the British used to justify colonizing and exploiting some of those places.
The temperature change is not the dangerous part of climate change for countries away from the equator. It's all the other changes that accompany that, which will affect Novosibirsk too directly or indirectly. Like loss of biodiversity, climate refugees, unstable political situation, etc.
I do agree with you that Canada and Russia are likely to suffer the fewest negative effects. But I wouldn't say it would be a net positive for them either. It's not impossible, but there are a lot of unknowns at this point and a lot of potential feedback loops that could be devastating, like mass extinction level devastating.
The people who will be hit the hardest are, unsurprisingly, the world's poorest. Particularly people in rural areas of Africa and India who can't afford having a bad growing season.
The prevailing sentiment in Russia about permafrost is that they can’t wait for it to thaw because it’s probably covering a lot of valuable resources. Breaking up arctic ice makes Russian shipping more valuable and Russia more strategically located globally. It’s hilarious to me how naively Western views on this issue are. Go talk to some Russians, maybe.
As I'm from Central/Eastern Europe, I do talk to them sometimes. Yes they are proud atomic superpower. And when westerners have doubts seeing the dwindling population, unimaginable corruption everywhere and lagging civilian technology - that's just naivete, right?
I should have specified you to ask someone who actually knows something about building on permafrost, sorry for the omission.
I think you misunderstand. 1.5C does not mean temperature everywhere is just going to rise by 1.5C.
This means altering of global and local weather patterns with unpredictable consequences. Some places will get much colder, some will get much hotter. Some places will dry out. Some places will see more tornadoes and flooding.
And some will get both hotter and more humid causing them to be absolutely uninhabitable, because of combination of 100% humidity and over 35 degrees C is basically lethal.
So if you think this is just a "thing", and "what's the fuss, you are going to have more sunshine", you obviously don't understand what the problem is.
Your interpretation of these claims is politically fashionable but far from certain. Climates change by definition and how those changes will affect anything on a macro scale remains beyond us. The medieval warming period wasn’t anthropogenic and affected climate globally in myriad ways. This issue smacks of the privilege of Westerners. Check it.
It's not evenly distributed, neither geographically or throughout the year. Some places will even get colder. Places like Siberia might get colder winners but warmer summers. Generally one can expect more extreme weather.
It's "watershed" because that was the number chosen at Paris. There's nothing scientifically significant about 1.5 or 2.0. They're just numbers that sit along the continuous path from here to whatever hellscape sits at the bottom of this human-created extinction event we've set into motion. I guess the people at Paris were all very optimistic and thought humanity could actually do something to avoid hitting 1.5. They were wrong.
More likely, we hit it, look around and see that nothing has change, and keep going.
Second most likely, we hit it, look around and see the devastation that has been wrought, and the people living in relatively safe zones institute military-backed authoritarian governments who are charged with keeping migrates from effected regions from coming in, and seizing what little available resources remain from weaker, neighboring states.
The article mentions that 1.5°C was the attainable target and 2°C was the hard limit. At this rate we'll blow through them both.
> The 1.5°C mark was established as the desirable target for all the countries of the world who signed up to the Paris Agreement to limit temperature rises, in order to prevent permanent changes that threaten the wellbeing of all life on earth. The agreement calls for limiting rises to 2°C or below.
1.5ºC is the lower bound for the estimated target.
In any case, the 2ºC nominal target was mostly arbitrary.
For those unaware, the problem with measuring global temperatures is that we can measure variation (relative values) with great accuracy (e.g. 0.5ºC increase), but the error bars on the absolute measurement are way to big to make useful statements on what will happen at XºC.
1.5 C sounds like no big deal to me, being the uneducated American I am in terms of the metric system. Once you plug that into a calculator, I get "34.7" F. HOLY CRAP
That's a big change. Imagine Denver's average temp in December is currently 20 and with the change it would be 40-50. That's a MASSIVE change in Denver's ecosystem.
Skiing might not be a thing in Colorado in 5 years. We might be able to grow oranges soon....
- edit -
Apparently I am stupid. The Google Calculator uses the formula: `(1.5°C × 9/5) + 32 = 34.7°F` where as 0C is 32 F.
That's not how the math works...you seem to have done a temperature conversion and ignore that Celsius and Fahrenheit place their O's at different places
+1.5 degrees C is about +3 degrees F but 0 degrees C is 32 degrees F.
You're confusing the two interpretations of "1.5°C". The calculation you're using is interpreting it as the absolute temperature, relative to Celsius zero (which is not the same as Fahrenheit zero!).
What you actually want to do is find how much Fahrenheit _delta_ is equivalent to a 1.5C delta. Try calculating the Fahrenheit value for 20C, and then for 21.5C, and then subtract.
Or you can look at the equation you're using, where the slope is a clear and constant 9/5. 9/5*1.5 = 2.7
1.5 degrees C is 2.7 degrees F - the only thing you missed is that this is a difference, not an absolute temperature. Suppose C to F is 1.8*c+32=f. Take two values for c, x and y. Then:
To elaborate a bit, your calculation is wrong because 0°F is not 0°C. That makes arithmetic really weird when mixing units. 0°C is 32°F, so 34.7°F is actually only 2.7°F more.
I think this is the only common case of units using a different zero point.
You're getting a lot of downvotes, but this is legitimately the first time I realized that a 1.5C temperature difference really means a 5 degree difference in Fahrenheit. I think it would genuinely help Americans if this were reported in the scale we were familiar with. A 5 degree F difference sounds far, far more scary than a 2.5 degree C difference.
What do you think is more efficient? Some how convincing all Americans to learn the metric system to the point that they can intuit differences in temperature, or, explain it in a way they can understand it by simply using a different unit of measurement?
I mean, I agree with you, but trying to get the entirety of a country to educate themselves in time to do something about it is not really going to work.
Well, it really does say something about our hopes of doing something about it if we can't even get them to learn to multiply a number by 2 and add 30 (see, I'm being generous and rounding the numbers). Hell, let's make it even simpler. Just say "IN FAHRENHEIT IT'S MORE, WAY MORE."
Maybe if we call them "dollar degrees" and "euro degrees" we'll get their attention.
But seriously now, yes, I do think it would be a pretty good idea for Americans to learn the metric system and not just because of the issue at hand, and it shouldn't be that hard. Isn't it intuitive enough to remember "0 is for freezing and 100 is for boiling water"?
Can people please push for 100% renewable crypto mining and chips in the next 1/2 years? There isn’t a lot of time left.
Beyond crypto need to stop all deforestation now and focus on ways to make cities more livable by decreasing or moving homeless and increasing transit and affordability of housing. Cities need to be more livable and comfortable. This will drive down deforestation of suburbs and the extensive fossil fuel use involved in transportation and movement of people outside of denser urban areas.
There isn’t a lot of time left and action needs to be taken urgently.
do you think crypto mining at scale is acceptable if the power sources are solar and wind? if people were really concerned about the environmental impact, the miners would be turned OFF.
I'm fairly certain that most mining operations are based in China and are heavily incentivized to use hydroelectric power, but could be wrong on that. Saw articles of it floating around everytime this gets brought up.
be able to sustain yourself and your family without external support
be able to protect yourself and your family from people who relied on the system, they will find you
this all sounds very tinfoil hat, but that will change too
edit: yes indeed this is consistent with whacko advice for the zombie apocalypse...if governments anywhere were capable of getting in front of climate change, they would have done so at least a decade ago. it is the governments and the systems they support that are making things worse. forget the Paris Accord, Neville Chamberlain had a piece of paper too
this sounds like "the beginner's guide to surviving the coming zombie apocalypse". Maybe you can prepare for a few days or weeks of isolation, but climate change does not just go away and get better. How long are your bullets really going to last?
If you are rich, you might or might not suffer some hardships. If you are poor, there probably isn't much you can do. The best advice is to become rich.
Yeah except for exponential increases in EV adoption, solar/wind power, and energy storage. Change is coming, and it's coming fast. Not saying it's enough, but it will make a significant difference.
We try to minimize usage of those and we're trying. We're not trying and thinking that renewabling crypto is going make a difference here is underestimating the level of shit we're already in with or without crypto.
Uhh... no. Air travel for example was 2.5% of global CO2 emissions in 2018. This kind of nonsense is almost as bad as denialism because it pushes the false "we can't radically cut CO2 without abandoning all modern technology!" narrative.
Yes, we absolutely can. Coal burning and only coal burning accounts for a whopping 61% of global manmade CO2 emissions. That means oil, gas, and agriculture are responsible for less than 50% of global emissions combined.
Phasing out coal for electricity generation in favor of renewables and nuclear is by far the #1 thing we can do. We could stop using airplanes entirely and it would make no measurable impact compared to closing even 10% of all global coal power plants.
The narrative should be that coal is the enemy. Keep it simple and bang the drum: coal, coal, coal. After coal there's a long tail of CO2 emitters and the next one to tackle is the next largest. That's probably oil for land and sea transport, which is far easier to replace with alternatives (mostly EVs) than aviation. By the time we get rid of >50% of coal power we might already have replaced a double digit percentage of the car fleet with EVs.
Sorry are we suggesting that bitcoin is more than air travel?
A significant issue is that we can't electrify international air travel. The 2.5% remains relevant.
> we can't radically cut CO2 without abandoning all modern technology!
That's you projecting, I never said that and you're basically trying to reject my input by misrepresenting me as a dismissible hippy which is a disgraceful way to debate.
You also need to increase taxes on imports from countries that burn coals if you ban coal. There is no point banning coal to import solar panels or EV car parts that are produced with cheap coal electricity.
Banning crypto mining would be a far easier solution and better for the world and humanity as a whole. No one is going to push for "100% renewable crypto mining", so just ban it completely.
Honestly it is absolutely unforgivable that people still push cryptocurrency in the face of the existential threat to humanity that global heating presents. It's a completely immoral, destructive, evil.
Your comment reads as if "crypto" is synonymous with "Proof of Work cryptos". Are you suggesting a blanket ban on all cryptocurrencies regardless of their electrical efficiencies, or specifically PoW-style mining?
PoW and PoS are both Proof of Waste. It's evil, especially so in this environment.
Humans need to co-operate to survive global heating, we cannot avoid trust, we need to make it easier to trust each other. If you buy into cryptocurrency you are implicitly abandoning hope of humanity surviving this crisis, in fact you're hastening our downfall.
What do you want, us to stop using energy? That's not gonna happen, the best you can do is to have tried to limit carbon emissions decades ago, but it's far too late for anything like that. Fuck it, pedal to the metal.
No, I want us to stop wasting energy on anti-social ideas. I want governments to end an industry that produces a net-negative value and is at least 75% powered by coal.
"Anti-social ideas" is in the eye of the beholder, given that a society is generally a diverse social landscape. I know many people who consider cryptocurrencies to be one of the biggest social boons in recent times.
A unified, international ban on something is a nearly unprecedented achievement, apart from perhaps chemical weapons, and even then i'm not sure all nations had a seat at the table.
You also referred to cyprots as "evil" earlier in this thread. What specifically about cryptocurrencies has given you this strong sentiment? (To be clear i appreciate your passion on the topic, i'm legitimately trying to understand your viewpoint, if that isn't obvious).
On the opposite end of the morality spectrum, some people think it's absolutely unforgivable to continue supporting corrupt governments that irresponsibly inflate their fiat to unusable levels, which is a much more immediate concern for some people than the ice is melting ad nauseum for like 50+ years, and use crypto as an alternative store of wealth when their governments fail them. So, whatever, let China use their energy to solve some stupidly complex algorithms to process transactions. In the end, it won't even matter.
You know how much my household contributes? Add a few more zeroes. Do you know how much that car over there contributes? Very, very, very little. That plane? Hardly anything. Nothing poses an existential threat.
Mining cryptocurrencies using renewable energy means that someone else has to use dirty energy.
Energy waste is energy waste, no matter what kind of energy it is wasting. Cryptocurrencies are, by design, pure waste, and the only rational action is to ban them before they do any more damage.
The doom didn't stop being impending. As an individual all you can do is doing your part in recycling and saving energy, and gaining citizenship and/or permanent residency in a country that is able to produce enough food for its own population by multiples, and spans enough climate zones to be stable in any scenario (hotter, colder, more dry, or more wet).
Because as with the current vaccine shortage, there's no international cooperation when the countries producing it don't have enough. Food shortages will be similar.
To be clear, recycling is greenwashing. The problem is consumption. It truly does not matter if we put waste in the correct bin if we do not also dramatically decrease our use of single-use and otherwise disposable goods.
Recycling is a marketing tactic crafted by the tin can industry in the 20th century to dethrone reusable glass bottles for products like beer.
Isn't whether these claims are true the relevant argument to be making here? If they're true then steady warnings and coverage in the media are not something to complain about. If they're false, then any amount of media coverage is something to complain about.
It's not simply "steady warnings." It's the doomsayer nature of the news and the fact that they have a provable profit motive for making things as extreme as their viewers will accept.
Maybe the media coverage and your perception of it are more short term, but this has been a known issue for a really long time, since the greenhouse effect is well known and can be studied in the field and the lab, and even observed on other planets. Oil companies internally knew this 40 years ago (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...) and some of us have been quite consistent on this for decades. Media scaremongering is a separate and distinct problem from global warming.
There aren't a lot of good things that came from the pandemic, but at least one of them is that it drastically reduced the amount of driving that people did, at least for awhile. Traffic where I live seems to be back to its pre-pandemic level but maybe that's just me forgetting how bad traffic was pre-pandemic. Work from home at least has been normalized for office work.
I must be the only one in the world who thinks that climate change, despite being a big issue, will be resolved if it ever harms (rich) humans in any meaningful way.
I think once the rubber meets the road we'll resolve and completely reverse climate change. That being said I might be too confident in our species' engineering ability.
No chance. Once the most cloistered people in our world are materially impacted, it will be far too late to mount any kind of response. It might already be too late.
Seems like this relies on tons of big assumptions. Like that climate change will negatively impact rich people in power in a reasonable timeline.
Rich people may even benefit from climate change in the short term, since during an economic downturn they can move their assets around, take risks, buy cheaper labor, etc, while everyone else is scrambling.
Rich humans will be the ones for whom it'll be most easy to avoid the consequences of climate change for a long time. By the time rich people really start suffering we'll probably be way past the point of no return.
Actually it's poor people who suffer both short and long term consequences the most. To tell you the truth I wouldn't even notice if my electricity bill went up by 20% because of switching to renewables, as I don't know how much it is usually.
We could engineer out global warming, but that's just one part of climate change. It might need to be an all-of-the-above type response, including decarbonization, negative emissions, geoengineering and adaptation.
Rich people will mainly be impacted by the forced migration of climate refugees from impacted countries. Will they be allowed to emigrate from regions beset by flooding (coastal areas), drought (inland areas), and the resulting crop failures?
You could compare with how rich countries handled the pandemic, and then consider that the pandemic was relatively easy with new vaccine candidates almost immediately ready for testing.
Also compare with how we handle various natural disasters. What is California doing about wildfires? The rich people in Malibu still lose their homes.
How about preparing for drought? What is Houston doing about hurricanes? Is Texas ready for the next winter storm?
Rich people will handle this with their own disaster preparation (sometimes) and moving if necessary.
While encouraging to think that some people will have the power to reverse climate change, it will be too late.
We can't wait for the negative effects to reach rich people.
Well, I think there already some geoengineering solutions that —- if worst comes to worst —- look like they might be effective in combating climate change albeit at the cost of unknown and potentially serious side effects.
I definitely think the US will pull the trigger on stratosphere aerosol injection and other geoengineering technologies before letting Miami go underwater.
It's not a simple matter of the weather being warmer when you step outside every day. This is a relatively rapid change in global temperature on an archaeological scale, and the downstream consequences could be significant.
I keep hearing about the rapidness being unprecedented, but then also that there are methane seems in the arctic that will be released, which should result in an even more rapid change. If this natural process exists, then really the rapidness of change in global temperatures can't be unprecedented, since any major climate swing would result in methane releases.
It's absolutely unprecedented for human civilisation.
If you want to compare it with catastrophic climate changes in pre-human times, go ahead. But that's far more likely to damage your argument than help it because they were far more catastrophic, up to and including mass extinction events.
"Unprecedented" is a dog whistle which is supported on the basis that technically the rise will have been unprecedented within the anthropocene timeframe, i.e., an ending ice age.
The downstream effects are also accelerated due to the rapid change of the inputs.
Normally we study climate change on the scale of 10s to 100s of millions of years.
This current change in CO2 concentration is unprecedented because it happened in the span of a century. 5-6 orders of magnitude faster than anything previously.
Buried in the last paragraph: “The chance of temporarily reaching 1.5°C has roughly doubled compared to last year’s predictions, said WMO. This is mainly due to using an improved temperature dataset to estimate the baseline rather than sudden changes in climate indicators.”
Knowing that a probability has doubled doesn't strike me as particularly useful here. If it doubled from 1e-6 to 2e-6, then it's still almost certain that it won't happen. If it went from 0.5 to 1.0, well, that's a different matter entirely....
Climate change is real, we are warming up and should/can solve this, but I'm skeptical that apocalyptic narratives help the cause.
"A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."
The statement isn’t that countries will go by 2000; it’s that we have until 2000 to do something about temperature rises which will eventually lead to countries going.
Then the statement is worthless! If any country is every covered in water at any point in the earth's future then it can be proved "correct".
The negative is not even true -- no one can guarantee that no countries will ever be covered in water at any point in the future, even if we had presumably gotten the rising temperatures "under control" twenty years ago.
You're misunderstanding the quote. It doesn't say "...entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth BY THE YEAR 2000" It says "...if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."
I like to think of it like this - some places are doomed to extreme drought and flodding and others will be mostly spared - but the environmental effects are just one piece of the puzzle, other areas of the earth will need to cope with the refugee crisis we're going to see from parts of the world becoming less habitable.
As these crises put more stress on the rest of the world we're just going to accelerate exploitation to support more people with less stuff - we're essentially burning through the world's buffer of habitability to eek out a bit more profits today.
Nonsense. Now we prepare for this to happen - by preemptively allocating places for displaced people can go. We do our best to limit how many countries are affected.
There's never a point where all we can do is throw up our hands and do nothing. There's always something to be done, even if it's not directly related to the cause of the crisis.
While some ill effects can most likely no longer be prevented, even worse things happen at higher temperatures. Every tenth of a degree makes things worse.
It said "some nations", mostly small island ones, like Tuvalu and Fiji.
That's not worldwide doom. It's just a very clear indicator of the damage that happens elsewhere, where low-lying cities like Amsterdam, New York, and much of Bangladesh have to either go elsewhere or take very expensive damage control measures.
We're at a point where it's still cheaper to prevent that at the climate level. It just grows more expensive by the day. Things can cost a lot of lives and dollars without being apocalyptic, and still worth dealing with sooner rather than later.
If you read the headline carefully, it's the global warming that needs to be reversed before 2000; the disappearance of nations can (and will) happen after.
The reason this is true is that CO2 emissions can't really be reversed; accounting for all forms of "capture" (biomass, sea exchange, calcification) CO2 disappears in a reverse power law way, such that after 10 000 years 10% of it is still there (https://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/pics/1210_ZHfig5.jpg)
Yes. So the argument is that this will probably happen then.
Because we didn't get it better under control by 2000.
The argument is that these island nations might actually already be lost.
Scientists estimate an around 40 year "climate lag" between cause and effect so if you think this is bad, we're only living out the happy times from the seventies with Pink Floyd and ABBA. And then, once you have it there, CO2 has an atmospheric "half life" counted in centuries. It's why climate change is so damn nasty. :-(
It also really doesn't jive well with our short election periods where after a few years, some new guy with a radically different policy will get in charge if the earlier one wasn't popular because <insert too radical climate policy here>.
Yeah the lack of a timestamp is definitely confusing. The page source lists a definitely incorrect timestamp, I guess the time the article was digitized.
That could be true for a few small Pacific island nations like Vanuatu. At the high end of predicted sea level rise they would be left with very little habitable land. Even if the land is above mean high tide, every little storm will wash over everything.
Naively using GDP per capita as a measure of the average level of technology people can afford, this suggests that Bangladesh should be able to employ land reclamation measures similar to the Netherlands in the 1960s, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevopolder
There might be other considerations (such as differing geography) that make this impracticable, however.
It kind of seems like this article is saying that if we (in 1989) slow global warming by the year 2000, the worst effects of sea level rise will not happen. It's not saying that those effects will happen in the year 2000.
My understanding in 2021 is that much of that stuff is already happening, since we obviously didn't halt warming. And that it's also too late to prevent more of it from happening, because there is a lag time between prevention measures happening, and having an effect.
We are past the point where just reducing emissions will be enough, and instead will need to also harden the world against inevitable effects of climate change. This is even harder and more expensive than it would have been if we had stopped emitting earlier.
Surely partially due to outsourcing manufacturing to outside the US/western world, and partially due to the rising living standards of the rest of the world.
Yeah consumption needs to be slowed down. Even dumb things like those Bird scooters littering cities...
I saw a t-shirt down here in New Orleans the other day that read “music, culture, industry” with a strike out line through industry. It boggles the mind.
After all how will our t-shirts and musical instruments be made?
This. So much this. We can't blame China for its emissions, while acting like we've solved ours, when all we did was shift our emissions from manufacturing to China.
The closest thing to flat you’re going to find is global CO2 produced per person is nearly flat. Global population has significantly increased, so that still represents growth in emissions but it clearly could have been much worse with massive increases in both population and CO2 per person as the 3rd world industrialized.
That's kind of like if I were morbidly obese, and my diet consisted of 6 big macs, 6 large Cokes and 6 large fries daily, plus a cheesecake at the end of the day for dessert, and I patted myself on the back because I went on a "diet" by cutting out the cheesecake.
Growth in CO2 emissions has recently plateaued, but the world still pumps out about 40% more CO2, every year, than we did in 2000. Stopping the growth doesn't really matter that much, we need to drastically reduce overall emissions.
It’s even worse. Not only do we need to get emissions as close to zero as possible, we need to suck a whole bunch of CO2 out of the atmosphere. The amount of effort, resources, energy, and collective action needed is extraordinary. The challenge ahead cannot be overstated.
@computerphage: Thank you for the typo correction! I am off for more coffee.
What's interesting is that we already know it's going to result in economic contraction, loss of profits, and general instability in the financial sphere. So we already know that tacking it will be profitable in the long run versus the alternative.
Perhaps the conversation needs to center on how to factor the long view into capitalism. Because in my view it is pretty shit at that, with often short term profits favoured over long term and the effects of that being felt long term.
Right now our intervention option looks like direct intervention to make things less profitable in the near term, and then we run into the problem of democracy also favouring short-term popularity over long-term stewardship and the immediate pains it bring to voters.
Is it capitalism, or is it our current regime?
I'm not sure that capitalism itself demands eternal growth, or that pollution not be taken into account.
Capitalism doesn't force us to continue to burn fossil fuels. We could impose massive fines or taxes against any greenhouse gas emitter, but we lack social will.
It can only be done under Capitalism, since we're at the point where drastically reducing CO2 is woefully insufficient to curb global warming in the next 50-100 years. We need technological innovation to cool the planet.
I'm a socialist, but I hate this meme on the left. We simply do not have time to build socialism before tackling climate change, especially with the recent crushing defeats the left has suffered in Western countries. We have to do this under capitalism, or we will not be able to do it at all.
That isnt the only alternative. A state run free market like china would actually be really useful for this global problem, if of course climate change was the priority for the government.
lack of personal freedom and ease of abuse probably make this a terrible choice, but it would without a doubt be better for climate change than currently
> A state run free market like china would actually be really useful for this global problem, if of course climate change was the priority for the government.
The cure suggested here is worse than the disease.
And I'm not entirely sure. Is authoritarian rule worse than billions starving to death, with collapse of the ecosystem?
All the enlightenment ideas fall apart when we actually reach the limit of the earths resources, and can potentially cause our own extinction along with the rest of the animal kingdom
The balance is between (a) effectively addressing an issue & (b) empowering government and risking it abuse its power.
Most long-lived democracies appear to have optimized to mitigate the risk of the second, over the long run, but at the cost of limiting the first.
One thinks the Roman Republic had a pretty good thing going politically... but declaring a temporary dictator in times of crisis only worked until it didn't.
Every politician who has attempted or done this has paid a heavy political price. We won't do enough to stop this problem until hundreds of thousands are forced to find new homes, at which point we'll have our hands full with the immediate problems we've caused by this.
It is not about economic systems, governments, or corporations. People are making choices that do not line up with the bigger things they say they want. Frankly I am getting tired of people with their SUVs, new phones, new computers, plastic everything, and huge homes bitching at me because I am "releasing carbon" when I burn wood. Don't even get me started on the people who bitch about my Nissan versa being gas powered instead of their clean battery powered alternative (Batteries, vehicle electronics, weight, tire size, and the source of their clean energy is my bitch here). People just need to shut the fuck up, live a frugal life and this problem with mitigate itself.
The carbon that has been released into the atmosphere from oil is here to stay. I am not even sure we should go looking for some energy guzzling carbon sink because we really need to give the earth time to breath and settle into the ecosystem that exists today. The earth will heal itself and balance will be restored but we can never go back to pre-industrial revolution levels of carbon.
The last big expansion of wind and solar from a percentage growth perspective happened when oil was hitting 100 USD. We shouldn't discount how efficient markets are at allocating resources. If expenditures into oil (something like 6bn USD per day) went to wind and solar, then much would change.
Government subsidies targeted at technologies perceived to be green could potentially be taking resources away from other energy innovations. In the end, some of those innovations might have resulted in greener energy.
You can't do that right now. Basically what you are asking is to ask a lot of people to lose their jobs, starve, for something uncertain (scientifically proved or not) in the future.
In the same time, the only thing we can do, as individuals, is to reduce the emission from our side. But it's wrong to enforce it upon others.
Yeah man, downvote me as you wish, but LOL you won't get very far.
I didn’t downvote but would be curious about your definition of “enforcement” that makes it wrong. I assume you mean “morally” wrong here and it seems NOT enforcing repercussions for externalities would be the immoral choice.
This comment is wrong on several levels. First, citation needed for the starvation hyperbole. There are more than a few competent people predicting that tackling climate change will actually create jobs because we will have to solve a whole host of new problems. Things like distribution, mass manufacturing, long term maintenance of equipment, design of the systems in the first place and on and on.
Second, "scientifically proved or not"? Are you really questioning whether we've proven climate change is occurring?
Finally, if you've been paying attention, you'll notice that the voices telling us that climate change is an individual problem and not a policy reform/regulation problem are basically Big Oil propaganda designed to demoralise you with guilt. It's not about individual action. I would still recommend it for spiritual and philosophical reasons, but not scientific.
Effectively this is going to require massive and coordinated action. We are going to have to rapidly develop and share the tech, and scale it quickly.
It is also insane how long humanity has ignored this issue. At least we have seemingly moved from ‘12 years left for real action? Hah!’ To ‘Oh shit this is happening and maybe we have that 11 years’
The good(?) news here is that the ocean is a crazy good CO2 sink. If we were to stop all CO2 emissions, global CO2 levels would start to drop dramatically because the oceans would soak up the atmospheric CO2. This doesn’t work endlessly, but right now about half of the CO2 emissions end up in the oceans, and that system doesn’t just stop if we stop producing it.
That being said, it’ll definitely continue to wreak havoc with ocean acidification. But it’s important to know that it’s not necessary to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere to get rid of a huge chunk that has already been emitted.
My concern around the ocean as a CO2 sink is how much longer can it absorb CO2 without pH drifting beyond what can support sea life. We keep pulling the elastic band tighter without knowing when it’s going to snap or what happens when it does (metaphorically speaking).
There’s a book called ‘The Sixth Extinction’ By Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert which talks about this. The sixth chapter is about the rise in ocean acidity.
She also details a critical acidity point (I forget the PH level but I think with current rise in acidity it is modeled to reach that point in 2100) where calcifiers cannot survive due to the acidity essentially breaking down their shells. Think oysters, barnacles, coral. Major parts of the ocean’s ecosystem that could have a ‘cataclysmic’ effect if wiped out.
When you say "growth has plateaued" do you mean that year on year increases to our output are now constant? Or do you mean year on year output is now roughly constant?
I realize this distinction between derivative values is further complicated by the even more baseline measure of total accumulation. But I do ask in earnest and don't know the answer.
We're on track for a roughly 3C increase in global average temperature according to this chart from the IPCC[1] and this [2] from world data.
And that IPCC projection doesn't take into account the dozens of reinforcing feedback loops contributing to further warming. For example, the Amazon rain forest is now a net green house gas producer due to human activity [3].
And my parents keep asking when I'm giving them grandkids. Why would I make a child go through this? That these things don't keep people up at night is bewildering to me.
maybe you're too young, I've heard the doom and gloom sine the 80s and those older than me have heard it since the 70's. If you look out across a sea of people there will always be a group of people holding a sign reading "Repent sinners, for the end is near".
Yep, back in the 1970s it was the coming ice age, and it was also the "population bomb." If neither of those happened, we were going to have a global thermonuclear war. Doom-and-gloomers will always find reasons to preach doom and gloom.
> Yep, back in the 1970s it was the coming ice age,
No. That was an artifact of hype in the mainstream press. If you look at the research being published at the time, the consensus was fairly consistently for warming scenarios (by a factor of 2:1 during the most cooling-friendly years):
Hearing doom and gloom since the 80s is consistent with the scientific evidence. It was in 1988 that James Hansen spoke before a U.S. Senate committee about human caused global warming. And it's not as though things have been getting better. They're getting worse, and at a faster than expected rate.
Go through what? Raising global temperatures may require moving away from current coastal areas or life changes like that. I've not read anything that would make it seem like a global warming future would be a hellscape not worth living in.
I have young children and have worried for them quite a bit. If they're healthy, if they're getting everything they need, if they're safe etc. I have never once considered global warming as a concern for them. While they're children I'll be able to handle any such changes. When they're adults, they will.
The 1.4 to 2.0C range is where we are going to start seeing large scale crop failures. Also massive fish die offs in the ocean. Unless we drastically change trajectories, this will occur during the lifetime of your children.
You hope you and they will be able to handle these changes, but there are going to be a lot of downstream effects from warming and sea level change.
Contrarian argument, if I was given a chance at existing in a world full of death, turmoil, and instability _or_ the certainty of not existing at all, I sure know what I would want.
The post-scarcity period we experience in developed economies is very much the exception not the rule, if you look at the whole of Human History.
I understand and share you're concerns but you are removing all agency from whatever children you might have. A child born now will in all certainty reach their 20's. If they share their parents values they will most likely be an agent for change in the right direction.
Excess population and excess pollution (per capita) are not necessarily overlapping problems.
I don't about the predictions but the annual CO2 emissions are climbing yearly. 1999 - 24.43 billions tons. 2019 - 36.44 billion tons. I think that's ~49% growth in 20 years. That is a bad forecast if you go 100 years into the future.
We have also had 30+% global population growth in the last 20 years and massive reduction in property.
Around 1980 people assumed rising standards of living would result in dramatic increases in CO2 per person which didn’t happen. Even as recently as 2000 models assumed as much as 10% increases over current levels where likely.
No, probably not. But then what's the alternative? The prediction is/was accurate, the error is in the kind of apocalyptic outcome it brings to mind. Reality is almost always far more boring. Silence doesn't seem helpful either, nor does being more vague about consequences.
Sea level rise looks more like king tides periodically destroying coastal occupations until it's uninsurable and everyone moves away. Poisioned aquifers resulting in no viable drinking water source and again, everyone leaves. Coastal erosion intensified means small islands with rich histories become nothing more than a sandbar over the course of decades, and sustains no population as it did before.
Chaotic weather looks like wildfires, tornados, and droughts 10, 20, 50% more frequent in their occurrence. But not a new phenomenon. Shit years for various crops become more common than good years because you're not getting enough sun, false springs and shock frosts destroy fruitings, yields are lower across the board. Prices go up. Buying tomatos peak season costs as much as is once did off-season.
Probably the biggest driver of inaction here is that what comes to mind is sudden shocks, yet the truth is more like a slow strangle. The urgency is just as valid if you take the long view, but it's easier to stick with the status quo when it's just the gradual discomfort of a belt tightening and not a gun pointed at your head. Boiled frogs and all that.
There's another important aspect to chaos. As you increase the energy in the system, which this is, you're also increasing the range over which phenomena can happen.
You cite 'tornadoes 10, 20, 50% more frequent' and you're not wrong, but it's very important to understand we're also looking at tornadoes and droughts and hurricanes (events tied to the behavior of the chaotic system of the climate) two, five, ten times more INTENSE than we're used to.
Chaos does this. The wildest outliers are tied to how much energy is in the system. They may be no more common than before, but the increased energy and increased chaos can produce wilder variances from the norm.
With regard to specifically destructive events like tornadoes, hurricanes, storm flooding and so on, this is way more dramatic than sea level rise. Nothing we can do, even with nuclear weapons, is as powerful as what weather can do with the energy in that chaotic system… because it's way, way bigger than anything we have at our command.
The truth also brings sudden shocks. We've just not quite wrapped our head around where those are coming from, and the frequency of 'em is probably no more common than usual, but the potential intensity of these events is ramping up with the same slow build you mention. We just don't see it until it hits.
One example: I think it's very likely there are industrialized cities that would not stand against hyper-weather of this nature. We're not used to the idea of tornadoes and hurricanes ripping down tall buildings, but we will live to see the theoretical peak energy (the ten or hundred-year storm) go beyond what our cities are designed to withstand. When that happens, we suddenly have areas where ALL the skyscrapers were toppled, on a weather-event scale rather than a terrorist-act scale.
> Chaos does this. The wildest outliers are tied to how much energy is in the system. They may be no more common than before, but the increased energy and increased chaos can produce wilder variances from the norm.
if we're talking about a chaotic system then wouldn't the probability of extreme weather being better for humanity be the same as worse for humanity? Maybe an exceptionally long growing season allowing more crops to be harvested for example.
Two things;
Adding more energy to a system doesn’t tend to produce (calm, sunny, scattered showers). I believe mild weather is a low energy outcome.
Also, humans like predictable weather. Weather becoming less so, good or bad, will make things harder.
This. The chances of a nice stable peaceful growing season… nope. Things will become more volatile, which means the chances of the opposite, ruined crops, increase.
Stability and predictability are low energy things.
But that's what's happening. We take people space away.
And primarily people who did not produce the co2
Globalization brought us also much closer over all.
I saw a view documentary about it and those people are aware why it happens.
While we did a lot of fixing medicine and food for them, climate change is what they are paying for and they didn't knew but we did for a long time now.
2/3rds of Bangladesh is <5m above sea level. If that much of the country disappeared, including Dhaka and Chittagong, you could well say they don't have a country any more.
Well, that could be true of the Maldives[1] (which would be tragic, don't get me wrong) but clearly even flooding lots of major coastal cities wouldn't wipe most countries off the map - but it'd still be huge problem.
It's such a heads-I-lose tails-you-win situation. If I talk about extreme cases I'm accused of alarmism. If I talk about nearly-certain cases that fall short of extinction, I'm told it's not important.
I'd say the problem is not enough people understand what the solutions are. Those who push the apocalyptic narrative included, as they tend to be against nuclear energy (a clean, safe, compact, 24/7 source) and even shut down existing plants. Which have been getting replaced by coal!!
It reminds me of the over-population warnings of the 1970s, where prominent scientists and politicians warned that mass starvation was right around the corner. This constant doom and gloom at an extreme level seems to cause fatigue and apathy.
That's exactly what it is. The "science" behind the climate change narrative is sponsored by groups that want to implement a global carbon tax, or any other justification they can think of to create a one-world government. It's exactly the same BS as the COVID manipulation we've endured since 2020.
Water vapor is a bigger contributor to the greenhouse effect than CO2 by three orders of magnitude. The current "models" do not accurately reflect the sun or water on earth.
The fatigue and apathy is because the predictions has been serially wrong. So much so they had to rebrand "global warming" to "climate change".
Normally intelligent people have let their hubris make them victims to globalist propaganda. It's disturbing to see how many people not only fall for it but parrot their programming ad nauseam and attack dissenters pointing out raw fact (like that unadulterated satellite temperate data shows the earth's temperature as relatively flat for the last 20 years, or that the 1930's were warmer than temperatures today).
The earth will be cooler in 10 years, not warmer. We're heading into a grand solar minimum. Wait and see.
1) hydrology professor shows that water is the largest driver of earth's climate (besides the sun of course) and that CO2 has proven to be an insignificant factor, both based on physics and on history, where CO2 levels were far higher, but temperatures did not rise in tandem.
2) Professor Valentina Zharkova predicting that the coming grand solar minimum will lower earth's temperature by around 1 degree C, based on past minima.
Zharkova has a history of being right, by the way, which is more than I can say for the tabloid science currently being peddled in this thread.
How convenient it must be to always have a paper or two ready that show warming trends are wrong and that it will stop in the next few years. It does not matter that the previous papers in the same vein were proven wrong by facts, like the ones that attempted to draw horizontal lines over the temperature graphs. Just come up with a new theory, pick some data that fits (in paper #2, why solar cycles 21-23 and not the others? No proposed mechanism behind the theory? No problem.), and here's your new justification to do nothing.
So established science is corrupt because of grant money. Yet this Demetris Koutsoyiannis who wrote the first article, who is a professor at an established university in Greece and seemingly climbed the completely normal academic ladder, is somehow untainted by the grant money he presumably got along the way?
I gave you the benefit of the doubt and had a closer look at the first paper. I wasted about 15 minutes of my life.
> Actually, one of the aims of the paper is to show that polarization stems from political, rather than scientific, roots.
Yeah, though luck there. The paper concerns itself with more political propaganda than with climate science. Most of it is just fluff and filler, with quotes from Aristotle to Mark Twain, spends half of its actual content with the premise to discover the true definition of the word climate and then dismissing "climate change" (the scary quotes are form the "paper"). And then we come to this gem here:
> Hence, in scientific terms, the content of the term climate change is almost equivalent to that of weather change or even time change (climate is changing as is weather and time).
Yes. Really. This paper is pulling no punches. Climate is just weather. And weather changes. Thus there is no climate change. QED.
What a piece of wasted bits.
It then spends the next few paragraphs "analyzing" how climate change is actually political in nature, spending more pixels on graphs of the occurrence of the term "climate change" than on actual climate data.
No discussion of the vast body of evidence that we have gathered in the last 100 years. No examination of actual possible problems, like measurement issues, systemic issues or anything the like. Nothing.
This is not a scientific paper. This is propaganda.
You didn't read the article. You cherrypicked the parts of it that you could use to justify disregarding it. That's intellectually dishonest, lazy, and frankly typical for climate change cultists.
The bulk of the article discusses hydrology and how the sheer volume of water on the earth is more significant than C02 in terms of greenhouse effects. There's also a section about far higher historical C02 levels being present when temperatures were lower than today.
Respond to that part of the paper, not the tangent on the term "climate change" (which is also accurate, but not the meat of the argument).
> how the sheer volume of water on the earth is more significant than C02 in terms of greenhouse effects
Where do you see this? I see a long rant about the definition of climate, sprinkled in with some cultural reference and some meaningless discussions about continuous vs discrete sampling (meaningless beyond any first year university course on any scientific topic).
- It's in a journal called "Temperature" with the mandate: "Temperature publishes papers related to interactions between living matter and temperature, with focus on the medical physiology of body temperature regulation." All the other papers fit this mandate, i.e., they're on physiology.
- It's marked as an editorial, not a peer-reviewed article. There are no co-authors.
I have no idea why or how this got published! It's very weird, why would one even submit such an article to an irrelevant journal?
I'll use direct NASA/NOAA data so there's no attacking my sources this time.
Here is a report published in 1999 by NOAA and NASA showing temperatures much higher in the 1930's with cooling through the end of the century. Temperature data outside the US wasn't very reliable in the 20th century, so it's best to focus on the US. Skip to page 37 and look at figure 6. Make a mental note the high point of 1.5 degrees C in the 30's from 1999 data.
Compare this with the same data today and you'll miraculously see the 1930's as much cooler with a warming trend (again, NASA direct data - note the new high point from the 30's is 1.2 degrees C, not 1.5): https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/graph_data/U.S....
My point is that the "climate science" we're bombarded with in the mainstream media isn't hard science. It's a political narrative fueled by financial conflicts of interest and grant money. That bothers me because 1) I like to understand reality, and 2) it is leading to massive misallocations of capital, just like with COVID over the last 1.5 years. I think we should be concerned with climate, but we need to focus more energy on our own sun. I think our sun is far more dangerous than all of the anthropogenic climate change theories combined.
Please see [1], which has before-and-after plots (page 18) that appear to match up with the differences you're seeing and describes why those adjustments were made (section 4, on page 3). For example, it fixes biases that resulted from different time-of-day for measurements, stations moving their thermometer locations over time, and a couple others.
One thing that doesn't perfectly match up is that the peak in the 1930s of the before-adjustment plot in [1] doesn't go quite as high as Fig 6 of the 1999 paper, but it does seem to match Plate A2, so I would assume it is a difference of using calendar years vs meteorological years (section A2 of the 1999 paper).
Regarding your broader point: I think skepticism is great; asking questions is how we learn new things, after all. But it's not so great to assume that climate science must be wrong (or a political narrative) just because you found something that doesn't immediately make sense. Often it simply means climate scientists know something we don't.
Also, since you mentioned concern about financial conflicts of interest, I'd encourage you to consider that the anti-climate-change narrative is just as (if not more) susceptible to those. Fossil fuels are big business.
I read the article. It's highly speculative, making extrapolations tens to hundreds of years with very little evidence or physics.
I have publications in this area. And given the above deficiencies, I started wondering about where it was published.
When what I noted above surfaced, I stopped, because life is too short to chase down BS.
You shouldn't be taking that article seriously! And I don't know how it was recommended to your attention, but I'd start wondering about that source as well.
The first article is also really weird. In the words of the second referee: this is an opinion piece!
I wholeheartedly agree. It's a tiny bit of light scientific "discussion" about vaguely related phenomena, wrapped in criticism of how culturally significant climage change has become. How the hell did this get past the very negative referee reports and get published??
25 of the first paper's references are to other papers the author has written. No matter what field a paper is in, having 19% of the references point to yourself is suspicious. For the other references, the high amount of citations from folks as general as Aristotle and Kolmogorov make doubly sure that the paper really doesn't pass the BS test of any researcher.
Most of the reports are quite critical (although I can't tell if referee 4 is being sarcastic or not). I don't understand how this paper got published.
Wow, I don't know this journal at all, but something terribly odd is going on. Did anyone else read the referee reports [1]? I'd call that scathing. If I ever had those reports come back to me for one of my papers, I wouldn't even try to push the paper through. And I've never used that harsh language myself in my referee reports, even for absolute garbage papers. Look at this:
The article by D. Koutsoyiannis "Rethinking climate, climate change, and their relationship with water" is, quite simply, an opinion or editorial piece and most certainly not original experimental research. At that, it remains grossly incomplete given the current state of knowledge in hydrology, water resources, and their relationships with climate.
First, the author uses this article for an absurd quantity of self-citations.
At any rate: I smell a giant rat!
Edit: I started reading now. This isn't a scientific article. I totally agree with referee 2 above! This is an opinion piece! The author explicitly goes into things like google search results for the words "climate change". What the hell is that supposed to have to do with water's effect on climate change? What absolute garbage! I don't trust anything in this paper.
From the first article (which is mostly asking “what is climate“ and “should we expect climate not to change?”) we get its only really solid prediction:
“it can be anticipated that many readers would find this paper useless, if not harmful.” Lol.
The second paper was discredited and withdrawn though that hasn’t stopped deniers citing it endlessly.
I'd say that this article doesn't really show even that much.
According to the article itself, "This is mainly due to using an improved temperature dataset to estimate the baseline rather than sudden changes in climate indicators."
This is an example of the past changing, rather than the present. I'm not sure how to react when the only change was the past got cooler - I wouldn't think that would change anything in the present or future.
I have an alternate hypothesis: the past didn't magically become cooler. The propagandists changed the historical temperature data (yet again) to sustain their narrative because it supports unrelated agendas.
Wait, so suggesting that temperature data recorded in the past was in fact accurate and shouldn't be altered to suit political narratives is far from reality?
> Wait, so suggesting that temperature data recorded in the past was in fact accurate and shouldn't be altered to suit political narratives is far from reality?
Yes. Because it didn't happen.
> You are demanding censorship of this idea?
No. In the same way that it's cool to hear dissenting political views at the local pub, but if a guy stands up and starts raving about the children trapped by the pedophile lizard people, I kinda want him to get kicked out so that I don't have to be associated with society-destroying lunatics like that. You're that guy. That guy isn't being subjected to "censorship of his idea". He's being kicked out of the establishment for being a moron and ruining the mood.
Go write a book about your crazy ideas. Now if the government makes it illegal to publish, you can decry censorship.
Except it absolutely DID happen and I can prove it.
Here is a report published in 1999 by NOAA and NASA showing temperatures much higher in the 1930's with cooling through the end of the century. Skip to page 37 and look at figure 6. Note the high point of 1.5 degrees C in the 30's from 1999 data.
Compare this with the same data today and you'll miraculously see the 1930's as much cooler with a warming trend (again, NASA direct data - note the new high point from the 30's is 1.2 degrees C): https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/graph_data/U.S....
Here is an article summarizing the alterations in case you do not want to read the NASA/NOAA report, but I know you will attack the source, which is why I published the report from 1999 and the same data from 2019 directly first. You can verify everything in this article with the original source materials using the links shared previously: https://realclimatescience.com/2020/10/alterations-to-the-us...
Before I start to even consider these sources, can you tell me in a clear yes or no answer whether they show:
(1) that the data was altered
and
(2) that the data was altered to suit a political narrative.
Only if the answer to both is yes will I even read any of this. I'll wait.
(Why am I being difficult? I believe you're a typical nutcase who sees X happening, and immediately concludes that "X is happening to fit the political narrative")
> So, I've proven conclusively that NASA altered their temperature data in the 20th century from a cooling trend to a warming trend.
So this is your new claim. Please write out in clear text that you've moved the goalposts since last time – make it clear what you're claiming now. Then I'll be happy to consider your sources. Just wanna make sure you don't move the goalposts again - as dishonest crackpots tend to.
Ah yes, the last stage of the crackpot: "do your own research"
I'm not asking you to do work for me. I'm asking you to clearly state your claim so that you can't move the goalposts again. The fact that you've done it once, makes me certain you'll do it again and thus invalidate any work I do. State your current claim in clear text, crackpot.
The mistake they keep making is focusing on sea level rise, as if that's the only real problem global warming could cause. Even at 1.5 degrees C higher than normal it will take years for enough ice to melt to cause significant sea level rise.
Meanwhile we are already seeing apocalyptic like effects of global warming: the worst droughts and fires across multiple continents as we've seen in modern history, significant increases and severity of tropical storms, increase and severity in seasonal flooding etc.
With Covid-19 a lot of this stuff fell out of the news cycle rapidly last year, but 2020 surely marks one of the worst years in history for climate related disasters.
Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent.
No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point. It's time for the "we can save the world" people to stop leading everyone on, unless they can present facts and real scenarios that back up their claims (hint: they can't and never do).
You'll notice that technologically we didn't come remotely close to doing anything in the past decade that will enable us to move as fast as we'd have to. Where are the great energy & resource breakthroughs? They don't exist and by the numbers we needed them yesterday.
The world will add 2 billion people in the next ~30 years. Nearly all of those births will be in the developing world where emissions are going to continue to skyrocket. Solar, wind and electric vehicles aren't going to solve that problem.
The emissions that the US + EU cut, India will add.
China will add an entire US-worth of emissions in just the next 10-15 years. If you had a magic wand and could put the US to zero emissions tomorrow morning it wouldn't make a bit of lasting difference to the situation. This single fact of reality makes all the "we can save the world" arguments false.
And that's merely two countries. Then you have parts of Latin America, Africa and developing Asia, where emissions and population are going to continue to rise substantially.
It seems increasingly clear that the so called experts claiming this can be stopped know they're lying, and they keep lying anyway. What's their plan for immediately stopping all emissions increases across all of the developing world? There is no such plan, they have no intention of implementing or calling for such a plan. Thus, they're lying.
There is no scenario where anybody can get the math to work out on what's happening. And you'll find that nobody even attempts to, they just issue empty statements about how we need to take urgent action and then we can save the world. They'll never present you the real scenarios for the actions necessary to immediately turn back all emissions increases. It's fraudulent intellectually, it takes a small amount of time to analyze the context and know that.
It's really just a matter of money. Wind and solar are enough to produce energy; add in nuclear if you like. We also know how to make Hydrogen and Methane to store large amounts of energy over long time periods, so storage is not a technical problem either. It's just very expensive right now. WW2 was a bigger manufacturing challenge that what we would need to do to become carbon neutral. There are several studies with roadmaps to net zero emissions published. They tend to be very long and technical, so they don't get much media attention.
you aren't presenting any data. I don't have the faintest idea what you mean by "thats just math".
You say so confidently it can't be solved, which I'm going to infer you mean impossible and not just hard.
We could without a doubt drastically reduce co2 emmissions to near zero by switching to nuclear, and paying for nuclear plants in developing countries, banning gas vehicles. Require any current and needed hydro carbon power plants to implement carbon capture.
That is hard, very hard. Might start a war. But it is not impossible like you are stating.
Climate nihilism is the next stage of climate denial. We CAN do much to manage growth and encourage sustainable development. Wealthy western nations need to concretely embrace technology transfer and infrastructure investment. As nations develop their infant mortality decreases, people naturally invest in the children that they have and their birthrates decline to replacement level.
Already we're seeing a difference in how technology infrastructure has been distributed in developing countries. People are coming to depend upon their cellular phone and wireless data connections to be more reliable than their electricity infrastructure.
One interesting facet is that it’s adding an extra 0.4 percentage point a year to annual global GDP growth, which is encouraging
On the other hand annual per capita income from oil and natural gas in producer economies falls by about 75%, which sounds like something that can cause political issues
> Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent.
> No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point.
So, I am seeing this set of ideas getting pushed a lot more these days, which means that a lot of the effort being put into climate change denial has started shifting to climate delay and outright fatalism (which used to mostly be a feature of evangelical "who are we to question God's plan for us?" arguments).
The fact of the matter is that there is a lot we can do in terms of slowing the growth and even reducing global CO2 (and CH4, methane) output, and a lot more we can do in terms of carbon capture, and a lot we can do in terms of mitigation and adaptation (which we will have to do regardless of how successful we are at reduction and capture) that is only going to get more expensive the longer we put it off.
This isn't a case of "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it". Every proposal is competing with every other in terms of cost, feasibility, externalities, and impact, it isn't the case that committing to spending money on the problem results in checks being handed out indiscriminately.
If you have a criticism of some specific intervention, please make it, but it isn't feasible to throw up our hands and do nothing. Because even if the cost/benefit analyses are so incredibly bad that just means that ultimately we only do things in the mitigation and adaptation buckets.
Sea rise is not the only effect of climate change, and the gradual rise won't be as urgent as extreme weather floods and storms episodes.
You will have also wet bulb temperature episodes, not all time, but more frequently and in bigger areas as time advances. And won't matter if the average temperature is not so high yet, once you get such peaks people (and maybe crops->famines) die.
And last but not least, this fuels positive feedback mechanisms, like less ice reflecting sunlight, more methane released in northern regions, more frequent forest fires and so on that accelerate an already pretty bad trend.
If you think it will cost a lot to try to do something about this, think how costly will be doing nothing.
Absolutely. Wet-bulb temperature episodes are exactly the sort of thing where increasing energy in the chaotic system will lead to previously unreachable spikes in the system: by increasing the ambient energy of the system X degrees, thus increasing its chaotic energy, you produce a maximum peak excursion of X*Y degrees (also accompanied by unexpectedly COLD extremes in a more irregular pattern).
Even in the absence of other weather events these exaggerated peaks and dips are dangerous to life.
I think without concerted citizen backed action many people won't do anything. IMHO it's not about whether climate change is real or not but whether appropriate action is taken when it counts. And when only few people do anything that is not fair. Therefore I think the message has to be repeated over and over again in increasing volume.
That said, the magnitude of climate change is probably underestimated and talking about average temperatures might also contribute to that.
Ok but I hope you're not saying OP's article is an apocalyptic narrative. It's a pretty mild projection given that we've already hit +1.2 degrees, and are already seeing effects from that.
I'm more concerned about predicable rain patterns than warmer weather. What happens if rainfall in America's breadbasket starts to decline? Even a small sustained change could have deep ramifications.
That an over generalization. The more temperate parts of southern Siberia would have a thawing that could potentially open up more agricultural space and increase Siberia's food production capacity.
What's the top soil look like in the US NE? It's been a while since I've been to, say, Maine. But I can tell you that the other new farmland folks propose is British Columbia, and it's obvious that they've never been to mid-to-northern BC and looked down toward their feet. You'd be better off trying to grow corn in sand that the stuff that passes for top soil in BC.
This also ignores the fact that when one starts heading north, that Sun in the sky tends to get pretty weak-ass, even in the summer. As a Seattle resident, I about go blind getting off the plane in Miami until I can get those sunglasses on. And I can tell you how much corn enjoys the lack of good sun in comparison to my home state of Indiana: it doesn't.
The northeast US was a huge agricultural region before the great plains. The entire area is covered with the remains of former farms. It is not as cost effective and there were other issues (rocky soil, for one) but it was once an agricultural center and can become one again if the economics shift.
The two icons below "snow" are boxes (on chrome for windows). It seems those are "freezing" and "extreme hot days" but would be great to use a workaround for fonts that don't display all the unicode chars
It'd be nice if your predictions for south of the equator correctly flipped summer and winter. Right now they show winter as the warmer months and summer as the colder ones.
First of all, weather is a chaotic system. And "good weather" is an extremely narrow band (at any given year try to find two farmers of different crops that both agree that the weather was good). As such, it is much more likely that any climate change (not chaotic on the scales discussed here) will have a negative effect on weather anywhere than the opposite.
Secondly, and more importantly, we are talking about a system that contains huge quantities of thermal energy. This energy will for instance create stronger storms. In general, we don't want to put energy into our climate because of the potential violence that follows from that.
Exactly. Even for places that get "better weather", that still is a huge strain on the existing ecosystem and economy that is built for the current climate. In a century or two some places might be better off, but the transition will be painful.
Also, as the saying goes, the rising tide lifts all boats. Even if only a couple of countries are hit hard, we will all feel the effects in trade and immigration. And it looks like a lot of countries might be hit hard.
I refuse to believe it will be bad for all countries. That doesn’t make sense whatsoever, that just being overly emotional and unscientific. There is always a winner and loser in everything. The key is to figure out which country benefits the most.
Even something like the Pandemic, some businesses have learned to thrive. Humans are resilient and the ones who can adapt to change the best will always win out.
Currently the northern hemisphere is closest to the sun during winter months. In the past when it was closest to the sun during summer months (so, hotter), the Sahara was paradoxically a lush savannah. It's possible that warming could affect air currents in a way that makes the Sahara receive dramatically more rainfall that could turn it back into savannah.
Russia might be the largest benefactor, as they have only very short (inhabited) coastlines but incredible amounts of currently barely inhabited land. That land might become arable, but in the meantime they too have their problems with increased fires, floods and immigration from Southern neighbors. The most important benefit would be the Northeast Passage for ships traveling between Asia and Europe. It runs through the Bering Strait and along Siberia, is 24% shorter for the popular Shanghai-Rotterdam trip, and is becoming increasingly viable thanks to global warming (and Russian nuclear icebreakers).
Canada has a similar story, but the Northwest Passage along Canada is much less exciting, and they have much more population on the coast.
No. It’s already getting uncomfortably warm in Canadian cities in the summer. And we already settled most of the fertile soil.
The bulk of our sparsely inhabited areas are Canadian shield, taiga, tundra. The soils are not well suited to agriculture.
The rapid change will also make our ecosystems unstable, and the melting ice is hurting northern infrastructure. We were already cold adapted.
We also don’t get more sunlight, which is governed by the rotation of the earth and not the temperature. One of the hardest parts of winter here is short days, rather than the cold.
Russia would get a lot of land out of it, and would get more usable coastline, which they have very little of. Countries like Canada and the Nordics also gain in this respect
Moreover, co2 is an input to photosynthesis. Studies show that projected levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere boost crop yields by 30%. Countries with a lot of agriculture exports stand to become wealthier from this, as well as countries with food insecurity issues.
> I saw on Google that it gets 6% brighter every 1 Billion years. That's a really long time, and I'm not sure what that even means anyway.
For our current situation, it means nothing.
The grandparent comment was referring to a period 100s of millions of years ago. Given that the sun's intensity has changed significantly on that scale, it's not appropriate to compare our current situation to that of something that happened 100s of millions of years ago.
For what it's worth, the atmospheric CO2 reduction that followed that period was associated with significant cooling and glaciation, which is further evidence that CO2 is a significant factor in determining global climate change. The grandparent comment was very disingenuous.
Related fun fact: If you buy a house near sea level now, the resale value [edit: for buyers in the know] will not be based on the current sea level, it will be based on the projected sea level 25 years from now when the potential next buyers will still be paying their mortgage.
And in their minds, if they are smart, they will realize that their resale value will be based on the sea level 25 years from their unknown future resale date.
Pretty sure you made this up , or read it as posted by someone else who made it up. My home is in a waterfront community. Homes on the water are increasing in price.
I am and have been a prospective buyer and have been basing shopping decisions on this already. So based on first hand information I
have an existence proof that such buyers are out there already who are factoring this in today. And for the past 20 years in fact… when we bought our previous house we passed on certain locations based on this issue alone.
Now does that mean all buyers are factoring it in? Of course not. People are not used to long term thinking. And there are plenty of people who are in denial, and those people will make fine buyers for the short term. But at some point it’s likely the music will stop.
I made a slight edit of the original comment to clarify the point.
Price increase slopes can also change. The price can be going up, yet still be held back by something when it could have gone up even more.
So my climate denying neighbor sent me this. I know it’s wrong and sinful but I wasn’t sure how to respond to the questions it raises. Anyone have some tips?
They did get the "sciency" bits right, though. They just refer to the IPCC. Your guy's arguments are "here's a bit of data they haven't bothered to fit." I can't even make out if the presented data has any basis in fact.
And England was pretty fucking cold in the 17th century. And after a particularly grim winter in 1709, the thaw "brought widespread flooding. This was a major catastrophe for a largely agricultural economy. The crops were ruined, grain prices soared sixfold and many communities were faced with starvation. Per capita gross domestic product dropped by 23%, and did not fully recover for another 10 years, all from a single terrible winter." (quote from the Guardian).
So you are willing to eschew any principals of respecting credentials because you want to agree with a predetermined result? Doesn’t sound at all like science to me.
The IPCC report has scientific underpinnings; it's not a predetermined result, but the reflection of continuing research. It's about the best we can do. Of course it's an approximation with errors, such is the fate of all models.
But to just point at a few short-comings, and do so with blatant disrespect for the context, and then conclude everything it says must be false is what I'd call unscientific. The linked article on wattsupwiththat doesn't even try to provide an alternative explanation. There have been skeptics who came up with reasonable objections and alternatives, but that article isn't one of them. It does falsely represent the 1.5°C threshold issue, though, to the point of manipulative dishonesty.
Steven Sloman at Brown University argues there is good evidence showing when people are asked to explain something in depth, their mind can be changed. Basically, it hinges on the idea of "the illusion of explanatory depth". People don't actually understand concepts as well as they think they do. If they come to that realization on their own (with your help, of course) they may wobble on their convictions, at which point you can point them toward better, more empirically driven conclusions.
So, in the case of your neighbor, ask them to explain their anti-climate change beliefs in depth, in a non-confrontational way. "Oh that's interesting, how does that work?". Kind of a 5-why approach. Hopefully as they dig in they realize, "Hey, I don't actually understand this very well." At which point, you point them to strong counterfactuals to their beliefs.
> At which point, you point them to strong counterfactuals to their beliefs.
This is the hard part. I don’t have these resources at my fingertips for every issue. When I’m talking to my neighbor Karen I can’t just say, there are articles to back up what I’m saying about climate change, COVID denial, anti vaccines, flat earth, getting microchipped, dangers of wireless energy, homeopathy, lizard people, etc.
Right--and part of the epistemic closure that they're in is that they have been repeatedly and consistently exposed to memes that enable that kind of whataboutism. Often they're so detached from any sort of objective reality that they will bring even a prepared and knowledgeable speaker to a halt because the only response is "what are you even talking about?".
This is the crux of the ideological problem we're facing: one "side" might be wrong and one "side" makes shit up and the equivalence has been drawn into the mushy middle's brains that pulling people out of the muck requires probably more time and effort than any one person can manage.
Anyone who's still reading something that devoid of any reference to the mass of precise accumulated studies and evidence is beyond discourse, climate denial has become part of their core identity. So send them the latest ipcc report and don't bother with discussions.
Also flip low lying Florida housing to them if you can: easy money.
How about this. This article is written by self proclaimed "amateur scientist" Willis Eschenbach and is a certified hack and kook. Everything he writes should be taken with giant grain of salt.
That's the baseline they've been using forever. Whenever the protocols are discussed about limiting the change to 2°C, that's what they mean. They've been warning about the dangers at 1.5°C for many years.
It's not an attempt to mislead anybody. They're simply leaving out the "above pre-industrial levels" part that they've said so many times they assume it's not necessary. Especially on HN, where the headlines are sharply limited in length.
Am I the only one around here who is old enough to remember this exact prediction from 30 years ago? Florida should have become the next Atlantis 20 years ago. I understand it's a worrisome issue, but like religious predictions of the end of the world, failures work against credibility.
Edit: At my location in southern Sweden it seems like this expected land rise compensates for ~70% of the expected sea level rise, but the data seems a bit sketchy. I think more research is needed.
Florida is porous limestone. Even the most sophisticated seawalls wouldn’t prevent water from coming in through the sides and up, unless you drilled those walls very deep...and even then you’d have to get water from somewhere once you’ve pumped it all out of the state (an issue already happening regardless of carbon output - look up lateral saltwater intrusion)
Besides, sea-level rise is not uniformly distributed, same as temperature variation due to climate change. But overall, yes, the sea level is rising, and it is accelerating globally.
Are you gaslighting me or what, dude? Because your own very first link shows a clear sea-level rise of almost 20 centimeters from 1900. (this https://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/rlr.annual.plots/20_hig..., if you are incapable of clicking on links in actual webpages).
What are you trying to say? It hasn't accelerated? Because clearly it must have sped up since before records began, otherwise it would not agree with records and reconstructions from 1000 and 2000 years ago.
To be brutally honest, it tests people's patience when someone posts trollish, curt, unsupported comments like "it's not accelerating here at place X" when a specific location is clearly not at issue, out of context, and out of perspective of the global problem. Then we end up down a rathole dispelling the stink around another unnecessary distraction which is clearly motivated by nothing but muddying the waters. It's just obfuscation and FUD, frankly. Sorry that it's uncomfortable when you're called out on it.
My understanding is that in many places in FL places that were dry are now soaking wet. Saw an article about a development where there are puddles everywhere (lawns, sidewalks, etc) because the water table is rising.
If I owned property in FL, I wouldn't be looking at the long term right now.
I lived in Miami for much of the 80s. The King Tides they encounter regularly, now, were unknown then. I can point you at a few dozen houses I know of, that are no longer on the coast, because the ocean is there now.
Former neighbors tell me these days they've never seen the water so high; it's not just me.
Its not merely "like" a religion. Faith and belief, scorn numbers science and history, authoritarian leadership, cultish belief in the inevitable apocalypse, control people via massive levels of guilt due to original sin, scorning shunning and hatred of non-believers and those insufficiently devout, hatred of apostates, encouragement of conversion by the sword or otherwise ... I'm sure there are a very small number of actual scientists doing actual science, but its only a tiny fraction.
The whole point is that it's a problem that is in no single person's immediate interest to solve. Yet it's in our collective interest to solve it, long term.
That you can't understand this simple concept would be funny, except that it impacts those of us that do, and especially our children.
I'd be very surprised if that exact prediction was made by peer-reviewed climate models 30 years ago, or if a scientific paper from that time suggested that Florida would become "the next Atlantis" by 2020.
It's quite easy to find flooding maps that show the effects of various sea level changes. It's not so easy to find concrete predictions about when those changes are due.
Perhaps we should stick to the science instead of imagining hypothetical news stories from decades ago and complaining they were silly.
Yes, let's stick to the science. Which says we have problems, yes, but the narrative so many on here are parroting (all is lost, the gun has already gone off, the world will be uninhabitable) is not remotely close to the predictions even the IPCC has reached.
A reminder that predictions of the end of the world are, so far, never true, is welcome.
Who is saying all is lost and that the world will be uninhabitable? People are saying bad things will happen, potentially catastrophic things for those directly affected. Some of these things may create large social challenges. What's wrong with acknowledging that? The fact that it makes you uncomfortable to hear doesn't mean it's not true.
A ctrl-F for 'uninhabitable' only gives this sub thread and someone saying that some countries (rather than the whole world as you've stated) will be uninhabitable. Which is true.
I searched for "uninhabitable", and the comment you're referring to says particular places will be uninhabitable. Not the world. This is true, according to scientific predictions.
I searched for "gun", and the comment you're referring to is saying that we are already locked into a great deal of warming due to lag and knock-on effects. This is also true according to scientific predictions.
I searched for "all is lost" and didn't find anything.
Meh, I don't really have a dog in this fight, but the tone of this thread is pretty clear. First or second-level comments from the first page most upvoted responses. There are unsubstantiated claims, needlessly hyperbolic descriptors, even a suggestion to blow up the moon. If this thread isn't perplexing, it's at least entertaining.
> It looks bleak. There are fewer and fewer options remaining.
> the IPCC reports/estimates excluded arctic methane emissions...which we a) now know are definitely happening and b) are just catastrophic positive feedback loops. The gun seems to have been fired.
> yeah, the n-th order effects like the siberian ice melting away into methane emissions equivalent to 100 years of 2020 CO2 output will just completely obliterate any efforts at mitigating new emissions.
> Question: How do you folks deal with the hopelessness of it all?
> Can we just gradually boost Earth a little farther (on average) from the sun? Or we could blow up the moon, reducing tidal fluctuation, and thus coastal flooding. Plus the debris would reduce sunlight imparting a cooling effect.
It's actually illegal in some states to acknowledge the land lost to climate change [0]. Part of the reasoning behind this is to sew doubt in the veracity of the climate predictions of the 80s and 90s.
As some people have said, a large amount of coastal land has already been lost to the sea, especially in Florida. This situation is going to take years/decades to really unfold, because, for the most part, it's not like houses will be above ground one day, then under water the next. Instead this will be a gradual process whereby flooding becomes more severe and frequent, yet the ground will be ostensibly "dry" 99% of the time (or underwater only 3 days a year). Then it will be 98% of the time, 97% of the time, etc.
[1] is a link to a McKinsey report on climate change and how it will effect Florida and how lenders should prepare.
Can you find any sources of such predictions from 30 years ago? It sounds plausible to me that you're remembering criticism of climate warnings from 30 years ago that described their warnings as hyperbolically apocalyptic.
The rise of technocracy and scientism seems more concerning from where I stand. Oh I know, these experts happen to be infallible. I wouldn't dare dispute their gospel or speak any heresies on this esteemed discussion board.
Just the same the trend is concerning. Especially if we are willing to consider the hypothetical world where experts planning the world's energy consumption might possibly have ulterior motives. Of course that isn't the case. It isn't even possible. I'm reliably informed that all skeptic views are paid stooges of the oil companies.
Scientism is infallible. Sure, private researchers funded by the tobacco companies might have fibbed here and there, but that's only because they're greedy capitalists. Government funded research explaining the dangers of cannabis has been 100% accurate. Mass incarceration is a wonderful policy. Scientific experts are qualified not only in their fields of research, but to make wide sweeping social dictates as well.
The rockefeller foundation is the 39th biggest foundation. Any search term and it will show something. I tried random terms such as "animal conservation" and "Sydney" and there were a dozen results.
Science is about building knowledge, so if climate change against all odds turns out to be false, it will be abandoned and the mechanism that is really behind the data will be the focus of further studies. There is no such thing as scientism but a bunch of different people who are competing for the best explanation of reality. The ability to predict is a very handy thing. Newtonian physics might not be 100% correct, but it makes damn good predictions that made our lives so much better.
>Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science
People always say this kind of thing. You're probably mis-remembering a headline of an article you barely read and are suggesting that was the global scientific consensus at the time. If you actually look at the real predictions about the climate, which always come packaged with the level of certainty, worst case, best case etc, then predictions have been remarkably accurate for decades. By comparing this to doomsday religious predictions that of course are nonsense you just add to the widespread public denial.
Well, it's a little tough to find a source for a televised news segment from 30+ years ago, before the rise of the modern internet, but you're just as free to claim my memory is faulty as I am to state my recollection.
This reminds me of a fearmongering TV "documentary" narrated by Leonard Nimoy about 40 years ago I saw that warned that a new ice age was coming and that the evidence was that snow storms were becoming more frequent.
Yeah, I left this part out of my comment. My 4th grade science textbook said we were headed for a new ice age by the 90's, and that we'd be completely out of oil by 2000.
I love that this prediction has a clear deadline. Now, what skin in the game does the UN have? Will they pay back any government spending that occurs as a result of this prediction if the 1.5C rise does not occur?
No this is how they justify their existence now. Originally created to stop Hitler 2.0, they've basically given up on that mission and now focus on health and climate crises, whether real or greatly exaggerated.
We should be thankful for their selfless action and wisdom. Carbon credits as part of a new global currency may save us all. We just need digital IDs, a cashless society and digital currency to ensure responsible purchases.
Dr. Peter Carter, an IPCC expert reviewer, makes the point that not only is breaking the 2C threshold by 2100 likely, but also that the equilibrium temperature increase is much higher than 2C: https://twitter.com/PCarterClimate/status/139707600859175731...
We're definitely going to go beyond 2ºC in the coming decades.
Even if a miracle happened and we stopped all human emissions today, current GHGs in the atmosphere will keep trapping more heat for some decades. This is known as climate inertia or climate lag.
Another aspect I don't see frequently mentioned are feedbacks. Again, even if we stopped all emissions today, self sustaining climatic systems will keep adding more heat to the atmosphere (methane, etc) or the sea (Arctic ice melting).
We're currently at aprox 36 billion tonnes of carbon emissions per year [1] only counting fuel burning. It would be a miracle if we could even reach 50% of that in our lifetime, which was aprox the emissions from the 70s.
yeah, the n-th order effects like the siberian ice melting away into methane emissions equivalent to 100 years of 2020 CO2 output will just completely obliterate any efforts at mitigating new emissions.
That article doesn't say anything about how much methane is being released. The fact that it's happening isn't being disputed. The prediction that it will be catastrophic is.
Oh, it will absolutely be catastrophic if the Siberian tundra thaws. Have you seen the estimates for how much carbon is locked in the permafrost? It's more carbon than is in the atmosphere today. [1]
Did you mean to write "if it keeps speeding up"? Because it is most definitely happening, it is speeding up [1], and it doesn't look likely to slow down.
The fact that it's happening isn't being disputed. The prediction that it will be catastrophic is.
The NASA article you linked is reputable, but pay attention to what it actually says - it makes no predictions of impact severity.
What the article DOES say: methane is responsible for 1/4 of all global warming, it's increased 9% in the last decade, and 250% in the last 17 decades (avg 15%/year).
It looks bleak. There are fewer and fewer options remaining. Carbon sequestration at the source of emissions could reduce some CO2 from big fossil fuel power stations, but won't fix vehicles. We need a miracle technology that can actually extract CO2 from the air. Planting 1 trillion trees might help, but we won't do it.
Fusion research hasn’t ever been funded well enough to hit the various timelines. If people fund it, or if computing power gets cheap enough to solve the remaining research problems in-silico rather than with a demo reactor, we could plausibly get it in 5-10 years.
But I agree with @gnfargbl, we should use the naturally occurring one that we orbit.
The issue is a lack of designs with promising commercial application. The world has dumped plenty of money into fusion design research since the 50s but only very recently created a design that could actually generate more power than it consumes containing the plasma field.
The current most effective designs output 1.25w for every watt of input. And only at a very small scale. It's great that we can finally produce net energy from fusion. But let's not get ahead ourselves here. The issue is not funding, it's lack of brain power. Fusion is an insanely difficult nut to crack and trillions of dollars won't do crack it alone.
I had similar discussions ten years ago with a Cambridge PhD in this field, who was of the opinion that the money spent on Iraq War would have been more than enough to resolve all known fusion reactor related questions (he explicitly did not say the result would be a working reactor).
ITER is set to come online in the next couple of years with a price tag of around $50,000,000,000 !!!! And it will spend 20 or so years testing various fuels.
China is building their own tokamak reactor to compete with ITER. I can't find cost figures, but presumably costs are roughly the same, considering the same size and is intended to "compliment" ITER.
These are still merely "test" reactors. They are experiments that may provide some enough data in 10-20 years such that another, even larger and more expensive test reactor may be constructed. Assuming ITER runs until 2045 and a replacement is started on in 2040. With 10 years of construction time, and 20 more years of testing, that means the next generation is set to complete testing in 2070. And hopefully the results of that generation will give us an idea of how to build a commercially viable fusion reactor.
All the funding in the world isn't going to change the fact that testing is a long-drawn out process, and that it must be performed in a somewhat linear fashion. The results of the previous experiments inform the next generation. And we are still a few generations away from commercial viability.
I do want to point out that I'm a strong advocate for fusion research. I just don't see it as a viable solution to global warming, regardless of how much we fund it, because we don't even know what a commercially viable reactor even looks like yet, much less be able to scale the technology out to the point that it will put a dent in CO2 emissions.
$50bn looks (eyeballing it) like less than the area under the graph labelled “moderate”.
You and I both agree fusion isn’t likely to be the solution to global warming, but I do think it could be if people wanted it to be. (I also think nobody with the money to spend really cares that much about fusion, and that PV is so absurdly cheap this is unlikely to change).
There's been a lot of interesting progress recently using high-temperature superconductors that weren't available when ITER was being designed. This should make fusion a lot more attainable and practically useful.
That said, I don't think we should count on fusion to get us out of this when renewables are a good-enough solution that's available now and they're cheap. (If storage is an issue, perhaps that means we should be investing in long-distance transmission lines so we can, for instance, power North America at night using solar panels in the Sahara.)
Usable fusion doesn't exist today and the problem is immediate, it is that simple. We are at the point of solving it with what we have, not helplessly waiting for a deus ex machina.
Everyone (especially the environmental activists) need to come to the realization that we've long passed the point where we have the luxury of being picky over what we replace our fossil fuel (carbon emitting) energy sources with.
While everyone has been arguing about hydroelectric versus nuclear fission versus truly renewable sources versus "just wait for fusion", the energy consumption of humanity has been exponentially growing and satisfying that desire primarily with carbon emitting sources of power.
All options need to be on the table. Mandate solar panels on roofs, mandate battery storage in homes, build utility scale PV and solar thermal plants where it makes sense, build wind farms where it makes sense, get over our fear of fission and build many small, yet passively safe nuclear fission plants and the necessary fuel recycling facilities to reduce the need for spent fuel storage.
Tell anyone who thinks that renewable power sources look ugly to shove it.
Rather than focusing our collective energies on developing more energy generation tech, pivot to figuring out how to sink carbon we've already emitted and use existing generation solutions until the problem is controlled. Then start looking at the future again and offline whatever is obsoleted.
At this time, albedo modification is not politically correct, because it would still work whether human action is the main driver of global warming or not.
And a quick reminder that the IPCC reports/estimates excluded arctic methane emissions...which we a) now know are definitely happening and b) are just catastrophic positive feedback loops.
Can you link to some sources on point B? From what I've read you'll find broad scientific consensus on your point A but your point B is not even close to widely accepted among climate scientists.
That said I've learned the science can change rapidly, so I'm all ears if the position of the majority of climate scientists has shifted.
There is also the negative feedback of plants growing faster due to increased available CO2 for them to use.
It would be interesting to see the list of all feedbacks and estimated significance.
There's also the wildcard of algae evolution. Since there are quadrillions of them, evolution happens very quickly so changes in ocean acidification and temperature could substantially change how efficiently they work. They could get better or worse.
Do you have and references on your last point about algae? I have this (totally unsubstantiated) idea that plundering the oceans of fish along with rising temperatures will result in the oceans sequestering incredible amounts of CO2 via algae blooms. Never found much to read on the topic though - in what ways could this be negative feedback loop?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadMichigan looks pretty good but moving people and infrastructure will be unlikely. Cities will likely adapt and build it into their cost. Miami for example will be underwater but levies and sea walls can be constructed. I don't imagine Miami moving to upstate Michigan.
It is probably the case that there will be some people who "win" a bit as the planet warms, but on the whole I'm not sure anyone will be entirely better off for it in the long run.
I do agree with you that Canada and Russia are likely to suffer the fewest negative effects. But I wouldn't say it would be a net positive for them either. It's not impossible, but there are a lot of unknowns at this point and a lot of potential feedback loops that could be devastating, like mass extinction level devastating.
This goes far beyond how comfortable the weather is when you step outside.
I should have specified you to ask someone who actually knows something about building on permafrost, sorry for the omission.
This means altering of global and local weather patterns with unpredictable consequences. Some places will get much colder, some will get much hotter. Some places will dry out. Some places will see more tornadoes and flooding.
And some will get both hotter and more humid causing them to be absolutely uninhabitable, because of combination of 100% humidity and over 35 degrees C is basically lethal.
So if you think this is just a "thing", and "what's the fuss, you are going to have more sunshine", you obviously don't understand what the problem is.
That way the year we hit it, everybody panics and circles the wagons, to avoid hitting the real, higher number which is actually our doom.
Second most likely, we hit it, look around and see the devastation that has been wrought, and the people living in relatively safe zones institute military-backed authoritarian governments who are charged with keeping migrates from effected regions from coming in, and seizing what little available resources remain from weaker, neighboring states.
> The 1.5°C mark was established as the desirable target for all the countries of the world who signed up to the Paris Agreement to limit temperature rises, in order to prevent permanent changes that threaten the wellbeing of all life on earth. The agreement calls for limiting rises to 2°C or below.
In any case, the 2ºC nominal target was mostly arbitrary.
For those unaware, the problem with measuring global temperatures is that we can measure variation (relative values) with great accuracy (e.g. 0.5ºC increase), but the error bars on the absolute measurement are way to big to make useful statements on what will happen at XºC.
That's a big change. Imagine Denver's average temp in December is currently 20 and with the change it would be 40-50. That's a MASSIVE change in Denver's ecosystem.
Skiing might not be a thing in Colorado in 5 years. We might be able to grow oranges soon....
- edit -
Apparently I am stupid. The Google Calculator uses the formula: `(1.5°C × 9/5) + 32 = 34.7°F` where as 0C is 32 F.
Therefore it's a 2.7 F change...
+1.5 degrees C is about +3 degrees F but 0 degrees C is 32 degrees F.
If not: We are not talking of the temperature 1.5°C. We are talking about a temperature difference of 1.5°C.
What you actually want to do is find how much Fahrenheit _delta_ is equivalent to a 1.5C delta. Try calculating the Fahrenheit value for 20C, and then for 21.5C, and then subtract.
Or you can look at the equation you're using, where the slope is a clear and constant 9/5. 9/5*1.5 = 2.7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius
Edit to add: I think I and sibling commenters have been trolled :-)
(1.8x+32)-(1.8y+32)=1.8(x-y)
Every 1c you increase is equivalent to 1.8f
I think this is the only common case of units using a different zero point.
I mean, I agree with you, but trying to get the entirety of a country to educate themselves in time to do something about it is not really going to work.
Maybe if we call them "dollar degrees" and "euro degrees" we'll get their attention.
But seriously now, yes, I do think it would be a pretty good idea for Americans to learn the metric system and not just because of the issue at hand, and it shouldn't be that hard. Isn't it intuitive enough to remember "0 is for freezing and 100 is for boiling water"?
Beyond crypto need to stop all deforestation now and focus on ways to make cities more livable by decreasing or moving homeless and increasing transit and affordability of housing. Cities need to be more livable and comfortable. This will drive down deforestation of suburbs and the extensive fossil fuel use involved in transportation and movement of people outside of denser urban areas.
There isn’t a lot of time left and action needs to be taken urgently.
be able to sustain yourself and your family without external support
be able to protect yourself and your family from people who relied on the system, they will find you
this all sounds very tinfoil hat, but that will change too
edit: yes indeed this is consistent with whacko advice for the zombie apocalypse...if governments anywhere were capable of getting in front of climate change, they would have done so at least a decade ago. it is the governments and the systems they support that are making things worse. forget the Paris Accord, Neville Chamberlain had a piece of paper too
Yes, we absolutely can. Coal burning and only coal burning accounts for a whopping 61% of global manmade CO2 emissions. That means oil, gas, and agriculture are responsible for less than 50% of global emissions combined.
Phasing out coal for electricity generation in favor of renewables and nuclear is by far the #1 thing we can do. We could stop using airplanes entirely and it would make no measurable impact compared to closing even 10% of all global coal power plants.
The narrative should be that coal is the enemy. Keep it simple and bang the drum: coal, coal, coal. After coal there's a long tail of CO2 emitters and the next one to tackle is the next largest. That's probably oil for land and sea transport, which is far easier to replace with alternatives (mostly EVs) than aviation. By the time we get rid of >50% of coal power we might already have replaced a double digit percentage of the car fleet with EVs.
Air travel at 2.5% is not even worth bringing up.
A significant issue is that we can't electrify international air travel. The 2.5% remains relevant.
> we can't radically cut CO2 without abandoning all modern technology!
That's you projecting, I never said that and you're basically trying to reject my input by misrepresenting me as a dismissible hippy which is a disgraceful way to debate.
Honestly it is absolutely unforgivable that people still push cryptocurrency in the face of the existential threat to humanity that global heating presents. It's a completely immoral, destructive, evil.
Humans need to co-operate to survive global heating, we cannot avoid trust, we need to make it easier to trust each other. If you buy into cryptocurrency you are implicitly abandoning hope of humanity surviving this crisis, in fact you're hastening our downfall.
Shame on your defeatist, destructive attitude.
A unified, international ban on something is a nearly unprecedented achievement, apart from perhaps chemical weapons, and even then i'm not sure all nations had a seat at the table.
You also referred to cyprots as "evil" earlier in this thread. What specifically about cryptocurrencies has given you this strong sentiment? (To be clear i appreciate your passion on the topic, i'm legitimately trying to understand your viewpoint, if that isn't obvious).
Energy waste is energy waste, no matter what kind of energy it is wasting. Cryptocurrencies are, by design, pure waste, and the only rational action is to ban them before they do any more damage.
Because as with the current vaccine shortage, there's no international cooperation when the countries producing it don't have enough. Food shortages will be similar.
Your choices are probably Brazil, USA, or Russia.
Recycling is a marketing tactic crafted by the tin can industry in the 20th century to dethrone reusable glass bottles for products like beer.
-- Charlie Chester (CNN) on hidden camera, April 2021
I think once the rubber meets the road we'll resolve and completely reverse climate change. That being said I might be too confident in our species' engineering ability.
I think you're not thinking critically enough on who it will be solved for.
Rich people may even benefit from climate change in the short term, since during an economic downturn they can move their assets around, take risks, buy cheaper labor, etc, while everyone else is scrambling.
Will seriously try to be resolved, but with no guarantees.
You could compare with how rich countries handled the pandemic, and then consider that the pandemic was relatively easy with new vaccine candidates almost immediately ready for testing.
Also compare with how we handle various natural disasters. What is California doing about wildfires? The rich people in Malibu still lose their homes.
How about preparing for drought? What is Houston doing about hurricanes? Is Texas ready for the next winter storm?
Rich people will handle this with their own disaster preparation (sometimes) and moving if necessary.
I definitely think the US will pull the trigger on stratosphere aerosol injection and other geoengineering technologies before letting Miami go underwater.
But... this debate has been going on a long time
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6450358
You don't think about driving slower during the 20ms between the impact and the airbag hitting your face do you ?
I see we're rounding up now.
It's not a simple matter of the weather being warmer when you step outside every day. This is a relatively rapid change in global temperature on an archaeological scale, and the downstream consequences could be significant.
If you want to compare it with catastrophic climate changes in pre-human times, go ahead. But that's far more likely to damage your argument than help it because they were far more catastrophic, up to and including mass extinction events.
Normally we study climate change on the scale of 10s to 100s of millions of years.
This current change in CO2 concentration is unprecedented because it happened in the span of a century. 5-6 orders of magnitude faster than anything previously.
It's so fast, it looks like an impulse on any graph with historical data: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
"A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
What I don't understand about your link is how AP can serve a new story without a timestamp.
The negative is not even true -- no one can guarantee that no countries will ever be covered in water at any point in the future, even if we had presumably gotten the rising temperatures "under control" twenty years ago.
As these crises put more stress on the rest of the world we're just going to accelerate exploitation to support more people with less stuff - we're essentially burning through the world's buffer of habitability to eek out a bit more profits today.
There's never a point where all we can do is throw up our hands and do nothing. There's always something to be done, even if it's not directly related to the cause of the crisis.
That's not worldwide doom. It's just a very clear indicator of the damage that happens elsewhere, where low-lying cities like Amsterdam, New York, and much of Bangladesh have to either go elsewhere or take very expensive damage control measures.
We're at a point where it's still cheaper to prevent that at the climate level. It just grows more expensive by the day. Things can cost a lot of lives and dollars without being apocalyptic, and still worth dealing with sooner rather than later.
The reason this is true is that CO2 emissions can't really be reversed; accounting for all forms of "capture" (biomass, sea exchange, calcification) CO2 disappears in a reverse power law way, such that after 10 000 years 10% of it is still there (https://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/pics/1210_ZHfig5.jpg)
Because we didn't get it better under control by 2000.
The argument is that these island nations might actually already be lost.
Scientists estimate an around 40 year "climate lag" between cause and effect so if you think this is bad, we're only living out the happy times from the seventies with Pink Floyd and ABBA. And then, once you have it there, CO2 has an atmospheric "half life" counted in centuries. It's why climate change is so damn nasty. :-(
It also really doesn't jive well with our short election periods where after a few years, some new guy with a radically different policy will get in charge if the earlier one wasn't popular because <insert too radical climate policy here>.
As an aside, I'm not sure why they call it an AP "dispatch" in this case. Does anyone know the definition of the term dispatch in this context?
[0] https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/notable-quotable-the-art-of...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nations-vanish-global-warm...
Bangladesh, similarly, is a very low lying nation without the capital to build seawalls and other protections (as the Netherlands can).
Naively using GDP per capita as a measure of the average level of technology people can afford, this suggests that Bangladesh should be able to employ land reclamation measures similar to the Netherlands in the 1960s, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevopolder
There might be other considerations (such as differing geography) that make this impracticable, however.
My understanding in 2021 is that much of that stuff is already happening, since we obviously didn't halt warming. And that it's also too late to prevent more of it from happening, because there is a lag time between prevention measures happening, and having an effect.
We are past the point where just reducing emissions will be enough, and instead will need to also harden the world against inevitable effects of climate change. This is even harder and more expensive than it would have been if we had stopped emitting earlier.
Net emissions just keep stacking, but if you compare total emissions today with past predictions they simply don’t line up with 2021.
Also, efficiency doesn't matter if it gets outweighed by consumption/usage.
Yeah consumption needs to be slowed down. Even dumb things like those Bird scooters littering cities...
After all how will our t-shirts and musical instruments be made?
The closest thing to flat you’re going to find is global CO2 produced per person is nearly flat. Global population has significantly increased, so that still represents growth in emissions but it clearly could have been much worse with massive increases in both population and CO2 per person as the 3rd world industrialized.
Growth in CO2 emissions has recently plateaued, but the world still pumps out about 40% more CO2, every year, than we did in 2000. Stopping the growth doesn't really matter that much, we need to drastically reduce overall emissions.
@computerphage: Thank you for the typo correction! I am off for more coffee.
Perhaps the conversation needs to center on how to factor the long view into capitalism. Because in my view it is pretty shit at that, with often short term profits favoured over long term and the effects of that being felt long term.
Right now our intervention option looks like direct intervention to make things less profitable in the near term, and then we run into the problem of democracy also favouring short-term popularity over long-term stewardship and the immediate pains it bring to voters.
Governments need to start paying into a fund, per CO2 ton produced, that pays out, per ton of CO2 removed.
Capitalism doesn't force us to continue to burn fossil fuels. We could impose massive fines or taxes against any greenhouse gas emitter, but we lack social will.
Capitalism doesn't mandate hypergrowth or working yourself to the bone.
That's a byproduct of our centralised monetary system and inflation.
lack of personal freedom and ease of abuse probably make this a terrible choice, but it would without a doubt be better for climate change than currently
The cure suggested here is worse than the disease.
And I'm not entirely sure. Is authoritarian rule worse than billions starving to death, with collapse of the ecosystem?
All the enlightenment ideas fall apart when we actually reach the limit of the earths resources, and can potentially cause our own extinction along with the rest of the animal kingdom
Most long-lived democracies appear to have optimized to mitigate the risk of the second, over the long run, but at the cost of limiting the first.
One thinks the Roman Republic had a pretty good thing going politically... but declaring a temporary dictator in times of crisis only worked until it didn't.
Still, 475 years was a pretty good run.
The carbon that has been released into the atmosphere from oil is here to stay. I am not even sure we should go looking for some energy guzzling carbon sink because we really need to give the earth time to breath and settle into the ecosystem that exists today. The earth will heal itself and balance will be restored but we can never go back to pre-industrial revolution levels of carbon.
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.
There's a reason they're suggested in that order.
I think you mean "overstated".
In the same time, the only thing we can do, as individuals, is to reduce the emission from our side. But it's wrong to enforce it upon others.
Yeah man, downvote me as you wish, but LOL you won't get very far.
Second, "scientifically proved or not"? Are you really questioning whether we've proven climate change is occurring?
Finally, if you've been paying attention, you'll notice that the voices telling us that climate change is an individual problem and not a policy reform/regulation problem are basically Big Oil propaganda designed to demoralise you with guilt. It's not about individual action. I would still recommend it for spiritual and philosophical reasons, but not scientific.
It is also insane how long humanity has ignored this issue. At least we have seemingly moved from ‘12 years left for real action? Hah!’ To ‘Oh shit this is happening and maybe we have that 11 years’
That being said, it’ll definitely continue to wreak havoc with ocean acidification. But it’s important to know that it’s not necessary to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere to get rid of a huge chunk that has already been emitted.
She also details a critical acidity point (I forget the PH level but I think with current rise in acidity it is modeled to reach that point in 2100) where calcifiers cannot survive due to the acidity essentially breaking down their shells. Think oysters, barnacles, coral. Major parts of the ocean’s ecosystem that could have a ‘cataclysmic’ effect if wiped out.
I realize this distinction between derivative values is further complicated by the even more baseline measure of total accumulation. But I do ask in earnest and don't know the answer.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mauna_Loa_CO2_monthl...
You can compute emission rates from that data yourself.
Our CO2 emissions are not accelerating, but still increasing.
And that IPCC projection doesn't take into account the dozens of reinforcing feedback loops contributing to further warming. For example, the Amazon rain forest is now a net green house gas producer due to human activity [3].
[1]: https://e360.yale.edu/assets/site/_1500x1500_fit_center-cent...
[2]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...
[3]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/amazon-rainforest-...
No. That was an artifact of hype in the mainstream press. If you look at the research being published at the time, the consensus was fairly consistently for warming scenarios (by a factor of 2:1 during the most cooling-friendly years):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
I have young children and have worried for them quite a bit. If they're healthy, if they're getting everything they need, if they're safe etc. I have never once considered global warming as a concern for them. While they're children I'll be able to handle any such changes. When they're adults, they will.
You hope you and they will be able to handle these changes, but there are going to be a lot of downstream effects from warming and sea level change.
The post-scarcity period we experience in developed economies is very much the exception not the rule, if you look at the whole of Human History.
I understand and share you're concerns but you are removing all agency from whatever children you might have. A child born now will in all certainty reach their 20's. If they share their parents values they will most likely be an agent for change in the right direction.
Excess population and excess pollution (per capita) are not necessarily overlapping problems.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
Around 1980 people assumed rising standards of living would result in dramatic increases in CO2 per person which didn’t happen. Even as recently as 2000 models assumed as much as 10% increases over current levels where likely.
"How it started" (From your Article)
Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. :
"How it's Going"
A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/climate/bangladesh-floods...
Sea level rise looks more like king tides periodically destroying coastal occupations until it's uninsurable and everyone moves away. Poisioned aquifers resulting in no viable drinking water source and again, everyone leaves. Coastal erosion intensified means small islands with rich histories become nothing more than a sandbar over the course of decades, and sustains no population as it did before.
Chaotic weather looks like wildfires, tornados, and droughts 10, 20, 50% more frequent in their occurrence. But not a new phenomenon. Shit years for various crops become more common than good years because you're not getting enough sun, false springs and shock frosts destroy fruitings, yields are lower across the board. Prices go up. Buying tomatos peak season costs as much as is once did off-season.
Probably the biggest driver of inaction here is that what comes to mind is sudden shocks, yet the truth is more like a slow strangle. The urgency is just as valid if you take the long view, but it's easier to stick with the status quo when it's just the gradual discomfort of a belt tightening and not a gun pointed at your head. Boiled frogs and all that.
You cite 'tornadoes 10, 20, 50% more frequent' and you're not wrong, but it's very important to understand we're also looking at tornadoes and droughts and hurricanes (events tied to the behavior of the chaotic system of the climate) two, five, ten times more INTENSE than we're used to.
Chaos does this. The wildest outliers are tied to how much energy is in the system. They may be no more common than before, but the increased energy and increased chaos can produce wilder variances from the norm.
With regard to specifically destructive events like tornadoes, hurricanes, storm flooding and so on, this is way more dramatic than sea level rise. Nothing we can do, even with nuclear weapons, is as powerful as what weather can do with the energy in that chaotic system… because it's way, way bigger than anything we have at our command.
The truth also brings sudden shocks. We've just not quite wrapped our head around where those are coming from, and the frequency of 'em is probably no more common than usual, but the potential intensity of these events is ramping up with the same slow build you mention. We just don't see it until it hits.
One example: I think it's very likely there are industrialized cities that would not stand against hyper-weather of this nature. We're not used to the idea of tornadoes and hurricanes ripping down tall buildings, but we will live to see the theoretical peak energy (the ten or hundred-year storm) go beyond what our cities are designed to withstand. When that happens, we suddenly have areas where ALL the skyscrapers were toppled, on a weather-event scale rather than a terrorist-act scale.
if we're talking about a chaotic system then wouldn't the probability of extreme weather being better for humanity be the same as worse for humanity? Maybe an exceptionally long growing season allowing more crops to be harvested for example.
Stability and predictability are low energy things.
And primarily people who did not produce the co2
Globalization brought us also much closer over all.
I saw a view documentary about it and those people are aware why it happens.
While we did a lot of fixing medicine and food for them, climate change is what they are paying for and they didn't knew but we did for a long time now.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change_on_i...
Water vapor is a bigger contributor to the greenhouse effect than CO2 by three orders of magnitude. The current "models" do not accurately reflect the sun or water on earth.
The fatigue and apathy is because the predictions has been serially wrong. So much so they had to rebrand "global warming" to "climate change".
Normally intelligent people have let their hubris make them victims to globalist propaganda. It's disturbing to see how many people not only fall for it but parrot their programming ad nauseam and attack dissenters pointing out raw fact (like that unadulterated satellite temperate data shows the earth's temperature as relatively flat for the last 20 years, or that the 1930's were warmer than temperatures today).
The earth will be cooler in 10 years, not warmer. We're heading into a grand solar minimum. Wait and see.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2020.1...
There you go.
1) hydrology professor shows that water is the largest driver of earth's climate (besides the sun of course) and that CO2 has proven to be an insignificant factor, both based on physics and on history, where CO2 levels were far higher, but temperatures did not rise in tandem.
2) Professor Valentina Zharkova predicting that the coming grand solar minimum will lower earth's temperature by around 1 degree C, based on past minima.
Zharkova has a history of being right, by the way, which is more than I can say for the tabloid science currently being peddled in this thread.
So established science is corrupt because of grant money. Yet this Demetris Koutsoyiannis who wrote the first article, who is a professor at an established university in Greece and seemingly climbed the completely normal academic ladder, is somehow untainted by the grant money he presumably got along the way?
Which is it? You can't have it both ways.
> Actually, one of the aims of the paper is to show that polarization stems from political, rather than scientific, roots.
Yeah, though luck there. The paper concerns itself with more political propaganda than with climate science. Most of it is just fluff and filler, with quotes from Aristotle to Mark Twain, spends half of its actual content with the premise to discover the true definition of the word climate and then dismissing "climate change" (the scary quotes are form the "paper"). And then we come to this gem here:
> Hence, in scientific terms, the content of the term climate change is almost equivalent to that of weather change or even time change (climate is changing as is weather and time).
Yes. Really. This paper is pulling no punches. Climate is just weather. And weather changes. Thus there is no climate change. QED.
What a piece of wasted bits.
It then spends the next few paragraphs "analyzing" how climate change is actually political in nature, spending more pixels on graphs of the occurrence of the term "climate change" than on actual climate data.
No discussion of the vast body of evidence that we have gathered in the last 100 years. No examination of actual possible problems, like measurement issues, systemic issues or anything the like. Nothing.
This is not a scientific paper. This is propaganda.
The bulk of the article discusses hydrology and how the sheer volume of water on the earth is more significant than C02 in terms of greenhouse effects. There's also a section about far higher historical C02 levels being present when temperatures were lower than today.
Respond to that part of the paper, not the tangent on the term "climate change" (which is also accurate, but not the meat of the argument).
Where do you see this? I see a long rant about the definition of climate, sprinkled in with some cultural reference and some meaningless discussions about continuous vs discrete sampling (meaningless beyond any first year university course on any scientific topic).
- It's in a journal called "Temperature" with the mandate: "Temperature publishes papers related to interactions between living matter and temperature, with focus on the medical physiology of body temperature regulation." All the other papers fit this mandate, i.e., they're on physiology.
- It's marked as an editorial, not a peer-reviewed article. There are no co-authors.
I have no idea why or how this got published! It's very weird, why would one even submit such an article to an irrelevant journal?
So that climate deniers have something (anything!) to point to?
Here is a report published in 1999 by NOAA and NASA showing temperatures much higher in the 1930's with cooling through the end of the century. Temperature data outside the US wasn't very reliable in the 20th century, so it's best to focus on the US. Skip to page 37 and look at figure 6. Make a mental note the high point of 1.5 degrees C in the 30's from 1999 data.
Warning, PDF file: https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1999/1999_Hansen_ha03200f.pd...
Compare this with the same data today and you'll miraculously see the 1930's as much cooler with a warming trend (again, NASA direct data - note the new high point from the 30's is 1.2 degrees C, not 1.5): https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/graph_data/U.S....
Here is an article summarizing the alterations in case you do not want to read the NASA/NOAA report, but I published the direct data from NASA so there would be no attacking the source: https://realclimatescience.com/2020/10/alterations-to-the-us...
My point is that the "climate science" we're bombarded with in the mainstream media isn't hard science. It's a political narrative fueled by financial conflicts of interest and grant money. That bothers me because 1) I like to understand reality, and 2) it is leading to massive misallocations of capital, just like with COVID over the last 1.5 years. I think we should be concerned with climate, but we need to focus more energy on our own sun. I think our sun is far more dangerous than all of the anthropogenic climate change theories combined.
One thing that doesn't perfectly match up is that the peak in the 1930s of the before-adjustment plot in [1] doesn't go quite as high as Fig 6 of the 1999 paper, but it does seem to match Plate A2, so I would assume it is a difference of using calendar years vs meteorological years (section A2 of the 1999 paper).
Regarding your broader point: I think skepticism is great; asking questions is how we learn new things, after all. But it's not so great to assume that climate science must be wrong (or a political narrative) just because you found something that doesn't immediately make sense. Often it simply means climate scientists know something we don't.
Also, since you mentioned concern about financial conflicts of interest, I'd encourage you to consider that the anti-climate-change narrative is just as (if not more) susceptible to those. Fossil fuels are big business.
[1] https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001_Hansen_ha02300a.pd...
I have publications in this area. And given the above deficiencies, I started wondering about where it was published.
When what I noted above surfaced, I stopped, because life is too short to chase down BS.
You shouldn't be taking that article seriously! And I don't know how it was recommended to your attention, but I'd start wondering about that source as well.
I wholeheartedly agree. It's a tiny bit of light scientific "discussion" about vaguely related phenomena, wrapped in criticism of how culturally significant climage change has become. How the hell did this get past the very negative referee reports and get published??
Most of the reports are quite critical (although I can't tell if referee 4 is being sarcastic or not). I don't understand how this paper got published.
Wow, I don't know this journal at all, but something terribly odd is going on. Did anyone else read the referee reports [1]? I'd call that scathing. If I ever had those reports come back to me for one of my papers, I wouldn't even try to push the paper through. And I've never used that harsh language myself in my referee reports, even for absolute garbage papers. Look at this:
The article by D. Koutsoyiannis "Rethinking climate, climate change, and their relationship with water" is, quite simply, an opinion or editorial piece and most certainly not original experimental research. At that, it remains grossly incomplete given the current state of knowledge in hydrology, water resources, and their relationships with climate.
First, the author uses this article for an absurd quantity of self-citations.
At any rate: I smell a giant rat!
Edit: I started reading now. This isn't a scientific article. I totally agree with referee 2 above! This is an opinion piece! The author explicitly goes into things like google search results for the words "climate change". What the hell is that supposed to have to do with water's effect on climate change? What absolute garbage! I don't trust anything in this paper.
[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/13/6/849/review_report
From the first article (which is mostly asking “what is climate“ and “should we expect climate not to change?”) we get its only really solid prediction:
“it can be anticipated that many readers would find this paper useless, if not harmful.” Lol.
The second paper was discredited and withdrawn though that hasn’t stopped deniers citing it endlessly.
According to the article itself, "This is mainly due to using an improved temperature dataset to estimate the baseline rather than sudden changes in climate indicators."
This is an example of the past changing, rather than the present. I'm not sure how to react when the only change was the past got cooler - I wouldn't think that would change anything in the present or future.
You are demanding censorship of this idea?
Wow, just wow.
Yes. Because it didn't happen.
> You are demanding censorship of this idea?
No. In the same way that it's cool to hear dissenting political views at the local pub, but if a guy stands up and starts raving about the children trapped by the pedophile lizard people, I kinda want him to get kicked out so that I don't have to be associated with society-destroying lunatics like that. You're that guy. That guy isn't being subjected to "censorship of his idea". He's being kicked out of the establishment for being a moron and ruining the mood.
Go write a book about your crazy ideas. Now if the government makes it illegal to publish, you can decry censorship.
Here is a report published in 1999 by NOAA and NASA showing temperatures much higher in the 1930's with cooling through the end of the century. Skip to page 37 and look at figure 6. Note the high point of 1.5 degrees C in the 30's from 1999 data.
Warning, PDF file: https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1999/1999_Hansen_ha03200f.pd...
Compare this with the same data today and you'll miraculously see the 1930's as much cooler with a warming trend (again, NASA direct data - note the new high point from the 30's is 1.2 degrees C): https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/graph_data/U.S....
Here is an article summarizing the alterations in case you do not want to read the NASA/NOAA report, but I know you will attack the source, which is why I published the report from 1999 and the same data from 2019 directly first. You can verify everything in this article with the original source materials using the links shared previously: https://realclimatescience.com/2020/10/alterations-to-the-us...
(1) that the data was altered
and
(2) that the data was altered to suit a political narrative.
Only if the answer to both is yes will I even read any of this. I'll wait.
(Why am I being difficult? I believe you're a typical nutcase who sees X happening, and immediately concludes that "X is happening to fit the political narrative")
1) Yes, the data was altered.
2) I can't prove a causal relationship between the alteration of the data and a political narrative, but I believe in Occam's razor.
So, I've proven conclusively that NASA altered their temperature data in the 20th century from a cooling trend to a warming trend.
See for yourself.
So this is your new claim. Please write out in clear text that you've moved the goalposts since last time – make it clear what you're claiming now. Then I'll be happy to consider your sources. Just wanna make sure you don't move the goalposts again - as dishonest crackpots tend to.
I'm not asking you to do work for me. I'm asking you to clearly state your claim so that you can't move the goalposts again. The fact that you've done it once, makes me certain you'll do it again and thus invalidate any work I do. State your current claim in clear text, crackpot.
Meanwhile we are already seeing apocalyptic like effects of global warming: the worst droughts and fires across multiple continents as we've seen in modern history, significant increases and severity of tropical storms, increase and severity in seasonal flooding etc.
In 2020 alone both Australia and the Western US saw their worst wild fire seasons in modern history. 2020 also saw the worse Atlantic hurricane season in history: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/record-breaking-atlantic-...
2020 also saw the Philippines get hit with the most powerful Cyclone at landfall in history (175 mph winds at landfall): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Goni
And that was no outlier, in the last 5-6 years we've seen multiple Cyclones with winds over 175 mph, with several over 200 mph. This is definitely new territory for storms like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tropical_cyclone_recor...
With Covid-19 a lot of this stuff fell out of the news cycle rapidly last year, but 2020 surely marks one of the worst years in history for climate related disasters.
Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent.
No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point. It's time for the "we can save the world" people to stop leading everyone on, unless they can present facts and real scenarios that back up their claims (hint: they can't and never do).
You'll notice that technologically we didn't come remotely close to doing anything in the past decade that will enable us to move as fast as we'd have to. Where are the great energy & resource breakthroughs? They don't exist and by the numbers we needed them yesterday.
The world will add 2 billion people in the next ~30 years. Nearly all of those births will be in the developing world where emissions are going to continue to skyrocket. Solar, wind and electric vehicles aren't going to solve that problem.
The emissions that the US + EU cut, India will add.
China will add an entire US-worth of emissions in just the next 10-15 years. If you had a magic wand and could put the US to zero emissions tomorrow morning it wouldn't make a bit of lasting difference to the situation. This single fact of reality makes all the "we can save the world" arguments false.
And that's merely two countries. Then you have parts of Latin America, Africa and developing Asia, where emissions and population are going to continue to rise substantially.
It seems increasingly clear that the so called experts claiming this can be stopped know they're lying, and they keep lying anyway. What's their plan for immediately stopping all emissions increases across all of the developing world? There is no such plan, they have no intention of implementing or calling for such a plan. Thus, they're lying.
There is no scenario where anybody can get the math to work out on what's happening. And you'll find that nobody even attempts to, they just issue empty statements about how we need to take urgent action and then we can save the world. They'll never present you the real scenarios for the actions necessary to immediately turn back all emissions increases. It's fraudulent intellectually, it takes a small amount of time to analyze the context and know that.
You say so confidently it can't be solved, which I'm going to infer you mean impossible and not just hard.
We could without a doubt drastically reduce co2 emmissions to near zero by switching to nuclear, and paying for nuclear plants in developing countries, banning gas vehicles. Require any current and needed hydro carbon power plants to implement carbon capture.
That is hard, very hard. Might start a war. But it is not impossible like you are stating.
Already we're seeing a difference in how technology infrastructure has been distributed in developing countries. People are coming to depend upon their cellular phone and wireless data connections to be more reliable than their electricity infrastructure.
https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050
Edit:
One interesting facet is that it’s adding an extra 0.4 percentage point a year to annual global GDP growth, which is encouraging
On the other hand annual per capita income from oil and natural gas in producer economies falls by about 75%, which sounds like something that can cause political issues
> No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point.
So, I am seeing this set of ideas getting pushed a lot more these days, which means that a lot of the effort being put into climate change denial has started shifting to climate delay and outright fatalism (which used to mostly be a feature of evangelical "who are we to question God's plan for us?" arguments).
The fact of the matter is that there is a lot we can do in terms of slowing the growth and even reducing global CO2 (and CH4, methane) output, and a lot more we can do in terms of carbon capture, and a lot we can do in terms of mitigation and adaptation (which we will have to do regardless of how successful we are at reduction and capture) that is only going to get more expensive the longer we put it off.
This isn't a case of "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it". Every proposal is competing with every other in terms of cost, feasibility, externalities, and impact, it isn't the case that committing to spending money on the problem results in checks being handed out indiscriminately.
If you have a criticism of some specific intervention, please make it, but it isn't feasible to throw up our hands and do nothing. Because even if the cost/benefit analyses are so incredibly bad that just means that ultimately we only do things in the mitigation and adaptation buckets.
You will have also wet bulb temperature episodes, not all time, but more frequently and in bigger areas as time advances. And won't matter if the average temperature is not so high yet, once you get such peaks people (and maybe crops->famines) die.
And last but not least, this fuels positive feedback mechanisms, like less ice reflecting sunlight, more methane released in northern regions, more frequent forest fires and so on that accelerate an already pretty bad trend.
If you think it will cost a lot to try to do something about this, think how costly will be doing nothing.
Even in the absence of other weather events these exaggerated peaks and dips are dangerous to life.
And the guy you're citing is still correct.
We didn't reverse it before 2000. Nations will dissapear under water and general turmoil.
He never said it would happen in 2000. Only that the reversal had to happen before 2000 to prevent it from happening.
That said, the magnitude of climate change is probably underestimated and talking about average temperatures might also contribute to that.
Russia benefits, I think.
Not clear, most of Siberia would be turned into mud (which currently only happens for a month or so), many roads there are just frozen rivers.
Don't get me wrong we need agriculture, but it's not going to save an economy :)
This also ignores the fact that when one starts heading north, that Sun in the sky tends to get pretty weak-ass, even in the summer. As a Seattle resident, I about go blind getting off the plane in Miami until I can get those sunglasses on. And I can tell you how much corn enjoys the lack of good sun in comparison to my home state of Indiana: it doesn't.
The silver linings brigade is running out of threads to pull on.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/16/magazine/russ...
First of all, weather is a chaotic system. And "good weather" is an extremely narrow band (at any given year try to find two farmers of different crops that both agree that the weather was good). As such, it is much more likely that any climate change (not chaotic on the scales discussed here) will have a negative effect on weather anywhere than the opposite.
Secondly, and more importantly, we are talking about a system that contains huge quantities of thermal energy. This energy will for instance create stronger storms. In general, we don't want to put energy into our climate because of the potential violence that follows from that.
Also, as the saying goes, the rising tide lifts all boats. Even if only a couple of countries are hit hard, we will all feel the effects in trade and immigration. And it looks like a lot of countries might be hit hard.
Even something like the Pandemic, some businesses have learned to thrive. Humans are resilient and the ones who can adapt to change the best will always win out.
EDIT: ignore, parent comment has been clarified.
Typo, or am I misunderstanding something? Reality is the opposite of that:
https://www.weather.gov/cle/seasons
Canada has a similar story, but the Northwest Passage along Canada is much less exciting, and they have much more population on the coast.
Canada benefits from sharing a border with a relatively stable state.
The bulk of our sparsely inhabited areas are Canadian shield, taiga, tundra. The soils are not well suited to agriculture.
The rapid change will also make our ecosystems unstable, and the melting ice is hurting northern infrastructure. We were already cold adapted.
We also don’t get more sunlight, which is governed by the rotation of the earth and not the temperature. One of the hardest parts of winter here is short days, rather than the cold.
Moreover, co2 is an input to photosynthesis. Studies show that projected levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere boost crop yields by 30%. Countries with a lot of agriculture exports stand to become wealthier from this, as well as countries with food insecurity issues.
Especially, in countries where food is plentiful, and customers want organic produce... Why would 30% matter at all?
Organic often yields 19-25% less than non-organic, yet that doesn't make a huge difference.
Mechanizing agriculture in poor countries is likely to yield much higher returns.
But I guess that won't be a problem if your apartment is above the 30th floor.
It's not relevant to the sharp increase in CO2 concentrations we've seen in the past century.
I saw on Google that it gets 6% brighter every 1 Billion years. That's a really long time, and I'm not sure what that even means anyway.
For our current situation, it means nothing.
The grandparent comment was referring to a period 100s of millions of years ago. Given that the sun's intensity has changed significantly on that scale, it's not appropriate to compare our current situation to that of something that happened 100s of millions of years ago.
For what it's worth, the atmospheric CO2 reduction that followed that period was associated with significant cooling and glaciation, which is further evidence that CO2 is a significant factor in determining global climate change. The grandparent comment was very disingenuous.
And in their minds, if they are smart, they will realize that their resale value will be based on the sea level 25 years from their unknown future resale date.
Now does that mean all buyers are factoring it in? Of course not. People are not used to long term thinking. And there are plenty of people who are in denial, and those people will make fine buyers for the short term. But at some point it’s likely the music will stop.
I made a slight edit of the original comment to clarify the point.
Price increase slopes can also change. The price can be going up, yet still be held back by something when it could have gone up even more.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/20/the-1-5c-hysteria/
He has no background in science. Why would you listen to him?
Bill Nye has no background in science, he was a mechanical engineer become actor. Why would you listen to him?
AOC has no background in anything scientific or engineering or public policy... do you get the point yet?
People listen to who they want to believe in.
Don’t pretend that “both sides” don’t do this.
And England was pretty fucking cold in the 17th century. And after a particularly grim winter in 1709, the thaw "brought widespread flooding. This was a major catastrophe for a largely agricultural economy. The crops were ruined, grain prices soared sixfold and many communities were faced with starvation. Per capita gross domestic product dropped by 23%, and did not fully recover for another 10 years, all from a single terrible winter." (quote from the Guardian).
So you are willing to eschew any principals of respecting credentials because you want to agree with a predetermined result? Doesn’t sound at all like science to me.
But to just point at a few short-comings, and do so with blatant disrespect for the context, and then conclude everything it says must be false is what I'd call unscientific. The linked article on wattsupwiththat doesn't even try to provide an alternative explanation. There have been skeptics who came up with reasonable objections and alternatives, but that article isn't one of them. It does falsely represent the 1.5°C threshold issue, though, to the point of manipulative dishonesty.
So, in the case of your neighbor, ask them to explain their anti-climate change beliefs in depth, in a non-confrontational way. "Oh that's interesting, how does that work?". Kind of a 5-why approach. Hopefully as they dig in they realize, "Hey, I don't actually understand this very well." At which point, you point them to strong counterfactuals to their beliefs.
This is the hard part. I don’t have these resources at my fingertips for every issue. When I’m talking to my neighbor Karen I can’t just say, there are articles to back up what I’m saying about climate change, COVID denial, anti vaccines, flat earth, getting microchipped, dangers of wireless energy, homeopathy, lizard people, etc.
This is the crux of the ideological problem we're facing: one "side" might be wrong and one "side" makes shit up and the equivalence has been drawn into the mushy middle's brains that pulling people out of the muck requires probably more time and effort than any one person can manage.
I wonder if there is a reasonable way to short-sell real estate on multi-year timeline (ie beyond shorting REITs with costal exposure).
Headline should be: "World now likely to hit 1.5 °C rise above pre-industrial levels in the next five years".
It's not an attempt to mislead anybody. They're simply leaving out the "above pre-industrial levels" part that they've said so many times they assume it's not necessary. Especially on HN, where the headlines are sharply limited in length.
Well, it mislead me, initially.
Edit: At my location in southern Sweden it seems like this expected land rise compensates for ~70% of the expected sea level rise, but the data seems a bit sketchy. I think more research is needed.
This just completely false. [1]
[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
From my initial comment it is crystal clear I am speaking about The Netherlands.
Besides, sea-level rise is not uniformly distributed, same as temperature variation due to climate change. But overall, yes, the sea level is rising, and it is accelerating globally.
All of that is explained here [1].
[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
What are you trying to say? It hasn't accelerated? Because clearly it must have sped up since before records began, otherwise it would not agree with records and reconstructions from 1000 and 2000 years ago.
Secondly, can you read? From my comment :
> Sea level rise at the Dutch coast has been stable
Your link fails to load here at my Dutch internet connection btw.
edit: climate.gov loads again.
If I owned property in FL, I wouldn't be looking at the long term right now.
Former neighbors tell me these days they've never seen the water so high; it's not just me.
There are elements of your comment that are worth listening to, others give into hyperbole which reduces your credibility.
Which is ironically on brand for the topic being discussed here. I like to think that was intentional.
That you can't understand this simple concept would be funny, except that it impacts those of us that do, and especially our children.
It's quite easy to find flooding maps that show the effects of various sea level changes. It's not so easy to find concrete predictions about when those changes are due.
Perhaps we should stick to the science instead of imagining hypothetical news stories from decades ago and complaining they were silly.
A reminder that predictions of the end of the world are, so far, never true, is welcome.
I agree that we should discuss all possible scenarios. But a lot of the extreme scenarios being parroted are just bonkers, scientifically speaking.
I searched for "uninhabitable", and the comment you're referring to says particular places will be uninhabitable. Not the world. This is true, according to scientific predictions.
I searched for "gun", and the comment you're referring to is saying that we are already locked into a great deal of warming due to lag and knock-on effects. This is also true according to scientific predictions.
I searched for "all is lost" and didn't find anything.
> It looks bleak. There are fewer and fewer options remaining.
> the IPCC reports/estimates excluded arctic methane emissions...which we a) now know are definitely happening and b) are just catastrophic positive feedback loops. The gun seems to have been fired.
> yeah, the n-th order effects like the siberian ice melting away into methane emissions equivalent to 100 years of 2020 CO2 output will just completely obliterate any efforts at mitigating new emissions.
> Question: How do you folks deal with the hopelessness of it all?
> Can we just gradually boost Earth a little farther (on average) from the sun? Or we could blow up the moon, reducing tidal fluctuation, and thus coastal flooding. Plus the debris would reduce sunlight imparting a cooling effect.
Turns out we didn't act, the scales did tip, and it may actually be too late to do anything about it now.
As some people have said, a large amount of coastal land has already been lost to the sea, especially in Florida. This situation is going to take years/decades to really unfold, because, for the most part, it's not like houses will be above ground one day, then under water the next. Instead this will be a gradual process whereby flooding becomes more severe and frequent, yet the ground will be ostensibly "dry" 99% of the time (or underwater only 3 days a year). Then it will be 98% of the time, 97% of the time, etc.
[1] is a link to a McKinsey report on climate change and how it will effect Florida and how lenders should prepare.
[0] https://skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1518
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functio...
Just the same the trend is concerning. Especially if we are willing to consider the hypothetical world where experts planning the world's energy consumption might possibly have ulterior motives. Of course that isn't the case. It isn't even possible. I'm reliably informed that all skeptic views are paid stooges of the oil companies.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Rockefeller+Foundation+clima...
Scientism is infallible. Sure, private researchers funded by the tobacco companies might have fibbed here and there, but that's only because they're greedy capitalists. Government funded research explaining the dangers of cannabis has been 100% accurate. Mass incarceration is a wonderful policy. Scientific experts are qualified not only in their fields of research, but to make wide sweeping social dictates as well.
Why? Who is this for?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/03/1174/
>Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27305500 " "How it started" (From your Article)
Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. :
"How it's Going"
A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/climate/bangladesh-floods... "
Anybody with a brain knows how dumb this is.
Even if a miracle happened and we stopped all human emissions today, current GHGs in the atmosphere will keep trapping more heat for some decades. This is known as climate inertia or climate lag.
Another aspect I don't see frequently mentioned are feedbacks. Again, even if we stopped all emissions today, self sustaining climatic systems will keep adding more heat to the atmosphere (methane, etc) or the sea (Arctic ice melting).
We're currently at aprox 36 billion tonnes of carbon emissions per year [1] only counting fuel burning. It would be a miracle if we could even reach 50% of that in our lifetime, which was aprox the emissions from the 70s.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
[1] https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/frozenground/methane.html
1300 * 10^9 is about 100 years of 2020 CO2 activity.
13 * 10^6 is 100/1000 years of 2020 CO2 activity, I guess.
Did you mean to write "if it keeps speeding up"? Because it is most definitely happening, it is speeding up [1], and it doesn't look likely to slow down.
[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146978/methane-emis...
The NASA article you linked is reputable, but pay attention to what it actually says - it makes no predictions of impact severity.
What the article DOES say: methane is responsible for 1/4 of all global warming, it's increased 9% in the last decade, and 250% in the last 17 decades (avg 15%/year).
But I agree with @gnfargbl, we should use the naturally occurring one that we orbit.
The current most effective designs output 1.25w for every watt of input. And only at a very small scale. It's great that we can finally produce net energy from fusion. But let's not get ahead ourselves here. The issue is not funding, it's lack of brain power. Fusion is an insanely difficult nut to crack and trillions of dollars won't do crack it alone.
I had similar discussions ten years ago with a Cambridge PhD in this field, who was of the opinion that the money spent on Iraq War would have been more than enough to resolve all known fusion reactor related questions (he explicitly did not say the result would be a working reactor).
China is building their own tokamak reactor to compete with ITER. I can't find cost figures, but presumably costs are roughly the same, considering the same size and is intended to "compliment" ITER.
These are still merely "test" reactors. They are experiments that may provide some enough data in 10-20 years such that another, even larger and more expensive test reactor may be constructed. Assuming ITER runs until 2045 and a replacement is started on in 2040. With 10 years of construction time, and 20 more years of testing, that means the next generation is set to complete testing in 2070. And hopefully the results of that generation will give us an idea of how to build a commercially viable fusion reactor.
All the funding in the world isn't going to change the fact that testing is a long-drawn out process, and that it must be performed in a somewhat linear fashion. The results of the previous experiments inform the next generation. And we are still a few generations away from commercial viability.
I do want to point out that I'm a strong advocate for fusion research. I just don't see it as a viable solution to global warming, regardless of how much we fund it, because we don't even know what a commercially viable reactor even looks like yet, much less be able to scale the technology out to the point that it will put a dent in CO2 emissions.
You and I both agree fusion isn’t likely to be the solution to global warming, but I do think it could be if people wanted it to be. (I also think nobody with the money to spend really cares that much about fusion, and that PV is so absurdly cheap this is unlikely to change).
That said, I don't think we should count on fusion to get us out of this when renewables are a good-enough solution that's available now and they're cheap. (If storage is an issue, perhaps that means we should be investing in long-distance transmission lines so we can, for instance, power North America at night using solar panels in the Sahara.)
Everyone (especially the environmental activists) need to come to the realization that we've long passed the point where we have the luxury of being picky over what we replace our fossil fuel (carbon emitting) energy sources with.
While everyone has been arguing about hydroelectric versus nuclear fission versus truly renewable sources versus "just wait for fusion", the energy consumption of humanity has been exponentially growing and satisfying that desire primarily with carbon emitting sources of power.
All options need to be on the table. Mandate solar panels on roofs, mandate battery storage in homes, build utility scale PV and solar thermal plants where it makes sense, build wind farms where it makes sense, get over our fear of fission and build many small, yet passively safe nuclear fission plants and the necessary fuel recycling facilities to reduce the need for spent fuel storage.
Tell anyone who thinks that renewable power sources look ugly to shove it.
Rather than focusing our collective energies on developing more energy generation tech, pivot to figuring out how to sink carbon we've already emitted and use existing generation solutions until the problem is controlled. Then start looking at the future again and offline whatever is obsoleted.
I wrote a blog about it a couple years ago. Basically, we needed to stop using coal years ago
http://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal-with-c...
Google tried to make renewable land cheaper than coal in 2007
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2014/11/30/why-...
We could have bought ourselves another decade by dealing with coal sooner
Coal is extremely bad for CO2 emissions, and we already have options
It seems many of the options are still small scale experiments or face energy storage issues... or have social issues like nuclear.
The gun seems to have been fired.
That said I've learned the science can change rapidly, so I'm all ears if the position of the majority of climate scientists has shifted.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/15/climate-...
This is not new and is getting worse.
In 2010, Russian wildfires severely impacted the worldwide price of grain which (some people argue) helped trigger the Arab spring revolts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/reports/201...
It would be interesting to see the list of all feedbacks and estimated significance.
There's also the wildcard of algae evolution. Since there are quadrillions of them, evolution happens very quickly so changes in ocean acidification and temperature could substantially change how efficiently they work. They could get better or worse.