Is it on topic though? Putting "yet" at the beginning of their comment suggests they think they are refuting the assertion in the article, which would be absolutely incorrect.
Maybe not a full refutation, but naively it does seem incompatible with the “hottest day on record”. Of course, the interest part here is “naively”; in reality, both can be true, which is a bit subtle.
What the devil does unofficial mean? Is there a world's hottest day governing body?
Or is it like boxing and there are multiple governing bodies and Tuesday captured the WBO hottest day, but the IBF and WBC still recognize August 1, 2022?
This unofficial number comes from a climate model published by the University of Maine as opposed to one created by a government agency or the WMO. Several agencies have their own climate models so “official” is very vague.
Generally in the US “official” numbers would come from the NOAA and the NCEI would be the one publishing them.
I have noticed lately that weather apps _predict_ your current weather. We no longer care about weather it's raining as a fact, it's just predicting rain or not. I've had days where it was raining, thunderstorm in fact, and google told me it was Sunny.
The goal is to estimate an "average temperature" for Earth. What does that even mean? Are we talking about the temperature of the ground, the temperature of air at 2 m above the surface, the temperature of the Earth 100 m above the surface? In this case it's something like the second example: 2 m above the surface.
How do you ideally compute this average? You take the simultaneous temperature measurement at every point on Earth and take the average. Obviously that is not possible.
What do you do instead? You put together temperature readings where they exist, satellite data, coupled with past data and behaviors to make an estimate for the average temperature. How else could you possibly do it.
There’s also the time when the surface was molten. The day the moon was created was probably a scorcher :)
That day might be the candidate for the first day earth existed given it gained quite a bit of mass. (Given the theory the earth-moon system was created by the collision of a couple of planetary bodies)
Global surface level temperatures do not jump around like that by degrees and we do not have proof for a mass aridification event for some thousands of years so no it's not bullshit.
No it’s bullshit, I’m not sure what your point is about “jumping around” or aridification because those aren’t the only effects or causes of high temperatures and regardless the point is that this data is not even a century old so claiming some point in it is “likely the highest in centuries” is facetious statistics.
The instrumental temperature record is typically considered to start in 1850 so I am not sure what do you mean by "this data". But 100 or 200 hardly matters.
What I meant is while we don't have day-to-day precise data, we don't quite need it because the global temperature doesn't change that much and we do have some ideas -- paleoclimatologists are crafty -- and if the surface would have heated like now that would have had long term effects and we haven't seen any.
So yes, we can, with a reasonable confidence say it has not been this hot for centuries.
No we would not. El Nino makes things warmer overall, but it's never been this hot before, despite El Ninos always being a thing. Acting like this is all due to natural variability is delusional at this point.
How would one approach calculating the "average temperature" of something as large as a planet?
If you were to ask a child in a maths class, they might suggest taking temperature measurements across all of the planet, then calculating the numerical average of all those values.
I suspect some of the excess evaporation off the subcontinent is precipitating over Sri Lanka. We haven't had a drought in ages and it feels like our monsoon seasons are getting longer and longer.
Claiming something is the hottest day on earth when your data only goes back half a century is the reason people think all these groups are little more than grifters. It’s bad science and hyperbole.
It would be beneficial to your understanding if you read the article. The title is slightly misleading.
> Even though the dataset used for the unofficial record goes back only to 1979, Kapnick said that given other data, the world is likely seeing the hottest day in “several hundred years that we’ve experienced.”
I used to think the same thing, and it was the argument that my dad would make against climate change (i.e. "we've only been tracking the temperature since the late 1800's"). But then I found out about climate proxies:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_(climate)
There was a brief spike at the beginning of the Holocene, a bit over 10,000 years ago, when there was a brief slightly warmer average. Someday soon-ish we seem likely to have a day higher than whatever peak happened then. We won't know it but the odds are already non-zero and rising that we've crossed that threshold.
Walking back in time, we have to go to 115k-130k years ago to find a hotter time period. That's during a brief Eemian period, before the last glacial period (where the glaciars retreated for good). This is called the Pleistocene era. Heaven help us if we breach that peak, whatever it was, but for a couple hundred years it looks like it was +3.5 or 4 C hotter on average than our 1960-1990 average.
It was around 2.5m years ago that the earth actually stayed consistently hotter: the Pilocene era.
Direct temperature measurements go back century or so, but proxies for temperature go back much further. Error bars may be larger but it's not like there's nothing to base the models on.
Sure, there were very high temperatures in the Earth past. There were higher CO2 levels too. The problem is the acceleration, the rate of change. There never were such changes in such short time period as there are today. You have a quant in your nickname, I'm pretty sure you can understand what this means. To make an analogy - you have an oven and it's temperature is currently 150C, way less than the maximum observed 250C. But the problem is that the regulator is set to Max now.
You have to look back 3 million years to see the same GHGe concentrations and temperatures that earth is reaching now (the two are closely correllated throughout most of earth history, and easily explained by science - the greenhouse effects, and the thin earth surface and atmosphere mostly acting as a closed system).
We see that both ice, ocean and air are heating up and accellerating as of 2023. What is observed now is in-line with projections, such as summed up in this hobbyist article (taken with some grains of salt): https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to...
Even if some of what is summarized on the notes linked above may be exhaggerated, it seems this is now happening sooner, faster and more relentless than IPCC and scientific consensus have found so far.
Note that any averages or aggregates on measurements, such as those IPCC and climate scientists use, will lag reality by approximately half the period used. So using multi-year averages means we will already be too late when long-term averages show accelleration, even if final calculations will be more stable ("smoother") by using averages. Of course there's no way to really "cheat" this, but that means when we now see we are in uncharted territory, it should be taken seriously.
Disclaimer: I'm not a climate change denier, I think we should stop burning fossil fuels ASAP.
Though I'm one to question a lot of things and this is my 2 cents. How the hell we know this current changes are completely abnormal? I read about some weird climate anomalies centuries ago and of course there's a lot of evidence that current events are completely abnormal but one question always come to my mind.
What if we're wrong? What if we're being too cooky thinking that by having looked into some evidence that made sense, we're not completely wrong here and current events are just part of a cycle in the planet weather?
Again, I'm questioning but I don't need you guys to present me the proof, I'm aware of it. Just questioning if we're not wrong all along and are here destroying our mental health for nothing. Seems like even by the 1940s standards our generation is being constantly swarmed with problems which we can't fix, which are causing all sort of mental issues due to the complete stress we live in.
This being said, the switch from fossil fuels should be done ASAP, even if we're wrong and it's not causing issues in the environment, they are for sure causing health issues.
There is a very simple experiment to show that human industry is affecting the climate. Take two glass boxes. Fill one with air. Fill the next with air and add carbon dioxide in any amount. Put them outside next to each other in the sun. The one with additional carbon dioxide will get hotter in proportion to the amount of carbon dioxide added.
> Take two glass boxes. Fill one with air. Fill the next with air and add carbon dioxide in any amount. Put them outside next to each other in the sun. The one with additional carbon dioxide will get hotter in proportion to the amount of carbon dioxide added.
Any amount? How does this play out with a CO2 concentration of 0.04%?
Yes any amount. It is a simple chemical property of carbon dioxide that it absorbs more sunlight than air does on average. That heat becomes a part of our climate.
Again this what I meant by we being too cooky. You're speaking about taking a water bottle, fill it with CO2 and use it to represent the entire planet.
If you can't be convinced by simple explanations and if you can't be convinced by harder explanations then you are just spreading doubts and part of the problem.
edit: "what if we are wrong" fuck that shit, it's the same shit from the crowd of "but what if we develop interstellar travels and escape climate change consequences, haha gotcha" or "we'll just invent a carbon extractor in the next 10 years for the whole planet et voilà, ah!".
If you can't have an argument without becoming toxic, please abstain from commenting. We're discussing here and I literally put a disclaimer in the beginning of the comment saying I'm not pro fossil fuels usage.
> We're discussing here and I literally put a disclaimer in the beginning of the comment saying I'm not pro fossil fuels usage.
This disclaimer is not a free card to cast doubts on climate change science. Not being pro fossil fuels usage has nothing to do with questions about climate change science. The way you raise that disclaimer to doubt climate change science ? Well...
People have given you simple explanations you dismissed, I am giving you links to longer/harder explanations you are dismissing (I presume, since you don't follow on that).
If you think climate change science is wrong then bring up why you think so. "What if it's wrong" is rarely a useful basis by itself for a discussion on topics that have been studied in depths for decades.
You can lead a horse to water, but can't make it drink.
Of course you're going to upset people by "feigning" ignorance and ignoring the mountains of supporting evidence provided.
You don't get to play the role of an obstinate child and continually ask "yeah but why" then feign innocence while ignoring the supporting evidence you requested.
The experiment demonstrates a correlation between carbon dioxide and heating of air. Physics explains the reputable and causative mechanism behind the heating. This is the basis for estimating the heating effects at planetary scale of the amount of carbon dioxide (and other gases such as methane) released by humanity.
Yes, I know that, what I'm questioning is the quantity of CO2 necessary to achieve that in earth atmosphere. Let alone be enough to cause it to overheat at this extent. Again, just questioning it not saying what's wrong or right here.
It's healthy to be skeptical about the fearmongering and narrative control, while also promoting ecological policies.
A recent example: Nordstream bombing was the "worst case of environmental terrorism in modern history". US govt blames Ukrainian actors[1]. Yet Greta Thunberg hasn't made a peep about it, and recently did a photo op with the Ukrainian govt, which also hasn't spoke out about it.
It's unbelievably cynical. For some people, environmentalism is just a means to power.
> There was no evidence that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy or other Ukrainian government officials were behind the attacks which spewed natural gas into the Baltic Sea, the newspaper reported, citing U.S. officials.
I'm not really following why Greta should be condemning the Ukrainian government if there's no evidence they had anything to do with it.
Where did I suggest that Greta should condemn him? She should simply not run PR for the government most proximal to the worst act of environmental terrorism in history, until more is figured out.
Imagine if Barack Obama did a photo op with the Saudi King in 2002, with the purpose of promoting the Saudi regime, just a year after a dozen Saudi nationals perpetrated 9/11. "Tone-deaf" would be putting it mildly.
I'm saying that Greta Thunberg, figurehead of environmentalism, is being unbelievably tone-deaf and it reflects very poorly on the integrity of her movement.
You keep calling it "environmental terrorism". How are you making that leap without even knowing who did it. Assuming for a moment the Ukraine government is involved (unproven), it seems far more likely they saw an opportunity to sabotage Russian infrastructure rather than an environmental motivation. You know the country that invaded them and they are currently at war with?
> Greta Thunberg, figurehead of environmentalism
Yuck. Greta is a 20-year old woman who happened to find the spotlight at 15 because a young person being so outspoken captured the public imagination. She's not some patron saint of environmentalism she's one young person who will enjoy making a great many bad decisions in her life (it's not clear to me that this is one). Taking her every action or inaction and using it to paint the entire environmental movement is nonsense.
> Imagine if Barack Obama did a photo op with the Saudi King in 2002, with the purpose of promoting the Saudi regime, just a year after a dozen Saudi nationals perpetrated 9/11. "Tone-deaf" would be putting it mildly.
Comparing Nord Stream to 9/11, especially if it was an act of war by Ukraine, feels like quite a reach.
What shocked me even more is that many people didn't even broke a sweat when they destroyed that dam, which by itself is a climate disaster. They're also threatening blowing up a nuclear plant.
Russia might have done it in order of causing pressure in Europe and to blame Ukraine.
They blew up the dam and also blamed the Ukrainians. They're also apparently rigging a NPP they control to blow up and are already trying to put the blame on Ukrainians as well.
It's a tendency, but we went a bit off-topic here.
You are still going on about that delusional idea, that some party used a tiny yacht to load it with tonnes explosives to get thru the giant pile of stones and mud above the pipes, and then manually put it in 3 or 4 separate places precisely on top of the pipes? And then nobody say the ship in highly controlled sea, and nobody found any explosives debris afterwards, not even the "offended" party with quite capable fleet?
And all that with what motivation? To harm themselves? Harm own economy? Or as KGB likes to say "to frame poor ruzzians"? As opposed to the country who had clear motive (avoid financial sanctions for stopping gas supply, which they actually did already)? And which had an easy and non sci-fi tool to do it? (maintenance payloads inside the pipes)
Come on, stop with the propaganda. Or at least find some fresh one. I have an idea for you - that Ukraine actually bought Prigozhyn wholesale. How's that for a delusional idea? Great, right? Better than cocaine used at Ostankino.
If I search for your quotation — "worst case of environmental terrorism in modern history" — Google only surfaces this thread. Whose assessment were you citing, and what did they actually say?
Do you have a better candidate for worst act of environmental terrorism? I'm open to amending that wording, or dropping the quotes if they are causing distress.
Yeah, using quotation marks when paraphrasing is super confusing. Still, paraphrasing what or whom?
I guess I'd need to know a working definition for environmental terrorism. I've heard of eco-terrorism before, but that's generally thought to be the use of violence to further environmental policy change, which isn't want happened in the case in question.
After we have that working definition, I'd like to know why it's important that one particular young private citizen not connected with the incident be held accountable to having a statement about it.
I'm not aware of that, everything I read about climate change is pretty conclusive on the fact we're doomed.
Some scientists say we might have created feedback loops so even if we "solve" the problem, our end might be inevitable. Would be cool to see more positive takes on it but can't find many.
Also makes me laugh seeing environmentalists being against nuclear power when by now seems to be our only solution stop CO2 emissions (together with renewables of course).
The people who should be trying to get the solution are also making the problem so much worse.
Know that there are sources that survive on misinformation on both sides. While the situation isn't good and still needs our attention and focus, it's not hopeless.
Recent reports show significant improvement, although I cannot provide you with a link at this time (since I'm not in the habit of bookmarking things). Sadly I've also seen plenty of social media responses to this that we should keep regarding the situation as doomed, lest we start to slow our efforts due to good news.
The thing with dynamical systems, and specially complex systems, is that things very complicated, very fast. Evidently things are complicated to reason about, so the severity of climate change is not obvious. So your questioning is completely natural.
There are intuitive one-minute explanations for why climate change is real and important. However, I think that due to the complex nature of the topic a full answer requires deep study.
Thus, I think it is reasonable to rely on the decades of evidence and science that have led to a concensus among the people that spend their entire lifes studying the topic.
> Thus, I think it is reasonable to rely on the decades of evidence and science that have led to a concensus among the people that spend their entire lifes studying the topic.
That's the thing, I could use the same argument to believe in "god" by saying that priest spend their entire lives studying the matter so I should believe them when they say it exists. Yet I'm an atheist. You see where I'm getting at right?
My entire take on this is that we should really do something about it. Specially since, in the chance they're actually right we'd be both saving the world and improving people's health. Going around in a city with smog is very bad for your lungs.
Edit: Though screwing over the mental health of an entire generation over it might defeat the purpose of "saving the world" or "saving humanity".
> That's the thing, I could use the same argument to believe in "god" by saying that priest spend their entire lives studying the matter so I should believe them when they say it exists. Yet I'm an atheist. You see where I'm getting at right?
The difference is called "empiricism". God is defined as something supernatural and unexplainable. Science is the opposite. Why do you think this is a good comparison?
It really feels like you are climate change denier trying to make it seem like you're not. It would have to be a massive conspiracy that spans multiple massive fields of science and has hundreds of thousands if not millions of scientists constantly doing something wrong intentionally or not. Your counter point is the equivalent of questioning the theory of relativity because you don't trust the decades worth of proof.
The science behind climate change is simple and more than 90% of the worlds experts in geology, ecology, climatology, oceanography, chemistry, physics, etc all are in agreement that global warming is real and caused by humans. Here's a FAQ from the times if you'd like a reference https://www.nytimes.com/article/climate-change-global-warmin...
I don't see any assumptions in my comment. Where did I make the assumption that "the studies being done are actually right"? If you can show that the existing studies have problems you're free to share those.
But let me ask you this. Can you think of a single thing you can't discard with this logic? One single thing.
Luckily Popper explained to us we have something in science called falsifiability. I suggest you try to falsify one single theory of our current climate science. Or, alternatively, show that any of the theories is unfalsifiable. Just going all Popper on you, because it’s needed.
By the way, much of our previous research on climate science has already been falsified, for them to be substituted for theories which show even stronger evidence for man-made climate change.
> Specially since, in the chance they're actually right we'd be both saving the world and improving people's health
It's funny you mention this and the "god" example, and yet you are an atheist. Can't you make the same argument about the existence of God? It might be unlikely that a God exists, but just in case He does, it is infinitely better to be religious.
Because you'd end up in hell otherwise.
(This is not my original idea, it was brought up the first time by Blaise Pascal)
Pascal's wager only works if you presuppose that gods don't care about beliefs in other gods. What if they are fine with atheists, but despise those who believe in false gods? Even the christian god is described as jealous! So it doesn't seem safe to believe in any god, on account of not angering the "real ones" due to misbelief.
> Though screwing over the mental health of an entire generation over it might defeat the purpose of "saving the world" or "saving humanity".
I don't take issue with that position, although I disagree. I'd say it is worth it.
However, we should consider that the effect of climate change on "the mental health of an entire genration" is perhaps not greater than the effect of e.g., WWI, WWII, or the Cold War. Imagine living under the constant threat of nuclear war.
Priests aren't doing science. Scientists have used their approach to truly conclusively prove many things; priests have not. In part by trusting scientists today, we're trusting in a broad institution that has a broad track record of success. Can it get things wrong? Of course. But I think 'science' has earned significant trust (not faith) from its long track record.
> That's the thing, I could use the same argument to believe in "god" by saying that priest spend their entire lives studying the matter
Priests "studying" a fixed text is not at all similar to scientists collecting empirical data, creating falsifiable hypotheses, running predictive simulations built on models derived from that empirical study.
It works like a brick wall. The thing is that people often think that "theory" is something unproven, just a sudden idea out of left field. Well, that is probably better described as "hypothesis". Theory on the other hand is a proven thing, just maybe not finalized (sorry if I made any mistakes here in the simplifying terms).
So returning to the brick wall - scientists are doing research everywhere contributing to the climate change theory, adding new facts brick by brick. They look the directly measured CO2 levels in the atmosphere and see an alarming trend. The trend has never reproduced previously according to research (both magnitude AND acceleration rate simultaneously, so "cycles" don't explain). They measure ocean temperature. They dig into Antarctic ice and check elements in older layer. And so on, all around the planet.
When they encounter something that is hard to quantify, like say global atmosphere temperature over time they estimate. They also check if the existing data fits into an existing theory, and unsurprisingly it does. Unfortunately so far everything fits in the global climate change theory.
If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
If climate change is a thing and it is man-made, the worst outcome would be everything that is described by the IPCC, which is bad for society as a whole.
So, just pondering the worst-case scenario is enough to give you an idea of a sensible course of action.
> If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
This is a bit reductive of what is happening. How about the psychological damage done by the fear mongering caused by these type of news regarding climate change?
You're not concerned about how having such a large percentage of population becoming basically useless due to psychological problems can trouble the future of mankind?
You're not concerned about how having such a large percentage of population becoming basically useless due to psychological problems can trouble the future of mankind?
I have not seen any evidence of a "large percentage of the population becoming useless" due to fear of climate change.
Can you provide a citation?
I have seen people with a basic background concern about climate change, and some people have more of it than others, but I don't see a "large percentage" of people becoming useless.
People have lots of fears. Some even more more pressing than climate change. Human beings are able to handle and process many different fears of varying intensities simultaneously, and have for thousands of years.
I have also not seen any information that the psychological fear of climate change is worse than actual climate change. One provokes level of fear in a subset of the population. The other will kill us all.
Perhaps the best way to fix those psychological fears in people is to fix the climate so they don't have to worry about it?
If somebody calls out the problem and then we all agree on an attempted solution why is there some major psychological damage to the general population as a result of that? Just because something might be scary we shouldn't talk about it?
What about the physical and psychological damage if the scientists are right and things get really really really really bad? If the ocean levels really do rise 10+ meters, won’t that cause even worse psychological damage? If places like the Middle East really do become uninhabitable, won’t that cause even worse psychological damage? Millions of refugees. If the vast majority of sea life dies, won’t that cause psychological damage? What about the Atlantic current stopping and the effects that would have on Europe? What about the increased drought and crop failure? What about invasive species moving farther North? More animals going extinct? Etc. It seems to me that the psychological damage from any and all of those will be far worse that what you are worried about.
If you removed news about climate change, the climate of fear mongering in the news would not change much, it’d just refocus on the typical, and I think the psychological damage you’re referring to would continue nearly unabated.
It’s a product of the information environment, not the information itself.
And in light of the magnitude of the risk of getting this wrong, future generations will benefit in either case - either because we did what we could to improve things, or because we were the unfortunate generation that got lucky enough to be the ones having to interpret the data and suffer through some anxiety so the next generation doesn’t have to.
Imagine two future headlines:
“21st century scientists were on the right track, but society failed to act in time due to a drastic pullback in climate related reporting caused by worry that such reporting was too upsetting for people to handle. 6B perished in the aftermath due to mass starvation and forced migration.”
“21st century scientists had the unfortunate job of coming face to face with apparently cataclysmic data, without enough information about earth’s long term cycles to know that this was inevitable”.
Bottom line: the cost of incorrectly taking no action is so much higher than taking unnecessary action that it seems preferable to find ways to manage the downsides of acting than to hope there are no downsides of not acting.
There is a third possibility: climate change is a thing and it’s NOT Man made. This is the true worst case senario. We both hurt the global economy (especially of developing world) in a futile attempt to stop it while still having to deal with the effects.
To be clear, I do believe in anthropomorphic climate change, but in a vacuum the situation is not as “sensible” as you say.
it would change the methods we have to use. cutting carbon emissions wouldn't do anything substantial if it's not man made. in that case I think we'd need to use geoengineering to avoid it.
> If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
A “few” percentage points of growth means misery for many.
> If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
It’s easy to be blithe about a few percentage points coming out of your bonus if you already live comfortably in the first world, but a few percentage points of economic growth is life or death for millions of people.
Considering how much money is being invested into the solutions, I would say that the change from fossil fuels will be great for economies and geopolitics. Specially since by going renewable/nuclear most countries are reducing dependence on crazy countries and may end up spending way less money on energy.
Those are all good reasons to support green energy (and I do), but I was responding to the patent poster’s worst-case scenario, which would in fact be bad, not just inconvenient.
"A few percentage points of economic growth" makes it sound so trivial. When what you're really saying is you want to keep billions of poor people around the world away from the chance at a better life.
What I do know is that Nigeria was recently forced to cut their fuel subsidy, and I highly suspect that was done under indirect pressure from western environmentalists. Which would be a very concrete example of making a couple hundred million very poor people even worse off.
Fair point. But the deeper problem was most of that money never trickled down to its own citizens, built infrastructure or got reinvested in the country. Someone else, not the people, became "owners", making foreign agents the policy-makers.
Just pointing out that the deeper issues often gets lost in the geopolitics. When it progressively makes people's lives worse or exponentially increases debts, it really all leads to the same outcomes in the end.
> If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
Don't forget about the benefits to average healthspan from not breathing in exhaust/coal fumes. And the unknown benefits from opening up a new technological frontier that has previously been closed off due to the high energy density of fossil fuels.
> the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
I suppose the real reason we're not tackling it full on is that it won't be a few percentage points.
Let's face it, the cost of abruptly stopping fossil fuel dependence would be high. Countries going bankrupt, people dying due to high fuel costs, enormous investments diverting money from other necessities.
It may well be necessary, and better than the alternative! But we tried the "just cycle a little bit more" approach and it made next to no dent to CO2 emissions. To really tackle it, we'd need to reinvent the global economy.
You can put it as a variant of the Pascal wager. If it is right, mankind may go through hellish conditions for decades and centuries, till extinction. If it is wrong we will have tl go through something like the lockdowns because the Covid pandemic.
Of course, that if you know nothing and believe in no one, so you don't have a clue of what future may come. We advanced a bit since astrology and reading tea leaves, we have better tools to make predictions, and they work well enough to base our current civilization on that, and, don't know, be afraid because taking a plane, entering a skyscraper, or taking a medicine. And those tools are the ones saying which alternative is the right one there.
What if we are? Worst case we've significantly reduced the amount of pollution we are putting into our air, land and sea, and reap those health benefits, but not actually affected the climate one way or another.
I think the evidence for climate change is pretty strong, but it's not like it's the only reason to quit burning coal and pumping the smoke into our atmosphere or producing huge amounts of plastics.
If we act and we're right we've prevented catastrophe, if we act and we're wrong we're just healthier, and kill less of the ecosystem around us.
There's plenty of easy-to-find evidence out there that shows that the speed and magnitude of these changes are not only unprecedented in human history, but geologic time scales as well. It's also crystal clear that these changes are caused by the massive increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations caused by humans burning fossil fuels. This is sorted by both theory and massive amounts of evidence. Good primers exist all across the web, http://climate.gov/ is a good starting point.
"But wait, maybe this is all just natural cycles" is borderline willful denial at this point, especially on a well-informed site like HN.
Might as well ask if maybe the earth is flat after all.
> "But wait, maybe this is all just natural cycles" is borderline willful denial at this point, especially on a well-informed site like HN. Might as well ask if maybe the earth is flat after all.
On such website dismissing someone for questioning common knowledge wouldn't be worse? :)
May I remind you people used to think the earth was the center of the solar system and they burned the person who questioned it. Quite an extreme example, but you get it right?
LOL. Copernicus & Galileo didn't "doubt" the geocentric model, they provided scientific evidence that it was incorrect. You see how that's different, right?
"I'm not trying to question climate change, I'm just wondering if this overwhelming scientific evidence might somehow be wrong, despite any evidence to the contrary ... and I'm just as brave as Galileo for questioning established orthodoxy, too!".
Definitely saving this comic for future reference!
Was chatting about "marketing gimmicks" earlier with a colleague but saying so what if the gimmicks are actually objectively good? Things like product made by humans, sustainable packaging, etc.
My personal perspective, FWIW:), is not "is this natural/normal" but a far more selfish "is this good for us?"
There were many extremely destructive events in the past that were perfect "normal", in the sense they're not man made, but we might not enjoy happening now.
So if there's a climate change happening ; and if it is negative / bad for us ; and if some actions we take can make it better and some can make it worse... It feeels like a no-brainer, that religion and capitalism and myriad other talking points of dissenting only distract from.
I.e. Even if without human kind, some curve would have a spike ; and that spike is bad for us ; and we can flatten that spike ; them umm lets do it.
It feels fairly intuitive that "pollution is bad" (we can argue how bad), and "adding c02 and making everything crazier is bad" (we can argue how much of the bad is our contribution).
In my view the entire point should be maintaining the earth atmosphere in a balance that suits us. Too much CO2 is bad but if we remove too much will be bad for us as well. Right now the common agreement is that we have too much of it though.
I find that a lot of folks start with very strong disagreement; and eventually it turns out (my interpretation, possibly horribly wrong!) subconsciously they resent feeling blamed or judged or moralized for just living. And fair enough. But for me, the key part is a very selfish perspective - something is happening that's bad for us, we are making it to some degree or another worse, and there's a clear optimal place on a curve of economic activity vs life stye vs future of species, and I don't think we are on the selfish optimal spot, let alone some "global earth/gaia-perspective multi-species well-being of all life" optimal spot.
Part of what I fail to understand about our current situation is that it seems like there's enormous economic gains to be had in leading the world in the development, production, and distribution of alternative energy (solar, wind, etc) technology. Would not a USG led moonshot type clean energy project both lead to economic growth while also helping address the issues from fossil fuel emissions? Are we just lacking the political will to make that happen?
https://xkcd.com/1732/ does a good job of showing why it does not look like "just part of a cycle in the planet weather".
For a long time scale, a rapid warming is associated with a rapid increase in greenhouse gases. This causes ocean acidification. Ocean acidification leaves a clear record in the paleontological record. The last one which was comparable to what we're doing through now was https://www.britannica.com/science/Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-... about 55 million years ago. And current projections for the speed and severity of acidification are worse. Which indicates that the warming that we are going through is also faster than that experienced at any point in the last 55 million years.
Nowadays you can't really question anything that's taken as common knowledge. During Covid times it happened that stuff that were questioned in a year were disproved in the next year. Yet people who questioned it were treated like assholes (like it's already happening here). And then there's this hungry for clickbaits media that will publish anything that can scare people into reading their articles...
Coming back to the matter at hand, there's a lot of new battery technologies and I strongly believe that current evs will be able to switch from Lithium if a better technology comes. Also Lithium batteries are recyclable so they might become useful to store energy in the grid, though I barely see investment for it worldwide.
Nuclear for me seems more and more as a silver bullet, together with the various renewables and grid storage. But this is just energy production, we still have a lot of things to stop burning fuels that right now seem damn impossible.
> Nowadays you can't really question anything that's taken as common knowledge. During Covid times it happened that stuff that were questioned in a year were disproved in the next year. Yet people who questioned it were treated like assholes (like it's already happening here).
Care to give examples? Because I don't remember anything those "questioning" were right about. I'll give you a short list of things they were wrong about that I can remember:
- "masks don't work"
- "it's just a flu"
- "vaccines are either perfect or fully ineffective"
- "they are using the crisis to control us and will never open back up"
- "as soon as the next US president is elected it will suddenly be over"
This reminds me of the "population bomb" of the 1970's. There was a scientific view at the time that the world would become overpopulated due to the rapid growth in places like India and China. That in turn would cause mass death and starvation world wide. This view became mainstream enough that the US and the World Bank pressured India into a mass sterilization program[1]. By the end over 8 million Indians were surgically sterilized, many against their will.
Of course the population bomb turned out not to be real. Third-world birth rates drop as they grow economically. But on the path to preventing the perceived apocalypse we imposed massive harm on millions of people.
The real problem was that part of the scientific community were so confident in their ability to correctly model extremely complex systems that they were willing to do incredible harm "for the greater good". But it turns out that modeling complex systems, especially ones that have never been observed (such as a population "bomb") is really hard. They were not wrong about the data (population was growing at an unprecedented rate). But they were wrong about how that would impact the future.
This has a lot of parallels to climate change. Climate is an incredibly complex system that we have just recently started to study. We have never before observed runaway anthropomorphic climate change (obviously) so all these predictions are based on our ability to model this system. There really isn't any dispute that the global climate is warmer then it was a few decades ago, but what that actually means for the future has big error bars. This could be another "population bomb" type scenario.
But again, it might not be. The science strongly suggest that climate change is a very real and preventable phenomenon. Scientists have been right about the global harm of many other industrial activities (such as leaded gasoline or CFC's). But I am wary of people who say we need to ignore the harm of climate related policy actions because the IPCC future is "inevitable" if we don't. I am also skeptical of our ability to get the international community united enough to actually have a meaningful impact.
(I’m also not a climate change denier) kinda the same reason it’s funny to me how not many economists are disgustingly rich despite supposedly being able to make scientific sense out of economic mechanics.
"Population Bomb" was not a scientific consensus at any time. It was controversial, at best, in its day and has always faced criticism. Ehrlich was a scientist but not of the type qualified to hold forth on the subject, and he did not perform research that would have strengthened his projections, none of which came to pass. His book is pop culture, not science.
> How the hell we know this current changes are completely abnormal?
Doing science. Thing is, unlike what everybody likes to pretend, doing science means to do a lot of tedious hard work and not a whole lot of quick explanations. So the thing is, that we understand the physics of dilute gasses at roughly room temperature phenomenally well, we did all the experiments of putting this gas into a piston, and then heating the piston slightly, and then do it with a slightly different gas mixture, and then we double checked all these experiments and finally we got a pretty good theory sometime around the turn of the 19th century. Then you start to integrate all that knowledge with a knowledge of radiation basis, and you start doing cross checks and try to understand weather, and at some point try to start forecasting wether, with all the associated trouble and that was then sometime in the let's say 1960ies or thereabouts. (During WWII the flying wing of the US Army had meteorologists at all airfields, I believe German news started to broadcast weather forecast in the late 60ies.) Then you do all that with bigger computers and quite a bit of theory of partial differential equations, and then you realize that understanding the 11 year average is a much much better defined problem than next weeks weather. And all of these steps do suggest different cross checks. (Actually in the Physical Science Basis part of the 5th IPCC report there is a chapter called Evaluation of Climate Models ([0], p. 741), which goes into quite a bit of detail on the most recent efforts along those lines.)
Imagine what they are going to say in 2030s about how much easier 2020s was.
One thing is for sure, the wealthy are just going to move higher up in their penthouses and crank the A/C while telling other people to get back to the coal mines to pay their bills or be homeless (which will be a death sentence due to the heat).
If this is true, how in the world do people in India or Arizona survive their summer?
More sensationalist, Doomer nonsense. The world absolutely isn’t going to end in the next 10 years because we hit a local max in a data set that only goes back 40 years.
You could also post relevant facts, like stuff that happened more recently than 55 million years ago, when there were no humans, not even apes or monkeys.
I feel like this is a really old, easily debunked argument. Rapid change toward a much warmer climate is likely to kick off a very abrupt extinction event. Which, incidentally, has already begun.
The point of this argument is that humans as a species are not going to go extinct (we have thumbs!) and life on Earth existed for millions of years at far hotter temperatures than even the worst-case warming scenario.
None of this makes climate change a good thing, but it's a useful corrective to headlines that suggest we're entering some kind of uncharted territory for the planet. The planet can take a lot more than we're dishing out, even if individual species can't.
Isn't the real issue with Carbon Emissions that they ACCELERATE climate change such that the planet is not able to adjust to the changes.
The earth has undergone many climate changes before however these take place over tens of thousands of years.
Maybe giant solar flares, intense volcanic eruptions (with enormous amounts of smoke), huge asteroid collisions are comparable in terms of rapidly affecting the Earth's climate previously.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] thread"An average person in a heterosexual couple has one boob and one ball."
I'm sure they think everything is fine too.
Or is it like boxing and there are multiple governing bodies and Tuesday captured the WBO hottest day, but the IBF and WBC still recognize August 1, 2022?
Generally in the US “official” numbers would come from the NOAA and the NCEI would be the one publishing them.
How do you ideally compute this average? You take the simultaneous temperature measurement at every point on Earth and take the average. Obviously that is not possible.
What do you do instead? You put together temperature readings where they exist, satellite data, coupled with past data and behaviors to make an estimate for the average temperature. How else could you possibly do it.
[1] https://docs.house.gov/meetings/SY/SY00/20160202/104399/HHRG...
Hopefully, we will get through this one way or another.
> The planet’s temperature spiked on Tuesday to its hottest day in decades and likely centuries,
It's not talking about "greenhouse Earth". Anyways, for immediate concerns we only need to look at the Meghalayan age.
That day might be the candidate for the first day earth existed given it gained quite a bit of mass. (Given the theory the earth-moon system was created by the collision of a couple of planetary bodies)
The instrumental temperature record is typically considered to start in 1850 so I am not sure what do you mean by "this data". But 100 or 200 hardly matters.
What I meant is while we don't have day-to-day precise data, we don't quite need it because the global temperature doesn't change that much and we do have some ideas -- paleoclimatologists are crafty -- and if the surface would have heated like now that would have had long term effects and we haven't seen any.
So yes, we can, with a reasonable confidence say it has not been this hot for centuries.
You do realise that the headline corresponds to a computer model, right? There hasn't actually been a record high measurement.
If you were to ask a child in a maths class, they might suggest taking temperature measurements across all of the planet, then calculating the numerical average of all those values.
the Principle Investigator here has a Nobel Prize in Physics
The Institute's Climate Reanalyzer also has some visual data of historical daily sea surface temps that is referenced quite a bit these days.
Data only stretches back to the late 70s/early 80s, but many of the hottest trending years are within the last decade.
[0] https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/
[1] https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
> Even though the dataset used for the unofficial record goes back only to 1979, Kapnick said that given other data, the world is likely seeing the hottest day in “several hundred years that we’ve experienced.”
Walking back in time, we have to go to 115k-130k years ago to find a hotter time period. That's during a brief Eemian period, before the last glacial period (where the glaciars retreated for good). This is called the Pleistocene era. Heaven help us if we breach that peak, whatever it was, but for a couple hundred years it looks like it was +3.5 or 4 C hotter on average than our 1960-1990 average.
It was around 2.5m years ago that the earth actually stayed consistently hotter: the Pilocene era.
The data isnt exactly precise but the conclusion should be resounding & clear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#Ov...
Antarctic Sea Ice Extent records: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/antarcti...
Ocean Temperature records: https://www.theinvadingsea.com/2023/05/01/record-warm-oceans...
2-Meter Air Temperature records: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/
You have to look back 3 million years to see the same GHGe concentrations and temperatures that earth is reaching now (the two are closely correllated throughout most of earth history, and easily explained by science - the greenhouse effects, and the thin earth surface and atmosphere mostly acting as a closed system).
We see that both ice, ocean and air are heating up and accellerating as of 2023. What is observed now is in-line with projections, such as summed up in this hobbyist article (taken with some grains of salt): https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to...
Even if some of what is summarized on the notes linked above may be exhaggerated, it seems this is now happening sooner, faster and more relentless than IPCC and scientific consensus have found so far.
Note that any averages or aggregates on measurements, such as those IPCC and climate scientists use, will lag reality by approximately half the period used. So using multi-year averages means we will already be too late when long-term averages show accelleration, even if final calculations will be more stable ("smoother") by using averages. Of course there's no way to really "cheat" this, but that means when we now see we are in uncharted territory, it should be taken seriously.
Though I'm one to question a lot of things and this is my 2 cents. How the hell we know this current changes are completely abnormal? I read about some weird climate anomalies centuries ago and of course there's a lot of evidence that current events are completely abnormal but one question always come to my mind.
What if we're wrong? What if we're being too cooky thinking that by having looked into some evidence that made sense, we're not completely wrong here and current events are just part of a cycle in the planet weather?
Again, I'm questioning but I don't need you guys to present me the proof, I'm aware of it. Just questioning if we're not wrong all along and are here destroying our mental health for nothing. Seems like even by the 1940s standards our generation is being constantly swarmed with problems which we can't fix, which are causing all sort of mental issues due to the complete stress we live in.
This being said, the switch from fossil fuels should be done ASAP, even if we're wrong and it's not causing issues in the environment, they are for sure causing health issues.
Any amount? How does this play out with a CO2 concentration of 0.04%?
It spreads out, like colorants in water.
Think about mercury:
> For example, if Isabella weighs 132 pounds (60 kg), she should consume a maximum of 95.8 µg of mercury per week.
95.8ug is just .0000001596..% of Isabella and yet it's deadly.
If you can't be convinced by simple explanations and if you can't be convinced by harder explanations then you are just spreading doubts and part of the problem.
edit: "what if we are wrong" fuck that shit, it's the same shit from the crowd of "but what if we develop interstellar travels and escape climate change consequences, haha gotcha" or "we'll just invent a carbon extractor in the next 10 years for the whole planet et voilà, ah!".
You are simply arguing for argument's sake.
This disclaimer is not a free card to cast doubts on climate change science. Not being pro fossil fuels usage has nothing to do with questions about climate change science. The way you raise that disclaimer to doubt climate change science ? Well...
People have given you simple explanations you dismissed, I am giving you links to longer/harder explanations you are dismissing (I presume, since you don't follow on that).
If you think climate change science is wrong then bring up why you think so. "What if it's wrong" is rarely a useful basis by itself for a discussion on topics that have been studied in depths for decades.
Of course you're going to upset people by "feigning" ignorance and ignoring the mountains of supporting evidence provided.
You don't get to play the role of an obstinate child and continually ask "yeah but why" then feign innocence while ignoring the supporting evidence you requested.
- You Asked: If CO2 Is Only 0.04% of the Atmosphere, How Does it Drive Global Warming? https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/07/30/co2-drives-glob...
- How Exactly Does Carbon Dioxide Cause Global Warming? https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-...
- Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
A recent example: Nordstream bombing was the "worst case of environmental terrorism in modern history". US govt blames Ukrainian actors[1]. Yet Greta Thunberg hasn't made a peep about it, and recently did a photo op with the Ukrainian govt, which also hasn't spoke out about it.
It's unbelievably cynical. For some people, environmentalism is just a means to power.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggest...
pretty sure it doesnt, but the russian one does - maybe youve confused them?
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-suggest...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-had-intelligence-ukrainian-...
> There was no evidence that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy or other Ukrainian government officials were behind the attacks which spewed natural gas into the Baltic Sea, the newspaper reported, citing U.S. officials.
I'm not really following why Greta should be condemning the Ukrainian government if there's no evidence they had anything to do with it.
Imagine if Barack Obama did a photo op with the Saudi King in 2002, with the purpose of promoting the Saudi regime, just a year after a dozen Saudi nationals perpetrated 9/11. "Tone-deaf" would be putting it mildly.
I'm saying that Greta Thunberg, figurehead of environmentalism, is being unbelievably tone-deaf and it reflects very poorly on the integrity of her movement.
> Greta Thunberg, figurehead of environmentalism
Yuck. Greta is a 20-year old woman who happened to find the spotlight at 15 because a young person being so outspoken captured the public imagination. She's not some patron saint of environmentalism she's one young person who will enjoy making a great many bad decisions in her life (it's not clear to me that this is one). Taking her every action or inaction and using it to paint the entire environmental movement is nonsense.
> Imagine if Barack Obama did a photo op with the Saudi King in 2002, with the purpose of promoting the Saudi regime, just a year after a dozen Saudi nationals perpetrated 9/11. "Tone-deaf" would be putting it mildly.
Comparing Nord Stream to 9/11, especially if it was an act of war by Ukraine, feels like quite a reach.
Can’t Russia just turn off the tap?
They blew up the dam and also blamed the Ukrainians. They're also apparently rigging a NPP they control to blow up and are already trying to put the blame on Ukrainians as well.
It's a tendency, but we went a bit off-topic here.
And all that with what motivation? To harm themselves? Harm own economy? Or as KGB likes to say "to frame poor ruzzians"? As opposed to the country who had clear motive (avoid financial sanctions for stopping gas supply, which they actually did already)? And which had an easy and non sci-fi tool to do it? (maintenance payloads inside the pipes)
Come on, stop with the propaganda. Or at least find some fresh one. I have an idea for you - that Ukraine actually bought Prigozhyn wholesale. How's that for a delusional idea? Great, right? Better than cocaine used at Ostankino.
Do you have a better candidate for worst act of environmental terrorism? I'm open to amending that wording, or dropping the quotes if they are causing distress.
I guess I'd need to know a working definition for environmental terrorism. I've heard of eco-terrorism before, but that's generally thought to be the use of violence to further environmental policy change, which isn't want happened in the case in question.
After we have that working definition, I'd like to know why it's important that one particular young private citizen not connected with the incident be held accountable to having a statement about it.
Some scientists say we might have created feedback loops so even if we "solve" the problem, our end might be inevitable. Would be cool to see more positive takes on it but can't find many.
Also makes me laugh seeing environmentalists being against nuclear power when by now seems to be our only solution stop CO2 emissions (together with renewables of course).
The people who should be trying to get the solution are also making the problem so much worse.
Recent reports show significant improvement, although I cannot provide you with a link at this time (since I'm not in the habit of bookmarking things). Sadly I've also seen plenty of social media responses to this that we should keep regarding the situation as doomed, lest we start to slow our efforts due to good news.
All the big headlines always show the worst news events and such. It's all doom and gloom.
I never see these reports showing significant improvement make the headlines and news about optimism about the recent changes and such.
There are intuitive one-minute explanations for why climate change is real and important. However, I think that due to the complex nature of the topic a full answer requires deep study.
Thus, I think it is reasonable to rely on the decades of evidence and science that have led to a concensus among the people that spend their entire lifes studying the topic.
That's the thing, I could use the same argument to believe in "god" by saying that priest spend their entire lives studying the matter so I should believe them when they say it exists. Yet I'm an atheist. You see where I'm getting at right?
My entire take on this is that we should really do something about it. Specially since, in the chance they're actually right we'd be both saving the world and improving people's health. Going around in a city with smog is very bad for your lungs.
Edit: Though screwing over the mental health of an entire generation over it might defeat the purpose of "saving the world" or "saving humanity".
The difference is called "empiricism". God is defined as something supernatural and unexplainable. Science is the opposite. Why do you think this is a good comparison?
The science behind climate change is simple and more than 90% of the worlds experts in geology, ecology, climatology, oceanography, chemistry, physics, etc all are in agreement that global warming is real and caused by humans. Here's a FAQ from the times if you'd like a reference https://www.nytimes.com/article/climate-change-global-warmin...
But let me ask you this. Can you think of a single thing you can't discard with this logic? One single thing.
By the way, much of our previous research on climate science has already been falsified, for them to be substituted for theories which show even stronger evidence for man-made climate change.
It's funny you mention this and the "god" example, and yet you are an atheist. Can't you make the same argument about the existence of God? It might be unlikely that a God exists, but just in case He does, it is infinitely better to be religious. Because you'd end up in hell otherwise.
(This is not my original idea, it was brought up the first time by Blaise Pascal)
I don't take issue with that position, although I disagree. I'd say it is worth it.
However, we should consider that the effect of climate change on "the mental health of an entire genration" is perhaps not greater than the effect of e.g., WWI, WWII, or the Cold War. Imagine living under the constant threat of nuclear war.
Priests "studying" a fixed text is not at all similar to scientists collecting empirical data, creating falsifiable hypotheses, running predictive simulations built on models derived from that empirical study.
So returning to the brick wall - scientists are doing research everywhere contributing to the climate change theory, adding new facts brick by brick. They look the directly measured CO2 levels in the atmosphere and see an alarming trend. The trend has never reproduced previously according to research (both magnitude AND acceleration rate simultaneously, so "cycles" don't explain). They measure ocean temperature. They dig into Antarctic ice and check elements in older layer. And so on, all around the planet. When they encounter something that is hard to quantify, like say global atmosphere temperature over time they estimate. They also check if the existing data fits into an existing theory, and unsurprisingly it does. Unfortunately so far everything fits in the global climate change theory.
That is an excellent question to ask.
If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
If climate change is a thing and it is man-made, the worst outcome would be everything that is described by the IPCC, which is bad for society as a whole.
So, just pondering the worst-case scenario is enough to give you an idea of a sensible course of action.
This is a bit reductive of what is happening. How about the psychological damage done by the fear mongering caused by these type of news regarding climate change?
What about it?
I have not seen any evidence of a "large percentage of the population becoming useless" due to fear of climate change.
Can you provide a citation?
I have seen people with a basic background concern about climate change, and some people have more of it than others, but I don't see a "large percentage" of people becoming useless.
People have lots of fears. Some even more more pressing than climate change. Human beings are able to handle and process many different fears of varying intensities simultaneously, and have for thousands of years.
I have also not seen any information that the psychological fear of climate change is worse than actual climate change. One provokes level of fear in a subset of the population. The other will kill us all.
Perhaps the best way to fix those psychological fears in people is to fix the climate so they don't have to worry about it?
- There's no climate change
- Climate change is okay and has no impact
- Climate change exists but it's due to natural causes
- Climate change exists but it's due to natural causes and its impacts are small
- Climate change exists but its impacts are good for us
- Climate change exists but we will adapt
- Climate change exists and its the activists' fault we didn't act because they scared us with their doomsday predictions
- Climate change exists and we shouldn't talk about it because it's scary and scared people are not productive members of society <- you are here
It’s a product of the information environment, not the information itself.
And in light of the magnitude of the risk of getting this wrong, future generations will benefit in either case - either because we did what we could to improve things, or because we were the unfortunate generation that got lucky enough to be the ones having to interpret the data and suffer through some anxiety so the next generation doesn’t have to.
Imagine two future headlines:
“21st century scientists were on the right track, but society failed to act in time due to a drastic pullback in climate related reporting caused by worry that such reporting was too upsetting for people to handle. 6B perished in the aftermath due to mass starvation and forced migration.”
“21st century scientists had the unfortunate job of coming face to face with apparently cataclysmic data, without enough information about earth’s long term cycles to know that this was inevitable”.
Bottom line: the cost of incorrectly taking no action is so much higher than taking unnecessary action that it seems preferable to find ways to manage the downsides of acting than to hope there are no downsides of not acting.
I agree. However, what you describe in your examples are not the worst case scenarios, or even of equal severity.
To be clear, I do believe in anthropomorphic climate change, but in a vacuum the situation is not as “sensible” as you say.
A “few” percentage points of growth means misery for many.
It’s easy to be blithe about a few percentage points coming out of your bonus if you already live comfortably in the first world, but a few percentage points of economic growth is life or death for millions of people.
Just pointing out that the deeper issues often gets lost in the geopolitics. When it progressively makes people's lives worse or exponentially increases debts, it really all leads to the same outcomes in the end.
Don't forget about the benefits to average healthspan from not breathing in exhaust/coal fumes. And the unknown benefits from opening up a new technological frontier that has previously been closed off due to the high energy density of fossil fuels.
I suppose the real reason we're not tackling it full on is that it won't be a few percentage points.
Let's face it, the cost of abruptly stopping fossil fuel dependence would be high. Countries going bankrupt, people dying due to high fuel costs, enormous investments diverting money from other necessities.
It may well be necessary, and better than the alternative! But we tried the "just cycle a little bit more" approach and it made next to no dent to CO2 emissions. To really tackle it, we'd need to reinvent the global economy.
Of course, that if you know nothing and believe in no one, so you don't have a clue of what future may come. We advanced a bit since astrology and reading tea leaves, we have better tools to make predictions, and they work well enough to base our current civilization on that, and, don't know, be afraid because taking a plane, entering a skyscraper, or taking a medicine. And those tools are the ones saying which alternative is the right one there.
What if we are? Worst case we've significantly reduced the amount of pollution we are putting into our air, land and sea, and reap those health benefits, but not actually affected the climate one way or another.
I think the evidence for climate change is pretty strong, but it's not like it's the only reason to quit burning coal and pumping the smoke into our atmosphere or producing huge amounts of plastics.
If we act and we're right we've prevented catastrophe, if we act and we're wrong we're just healthier, and kill less of the ecosystem around us.
"But wait, maybe this is all just natural cycles" is borderline willful denial at this point, especially on a well-informed site like HN. Might as well ask if maybe the earth is flat after all.
On such website dismissing someone for questioning common knowledge wouldn't be worse? :)
May I remind you people used to think the earth was the center of the solar system and they burned the person who questioned it. Quite an extreme example, but you get it right?
"I'm not trying to question climate change, I'm just wondering if this overwhelming scientific evidence might somehow be wrong, despite any evidence to the contrary ... and I'm just as brave as Galileo for questioning established orthodoxy, too!".
Sure, buddy. Tell me all about it.
Your comment reminded me of this comic, “what if we create a better world for nothing” is basically what you’re saying.
Was chatting about "marketing gimmicks" earlier with a colleague but saying so what if the gimmicks are actually objectively good? Things like product made by humans, sustainable packaging, etc.
There were many extremely destructive events in the past that were perfect "normal", in the sense they're not man made, but we might not enjoy happening now.
So if there's a climate change happening ; and if it is negative / bad for us ; and if some actions we take can make it better and some can make it worse... It feeels like a no-brainer, that religion and capitalism and myriad other talking points of dissenting only distract from.
I.e. Even if without human kind, some curve would have a spike ; and that spike is bad for us ; and we can flatten that spike ; them umm lets do it.
It feels fairly intuitive that "pollution is bad" (we can argue how bad), and "adding c02 and making everything crazier is bad" (we can argue how much of the bad is our contribution).
I find that a lot of folks start with very strong disagreement; and eventually it turns out (my interpretation, possibly horribly wrong!) subconsciously they resent feeling blamed or judged or moralized for just living. And fair enough. But for me, the key part is a very selfish perspective - something is happening that's bad for us, we are making it to some degree or another worse, and there's a clear optimal place on a curve of economic activity vs life stye vs future of species, and I don't think we are on the selfish optimal spot, let alone some "global earth/gaia-perspective multi-species well-being of all life" optimal spot.
For a long time scale, a rapid warming is associated with a rapid increase in greenhouse gases. This causes ocean acidification. Ocean acidification leaves a clear record in the paleontological record. The last one which was comparable to what we're doing through now was https://www.britannica.com/science/Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-... about 55 million years ago. And current projections for the speed and severity of acidification are worse. Which indicates that the warming that we are going through is also faster than that experienced at any point in the last 55 million years.
Coming back to the matter at hand, there's a lot of new battery technologies and I strongly believe that current evs will be able to switch from Lithium if a better technology comes. Also Lithium batteries are recyclable so they might become useful to store energy in the grid, though I barely see investment for it worldwide.
Nuclear for me seems more and more as a silver bullet, together with the various renewables and grid storage. But this is just energy production, we still have a lot of things to stop burning fuels that right now seem damn impossible.
Care to give examples? Because I don't remember anything those "questioning" were right about. I'll give you a short list of things they were wrong about that I can remember:
- "masks don't work"
- "it's just a flu"
- "vaccines are either perfect or fully ineffective"
- "they are using the crisis to control us and will never open back up"
- "as soon as the next US president is elected it will suddenly be over"
Of course the population bomb turned out not to be real. Third-world birth rates drop as they grow economically. But on the path to preventing the perceived apocalypse we imposed massive harm on millions of people.
The real problem was that part of the scientific community were so confident in their ability to correctly model extremely complex systems that they were willing to do incredible harm "for the greater good". But it turns out that modeling complex systems, especially ones that have never been observed (such as a population "bomb") is really hard. They were not wrong about the data (population was growing at an unprecedented rate). But they were wrong about how that would impact the future.
This has a lot of parallels to climate change. Climate is an incredibly complex system that we have just recently started to study. We have never before observed runaway anthropomorphic climate change (obviously) so all these predictions are based on our ability to model this system. There really isn't any dispute that the global climate is warmer then it was a few decades ago, but what that actually means for the future has big error bars. This could be another "population bomb" type scenario.
But again, it might not be. The science strongly suggest that climate change is a very real and preventable phenomenon. Scientists have been right about the global harm of many other industrial activities (such as leaded gasoline or CFC's). But I am wary of people who say we need to ignore the harm of climate related policy actions because the IPCC future is "inevitable" if we don't. I am also skeptical of our ability to get the international community united enough to actually have a meaningful impact.
[1]https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/india...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb#Criticisms
Not a climate scientist, but roughly, from memory:
- Past predictions didn't know exactly what future emissions will be like. Applying real emissions to the models gives "correct" warming quantities
- Climate is changing in a similar manner to predicted, e.g. the poles are warming more quickly than the other areas
Doing science. Thing is, unlike what everybody likes to pretend, doing science means to do a lot of tedious hard work and not a whole lot of quick explanations. So the thing is, that we understand the physics of dilute gasses at roughly room temperature phenomenally well, we did all the experiments of putting this gas into a piston, and then heating the piston slightly, and then do it with a slightly different gas mixture, and then we double checked all these experiments and finally we got a pretty good theory sometime around the turn of the 19th century. Then you start to integrate all that knowledge with a knowledge of radiation basis, and you start doing cross checks and try to understand weather, and at some point try to start forecasting wether, with all the associated trouble and that was then sometime in the let's say 1960ies or thereabouts. (During WWII the flying wing of the US Army had meteorologists at all airfields, I believe German news started to broadcast weather forecast in the late 60ies.) Then you do all that with bigger computers and quite a bit of theory of partial differential equations, and then you realize that understanding the 11 year average is a much much better defined problem than next weeks weather. And all of these steps do suggest different cross checks. (Actually in the Physical Science Basis part of the 5th IPCC report there is a chapter called Evaluation of Climate Models ([0], p. 741), which goes into quite a bit of detail on the most recent efforts along those lines.)
[0] AR5: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
This is a problem to be addressed/solved regardless of the causes of climate change.
One thing is for sure, the wealthy are just going to move higher up in their penthouses and crank the A/C while telling other people to get back to the coal mines to pay their bills or be homeless (which will be a death sentence due to the heat).
More sensationalist, Doomer nonsense. The world absolutely isn’t going to end in the next 10 years because we hit a local max in a data set that only goes back 40 years.
Now we do. That is lethal.
Stop telling everyone "this is fine" because it's not.
https://i.redd.it/fxnx22vwm19b1.jpg
I feel like this is a really old, easily debunked argument. Rapid change toward a much warmer climate is likely to kick off a very abrupt extinction event. Which, incidentally, has already begun.
None of this makes climate change a good thing, but it's a useful corrective to headlines that suggest we're entering some kind of uncharted territory for the planet. The planet can take a lot more than we're dishing out, even if individual species can't.
And your evidence for that is temperatures millions of years ago, when neither we nor any of our close ancestors lived?
The earth has undergone many climate changes before however these take place over tens of thousands of years.
Maybe giant solar flares, intense volcanic eruptions (with enormous amounts of smoke), huge asteroid collisions are comparable in terms of rapidly affecting the Earth's climate previously.