Is fatalism (in an all too unfortunately literal sense) all we have left?
When an official says "unless governments credibly commit to immediate, massive decreases in emissions, we're screwed," it just amounts to "we're screwed."
Encouraging and striving for some radical new technological innovation is all we can do.
No. We just cannot sustain panic continuously. I am confident that eventually a mix of decarbonization, mitigation of climate change effects, and some sort of geoengineering will avoid any apocalypse.
The point is that by all measures decarbonization isn't happening. Mitigations are a critical part of any solution, but expensive and hacky. And geoengineering is exactly the kind of radical new technology we might need, but the key point is that it doesn't exist right now and might not ever be practical.
Decarbonization is happening/starting to happen - I actually see it taking off. It is an S-curve, though, so right now it looks tiny, but that will change.
Decarbonization needs to sequester it as fast—actually, much faster—than we’ve been taking it out. 75 million barrels per day. IMO that is not attainable.
We need to turn the experience of daily life into something far worse than the most draconian COVID lockdowns to even put a dent in this problem. Forever.
This is my viewpoint as well. People are all talk about "should be doing" but when it comes down to "alright, you're going to have to sacrifice some comfort" all action ceases.
I don't think this is so much people, as corporations and the politicians they own. Even economic stagnation is seen as abhorrent, when in fact we will have to undergo economic shrinkage to even contain the problem. The entire world economy will have to start shrinking for a few decades while we replace all fossil fuels with other things, and then we can try to get back to growth.
But this is absolutely not acceptable in any mainstream economic discussion, even from the left, and absolutely counter to the very definition of a for-profit corporation.
Even slowing down growth is seen as 'too risky', while the world burns. Better we buy new iPhones every month to help propel the economy.
Not saying it's a good idea, but geoengineering is currently both technically and economically feasible. It would be easy for e.g. the United States to reduce the total incoming sunlight by enough to counteract global warming. The issue is that doing so will have widespread unknown issues on the planet.
For example- launching enough thin, reflective mylar film to the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point to reduce incoming solar radiation by ~0.1% would take about 500 Falcon Heavy launches (highest capacity rocket currently available). This would take several years and around $100 billion. Once Starship is ready and in use, this would go way down.
$100 billion and several years is practically nothing for the US, China, or one of several other countries with the capability to do this.
Obvious downsides include denying the use of the L1 Lagrange point to human use permanently, eventual degradation of the sun shield as solar wind pushes pieces of film out of place, and of course possible mass famine and plant die-off due to lower solar radiation.
Teller, E., Wood, L., & Hyde, R. (1996). Global warming and ice ages: I. Prospects for physics-based modulation of global change (No. UCRL-JC--128715). Lawrence Livermore National Lab..
Agreed, but I quit saying as much, as often here you are met with disdain for saying such things, and that you are creating distractions. TBF I do see both sides - by saying 'ah we'll figure it out' it makes it seem like it's not a huge issue(it is). But I do think we will figure it out, even if it means vaporizing the sky to block the sun while carbon increases.
The problem lies much more in the realm of politics, rather than technology and science. We opted to wage pointless wars instead of modernizing the energy mix.
There are also instances when politicians do want to change something, but their cluelessness shows - solar freakin' roadways anyone?
It’s worth pointing out that the US Military is one of the most prolific polluters in the world, and while an army at peace isn’t a totally idle thing, active deployment drives up consumption massively. Our pointless wars have absolutely contributed to global warming, although I wouldn’t pin the majority of the blame on them.
I think the military comparison is apt, because massive military spending is seen as table stakes for being a “serious” politician in the US, whereas massive GHG reduction spending is seen as an automatic disqualifier and makes you a silly believer in the “green dream or whatever”.
It has to be in the US due to FPTP voting. That's how you build a coalition. Getting Republicans on your side won't do any good because they don't vote in your primary.
Don't even get me started on ecologists complaining about nuclear power for the last 50 years at least. These people should be punished for all the time and energy they wasted.
It's literally the best thing we have going for us, even now. In terms of energy output (TW/h to grid over lifespan) for energy input (mining, refinement, construction, cooling), it's something like 10x both solar and wind.
We would need to do fuel reprocessing to manage the waste output and also need to enter serial production of reactors so they could all stop being one-off designs that take forever and literally billions of dollars to certify. Build them where cooling water is available and build wind and solar where practical anywhere else.
If fusion ends up working out and/or something better comes along, switch to building that over nuclear fission plants whenever that time comes and sunset the fission plants at the end of their lives. Waiting for a more convenient answer is no excuse for inaction today.
We're going to need more power capacity that we have today, because we'll also have to be switching all transportation and manufacturing to electrical sources as well. Shipping is either going to need vessels with nuclear power, or that burn ammonia or hydrogen. One of the only things that we don't have any decent known answers for is what to run airplanes off of. Maybe they keep burning carbon fuels and we explicitly build carbon scrubbers for what we know they produce.
Couldn't part (even a large part) of that "change-the-entire-economy thing" be weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels? I don't see how they are incompatible. Sometimes the correct solution has more than one benefit.
Maybe, but you never actually connected the two things beyond cryptic innuendo. Your link doesn’t related to actual climate change legislation that is under discussion today. It’s a distraction made for us to focus on the partisan aspects rather than the actual proposals and solutions.
The Green New Deal is an “actual proposal.” It was an actual bill that was submitted. You could just read it and see that it was a laundry list of economic interventions that liberals have always wanted, mostly unrelated to climate change.
I understand that many Democrats purport you support the Green New Deal while advancing much more moderate proposals. Democrats think that “making a big opening bid” and paring it back is a way to anchor expectations. Except how this reads to non-Democrats is that “socialist takeover of the economy in the name of climate change is the ultimate goal,” and subsequent moderate measures are just seen as stepping stones toward that end.
It’s like leading with “Defund the Police” and trying to backfill with moderate police reform proposals. It’s a way to keep activists engaged, but it just makes moderates distrustful off your true intentions.
There are two parties in the USA. One party has acknowledged climate change and proposed solutions (even though the solutions aren’t perfect). The other party denies climate change exists and has presented no plans to combat it.
An entire political party not providing a single solution for society’s largest ongoing problem is what should make moderates distrustful.
Actually proposing solutions opens one up to the types of attacks you constantly make on this site, that’s the price to pay for taking threats seriously and actually trying to solve problems. You can deflect to other topics, but in the end, no amount of wordsmithing changes that fact.
Republicans (well, honestly, every party) had decades to come up with their own sane climate policy. They came up with a president that called climate change a Chinese hoax. Not that I'm terribly fond of AOC, but I'd pick AOC over Republicans every time if I get to choose.
>Is fatalism (in an all too unfortunately literal sense) all we have left?
If you wish to keep 'the world as we know it'? Yes, that ship has sailed. What we're fighting for now is the degree to which the world we know will be destroyed.
I think the wording gives it away. "Unless government credibly commit to..." Not "unless governments do". Just if they "credibly commit to doing". They still aren't thinking in terms of actually doing things, just in terms of committing to do them.
Talk != action, not even if the talk is "credible". You think this is an existential problem? Great. Start doing something. Don't tell me what you're going to do, do it.
Keep in mind, it's not pass/fail. 2.7 is different from 2.8 is different from 2.9, etc. They're all bad, sure, even terrible, but limiting it _at all_ could make the difference for literal millions of people.
Fatalism leads to giving up, which leads to us hitting all those higher numbers, which leads to an unnecessary amount of extra suffering.
IPCC thinks that “tipping points” leading to positive feedback loops are highly unlikely.
In general, you should rather expect negative feedback loops. For example, the warming response to increased CO2 emission is logarithmic, meaning that the more CO2 you emit, the weaker effect additional effect has, and quite significantly so. Of course, our problem is that we are emitting so much, and our emissions grow so fast, that this diminishing effect is of little consolation. The point is, negative feedback loops are much more likely than positive ones.
There are some pretty clearly known positive feedback loops as well - mainly that ice has much higher albedo than water, and that ice covered areas that today are net emitters of heat will become net absorbers if they lose more ice. Specifically Greenland is known to already have become a net absorber, meaning that there is no way nkw to prevent the eventual permanent melting of all of Greenland's ice.
Those are already accounted for in the 2.7C etc estimates, though. The CO2 forcing just accounts for 0.5C IIRC of the warming, with known positive feedbacks (most notably water vapor, but also albedo etc) driving the rest.
The question becomes, are unknown feedbacks more likely to be positive or negative? I'd lean toward negative, which is what most experts think, but definitely an unknown.
I feel like we could go a long way toward this through individual choice. You can just y'know, refuse to help ruining our planet. I bet for most people on this forum that's absolutely a practical choice but the money is too good to worry about that.
I don't think that's the best solution, but at least it's one I can personally enact, and if deontologically expanded it does lead to solving the problem. Don't play negative or zero sum games and ostracize those that do.
> You can just y'know, refuse to help ruining our planet.
People don't like that. A friend of mine likes driving his car, and does so a lot to go places on the weekend and stuff. He'd like to see the government mandate reduced car usage. I've asked him: you're free not to use your car, why do you still use it if you believe it would be best if you didn't? Because he likes it and if it's not made into law, he won't do what he thinks is best.
"We should outlaw personal air travel, but until that has happened, I'm going to fly around the globe" is what I see in far too many proponents of those rules.
I have no idea what goes on in their head, it's completely alien to me.
I know exactly what goes on in their head. They could abstain from things they like and make their lives more miserable, but it has absolutely zero impact unless millions of others also do the same. And there's no way the masses are doing that voluntarily. (See also how difficult it is to get people to put masks on, distance, take vaccines, etc. with or without mandates; now try get people to voluntarily give up property and hobbies they enjoy)
Individual action just isn't enough. Hell, you could wipe my entire country of about 5 million people, and the impact on global CO2 output is on par with the average annual increase in CO2 output over the past two decades. A year or two later, the world would be outputting more CO2 than it did before our genocide.
Yeah, I just don't understand that line of thought. Of course, each individual's actions are meaningless, but they're wouldn't be the only ones who do it.
If only the voters of the green party in Germany would stop/sharply reduce flying, that would be ~10% of Germans (~16% projected votes, ~70-75% citizens are voting).
Since they do fly more than the average person [1][2][3], and since they are more likely to be part of the upper class which tends to contribute more per capita, the impact would be even larger. They could single handedly massive reduce the pollution from air travel just by changing their own habits. Yet they don't, keep on flying at higher levels than other groups while demanding legislation to stop them.
It's like a cliche movie killer who asks to be stopped.
Look at vegans who are vegan for moral reasons. They don't say "we shouldn't eat animals, and the state should outlaw it, but until no one is allowed to eat animals, I'll have a steak every day". They start by themselves and then try to convince others and (sometimes) call for legislation.
"Since my influence as an individual is meaningless, I'll continue to be (an outsized) part of the problem instead of being part of the solution" is just completely alien to me, I literally don't understand the reasoning behind it. Would they own slaves if it wasn't outlawed because one slave more or less doesn't change the big picture?
There are huge industries pumping money into making sure this doesn't happen. Modern advertising is one of the biggest industries on the planet, and it's only goal is to get people to consume more. One of the means of doing this is specifically convincing people that global warming is not that risky.
Not to mention, many behaviors are in fact impractical. The vast majority of people can't afford equipment and clothes that can last a few decades, as used to be the norm, for example. In much of the west, responsibly grown sustainable food is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than fast food.
Predictions of specific events at a specific date are most often stupid. What we know is that the global average temperature is trending upwards, that Greenland is on the way to losing its ice sheet, and that some large ice sheets are sliding into the sea in Antarctica. It is certain at this point that Greenland will be ice free and that there won’t be any glacier left in Europe, but putting a specific date is foolish.
Have you been to Glacier Park? I suggest you go there and take a tour. Especially look at the pictures of what the glaciers used to look like, and then look at the real glaciers now. Hard to argue against global warming then.
The pictures of what they used to look like are 50-100 years old, not 20,000. It's obvious from the rate of shrinking that they have not been shrinking at that pace since the last ice age.
It's interesting that you chose that link to illustrate your point. The only thing Glacier NP did wrong was being overly-pessimistic. But anyone that has been to Glacier in, say, 2010 or prior can visit today and see quite visibly noticeable differences. I'm hardly qualified to give even a half-assed prediction, but it wouldn't surprise me much if it turns out that Glacier NP was just 10 years off in their prediction, and I certainly wouldn't expect to see much in the way of glaciers in 2040.
Glacier NP isn't the only place that I've looked up and wondered, "wasn't that a lot bigger when we were here ten years ago?", either.
Honestly, what would change your mind? Really? Like if the oceans were literally boiling and you could be outside without a thermal suit, would you still be saying it was just a little spike? At what point would you say, "we need to do something"?
We tend to low-ball the predictions from the models for political reasons and not to sound too alarmist, but we get more and more data showing that the numbers we use are severely underestimated. 1.5°C was always a pipe dream, but it looks like even 2°C or 2.5°C are all but inevitable, just because of the stuff that’s already in the atmosphere.
This - the tipping point where a glacier melt is sped up, and then exposes peat and releases more co2 etc etc - there are so many little tipping points that we just don't know about. Maybe easy alone would have a minor impact, but cumulatively the impacts may be huge.
A lot will also depend on the state of society in general when the things get tough, will extreme heat or extreme rain come during a war, or economic downturn, or in a pandemic?
> Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (130 °F). The theoretical limit to human survival for more than a few hours in the shade, even with unlimited water, is 35 °C (95 °F) – theoretically equivalent to a heat index of 70 °C (160 °F), though the heat index does not go that high.
> A heat wave in August 2015 saw temperatures of 48.6 °C (119.5 °F) and a dew point of 29.5 °C (85.1 °F) at Samawah, Iraq, and 114.8 °F (46.0 °C) with a dew point of 89.6 °F (32.0 °C) in Bandar-e Mahshahr, Iran. This implied wet-bulb temperatures of about 33.5 °C (92.3 °F) and 34.7 °C (94.5 °F) respectively. The government urged residents to stay out of the sun and drink plenty of water.
Hit 35 °C wet bulb somewhere heavily populated like Bangladesh for a day and you're looking at significant casualties.
2.7°C is the world wide average. It will be a lot more in places.
This would mean 200 million refugees compared to 44 million refugees that we can expect when we manage to pull of a climate-friendly scenario (which looks rather unlikely at the moment).(1)
I suggest you have a look at the sixth IPCC assessment report released in August https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/ especially chapter 12 of the full report.
It's a good metric to give because the whole concept of climate refugees seems to be something people often haven't even considered. We seem to have grown so used to this modern sedentary lifestyle that we forget that migration is what humans do, what we have adapted to do, when conditions become inhospitable. Especially if the alternative is to give up and die.
I think that anyone that lives in Europe has already considered this, especially after the waves of "Syrian refugees". People in North America may not think about it too much as crossing the Atlantic is a bit more involved than crossing the Mediterranean sea.
As far as North America goes, while I can't speak for Canada, I know the US is wholly unprepared for massive migration from other regions. Look at how we view immigrants right now. The last administration's brand was "build a wall and keep them out". These are just the people who are running from oppressive governments or cartels - when global climate change makes the equatorial regions less and less inhabitable from pure heat, apocalyptic storms, desertification, severe humidity, etc. all of Central America is headed northward towards the US and Canada, or south towards Argentina and southern Chile.
Admittedly, we're only going to be dealing with 550 million people being added to our combined 360 million people, as compared to Northern Asia and Europe, which will be dealing with literally the rest of the human species.
The first wave is going to be all the pacific islanders looking to move when the fish stocks collapse in the 2050s to places like China, Japan, and Australia (while it hasn't completely overheated yet).
The next two centuries are going to suck unless we actually do something about it. Presumably after that we'll have taken so much of a beating that some new equilibrium will have been achieved.
A small fraction of that number of refugees is bringing several European and American democracies to their knees. The problem is not the migrants, but how they are used to prop up fascistic and illiberal agenda. Regardless of the other effects of climate change, this in itself could cause the collapse of a few countries, which is kind of a big deal.
Right, but the migrant waves linked with the current instability are just a couple of percents of the overall population here. That is far below real integration issues (which do currently exist for the 2nd and 3rd generations of earlier migrant waves).
More extreme events, more frequently, causing more damage both in economic and human terms, mostly. Also, some places uninhabitable around South and South-East Asia, leading to lots of millions of refugees.
It is very difficult to quantify accurately, because this is unprecedented in the history of the planet, never mind the history of the human race.
If we generously assume the models which do not have a good record of maching actual data are correct, 2.7C is not remotely catastrophic by the IPCC's own analysis. Average temperature has been up by much more than that at times in the last few thousand years.
A slow, steady increase over millennia of a couple degrees Celsius is fine and possibly even on net good (more agriculture in the northern parts of the globe, which contain a lot of land).
The same increase over a century is disastrous, because infrastructure and capital doesn't change or move nearly so rapidly.
Yes most people on hn will not experience much issues through climate change the other 100million and more will.
They will loose land, health, money etc.
People whoms homes will be burned etc.
We will experience future animal diversity reduction. This is something very depressing but depending in the Person how much you care for such things.
Also we will experience more dramatic Events as well. Like droights and lots of rain. The Impact on you might range from 'not leaving my flat today' to 'I lost everything'. Your surroundings will slowly change. Woods will start looking different.
And still we are not very certain about all those things. It could get much faster much worse through tipping points.
It also forces future generations to already plan their future accordingly: they will know that they will experience an increase of sealevel of 60cm and more.
> Average temperature has been up by much more than that at times in the last few thousand years.
That is simply not true. Global average temperature has been stable for 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age. It is that long-term stability that made the rise of human civilization possible.
Yes, he didn't predict details like the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in 1991. "Scenario C" was a rapid emissions tapering scenario, not a global lower bound for possible future temperatures. But if it makes you feel better, if you add the more recent data going up to 2020, it still quite closely tracks Scenario B.
Your objection was that his prediction was "often below". You can see that a big part of this is 1991-1995, as his volcano guess was a few years late.
This chart is to the same scale as in the realclimate link. As of 2020, we're about 0.1 to 0.2 degrees below the Scenario B forecast, at +1 instead of ~+1.15.
Your new chart overlays all ten years for each decade over each other with the same color. This is great for obscuring, but not much else. Is there a reason you don't like the more legible chart I posted?
Looking again at your original link, Hansen's scenario B predicts a ~1.45 deg increase from 1988. So, in answer to your question, not that.
The realclimate.org graph (https://www.realclimate.org/images/Hansen88_forc.jpg) shows B as off the chart by 2020, but 1988 is around .2 and 2015 is around 1.45. Extending another 5 years, should be about 1.45 deg C difference by 2020.
The NASA chart shows a rise of about .7 during that time.
It's an interesting hack for the electoral college, certainly. The state is still going to be there, build an artificial island and be the only person left on the island and you get yourself 3 electoral votes and a personal rep and two senators.
The models do actually have a very good record of matching the actual data. The way that propagandists convince you they don't is by cherry picking model runs with higher co2 levels and showing a discrepancy between those model runs and reality.
If you instead only look at model runs with co2 levels close to reality you find that the models have done an amazing job of predicting current warming levels. 50 years more than one study showed 1C of warming by 2020 if co2 levels were around 420. Which is exactly spot on to where we are.
Climate modeling predictions are some of the most stunningly accurate predictions in the history of earth science and someone should have gotten a Nobel for it by now.
Also temps are higher right now at 1C of warming than they have been in 100,000 years. I'm not aware of any scientists predicting 2.7C of warming as manageable. Society may not collapse, but the amount of degradation of agriculture and biodiversity would be one of the worst tragedies in human history.
Well, 2.7 from here would be likely not a good thing.
That said, why should we generously assume the models are correct? Because, despite the hundreds of lines of hand-waving in this topic, they have not proved to be correct.
There is a solution, it's called nuclear power. When will the perceived risk of nuclear power be overtaken by the risks of global warming? Why does it seem like we, as a society, are not capable of making grown-up assessments of this issue?
That's A solution, but it's not like energy plants are the only source of CO2. They also take many billions to create and many many years, need rare materials that can also be turned into weapons, and need to be located near some large body of water for cooling. It's not like you can just roll that out to the entire world in time even if you started now.
We also need to electrify everything that can be, and use fuel cells for what can not.
The capital issue really is political, as not doing it will cost way more in the long run. Pricing adequately carbon emissions would be a first step.
Nuclear plants don’t need rare materials, and the waste in current designs cannot be used in a nuclear bomb (well, they could be used in a dirty bomb, but then there are loads of cheap as chips chemicals that are much better for this use).
It is true that it is too late now to rely only on that. We still need all the tools we have, and we should build as much reactors as we can, and as much wind turbines (and solar panels where it makes sense) as we can. We are not in a situation where we can prioritise one or the other, otherwise we end up with gas and coal, like in Germany.
We need a price on carbon emissions. Probably coupled with subsidies on a per kwh basis for carbon free energy. Different energy sources will be appropriate in different markets. Mandating specific technologies is going to end up being wasteful and inefficient.
Wind and solar can get you very far and are significantly cheaper and easier than nuclear, so it only makes sense that we ramp that up to 50%+ of the energy mix immediately, with power lines and natural gas peaker plants in place to smooth out temporal availability.
I'm not discounting nuclear and see its value for base load power, and I think anti-nuclear energy people are puritanical idiots and definitely do not want to vote for anyone who is against nuclear, but I get the sneaking suspicion that nuclear power is often mentioned as a way to misdirect away from wind and solar for political reasons which is a shame since these technologies are such easy wins that can be implemented right now.
Okay grownup, assess this. How do we credibly maintain that we can properly maintain stored wastes for centuries, in order to prevent some sort of ecological cataclysm? This is a particularly sensitive question in light of the fact that the overall conversation we are having is concerned with preserving society as we know it?
I'm not against nuclear power. But if we are to be adult about it, we need to be clear about the risks (and not pretend that there is a risk in assuming the same type of society in 1500 years). We also need to be clear what it means to take this risk if all we are solving is a 'problem' that our best efforts at modelling CAN NOT REPLICATE, and evidence for which only exist if one cherry-picks the dates.
Construction on a new reactor, Flamanville 3, began on 4 December 2007.[4] The new unit is an Areva European Pressurized Reactor type and is planned to have a nameplate capacity of 1,650 MWe. EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[4] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[5] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.
35%+ of the US population won't even get vaccinated to save their own lives. The majority of people aren't willing to sacrifice their own standard of living at all to help. 97.8% of cars sold in the US are gasoline-powered even though people could afford to buy EVs. Nearly every house built today is not at passivhaus standard, and probably not a single apartment building.
And even if the US completely changed... there's oil and coal distributed fairly evenly across the whole world. Even if the USA used all its power, it couldn't stop the rest of the world from exploiting every last drop of oil and last chunk of coal. Tell me where I'm wrong, what could any group do to stop every drop of oil in the middle east and Nigeria from being pulled out?
It would help to avoid thinking on the individual level and more so on the system level of what we could do to encourage certain behaviors?
For example, Netherlands was able to completely revolutionize their cities and optimize them for bike travel. Now biking is the main mode of transportation.
A lot of the changes we want to see individuals do, the system discourages it or makes it hard to do those changes.
Electric cars have dubious benefit for the environment as well, so I don't think using that as a solution is fair.
EVs are just the tiniest bit better than gasoline engines for the environment, yet everyone pretends like the solve the problem because they don't want to be inconvenienced.
If you want to make a dent in the problem you need useful mass transit everywhere. Useful is more important than everywhere - useful will get people out of their cars, while everywhere gets people driving by and ignoring it because when they last looked it wasn't useful. (best to assume once every 5 years unless someone else finds it useful and raves about it)
They won't happen in the US. Seattle has 89% single-house zoning. We just invested $54 billion in a transit system which can never carry the majority of the metro-area commuters even when it finishes in thirty years. It's too late and a dollar short.
EVs are way better for the environment than gas cars while asking so little from the user. And we still won't make this tiny sacrifice.
No one thing is. The US doesn't have the infrastructure for effective mass transit. We've shown to be incapable of running large projects: it costs far more and takes longer for projects we do -- like Sound Transit 3 or second avenue subway -- and many are given up -- CA HSR.
If your plan is "US moves the population into apartments and builds mass transit for all" then you have no plan.
There are examples of countries getting their shit together and actually expanding mass transit.
If your plan is "Let's make everyone drive EVs" you also did nothing, and fucked over poor countries while doing that.
If we're going to do something, we need to do it right, which means:
1. Listen to climate scientists about what's the best way to mitigate as much as we can.
2. Mobilize every single branch of the government to respond to the realities of climate change.
3. Make the hard decisions and push companies and cities to follow them. We've done this before with the new deal. It's not hard to imagine that level of mobilization.
4. THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE: Plan how you're going to minimize damages that we can't prevent, and minimize damages that are going to be caused by this "move fast" approach. Keep people on your side while making these changes. These changes should come with a quality of life improvement for most Americans.
It's important to remember, climate change was NEVER an individual failing. It was systemic ignorance and failure. Which means the response to it needs to involve as many, or more gears that climate change denial did.
> There's not the will. Literally 40%+ of voters are completely opposed.
If this is a reference to either party, people who identify with either party all actually are suffering under the status quo, and would be fine with making changes if the changes also take them into account and increase their QoL.
So no, I disagree, the divide is barely there and has been fabricated.
I'm an anarchist, I've had successful conversations with essentially everyone on every side you can imagine. The problems are the same. Just that US has allowed media to drive a "us vs them" mentality.
What makes you think the US would "use all its power" to prevent oil and coal from being extracted and used? The US government is the largest single polluter in the world. Everywhere there is waste and pollution, there is the approval of a government.
People will do what is economical for them personally. Effectively no one would pull carbon from the ground if they could get cheaper energy from somewhere else. The answer is to develop the technology to produce that energy and give it away if that is what it takes to undercut the fossil fuels.
Saudis can profitably pull oil out of the ground at ~$10/bbl. We have some oil "replacements" which could be cheaper than the current price of $70/bbl. We're not even close to $15/bbl equivalent.
> 35%+ of the US population won't even get vaccinated to save their own lives.
Only 26% of eligible Americans are unvaccinated, and that number is still shrinking every day. Yes, there is a depressing number of hardcore anti-vaxxers, but it's a much smaller minority than 35% of the population.
> there is a depressing number of hardcore anti-vaxxers
According to polls, one-third of the unvaccinated say they would get the shot if they were given time off work to deal with the symptoms. That suggests their "vaccine refusal" is related to their precarious economic circumstances and isn't a political stance. That brings the number of hardcore vaxxers down even further, to around 17%. This is probably still an overestimate, since some proportion of this population are minors and not making their own medical decisions, or may have other non-political reasons.
I agree we are likely spiraling toward our collective demise, but there are still some ways to try to attack the problem. One thing we can do is shift the economics of energy production by increasing research funding for alternatives. I would argue cost effectiveness of modern panels is the real reason solar installations are becoming more common. They are a solid investment for individual homeowners. We need better storage and transmission technologies to lower the remaining barriers to running a grid on renewables.
Once renewables become the most cost effective option, people will switch regardless of their politics or location.
I would argue the huge investments needed to conduct modern fossil fuel exploration and get the remaining (and least accessible) material from the ground may become unjustifiable if demand drops sufficiently.
If the stimulus checks had been tied to vaccination status we would be at 99%. The government asking the populace to "Please do the right thing" isn't an effective strategy. Who would have thought?
Don't think EV is going to help much. On the individual level anything you would do is miniscule. The change has to come from politicians, so its all about voting.
I agree with you, but I think it shows the level of commitment from the population is so low that we aren't willing to prioritize the issue when voting. WA even shot down multiple carbon-tax-like initiatives.
> won't even get vaccinated to save their own lives
See, that kind of hyperbole makes me question the whole climate change narrative. There's virtually 0 chance that Covid is going to kill me. I'm vaccinated because I don't like getting sick even if I don't die at the end of it, but Covid is actually very mild. When the same people who treat it like the bubonic plague are always the ones who are telling me that the world is going to end in 10 years unless I vote to pay higher taxes, I'm inclined to discount them.
The lyrics of The Clash' London Calling [1] come to mind, especially the chorus and the last verse. Ton understand the chorus you need to realise they wrote this in 1979 when there was another climate-related disaster scenario. The title London Calling refers to the call sign for the BBS news broadcast, the last verse lets the listener know that some of what was said might be true.
Chorus:
The ice age is coming, the sun's zoomin' in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growin' thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
Cause London is drownin', I, live by the river
Verse 3:
(London calling), yes, I was there, too
And ya' know what they said? Well, some of it was true!
(London calling) at the top of the dial
And after all this, won't you give me a smile?
(London calling)
If The Clash is not your thing, maybe R.E.M.'s It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) fits the bill. Both tracks can be seen as dealing with the same subject matter and come to the same conclusion - The Clash wants you to give them a smile, R.E.M. feels fine.
In other words, stop it with the panic porn. Learn to adapt to the warmer climate as humans have done before, just like they adapted to an ice age where large parts of the continents were ice-covered. Use your head when confronted with statements of doom, check historical records and you'll quickly find there were worse droughts and more heatwaves about a century ago - which led to the Dust Bowl [3].
Take the ravages of the dust bowl as an example and imagine they had had access to the current crop of social networks and networking technology back then. There would have been similar predictions of doom - crops were failing, anf not just in the USA. Would those predictions have been justified given the development of the weather in the decades past the 40's? Clearly not.
What makes the current predictions of doom different from earlier ones? Is it the climate modelling which is used as base? Feed those models with (real - not 'corrected') data from before the dust bowl and see what they make of the next century.
Especially considering the narrow interpretation the op is using for both songs. It's amazing how easily people will gaslight themselves.
> The lyrics reflect the concern felt by Strummer about world events with the reference to "a nuclear error" – the incident at Three Mile Island, which occurred earlier in 1979. Joe Strummer has said: "We felt that we were struggling about to slip down a slope or something, grasping with our fingernails. And there was no one there to help us."
> The line "London is drowning / And I live by the river" comes from concerns that if the River Thames flooded, most of central London would drown, something that led to the construction of the Thames Barrier.[1][5] Strummer's concern for police brutality is evident through the lines "We ain't got no swing / Except for the ring of that truncheon thing" as the Metropolitan Police at the time had a truncheon as standard issued equipment. Social criticism also features through references to the effects of casual drug taking: "We ain't got no high / Except for that one with the yellowy eyes".
> The lyrics also reflect desperation of the band's situation in 1979 struggling with high debt, without management and arguing with their record label over whether the London Calling album should be a single or double album. The lines referring to "Now don't look to us / Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust" reflects the concerns of the band over
its situation after the punk rock boom in England had ended in 1977.
Michael Stipe isn't exactly fond of explaining the meaning behind the lyrics of many of his songs but I somehow doubt the song was made to ease the concern of a real future climate catastrophe.
That is the Wikipedia explanation, written by some random Wikipedia editor. If you want more explanations - which are just as subjective - there are plenty of 'Song meanings' sites around [1] where people can have their say without being edit-warred into oblivion by the Keepers of The Page at Wikipedia.
I linked to the Wikipedia page as a starting point for those who do not know the song. It is not meant to be an endorsement of the explanation of the lyrics' meaning. Have a look at the edit history for that page, it is quite lively.
I think you are on to something though with respect to linking to Wikipedia, the time has probably come to stop linking to any potentially polarised/polarising page. I tend to link to Wikipedia out of habit and also laziness but it has lost whatever semblance of neutrality it had. Allmusic [1] has a page on the song but it it quite bland. Rolling Stone claims the song was originally called "Ice Age" and the lyrics are essentially a radio broadcast from a dystopian future that was easy to envision at that point in time [2] - which is the reason the current crop of panic porn reminds me of this track.
Read it again, you seem to have missed the point. Those "few lines from The Clash" are used to discredit what I call panic porn, they do not target an entire scientific area of study. Also notice that The Clash was proclaiming the ice age is coming, referring to the then-current ice age scare.
The scientific method can not work when extremes are used to attract attention, this eventually has the opposite effect of numbing the populace to yet another dire prediction of the coming collapse.
It is disheartening to see how (some?) people at this forum are wont to discredit anyone who does not follow the current narrative. This is neither rational nor objective, it is emotional and subjective.
I'd encourage anyone to read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling to get a sense of whether most scientists were promoting an "ice age scare" in the 1970s. Spoiler alert: nope.
It doesn't take all that many people who speak from a point of (real or perceived) authority to whip up a scare. Also, most scientists thought continental drift was a hoax [1] - that did not make it less true.
Upvote. One of the many disconnects in climate is around measurable day to day impacts both individually and on aggregate.
The same UN report that points to high-C temperature increases claims in economic terms only a smaller rate of GDP growth for a high-C world, compared to GDP growth for a stable world. That means we may well have both climate disaster AND flying cars and disease and aging elimination and all the benefits that "progress" makes available, now not just from traditional tech but acceleration in energy and biology development as well.
If that is true, then even a dramatic rise in episodic disasters just becomes a cost of doing business. I don't think that's true, but I also don't think we are headed for population crash. And I would be very, very, very surprised to see e.g. travel rationing.
Much much more work to do on localized analysis and narrative.
Let's be very clear. Every mitigation strategy discussed will have massive downward pressure on the population. You don't get to make it harder/more expensive/impossible to generate food and energy and also have the same amount of people.
True but not in these timeframes. With all respect, willing to take the (way way) over in the scenario parent describes- total global population of 1-2B in 50 years.
In 200 years? Yeah, dramatically reduced counts of humans is possible.
But in 50 years- global population will be greater than it is now.
Every major world government, even the supposedly good/professional ones, lied about various things both big and small, and engaged in different types of ass-preserving coverups.
Not just the government, but the people they govern. Look how many people have been unwilling to do even the most simple intervention - face masks. It's going to be hard to get these types of laggards to accept the changes we need to make so cut down on carbon pollution.
That's true and a good point I kind of erased from my memory. There was a lot of pushback from the medical establishment around masks at the beginning here in Canada as well. That was extremely frustrating to witness.
This problem is analogous to the conflicting messaging about climate change that's been coming from politicians, industry, media, over the last couple of decades.
Did we not have vaccines operational and distributed on a large scale in record time? Shows what we can do to solve crises - might not all be government action, but does that matter?
Recent I was having a "discussion" with an anti-vaxxer (though they don't like that term since it's not really a vaccine, according to them). They claim that "studies" prove that mRNA drugs cause cancer in almost all cases. So I responded that this was great news since it means almost everyone will die which will solve the Covid crisis, over-population, and the dumping of gases from the burning of fossil fuels into the atmosphere. Killing 3 birds with 1 stone! They were not amused.
> (though they don't like that term since it's not really a vaccine, according to them)
To be fair, compared to the other vaccines that we're used to (except for the flu shot), this vaccine appears really weak. I wonder if giving it another name (immunity booster?) would have helped.
It's more effective than most vaccines, but most vaccines are for relatively rare diseases (due to near-universal vaccination for decades). The pertussis vaccine is only about 80% effective against contracting pertussis, but, nearly nobody is exposed to pertussis EVER, versus nearly everyone being exposed to the flu (or to covid) -- usually several times.
Due to universal administration over years. The polio vaccine is particularly an awful one, with only about 90% effectiveness (matching the covid vaccine) but the ability to cause polio as a side effect. Polio is nearly eradicated because so many people got the vaccine. It only works if everyone does it.
who here is working on planning socio-economic scenarios and responses to the plausible crisis ? (migrants, anger, poverty)
I'm a bit stumped to see nobody trying to model social dynamics in potentially catastrophic contexts. Sure, some people are doing the usual "It's gonna be war and crime and bla" but I'm talking about almost quantitative modeling. How to see society as chemical or proteic reaction bath and try to see how we can dope the material here and there to smoothen the future problems.
I'm not using any scientific tools for now, but I think the changes coming are a good reason to run away from the cities. The shift to work from home have made this even easier than before. I wouldn't want to be there when the climate refugees arrive.
With respect- in the US I would suggest the opposite.
Cities are the only places that know how to scale, that have the capital and human infrastructure to handle influx, and that can and will command resources when there are scarcities and constraints. I would double down on cities. Everywhere else will be a crapshoot.
I don't really agree. Refugees won't go into the countryside. A few years ago in France we had a influx of refugees, and the vast majority were around Paris or big cities in general. In the countryside no one saw anyone. Even in Lyon we didn't see many people.
There's lying, delusion, denial, opportunism occuring in vast abundance. I commonly see a large amount of living in denial, living in delusion, about it, even among people that (supposedly) fully buy in to the worst climate change scenarios.
See: The Obamas buying an $11 million ocean-side property. They either don't believe any of it, or they don't care how bad that looks. Similar to rich climate change evangelicals flying around on private jets all the time. Are they rationalizing? Are they pathological liars? Are they in denial? Standard hypocrites?
Or see: Chuck Schumer & Co. pushing the fraud that we have to act immediately on their proposed green agenda to save the US from climate change. It's all bunk, they're lying very belligerently. The US isn't an isolated magic realm, climate change is overwhelmingly global. There's nothing they have proposed that will matter stacked next to China's rapid emissions expansion. They conveniently ignore that of course, they go out of their way to not talk about that aspect, and then lie and claim their plans can rescue the US from global climate change.
With most people you can't have a rational discussion about any of this. For the same reason you can't have rational discussions about Covid. Out of control emotion, irrationality and propaganda rule the day.
This is tangential, but I don't like this word "heating" -- and not for the political reasons you think.
I know why we use it. It sounds more severe than "warming", and more active. That's not my problem with it.
My problem is that it misleads about the physical mechanism. Temperatures don't go up because of additional heat inputs to the system. They go up because of the greenhouse effect.
A better description would be something that evokes, somehow, that you are wrapping something in insulating blankets until it overheats and dies. It's less "heating", more "smothering".
"Heating" conjures this mental image of the Earth in a pot on the stove. That's dramatic but not how it works. It's more like the Earth is your beloved dog, who you've just locked in the car with the windows up on a hot day.
Additionally, a phrase like "2.7C degrees of heating" has a little of the problem that popular science-speak often does, where it insists on saying, say, "power", where "force" would have been a more accurate word, and no less communicative to those who don't know any physics anyway. Because "heat" is measured in units of energy, while "2.7C" is in units of temperature. Granted, if you multiply this temperature delta by the thermal capacity of the Earth, you do get a change to thermal energy. But again, what's misleading is the idea that humans are directly injecting that energy. They -- we -- aren't. We're shifting an equilibrium, in an energy flow -- from the Sun to the Earth, and radiated from the Earth to space.
A good thing about the focus on temperature, though, is that that's more directly relevant to the environmental issues. The thermal energy of the Earth is not really relevant. The temperature is.
Anyway, I wish that our efforts at communicating urgency could also embed some communication of the underlying scientific concepts, the causal mechanisms.
I think we are beyond semantics. Calling it smothering, greenhouse, warming, climate change, etc. doesn't make a difference. The only people who still want to believe that it isn't happening won't be convinced by names.
They'll be convinced only when it (drought, desertification, flooding, hunger, etc.) affects their own neighborhood.
Not even then. The pandemic has made it very clear how good people are at ignoring a disaster happening around them. And look at the Texas response to its power crisis last winter.
In my country we say "Estás viendo, pero no ves" (You're seeing, but you're not seeing).
The data is clear. It has been a warning for 50 years, now it's been proven not only right, but conservative. The more data there is, the more people who want to disbelieve will refuse to see it.
My issue is that the problem is more about "energy" than heat. While the average over time will be a gradual warming, the impacts locally will be much different on the time scales normal people care about. We should be talking about weather extremes, not "heat." When we say the earth is going to get warmer, people think "fine, Canada is kind of nice anyways." In reality, we'll also see extreme blizzards, floods/rain, tornados, insect swarms, mass deaths of flora/fauna, and more. Pretty much all natural phenomena will be amplified both in terms of frequency as well as severity. And we may have many years before that 2.whatever C warming trend is realized, extreme weather events are increasing now. My home was almost leveled this year by an F4/5 tornado this year in an area where tornados are typical but never much more than an F2.
I think you're making a pedantic mountain out of a molehill.
For Mr. and Ms. Average Person, what do they gain in understanding by you saying "smothering" or "warming" over "heating"? Do you think that will lead to increased activism? More efficient activism? Or is it solely to satiate the scientists who already understand the difference of heating vs. warming?
While I think precision in speech is a good thing, there is a point where it really just doesn't matter anymore - because the end result remains exactly as intended.
When I'm explaining security concepts in a security awareness presentation, for example, I sometimes make a non-perfect analogy to get my point across. Anyone who understands why the analogy isn't perfect probably doesn't need the talk. Anyone who doesn't understand why the analogy isn't perfect probably doesn't care about the nuance. The average person doesn't care if it's a gigabit or a gigabyte of data stolen, they just care about the end result - data was stolen. The same applies here.
I personally don't care whether the earth is technically "heating" or "warming" - I only care about the end result and what I can do to help.
Even if we get to catastrophic 5 or 8 or 10 degree warming, it won’t wipe us out completely and we will still have to find a way to pay back our pollution debt.
Why is this supposed to be encouraging? Because every little bit of pollution avoided today is a little bit less pollution to clean up in the future.
Every bit does count.
Even if avoiding 2.5 degree warming seems impossible, let’s at least make it 3 instead of 5 or 8 or 10.
I use “pollution” to make it clear that this is not just about CO2 but also about every other type of trash that we dump onto this planet.
Mobile phone culture is really disturbing in this regard. The amount of annual-upgrade-onto-the-next shit with devices that can last years and years. It’s not the problem in itself, but it highlights an aspect of consumer psychology that really damages the planet and probably our mental health too.
The pollution from mobile phones is actually not even worth thinking about.
> We have found that, if unchecked, ICT GHGE relative contribution could grow from roughly 1–1.6% in 2007 to exceed 14% of the 2016-level worldwide GHGE by 2040
> It’s not the problem in itself, but it highlights an aspect of consumer psychology that really damages the planet and probably our mental health too.
the idea that consumer psychology is relevant at all is a deliberate effort by the industry to mislead. Recycling will never matter, not buying a new phone will never matter, that's why they have focused public attention onto those things.
collective action, largely regulation and government intervention, is the only way anything will ever change. And yes, pricing those externalities in is certainly going to make prices increase, and if your iphone costs 50% more then you'll have your "personal incentive" to hold onto it longer as well, if that's really the hill you want to die on.
phones don't matter in particular, though, and the price wouldn't go up 50%. And broadly speaking electronics are good on climate in general, climate change is largely due to energy consumption and things like not commuting are easy wins in terms of personal energy reduction. Sitting at home on your xbox tonight is way better than you driving to a concert, sitting in your home office is way better than you commuting 30 minutes each way to work twice a day.
But it's something that is near and dear to people so of course that's the thing people who are opposed to climate interventions choose to focus on, because what if it meant you had to give up your phone, is THAT what you want, huh!?!?!? Nah, I want companies to be forced to make efficiency improvements and emissions capture technologies that they don't do because it's not economically viable and nobody's forcing them, I want farmers to be forced to use low-methane-emission feeds that they don't do because they aren't economically viable and nobody's forcing them, etc etc.
Cumulatively that stuff won't add up to even 50% except for a handful of goods probably. It's just something industries use to drag their feet.
Not disagreeing with you. I think it’s not an either/or situation. Nor do I think it’s specifically the fault of consumers themselves.
It is the environment of social norms we’ve created. Wastefulness is for all intents and purposes just a facet of our culture from consumers up to corporations.
We don’t worry about the costs we needn’t immediately bear.
So yeah - wasn’t an indictment of people or a shrugging off of responsibility on the part of corporations and governments to regulate and manage the issue.
I just also lament seeing the manifestations of it in the average person, feeling compelled to throw more useful shit out to replace it with moderately newer shit of practically identical utility.
We need to make the Government care first... planned obsolescence can easily be avoided. But of course they don't want to fix that because it hurts the economy in the short term.
i know this is cynical but it is also the truth. if i die or my life is ruined then you can all go and fuck yourself. i don't give a flying shit about humanity surviving me.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that Stratospheric aerosol injection "is the most-researched SRM method, with high agreement that it could limit warming to below 1.5°C."
I have a question which might betray ignorance - why wouldn't humans still be able to live in colder countries which are now warm countries?
I agree that 5-8C warming will lead to mass death through war, famine. But why would Siberia be too hot for habitation for the remaining population (whether that's 100 or 500 million people)?
Some humans will survive. There are a lot of us and it's a big planet.
When permafrost melts, it turns into a bog. Over decades and centuries, many of those bogs would dry out, but most of Siberia will be one great big morass for generations after it melts.
You can't grow food and crops in suddenly warmed up permafrost earth. Generating nutrient rich soil takes a long time (decades to centuries for long lasting results). Global temperature rises are happening too fast.
Not true. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was this hot, or even hotter, and life was thriving.
But not human life.
Could humans survive this? Probably yes - we are resourceful and adaptable. But probably with a vastly smaller population and with a type of civilization radically different to our own.
> Even if we get to catastrophic 5 or 8 or 10 degree warming, it won’t wipe us out completely and we will still have to find a way to pay back our pollution debt.
8 or 10 degree warming!? It wouldn't "wipe us out completely", but mostly, and certainly civilization would not survive, so how are we going to pay back the pollution debt?
I think what the parent comment meant was that the pollution debt will be automatically paid when civilization collapses and industry basically stops functioning.
A good way of looking at the situation is that the Earth will be fine regardless - it's been through worse (the Premian-Triassic saw extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species), it's humanity that will be in deep, deep trouble in the near future.
I’m not ready to subscribe to the panic just yet. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still worth taking measures to limit co2 but I’m not going to panic about it.
News about climate change always reminds me of that "Truck almost hits a pole" meme [1]. We're always "on the catastrophic path" and "nearing irreversible damage" and "almost permanently fucked". I'm personally not a climate denier, but I can understand the skepticism. For the last 20 or so years, we've always been really really close to utter disaster. To get a little more provocative, it feels like Christians declaring Jesus will be returning Any Day Now, for the last 2000 years.
Science communicators try to avoid it because implying that things are on an irreversible course tends to cause people to shrug and say "oh well, guess that's that then". But things can actually always get worse, and they will if something isn't done.
But we're already there. Things are catastrophic right now. Wildfires are intensifying, hurricanes are intensifying, we're having "hundred year" floods every 5-10 years, the coral reefs are dying from the carbon dioxide in the air. And this is just the start, things are going to be far worse in another 50 years unless we take action now.
What a lazy and irrelevant point. Social scientists won't shift the blame to Africa and Asia because their energy intensity is still a tiny fraction of the developed world, and unless and until we deal with energy intensity, we don't have political authority to dictate terms to the rest of the world.
China pollutes more than the US, the EU and Canada combined https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di.... The amount of resources on Earth is limited, and doesn't increase with the population. Pollution by capita is irrelevant. I'll also let you take a look at energy intensity and see if Africa and Asia are so good at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_intensity_by_country. China is worse than the USA, India is worse than France. What exactly do we have to deal with?
And it's not like it's a secret that people living is why CO2 emissions happen. A big part of the Paris Agreement includes details about the varying development states of different places around the world (the average Ghanian is responsible for way less carbon emissions than the average American, but it's not fair to enforce them staying that way).
But fine, I'll bite; lets talk about it. What do you suggest? Who are you suggesting we have fewer of?
We don't necessarily have to kill everybody to get them off the planet - if we focus on space travel and terraforming, we can reduce the population of a given planet to an almost arbitrary number... once we figure out a way to safely get somewhere else.
Olivine beaches: unknown impact of this mineral in large quantities on local life, plankton, general ocean life. Since ocean life is a major component of climate (through the vast amount of carbon sequestered), this could have unpredictable consequences. Probably one of the less crazy options.
Sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere: unknown impact on ozone layer. Unknown possible chemistry in high radiation environment. Unknown effect on weather patterns. Unknown chance to fall back down to earth. Reductions of incoming solar radiation have unknown effects on all ecosystems on the planet. Extremely dangerous to try.
Shade satellites: similar concerns as above, except for ozone layer, chemical reactions, risk of raining down. Production of the huge number of satellites needed to matter has risky environmental costs. Huge number of objects in orbit will greatly accelerate orbital collisions, may destroy the constellation before it has any real effect.
The risks are currently inestimable, while the risk of 2.7C is at least understood.
On the other hand, reducing carbon emissions is doable, and has little risk of negatively impacting the environment. It's the right solution, and any time wasted by delaying it with promises of Geoengineering is criminal.
> any time wasted by delaying it with promises of Geoengineering is criminal.
We know a lot about sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere, because volcanos.
We should really try all these things at a small scale, with science and R&D, so we can learn and reduce the unknowns. It isn't extremely dangerous.
For instance, the best geoengineering is cloud creation (marine cloud brightening) which literally just involves lofting seasalt into the lower atmosphere.
Why not? "Technology caused the problem, so it can't solve it", that sort of thing?
Who's funding? What's the business model? How do we convince people that we need to experiment directly on the live system even though we don't really know what we are doing?
It feels too big and without tangible ROI for private companies, too long term for politics, too hard for governments to justify the shot in the dark.
1. Funding: NSF? Hell, how about DARPA. It isn't big money. It's a few science grants of $10 million, which, let's be honest, is pocket change compared to coastal flooding.
2. Business model: government contracting. Or carbon credits, eventually.
3. How to convince people: Good question. Probably by doing it small scale and getting convincing scientific evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that Stratospheric aerosol injection "is the most-researched SRM method, with high agreement that it could limit warming to below 1.5°C." People might not believe the IPCC, but with more empirical evidence they might.
Tangible ROI: avoiding rapid climate change and enabling companies to transition out of fossil fuels. It's happening, we just need another couple decades. It isn't a shot in the dark, it is building on a scientific legacy. This isn't crazy business. It's science and engineering.
> How do we convince people that we need to experiment directly on the live system even though we don't really know what we are doing?
This. All these “geoengineering now!” pleas are infuriating. It’s like a programmer’s simplistic solution to a complex problem, except that we don’t get to roll back a dodgy patch. We already have tools to avoid the worst if we wanted to, and waiting 20 years for the next technological breakthrough is dangerously stupid, particularly considering how little we know about how the biosphere works in general and the likelihood to fuck it up.
Have you read any scientific articles on this topic? This is the WHOLE earth we are talking about. Lofting a few hundred pounds of salt or sulfur to conduct research isn't going to "fuck it up." It's going to help us "know about how the biosphere works"
If we learn that doesn't make sense to do it, we shouldn't do it. But we shouldn't ban the science and sit on our hands, waiting for people to stop having children (children are far and away the biggest contributor).
so we all know that some 10,000 temperature reading stations get ommited from most climate change whitepapers, leaving with with ~7,200 legacy 1973 stations in which to use for our much bias/less readings and analysis.
But I’ve yet to read how today’s whitepaper sought to compensate for creeping but heat-producing urban and suburban sprawl.
What I really want to see is how are the rural regions faring decade-over-decade.
> With only 1.1C of warming so far, the world has seen a torrent of deadly weather disasters intensified by climate change in recent months, from asphalt-melting heatwaves to flash floods and untameable wildfires.
I'm really bothered by the recent trend in science reporting to take a carte blanche approach to attributing every natural disaster to climate change. Yes, it's indisputable that climate change is absolutely changing our weather patterns, and it's very probably causing and/or strengthening the consequences of disasters happening now, but it's just plain bad science reporting to lump up all recent natural disasters and go "see! Climate change!". And yes, I'm aware that this might be the only way to catch people's attention to the current crisis, but that doesn't excuse the disservice to bone fide science reporting.
So, how would you report it? You can't point at two hurricanes and say "this one was caused by climate change and this one wasn't", you can only say, statistically, we should be seeing one hurricane instead of two.
Climate change is an evidence based assertion that makes verified predictions and is widely accepted by the scientific community. God meets none of these criteria.
That's not how natural disasters work. It's a complex system that interacts with a bunch of other stuff. It's like asking which pregnancies were caused by a lack of sex education. There's too many variables to label specific ones caused by climate change, but you can observe an increase.
Did you read the comment you replied to? I'm so sick of people doing these weird semantic backflips in an attempt to deny that severe weather events are increasing in number, and that climate change is the only known/hypothesized driver for such a change.
> you can only say, statistically, we should be seeing one hurricane instead of two
I was actually curious if climate change results in more hurricanes. Apparently, not so:
"Because of climate change, tropical cyclones are likely increasing in intensity, have increased rainfall, and have larger storm surges, but there might be fewer of them globally. Tropical cyclones may also intensify more rapidly, and occur further polewards. These changes are driven by rising sea temperatures and increased maximum water vapour content of the atmosphere as the air heats up."
The disservice is the causal inference that global warming is behind all the recent natural disasters. The sentence I quoted could be better written as:
> Many scientists believe that with a warming climate, certain natural disasters, such as floods, heatwaves and wildfires will become more frequent as well as severe. Scientists also say the world has warmed by about 1.1C which they believe has already begun to increase the frequency and severity of natural disasters and, as climate change continues to warm the plant, anticipate further increases in the frequency and severity of these disasters.
Or whatever. I'm not a climate scientist. The point is, nobody can say for certain that the current set of natural disasters is climate change, or sheer luck. That's not a political statement, that's a scientific statement of fact. Science cannot change the facts to suit it's disposition, regardless of its good intentions.
> The point is, nobody can say for certain that the current set of natural disasters is climate change, or sheer luck. That's not a political statement, that's a scientific statement of fact.
That's more like the expression of a computer scientist or a programmer mindset for whom every events can be precisely traced back to a single set of clearly identifiable causes.
Just because we will never know which drop of gas is responsible for a particular event it doesn't make the whole climate science crumble.
Scientific method is way cooler and useful than that because despite these unknowns we can actually move forward with our understand of the world. That's why it's false to write things like `Many scientists believe`. No, they do not believe. There are no debates. We know it.
I posted this list before but I need to add a new sub step:
- there are no climate change
- climate change is not because of humane activities
- climate change isn't that bad
- we can't say climate change is affecting the weather <- you are here
- climate change might be good overall
- climate change is business as usual: improvise, adapt, survive
To my mind, it is "correlation" that is being posed as a "causation". Science is never certain, though the Climate Scientists are absolutely certain. See the disconnect? It is more likely this alarmist/doomsday position will be ignored completely by the public (the boy who cried wolf scenario).
A better framing may be to say something like this: "All physical systems of this planet are interconnected. While we cannot be absolutely certain the worsening of weather is related to our behavior, there is mounting evidence that our behavior does, to a great extent, influence the climate. So it is in our hands to alter our behavior so the future generations can enjoy the earth like we do today. We owe it to them."
> To my mind, it is "correlation" that is being posed as a "causation". Science is never certain, though the Climate Scientists are absolutely certain. See the disconnect? It is more likely this alarmist/doomsday position will be ignored completely by the public (the boy who cried wolf scenario).
This is very reductionist. Science is not certain, but we are talking about ~90% certainty here. What we cannot do is point at a given specific event and say “this was caused by climate change”. But we have a significant statistical sampling of weather events and we definitely can say that this is unprecedented and caused by global warming. Simple Bayesian statistics show that what we keep seeing year after year is all but impossible without sustained global warming.
> A better framing may be to say something like this: "All physical systems of this planet are interconnected. While we cannot be absolutely certain the worsening of weather is related to our behavior, there is mounting evidence that our behavior does, to a great extent, influence the climate. So it is in our hands to alter our behavior so the future generations can enjoy the earth like we do today. We owe it to them."
That is not a better phrasing at all. You’ve lost all of your audience by the end of the first sentence. A single hurricane is not caused by global warming (though some events, like the melting of the permafrost, the melting of Greenland’s ice, or the collapse of Antarctica ice sheets definitely are); but collectively all these freak events and these 1,000 years floods every other years are consequences of global warming. It is too late for the future generation to “enjoy earth as we know it”, and trying to make it sound like it is a possibility is doing humanity a disservice. That ship sailed, the objective now should be to do everything we could to mitigate the effects of what we’ve already done. We need more than a little urgency to do this.
But, we plebes will still be shamed for our straws.
In reality, it's the massive industry that has no reason to be clean.
And it's the transportation infrastructure in the USA that favors cars over everything else.
And its massive deforestation across the world.
And it's massive CO2 causing evolution of H2CO3 in the ocean, systematically destroying oceanic life.
In reality, it's capitalism, hockeystick required growth (as opposed to sustainability), bad/no planning at larger governance levels, and obsolete-by-design goods that used to be durable.
One pet peeve of mine with climate change articles is that in the US Celsius is often used.
A&W tried introducing a 1/3 lb burger, and it failed horribly because the average consumer couldn't understand that 1/3 is greater than 1/4.
Now with climate change, that same person is going to shrug off 2.7C because "2.7 isn't much". Re-frame that as 5-10F, and that person is suddenly going to be much more interested, because a 5-10F increase in summer temperatures anywhere in the US is meaningful.
I don't think the global mean temperature change is going to come off as particularly impactful either way. 5-10°F increase is notable, but doesn't sound particularly scary or urgent. It's the catastrophic consequences that are the scary part.
Yep I won't disagree that the actual consequences are far more severe than turning up the A/C and not going outside.
Depending where you live though, adding 5-10°F isn't entirely ignorable. If you live in Texas, that's taking a 100°F day and making it sound even more brutal. Or as a Coloradan, it's experiencing temperatures you never thought you'd see in the mountains, and being able to intuitively associate the increase in temperatures with the increase of wildfires.
A 10 degree increase in the average summer temperature would probably mean tens of thousands of deaths per day in less developed countries with humid climates. The human body doesn’t tolerate wet-bulb temperatures above 95F.
> the average consumer couldn't understand that 1/3 is greater than 1/4.
The average reader of France 24 understands Celsius and has no clue what a Fahrenheit is. No one uses Fahrenheit apart from the US. It's like imperial units, totally irrelevant if you are addressing a global audience.
F does have that nice comfort-zone granularity though. Swingier whole numbers around the zone of human activity. Maybe there's a way in which the numbers could be displayed side by side... Even for sheer generic number effects
A 1°C difference is about 2°F. Not that much more granularity and in practice we just round to the nearest °C and it gives a pretty good idea. It’s like inches and pounds: purely a matter of habit. OTOH, using °C makes much more sense for other reasons.
You're missing my point completely. If a news article is targeted at a US resident, it should use Fahrenheit for maximum impact. Globally and scientifically, of course use Celsius -- or even better, mention both.
I was more upset about the "10" than the "5". My point was that you "converted" a single value to a range, giving the impression that the single value would be roughly in the middle of the range, but it was actually below its lower bound. Why didn't you say just "5F", or if you wanted to give a range, then "3-7F" instead?
To make a point. In this day and age, for the worse, news is sales. You want average people to pay attention, give them something they can't help but click on because it sounds scary.
This site is a different kind of echo chamber, in that precision, nuance, and actual science tends to be rewarded with upvotes. If you fit in that category, you are multiple standard deviations above the mean news reader/watcher.
> You want average people to pay attention, give them something they can't help but click on because it sounds scary.
And then they completely ignore you or think the entire thing is a lie because you lied about the details.
Pretty much every denial of anthrogenic climate change boils down to pointing out hyped up, exaggerated worst-case scenarios peddled in the media that didn't come to pass, even if the underlying data and original conclusions were accurate.
They already ignore it, and being scientific about 2.7°C doesn't do jack shit to change their mind.
Link the 5°F to all sorts of concrete bad stuff going on instead 10+ year problems like New Orleans being underwater.
For instance, "Houses in Oregon burned down because of record temperatures!". Use hyperbole, but make it personal. Hell, turn the narrative around if it manipulates people to care: "Five things the government doesn't want you to know about record temperatures!".
It's just like the problem with US politics. One side plays fair, and the other doesn't. In the age of influencers, a dipshit like Joe Rogan has more sway than factual reporting by reputable news sources.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadWhen an official says "unless governments credibly commit to immediate, massive decreases in emissions, we're screwed," it just amounts to "we're screwed."
Encouraging and striving for some radical new technological innovation is all we can do.
But this is absolutely not acceptable in any mainstream economic discussion, even from the left, and absolutely counter to the very definition of a for-profit corporation.
Even slowing down growth is seen as 'too risky', while the world burns. Better we buy new iPhones every month to help propel the economy.
For example- launching enough thin, reflective mylar film to the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point to reduce incoming solar radiation by ~0.1% would take about 500 Falcon Heavy launches (highest capacity rocket currently available). This would take several years and around $100 billion. Once Starship is ready and in use, this would go way down.
$100 billion and several years is practically nothing for the US, China, or one of several other countries with the capability to do this.
Obvious downsides include denying the use of the L1 Lagrange point to human use permanently, eventual degradation of the sun shield as solar wind pushes pieces of film out of place, and of course possible mass famine and plant die-off due to lower solar radiation.
Teller, E., Wood, L., & Hyde, R. (1996). Global warming and ice ages: I. Prospects for physics-based modulation of global change (No. UCRL-JC--128715). Lawrence Livermore National Lab..
There are also instances when politicians do want to change something, but their cluelessness shows - solar freakin' roadways anyone?
No, we opted to provide incentives to fossil fuel producers and consumers. That is how we got into this mess.
Pointless wars are bad for other obvious reasons.
> “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” he added
We would need to do fuel reprocessing to manage the waste output and also need to enter serial production of reactors so they could all stop being one-off designs that take forever and literally billions of dollars to certify. Build them where cooling water is available and build wind and solar where practical anywhere else.
If fusion ends up working out and/or something better comes along, switch to building that over nuclear fission plants whenever that time comes and sunset the fission plants at the end of their lives. Waiting for a more convenient answer is no excuse for inaction today.
We're going to need more power capacity that we have today, because we'll also have to be switching all transportation and manufacturing to electrical sources as well. Shipping is either going to need vessels with nuclear power, or that burn ammonia or hydrogen. One of the only things that we don't have any decent known answers for is what to run airplanes off of. Maybe they keep burning carbon fuels and we explicitly build carbon scrubbers for what we know they produce.
I understand that many Democrats purport you support the Green New Deal while advancing much more moderate proposals. Democrats think that “making a big opening bid” and paring it back is a way to anchor expectations. Except how this reads to non-Democrats is that “socialist takeover of the economy in the name of climate change is the ultimate goal,” and subsequent moderate measures are just seen as stepping stones toward that end.
It’s like leading with “Defund the Police” and trying to backfill with moderate police reform proposals. It’s a way to keep activists engaged, but it just makes moderates distrustful off your true intentions.
An entire political party not providing a single solution for society’s largest ongoing problem is what should make moderates distrustful.
Actually proposing solutions opens one up to the types of attacks you constantly make on this site, that’s the price to pay for taking threats seriously and actually trying to solve problems. You can deflect to other topics, but in the end, no amount of wordsmithing changes that fact.
If you wish to keep 'the world as we know it'? Yes, that ship has sailed. What we're fighting for now is the degree to which the world we know will be destroyed.
Talk != action, not even if the talk is "credible". You think this is an existential problem? Great. Start doing something. Don't tell me what you're going to do, do it.
Fatalism leads to giving up, which leads to us hitting all those higher numbers, which leads to an unnecessary amount of extra suffering.
In general, you should rather expect negative feedback loops. For example, the warming response to increased CO2 emission is logarithmic, meaning that the more CO2 you emit, the weaker effect additional effect has, and quite significantly so. Of course, our problem is that we are emitting so much, and our emissions grow so fast, that this diminishing effect is of little consolation. The point is, negative feedback loops are much more likely than positive ones.
The question becomes, are unknown feedbacks more likely to be positive or negative? I'd lean toward negative, which is what most experts think, but definitely an unknown.
I don't think that's the best solution, but at least it's one I can personally enact, and if deontologically expanded it does lead to solving the problem. Don't play negative or zero sum games and ostracize those that do.
People don't like that. A friend of mine likes driving his car, and does so a lot to go places on the weekend and stuff. He'd like to see the government mandate reduced car usage. I've asked him: you're free not to use your car, why do you still use it if you believe it would be best if you didn't? Because he likes it and if it's not made into law, he won't do what he thinks is best.
"We should outlaw personal air travel, but until that has happened, I'm going to fly around the globe" is what I see in far too many proponents of those rules.
I have no idea what goes on in their head, it's completely alien to me.
Individual action just isn't enough. Hell, you could wipe my entire country of about 5 million people, and the impact on global CO2 output is on par with the average annual increase in CO2 output over the past two decades. A year or two later, the world would be outputting more CO2 than it did before our genocide.
If only the voters of the green party in Germany would stop/sharply reduce flying, that would be ~10% of Germans (~16% projected votes, ~70-75% citizens are voting).
Since they do fly more than the average person [1][2][3], and since they are more likely to be part of the upper class which tends to contribute more per capita, the impact would be even larger. They could single handedly massive reduce the pollution from air travel just by changing their own habits. Yet they don't, keep on flying at higher levels than other groups while demanding legislation to stop them.
It's like a cliche movie killer who asks to be stopped.
Look at vegans who are vegan for moral reasons. They don't say "we shouldn't eat animals, and the state should outlaw it, but until no one is allowed to eat animals, I'll have a steak every day". They start by themselves and then try to convince others and (sometimes) call for legislation.
"Since my influence as an individual is meaningless, I'll continue to be (an outsized) part of the problem instead of being part of the solution" is just completely alien to me, I literally don't understand the reasoning behind it. Would they own slaves if it wasn't outlawed because one slave more or less doesn't change the big picture?
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/gruenen-waehle..., 2014
[2] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/umfrage-zur-flugscham-gr..., 2019
[3] https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/klimawandel-gruene..., 2019 for green members of parliament who fly more than any other party per person
Not to mention, many behaviors are in fact impractical. The vast majority of people can't afford equipment and clothes that can last a few decades, as used to be the norm, for example. In much of the west, responsibly grown sustainable food is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than fast food.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/08/us/glaciers-national-park-202...
Or am I misunderstanding what you are writing?
Glacier NP isn't the only place that I've looked up and wondered, "wasn't that a lot bigger when we were here ten years ago?", either.
Yeah, there is little to be optimistic about.
A lot will also depend on the state of society in general when the things get tough, will extreme heat or extreme rain come during a war, or economic downturn, or in a pandemic?
Unfortunately, it's entirely possible to go too far in the other direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
> Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (130 °F). The theoretical limit to human survival for more than a few hours in the shade, even with unlimited water, is 35 °C (95 °F) – theoretically equivalent to a heat index of 70 °C (160 °F), though the heat index does not go that high.
> A heat wave in August 2015 saw temperatures of 48.6 °C (119.5 °F) and a dew point of 29.5 °C (85.1 °F) at Samawah, Iraq, and 114.8 °F (46.0 °C) with a dew point of 89.6 °F (32.0 °C) in Bandar-e Mahshahr, Iran. This implied wet-bulb temperatures of about 33.5 °C (92.3 °F) and 34.7 °C (94.5 °F) respectively. The government urged residents to stay out of the sun and drink plenty of water.
Hit 35 °C wet bulb somewhere heavily populated like Bangladesh for a day and you're looking at significant casualties.
This would mean 200 million refugees compared to 44 million refugees that we can expect when we manage to pull of a climate-friendly scenario (which looks rather unlikely at the moment).(1)
I suggest you have a look at the sixth IPCC assessment report released in August https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/ especially chapter 12 of the full report.
(1) https://www.pri.org/stories/2021-09-13/report-climate-change...
Admittedly, we're only going to be dealing with 550 million people being added to our combined 360 million people, as compared to Northern Asia and Europe, which will be dealing with literally the rest of the human species.
The first wave is going to be all the pacific islanders looking to move when the fish stocks collapse in the 2050s to places like China, Japan, and Australia (while it hasn't completely overheated yet).
The next two centuries are going to suck unless we actually do something about it. Presumably after that we'll have taken so much of a beating that some new equilibrium will have been achieved.
Migrants are also part of the problem. Integrating other people has always been hard.
It is very difficult to quantify accurately, because this is unprecedented in the history of the planet, never mind the history of the human race.
This temperature rise is totally out-of-context for us, and will cause a lot of pain.
The same increase over a century is disastrous, because infrastructure and capital doesn't change or move nearly so rapidly.
They will loose land, health, money etc.
People whoms homes will be burned etc.
We will experience future animal diversity reduction. This is something very depressing but depending in the Person how much you care for such things.
Also we will experience more dramatic Events as well. Like droights and lots of rain. The Impact on you might range from 'not leaving my flat today' to 'I lost everything'. Your surroundings will slowly change. Woods will start looking different.
And still we are not very certain about all those things. It could get much faster much worse through tipping points.
It also forces future generations to already plan their future accordingly: they will know that they will experience an increase of sealevel of 60cm and more.
If the AMOC collapses as we are already starting to see [0] then at least the European portion of the HN community will be deeply impacted.
If the American South West continues it's path of aridification [1] then plenty of HN member will be impacted as well.
[0]. https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/oceano...
[1]. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/22/11856
That is simply not true. Global average temperature has been stable for 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age. It is that long-term stability that made the rise of human civilization possible.
When was that?
If you look at this estimate of temperature on Planet Earth[0][1] you can clearly see the last time the planet saw > +2C was the Pliocene.
Even if you look more closely at just the Holocene you don't see > +2C anywhere[2]
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_pala...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med...
They don't? Which models are you referring to? The model forecast in James Hansen's 1988 congressional testimony was almost spot on.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hanse...
> Scenario B and C had an ‘El Chichon’ sized volcanic eruption in 1995.
EDIT: Looking at the graph once again, he predicted in scenario B that we would see more than .6 deg C of warming between 2000 and 2020.
But it appears that we've only had about .3 deg C of warming in the past 20 years: https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/global-land-o...
This chart is to the same scale as in the realclimate link. As of 2020, we're about 0.1 to 0.2 degrees below the Scenario B forecast, at +1 instead of ~+1.15.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/
What do you think a good 1988 model prediction would look like?
Looking again at your original link, Hansen's scenario B predicts a ~1.45 deg increase from 1988. So, in answer to your question, not that.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/graph_data/Glob...
And, where do you see 1.45 C forecast for 2020 outside of Scenario A? Scenario B doesn't even come close to the 1.25 indicator line.
The NASA chart shows a rise of about .7 during that time.
This is simply false. The last time global average temperature was more than 2.7°C higher than modern times was over 100 thousand years ago.
This prediction is for 6.75m of sea level rise or 22ft.
If you instead only look at model runs with co2 levels close to reality you find that the models have done an amazing job of predicting current warming levels. 50 years more than one study showed 1C of warming by 2020 if co2 levels were around 420. Which is exactly spot on to where we are.
Climate modeling predictions are some of the most stunningly accurate predictions in the history of earth science and someone should have gotten a Nobel for it by now.
That said, why should we generously assume the models are correct? Because, despite the hundreds of lines of hand-waving in this topic, they have not proved to be correct.
That's just coal power plants. No oil, no gas, no other sources.
The capital issue really is political, as not doing it will cost way more in the long run. Pricing adequately carbon emissions would be a first step.
Nuclear plants don’t need rare materials, and the waste in current designs cannot be used in a nuclear bomb (well, they could be used in a dirty bomb, but then there are loads of cheap as chips chemicals that are much better for this use).
It is true that it is too late now to rely only on that. We still need all the tools we have, and we should build as much reactors as we can, and as much wind turbines (and solar panels where it makes sense) as we can. We are not in a situation where we can prioritise one or the other, otherwise we end up with gas and coal, like in Germany.
I'm not discounting nuclear and see its value for base load power, and I think anti-nuclear energy people are puritanical idiots and definitely do not want to vote for anyone who is against nuclear, but I get the sneaking suspicion that nuclear power is often mentioned as a way to misdirect away from wind and solar for political reasons which is a shame since these technologies are such easy wins that can be implemented right now.
I'm not against nuclear power. But if we are to be adult about it, we need to be clear about the risks (and not pretend that there is a risk in assuming the same type of society in 1500 years). We also need to be clear what it means to take this risk if all we are solving is a 'problem' that our best efforts at modelling CAN NOT REPLICATE, and evidence for which only exist if one cherry-picks the dates.
Construction on a new reactor, Flamanville 3, began on 4 December 2007.[4] The new unit is an Areva European Pressurized Reactor type and is planned to have a nameplate capacity of 1,650 MWe. EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[4] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[5] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
And even if the US completely changed... there's oil and coal distributed fairly evenly across the whole world. Even if the USA used all its power, it couldn't stop the rest of the world from exploiting every last drop of oil and last chunk of coal. Tell me where I'm wrong, what could any group do to stop every drop of oil in the middle east and Nigeria from being pulled out?
For example, Netherlands was able to completely revolutionize their cities and optimize them for bike travel. Now biking is the main mode of transportation.
A lot of the changes we want to see individuals do, the system discourages it or makes it hard to do those changes.
Electric cars have dubious benefit for the environment as well, so I don't think using that as a solution is fair.
EVs are just the tiniest inconvenience to Americans over gas and still they won't embrace it. It's much cheaper than the other things we need to do.
If you want to make a dent in the problem you need useful mass transit everywhere. Useful is more important than everywhere - useful will get people out of their cars, while everywhere gets people driving by and ignoring it because when they last looked it wasn't useful. (best to assume once every 5 years unless someone else finds it useful and raves about it)
EVs are way better for the environment than gas cars while asking so little from the user. And we still won't make this tiny sacrifice.
If your plan is "US moves the population into apartments and builds mass transit for all" then you have no plan.
If your plan is "Let's make everyone drive EVs" you also did nothing, and fucked over poor countries while doing that.
If we're going to do something, we need to do it right, which means:
1. Listen to climate scientists about what's the best way to mitigate as much as we can.
2. Mobilize every single branch of the government to respond to the realities of climate change.
3. Make the hard decisions and push companies and cities to follow them. We've done this before with the new deal. It's not hard to imagine that level of mobilization.
4. THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE: Plan how you're going to minimize damages that we can't prevent, and minimize damages that are going to be caused by this "move fast" approach. Keep people on your side while making these changes. These changes should come with a quality of life improvement for most Americans.
It's important to remember, climate change was NEVER an individual failing. It was systemic ignorance and failure. Which means the response to it needs to involve as many, or more gears that climate change denial did.
The US is not capable of doing that. There's not the will. Literally 40%+ of voters are completely opposed.
If this is a reference to either party, people who identify with either party all actually are suffering under the status quo, and would be fine with making changes if the changes also take them into account and increase their QoL.
So no, I disagree, the divide is barely there and has been fabricated.
I'm an anarchist, I've had successful conversations with essentially everyone on every side you can imagine. The problems are the same. Just that US has allowed media to drive a "us vs them" mentality.
This portion also has outsized influence due to how the electoral politics is set up.
But who would pay for this? At the end, the States can only take the money in the pocket of its citizens, present or future.
Only 26% of eligible Americans are unvaccinated, and that number is still shrinking every day. Yes, there is a depressing number of hardcore anti-vaxxers, but it's a much smaller minority than 35% of the population.
According to polls, one-third of the unvaccinated say they would get the shot if they were given time off work to deal with the symptoms. That suggests their "vaccine refusal" is related to their precarious economic circumstances and isn't a political stance. That brings the number of hardcore vaxxers down even further, to around 17%. This is probably still an overestimate, since some proportion of this population are minors and not making their own medical decisions, or may have other non-political reasons.
Once renewables become the most cost effective option, people will switch regardless of their politics or location.
I would argue the huge investments needed to conduct modern fossil fuel exploration and get the remaining (and least accessible) material from the ground may become unjustifiable if demand drops sufficiently.
As far as I know those 35% are still around so it seems like they've successfully saved their own lives.
See, that kind of hyperbole makes me question the whole climate change narrative. There's virtually 0 chance that Covid is going to kill me. I'm vaccinated because I don't like getting sick even if I don't die at the end of it, but Covid is actually very mild. When the same people who treat it like the bubonic plague are always the ones who are telling me that the world is going to end in 10 years unless I vote to pay higher taxes, I'm inclined to discount them.
Chorus:
The ice age is coming, the sun's zoomin' in Meltdown expected, the wheat is growin' thin Engines stop running, but I have no fear Cause London is drownin', I, live by the river
Verse 3:
(London calling), yes, I was there, too And ya' know what they said? Well, some of it was true! (London calling) at the top of the dial And after all this, won't you give me a smile? (London calling)
If The Clash is not your thing, maybe R.E.M.'s It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) fits the bill. Both tracks can be seen as dealing with the same subject matter and come to the same conclusion - The Clash wants you to give them a smile, R.E.M. feels fine.
In other words, stop it with the panic porn. Learn to adapt to the warmer climate as humans have done before, just like they adapted to an ice age where large parts of the continents were ice-covered. Use your head when confronted with statements of doom, check historical records and you'll quickly find there were worse droughts and more heatwaves about a century ago - which led to the Dust Bowl [3].
Take the ravages of the dust bowl as an example and imagine they had had access to the current crop of social networks and networking technology back then. There would have been similar predictions of doom - crops were failing, anf not just in the USA. Would those predictions have been justified given the development of the weather in the decades past the 40's? Clearly not.
What makes the current predictions of doom different from earlier ones? Is it the climate modelling which is used as base? Feed those models with (real - not 'corrected') data from before the dust bowl and see what they make of the next century.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Calling_(song)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_End_of_the_World_as...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
> The lyrics reflect the concern felt by Strummer about world events with the reference to "a nuclear error" – the incident at Three Mile Island, which occurred earlier in 1979. Joe Strummer has said: "We felt that we were struggling about to slip down a slope or something, grasping with our fingernails. And there was no one there to help us." > The line "London is drowning / And I live by the river" comes from concerns that if the River Thames flooded, most of central London would drown, something that led to the construction of the Thames Barrier.[1][5] Strummer's concern for police brutality is evident through the lines "We ain't got no swing / Except for the ring of that truncheon thing" as the Metropolitan Police at the time had a truncheon as standard issued equipment. Social criticism also features through references to the effects of casual drug taking: "We ain't got no high / Except for that one with the yellowy eyes". > The lyrics also reflect desperation of the band's situation in 1979 struggling with high debt, without management and arguing with their record label over whether the London Calling album should be a single or double album. The lines referring to "Now don't look to us / Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust" reflects the concerns of the band over its situation after the punk rock boom in England had ended in 1977.
Michael Stipe isn't exactly fond of explaining the meaning behind the lyrics of many of his songs but I somehow doubt the song was made to ease the concern of a real future climate catastrophe.
[1] https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/52876/ is just an example of such a site
Even using your songmeanings.com link it doesn't appear that the common interpretation is satirical in nature.
I think you are on to something though with respect to linking to Wikipedia, the time has probably come to stop linking to any potentially polarised/polarising page. I tend to link to Wikipedia out of habit and also laziness but it has lost whatever semblance of neutrality it had. Allmusic [1] has a page on the song but it it quite bland. Rolling Stone claims the song was originally called "Ice Age" and the lyrics are essentially a radio broadcast from a dystopian future that was easy to envision at that point in time [2] - which is the reason the current crop of panic porn reminds me of this track.
[1] https://www.allmusic.com/song/london-calling-mt0008645476
[2] https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/clash-london-calling-al...
The scientific method can not work when extremes are used to attract attention, this eventually has the opposite effect of numbing the populace to yet another dire prediction of the coming collapse.
It is disheartening to see how (some?) people at this forum are wont to discredit anyone who does not follow the current narrative. This is neither rational nor objective, it is emotional and subjective.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-continent...
The same UN report that points to high-C temperature increases claims in economic terms only a smaller rate of GDP growth for a high-C world, compared to GDP growth for a stable world. That means we may well have both climate disaster AND flying cars and disease and aging elimination and all the benefits that "progress" makes available, now not just from traditional tech but acceleration in energy and biology development as well.
If that is true, then even a dramatic rise in episodic disasters just becomes a cost of doing business. I don't think that's true, but I also don't think we are headed for population crash. And I would be very, very, very surprised to see e.g. travel rationing.
Much much more work to do on localized analysis and narrative.
In 200 years? Yeah, dramatically reduced counts of humans is possible.
But in 50 years- global population will be greater than it is now.
'There is no proof' 'It could actually be harmful because false sense of security'
This problem is analogous to the conflicting messaging about climate change that's been coming from politicians, industry, media, over the last couple of decades.
To be fair, compared to the other vaccines that we're used to (except for the flu shot), this vaccine appears really weak. I wonder if giving it another name (immunity booster?) would have helped.
I'm a bit stumped to see nobody trying to model social dynamics in potentially catastrophic contexts. Sure, some people are doing the usual "It's gonna be war and crime and bla" but I'm talking about almost quantitative modeling. How to see society as chemical or proteic reaction bath and try to see how we can dope the material here and there to smoothen the future problems.
Cities are the only places that know how to scale, that have the capital and human infrastructure to handle influx, and that can and will command resources when there are scarcities and constraints. I would double down on cities. Everywhere else will be a crapshoot.
See: The Obamas buying an $11 million ocean-side property. They either don't believe any of it, or they don't care how bad that looks. Similar to rich climate change evangelicals flying around on private jets all the time. Are they rationalizing? Are they pathological liars? Are they in denial? Standard hypocrites?
Or see: Chuck Schumer & Co. pushing the fraud that we have to act immediately on their proposed green agenda to save the US from climate change. It's all bunk, they're lying very belligerently. The US isn't an isolated magic realm, climate change is overwhelmingly global. There's nothing they have proposed that will matter stacked next to China's rapid emissions expansion. They conveniently ignore that of course, they go out of their way to not talk about that aspect, and then lie and claim their plans can rescue the US from global climate change.
With most people you can't have a rational discussion about any of this. For the same reason you can't have rational discussions about Covid. Out of control emotion, irrationality and propaganda rule the day.
I know why we use it. It sounds more severe than "warming", and more active. That's not my problem with it.
My problem is that it misleads about the physical mechanism. Temperatures don't go up because of additional heat inputs to the system. They go up because of the greenhouse effect.
A better description would be something that evokes, somehow, that you are wrapping something in insulating blankets until it overheats and dies. It's less "heating", more "smothering".
"Heating" conjures this mental image of the Earth in a pot on the stove. That's dramatic but not how it works. It's more like the Earth is your beloved dog, who you've just locked in the car with the windows up on a hot day.
Additionally, a phrase like "2.7C degrees of heating" has a little of the problem that popular science-speak often does, where it insists on saying, say, "power", where "force" would have been a more accurate word, and no less communicative to those who don't know any physics anyway. Because "heat" is measured in units of energy, while "2.7C" is in units of temperature. Granted, if you multiply this temperature delta by the thermal capacity of the Earth, you do get a change to thermal energy. But again, what's misleading is the idea that humans are directly injecting that energy. They -- we -- aren't. We're shifting an equilibrium, in an energy flow -- from the Sun to the Earth, and radiated from the Earth to space.
A good thing about the focus on temperature, though, is that that's more directly relevant to the environmental issues. The thermal energy of the Earth is not really relevant. The temperature is.
Anyway, I wish that our efforts at communicating urgency could also embed some communication of the underlying scientific concepts, the causal mechanisms.
Maybe "smothering" does it.
They'll be convinced only when it (drought, desertification, flooding, hunger, etc.) affects their own neighborhood.
The data is clear. It has been a warning for 50 years, now it's been proven not only right, but conservative. The more data there is, the more people who want to disbelieve will refuse to see it.
For Mr. and Ms. Average Person, what do they gain in understanding by you saying "smothering" or "warming" over "heating"? Do you think that will lead to increased activism? More efficient activism? Or is it solely to satiate the scientists who already understand the difference of heating vs. warming?
While I think precision in speech is a good thing, there is a point where it really just doesn't matter anymore - because the end result remains exactly as intended.
When I'm explaining security concepts in a security awareness presentation, for example, I sometimes make a non-perfect analogy to get my point across. Anyone who understands why the analogy isn't perfect probably doesn't need the talk. Anyone who doesn't understand why the analogy isn't perfect probably doesn't care about the nuance. The average person doesn't care if it's a gigabit or a gigabyte of data stolen, they just care about the end result - data was stolen. The same applies here.
I personally don't care whether the earth is technically "heating" or "warming" - I only care about the end result and what I can do to help.
Even if we get to catastrophic 5 or 8 or 10 degree warming, it won’t wipe us out completely and we will still have to find a way to pay back our pollution debt.
Why is this supposed to be encouraging? Because every little bit of pollution avoided today is a little bit less pollution to clean up in the future.
Every bit does count.
Even if avoiding 2.5 degree warming seems impossible, let’s at least make it 3 instead of 5 or 8 or 10.
I use “pollution” to make it clear that this is not just about CO2 but also about every other type of trash that we dump onto this planet.
> We have found that, if unchecked, ICT GHGE relative contribution could grow from roughly 1–1.6% in 2007 to exceed 14% of the 2016-level worldwide GHGE by 2040
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596...
collective action, largely regulation and government intervention, is the only way anything will ever change. And yes, pricing those externalities in is certainly going to make prices increase, and if your iphone costs 50% more then you'll have your "personal incentive" to hold onto it longer as well, if that's really the hill you want to die on.
phones don't matter in particular, though, and the price wouldn't go up 50%. And broadly speaking electronics are good on climate in general, climate change is largely due to energy consumption and things like not commuting are easy wins in terms of personal energy reduction. Sitting at home on your xbox tonight is way better than you driving to a concert, sitting in your home office is way better than you commuting 30 minutes each way to work twice a day.
But it's something that is near and dear to people so of course that's the thing people who are opposed to climate interventions choose to focus on, because what if it meant you had to give up your phone, is THAT what you want, huh!?!?!? Nah, I want companies to be forced to make efficiency improvements and emissions capture technologies that they don't do because it's not economically viable and nobody's forcing them, I want farmers to be forced to use low-methane-emission feeds that they don't do because they aren't economically viable and nobody's forcing them, etc etc.
Cumulatively that stuff won't add up to even 50% except for a handful of goods probably. It's just something industries use to drag their feet.
It is the environment of social norms we’ve created. Wastefulness is for all intents and purposes just a facet of our culture from consumers up to corporations.
We don’t worry about the costs we needn’t immediately bear.
So yeah - wasn’t an indictment of people or a shrugging off of responsibility on the part of corporations and governments to regulate and manage the issue.
I just also lament seeing the manifestations of it in the average person, feeling compelled to throw more useful shit out to replace it with moderately newer shit of practically identical utility.
Is it any wonder they want to watch the world burn?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering
https://spectrum.ieee.org/climate-change
Discussion on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28451710
Or develop a shipping fuel additive that accelerates the production of clouds.
These won't solve the problem, but they can buy time. We need time.
I agree that 5-8C warming will lead to mass death through war, famine. But why would Siberia be too hot for habitation for the remaining population (whether that's 100 or 500 million people)?
When permafrost melts, it turns into a bog. Over decades and centuries, many of those bogs would dry out, but most of Siberia will be one great big morass for generations after it melts.
But not human life.
Could humans survive this? Probably yes - we are resourceful and adaptable. But probably with a vastly smaller population and with a type of civilization radically different to our own.
Yes, but it didn't become that this fast.
> Could humans survive this? Probably yes - we are resourceful and adaptable.
No, and we're not.
8 or 10 degree warming!? It wouldn't "wipe us out completely", but mostly, and certainly civilization would not survive, so how are we going to pay back the pollution debt?
A good way of looking at the situation is that the Earth will be fine regardless - it's been through worse (the Premian-Triassic saw extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species), it's humanity that will be in deep, deep trouble in the near future.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t...
I’m not ready to subscribe to the panic just yet. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still worth taking measures to limit co2 but I’m not going to panic about it.
1: https://imgur.com/r/gifs/kuplW0m
But we're already there. Things are catastrophic right now. Wildfires are intensifying, hurricanes are intensifying, we're having "hundred year" floods every 5-10 years, the coral reefs are dying from the carbon dioxide in the air. And this is just the start, things are going to be far worse in another 50 years unless we take action now.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/07/23/pet...
I just don’t understand why no one talks about how we produce more and more people, each consuming a lot.
Edit: as an example of that, look at that map of mismanaged plastic https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution#share-of-global.... Do you think that fighting against plastic straws and bags had any kind of meaningful impact?
China is in Asia.
And something else, Asia consumes the most energy in the world by far: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-consumptio.... At some point you have to face reality, even if you don't like it.
Because most people frown on genocide.
And it's not like it's a secret that people living is why CO2 emissions happen. A big part of the Paris Agreement includes details about the varying development states of different places around the world (the average Ghanian is responsible for way less carbon emissions than the average American, but it's not fair to enforce them staying that way).
But fine, I'll bite; lets talk about it. What do you suggest? Who are you suggesting we have fewer of?
We don't necessarily have to kill everybody to get them off the planet - if we focus on space travel and terraforming, we can reduce the population of a given planet to an almost arbitrary number... once we figure out a way to safely get somewhere else.
Geoengineering is absolutely to be discarded in these discussions. Technology will kot save us this time.
Geoengineering is a broad category, and it'd probably be better if we split it into specific strategies.
Why are olivine beaches at least as likely to make the problem worse?
Why is injecting Sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere at least as likely to make the problem worse?
Why are shade satellites at least as likely to make the problem worse?
Are the risks associated with these strategies really worse than 2.7+ C of global warming?
Sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere: unknown impact on ozone layer. Unknown possible chemistry in high radiation environment. Unknown effect on weather patterns. Unknown chance to fall back down to earth. Reductions of incoming solar radiation have unknown effects on all ecosystems on the planet. Extremely dangerous to try.
Shade satellites: similar concerns as above, except for ozone layer, chemical reactions, risk of raining down. Production of the huge number of satellites needed to matter has risky environmental costs. Huge number of objects in orbit will greatly accelerate orbital collisions, may destroy the constellation before it has any real effect.
The risks are currently inestimable, while the risk of 2.7C is at least understood.
On the other hand, reducing carbon emissions is doable, and has little risk of negatively impacting the environment. It's the right solution, and any time wasted by delaying it with promises of Geoengineering is criminal.
We know a lot about sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere, because volcanos.
We should really try all these things at a small scale, with science and R&D, so we can learn and reduce the unknowns. It isn't extremely dangerous.
For instance, the best geoengineering is cloud creation (marine cloud brightening) which literally just involves lofting seasalt into the lower atmosphere.
Why not? "Technology caused the problem, so it can't solve it", that sort of thing?
also, olivine beaches.
It feels too big and without tangible ROI for private companies, too long term for politics, too hard for governments to justify the shot in the dark.
2. Business model: government contracting. Or carbon credits, eventually.
3. How to convince people: Good question. Probably by doing it small scale and getting convincing scientific evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that Stratospheric aerosol injection "is the most-researched SRM method, with high agreement that it could limit warming to below 1.5°C." People might not believe the IPCC, but with more empirical evidence they might.
Tangible ROI: avoiding rapid climate change and enabling companies to transition out of fossil fuels. It's happening, we just need another couple decades. It isn't a shot in the dark, it is building on a scientific legacy. This isn't crazy business. It's science and engineering.
This. All these “geoengineering now!” pleas are infuriating. It’s like a programmer’s simplistic solution to a complex problem, except that we don’t get to roll back a dodgy patch. We already have tools to avoid the worst if we wanted to, and waiting 20 years for the next technological breakthrough is dangerously stupid, particularly considering how little we know about how the biosphere works in general and the likelihood to fuck it up.
If we learn that doesn't make sense to do it, we shouldn't do it. But we shouldn't ban the science and sit on our hands, waiting for people to stop having children (children are far and away the biggest contributor).
But I’ve yet to read how today’s whitepaper sought to compensate for creeping but heat-producing urban and suburban sprawl.
What I really want to see is how are the rural regions faring decade-over-decade.
> With only 1.1C of warming so far, the world has seen a torrent of deadly weather disasters intensified by climate change in recent months, from asphalt-melting heatwaves to flash floods and untameable wildfires.
I'm really bothered by the recent trend in science reporting to take a carte blanche approach to attributing every natural disaster to climate change. Yes, it's indisputable that climate change is absolutely changing our weather patterns, and it's very probably causing and/or strengthening the consequences of disasters happening now, but it's just plain bad science reporting to lump up all recent natural disasters and go "see! Climate change!". And yes, I'm aware that this might be the only way to catch people's attention to the current crisis, but that doesn't excuse the disservice to bone fide science reporting.
/rant.
I was actually curious if climate change results in more hurricanes. Apparently, not so:
"Because of climate change, tropical cyclones are likely increasing in intensity, have increased rainfall, and have larger storm surges, but there might be fewer of them globally. Tropical cyclones may also intensify more rapidly, and occur further polewards. These changes are driven by rising sea temperatures and increased maximum water vapour content of the atmosphere as the air heats up."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclones_and_climate_...
> Many scientists believe that with a warming climate, certain natural disasters, such as floods, heatwaves and wildfires will become more frequent as well as severe. Scientists also say the world has warmed by about 1.1C which they believe has already begun to increase the frequency and severity of natural disasters and, as climate change continues to warm the plant, anticipate further increases in the frequency and severity of these disasters.
Or whatever. I'm not a climate scientist. The point is, nobody can say for certain that the current set of natural disasters is climate change, or sheer luck. That's not a political statement, that's a scientific statement of fact. Science cannot change the facts to suit it's disposition, regardless of its good intentions.
That's more like the expression of a computer scientist or a programmer mindset for whom every events can be precisely traced back to a single set of clearly identifiable causes.
Just because we will never know which drop of gas is responsible for a particular event it doesn't make the whole climate science crumble.
Scientific method is way cooler and useful than that because despite these unknowns we can actually move forward with our understand of the world. That's why it's false to write things like `Many scientists believe`. No, they do not believe. There are no debates. We know it.
I posted this list before but I need to add a new sub step:
A better framing may be to say something like this: "All physical systems of this planet are interconnected. While we cannot be absolutely certain the worsening of weather is related to our behavior, there is mounting evidence that our behavior does, to a great extent, influence the climate. So it is in our hands to alter our behavior so the future generations can enjoy the earth like we do today. We owe it to them."
This is very reductionist. Science is not certain, but we are talking about ~90% certainty here. What we cannot do is point at a given specific event and say “this was caused by climate change”. But we have a significant statistical sampling of weather events and we definitely can say that this is unprecedented and caused by global warming. Simple Bayesian statistics show that what we keep seeing year after year is all but impossible without sustained global warming.
> A better framing may be to say something like this: "All physical systems of this planet are interconnected. While we cannot be absolutely certain the worsening of weather is related to our behavior, there is mounting evidence that our behavior does, to a great extent, influence the climate. So it is in our hands to alter our behavior so the future generations can enjoy the earth like we do today. We owe it to them."
That is not a better phrasing at all. You’ve lost all of your audience by the end of the first sentence. A single hurricane is not caused by global warming (though some events, like the melting of the permafrost, the melting of Greenland’s ice, or the collapse of Antarctica ice sheets definitely are); but collectively all these freak events and these 1,000 years floods every other years are consequences of global warming. It is too late for the future generation to “enjoy earth as we know it”, and trying to make it sound like it is a possibility is doing humanity a disservice. That ship sailed, the objective now should be to do everything we could to mitigate the effects of what we’ve already done. We need more than a little urgency to do this.
- record breaking rainfall
- record breaking droughts
- record breaking glacier melt etc.
followed by "the previous record was set last year"
In reality, it's the massive industry that has no reason to be clean.
And it's the transportation infrastructure in the USA that favors cars over everything else.
And its massive deforestation across the world.
And it's massive CO2 causing evolution of H2CO3 in the ocean, systematically destroying oceanic life.
In reality, it's capitalism, hockeystick required growth (as opposed to sustainability), bad/no planning at larger governance levels, and obsolete-by-design goods that used to be durable.
A&W tried introducing a 1/3 lb burger, and it failed horribly because the average consumer couldn't understand that 1/3 is greater than 1/4.
Now with climate change, that same person is going to shrug off 2.7C because "2.7 isn't much". Re-frame that as 5-10F, and that person is suddenly going to be much more interested, because a 5-10F increase in summer temperatures anywhere in the US is meaningful.
Depending where you live though, adding 5-10°F isn't entirely ignorable. If you live in Texas, that's taking a 100°F day and making it sound even more brutal. Or as a Coloradan, it's experiencing temperatures you never thought you'd see in the mountains, and being able to intuitively associate the increase in temperatures with the increase of wildfires.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/08/global-heati...
The average reader of France 24 understands Celsius and has no clue what a Fahrenheit is. No one uses Fahrenheit apart from the US. It's like imperial units, totally irrelevant if you are addressing a global audience.
This site is a different kind of echo chamber, in that precision, nuance, and actual science tends to be rewarded with upvotes. If you fit in that category, you are multiple standard deviations above the mean news reader/watcher.
And then they completely ignore you or think the entire thing is a lie because you lied about the details.
Pretty much every denial of anthrogenic climate change boils down to pointing out hyped up, exaggerated worst-case scenarios peddled in the media that didn't come to pass, even if the underlying data and original conclusions were accurate.
Link the 5°F to all sorts of concrete bad stuff going on instead 10+ year problems like New Orleans being underwater.
For instance, "Houses in Oregon burned down because of record temperatures!". Use hyperbole, but make it personal. Hell, turn the narrative around if it manipulates people to care: "Five things the government doesn't want you to know about record temperatures!".
It's just like the problem with US politics. One side plays fair, and the other doesn't. In the age of influencers, a dipshit like Joe Rogan has more sway than factual reporting by reputable news sources.
Why then they didn't come up with a 1/5 lb burger?