i wonder how much contribution to hotter and hotter summers corresponds to more and more concrete / asphalt.
In the Phoenix areas that abut open nature, one can feel the radiant heat for a long time from concrete/asphalt after the sun intensity has reduced, in contrast to walking off into desert land where the air temp immediately feels many degrees cooler.
How much does that matter? (And that proliferation of concrete/asphalt is an obviously man-made issue.)
Edit: thanks to responses for terms i hadn't thought to look up. Very useful sites.
I am confident that the heating effect of "heat islands" has been studied, as I'm pretty sure I've seen mention of such, but I'll leave the search for that as an exercise for the reader. Though the EPA has a whole bunch of information, and you might wish to start here:
a graduate student at Berkeley gave a presentation on exactly this topic, a few years ago. From first-hand viewing, they used maths to determine range of effect of the heat entrapment in urban enclaves, at several scales. It was rigorous enough for the serious science in the room, and was well-received. The result is basically as someone else said -- local effects are very large, but regarding the whole climate, not a driver basically.
It's somewhat approached through the concept of Urban Heat Islands. I would also imagine that rocks and mountains store plenty of thermal energy similar to a urban heat island. I don't know enough to offer a substantial comment beyond that.
By then it's too late. If you wait until the engine stalls on a desert road trip to fix the problem of not having gas, what could have been a brief stop becomes a long headache or worse.
This is a world-wide tragedy of the commons. I think a world dictator would be necessary. But perhaps if the largest economies imposed a carbon tax - including on traded goods, then mitigation could be accomplished.
Highly recommend people read Dr. Christy's congressional testimony from 2016 [1]. It gets disparaged as "climate denialism," but if you read it (or watch the recording), you'll see that he's arguing from a factual basis; not some kooky hyperbole.
“Climate change is not real because a specific model I chose to run from spotty 1950s data over cooks the atmosphere.”
Misapplying models, in this case through the intentional omission of proper data for said model cause it didn’t exist at the time, is a commonly reoccurring theme from climate change deniers.
What this person did is tantamount to when PHDs carbon date an object known to be millions of years old, land on 6,000 years, then say “see earth is actually young.” Carbon dating doesn’t work on extremely old objects, so this is a misapplication of carbon dating with the intent to deceive and mislead.
In other words, it’s shit tier science created specifically to mislead.
It doesn't respond to the 2016 address, but this site [1] has a table of many of Christy's claims and evidence against them.
A central graph in the 2016 address (found on page 2) has numerous visualization issues (e.g., misalignment of the lines on the graph to exaggerate differences, no uncertainty ranges are provided, averaging data sets in the curves, leaving out data) [2].
If this guy has any actual evidence he should publish it in peer-reviewed journals. Others should be able to reproduce his work.
Everything else is just noise.
> when all of the team members were asked if isotope data supported the conclusion that about 75% of the increase in atmospheric CO2 since the Industrial Revolution was due to the burning of fossil fuels, and Christy was the only member who disagreed.
> “Of course, those isotopic measurements have been made by labs around the world. You know, it’s very, very well established science. But John Christie did not agree. And when Professor Koonin asked him, well, why don’t you agree? John Christie said, because I did not make the measurements myself
> DeSmog, (formerly The DeSmogBlog) founded in January 2006, is a journalistic and activist website that focuses on topics related to climate change. The site was founded, originally in blog format, by James Hoggan, president of a public relations firm based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Why does climate change attract all these loonies? Even if you ignore the data completely, these people surely can’t look at an open pit mine, a plastic-filled landfill, and a smoke-spewing industrial plant and think that’s somehow good for the environment?
Because destructive climate change is a condemnation of how we live our comfortable lives in the civilization we've built, and people rightly recognize that fighting it would mean their lives get less comfortable. Therefore, sticking head in sand and going full denial and bargaining is the less painful option.
We all worship the beast that feeds us, right until the moment it turns around and devours us.
I think you're missing a crucial point in understanding the opposition. It's not about giving up comfort, it's about authorities asking for trust that has either not been earned, or has been destroyed. For example; the Covid lockdowns were a disaster and destroyed a lot of trust. There are a lot of people in that group that would go to war for Trump because they trust him, and war is not comfortable at all.
This denialism was already very strong well before the collapse of institutional trust that you're referring to. It goes back many decades, both at an institutional level and a population level.
Two things can be true at the same time.
1) We can recognize the measurable physical reality of climate change, the likely devastating impact on life, wealth, and well-being, and the absurdity of believing that all the data around it is an elaborate century long scam, especially when even huge moneyed interests that are condemned by it (e.g. Shell) acknowledge that it's really happening.
2) We can be suspicious of our government's ability to respond to it reasonably and not take advantage of and leverage the tragedy to force unpopular and restrictive changes on their populations.
> it's about authorities asking for trust that has either not been earned, or has been destroyed
That's a lazy cop-out, because the alternative to trusting those authorities is trusting business authorities, whom you have zero democratic control over, who have done nothing to earn trust, and who are driven by incredibly powerful, self-serving profit motives to fuck you over.
Saying that the public can't fix climate change because you don't trust public institutions, while careening down the road of private institutions causing climate change is illogical nonsense.
As Churchill once famously said, public solutions are the worst kinds of solutions, except all the others that have ever been tried.
But people do have democratic(ish) influence over business. Businesses must please customers and have big incentives to respond to customer demand. A business that fucks over customers is going to lose a lot of money, unless there's some tradeoff at play (e.g. Apple "fucking over" customers due to hard-to-replace batteries. Except people want a sleek phone and are evidently pleased with prioritizing form factor over repairability.)
And in a normal democracy, some people don't vote. Others have enough disposable time to actively volunteer and organize. And others have the money to lobby and influence politicians or pay for lots of ads and messaging.
I don’t understand how the lockdowns destroyed trust. From my perspective, they saved thousands of lives, buying time for the development of a vaccine. Can you explain?
> I don’t understand how the lockdowns destroyed trust. From my perspective, they saved thousands of lives, buying time for the development of a vaccine. Can you explain?
They really didn't, what was thought to be sensible policy ended up exacerbating a problem much worse: primarily because COVID thrives in spreading in confined areas and was not viable for transmission outdoors when exposed to either water or UV light; furthermore, denying people to get outside, do excercise at gyms and get natural vitamin D, converse with people in person and overall just live their lives was cause to a much larger, but rarely spoken of epidemic unless you or your loved ones are in the medical field: suicide and over-dose out paced COVID deaths by mid-summer 2020 where I was and no one wants to talk about that.
People's mental health definitely has gotten worse from the lockdowns, and in the US states where they didn't do lock-downs thrived economically but had a huge economic disparity issue and homeless populations are at alarmingly scary levels.
Some people, like myself, dealt with out PTSD with intense gym sessions that were available 24hours/day (the adrenaline and endorphins were a lifeline) and depression was creeping in and I often had bouts of it despite my best efforts to make due.
The one good thing that came from lockdowns, in my view as an environmentalist, was that it showed how the Earth was actually healing itself: you could see the Himalayas from India when they stopped burning so much outdoors, the same could be seen in DTLA where most didn't even know there were mountains in the area because of pollution/smog.
I was an essential worker during this time, I chose to be rather than stay locked down a home as I knew after my teens in public high school that my cognition and over all mental health and well being suffer when confined in one place, and it was alarming to see it from the other side. People embraced it at first, made bread recipe videos and memes online and were actually rather nice to each other as we all had a common threat, but then after the Spring time it got really dark.
I want to write a chronicle of the events one day from the POV of small chef-owners/restaurateurs who got blind-sided from the politics of COVID, but the more the I think about it the more its a reflection on how poorly Society fared during that time and its actually never gotten better.
Lockdowns were smart, but they did demonstrate that US citizens can't trust their government to help them in a crisis. Everything shutdown and many many people couldn't work, which meant they couldn't support themselves.
In the UK people out of work were given 80% of their pay. Denmark paid people 75% of their income. The Netherlands gave their people 90% of their wages. All of this on top of their already strong social services and safety nets which helped make sure that people were taken care of.
In the US we got nothing until after a lot of government fighting we were reluctantly given a couple $1,000 "stimulus" checks leaving Americans with record amounts of household debt. We're still seeing the impacts in increasing rates of utility disconnections and rising numbers of evictions and homelessness which will likely continue to get worse long before they improve.
This is completely subjective to someone's values. To some, living is more important than survival. Not everyone believes in courage in the sense of loving life (life as in the virtue of living, not specifically one's own life) enough to being ready to die for it. Lockdowns were smart to some, but a tyranny to others, and we are still paying dearly for them. Even those of you in bed with the green agenda should be distraught over this, the world's coal consumption set a new record in 2022, and the lockdowns are largely to blame.
Me too. I studied climatology and a bit of environmental policy at university, so it seems unlikely… but I’ve seen weirder feedbacks. It’s plausible.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand why people deny climate change, but it usually comes down to a few basic things: 1. Group membership. 2. Seeing is believing, and not having been impacted yet. 3. Having been impacted, but unwilling to admit it due to embarrassment/sunk cost fallacy. Honestly I expect that after this summer most people in cohort 2 will move to cohort 3.
> There are a lot of people in that group that would go to war for Trump because they trust him, and war is not comfortable at all.
They would be 'legions' comprised of men like the the Qanon Shamaon I take it? If so, this would be a short fought battle and these often over-weight, out of shape diabetics wouldn't do very much. Moreover, it was Trump who advocated for lockdowns and was the first to highlight not allowing super-spreader events to take place as the Pandemic started to get serious in Asia: unlike that walking corpse Pelosi had in San Francisco for the Lunar New Year to goad her voter base into thinking she was more progressive and woke and told everyone to go out and celebrate.
Again, facts be damned, people are hardliners that justify their own cognitive dissonance.
You strike on something notable, but fail to see the facts that these people are ill-informed and much of social media has made them that way, which if we are honest is really what a place like HN should be able to do considering it's root within tech.
But hey... who says they aren't in denial and deluding themselves, either?
I'm going to be incredibly cynical and go back to my channer days for a second because you think this holds water for some reason:
I can't believe anyone thinks these cosplaying militiaman would hold their own in any real conflict, it's pathetic: look at how the bodies of even mercenaries from Wagner are piling up when former Ukrainian farmers, bakers, bank tellers, and artists are trained by and with modern Western weaponry. The fact that anyone thinks these things is why I think Social Media has irreparably damaged most people's minds.
Bubba and his buddies stack of ARs isn't going to mean a thing if they were taken seriously, it takes one drone strike at the local watering hole for this to end; what I think is a media distraction is how Jan 6th was a psyop that let these imbeciles into one of the most fortressed places on Earth in order to increase survielence and policing budgets; they let the National Guard sleep on the floor and opined how under-budgeted they were and was unpreventable when their is actual video footage of the security letting the mob into the Capital rather than doing their job and stopping them from making a mess.
Hell one guy even had a heart attack on the way to storm the Capital by tazing himself in the balls [0].
>The fact that anyone thinks these things is why I think Social Media has irreparably damaged most people's minds.
Americans have believed it since the country was founded, it's part of their national myth, that they began as a ragtag bunch of drunken rebels who took down the greatest empire in the world with nothing but grit and tenacity (and definitely no help from the French, Spanish and Dutch.)
Jan 6th was such a mess not because it was a psyop to increase surveillance and police budgets (Americans by and large love both of those things during Republican administrations, and the government doesn't need a pretext) but because despite American bluster about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, all most American gun owners know about actual combat or insurgent operations they learned from playing boomer shooters.
But yes, they absolutely believe the government's fear of the pistols they keep hidden under their pillows is the only thing keeping the US from tilting into hard Stalinist tyranny at any moment.
So has the trust that climate change will go bad starting from international reports in 1990 not earned?
We need to make predictions for more than 30 years that are accurate before we trust scientists?
Or has it been destroyed? By what?
You talk about another completely arbitrary problem with government decision making without context as if it dismisses this entire argument without need for explanation.
You then go on to say that Trumpists trying to start a civil war do so not for comfort but due to trust.
That couldn't be further from the truth. The entire point of the far right propaganda machine is to aim for comfort. Anything wrong is the out groups fault and eliminating them will bring back your comfort is the tagline of that mindset.
Efficiency is an answer but the question is never asked in public. Why? Secondly, a handful of industrial actors and their dot-mil customers are apparently never to be questioned, instead we get the 632nd episode of you and your carbon footprint, citizen.
Most people are pathetically weak with such an extreme aversion to minor discomfort or the denial of indulgence and acute pleasure. This counter intuitively makes their holistic life experience more miserable than if they had the foresight to sacrifice a little today for a much better future.
Aversion to exercise and eating healthy resulting the obesity epidemic is the classic example of this.
You seem to be very close to the insight that human behavior and preferences have nature and nurture influences that are hard for everyone to overcome, and impossible for many. It’s fine to look down on those people, but that doesn’t change the reality.
(only speaking as an American) The amount of effort, cost, and discomfort involved in transitioning most of America from car-first to infrastructure that supports walking and biking is quite large. Given the choice between staying as things are, moving your entire life to a distant urban area, or being taxed to upgrade infrastructure, many are going to desire the first option.
The kind of "urban" that qualifies for that label in the US is a lot more spread out and car-based than it is in Europe. Miami, FL and Los Angeles, CA are urban, but have relatively small areas of high enough density to support a public transit system.
I think you are underestimating how much effort would be required. That is at least a 9-figure project in each city if you don't widen any roads and just convert car space to bike space.
The real choice however is between personal sacrifice of luxury today and sacrifice of life or livelihood for those alive tomorrow. And possibly a mention in future history books as 'the generation that was aware and could have fixed it'.
I don’t think you’ve ever been the level of our-of-shape that many people are. I have experienced the full spectrum from trained-athlete to alcoholic obesity, and there is a level of out-of-shape you can be where going for a half mile walk will be physically painful for more than a day. It really feels miserable. The good news is that it can be overcome.
> I don’t think you’ve ever been the level of our-of-shape that many people are.
No, I haven't. And I fail to see how being out-of-shape is a comfort and not a discomfort.
I do agree that we can't force morbidly obese people onto bikes.
But the narrative amongst healthy people has got to change that their life would be DRAMATICALLY worse if they biked instead of drove a stupid $80k SUV.
Only ~28% of urbanites are obese in the US, btw. Compare that to ~60% in most rural areas and suburbs. In most walkable urban areas - this number is ~20% or less.
It's almost as if the car and the design of our cities makes us fat, and maybe we should change that, instead of saying that the car & roads & parking makes us comfortable.
What you are apparently failing to understand is that the Netherlands is smaller than the 41st largest of 50 states in the US (West Virginia). The longest distance you can travel by any means whatsoever in West Virginia is about 440km. Oh, and it has mountains, too. The Netherlands is pretty much flat, cyclist-friendly terrain.
Let's also not forget that the US pretty much has no bike infrastructure. You can say "well, that's your fault," but it's not the fault of the SUV drivers; it's the fault of city planners who plan for anticipated demand by cyclists, rather than leading with infrastructure to encourage cycling. This predictably leads to a lack of people wanting to cycle, for fairly rational reasons: roads built for and dominated by cars are not very safe for people riding bikes. So, the demand doesn't materialize because the infrastructure isn't here, which inhibits demand.
Oh, and yeah, the auto manufacturers had a bit to do with it as well. [0]
In any case, your ire is aimed in the wrong direction, and the "fat, out of shape American" stereotype has very little to do with it.
I think this is the answer- why move bodies at all? We've been told for decades now that Silicon Valley is just filled to the brim with innovators but I'm supposed to believe that they cannot figure out remote work?
I think it would be fantastic if we biked more, but let’s be realistic: while biking can be super-fun in perfect conditions, it is considerably less so when you add hills, rain, cargo, and temperature extremes.
You're right. Electric bikes are pretty awesome at addressing these problems, though. I know they remove some of the exercise element, though for many it might add exercise since they're otherwise doing nothing at all.
It's also okay to be a little uncomfortable. A lot of us are quite obsessed with avoiding discomfort, but it's often exactly what we need. I like riding my cargo bike with my son to his school, getting soaked and blown around in the wind. Sometimes he hates it, sometimes I dream of dry sunny days, but when I get home or to the office I'm in love with my awesome bike and all the cool stuff we do with it. Camping, shopping, errands—it's awesome, and totally worth the discomfort.
Like in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: on a bike, you're in your environment, not just watching it go by. You're a participator, not a spectator. You're in the weather, you can reach out and touch some tall grass or a low hanging branch. That aspect makes little parts of the day so much more immersive and interesting. I love that, and I'll take getting hot and sweaty or cold and soaked over driving my car 95% of the time.
I know it's only my perspective, and many will never consider it, but I hope a lot more people do. Bikes made my life so much better.
For what it's worth, I'm out of shape and a bit overweight, so I'm not some fit and out-of-touch athlete telling people they should just go ahead and do a difficult thing.
I'll admit though, there are definitely financial barriers. If you take the bus for economical reasons, an electric cargo bike probably isn't an option. If you own a car and need it, and you can barely afford it as it is, an electric cargo bike also isn't a realistic option. It's definitely a privilege in a sense, and I won't shame someone for relying on a car in those circumstances. Well, I won't shame anyone regardless.
I love going with my kid in the cargo bike when it's raining and he's sitting in the canopy dry and happy.
The car's role in family life is hard to overstate, though, when you have more than one kid, and you need to get somewhere all together while also bringing some cargo like a stroller.
We get by with renting a car occasionally, but installing two car seats and bringing them back up to the flat again is getting really boring.
One word: infrastructure. People over here cry every time they add anything resembling bike/walking infrastructure - "WHAT ABOUT ALL THOSE CARS LOSING SPACE?".
This seems to ignore that we've been thinking of the cars for a century and it really hasn't worked out all that well for cities, where most people live.
We need to do it differently, and more cars/space for cars isn't the solution. It doesn't need to be bikes either; plenty of people can't even ride bikes. All access lanes seem be the best solution I've seen (wide enough for mobility scooters, room for passing, on and off ramps, etc).
I ride a bike (have never owned a car) and am vegan and I think both of those are awesome, at least if you live in a place where both are common so that things are at least moderately convenient.
But I also flew about 100,000 km per year in the time before COVID and am still on track to fly about 30,000-50,000 km this year. This puts me right back among the people with the highest carbon footprints in the whole world.
There are lots of different things that people might be asked to sacrifice, not just one. And the general trend of development and rising wealth is a trend of greater energy intensity. You can find exceptions and substitutes where you can reduce energy intensity in some area without major sacrifice, but if you have to do it across the board over and over again, that's really a loss of material standard of living.
> But I also flew about 100,000 km per year in the time before COVID and am still on track to fly about 30,000-50,000 km this year. This puts me right back among the people with the highest carbon footprints in the whole world.
You were going to fly 30k-50k km regardless of if you biked or drove.
The fact that you biked cut your emissions quite a bit.
A cut in emissions is still a success.
And before anyone says, but what about my electric car!?
1) it produces a ton of carbon to build your car (a year's worth of emissions for a Westerner)...
2) for at least the next 10-years, in most of the US and the EU, your car is charged by ~50% fossil fuels.
The average person's emissions are almost ~1/10th just from building their car...
In the time before COVID I frequently spoke at conferences and would go in person to several conferences per year, often in foreign countries.
This year is family visits and vacations.
My travel patterns were still rather low for self-conscious "frequent flyers", who would, for example, feel an absolute requirement to fly at least 50,000 or 100,000 miles on a single airline each year in order to "maintain status" so that that airline would reward them with various perks. I have "only" ever done this once. Of course, I expect even approaching the low end of a frequent flyer status is probably the top 1% carbon footprint in the world.
The same Netherlands that still can’t say goodbye to its beloved car. Traffic is back and surpassed pre-covid records. We still have to keep speed restrictions during daytime to reduce emissions because we just can’t help it to live in one part of the country and work in the other.
And this is a change I"m guessing you prefer? Independent of carbon emissions? Like the vegetarians who long for climate change policies to end animal slaughter, climate change is being used as a justification for policy prescriptions a subset of the population wants, and the sacrifices involved are not even considered sacrifices to them but preferred policy outcomes.
There are places with weather (rain, extreme temperatures, winds) that make it difficult for people to get by on a bike and possibly deadly to those with prior health conditions.
Addressing climate change does not have to be coupled with making our lives worse, nor is it a condemnation of industrialized society. Fossil fuels need to be replaced with energy sources that don't emit greenhouse gases, but otherwise it does not require de-growth.
I think there's so much skepticism of climate change precisely because so many of those pushing for action are so invested in using climate change to push for other political goals. Chiefly anti-capitalism and de-growth. People aren't necessarily adverse to climate action, they're adverse to anti-capitalism or de-growth. As much of a buffoon he's been in recent years, one of the best things Elon Musk has done via Tesla is demonstrate that climate action does not have to be coupled with the deeply unpopular positions that so many climate activists espouse. Likewise, France demonstrates how electricity can be thoroughly decarbonized without making people's lives substantially more uncomfortable.
I believe environmentalists could shift their focus from solely emphasizing climate change to broader environmental degradation that’s visible to everyone.
This way, we can frame the issue in a manner that garners widespread support.
It’s unfortunate that some discussions around climate change are politically charged, detracting from the core message of environmental preservation.
There's huge lobbies opposing environmentalist messaging so I don't think it's quite right to lay all the blame on them. The fossil fuel industry spends am obscene amount of money on online shit stirring.
And instead instead of countering solely with scientific data (graphs bla bla), we should use visual evidence: show photos and videos of pollution around coal plants.
There’s regularly news about people’s tap water being flammable, or city-cized pile of fast fashion garbage in the developing world, or whale carcass filled with plastics.
And the reaction is to go purchase a new giant-ass truck and get the engine detuned to roll coal on a cyclist.
Why is it anyone's job to coddle and cajole people who have no logical basis for their beliefs, no interest in changing them and will in fact double-down on them any time they feel the slightest bit challenged, such as when merely presented with an alternate view?
They've pushed everyone else away as part of falling down the rabbit hole of denialism, they're the ones who have to want to change their beliefs.
That is only marginally effective when a large portion of the voting public is motivated by "fuck you" and a conservative court is happy to intervene when regulations do get put in place because they'll make their friends' companies earn smaller profits.
They have. Most of the motivation for there being an EPA and things like the Clean Air and Water act had nothing to do with climate. They were motivated by things like smog days in major cities because of unbreathable air or entire generations of children in some places having cognitive deficits thanks to lead poisoning and toxic waste being dumped in water sources, or fears of cancer rising thanks to industrial contaminants. Even with respect to fears of biodiversity collapse, factors like farming monoculture, overfarming, overfishing, and overhunting, encroachment of human habitats, roads blocking migration paths, have all been and remain larger factors than anything climate-related, and environmentalists have historically raised and continue now to raise concerns about all of these things. The largely successful global effort in the 80s to put an end to commercial whaling was because the largest threat to whales continuing to exist was humans killing them on purpose, not oceans getting warmer.
To the extent that all of these efforts were resisted anyway, it had nothing to do with general population climate alarmism fatigue. It's that people resist any restrictions whatsoever on freedom of commercial activity and think of everything in nature as either a resource that can't be exhausted or a resource that doesn't matter if it gets exhausted because it can either be replaced with something else or they'll have gotten rich enough by the time it's gone that it won't affect their personal ability to profit and the portion of future generations they care about (their own descendants) can simply inherit their wealth and not need to continue the activity that generated it.
I don't think it should be surprising that there are groups of people everywhere who want to skew data one way or another. But the thing I keep coming back to WRT climate change is that the climate in my area is currently killing trees that were totally fine for 40, 50, 60, 70 or 80 years until the last 2 or 3 years. I find that pretty convincing evidence that something is wrong, and working backwards from that through the idea that carbon dioxide blocks thermal radiation and that the temperature is increasing, it's pretty convincing to me that increasing the amount of carbon dioxide as much as we have has had a pretty substantial effect on the stable temperature of the planet. I would expect the temeperature to go up as a result of our actions. So in my opinion the only argument is about the degrees, and currently I'm seeing very convincing evidence that the IPCC is wrong, but that it was too conservative in its prediction, and that's very alarming to me as a person who has to live here for the next 40 or 50 years.
I wonder whereabouts you are? I'm in South Texas which is currently going through a heat wave and drought the likes of which I've not seen (and it wasn't like it was cool and wet here before). Trees seem to be giving up, and I think I've noticed more animals dead on the road than ever before; I'd assume from heat exhaustion or thirst. Also a co-worker's well ran dry and apparently it's difficult to drill another because the local concrete supplier's well also ran dry. Meanwhile, my city (San Antonio) reports that they're dealing with a lot of water main breaks because of ground shifting. It all feels like the start of a dystopian near-future sci fi.
I suppose to balance it out somewhat and not catastrophize too much, it seems like we have good water management because we aren't in the deepest level of drought restrictions and it seems like the state has quietly added a fair amount of solar energy which has been keeping our power grid from seeing major issues.
All their favorite politicians and news sources have been paid off by the almost unimaginably deep pockets of the fossil fuel industry, for over 4 decades.
They do indeed have entire parallel constructions of reality where landfills full of plastic are a good thing, and people trying to stop those happening are the real problem. That's regularly suggested here on HN as what really needs to be done to combat climate change.
Sure, the right is crazy in one direction. But the left has shunned nuclear energy for decades, a viable solution that could have moved us in the right direction.
We should be proposing solutions, not blaming one side.
The amount of influence fringe anti-nuke-groups actually have in most governments is ~0%.
The better criticism is that the 'left' that actually gets elected has done ~fuck-all to solve the problem, on any of the axes they could push. Of course, actually doing anything would be political suicide, and then the denialist-right gets all the power, and will also continue to do nothing.
It's not a 'two sides equivalence' issue. Anti-nuke people aren't the ones in control of the equilibrium, the right is. If the anti-nuke movement disappeared tomorrow, we'd still be in essentially the same pickle we're in. If the denialist-right movement dissapeared tomorrow, we might have some hope of making progress.
Just because you found one village idiot, doesn't mean that you should point at him, and shout that the village isn't really any different from the insane asylum up the road. They are not the same.
> All their favorite politicians and news sources have been paid off by the almost unimaginably deep pockets of the fossil fuel industry, for over 4 decades.
I'm curious to know which news sources are you specifically referring to.
> these people surely can’t look at an open pit mine, a plastic-filled landfill, and a smoke-spewing industrial plant and think that’s somehow good for the environment?
You think they look at things of their own volition or what? They just rail against the concept holistically and label everything lefty propaganda that's even vaguely adjacent
And credit to the NASA social media person for keeping the conversation on-topic and responding with well considered and engaging answers. They must have the patience of a saint!
Twitter sorts all the blue checkmarks to the top so on a thread like this you get blasted with all of Elon’s fan boys who are notorious for both their idiotic takes and their disdain for NASA since they think Space X is superior. It’s like the perfect storm for stupidity.
Yes, and I think that NASA probably shouldn't be using "X" as a communication medium as a result. Then again, maybe this X account isn't the main NASA account but someone's side project. I didn't log in to check.
Nietzsche was right to be concerned with the "death of God". People have a very hard time dealing with the inevitability of our own death and the fundamental meaninglessness of our existence. Even people who think they are comfortable with these concepts tend to still have many tactics of avoiding this reality.
For most of human history we solved this problem by pointing to the past (e.g. "when I die I become one with my ancestors") or another world (e.g. "when I die I will leave this vale of tears, and find myself in the world I belong in").
For most of modern society we have replaced this with finding salvation in the future (e.g. "My life is meaningful because my work is contributing to a better future for humanity"). I think most of us, striving to work on hard technical problems, imagine ourselves as ultimately being a small screw in the generation ship that will send humanity into the stars. Or, at the very least, most hope to live on through their children.
Catastrophic climate change challenges that fundamental system of meaning many people have established to resist this terror of existence. If society as we know it has no future, this is roughly the same as telling a devote Christian that their is no heaven. No matter how much evidence you gather for this, at a deep level they will be unable to accept this. And if they are able to accept this, it will only because there has been an alternate method of meaning proposed.
This is why Nietzsche was so sincerely concerned with the death of God. We can't simply go back to being a world that derives meaning from ancestor worship, or from religion. Sure some subset of the population might "find God", but realistically we can't trivially go back. Nietzsche saw how fragile our systems of meaning had become and worried what society will look like when they start to break down en masse.
Nietzsche was write, these climate deniers and many other similar radicals are near perfect representation of Nietzsche's "Last Man" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man
"If you don't change your lifestyle completely, and manage to convince everyone you know and 1/2 of voters in your area to do the same, you and your children will die in agony."
This is what climate change means. When put so bluntly, it's not hard to see why people get defensive about it.
And it's just for the people in developed countries! For developing countries it's even worse: "In the best case, you, everyone you care and love, and your whole race will never ever enjoy the lifestyle and wealth of those in developed countries."
I was at a barbecue when climate change came up. A lot had been drunk and people spoke freely. One Dad cried, and said he couldn't believe it, because of the future effects on his kids. It was a powerful and enlightening moment.
> Why does climate change attract all these loonies?
Its not just Climate Change, though its rather stark and obvious there for the listed reasons below, but we've come to realize that 99% of social media based tech has been based on profiting from derision and establishing conflicting identity/tribal mindsets, and it's worked out so exceedingly well that even nation state's Intelligence agencies use it for this purpose (see twitter files).
It has been immensely lucrative, unless you're Elon and bought an over-inflated company and then ran it into the ground proving that when you venture outside of a domain where you cannot take credit for other People's work you show who and what you really are.
Hell, even Dorsey has backed away from Bluesky and is now really backing Nostr, I used to think this was a coup--Dorsey gets to take down the board from Twitter that sullied it and Elon got his next big distraction on the platform he spends shitposting all day on. I was hoping this was to make users migrate to Bluesky and have something really valuable to show for it in the end, but honestly I just expected way too much from Elon and instead he did what all rich idiots do when they are in charge: censor, ban, throttle what he doesn't like.
What has happened instead is way more depressing and makes me think social media should just die already, people's speaking habits have deteriorated so much in these last 15 years that it's hard to have a conversation in person with most people who use it.
Also why is the majority of it are Americans ? I have this theory that an average american has finished the main quest of life and just doing side quests to troll people. Main quests as in not worried about the stuff needed for basic survival aka food, water and shelter. A well fed rebel without a cause with a government aided financial safety net. Just be contrarian because why not. Soo much free time in their hands that they don't know what to do with it. When you have nothing to fight for anymore no wars etc, you have to create these imaginary boogeymen to keep your sanity in check. Earth is flat, climate change is not real, vax causes autism, Like imagine the time and mental space of these giblet heads.
> A well fed rebel without a cause with a government aided financial safety net.
There's no safety net in the US and we have the homelessness to prove it. What you're seeing is the right wing roots of the US being used to promote a mix of corporate, government and individual cult-like (think Alex Jones) propaganda. Lots of people in the US are susceptible to that, they've spent generations trying to promote white supremacy, US supremacy... that radicalism is easy to hijack, especially when the "opposition" is also thinly veiled corporate and government propaganda.
They live rurally. Your argument falls flat because they look around and see greenery and clean air. They look at you living in a grey urban city spewing smoke and smog and see you lecturing them.
genuine question: electric cars have to be worse per car on the environment than a gas-car right now?
reasoning:
lets compare the carbon footprint of the entire supple chain (production, maintenance, etc) of electric and gas(petrol) cars;
guess it is about the same (actually economies of scale for the gas-car side mean per gas-car footprint is lesser right now, but say electric cars also catch up at scale).
Then we are down to efficiency diff of the power plant vs ICE.
So would you argue: we will be renewable energy powered soon, at that point we need the electric car ecosystem?
I understand the push to switch to renewables. But there's enough load on the grid to soak up the production and clean up the air.
> But a recent study from the Yale School of the Environment published in Nature Communications found that the total indirect emissions from electric vehicles pale in comparison to the indirect emissions from fossil fuel-powered vehicles. This is in addition to the direct emissions from combusting fossil fuels — either at the tailpipe for conventional vehicles or at the power plant smokestack for electricity generation — showing electric vehicles have a clear advantage emissions-wise over conventional vehicles.
> “A major concern about electric vehicles is that the supply chain, including the mining and processing of raw materials and the manufacturing of batteries, is far from clean,” says Gillingham. “So, if we priced the carbon embodied in these processes, the expectation is electric vehicles would be exorbitantly expensive. It turns out that’s not the case; if you level the playing field by also pricing the carbon in the fossil fuel vehicle supply chain, electric vehicle sales would actually increase.”
Because they are the people that think one or more of:
- "don't tell me what to do" (government imposing things is Communism).
- "god will provide".
- "there's no global warming, it's all a scam" (by hippie scholars or to help impose a global world order").
I would like to understand how they aggregated the data for a specific location (pixel in that map?) and how they obtained temperatures - is it a temperature measured by a satellite or measured by a weather station on ground; if it's on the ground how many stations they used and how often was the temperature sampled. They discuss very little about this and I think it's key to understand this data they present here.
that's not what i was saying. If temperature is going up then every day/week/month is warmer than the previous. It's a tongue-in-cheek way of saying I don't see how July being the hottest month on record would be surprising or newsworthy given the current climate trends.
Actually you're kind of correct. Our measurement of the planet isn't complete. We don't have the ability to measure the movement of every molecule and get a perfect temperature measurement.
So imagine all that extra energy swimming around. If it gets pushed into the deep ocean we have no way to measure that, but after a while it gets pushed to the surface and it looks like the temperature spiked as it also warms the atmosphere.
So the temperature at the moment is actually always increasing but we have to average it over a longer period of time to iron out the gaps in our measurements.
Is there a reason the magnifying glass is always on the USA to make changes? I'm no climate expert, but last I checked China/India/the rest of SEA and the largest ships generate a large majority of non-natural carbon emissions. Wouldn't it be far more practical to make changes to the couple hundred of large ships running cruises/containers than changing the entire automotive industry?
Per capita emissions of India/China are much lower compared to the US. It's also easier for a developed country to try and lower their emissions than poor/developing countries to do it.
> Is there a reason the magnifying glass is always on the USA to make changes?
The great majority of countries are too small to make a difference.
Some large countries are too corrupt, or perhaps even stand to benefit from climate change, to make a difference (Russia, middle east).
Some large countries are too poor (relatively, per head of population) to be able to be leaders in climate initiatives (E.g the other BRIC countries).
Many developing countries don't have the technology base to create green energy technology solutions, so can't share in the benefits of selling it to others.
There are only two global powers that are powerful enough and influential enough to move the needle on climate, and not coincidentally, have been at the forefront of plundering our planet for the last couple of centuries and have benefited enormously from their abuse of the commons.
One is the USA. They have a chequered history, but it does include saving the planet once before from an existential threat. That's why people look to the US for leadership.
Unfortunately the US is riven by internal division, and half of the population think that protecting female bathrooms is more important than protecting the atmosphere, and/ or that a mythical being in the sky will fix everything up anyway.
So that leaves only the EU. They are the only hope for humanity. If the EU can get their shit together on climate, then force action on their trading partners, and the US can awaken from their obsessions and fall in behind, then just perhaps we have a chance to stop this runaway train.
So tired to see this take over and over again in HN. Putting the blame on Asia and developing nations for carbon emissions while
USA pays other nations to dump their garbage. The west/developed countries blames eastern/developing countries for it when in fact they were also responsible for a shitton amount of emissions when they started industrializing their countries and still continue to export wastes/export manufacturing stuff which generates waste.
> I'm no climate expert, but last I checked China/India/the rest of SEA and the largest ships generate a large majority of non-natural carbon emissions.
I think it's because USA keep sending them money to make these emissions for them.
This seems like a very strange sentiment to me. Can you explain your thinking here? Do you think that, hypothetically, the climate fluctuated in similar ways with some frequency over the last 2000 years? Or even 10,000?
The only evidence I can find suggests that fluctuations like this have occurred, but never (as far as we can tell) over this short of a time span.
Good point. This is actually why it’s so concerning; it’s clearly a trend, which by some measurements appears to be exploding at this point.
Kind of brings me back to people totally misunderstanding why covid infection rate graphs were concerning. You know, 10 people in your city, then 30, then 100, 500, 2000, 7500, and for the first lower numbers people are like “what’s the big deal? 30 people? Out of 2 million? Big deal”.
The risk of spread doesn’t apply to climate change of course. It’s just a seriously alarming trend line that not enough people recognize as concerning.
173 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadIn the Phoenix areas that abut open nature, one can feel the radiant heat for a long time from concrete/asphalt after the sun intensity has reduced, in contrast to walking off into desert land where the air temp immediately feels many degrees cooler.
How much does that matter? (And that proliferation of concrete/asphalt is an obviously man-made issue.)
Edit: thanks to responses for terms i hadn't thought to look up. Very useful sites.
https://www.epa.gov/heatislands/measuring-heat-islands
My understanding is that globally this matters little, but locally, this can matter a lot.
You do need to account for this to some extent when comparing long term temperature measurements at the same location.
My understanding is that they checked in places with and without concrete (like the ocean, remote areas, etc).
The urban heat island effect is well understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
It is not the reason for global warming, but it can be the reason places like Chicago and Phoenix are hotter than their nearby surroundings.
Desertification is happening at a staggering rate.
Extremely weather events are becoming more extreme and more frequent
Canada forests are burning to the ground, and are now a net negative contributor to warming as a result
The ocean is observably dying
What “problem” are you waiting for?
Anyone who sees us getting to minimal emissions much faster than our current trajectory is pretty naive.
We're already on a trajectory where it's reasonable to believe we could have minimal emissions in the US, the EU, and China by 2060.
If you see this happening by 2030 or even 2040 - you're dreaming.
[1] https://docs.house.gov/meetings/SY/SY00/20160202/104399/HHRG...
Misapplying models, in this case through the intentional omission of proper data for said model cause it didn’t exist at the time, is a commonly reoccurring theme from climate change deniers.
What this person did is tantamount to when PHDs carbon date an object known to be millions of years old, land on 6,000 years, then say “see earth is actually young.” Carbon dating doesn’t work on extremely old objects, so this is a misapplication of carbon dating with the intent to deceive and mislead.
In other words, it’s shit tier science created specifically to mislead.
A central graph in the 2016 address (found on page 2) has numerous visualization issues (e.g., misalignment of the lines on the graph to exaggerate differences, no uncertainty ranges are provided, averaging data sets in the curves, leaving out data) [2].
[1]: https://skepticalscience.com/skeptic_John_Christy.htm
[2]: https://skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm
https://www.desmog.com/john-christy/
> when all of the team members were asked if isotope data supported the conclusion that about 75% of the increase in atmospheric CO2 since the Industrial Revolution was due to the burning of fossil fuels, and Christy was the only member who disagreed.
> “Of course, those isotopic measurements have been made by labs around the world. You know, it’s very, very well established science. But John Christie did not agree. And when Professor Koonin asked him, well, why don’t you agree? John Christie said, because I did not make the measurements myself
> DeSmog, (formerly The DeSmogBlog) founded in January 2006, is a journalistic and activist website that focuses on topics related to climate change. The site was founded, originally in blog format, by James Hoggan, president of a public relations firm based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DeSmog&oldid=1164...
Why does climate change attract all these loonies? Even if you ignore the data completely, these people surely can’t look at an open pit mine, a plastic-filled landfill, and a smoke-spewing industrial plant and think that’s somehow good for the environment?
We all worship the beast that feeds us, right until the moment it turns around and devours us.
This denialism was already very strong well before the collapse of institutional trust that you're referring to. It goes back many decades, both at an institutional level and a population level.
Two things can be true at the same time.
1) We can recognize the measurable physical reality of climate change, the likely devastating impact on life, wealth, and well-being, and the absurdity of believing that all the data around it is an elaborate century long scam, especially when even huge moneyed interests that are condemned by it (e.g. Shell) acknowledge that it's really happening.
2) We can be suspicious of our government's ability to respond to it reasonably and not take advantage of and leverage the tragedy to force unpopular and restrictive changes on their populations.
That's a lazy cop-out, because the alternative to trusting those authorities is trusting business authorities, whom you have zero democratic control over, who have done nothing to earn trust, and who are driven by incredibly powerful, self-serving profit motives to fuck you over.
Saying that the public can't fix climate change because you don't trust public institutions, while careening down the road of private institutions causing climate change is illogical nonsense.
As Churchill once famously said, public solutions are the worst kinds of solutions, except all the others that have ever been tried.
A system of oligarchic patronage would also have the properties you describe, and I cannot seriously call that one a democracy, either.
They really didn't, what was thought to be sensible policy ended up exacerbating a problem much worse: primarily because COVID thrives in spreading in confined areas and was not viable for transmission outdoors when exposed to either water or UV light; furthermore, denying people to get outside, do excercise at gyms and get natural vitamin D, converse with people in person and overall just live their lives was cause to a much larger, but rarely spoken of epidemic unless you or your loved ones are in the medical field: suicide and over-dose out paced COVID deaths by mid-summer 2020 where I was and no one wants to talk about that.
People's mental health definitely has gotten worse from the lockdowns, and in the US states where they didn't do lock-downs thrived economically but had a huge economic disparity issue and homeless populations are at alarmingly scary levels.
Some people, like myself, dealt with out PTSD with intense gym sessions that were available 24hours/day (the adrenaline and endorphins were a lifeline) and depression was creeping in and I often had bouts of it despite my best efforts to make due.
The one good thing that came from lockdowns, in my view as an environmentalist, was that it showed how the Earth was actually healing itself: you could see the Himalayas from India when they stopped burning so much outdoors, the same could be seen in DTLA where most didn't even know there were mountains in the area because of pollution/smog.
I was an essential worker during this time, I chose to be rather than stay locked down a home as I knew after my teens in public high school that my cognition and over all mental health and well being suffer when confined in one place, and it was alarming to see it from the other side. People embraced it at first, made bread recipe videos and memes online and were actually rather nice to each other as we all had a common threat, but then after the Spring time it got really dark.
I want to write a chronicle of the events one day from the POV of small chef-owners/restaurateurs who got blind-sided from the politics of COVID, but the more the I think about it the more its a reflection on how poorly Society fared during that time and its actually never gotten better.
In the UK people out of work were given 80% of their pay. Denmark paid people 75% of their income. The Netherlands gave their people 90% of their wages. All of this on top of their already strong social services and safety nets which helped make sure that people were taken care of.
In the US we got nothing until after a lot of government fighting we were reluctantly given a couple $1,000 "stimulus" checks leaving Americans with record amounts of household debt. We're still seeing the impacts in increasing rates of utility disconnections and rising numbers of evictions and homelessness which will likely continue to get worse long before they improve.
This is completely subjective to someone's values. To some, living is more important than survival. Not everyone believes in courage in the sense of loving life (life as in the virtue of living, not specifically one's own life) enough to being ready to die for it. Lockdowns were smart to some, but a tyranny to others, and we are still paying dearly for them. Even those of you in bed with the green agenda should be distraught over this, the world's coal consumption set a new record in 2022, and the lockdowns are largely to blame.
I‘d love to learn more about that interaction.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand why people deny climate change, but it usually comes down to a few basic things: 1. Group membership. 2. Seeing is believing, and not having been impacted yet. 3. Having been impacted, but unwilling to admit it due to embarrassment/sunk cost fallacy. Honestly I expect that after this summer most people in cohort 2 will move to cohort 3.
Possibly, although that would imply that you'd see more acceptance at the state, local, and individual level, and I certainly haven't seen that.
What I have seen is people eager to latch on to any narrative that doesn't involve big changes, especially not big preemptive changes.
They would be 'legions' comprised of men like the the Qanon Shamaon I take it? If so, this would be a short fought battle and these often over-weight, out of shape diabetics wouldn't do very much. Moreover, it was Trump who advocated for lockdowns and was the first to highlight not allowing super-spreader events to take place as the Pandemic started to get serious in Asia: unlike that walking corpse Pelosi had in San Francisco for the Lunar New Year to goad her voter base into thinking she was more progressive and woke and told everyone to go out and celebrate.
Again, facts be damned, people are hardliners that justify their own cognitive dissonance.
You strike on something notable, but fail to see the facts that these people are ill-informed and much of social media has made them that way, which if we are honest is really what a place like HN should be able to do considering it's root within tech.
But hey... who says they aren't in denial and deluding themselves, either?
No, more like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, the QAnon shaman did serve as a pretty effective media distraction, though.
I'm going to be incredibly cynical and go back to my channer days for a second because you think this holds water for some reason:
I can't believe anyone thinks these cosplaying militiaman would hold their own in any real conflict, it's pathetic: look at how the bodies of even mercenaries from Wagner are piling up when former Ukrainian farmers, bakers, bank tellers, and artists are trained by and with modern Western weaponry. The fact that anyone thinks these things is why I think Social Media has irreparably damaged most people's minds.
Bubba and his buddies stack of ARs isn't going to mean a thing if they were taken seriously, it takes one drone strike at the local watering hole for this to end; what I think is a media distraction is how Jan 6th was a psyop that let these imbeciles into one of the most fortressed places on Earth in order to increase survielence and policing budgets; they let the National Guard sleep on the floor and opined how under-budgeted they were and was unpreventable when their is actual video footage of the security letting the mob into the Capital rather than doing their job and stopping them from making a mess.
Hell one guy even had a heart attack on the way to storm the Capital by tazing himself in the balls [0].
I think I've had enough of HN for today...
0: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/01/13/fac...
Americans have believed it since the country was founded, it's part of their national myth, that they began as a ragtag bunch of drunken rebels who took down the greatest empire in the world with nothing but grit and tenacity (and definitely no help from the French, Spanish and Dutch.)
Jan 6th was such a mess not because it was a psyop to increase surveillance and police budgets (Americans by and large love both of those things during Republican administrations, and the government doesn't need a pretext) but because despite American bluster about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, all most American gun owners know about actual combat or insurgent operations they learned from playing boomer shooters.
But yes, they absolutely believe the government's fear of the pistols they keep hidden under their pillows is the only thing keeping the US from tilting into hard Stalinist tyranny at any moment.
Probably true—I wonder what he did to earn that level of trust?
We need to make predictions for more than 30 years that are accurate before we trust scientists?
Or has it been destroyed? By what?
You talk about another completely arbitrary problem with government decision making without context as if it dismisses this entire argument without need for explanation.
You then go on to say that Trumpists trying to start a civil war do so not for comfort but due to trust.
That couldn't be further from the truth. The entire point of the far right propaganda machine is to aim for comfort. Anything wrong is the out groups fault and eliminating them will bring back your comfort is the tagline of that mindset.
Efficiency is an answer but the question is never asked in public. Why? Secondly, a handful of industrial actors and their dot-mil customers are apparently never to be questioned, instead we get the 632nd episode of you and your carbon footprint, citizen.
I'm growing tired of the idea that riding a bike instead of driving a car is a discomfort equivalent to being a Neanderthal.
Biking works out just dandy for Netherlands.
It's not about comfort. It's about aversion to change.
Most people are pathetically weak with such an extreme aversion to minor discomfort or the denial of indulgence and acute pleasure. This counter intuitively makes their holistic life experience more miserable than if they had the foresight to sacrifice a little today for a much better future.
Aversion to exercise and eating healthy resulting the obesity epidemic is the classic example of this.
Enlightened hedonism is the way.
Who says you need to move?
~50% of the US population is urban, and that number is rising quickly.
Miami & Los Angeles could be biking paradises with minimal effort from the city.
But voters view bikers as subhuman.
No one did. That’s why “or being taxed to upgrade infrastructure” is the very next part of my statement.
No, I haven't. And I fail to see how being out-of-shape is a comfort and not a discomfort.
I do agree that we can't force morbidly obese people onto bikes.
But the narrative amongst healthy people has got to change that their life would be DRAMATICALLY worse if they biked instead of drove a stupid $80k SUV.
Only ~28% of urbanites are obese in the US, btw. Compare that to ~60% in most rural areas and suburbs. In most walkable urban areas - this number is ~20% or less.
It's almost as if the car and the design of our cities makes us fat, and maybe we should change that, instead of saying that the car & roads & parking makes us comfortable.
Let's also not forget that the US pretty much has no bike infrastructure. You can say "well, that's your fault," but it's not the fault of the SUV drivers; it's the fault of city planners who plan for anticipated demand by cyclists, rather than leading with infrastructure to encourage cycling. This predictably leads to a lack of people wanting to cycle, for fairly rational reasons: roads built for and dominated by cars are not very safe for people riding bikes. So, the demand doesn't materialize because the infrastructure isn't here, which inhibits demand.
Oh, and yeah, the auto manufacturers had a bit to do with it as well. [0]
In any case, your ire is aimed in the wrong direction, and the "fat, out of shape American" stereotype has very little to do with it.
---
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/cycling-boom-us-streets-infr...
Netherlands doesn't have a huge biking culture in the middle of nowhere, Netherlands.
Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)
https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU
Companies need to see where people are commuting from and set up a small office to capture those people.
Who thinks it's a good idea for hundreds of thousands of people to burn fuel to sit in an open office with half the company WFH that particular day?
Commuting culture is insanity.
It's also okay to be a little uncomfortable. A lot of us are quite obsessed with avoiding discomfort, but it's often exactly what we need. I like riding my cargo bike with my son to his school, getting soaked and blown around in the wind. Sometimes he hates it, sometimes I dream of dry sunny days, but when I get home or to the office I'm in love with my awesome bike and all the cool stuff we do with it. Camping, shopping, errands—it's awesome, and totally worth the discomfort.
Like in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: on a bike, you're in your environment, not just watching it go by. You're a participator, not a spectator. You're in the weather, you can reach out and touch some tall grass or a low hanging branch. That aspect makes little parts of the day so much more immersive and interesting. I love that, and I'll take getting hot and sweaty or cold and soaked over driving my car 95% of the time.
I know it's only my perspective, and many will never consider it, but I hope a lot more people do. Bikes made my life so much better.
For what it's worth, I'm out of shape and a bit overweight, so I'm not some fit and out-of-touch athlete telling people they should just go ahead and do a difficult thing.
I'll admit though, there are definitely financial barriers. If you take the bus for economical reasons, an electric cargo bike probably isn't an option. If you own a car and need it, and you can barely afford it as it is, an electric cargo bike also isn't a realistic option. It's definitely a privilege in a sense, and I won't shame someone for relying on a car in those circumstances. Well, I won't shame anyone regardless.
The car's role in family life is hard to overstate, though, when you have more than one kid, and you need to get somewhere all together while also bringing some cargo like a stroller.
We get by with renting a car occasionally, but installing two car seats and bringing them back up to the flat again is getting really boring.
Actually I'm dreaming of buying a used RV...
This seems to ignore that we've been thinking of the cars for a century and it really hasn't worked out all that well for cities, where most people live.
We need to do it differently, and more cars/space for cars isn't the solution. It doesn't need to be bikes either; plenty of people can't even ride bikes. All access lanes seem be the best solution I've seen (wide enough for mobility scooters, room for passing, on and off ramps, etc).
But I also flew about 100,000 km per year in the time before COVID and am still on track to fly about 30,000-50,000 km this year. This puts me right back among the people with the highest carbon footprints in the whole world.
There are lots of different things that people might be asked to sacrifice, not just one. And the general trend of development and rising wealth is a trend of greater energy intensity. You can find exceptions and substitutes where you can reduce energy intensity in some area without major sacrifice, but if you have to do it across the board over and over again, that's really a loss of material standard of living.
You were going to fly 30k-50k km regardless of if you biked or drove.
The fact that you biked cut your emissions quite a bit.
A cut in emissions is still a success.
And before anyone says, but what about my electric car!?
1) it produces a ton of carbon to build your car (a year's worth of emissions for a Westerner)...
2) for at least the next 10-years, in most of the US and the EU, your car is charged by ~50% fossil fuels.
The average person's emissions are almost ~1/10th just from building their car...
Can I ask why? I struggle to think of a legitimate reason anyone would need to travel that much.
Please don't say it's for meetings.
This year is family visits and vacations.
My travel patterns were still rather low for self-conscious "frequent flyers", who would, for example, feel an absolute requirement to fly at least 50,000 or 100,000 miles on a single airline each year in order to "maintain status" so that that airline would reward them with various perks. I have "only" ever done this once. Of course, I expect even approaching the low end of a frequent flyer status is probably the top 1% carbon footprint in the world.
The same Netherlands that still can’t say goodbye to its beloved car. Traffic is back and surpassed pre-covid records. We still have to keep speed restrictions during daytime to reduce emissions because we just can’t help it to live in one part of the country and work in the other.
Well said.
You wouldn’t need so many cargo ships plying the world’s oceans, for instance, if you simply produced more locally and regionally.
Yet, we’ve somehow decided that complicated supply chains that simply add to consumption bloat are more important.
Would we really be in that much pain if our local store stocked 10 types of tees instead of 200?
I think there's so much skepticism of climate change precisely because so many of those pushing for action are so invested in using climate change to push for other political goals. Chiefly anti-capitalism and de-growth. People aren't necessarily adverse to climate action, they're adverse to anti-capitalism or de-growth. As much of a buffoon he's been in recent years, one of the best things Elon Musk has done via Tesla is demonstrate that climate action does not have to be coupled with the deeply unpopular positions that so many climate activists espouse. Likewise, France demonstrates how electricity can be thoroughly decarbonized without making people's lives substantially more uncomfortable.
This way, we can frame the issue in a manner that garners widespread support.
It’s unfortunate that some discussions around climate change are politically charged, detracting from the core message of environmental preservation.
And the reaction is to go purchase a new giant-ass truck and get the engine detuned to roll coal on a cyclist.
They've pushed everyone else away as part of falling down the rabbit hole of denialism, they're the ones who have to want to change their beliefs.
To the extent that all of these efforts were resisted anyway, it had nothing to do with general population climate alarmism fatigue. It's that people resist any restrictions whatsoever on freedom of commercial activity and think of everything in nature as either a resource that can't be exhausted or a resource that doesn't matter if it gets exhausted because it can either be replaced with something else or they'll have gotten rich enough by the time it's gone that it won't affect their personal ability to profit and the portion of future generations they care about (their own descendants) can simply inherit their wealth and not need to continue the activity that generated it.
They've been exposed to a decades-long propaganda campaign that is ongoing.
I suppose to balance it out somewhat and not catastrophize too much, it seems like we have good water management because we aren't in the deepest level of drought restrictions and it seems like the state has quietly added a fair amount of solar energy which has been keeping our power grid from seeing major issues.
They do indeed have entire parallel constructions of reality where landfills full of plastic are a good thing, and people trying to stop those happening are the real problem. That's regularly suggested here on HN as what really needs to be done to combat climate change.
We should be proposing solutions, not blaming one side.
The better criticism is that the 'left' that actually gets elected has done ~fuck-all to solve the problem, on any of the axes they could push. Of course, actually doing anything would be political suicide, and then the denialist-right gets all the power, and will also continue to do nothing.
It's not a 'two sides equivalence' issue. Anti-nuke people aren't the ones in control of the equilibrium, the right is. If the anti-nuke movement disappeared tomorrow, we'd still be in essentially the same pickle we're in. If the denialist-right movement dissapeared tomorrow, we might have some hope of making progress.
Just because you found one village idiot, doesn't mean that you should point at him, and shout that the village isn't really any different from the insane asylum up the road. They are not the same.
Are you aware of the closure of many nuclear power plants (Germany & the US specifically)?
I'm curious to know which news sources are you specifically referring to.
You think they look at things of their own volition or what? They just rail against the concept holistically and label everything lefty propaganda that's even vaguely adjacent
pollution =/= climate change. it's a separate problem, isn't it?
Nietzsche was right to be concerned with the "death of God". People have a very hard time dealing with the inevitability of our own death and the fundamental meaninglessness of our existence. Even people who think they are comfortable with these concepts tend to still have many tactics of avoiding this reality.
For most of human history we solved this problem by pointing to the past (e.g. "when I die I become one with my ancestors") or another world (e.g. "when I die I will leave this vale of tears, and find myself in the world I belong in").
For most of modern society we have replaced this with finding salvation in the future (e.g. "My life is meaningful because my work is contributing to a better future for humanity"). I think most of us, striving to work on hard technical problems, imagine ourselves as ultimately being a small screw in the generation ship that will send humanity into the stars. Or, at the very least, most hope to live on through their children.
Catastrophic climate change challenges that fundamental system of meaning many people have established to resist this terror of existence. If society as we know it has no future, this is roughly the same as telling a devote Christian that their is no heaven. No matter how much evidence you gather for this, at a deep level they will be unable to accept this. And if they are able to accept this, it will only because there has been an alternate method of meaning proposed.
This is why Nietzsche was so sincerely concerned with the death of God. We can't simply go back to being a world that derives meaning from ancestor worship, or from religion. Sure some subset of the population might "find God", but realistically we can't trivially go back. Nietzsche saw how fragile our systems of meaning had become and worried what society will look like when they start to break down en masse.
Nietzsche was write, these climate deniers and many other similar radicals are near perfect representation of Nietzsche's "Last Man" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man
So even ignoring the environment, these people are just trying to cancer themselves.
This is what climate change means. When put so bluntly, it's not hard to see why people get defensive about it.
And it's just for the people in developed countries! For developing countries it's even worse: "In the best case, you, everyone you care and love, and your whole race will never ever enjoy the lifestyle and wealth of those in developed countries."
Its not just Climate Change, though its rather stark and obvious there for the listed reasons below, but we've come to realize that 99% of social media based tech has been based on profiting from derision and establishing conflicting identity/tribal mindsets, and it's worked out so exceedingly well that even nation state's Intelligence agencies use it for this purpose (see twitter files).
It has been immensely lucrative, unless you're Elon and bought an over-inflated company and then ran it into the ground proving that when you venture outside of a domain where you cannot take credit for other People's work you show who and what you really are.
Hell, even Dorsey has backed away from Bluesky and is now really backing Nostr, I used to think this was a coup--Dorsey gets to take down the board from Twitter that sullied it and Elon got his next big distraction on the platform he spends shitposting all day on. I was hoping this was to make users migrate to Bluesky and have something really valuable to show for it in the end, but honestly I just expected way too much from Elon and instead he did what all rich idiots do when they are in charge: censor, ban, throttle what he doesn't like.
What has happened instead is way more depressing and makes me think social media should just die already, people's speaking habits have deteriorated so much in these last 15 years that it's hard to have a conversation in person with most people who use it.
There's no safety net in the US and we have the homelessness to prove it. What you're seeing is the right wing roots of the US being used to promote a mix of corporate, government and individual cult-like (think Alex Jones) propaganda. Lots of people in the US are susceptible to that, they've spent generations trying to promote white supremacy, US supremacy... that radicalism is easy to hijack, especially when the "opposition" is also thinly veiled corporate and government propaganda.
reasoning:
lets compare the carbon footprint of the entire supple chain (production, maintenance, etc) of electric and gas(petrol) cars;
guess it is about the same (actually economies of scale for the gas-car side mean per gas-car footprint is lesser right now, but say electric cars also catch up at scale).
Then we are down to efficiency diff of the power plant vs ICE.
So would you argue: we will be renewable energy powered soon, at that point we need the electric car ecosystem?
I understand the push to switch to renewables. But there's enough load on the grid to soak up the production and clean up the air.
https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/yse-study-finds-el...
> But a recent study from the Yale School of the Environment published in Nature Communications found that the total indirect emissions from electric vehicles pale in comparison to the indirect emissions from fossil fuel-powered vehicles. This is in addition to the direct emissions from combusting fossil fuels — either at the tailpipe for conventional vehicles or at the power plant smokestack for electricity generation — showing electric vehicles have a clear advantage emissions-wise over conventional vehicles.
> “A major concern about electric vehicles is that the supply chain, including the mining and processing of raw materials and the manufacturing of batteries, is far from clean,” says Gillingham. “So, if we priced the carbon embodied in these processes, the expectation is electric vehicles would be exorbitantly expensive. It turns out that’s not the case; if you level the playing field by also pricing the carbon in the fossil fuel vehicle supply chain, electric vehicle sales would actually increase.”
I will def take a look at the link later, but is it per car or per mile or some normalized comparison?
I like to drive my car and I'll keep doing it. I recognise that seven billion people can't do it.
My answer to that is to use market mechanisms to ensure that only the elite can drive. If I make it into the elite, great, if not, so be it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/0...
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-climate-impact-of-the-...
https://berkeleyearth.org/about/
You've got to come up with better material than that. That's a vintage 2000's denialist gotcha.
So imagine all that extra energy swimming around. If it gets pushed into the deep ocean we have no way to measure that, but after a while it gets pushed to the surface and it looks like the temperature spiked as it also warms the atmosphere.
So the temperature at the moment is actually always increasing but we have to average it over a longer period of time to iron out the gaps in our measurements.
The great majority of countries are too small to make a difference.
Some large countries are too corrupt, or perhaps even stand to benefit from climate change, to make a difference (Russia, middle east).
Some large countries are too poor (relatively, per head of population) to be able to be leaders in climate initiatives (E.g the other BRIC countries).
Many developing countries don't have the technology base to create green energy technology solutions, so can't share in the benefits of selling it to others.
There are only two global powers that are powerful enough and influential enough to move the needle on climate, and not coincidentally, have been at the forefront of plundering our planet for the last couple of centuries and have benefited enormously from their abuse of the commons.
One is the USA. They have a chequered history, but it does include saving the planet once before from an existential threat. That's why people look to the US for leadership.
Unfortunately the US is riven by internal division, and half of the population think that protecting female bathrooms is more important than protecting the atmosphere, and/ or that a mythical being in the sky will fix everything up anyway.
So that leaves only the EU. They are the only hope for humanity. If the EU can get their shit together on climate, then force action on their trading partners, and the US can awaken from their obsessions and fall in behind, then just perhaps we have a chance to stop this runaway train.
USA pays other nations to dump their garbage. The west/developed countries blames eastern/developing countries for it when in fact they were also responsible for a shitton amount of emissions when they started industrializing their countries and still continue to export wastes/export manufacturing stuff which generates waste.
I think it's because USA keep sending them money to make these emissions for them.
The only evidence I can find suggests that fluctuations like this have occurred, but never (as far as we can tell) over this short of a time span.
Here is a paper which shows that the climate appeared relatively stable over the last 2000 years: http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/article...
I'm interested in what information you have that suggests we shouldn't be concerned.
Kind of brings me back to people totally misunderstanding why covid infection rate graphs were concerning. You know, 10 people in your city, then 30, then 100, 500, 2000, 7500, and for the first lower numbers people are like “what’s the big deal? 30 people? Out of 2 million? Big deal”.
The risk of spread doesn’t apply to climate change of course. It’s just a seriously alarming trend line that not enough people recognize as concerning.