[HN Gopher] IPCC climate crisis report delivers 'final warning o...
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IPCC climate crisis report delivers 'final warning on 1.5C'
Author : m1
Score : 198 points
Date : 2023-03-20 13:14 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| climatescam wrote:
| [flagged]
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Tragically, they're wasting their time. Experience has shown that
| such IPCC preaching is like telling the world to stop using
| Facebook and Google because tech giants spy on users and sell
| their data.
|
| Everyone knows that and most don't like it but their addiction is
| too great to make the necessary lifestyle changes to quit.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| To start, yes, I agree with all the rest of the comments. _Of
| course_ if you look at the action needed to start within the 1.5
| degree carbon budget, it 's simply impossible. It's kind of like
| saying how much better humanity would be if there were no wars -
| a nice thought, but also not going to happen.
|
| I'm curious, though, and I admit I haven't read the report, but
| what is it about 1.5 degrees that the scientific community sees
| as so critical. Is that the temp after which positive feedback
| loops take over and it becomes a "runaway train", so to speak
| (e.g. less ice results in less albedo and more warming, which
| causes less ice). I just want to understand why that number was
| chosen to represent such a critical point.
|
| And since it's obvious we are _not_ going to make that limit,
| what are the additional consequences of hitting 2 or 3 degrees of
| warming?
|
| Edit: To the downvoters, please take a look at
| https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions. Global CO2 emissions
| have simply skyrocketed since 1950. The only year they didn't go
| up was 2020 - remember that year we had a pandemic that shut down
| much of the world for months and months on end. And _still_ ,
| despite all the stoppage of activity, there was just a small blip
| down in CO2 emissions. I don't understand how any sane person can
| look at this graph and believe that 1.5 is attainable. Remember,
| we don't just have to flatten this graph, we need to bring it all
| the way back down to 0. I _do_ think alternative energy
| technology will eventually get us there, but certainly not in 15
| years, all across the world.
| Extasia785 wrote:
| 1.5 degrees is commonly talked about because almost every
| country on earth pledged to "pursue efforts to limit the
| temperature increase to 1.5degC above pre-industrial levels"
| [0] in the Paris agreement. We won't hit that anymore, but it
| makes sense for scientists to compare the taken measures with
| the original goal. Every degree matters and aiming for 1.5 and
| missing by 0.5 degrees is better than aiming for a "realistic"
| 2.5 degrees and missing by 0.2 degrees.
|
| [0] https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Thanks very much for your response, I think it makes the most
| sense - that is, 1.5 degrees isn't some "magic number", but
| every .1 degree makes things disproportionally _worse_ , and
| we want to limit the damage as much as possible.
|
| In that case, I think still harping on the 1.5 degree number
| is a communications mistake. It is obviously impossible at
| this point (see the edit in my original comment), and so I
| think focusing it risks encouraging a "well, this is
| obviously too late, might as well enjoy our bread and
| circuses while they last" attitude. I think it would be much
| better if scientists said "Remember when we warned you about
| that 1.5 degree limit? Well, y'all f'd that up, so now a lot
| of these dire predictions are going to come true. Oh, and
| here is a whole host of even _more_ dire predictions that
| will occur for every .1 degree you miss the limit, so you
| better try to limit carbon emissions as much as you can to
| prevent things from becoming more screwed than they are
| already guaranteed to be. "
|
| I just think that any messaging that talks about things
| eventually being "too late" is bad from a public motivation
| standpoint.
| gmuslera wrote:
| The point wasn't not only hitting that limit, but not hitting
| it before some date (end of century originally). The planet
| will continue warming up as long as we have an excess of
| greenhouse gases, even if we reach some kind of cooked up "net
| zero" of emissions.
|
| If we warm faster, feedback loops will have more effect
| earlier, tipping points may be reached in shorter time,
| biodiversity will drop a lot, and our ability to react and do
| something about it will be compromised because we will have
| more urgent things to do like i.e. figuring out new food
| sources in scale after agriculture becomes unreliable enough.
|
| It is not if we will hit a mark, but how fast we will leave it
| behind. There is no possible adaptation to fast enough change,
| for us and the world we depend on.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Thanks for your answer, but to be clear, I understand all
| that.
|
| My question is what, _specifically_ , the 1.5 degree budget
| signifies, and why it seems like there will be such a
| discontinuous amount of harmful effects if we blow past it.
| What is the significance of 1.5 vs 1 or 3?
|
| Also, I'm not some sort of "climate skeptic" - I totally
| understand there will be severe negative consequences for
| continuing to pump carbon into the atmosphere. I'm just
| genuinely curious on why scientists landed on the 1.5 number.
| tito wrote:
| Discontinuous effects, yes.
|
| A stable climate functions more like a light switch than a
| dimmer switch. There is an "off", and once we go there
| getting back is really hard. It's almost like a one way
| switch.
|
| As one example of a feedback loop, when polar ice melts,
| the area effectively turns from white (ice) to black
| (ocean). This area then absorbs more heat, driving more
| heating. So that's one feedback loop.
|
| I think the feedback loops are kind of cool to study.
| Methane emissions in the tundra. Greenland melting causes
| more melting. Higher temps cause more water vapor that
| absorbs heat.
|
| That doesn't give you specifics on where the line is. But
| wanted to give you an idea about the discontinuity, that
| there is a threshold vs dimmer switch.
|
| P.S. I plugged your question into ChatGPT but the response
| was vague.
| gmuslera wrote:
| I think it was a compromise between achievability and
| limiting damage what made it to be accepted decades ago. It
| was unrealistic to ask to not reach 1.5oC back then, but
| the increase should be as low as possible to avoid reaching
| tipping points and triggering positive feedback loops that
| could put things beyond our possibility of control.
|
| Things are not binary, we are talking about global average
| temperatures, not the temperature you reach some day or
| season in a region. So you have to deal with uncertainty
| and that with higher global average temperature you will
| have the smaller version of the loops, even if you didn't
| reach the budget yet. But when you surpass enough them,
| then you will have more players that are changing the
| climate, influencing each other, and things will change
| faster. And there the decimal resolution may lose its
| meaning, your range of confidence will be much wider.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| A) We've already passed the expected point of no return for
| 0.5 (warned about as early as the 1960s as I recall) and
| 1.0. As of 2023 we have already experienced years at as
| much as 1.2 degrees (above pre-industrial average).
|
| B) The 1.5 degree budget, as I recall is the "best wish"
| case of the 2015 Paris agreement.
|
| C) The 2 degree budget is the "worst case" allowable by the
| 2015 Paris agreement.
|
| D) The Paris agreement was based on previous IPCC reports
| on some of the expected outcomes at 1.5 degree and 2 degree
| budgets. The Paris agreement was largely trying to pick the
| smallest number that still seemed feasible in 2015.
| programwiz wrote:
| I see multiple people in this thread are talking about 3 degrees
| which is unrealistic. While 1.5 seems unlikely at this point 2
| degrees is within reach and IMO the most likely outcome. I would
| even say anything above 2.5 is unrealistic. This chart[1] can be
| useful, compare it to last predictions and you'll see the reason
| of my optimism.
|
| Also note in the beginning of 2010s solar was very expensive,
| right now it's (almost) the cheapest source of energy[2] and the
| technological problem at this point is battery.
|
| That begin said our problem for switching to renewables isn't
| only technological, there are political reasons (e.g. China and
| coal [3]) and also despite solar being cheap for a certain period
| of time running old infrastructure (e.g. natural gas power plant)
| still makes economic sense, at least in the short term. but I
| expect that predictions like [1] become more optimistic in this
| decade.
|
| As a final note in the past economic growth = more pollution
| which is simply not the case any more for most of the countries.
|
| [1]: https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/ [2]:
| https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth [3]:
| https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/china-must-stop-its-coal-i...
| wilg wrote:
| I agree 2C peak is the most likely current situation.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Are there any resources that show the improvement we've already
| made in those terms? I think that would be helpful. Like, there's
| got to be an estimate of what our rate was when growth was before
| we started introducing what we've already been doing. I know
| there are cynics who want to make the argument that we've done
| absolutely nothing and that we're still in the base scenario, but
| I think that doesn't give credit to the advancements we've made
| due to environmentally-influenced policy changes across the
| world.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's not just cynics, that's just how it is. Emissions are
| still growing.
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Frqp9M_X0AsvyMW?format=jpg&name=...
| tunesmith wrote:
| I'm asking something more nuanced than that. Emissions are
| still growing, but probably not growing as much as if we had
| done absolutely nothing. What's the difference between those
| two trend lines?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| This IPCC report is an annual report and you can directly
| compare year to year.
|
| So far it seems like the report gets worse every year.
|
| The pessimistic take is that every single advancement in
| environmental policy has been used to cover increased fossil
| fuel usage somewhere else. Almost every "carbon credit" trading
| program has been to pat people on the back for doing "their
| part" while actually doing very little and masking existing
| fossil fuel consumption with sleight of hand accounting tricks.
| Almost every bit of annual power savings by collective action
| switching to things such as LED light bulbs and EV cars has
| been (too easily) entirely offset by the vastly increased
| energy consumption of things like cryptocurrency mining
| operations and AI computation farms and still far too cheap oil
| prices. (The world was on track for net coal-fired power plant
| shutdown and Bitcoin alone is responsible single handedly for
| restarting up enough coal-fired power plants in the 2020s to
| offset that expected net gain.)
|
| This report card says we aren't doing anywhere near enough. We
| aren't meeting our collective promises (we are likely to miss
| the Paris Agreement best case target and are hoping we still
| have a path to stick to the Paris Agreement's worst case).
| Maybe we still aren't yet "doomed", but there's not really a
| lot of credit to go around for anyone collectively doing the
| right thing. (Individual action was always something of a red
| herring given how dwarfed individuals are by large corporations
| and industries. It's probably not worth handing out gold stars
| for individuals doing their part, either.)
| tunesmith wrote:
| This is why it's so hard to ask my question, because I feel
| like this mentality is so oppressive.
|
| You're not literally arguing that LED light bulbs and EV cars
| somehow _enabled_ cryptocurrency mining operations, are you?
|
| What I'm asking is: for the set of actions we have taken due
| to environmental policy that have led to reduced emissions,
| what is the effect of those policies compared to if we hadn't
| enacted those policies? For instance, if LED light bulbs and
| EV cars are a result of those policies, then where would be
| if we hadn't done that, and _still_ had cryptocurrency mining
| operations?
|
| In other words, how much have we bent the curve? _Not_
| compared to previous estimates, but compared to what reality
| would have been if-not-for?
|
| Because, unless the argument is that these policies have
| actually had _more_ perverse outcomes than beneficial
| outcomes, it 's literally impossible that we haven't bent the
| curve. I'd like to see more reporting on how much we have
| bent the curve, because I think it would supply positive
| motivation.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > You're not literally arguing that LED light bulbs and EV
| cars somehow enabled cryptocurrency mining operations, are
| you?
|
| I somewhat am. It's far more correlation than direct
| causation, but the added energy equivalent of an entire
| second world country such as Iceland doesn't just spring
| out of nowhere, especially when considering nearly zero-sum
| fossil fuel utilization. Assuming that fossil fuel
| mining/drilling/refining _didn 't_ massively increase over
| the same years (and statistically it hasn't, it mostly
| appears "constant"), much of the energy that things like
| cryptocurrency mining have used have by simple matter of
| fact come in part from efficiencies gained _elsewhere_ in
| the overall energy ecosystem.
|
| It's not entirely a zero sum game of course, because there
| has been an increase in renewable energy sources (hydro,
| solar, and wind especially), but it certainly awfully looks
| like it is still close enough to zero-sum or possibly even
| (pessimistically) negatively weighted sum, with regards to
| carbon output, when even given huge increases in renewable
| energy mixes across the world we didn't see net decreases
| in things like coal-fired power plants at the scale we
| should have. We keep collectively finding ways to use
| roughly all of the available fossil fuel energy extracted
| each year, despite focuses on renewables and despite
| efforts at using less energy overall in average households.
|
| Is that a perverse outcome of well-intentioned policies?
| I'm not entirely sure. Cynically, it certainly feels like
| it.
|
| Positive motivation would be great to have, you are
| correct. I don't think we have enough of it in current
| policies. (We needed carbon _caps_ , not [just]
| credits/offsets. We needed carbon taxes to internalize to
| markets externalities they don't actually care to watch. We
| didn't get those things. We still seem unlikely to get
| those things.)
|
| The best positive motivation I'm aware of that we're
| finally seeing "just in time" some of the effects of a
| greatly healed Ozone layer, which proves the concerns about
| Ozone depleting chemicals in 80s and 90s had the desired
| effect and the efforts to eradicate them were not
| hyperbolic and were definitely necessary (and that climate
| change would be much, much worse in most of the world had
| we not made those changes; though Australia and its strict
| sunscreen regimens can still tell us how much the remaining
| Ozone damage is a present threat in anthropogenic climate
| change).
|
| I still sometimes worry that we needed (years ago) an
| attitude like _that_ towards things like a possible ban on
| cryptocurrency energy usage if we actually wanted to bend
| the curve, but in the 2020s the fact that things like
| fighting for the Ozone _succeeded_ "quietly" almost
| dastardly make it harder to fight for political will _now_
| because "people already did their part and sacrificed for
| 'nothing' and are exhausted".
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Looking at the CO2 concentration per year chart: how long until
| we've got Spaceballs' "Perri Air" to avoid cognitive impairment?
| Anyone already experimenting with getting their indoor air closer
| to the (extrapolating a bit) ~250-280PPM of the pre-industrial
| atmosphere? This'd be a step farther than people who vent in
| outdoor air to keep indoor air from creeping even higher due to
| respiration and such.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Ventilation (or lack of it, due better sealing that prevents
| continuous ventilation through cracks) will have much more
| impact than background concentration.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| > at the Swiss resort of Interlaken
|
| I hope they all walked up there after taking their sail boats
| across the ocean.
| Ligma123 wrote:
| oh boy I guess this is our last "last chance"
| dudeDDRrulez wrote:
| Yeah where have I heard that before? Oh yes, it was "at least
| once a year for the past three decades".
|
| The story of the little boy that cried wolf comes to mind...
| tgv wrote:
| Don't the sheep get eaten in the end? Or was that your point?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Average corp still don't care! 1.5C is just a number. Until we
| _witness_ cities with populations over 1 million _destroyed_ by
| climate change, warnings will continue to be (largely) ignored.
| Yes, it will take _that much destruction_ before we collectively
| get our shit together and force ourselves to stop burning fossil
| fuels.
| yk wrote:
| The problem is to a large part one of attack surface, if we don't
| have anything to talk about we talk about weather because weather
| effects everything and everyone. Thing is, all our systems are
| tuned to how the weather is right now, if climate and thus
| weather changes, problems can potentially pop up just about
| everywhere. Now we can talk about the systems we know are at a
| critical location, like coral reefs, but the actual problem is
| about unknown unknowns: Right now we are taking the bet that the
| worst problem connected to a changing climate that nobody has
| thought about is quite bearable, which to me doesn't look like a
| good bet.
| sazz wrote:
| TL;DR - Sorry for this long post.
|
| "Scientists have issued a "final warning" on the climate crisis
| as rising greenhouse gas emissions bring the world to the brink
| of irreversible damage that can only be averted by swift and
| drastic action."
|
| OMG.
|
| I just stopped reading after the first paragraph. Welcome to the
| attention economy where only the biggest fairground screamer gets
| a hearing. Except that fairground screamers are definitely not
| part of the achievements of "age of enlightenment".
|
| I remember a few years ago - when it was about the populism of
| extreme right-wing parties - how the propaganda was described:
| First a problem is described as a catastrophe, and then the only
| way to solve it is presented. Any parallels?
|
| Nothing - but absolutely nothing - makes sense in this paragraph.
| Where is the critical thinking that "science" always prides
| itself?
|
| It starts with the fact that scientists have issued a final
| warning on the climate crisis. Sounds somehow like parents who
| are at their wits' end with their educational measures and don't
| know what to do next. And what does "final warning" actually
| mean? Will we be spared that from next year on? Or will there be
| the "really last warning", the "last last warning" or the "last
| last warning 2"?
|
| I am sure they will continue with their "warnings" next year.
| What else are they supposed to do?
|
| So then the world comes to the brink of irrevocable damage? What
| is that supposed to be? Irreversible damage like the last
| eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in 2010, the irreversible damage of
| the Hiroshima bombs, the irreversible damage of the last world
| war?
|
| The world is continuously changing. Things are destroyed and
| things are rebuilt. We dig up the earth everywhere we greed for
| mineral resources. For the next iPhone of the very scientists who
| warn against it. We changed the surface of the Earth a dozen
| times but now it's irreversible. Fun fact: If nature gets the
| chance in 1.000 years nothing will be there anymore because
| nature irreversible changed everything again. Is this a
| catastrophe as well?
|
| But it's not even "damage", it's just the "brink of possible
| damage". So we are heading for a situation that might produce
| damage - and that we can only prevent by taking drastic measures.
|
| But who tells us that precisely these drastic measures will not
| also lead to damage?
|
| Yes, the climate is changing. The glaciers are melting and
| suddenly old Roman roads appear that led over the mountains. Yes,
| it was warmer 2,000 years ago, too. But probably someone forgot
| to announce to the people back then that they were living on the
| brink of a catastrophe or something.
|
| Before anybody asks: Yes, lets clean the oceans. Lets plant
| trees. Lets adapt to the climate change. Lets invest in robust
| energy sources which are not dependent on wind or sun for which
| we have to cut down forests and destroy seas. But don't be that
| arrogant to think that using a master plan we can control a
| complex, non-deterministic, loopback-based system on the edge of
| chaos.
|
| This never happened. And this never will. And those systems are
| always "irreversible" because that's the nature of it.
| alfor wrote:
| My comment was removed because it doesn't support the current
| orthodoxy. (and could make people feel bad about their new
| climate religion)
|
| I would be great if the censure applied here would put the
| comments censored on another page with a link to it.
|
| That way people interested could see what is removed and why.
| Instead of being it silent and hidden.
|
| More and more I feel that HN has become an echo chamber where
| only one direction is allowed.
|
| TLDR: make censure explicit and visible instead of hidden.
| realworldperson wrote:
| [dead]
| juujian wrote:
| Just looking at the press conference slides, some notable stuff
| in there. "The challeng ... Cut global GHG emissions by nearly
| half by 2030." I don't know why they bother putting that in
| there, it is obviously not going to happen. We will be lucky if
| by 2030 the emissions are below the current level...
| julosflb wrote:
| "There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a
| liveable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence)"
|
| Given how each word is carefully weighted in their report, this
| sounds a bit scary to me.
| adamwong246 wrote:
| We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap. ~Kurt
| Vonnegut
| zpeti wrote:
| [flagged]
| polotics wrote:
| The IPCC sadly had to accommodate economists, and they went one
| to do what economists do. However they got cordoned off in a
| separate section. Of course economic growth of Pakistan has
| been severely impacted by the floods they recently got, but hey
| what's evidence and anyway, it's all just a far away 'stan,
| right? The hard science sections tell it like it is, then the
| growth of GDP can be gamed in oh so many ways, maybe a beach
| that survived +2 warming and still looks good is worth visiting
| to the tune of _1000 more in $ /vacation-day, right? Well then
| here is your GDP boost right there, all you got to have is
| someone still able to afford the _1000...
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The IPCC are the people who wrote the source report in the
| first place! If you don't trust their analysis of climate
| change, I'm not sure what we're doing here - do you have some
| other source you think is more reliable?
| luckylion wrote:
| Should we just tell Pakistan to suck it and not develop?
| Should we just shut down all economic activity that isn't
| related to sequestering co2?
|
| It seems obvious that there's a tension between economic
| activity (aka living in a somewhat developed country) and
| resource usage.
| nukeman wrote:
| No, it's more along the lines of "build a high-speed rail
| line from Karachi to Islamabad" instead of encouraging
| further air travel. The corridor is around 1500 km long, so
| a line with an average operating speed of 320 kph would
| enable sub-5 hour journey times, and allow for a reduction
| or elimination of air services between the two cities
| (currently 105 per week).
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I cannot comprehend how someone could look at the evidence and
| conclude that growth will continue uninterrupted as the natural
| world is destroyed around us.
|
| If you really don't believe climate change will have any
| impact, you should take a look at the actions of insurance
| companies. Their survival depends on them properly pricing in
| climate risk, and there's a reason why they've largely
| abandoned florida.
| FrojoS wrote:
| you: > [...] If you really don't believe climate change will
| have any impact [...]
|
| parent: > [...] they only predict that economic growth will
| be less because of climate change [...]
| Rygian wrote:
| "Economic growth" is probably a bad indicator to follow.
|
| I would rather follow "number of excess death directly or
| indirectly linked to climate change." I don't know if that can
| be calculated somewhere.
| prottog wrote:
| And who will follow the number of excess lives that were
| enabled by the deployment of cheap (and yes, dirty) fossil
| fuel energy among the global poor? These decisions aren't
| made in a vacuum. We must weigh the costs and the benefits.
| polotics wrote:
| Also note that most deaths actually do boost the GDP metric,
| in the short term...
| logicalmonster wrote:
| > "Economic growth" is probably a bad indicator to follow.
|
| Why? Isn't economic activity a very good proxy for normal
| human life, good living standards, and the capacity to adapt
| to any conceivable challenges? Limited economic impact from
| climate change is arguably the most important and positive
| climate related news you could ever hope to see.
|
| > I would rather follow "number of excess death directly or
| indirectly linked to climate change." I don't know if that
| can be calculated somewhere.
|
| Excess deaths due to climate change, or perhaps a ratio of
| excess deaths relative to the total population, might be a
| great metric to consider. But how could one even begin to
| calculate this in a way that wasn't agenda driven? One could
| spin pretty much anything as directly or indirectly linked to
| climate change. Maybe you won't, but others will.
|
| If there's bad political policies that screws over the global
| economy (possibly caused by the attempt to react to climate
| change itself) and masses starve to death the "experts" can
| spin it as "Economic pressures from climate change killed
| these people."
|
| If there's government incompetence that poisons some water
| supply and kills a bunch of people the "experts" can spin it
| as "Pressures from a changing climate contributed to a
| reduction in the fresh water supply that contributed to mass
| deaths."
|
| If there's some civil war that kills a bunch of people the
| "experts" can spin it as "Civil strife brought about
| partially from the social pressures caused by economic
| inequality due to a lack of climate justice caused this."
|
| If there's any natural disaster that kills a lot of people
| the "experts" can spin it as "Continued impacts from climate
| change contributed to the massive death toll."
|
| Voila, climate change directly or indirectly killed 2 billion
| people over some large time period, depending on how you
| count it.
|
| Whether you agree with it or not, using that metric is going
| to feel a lot like Covid where both sides see the "other
| side's" statistical interpretation of reality as completely
| untrustworthy.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Why? Isn't economic activity a very good proxy for normal
| human life, good living standards, and the capacity to
| adapt to any conceivable challenges?
|
| It's not a _bad_ proxy, but it surely is not as good as
| _actual excess death_ as proxy for "normal human life,
| good living standards and the capacity to adapt". Economic
| activity is means to those ends; excess death is a
| measurement of how far we can attain them.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| > It's not a bad proxy, but it surely is not as good as
| actual excess death as proxy for "normal human life, good
| living standards and the capacity to adapt".
|
| Excess deaths, in and of themselves, only tell you that
| more people than average died. Excess deaths, in and of
| themselves, don't tell you why they died.
|
| While a total number of human deaths is objective and can
| be counted with nearly perfect confidence, human deaths
| from a specific cause can be extraordinarily subjective.
| I gave some examples in the post you're replying to, but
| anybody with an agenda can link virtually anything to
| climate change if they really want to. Therefore, this
| metric isn't going to be persuasive to a large amount of
| people.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| That's the whole point: it doesn't matter why they died.
| If you're doing things well, excess deaths are low. If
| you're doing things badly, excess deaths are high. Could
| be a multiplicity of reasons that connect "bad" and
| "excess deaths", and the specifics won't matter if you're
| looking for a summary of "normal human life, good living
| standards, capacity to adapt".
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| > "number of excess death directly or indirectly linked to
| climate change."
|
| That will be a negative number.
|
| Because "climate change" i.e. global warming will see
| increased temperatures and increased crop yields.
| mjhay wrote:
| Bjorn Lomborg is a professional contrarian spouting nonsense.
|
| https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/a-closer-examin...
| amai wrote:
| So what? After my vacation in Dubai I'm going to buy my next SUV
| with BitCoins.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| why are you gonna do that?
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Maybe they don't have children. Thus a lot of "free credits".
| rationalist2948 wrote:
| So, we hear alarms about humans causing rapid climate change.
| Sorry, I don't believe the claims, don't believe that a
| meaningful case has been made, and have to explain the alarms as
| driven by people looking for money from political power, media
| looking for eyeballs for ad revenue (money), and _convenient
| idiots_ deliberately misled by the leaders.
|
| Bluntly, so far there is no credible evidence that human sources
| of greenhouse gasses have caused, are causing, or will cause
| significant temperature change of the earth.
|
| Efforts were made to say what effects CO2 (and other greenhouse
| gasses) would have on temperature. The results were summarized in
| a graph in
|
| http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg
|
| The results varied from no significant changes in temperature to
| massive "hockey stick" changes.
|
| The times of the predicted changes came and went years ago with
| no credible evidence of significant changes. The efforts that
| predicted significant changes were all bad science, and I don't
| believe that they were objective science.
|
| At present the predictions of significant changes have no
| credibility and look convincingly like just a flim-flam scam
| running after money and power.
|
| In short, the efforts summarized in
|
| http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg
|
| show that we have no credible scientific evidence that human
| sources of CO2 have caused, are causing, or will cause
| significant temperature change. The alarmists about CO2 lost
| their credibility.
|
| If the CO2 does not cause significant temperature change, then it
| will not cause significant "climate change" or a "climate
| crisis".
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Are you boiling all of climate change research to a single
| graph from a decade ago presented without context?
| thicknavyrain wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure what your graphs are presenting, but the
| IPCC climate models have done a pretty damn good job predicting
| global temperature rises since the 70s:
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...
| thicknavyrain wrote:
| Which, I should have pointed out in the original comment,
| relied on, yes, anthropogenic carbon emissions.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| This whole "act now or it will be too late", I think actually
| damages our chances of dealing with this.
|
| The reason is that there is a good chance we will blow past 1.5,
| and this will be brought up as evidence that they are just
| "crying wolf".
|
| My guess is that the "final warning" phrasing is more news media
| and not actual scientists. If so, the news media is doing a great
| disservice to humanity.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| It always makes me sad how scientists have to put on a brave face
| and try to tell us there's _still time_. Sadly, they know the
| most likely outcome puts us blowing past 3C by the end of the
| century, and 'carbon capture' isn't going to save us.
|
| If you guys are planning to see the natural world in retirement,
| don't wait. Better to see it as it is now than what it will
| become.
| [deleted]
| mikeholler wrote:
| It's not a brave face. The science tells us that we're on a
| better and improving track. It's not without hope. A decade ago
| we thought we were on track for 6C by the end of the century.
|
| That said, it's still going to be worse than we all want it to
| be. Like many things, the truth lies in the middle and all we
| can do is push hard on the margins.
| [deleted]
| buzzert wrote:
| > If you guys are planning to see the natural world in
| retirement, don't wait. Better to see it as it is now than what
| it will become.
|
| What exactly are you saying here? That in 30 years, the entire
| planet will be an arid desert?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| No, the entire planet will not become arid desert, don't be
| silly, but the world will be getting hotter and drier. Coral
| reefs will bleach. Rain forest will give way to savanna.
| glaciers will disappear. The world will be irrevocably
| changed.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Final report, not final warning - that's the guardian's headline
| spin, the 'warning' comes from a "climate expert at Greenpeace
| International" in the article.
|
| "The Synthesis Report will be the last of the AR6 products and is
| scheduled to be released in March 2023 to inform the 2023 Global
| Stocktake under the United Nations Framework Convention on
| Climate Change."
| noiv wrote:
| Well, some weeks ago The Guardian wrote:
|
| Early forecasts suggest El Nino will return later in 2023,
| exacerbating extreme weather around the globe and making it "very
| likely" the world will exceed 1.5C of warming. The hottest year
| in recorded history, 2016, was driven by a major El Nino.
|
| 1.5degC is basically already locked in.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/16/return-o...
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I'm confused as to how a part of the system can cause a change
| in the whole system. I understand it's changes based upon ocean
| temperatures, but it's not as though during an El Nino yeah our
| global temperature goes up and during a La Nina year it goes
| down, right? I can follow that El Nino will get worse and cause
| more local extremes across the global, but I don't know how it
| will cause or exacerbate the 1.5C global heating.
| noiv wrote:
| Warming of 1.5C is an average over the entire planet and a
| warming Pacific Ocean can drive this average beyond the
| threshold.
|
| Also nowadays an El Nina more or less pauses the warming.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| It's an El Nino actually a warm Pacific ocean? I assumed it
| was changes in currents that were already there.
| jmclnx wrote:
| > as rising greenhouse gas emissions push the world to the brink
| of irrevocable damage that only swift and drastic action can
| avert.
|
| Well like no one knew that :) But the official report I am sure
| details all the background to prove that statement. It is too bad
| the people that can do something will not only ignore the report
| but probably will double down.
| pocketarc wrote:
| Is it just my memory playing tricks, or did we not use to talk
| about crossing the 1C threshold? I guess now that that's not a
| possibility anymore, we're moving to the next, hoping to get some
| sort of action out of politicians.
|
| I strongly suspect we're going to cross the 2C threshold in our
| lifetimes.
|
| The willpower to change things isn't there, and the effects are
| too far removed from our decisions. Even the floods and droughts
| are easy to ignore, telling yourself "it's not happening here,
| just some random far away place".
|
| But I also think that we'll slowly start reducing our emissions
| anyway, as electric cars and green energy keep spreading. So we
| will eventually reach an equilibrium. I just don't think that
| that'll be before the 2C threshold.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| How about the hot-fresh super charged activist group called (
| _edit_ ) "Climate 350" .. stop those carbon density numbers
| from climbing before it is TOO LATE
|
| less than two years after it was formed the PPM went past 360,
| then not long after went past 400 PPM iir.. how can those
| people feel emotionally after that?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Are you thinking of https://350.org/about/#history.
|
| As far as I can tell, it was already past their "safe" target
| when formed, they were just setting a target to aim for in
| the long term.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > it was already past their "safe" target when formed
|
| no, look how bad it is .. the target was close and ahead of
| them when it founded. Now from media sources and casual
| inspection, a person cannot even tell that the atmospheric
| concentration was less than 350 at that time. Awful.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Well, .5 C degree increments in average temperature are big
| enough to be qualitatively different, so that's why we use
| them. Hitting 1.5 C includes some things things like "All the
| ice in the arctic melts in the summer which really sucks for
| local wildlife" but nothing with huge negative effects on
| humans. 2.0 C includes "Sea level rise wipes some small island
| nations off the map", though, which made it of particular
| concern to said island nations during negotiations.
|
| Probably, the climate is a complex system and we've never had a
| ringside view of CO2 levels rising this rapidly so there's
| really a large degree of both upside and downside uncertainty
| in all of this. Probably hitting 2C just means a few refugee
| crises and no disasters that'll effect most of humanity but we
| can't be sure.
| ttiurani wrote:
| A major addition to this report compared to previous ones was the
| emphasis on "demand side" mitigations. That means scaling down
| excess energy use in a way that doesn't compromise people's
| quality of life.
|
| For example this paper suggests that in the UK a reduction of 52%
| by 2050 compared with 2020 levels is possible.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01057-y
| [deleted]
| swader999 wrote:
| It was refreshing to see Greta delete her "were all doomed in
| five years tweet from 2018" last week. They also took down the
| signs in Glacier Park that predicted the glaciers would be gone
| by now near where I live.
| sbate1987 wrote:
| [dead]
| geysersam wrote:
| Glaciers are disappearing globally.
|
| http://wgms.ch/data/faq/_FAQ_RefGlac_Global_Cum_MB.svg
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Sweet, I didn't realize that that automatically means doom is
| never going to happen.
| jf22 wrote:
| Is your point that sometimes people get predictions wrong?
| prottog wrote:
| Not the GP, but sure, if the people making those wrong
| predictions are advocating for policy changes that will
| impoverish so many people.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Climate change is already impoverishing people.
| prottog wrote:
| Not as many as cheap energy from fossil fuels are lifting
| the global poor out of poverty.
| jf22 wrote:
| How accurate do people have to be in their predictions to
| advocate for policy change?
| prottog wrote:
| If said policy change is a radical departure from status
| quo that allowed humanity to flourish since the start of
| the Industrial Revolution, then quite accurate indeed.
| People can't just bandy about phrases like "abolish
| fossil fuels" without justifying it with strong evidence.
|
| Most climate advocacy, I find, focuses too much on the
| doom and gloom of what will happen if we continue down
| our present path, and not enough on the number of lives
| that have been and will continue to be enriched by easily
| and cheaply accessible energy from fossil fuels. I am
| aware of the downsides and by no means think we should
| pollute for the sake of polluting, but I remain
| unconvinced by the current alternatives proposed by the
| overall climate movement.
| charbonneau wrote:
| [dead]
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Should they take down those signs? I would personally prefer
| for things like that to stay up with contextualization about
| how scientific understanding has changed and why the prediction
| was wrong.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| The predictions were not wrong. Society changed, people
| reacted to Greta and others, and that changed the situation,
| and thus the predictions. The Pandemia and pausing industries
| on a global scale did their own share. And as sad as it is,
| the war in Ukraine was finally a massive boost for changes in
| Europe's energy-infrastructure. People previously thought it
| would take decades, what now is finished in some years.
|
| The initial predictions at the time were for the situation
| then, but if the situation changes, the predictions won't
| become wrong, just outdated.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Is that true? And assuming it is, the model was still wrong
| as an assumption of business as usual is part of that
| model. But I don't see how any of that could have prevented
| a glacier from melting by 2023 or the world from being
| "doomed" by 2018.
| mrmanner wrote:
| The model didn't _assume_ business as usual. It explained
| the consequences of business as usual.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I'm being charitable by saying "model". Greta was just
| making shit up when claiming the world would be doomed in
| 5 years back in 2018. But models don't explain what will
| happen in the future, they predict and they bake in a lot
| of assumptions. Any model that predicted an ice free
| Glacier National Park by 2023 was simply wrong, and it
| was doubly wrong to post signage that stated the
| prediction as fact.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Haha society changed? In what way? Of the factors you
| mentioned I'd say that had a negligible impact on climate
| change if any at all.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJdqJu-6ZPo
|
| And we can debate semantics, but the prediction failed to
| accurately predict the future, as is the norm for climate
| catastrophists. It's all emotional appeal to whip up the
| masses to vote, same way gun and ammo prices spike whenever
| a democrat wins the Presidency. I would hope people who
| actually have the power to help solve the problem are
| looking at the issue more objectively.
| robertoandred wrote:
| That's of course not what her tweet said. Did you intentionally
| misread it or just get it through an incorrect grapevine?
| jimmar wrote:
| Her tweet was, "A top climate scientist is warning that
| climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop
| using fossil fuels over the next five years."
|
| Not that far off from, "We're all doomed in five years,"
| because we definitely did not stop using fossil fuels, and in
| my opinion, wiping out all of humanity would count as doom.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| It kind of depends what does the "over the next five years"
| refers to. I would assume she meant "if we don't stop using
| fossil fuels within the next five years, the humanity will
| get wiped out in some unspecified time".
| Ekaros wrote:
| So, what she is saying is that now we are all doomed
| anyway. So we can as well have fun while we can. So let's
| just stop this climate change nonsense and party until we
| all die.
| jfengel wrote:
| It's the "final warning" in the sense that the next report is
| going to be issued in 2030. By that time, 1.5C will be be
| inevitable. We may not have hit the temperature yet, but only
| because it takes a few years for the temperature to respond to
| the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere.
|
| Which is to say, if we don't change right now, then when the next
| report comes out, we will already have enough CO2 in the
| atmosphere to be at 1.5C -- even if we stopped burning fossil
| fuels absolutely and utterly.
|
| I'm really not sure how much such a warning can accomplish, after
| decades of having been ignored in the past. I've been treating
| 1.5C as a fait accompli already.
|
| The problem for me is less about the actual temperature, or even
| the disasters that will come of it, but what it does to American
| culture right now. The whole world has failed to solve the
| problem, but I think America was the lynchpin. We deny that the
| problem exists, making it much harder for the rest of the world
| to summon the will to spend money to do it.
|
| But in America, that has cost us our relationship to science. Any
| HN discussion is sure to be filled with criticisms of the
| scientists, many of them insisting now that this is all some kind
| of leftist power trip. That has utterly destroyed not just our
| ability to use science for any national ends, but an implacable,
| violent hostility between political groups.
|
| Climate change is only one part of that culture war, but it is a
| particularly strong example. The climate conspiracy theorists are
| simply wrong, just plain factually on the face of it. It's not a
| matter of values, or interpretation, or conflicting scientific
| models. There's a right and a wrong answer, and if even that
| turns to bitter hatred, how an we possibly resolve any genuine
| differences of opinion?
| br4dN3w wrote:
| Is the issue with science or with humans in science who also
| contribute to the problem via their career roleplay; energy
| hungry facilities, gadgets for personal and job roles, global
| travel, and celebrity within their respective specialties, some
| of them peddling books and pop science gibberish to sell them
| (looking at Brian Green, Michio, and Sam Harris types).
|
| Everyone needs to kill their figurative identity and accept
| their literal behavior is a contributing factor.
|
| Science does not require credentials and figurative status in
| life. Science has been swallowed by American gamesmanship of
| agency, shallow fiat currency schemes.
|
| The issue is very literal and we humans prefer to live in
| emotional abstraction like nation state pride, wealth chasing,
| and out-bro'ing each other. We're just petty dumb animals. Is
| climate change a problem to anything but us? If so, who really
| cares; if we're not going to make the species more important
| through change in agency, let it die off.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I can't believe the problem has anything at all to do with
| specific individuals in science when the clear elephant in
| the room is that an entire American political party decided
| decades ago that facts and reality were biased against them
| and the only "solution" was to treat reality and facts as the
| enemy, choose anti-intellectualism as a core party
| platform/tenet, and to keep votes that they needed to keep at
| least half of America consistently playing a conspiracy-
| theory-laced alternate reality game of utter brinksmanship
| and terrifying levels of distrust and paranoia versus actual
| reality.
| p0pcult wrote:
| Geoengineering, lets gooooooooooo!
| af3d wrote:
| Not concerned. The climate has been in a constant state of
| fluctuation since the beginning of time....
| myrmidon wrote:
| I would like to understand your PoV:
|
| Are you not concerned because you think current mainstream-
| science overestimates the consequences [1]? Or do you just
| believe that climate change will have little effect on you,
| personally?
|
| [1]: Flooding, biodiversity loss, food production yield,
| increase in regions and days/year with human-lethal outside
| temperatures (see relevant graphs in "summary for policymakers"
| around pg 16)
| af3d wrote:
| Climate activists have been declaring impending doom for
| years. So much so that it has become an entire industry. NOAA
| has even altered historical data (eg.
| https://climatecenter.fsu.edu/does-noaa-adjust-historical-
| cl...) to support their ridiculous claims. And when the rise
| of temperatures didn't meet "expectations" they just moved
| the goal post. Used to Wikipedia actually had an article for
| "Global Warming". Where did it go? Ah yes, now moved to
| "Climate Change". See how that works? Bottom line, do the
| activities of humans have some effect on the environment?
| Yes, of course, but it's minuscule compared with the impact
| that natural forces have on it (volcanoes, solar activity,
| etc).
| chrismatic wrote:
| Just to be sure: You are being sarcastic, right?
| PheeThav1zae7fi wrote:
| [flagged]
| chrismatic wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them
| instead._"
|
| a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| megabless123 wrote:
| Yes the planet's climate has always been in flux, but never has
| it warmed this _quickly_ without disastrous results for it 's
| inhabitants.
| Rygian wrote:
| For anyone interested in what 1.5C represents, I can't recommend
| enough the Climate Fresk [1] exercise.
|
| It's not just the droughts and floods, the heatwaves, the changes
| in birds, insects, crop yields, ... Include permafrost melting
| and releasing greenhouse gasses, civil unrest in populated areas
| that won't be livable anymore, unstable food production, and
| quite a few other causes and consequences.
|
| It's a feedback loop of many moving parts. Thinking that "we will
| reach an equilibrium eventually" is probably a naive take. The
| next natural equilibrium probably includes a decimated world
| population.
|
| Positive action is necessary now. If you don't know what action
| to do, go to [1] and start there.
|
| [1] https://climatefresk.org/
| skrowl wrote:
| [dead]
| barbazoo wrote:
| Thanks for sharing that. I signed up for a workshop on
| Thursday!
| tito wrote:
| Thanks! I wonder if there's a digital game or model version of
| this. Feedback loops can be pretty entertaining if presented
| well.
| Retric wrote:
| Overstating impact is detrimental to the cause.
|
| > decimated
|
| 1.5C will be bad, but it won't directly kill 800+ million
| people in a short timeframe. People simply don't respond to
| harm spread across 100 years the way they react to harm
| concentrated into a few large events.
| bertil wrote:
| OK: how will their respond?
|
| Imagine you live in a valley where elderly people die of heat
| stroke every summer: 100 three years ago, 500 the summer
| after, 2,000 last summer. Your parents are 70 and 71 and
| barely made it. You immigrate, with your children, right? To
| where? The big city with worse heat management?
|
| Repeat with peasants who can't grow crops without expensive
| feedstock, or pig farmers whose water supply is dry. Where
| will _they_ go?
|
| People will want to flock to places that are currently openly
| considering tall walls and machine guns to prevent
| immigration -- and that's when thousands are coming at a
| time.
|
| You think that having several millions every year will not
| make that situation a lot more tense?
| [deleted]
| geysersam wrote:
| So is understating the impact.
|
| This take is seriously dangerous.
|
| "1.5C is not so bad, chill people"
|
| When the fact is - _we don 't know the impact_ - if we go
| beyond 1.5.
|
| What we do know (because it's already very much measurable)
| is that much of the worlds glaciers will melt, causing
| drought.
|
| What we do know is that eventually the sea levels will rise
| and drown many extremely valuable coastal areas.
| scottLobster wrote:
| I'd argue we have no idea what will happen when the
| glaciers melt, given the lack of accurate climate change
| predictions to date. We have a lot of models that have
| historically proven very incomplete with no reason to
| believe they're any more complete now.
|
| The oceans rising is more a problem, but it's not going to
| end human civilization and will happen slowly enough that
| adaptation is possible, albeit expensive. "Drowning" is
| hyperbole.
|
| Uncertainty is just that, uncertainty. It will be positive
| for some areas and negative for others. Those of us who
| benefit from the status quo (myself included) can argue it
| would be unwise to mess up a good thing, but the simple
| fact is we have no idea. There will be winners as well as
| losers. It's quite possible that the midwest becomes wet
| enough that American farmers will become even more
| productive through double-cropping, for starters. Likewise
| the Russians look forward to their northern coastline
| thawing.
|
| The sky isn't falling, it's shifting, and while we probably
| should minimize the shift as much as practical, we
| shouldn't plunge ourselves into an economic depression to
| do it.
| taylodl wrote:
| Oh my Sweet Summer Child, you really have an unplaced
| faith in humanity - especially given our track record.
| "The sky is shifting" - is a hand-wave to the life-
| changing impacts headed our way and what our collective
| response to those impacts will be. Look how nuts people
| are getting over what are mere trivialities in
| comparison. Wait until there's crop failures threatening
| our food supply, fresh water supplies being threatened,
| property damage on the scale never seen in history, the
| religious blaming the non-religious for all our woes -
| the list goes on.
|
| That's some "shifting."
| p0pcult wrote:
| >Oh my Sweet Summer Child
|
| Yeah, this person offers nothing but condescension.
| Immediate downvote.
| taylodl wrote:
| Just wait until our upcoming reality hits the conspiracy
| theorists and religious fanatics. Climate change is going
| to herald in Dark Ages 2.0. I suppose the upside to that
| is eventually there will be an Enlightenment 2.0 also,
| and hopefully we'll get there faster than it took the
| first time.
|
| BTW, Dark Ages 1.0 wasn't even the first time humanity
| has been through a dark age...
|
| ...honestly, it pays to study history to start
| understanding what's headed our way.
|
| We've been here before.
| p0pcult wrote:
| I don't disagree with the existential threat proposed by
| climate change. I just think that you're being a
| condescending jerk, which will ultimately only impede
| progress toward your goals.
|
| You're not going to convince people of your cause by
| calling them ignorant. Jesus.
| taylodl wrote:
| "The sky is shifting" is a euphemism to hide the ugly
| truth of what we face. The OP is lying to themselves. The
| phrase "Sweet Summer Child" doesn't connote ignorance, it
| connotes innocence and naivete.
| Retric wrote:
| We've arguably had 2 dark ages in western history though
| they were both localized. Meanwhile people constantly
| predict imminent disaster.
|
| If there's anything to learn from history it's that
| things might suck but they will probably be relatively
| ok. Hell the Black Death didn't doom western civilization
| and it got really bad.
|
| PS: 500-1500 actually saw a great deal of innovation and
| improvements to the average persons quality of live
| compared to the heights of Rome. For a direct competition
| both total steel production and steel production per
| person dramatically increased. Socially peasants where
| dramatically better off than Roman slaves etc.
| Daishiman wrote:
| All of that was child's play when we lose the vast,
| gigantic tail of biodiversity, which will be completely
| unrecoverable.
| coderenegade wrote:
| The black death must have seemed like the end of the
| world in a fairly literal sense. Rates of change and
| relative quantities matter when it comes to population
| growth: losing a billion people over a century probably
| isn't a big deal, but losing a billion people in 14 years
| would be the single largest loss of life in human
| history. And yet it would only be a negation of the
| growth we saw going from 7 billion to 8 billion, which
| took 13-14 years.
|
| In relative terms, lower estimates of the fatalities
| between 1347-1351 are 30% of the population of Europe. So
| on a global level we would be looking at more than 2
| billion dead in 4 years to get a sense of what that must
| have been like. 100 million dead in the US alone. That's
| staggering to think about, and it's no wonder that the
| pandemic left such an indelible mark on Europe.
| geysersam wrote:
| > Drowning is hyperbole
|
| English is not my first language.
|
| How would you describe something previously on land
| becoming submerged by the ocean?
| Retric wrote:
| Flooding.
|
| Drowning is when a living organism is submerged, flooding
| is when buildings are submerged.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Drowning is when a living organism is submerged...
|
| ...and dies from it, which is a pretty important aspect
| to the word. If the organism doesn't die, it's swimming
| or just submerged.
| Retric wrote:
| Drowning is a process. You can escape or be rescued
| before death.
| taylodl wrote:
| _we don 't know the impact_
|
| To your point, we know quite a bit, and it's pretty bad.
|
| Will 10% of the world's population perish? Most likely.
| There's already a population die-off in progress in many
| areas of the world as the birth rate continues to decline.
| People don't have to drop dead for the population to die
| off, they can simply not be born in sufficient numbers to
| replace the existing population.
|
| As for those who _are_ alive - adversity leads to war. What
| we should be thinking about is how much disruption is
| required to foster chaos - especially in a political
| environment that has become so divisive.
|
| All in all it's easy to imagine a population decline of 10%
| over 100 years. Chillingly, it's also easy to imagine a lot
| higher percentage. Over the next 100 years people are going
| to rediscover that we are, in fact, animals. Animals who
| will react violently should our existence be threatened.
| Hopefully we'll also rediscover that we're social animals
| and that the key to our survival will be working together.
|
| The old saying is it's darkest before the light. I'm afraid
| of how dark it's going to get. There's thousands of years'
| worth of junk in humanity's attic we have to sort out
| before we come through to the other side. People are
| fooling themselves if they think sorting through all this
| will be easy and that the price won't be paid in lives
| lost.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Very few things give me as much hope as reading this
| kinda of doom spam. To know the people pushing this are
| so detached from reality gives me a lot of confidence
| we'll be all right.
| taylodl wrote:
| Are we reading the same history books and watching the
| same global news events? Hope isn't the strategy that's
| going to get us through this crises.
| coderenegade wrote:
| >Will 10% of the world's population perish? Most likely.
| There's already a population die-off in progress in many
| areas of the world as the birth rate continues to
| decline. People don't have to drop dead for the
| population to die off, they can simply not be born in
| sufficient numbers to replace the existing population.
|
| There are two very different points being conflated here.
| What's the time scale for the reduction in population?
| 10% of the world's population disappearing today is very
| different from a gradual reduction over the course of
| decades. 10% of the world's population disappearing over
| 100 years is almost certainly a _good_ thing at our
| current population level, when every indication is that
| sustainability just isn 't possible with 8 billion
| people. At the very least, it'll force us to challenge
| existing economic models that are all predicated on
| endless growth.
|
| And I don't see anyone saying that things will be easy.
| In fact, I think most acknowledge that the opposite is
| very much true. But a) on an individual level, there's
| not much you can do when income, consumption, and
| emissions are all Pareto distributed -- I can no more
| instigate a bank run on my own than I could affect carbon
| emissions -- and, b) the species has survived worse
| population declines than this before, on numerous
| occasions. The black plague in Europe and the Mongols
| tearing through Central Asia both come to mind. Tomorrow
| has never been guaranteed, for anyone.
|
| As an average person who does his best to live
| sustainably, there's only so much I have the time and
| energy for. I live semi-rurally within an hour of a major
| population center and on the edge of a state park, so
| believe me, I get it. But if it gets bad enough, at some
| point it really is out of my control. There's only so
| much I can care when I have bills to pay and a life to
| live. I'd imagine most people are in a similar position.
| Retric wrote:
| Population declines on the other hand are expected
| because birth rates have been dropping for _hundreds of
| years._ This is a good thing you can't support infinite
| growth on a finite planet. Suggesting global warming is
| the cause completely ignores these long term trends.
|
| Peoples quality of life globally has been consistently
| improving and that's unlikely to change with global
| warming. China had one of the worlds largest famines in
| living memory 1958-1961, it's simply been the norm for
| most of human history.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines
| taylodl wrote:
| Peoples quality of life globally has been consistently
| improving due to the "green revolution" transpiring
| during the 1960's, a revolution that's imperiled by GCC.
| Retric wrote:
| Peoples lives have been improving long before the green
| revolution started. Also, global yields aren't
| particularly threatened by global warming due to the
| overwhelming surplus we currently have there's a huge
| buffer before problems start.
|
| To be clear yes some declines are likely in some areas
| for some crops. But 2100 is expected to have a much
| larger problem with obesity than crop failure.
| nforgerit wrote:
| Not sure where you take your optimism from but the
| network effects global warming is causing are not to
| underestimate. There's been plenty of research that we're
| talking about several threats to modern civilization at
| once where each of them alone could already be
| disastrous. And chances are high that there will emerge
| additional effects along the road we don't even know
| about.
|
| The argument of "look back, it always got better in
| average" is ignoring the fact we're dealing with a global
| chaotic situation in a world that fragile, it is already
| shaking because of interrupted supply chains due to a
| pandemic or a secondary bank for techbros going down.
|
| We have no clue what we'll be dealing with in 30 years
| but what we know, it's definitely not gonna be good.
| Retric wrote:
| People have said that frequently for all kinds of things,
| but in practice civilization is just really shockingly
| resilient.
|
| Look at say Ukraine it was literally invaded with a war
| going on last year plus mass migration etc, but it also
| exported crops last year and are likely to do the same in
| 2023. Yes they are down significantly from 2021, but it's
| not even close to zero.
|
| It's easy to get into this mindset that everything must
| work perfectly or the world falls apart but people adapt
| fairly quickly and in the end global warming is slow.
| It's a death of a thousand cuts, but each of them gives a
| great deal of time to react. Cities aren't going to flood
| on day X of year Y, it's going to take decades of
| slightly worse storm surges etc. Crops wouldn't suddenly
| fail because this year is 0.02C warmer than last the
| yield will mostly just slowly decline until alternative
| crops and methods are used etc etc.
|
| Yes, local crop yields vary significantly year to year
| based on weather but that's been the case since
| agriculture was a thing. The difference is we have much
| better transportation infrastructure and more ability to
| make substitutions.
| mrpopo wrote:
| Of course, 1.5C will not kill 800+ million people.
|
| https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/
|
| 1.5C is the (likely to be overshooted) goal. The IPCC report
| assesses that 2011-2020 is already 1.1C warmer than 1850-1900
| (page 7), that the world has been warming by ~0.2C/decade
| (saw it somewhere), and that current policies (if
| implemented) will lead to a warming of +3.2C by 2100 (page
| 23). Page 16 shows various ways in which a +3.2C world will
| be hostile to humans. For instance most of south and south-
| east asia, and some of the most populated areas in Western
| Africa will experience temperatures and humidity levels that
| are dangerous for human survival >200 days a year. This is
| now all determined with rather high confidence.
| politician wrote:
| Famine will. Rice fails to germinate at 35degC.
|
| https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-06118-0
| _...
| Retric wrote:
| False, 35C is described as the highest optimal
| temperature not the maximum in your link. Yields do
| slowly decline with increased temperature. For specifics,
| "Germination occurs within the temperature range of 50deg
| to 107degF with an optimum temperature of about 87degF."
|
| https://www.uaex.uada.edu/publications/pdf/mp192/chapter-
| 2.p...
|
| Further, it's exactly the kind of reason to chose a new
| variety over an old one.
| Daishiman wrote:
| Ahh fantastic. Now let's talk about the rest of the flora
| and fauna that is absolutely essential for crop growth
| beyond the few staples that get researched.
| witheld wrote:
| I would love to make a bet with you, and I'd be willing to,
| but I really don't think I'll get to collect.
| Retric wrote:
| Would you actually be willing to bet that world population
| drops by 800+ million people within 10 years of 1.5C?
| javajosh wrote:
| 800M is 10% of the current population - the OP's point is
| that if he's right, there's a non-trivial chance that he,
| and you, may be dead, making the prediction moot.
|
| In terms of EV, it never pays to bet on the apocalypse
| since you can't collect. Markets can't price in their own
| demise. (it would actually be quite interesting if they
| could).
|
| (Also, given how often people make predictions online,
| how often do you see people saying "mea culpa, I was
| totally wrong about that one!" It's close to zero.
| Guessing wrong, even in earnest, about important things,
| doesn't matter anymore, and doesn't pose even a minor
| threat to one's reputation. This lack of social/cultural
| corrective has made our zeitgeist is so remarkably
| polluted with utterly ignorant, bad faith BS like bets
| about the apocalypse that it doesn't even register any
| more. How fascinatingly horrible!)
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| Depends, can we filter out any deaths caused by the
| current major landwar between the breadbasket of europe &
| the "Order #227" gas station?
| Retric wrote:
| No need to filter anything. If world population drops by
| that much I'll concede the bet, if it doesn't then they
| lose.
| vkou wrote:
| And underestimating what's actually going to happen, and how
| difficult it's going to be to reverse, or even put brakes on
| it is intellectually criminal, but the pro-AGW group hasn't
| ever cared about that. Why would they, the track record of
| 'Let industry self-regulate' has worked out great for _them_
| in the past.
|
| We're going to blow right past 1.5C, 2C, 2.5C...
| Retric wrote:
| Longer term projections on 2.5C look more hopeful.
|
| Globally electricity production has gotten significantly
| more green, though offset by increased demand. But, new
| coal power plants for example were down 66% globally in
| 2020 vs 2016 and existing infrastructure only lasts so
| long. Project things forward to 2040 and emissions should
| be noticeably below current levels even with increasing
| demand simple because of economic forces.
|
| In 2022 10% of all new cars globally were EV's and that
| number keeps rising. Combined with an even cleaner grid and
| things could look quite different in 2040 again even with
| increasing demand for cars.
|
| Now I don't want to project those trends over the following
| 60 years, but lower emissions give even more time to lower
| them further. 2.5C could easily hit in 2200 rather than
| 2100, or even be avoided entirely.
|
| Thus we might be able to shift 1.5C by a few years, 2C by
| decades, and 2.5C by literal centuries.
| vkou wrote:
| Coal is only going out of style because we are building
| out new natgas plants. The greatest trick that has been
| pulled on us this century is somehow billing gas as a
| 'green' source of energy.
|
| Electric cars are an expensive distraction from the
| problem. The sustainable future of transportation is the
| electric train, the electric trolley, the electric
| scooter, and the electric bicycle. Personal automobiles,
| electric or otherwise, were, are, and will continue to be
| an environmental catastrophe.
|
| And while we can electrify some fraction of personal
| automobiles by 20whenever, we aren't lifting two fingers
| on the task of rebuilding our societies to be less car-
| manic. A few underused bike lanes, a few rental scooters
| scattered around town, and a light rail extension 10
| years from now aren't it.
| Retric wrote:
| Also > Coal is only going out of style because we are
| building out new natgas plants.
|
| False. Total electricity produced from fossil fuels (coal
| + natural gas + Oil) is down even ignoring efficiency
| gains which reduced the amounts needed per kWh.
|
| US per person total Fossil Fuel based electricity
| production production: 2020: 7,322 kWh, 2019: 7,861 kWh,
| 2015: 8,499 kWh, 2010: 9,321 kWh, 2005: 9,838 kWh. It's
| offset somewhat by increased population but the overall
| trend is still really clear.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_U
| nit...
| californical wrote:
| Could not agree more.
|
| Spending enormous amounts of energy to move around 4,000+
| lbs of metal, just to go to the restaurant down the
| street, is insane.
| timr wrote:
| > The greatest trick that has been pulled on us this
| century is somehow billing gas as a 'green' source of
| energy.
|
| Gas has significantly lower emissions than coal. Progress
| is progress.
|
| Absolutism gets us nowhere, unless your goal is to drive
| humanity back to the stone age by "switching" to energy
| production systems that do not currently exist (with the
| exception of nuclear, which is the only currently
| practical solution for "green" base load that we
| stubbornly refuse to consider).
|
| All of those electric transportation doo-dads add
| significant load to a system that can barely keep up as
| it is (in the US, anyway).
|
| Just to emphasize the point, in NYC environmental
| extremists shut down Indian Point, thus converting about
| a quarter of NYC's power demands from clean energy
| (nuclear) to fossil fuel. Meanwhile, each of the past few
| summers the city has come close to rolling blackouts.
| Good job, folks.
| vkou wrote:
| > Absolutism gets us nowhere,
|
| And building out natgas will get us into a situation
| where we are locked into decades of guaranteed emissions,
| as all the vested interests in the production and
| consumption space fight tooth and nail to protect their
| line of business, and the capex they've dumped into it.
|
| There's no plausible net-carbon zero path this century
| that's compatible with our current buildout of natgas.
| Perfect is the enemy of the good, but this isn't even
| good!
| Retric wrote:
| Natural gas is a great pathway to net zero because the
| fuel is so vastly more explosive than the equipment.
| People own gas turbines that are literally used for less
| than a week a year and are simply paid for standby
| capacity.
|
| Quite literally you're better off building solar where
| 1/2 it's output is wasted over a year than burning
| natural gas. When you're building that much solar things
| are very close to net zero.
|
| Eventually batteries will replace natural gas, but until
| that happens we need technologies that can fill the gaps
| in demand and nuclear can't do it economically.
| timr wrote:
| > nuclear can't do it economically.
|
| It can, we're just stupid (in the US).
| Retric wrote:
| No country on earth can operate nuclear at 20% capacity
| factor economically. It needs massive subsidies to
| operate at even 70% capacity factor quite literally
| everywhere.
| Retric wrote:
| Every hour in operation 2GW of natural gas emit the same
| CO2 as 1GW of coal. In terms of how quickly we hit 2.5C
| of global warming that makes a big difference on its own.
|
| However, large steam turbines simply take a lot of energy
| to warm up to operating temperature. This means simply
| turning coal power plants on and off releases lots of
| CO2.
|
| This makes a huge difference as we add wind and solar
| because you can turn natural gas off and on multiple
| times a day with minimal cost. Which enables you to
| dramatically scale just how much wind and solar is
| connected to the grid.
|
| Nobody wants to turn off a wind farm in favor of a coal
| power plant but it happens. Eventually we want to swap to
| energy storage, but for now getting off of coal is a huge
| deal in both directly and because it allows the grid to
| be more flexible.
|
| > Electric cars are an expensive distraction from the
| problem.
|
| As long as people live outside of cities they need
| personal transportation. Electrifying roads is a viable
| option, but it's much easier when cars carry a big
| battery so you get similar results with 1% of the
| infrastructure.
|
| *Actual efficiency varies somewhat, but it's still big
| gap.
| [deleted]
| timr wrote:
| > However, large steam turbines simply take a lot of
| energy to warm up to operating temperature.
|
| Boilers, not turbines. The boilers at a coal plant are
| gigantic -- 5+ story hunks of metal the size of city
| buildings. They don't turn on/off on demand. The whole
| system is complex, of course, but the boilers are giant
| boxes of fireball that flash-vaporize water using
| pulverized coal at ~500C and 200+ bar of pressure [1].
|
| My father was a control systems engineer for coal plants
| (and later, gas) for a major utility. When I was a child,
| he'd be away for weeks at a time when plants were spun up
| or down for maintenance.
|
| One of the more memorable events in my life was when I
| was allowed to take a tour of a big coal plant when it
| was down for maintenance. Those boilers were terrifying,
| even when "off". The gates of hell.
|
| [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/pulv
| erized-...
| Retric wrote:
| I was referring to a nuance that's easy to overlook. As
| you say the coal power plant needs to heat up a boiler to
| operating temperatures before it's turbine can generate
| power. Yet, that's still not enough for maximum
| efficiency.
|
| Cold pipes and turbine blades steal energy from the
| steam. Similarly the boiler is less efficient when fed
| cold water vs hot water from the condenser. Thus the
| startup process is more involved than just how long it
| takes to start generating power.
|
| The most efficient coal power plants are actually double-
| reheat which takes even long to get up to optimal
| conditions. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article
| /abs/pii/S03605...
| timr wrote:
| Yes, definitely. Not disagreeing with you, just adding
| color and an anecdote.
|
| The broader point that we can't just turn these things on
| and off is 100% correct, and one of the (many) things
| that people don't understand when talking about the power
| system and emissions.
|
| I don't know the details of wind and solar, but _any_
| system that deals with hundreds-to-thousands of megawatts
| can 't just be spun up on a dime. Make a mistake, and
| things blow up.
| toast0 wrote:
| > The greatest trick that has been pulled on us this
| century is somehow billing gas as a 'green' source of
| energy.
|
| It kind of is, in that before it was being used all over
| the place, natural gas would just be vented or flared
| when it was extracted as bycatch for oil. Burning it
| instead of venting it is climate positive, and burning it
| in a power plant instead of onsite is energy with no
| impact to the climate.
|
| Of course, when you extract it specifically, that's no
| longer the case.
|
| Natural gas also makes for decent peaker plants which can
| complement solar and wind until/unless storage fills that
| need better.
| ratboy666 wrote:
| It has been the "mean, bad Capitalist" vs the "nice, social
| minded Socialist". I tend to go with the Capitalist. Why?
| Because it has never been good to kill the consumer of the
| product. In general, this particular principle does NOT
| hold with Socialists. They (and again, not all) generally
| do not care.
| specialist wrote:
| > _won't directly kill 800+ million people in a short
| timeframe_
|
| I'd rather we not find out.
|
| Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
| burkaman wrote:
| Was the parent comment edited? I don't understand who you're
| responding to, nobody here or in the article or report made
| that claim.
| timr wrote:
| I don't know, but this:
|
| > The next natural equilibrium probably includes a
| decimated world population.
|
| Is obvious speculation and likely hyperbole.
| burkaman wrote:
| It doesn't seem hyperbolic to me, and I don't understand
| the addition of "short timeframe". "next natural
| equilibrium" implies something like 100 years to me, at
| least. I am very concerned about climate change even
| though I understand it's not going to directly kill me in
| 10 years.
| ratboy666 wrote:
| Not hyperbolic. What is NOT factored in by the IPCC is
| the effect of NOT using "fossil fuels". Agriculture is
| affected. NOT using fossil fuels simply means no
| fertilizer. Famine killing 1 billion would be expected.
| So -- bad if you do, bad if you don't. My "bet" is
| simple. I simply purchased natural gas stocks. The bet is
| that the need for fertilizer will beat the "stop fossil
| fuels". Because, if it doesn't, the money is worthless.
| If it does, I will be "sitting pretty". If a billion
| people die "one way or the other", I am going with my
| comfort, and my childrens comfort.
| burkaman wrote:
| Please read some of these reports before you say stuff
| like this. Of course they factor this in, of course it
| isn't true that you need fossil fuels to make fertilizer,
| of course the IPCC does not advocate eliminating
| fertilizer use.
|
| Producing ammonia is one of the primary uses for hydrogen
| discussed in the reports. There are many companies doing
| this as we speak (Yara, CF Industries, BP). If it turns
| out to be too difficult to scale up or become cost
| effective, then fertilizer production will be one of the
| last sectors to use fossil fuels. That's ok, because
| there are so many other sectors that we can decarbonize
| right now.
| ratboy666 wrote:
| I agree with you. But I caution -- shipping lng is not
| something that Canada does or will do. Canada's stated
| goal is to TRY to ship hydrogen. Dangerous as that is.
| Yes, fertilizer production becomes "one of the last
| sectors to use fossil fuels". I see no other path. Of
| course, THAT has to be transported. As does the food
| produced... That entire chain relies on fossil fuels. A
| simple bet -- I invest in NatGas and pipelines. The IPCC
| may not advocate fertilizer reduction... Canada does. No
| LNG to Europe (for now). Canadian farmers are told to cut
| fertilizer use by 50%... or else. Market and production
| controls will be put into place.
|
| And, it is NOT CLEAR that the current perturbations are
| CO2 related: Snow in Miami on Jan 19, 1977 would be an
| interesting case (in my lifetime, anyway).
|
| As to the IPCC reports AND the local media reaction --
| the Toronto Star reports that Canada will have to CUT CO2
| emissions in half.
|
| Here are the numbers:
|
| 2T per year for each human:
|
| 840lbs to 6710lbs (resting to active) exhalation. Which
| means, not below 0.5T/year/human.
|
| We are at 20T/year/human here in Canada -- but, of
| course, at 8953 trees/human, with each tree absorbing
| 48lbs of CO2/year, Canada absorbs 215T/year/human (carbon
| negative in Canada by 195T/year/human).
|
| Cutting in half? 10T/year pure human, or 205T/year. But,
| we are on track to "100 by 100" that is, the Federal Govt
| here wants 100M people in Canada by 2100. With an
| additional 30M people (putting the immigration growth in
| line with the climate objectives), the budget for each
| human is... well under 5T/year. Not just 1/2, 1/4 (by the
| specified date) How is THAT to be accomplished? What is
| interesting (if you have been following the numbers here)
| is that EVEN at the target date, NO MATTER WHAT the
| Government does, Canada is still "Carbon Negative". Go
| figure. It isn't even a problem here.
|
| Solar, I guess... Won't be wind here... Oh, we are too
| far North for Solar to be that effective. Burn trees ,
| just like our ancestors. That goes over really well... My
| bet is NatGas. Maybe Nuclear.
| burkaman wrote:
| I'm not going to argue with your investing strategy, if
| you want to make money investing in gas companies is
| probably a good idea in the short term. Personally I have
| priorities other than making money but I'm not going to
| try to change your life philosophy in an internet
| comment.
|
| I will say that "it isn't a problem here" is nonsensical.
| Canada isn't on its own planet. It is a problem on Earth,
| and you are on Earth.
| coderenegade wrote:
| You don't need to use hydrogen directly. Methanol is made
| catalytically from hydrogen, can be reformed back into
| hydrogen fairly easily, and makes a good fuel on its own.
| The main link in the chain the needs to be replaced is
| switching hydrogen production from a natural gas
| feedstock over to a water feedstock.
|
| But yes, the Canadian government's immigration policies
| sound like madness and directly contradict a stated goal
| of sustainability.
| timr wrote:
| Let's be really clear: it's not going to "directly" kill
| many people at all in the next ten years.
|
| People will die from things like storms and floods and
| heat waves and droughts. Maybe _more_ people will die
| from causes that someone, somewhere attributes to
| climate, but these are all indirect.
|
| The real, immediate threat of climate is that we'll have
| to spend huge amounts of money mitigating these things.
| mbgerring wrote:
| The "real, immediate threat of climate" is trillions of
| dollars changing hands? A massive TAM, with tons of
| otherwise intelligent people distracted by chatbots and
| crypto?
|
| Sorry... this is supposed to be a threat? What are you
| threatening me with, a good time?
| bartislartfast wrote:
| I'm wondering what those workshops will teach people to do.
| Most of the advice I hear comes down to three things "Vote
| green at the polls"(1), "Vote with your wallet"(2) and
| "encourage others to do the same"(3)
|
| (1) I live in a democracy with ranked choice voting, and I
| always vote green #1, but the greens are in minority and the
| main parties are more interested in playing to the masses.
| sometimes they're in coalition but they don't achieve much.
|
| (2) I'm a relatively well paid person in a relatively wealthy
| country. I own my own home, and I have rooftop solar installed.
| But I can't afford an EV that will fit my family, or a heat-
| pump, so I still have to burn oil or wood to heat the house in
| winter and burn diesel to bring the kids to school. I die
| inside a little every time I have to go to a filling station.
| We live in a rural area with no public transport, so that's not
| an option either.
|
| (3) I talk people into getting solar panels and switching to
| EVs, lowering electricity usage, buying second hand, reusing,
| recycling, every green action thing I can do. I urge people to
| vote green. Sometimes I feel like I have a little effect here,
| but I could be fooling myself.
|
| It's disheartening that an environmentally conscious person
| like myself, with a good steady income and no big debt, still
| has to burn fossil fuels on a daily basis to keep warm and move
| around. I feel like I'm part of the problem, not part of the
| solution.
| toxik wrote:
| What I always find so hard to believe is that, knowing how well
| we can predict weather and other complicated systems, climate
| change science somehow is able to make 1/10 centigrade
| precision predictions on time horizons of decades and
| centuries.
| NationalPark wrote:
| Can we predict weather that well? The 10 day forecasts my
| phone gives are mostly ok, not great, and often change at the
| last minute.
| p0pcult wrote:
| Aggregates (global temp average over a year) are generally
| more predictable than the underlying datapoints (daily local
| weather).
|
| Source: am data scientist.
| avaldez_ wrote:
| for starters, weather and climate and different concepts.
| it's easier to predict the long term probability distribution
| of a coin toss than a single event result.
| js8 wrote:
| Do you also find it hard to believe that casino can say your
| chance of winning roulette is 1/37 (and you're gonna lose
| money), despite the fact every roll is random? Both are just
| law of large numbers.
| prottog wrote:
| Strange to compare the random results of a spinning wheel
| three feet wide in an air-conditioned room to a planetwide
| system, isn't it?
| johnnymorgan wrote:
| Not really, they both rely on chance to win
| orbifold wrote:
| Well in both cases you can ignore a lot of unknown
| physical details and still reach a valid conclusion. In
| the case of the climate this is done in terms of energy
| balance for example. The details are super complicated
| but you also have historical data that you can use to
| calibrate and validate your models on.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Why would you be confused about this? Temperature of a
| function of energy. We're talking about a global average
| temperature. Energy is being captured and retained. That
| raises the global average temperature. The specifics don't
| matter. Predicting the weather on the other hand is very
| complicated because you're asking what specifically will
| happen in a specific place. The variables going into that are
| many and even if measured extremely accurately, it's not good
| enough because weather is chaotic.
| thwayunion wrote:
| If climate models were predicting the temperature of your
| city on March 21, 2120 then your intuition here would be
| wise. But that is not at all what these models are
| predicting. They are predicting global average annual
| temperatures and other gross, planet-scale statistics.
|
| "Average annual global temperature in a given year" and
| "temperature in my city tomorrow" are fundamentally very
| different types of predictions.
|
| Often it is easier to accurately forecast gross dynamics on a
| long time frame than it is to forecast precise dynamics the
| exact same process over a short time frame.
|
| You don't even need to understand the math or physics to see
| why this is intuitively true.
|
| Consider e.g. predicting minutiae about the behavior of a
| fetus over the next week ("how many fist clenches", "how many
| kicks") vs. predicting which week the baby will be born --
| the latter is substantially easier than the former despite
| the longer time frame.
|
| Or, more to the point, consider forecasting the position of a
| particular cloud of molecules in a pot of water being bought
| to boil vs forecasting the temperature of the water in the
| pot in 5 minutes. The latter is hilariously trivial -- a
| small child can be taught how to do this with excellent
| accuracy. The former is some horrendously difficult phd level
| fluid mechanics and even then hard/impossible.
|
| In some sense, an educated intuition is exactly the opposite
| of yours -- it'd be surprising if we were _this good_ at
| extremely fine-grained weather prediction but couldn 't guess
| the annualized average temperature of the entire system in 50
| years. The latter is a much simpler statistic because the
| timescales and physical scales take a lot of the difficult
| stochasticity out of the forecasting problem.
| johnnymorgan wrote:
| The point he is making is the disconnect between models and
| reality.
|
| Also when are people held accountable for their models
| being wrong and the output that comes from that.
|
| Climate models has a terrible track record and have failed
| to materialize over and over again.
|
| We have environmental crises all over the place which we
| should be focused on. The two are not the same thing and
| climate activism seems to not care about that at all, ie
| the issue of EVs and their super non green batteries or the
| near slave labor in terrible conditions resource
| extraction.
|
| There is a good reason to be skeptical of the regulations
| derived from these models when they are wrong all the time.
| Symmetry wrote:
| On a year by year level they've been pretty bad but on a
| decade by decade basis they've been pretty much spot on.
| Why wasn't there any increase in the average temperature
| between 2004 and 2014? Nobody know, but in 2015 global
| temperature spiked all the way up to where predicted and
| stayed there. There's been this weird stepwise pattern to
| the warming but the general trend is in line with
| predictions.
|
| The general relationship between increased CO2 and
| warming has been known since the 19th century, though
| they were off by a factor of two on the slope back then.
| Modern climate models have a lot of moving and it's not
| clear they're actually better than the "Assume a
| spherical^H^H^H^H homogeneous atmosphere" models but the
| basic physics and general trend line are hard to ignore.
| t12049 wrote:
| [dead]
| mrmanner wrote:
| But the models aren't wrong. They're surprisingly
| accurate. Some media reporting has been alarmist,
| choosing absolute worst cases and stating them as fact.
|
| But in general, the changes we've seen so far are in line
| with predictions and there's no reason to be more
| skeptical than normal of this science.
|
| (As a side note, the resource extraction required to run
| a petrol engine is also not very green and often
| connected to human rights abuses. Not to downplay the
| issues in lithium sourcing, there are horrible conditions
| that need to be fixed, but the solution is not "oil".)
| ratboy666 wrote:
| No they are not "surprisingly accurate". I have actually
| made more money in direct bets AGAINST climate models.
| From 1970 to present. Indeed, the challenge I make to
| climate doomsayers is simple: make one prediction in the
| 5 year out timeframe and stick to it. I'll simply take
| the opposite. So far, I have won... every time. Let me
| have a look at my trading accounts: cenovus up, pembina
| up, taiwan semi up, everything else down. And that is the
| current recession. Now, I am worried about china, so I
| may trade the tsm. The only "surprise" for me is that
| alcoa is down. I'll ride that one.
|
| The "no oil" people may be right; that would make me a
| horrible person. But, make the prediction -- I'll
| "convert" if it comes true. Science for the win.
| ewjt wrote:
| Please back up the claim "climate models has a terrible
| track record" and qualify the word 'terrible'.
|
| Casting blame is a common denier tactic [1] used despite
| the models being useful and accurate [2].
|
| The "whataboutisms" you mention are another common
| tactic. [3] Blaming EV batteries is a red herring; they
| have much lower lifecycle emissions than gas-based
| engines. [4]
|
| [1] https://skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm [2]
| https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-
| climate-mo... [3]
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-
| sustainabilit... [4]
| https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/07/electric-cars-have-
| much...
| johnnymorgan wrote:
| [flagged]
| 6nf wrote:
| 'We got it right NOW we promise!'
| 6nf wrote:
| Predictions so far have been terrible compared to what
| actually happened.
| mikestew wrote:
| Yes, turns out the predictions were too conservative.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Compare with how hard it is to exactly predict if a patient
| is gonna survive the next day-- while assuming that *anyone*
| (for now) is gonna be dead in 120 years is a pretty safe bet.
|
| And predictions about life expectancy become easier in
| aggregate, too.
| bertil wrote:
| Can you predict the height of the next person that will turn
| a corner? You likely won't any less than three inches off.
|
| Can you predict the average height of all the residents of
| your city? A demographer can given an answer that is a lot
| more accurate.
| alfor wrote:
| [flagged]
| tito wrote:
| Haha love it. Reminds me of something out of Game of Thrones.
|
| For anyone reading this poem who has a strong negative
| reaction:
|
| Consider it a sign that perhaps there's something more you
| could be doing in your own life. Take a job in climate
| (https://workonclimate.org/ https://climatebase.org/). Start
| a startup working on climate solutions.
|
| "Climate deniers" aren't really a problem.
|
| Complacency is bullshit though.
|
| Consider that future generations may look back and judge your
| excuse of "but alfor on HN wrote a poem that made fun of a
| climate person" quite harshly.
|
| It's go time :)
| alfor wrote:
| Thanks ;)
|
| I have no problem with climate action, but the religious
| tendency is too obvious at this point. Clearly Gretha is
| our virgin Mary, she is not there because of her knowledge,
| but because she represent innocence, purity.
|
| I think we should balance our actions against other causes
| that are also vitaly important and be careful with giving
| too much power to government at this moment.
|
| Ironically the activists movement (greenpeace) blocked much
| of the development of nuclear energy, one of the best
| solution we had many many years ago.
|
| Now solar, batteries, wind and EV are completely
| decarbonizing the energy sector and activist are trying to
| block mines projects that could help make batteries.
|
| I think the solutions is mostly not austerity, taxes and
| more government, it's more technology, more developpement.
|
| (I would make exceptions for forever chemicals, air
| quality, ocean and diversity protection)
| tablespoon wrote:
| > ... the changes in ... crop yields...
|
| How would they even predict/model that? Have they modeled all
| the different plausible crops and agricultural techniques,
| which regional environmental conditions they're most suited
| for, and the transitions between them based on regional climate
| change effects?
|
| It's one thing to model a natural system, but seems quite a bit
| more complicated to model a system where human technology and
| decision-making is extremely significant.
| mrpopo wrote:
| Page 16
|
| https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/
|
| > Have they modeled all the different plausible crops and
| agricultural techniques, which regional environmental
| conditions they're most suited for, and the transitions
| between them based on regional climate change effects?
|
| Seems so.
|
| > It's one thing to model a natural system, but seems quite a
| bit more complicated to model a system where human technology
| and decision-making is extremely significant.
|
| "Extremely" is a big word. Agricultural yields depend on the
| weather. A population of 9-10 billion will not be sustained
| by vertical farms maintained in a synthetic climate.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Page 16
|
| > https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/
|
| >> Have they modeled all the different plausible crops and
| agricultural techniques, which regional environmental
| conditions they're most suited for, and the transitions
| between them based on regional climate change effects?
|
| > Seems so.
|
| I'm not seeing it. I'm assuming you mean page 16 of the
| "Summary for Policymakers," but all that has is a
| unreadable map of "Maize Yield" projections with the
| disclaimer:
|
| > Projected regional impacts reflect biophysical responses
| to changing temperature, precipitation, solar radiation,
| humidity, wind, and CO2 enhancement of growth and water
| retention in currently cultivated areas. Models assume that
| irrigated areas are not water-limited. Models do not
| represent pests, diseases, future agro-technological
| changes and some extreme climate responses.
|
| So it sounds like they are not accounting for things like
| changes between crops or changing which areas are
| cultivated, which could be pretty significant. For
| instance: their tiny map shows the cultivated area in
| Canada remaining unchanged, but if you're looking at total
| world agricultural yield of a future warmer planet, it
| seems like you would have account for more Canadian land
| becoming arable and agriculture spreading further north.
|
| > "Extremely" is a big word. Agricultural yields depend on
| the weather. A population of 9-10 billion will not be
| sustained by vertical farms maintained in a synthetic
| climate.
|
| Which is not the way I (or anyone reasonable) would think
| people would adapt. Instead of the software-engineer
| techno-fetishist fantasy of "vertical farms", I would think
| the adaptations would consist of things like:
|
| 1. Creating new farms in areas where the climate is
| currently too cold for productive agriculture,
|
| 2. Switching to different crops or different varieties that
| are hardier against heat and drought or otherwise yield
| more calories (per whatever limiting factor),
|
| 3. Switching to different irrigation techniques that may be
| more water-efficient,
|
| 4. etc.
| mrpopo wrote:
| > So it sounds like they are not accounting for things
| like changes between crops or changing which areas are
| cultivated, which could be pretty significant. > it seems
| like you would have account for more Canadian land
| becoming arable and agriculture spreading further north.
|
| It's a map. It's litterally showing the changes by areas.
| And the map does show areas with increased maize yield,
| such as Southern Africa, but these don't include Canada
| or Russia. Potentially the full volume will include other
| crops yields and more details that you are hoping for.
|
| Of course, the world will adapt and change their crops,
| but it will come at a cost for people who are unable to
| adapt, such as farmers in underdeveloped countries.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It's a map.
|
| One that appears to not answer the question I posed, or
| answer it in the negative (as in, they're not modeling
| realistic agricultural adaptations).
|
| > It's litterally [sic] showing the changes by areas.
|
| Apparently only _" in currently cultivated areas."_ It's
| hard to get worked up over the predictions of a model
| that basically assumes everyone continues to do the exact
| same stuff while everything else changes, even if that
| would mean individuals fail to meet their _short-term_
| goals.
|
| It wouldn't have been hard to depict the area under
| cultivation creeping further north (or the area under
| cultivation receding in other areas).
|
| > Potentially the full volume will include other crops
| yields and more details that you are hoping for.
|
| Those are _not_ the details I 'm looking for. It would be
| closer to what I'm looking for if they took that data,
| divided the world into plots, then for each scenario
| picked the highest yielding crop for that plot, to come
| up with an overall agricultural productivity estimate. I
| say that's only closer, because it presumably wouldn't
| reflect other reasonable and straightforward agricultural
| adaptations.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The problem is that about a quarter of the world population -
| 2 billion people - currently make their living through
| traditional small-scale farming. If it turns out that climate
| change rapidly expands the viable area for growing quinoa,
| that's great for Peru and Bolivia and the world food market,
| but it's not going to help a subsistence farmer in Vietnam
| who finds their rice fields no longer grow enough to live
| from.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > but it's not going to help a subsistence farmer in
| Vietnam who finds their rice fields no longer grow enough
| to live from.
|
| But what if those farmers switch from rice to some other
| subsistence crop better adapted to the new conditions?
| fwlr wrote:
| I do wish someone would just _acknowledge_ we've been getting
| "final warnings" as well as predictions of catastrophe every few
| years for decades now. Just _recognize_ that I have to force
| myself quite hard to take this seriously. I do trust the science!
| But I trusted the science in 2017 and in 2012 and in 2009 and in
| 2004 and in 2000 and so on. I am making myself trust the science
| this time, _again_ , and selfishly I would just like that extra
| effort validated.
| davesque wrote:
| I'm with you on this. And I am absolutely the furthest possible
| thing from a climate skeptic. If anything, it's just a
| recognition that this kind of communication from official
| sources is clearly ineffective. The climate crisis is never
| _ever_ going to be solved by spontaneous collective action or
| by appeals to collective action. People will continue to do
| whatever it is they have to do to get their daily or yearly
| basic needs met.
|
| What we need are people in positions of power that care.
| lisasays wrote:
| _What we need are people in positions of power that care._
|
| Okay then - so how do we get those people to materialize?
|
| Absent "appeals to collective action" which you've already
| determined is never going to work.
| myrmidon wrote:
| In a democracy, this means that people in aggregate need to
| care more about climate change consequences in the future
| than wealth/disposable income right now.
|
| That is simply a hard sell, always has been, and most of us
| are to blame for the consequences...
| Ekaros wrote:
| Specially hard to sell when those in power don't seem to
| treat is as existential crisis that will kill them. I do
| not see them following their own messaging to utmost care.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| We have been getting warnings like this for years and for years
| things have been getting visibly worse.
|
| I don't know how you "have to force myself quite hard to take
| this seriously" when the environment around us has been
| degrading _faster_ than scientist have been claiming for years.
|
| Maybe you're confused by how events related to climate
| catastrophe unfold? It's not like a nuclear bomb where one day
| everything is fine, then the next every thing is gone. That
| case is different in two major ways: the break down is
| instantaneous and a new normal is almost immediately
| established.
|
| The final warning for climate is about a process that once
| started can no longer be stopped.
|
| You don't have to "trust the science", you can literally watch
| it happen as the arctic heads rapidly towards a blue ocean
| event (see "arctic death spiral"), crop failures have been
| increasing, California has suffered extreme years of drought
| followed by this current season of incredible floods, lake mead
| reaches a lower level than it has since it was filled, Texas is
| subjected to extreme weather (in both directions) causing year
| after year failure of the power grid.
|
| These things will continue to happen, will happen more
| frequently and at greater magnitude for the rest of your life.
|
| If you feel unconvinced it's because you're in a state of
| denial (which in part of grieving so not terribly surprising or
| uncommon).
| yamtaddle wrote:
| We'll keep getting "final warnings" as we pass "realistic hope
| of keeping warming under X" and "a sliver of hope for keeping
| warming under X if a literal miracle occurs" thresholds for
| different warming levels. The next major report like this will
| probably have a best-case scenario of more like 2.0C. We're at
| "a sliver of hope if a literal miracle occurs" for 1.5C
| (realistic hope of keeping it that low was probably gone a
| decade ago, and you may have seen that shift reflected in
| earlier reports) and have passed similar thresholds for 1.0C
| already.
| SamPatt wrote:
| The issue is that we crossed those previous thresholds and
| ... the world kept improving?
|
| If you look at sites like Our World in Data then nearly all
| metrics of human progress have dramatically improved over the
| past century, while temperatures increased 1degC.
|
| So it isn't clear that another degree increase will lead to
| catastrophe. The numbers are round and arbitrary. Our
| increased wealth and technology has improved lives far, far
| more than the increased temperature has diminished them, and
| I don't see why that trend won't continue.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| > Everyone keeps saying the water is getting hotter! I trust
| the thermometer I really do! It just doesn't _feel_ like it 's
| getting hotter to me!
|
| - the slow-boiling frog
| myrmidon wrote:
| I'm not sure what your expectations are?
|
| IMO the situation is that mainstream science said categorically
| since before 1990 that CO2 emissions lead to unpleasant
| outcomes, and gives periodic updates on how the world in
| aggregate is mostly doing worse then planned in emissions and
| adds some detail to the predicted resulting consequences.
|
| What would you expect from science and science reporting
| instead?
| makerofspoons wrote:
| The comparisons between the AR5 and AR6 are alarming. Now, under
| no emission scenarios other than low and very low which we are
| not tracking close to, we reach +2C at or just before 2050. Many
| reading this thread will see 3 degrees by the time they plan to
| retire. This comes with drought, undernourishment, and mass
| migration: https://sciencenorway.no/climate-climate-
| change/deadly-heat-...
| guerrilla wrote:
| Do people in capitals not understand or believe this? What do
| rich people (some of whom control large parts of the media)
| plan to do exactly? Die? Bunker? I mean seriously.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| What I don't understand is how not even environmentalists
| seem to believe it given their opposition to nuclear power.
| If a climate apocalypse were upon us, shouldnt we have been
| building nuclear power as fast as possible for the past
| decades? I really don't understand
| thedrbrian wrote:
| They seem to be buying beachfront property
| creato wrote:
| What are the options, really? Option A is business as usual.
| Option B is a massive cut in energy consumption.
|
| Option A implies at some point in the future, massive social
| unrest due to mass migration.
|
| Option B implies massive social unrest today due to a large
| decline in standard of living. And no, it won't be the
| "people in capitals" suffering here.
|
| Option C is option A plus some geoengineering that will
| likely be undertaken when the situation is desperate enough.
| Ekaros wrote:
| They will be well enough. Maybe their mansions and yacht will
| be slightly smaller and they will need to find some new
| destination for tourism. But they will have their air
| conditioned and heated, homes, cars, shopping centres and so
| on.
| Nevermark wrote:
| The problem is to gain political power you have to out
| compete others for money and votes.
|
| Understanding a problem, and being able to hold on to power
| while making the hard decisions is a classic unsolved problem
| in politics.
|
| But it's infinitely harder with very few (two!?!) high
| centralized litmus-tested groupthink political parties,
| incentivized to lock up power unilaterally, and marginalize
| the power of other parties, not skills conducive to
| governing.
|
| And also infinitely harder with unlimited spending by
| corporations (who are not citizens, and don't share the
| interests of citizens), where tiny groups of executives get
| to leverage all their companies resources toward tilting the
| political field in their favor, in order to get massive
| bonuses for feeding insatiable shareholder demand. But
| without reflecting any of the decency that shareholders might
| actually have.
|
| It's the moloch beast. The whole system is the problem, but
| it's near impossible to improve the system's design because
| it will fight that at every step.
|
| It mindlessly cares about its own survival. Which is how it
| came to be.
|
| Even if every single person in the system actually wants to
| do the hard things that will keep the planet in good shape.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Build walls to keep out refugees.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Die? I think it's die. Look at Biden, Putin, Xi, and Rupert
| Murdoch they range from old to really fucking old.
| juujian wrote:
| I would love to say this comes as a surprise, but it really
| does not. UN Secretary-General Guterres really foreshadowed
| that last year, and he did not mince his words. Really unusual
| for somebody that role, usually it is more of a diplomat-style
| position.
|
| > Using bogus 'net-zero' pledges to cover up massive fossil
| fuel expansion is reprehensible.
| Diederich wrote:
| All true, but as a reminder, more energy in a pseudo stable
| chaotic system means more extremes in both directions: more
| frequent floods, more frequent extreme snow events, etc., all
| across the globe.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/global_weirding
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Many reading this thread will see 3 degrees by the time they
| plan to retire. This comes with drought, undernourishment, and
| mass migration
|
| I wonder what it'll feel like looking back at that point. There
| isn't anything that I alone can do right now to prevent this
| from happening, it has to be a collective action but still,
| we've been warned for decades, over and over, we knew what
| would happen. Will we regret not having mobilized more, joined
| every protest out there, not having written our representatives
| more than we did, not having made more sustainable choices than
| we did? I know the effect of personal choices and actions is
| marginal but still, I'm sure we'll feel lots and lots of
| regret.
| shagie wrote:
| From Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell:
|
| Can YOU Fix Climate Change? https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc
|
| and
|
| We WILL Fix Climate Change! https://youtu.be/LxgMdjyw8uw
|
| Make sure that you watch the second one if you watch the
| first one.
| headsupernova wrote:
| Our descendants will rightfully conclude that we were a
| generation of comfortable cowards. Truly unforgivable. Yet we
| understandably don't know what to do as individuals. The
| scale of the tragedy is almost inconceivable.
| splitstud wrote:
| [dead]
| coolspot wrote:
| > 2050
|
| Luckily that aligns with the singularity timeline. AGI will
| have a very good carrot for us to agree on its terms.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| It wants Ohio
| amoss wrote:
| It can fix the planet or it gets the hose again.
| rolenthedeep wrote:
| Literally nobody would miss it.
|
| We'd need another state to pick on, though. Probably West
| Virginia.
| mbgerring wrote:
| Stop arguing on the internet and join the fight:
| https://climatebase.org
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| I'll up my cigarette intake from 1 a day to 2 to make up for this
| kypro wrote:
| Assume we hit 1.5C and "nothing happens" does this help the
| cause?
|
| While I'm very concerned about how unchecked climate change could
| impact future crop yields I also worry that having a hard line
| like this probably won't help convince anyone, and could counter
| intuitively act as a "I told you so" for climate denialists when
| the world doesn't fall apart as soon as we hit 1.5C.
|
| A lot of the more convincing arguments I hear from climate
| denialists (I hate that phase btw) is that past climate models
| have been highly inaccurate and many claims and concerns have in
| time been proven overstated. This is somewhat true.
|
| But here we are once again looking down on the masses and
| effectively saying, "you plebs just don't get it, this is your
| final warning before you all die".
|
| I think I'd rather the data was presented with less emotion and I
| think that would be more convincing personally, but at the same
| time I suspect we're probably going to have to see some dire
| consequences of climate change before any serious action is
| taken.
| burkaman wrote:
| Can you quote something from the report that you feel was
| overly emotional?
| zug_zug wrote:
| Well I think climate change is objective fact, but this link
| is wildly emotional.
|
| "Final Warning" "act now or it's too late" sounds like a
| late-night infomercial selling me something.
|
| If I were running the report I'd try to write it in a manner
| that is scientific and thus emotionally indifferent to every
| outcome. Science doesn't care whether any special dies or not
| (humans or not). If you can't look at climate science with an
| indifference to the death of the species, you probably can't
| run statistics neutrally, which gives a lot of room for doubt
| (fair or not).
| burkaman wrote:
| If you want to criticize this article that's fine, but you
| are blaming the IPCC authors for this Guardian reporter's
| phrasing. If you read the report you'll find it was written
| in a scientific and objective manner, and as emotionless as
| possible while using human language. You will probably find
| it boring to read even the extremely shortened "Summary for
| Policymakers".
|
| https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf
|
| The associated press release uses stronger language, but it
| still pretty objective if you accept the emotional axiom
| that "avoiding death and destruction is good".
|
| https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/press/IPCC_AR6
| _...
| tgv wrote:
| > A lot of the more convincing arguments I hear from climate
| denialists (I hate that phase btw) is that past climate models
| have been highly inaccurate and many claims and concerns have
| in time been proven overstated.
|
| That's such a trite reply. First, we can take it literal. Yes,
| models have been inaccurate, and this one will be too. The
| trend is unmistakably there, though. You can check the bloody
| weather outside to see for yourself. Do you want to bet your
| life that the estimate is too high this time?
|
| Second, we can take it less literal. They simply mean they
| don't want to move. They don't take it seriously. They don't
| care. Nothing in the world short of an immediate disaster in
| their direct environment is going to change their "opinion".
| And even then some will claim it's a freak accident.
|
| Don't take these arguments as if they have the same weight. Do
| _you_ want to bet your life and the lives of the ones you and
| we love?
| kypro wrote:
| I agree with everything you're saying.
|
| I tend to operate with two mental modals because I believe a
| lot of these divides can be explained by differing
| educational levels and intellectual abilities.
|
| I think you need to put yourself in the headspace of a 90 IQ
| dude who has been told his entire adult life that the world
| is going to end because of climate change. To him the fact
| that there was snow the other day and the world hasn't yet
| come to an end is actually a convincing argument that the
| Earth isn't getting so hot that he needs to be concerned.
|
| Similarly, while this hypothetical person might not be
| intelligent enough to understand that scientific models are
| always going to have some level of inaccuracy and there is
| always some amount of noise in the data, they are intelligent
| enough to recognise that in the past false claims have been
| made - and often these claims have been made in a
| condescending manner.
|
| We've seen similar divides and misunderstandings with Trump,
| Brexit and the pandemic. We need to find better ways to
| communicate across social divides - that's what I was
| appealing to. We have to do a better job at presenting data
| in a way that's accessible to every while also not being so
| condescending and overly opinionated that it's off putting to
| those who remain unconvinced.
|
| Or put another way, a climate denialist isn't going to be
| convinced by you telling them they're an idiot for not
| understanding how to analyse the data correctly (even if
| you're correct). You instead have to recognise the merits of
| their perspective and try to explain the data in a way that
| will allow them (hopefully) to come to the correct
| conclusions.
|
| But like I say, I don't know if this is even possible with
| climate change. A lot of people I'm referring to here think
| with their eyes and if they can't see the truth in their own
| life experiences, and with their own eyes, then they're
| sceptical of it. Climate change for lots of reasons is
| unfortunately one of those things that's really difficult to
| explain to someone who sees snow as evidence of that the
| Earth isn't getting hotter, but these are the people we
| ultimately need to convince.
|
| > Do you want to bet your life and the lives of the ones you
| and we love?
|
| No. That's why I'm saying please stop with the alarmism. It
| doesn't convince anyone and just causes unhelpful ideological
| divides.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > we're probably going to have to see some dire consequences of
| climate change before any serious action is taken.
|
| Is it your position that there have been no serious
| consequences of climate change to date? That's not factual.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| What the fuck do you even mean with "nothing happens", when the
| climate has been changing noticeably for the past decade
| already?
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| [flagged]
| numbers_guy wrote:
| I am not trying to communicate anything; just reacting with
| absolute bewilderment at somebody who is so far removed
| from reality, that he seemingly has not stepped outside in
| the past decade.
| aaomidi wrote:
| To be honest, majority of environmentalists don't care to
| change our tone to make obvious concern trolls happy
| anymore.
|
| Nothing has worked and your condescending tone doesn't help
| with anything either.
|
| Have you tried to reason with the average Q person? It's
| not possible.
|
| Enjoy being depressed:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/hot
| starkd wrote:
| [flagged]
| starkd wrote:
| People generally do not respond to insults. It only takes a
| little imagination to see how you react when someone swears
| at you. Invert the situation. It is a basic empathy test
| that they fail.
| aaomidi wrote:
| I know right?
|
| We're seeing crop failure after crop failure. Whole
| ecosystems are collapsing. Tornados and floods are happening
| in places they had never happened in.
|
| Europe and the US are going to be impacted way later than
| everyone else other than the immigration wave they're going
| to have to deal with.
|
| It's a sick joke that the countries with the ability to do
| something about this are also going to be the last ones
| severely impacted.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| My father is 75, doesn't speak English and has no idea what
| "climate change" is scientifically. However, as a farmer he
| has been noticing the change in climate for the past 15
| years at least. I am not a farmer, and don't have his
| experience, but I am aware enough or my surroundings to
| notice that the climate of my childhood was different. We
| used to get rain in the summer. We used to get snow in the
| winter. It's currently winter, one of the driest I can
| remember. No rain and no snow.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > We're seeing crop failure after crop failure.
|
| Where? We just saw some of the best grain yields globally.
| starkd wrote:
| [flagged]
| specialist wrote:
| > _I 'd rather the data was presented with less emotion_
|
| "Intellectually, progress could be okay. But you're doing it
| wrong."
| johnnymorgan wrote:
| Did they mention their regulations that is attempting to
| destroy crop yields, ie limit inputs, is the reason crop yields
| will drop and that the extra carbon in the atmo has been an
| inconvenient truth it's helped offset that...
|
| The talking down to people, coupled with hyperbolic dialogue
| has just fatigued everyone on this file.
|
| I think climate activism is total shit and ignores all the
| environmental damage that goes along with it.
| mrmanner wrote:
| The problem here is that we just aren't cut out to understand
| delayed consequences. The society we build today decided co2
| levels tens of years into the future, affecting temperature for
| yet more years into the future, affecting society for very long
| time. One effect of this is that consequences may be locked in
| long before we see them.
|
| Propagandists love to exploit this by saying things like
| "there's still time - just look at all the snow".
| mrmanner wrote:
| Another interesting thing: one of many reasons behind the
| "hard line" at 1.5 degrees is that this is the level of
| warming were models and simulations of consequences have
| reasonable certainty. Beyond that level there are more
| unknowns and more less certainty.
|
| So 1.5 degrees should be an important target if good models
| are important. But, it turns out, certainty isn't what we're
| after.
| tito wrote:
| Yeah the headlines end up all sounding similar after awhile.
|
| Another challenge is the report itself is pretty dry and
| emotionless (for example, every line of the PDF is numbered).
|
| Here's a link to the new Synthesis report referenced in the
| article: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/
|
| Here's the "summary for policymakers":
| https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf
| dham wrote:
| We could have solved energy in the 50's. We probably deserve to
| die. Good luck.
| NhanH wrote:
| Let's say if there is a magical wand that can will any policy the
| user wants to happen -- so the magic can't remove carbon, but it
| allows the bearer to pursue any mean within humanity
| technological abilities -- what are the actual actions that could
| be taken to fight climate change? My impression is that even the
| big polluter like China (as an example) is already on full speed
| to build more nuclear plant or solar power, and they just can't
| do it faster. Can someone realistically elaborate a high level
| plan on what could be done, or a pointer to such sources?
| ixtli wrote:
| There is no way except property seizure and capital
| reallocation at a large scale. This wont happen, so we're
| effectively doomed to suffer the slow violence of the inaction
| of our owners who themselves will never live to feel the harm
| they're aiding and abetting.
| NhanH wrote:
| Can you go into a bit more details? What are the next step
| after property seizure, and where is the capital deployed?
| prottog wrote:
| Mass property seizure and capital reallocation, i.e. a
| revolution on a global scale, will inevitably lead to the
| deaths of millions and a setback on living standards for
| the rest, i.e. degrowth; which will accomplish the
| objective of fewer carbon emissions.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| >will inevitably lead to the deaths of millions
|
| You are being generous. Historically, tens to hundreds of
| millions would be more likely.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| >There is no way except property seizure and capital
| reallocation at a large scale.
|
| Just like collective farms made Russia and China agricultural
| power houses.
| H_Pylori wrote:
| [dead]
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| That is a very good point; nothing has done more to solve
| starvation or improve the global standard of living then
| capitalism. If we manage a hard switch to another system the
| mass deaths from starvation and the collapse of the standard
| of living should greatly reduce carbon emissions.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| But removing carbon is within humanities technological
| abilities. I mean, just plant enough trees, and it's mostly
| done. This is not even a matter of technology. Removing sources
| of pollution, like certain animals we use for food and other
| things is another simple solution, which demands not technology
| at all.
|
| This problem is not a matter of technology, it's yet another
| problem of society and people.
| Symmetry wrote:
| One square meter of forest land, if any fallen trees are
| sequestered in a way so they never rot, will be enough to
| offset 1 watt of fossil fuel energy use. It's not enough to
| offset our current civilization by a long shot.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > I mean, just plant enough trees, and it's mostly done. This
| is not even a matter of technology.
|
| Carbon capture is completely unplausible. Annual US
| CO2/capita is ~15tons, we simply can't realistically plant
| enough trees.
|
| Currently there is no way to do anything that would have
| sufficient effect to _compensate_ current pollution-- we HAVE
| to reduce it at the source.
|
| But I completely agree that it is mostly just the _will_ that
| is lacking.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Simply taxing CO2 emissions and maybe reinvesting some profits
| (into electrification and renewables) should do just fine.
|
| The problem is people have to pay for these changes. This means
| potentially:
|
| - General increase in prices/decrease in disposable income
|
| - Danger for competitiveness of domestic industries
|
| - Uncertain second-order effects/additional risk
|
| Just consider electric vehicles-- pushing for no new
| combustion-car sales starting in 2025 would be political
| suicide in a lot of democractic nations, simply because people
| _actually_ value future wellbeing on a planetary scale less
| than what 's in their own pockets right now.
|
| There is absolutely no need to go nuclear for electrical power
| at this point IMO-- it's not cost competitive, not sustainable
| and extremely unpopular, too.
| [deleted]
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Well, completely deconstruct the globalized civilization we
| have today for a start. Everything that requires putting carbon
| into the atmosphere would need to be judged for whether or not
| it is truly necessary. And if you really want to exhibit wisdom
| rather than just intelligence, you'd want to start considering
| how things are going to work if renewables and nuclear simply
| just don't scale no matter what innovation you try.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| The biggest and simplest is build massive nuclear power plants
| and run carbon capture with the energy. It solves the issue
| it's just not very $$ efficient.
| mattwest wrote:
| 80% of the global population lives in a developing nation, keen
| on quick and dirty energy sources and a growing appetite for
| hyper consumerism and meat consumption.
|
| The West is living in lala land with some of the proposed
| policy measures.
|
| A popular one is implenting a carbon tax at the border which
| forces buyer and seller to internalize societal cost.
|
| But this would result in redefined trading blocs, particularly
| with united developing nations. The other bloc (paying the
| border carbon tax) will enter a post-growth period due to slow
| and expensive trade
| cagenut wrote:
| this inevitably turns into an argument over the definition of
| "realistic" that then in turn becomes an argument over
| hope/positivity-vs-doomer that then inevitably turns into an
| argument over values.
|
| with that caveat out of the way, here are some examples from
| other people you can mull around as you ponder the scope and
| scale.
|
| #1 the IPCC themselves. As part of AR6 one of its reports is on
| mitigation options: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-
| assessment-report-working-g...
|
| #2 - Bernie, if elected, wanted to start a 'green new deal'
| jobs program that would re-direct most of the military budget
| as well as greatly increase federal spending such that
| somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5T/year would be spent on the
| transition. The hope was that in de-escalating our global
| military presence he could also entice china into a grand
| bargain that involved them putting more of their military
| budget into it as well. Again regardless of your opinion on the
| realisticness of it, its worth recognizing as one of the only
| people and plans that got the scope and scale correct.
|
| #3 - https://drawdown.org/ Drawdown isn't a policy so much as a
| menu of options that have been explored, studied, modeled,
| quantified and ranked.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Invest on renewable energy, until it is several times larger
| than our consumption; invest on energy storage and renewable
| chemical inputs; invest on carbon capture.
|
| There's no hidden trick, all of that is completely obvious.
| Yet, government action could increase the rate of change
| several times.
|
| Nobody is in full speed, everywhere things are mostly left to
| the market, and the market created a huge lot of completely
| artificial bottlenecks. It also is unable to do research and
| any kind of long-term investments, even when it's clear those
| are profitable; and it's always completely unwilling to do
| infrastructure investment.
| pier25 wrote:
| The currently measured temps are nowhere near reality. We're
| already way past 1.5oC if we consider aerosols cooling, climate
| lag, and feedbacks. We've already eaten and really just waiting
| for the bill. Even if a miracle happened today and we reached
| zero emissions it wouldn't change that.
|
| But considering that our global emissions are huge and population
| keeps growing I'd be very surprised if we didn't reach 2oC in a
| couple of decades. Even with the efforts of some countries in
| reducing emissions, our per capita global emissions have been
| hovering between 4-5t since the 70s and we're probably going the
| break past 5t in the next years.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
|
| The only way out of this are very strong negative emissions. That
| is, reducing emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere.
| [deleted]
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Just in case it saves one person the effort to research this
| themselves ... for some reason I find the measurement of climate
| change in units of temperature a bit problematic (though entirely
| rational). It tends to suggest the old bugbear of "global
| warming", which of course gets translated by deniers (& skeptics)
| into "well it's colder here so that's wrong".
|
| I spent a while digging in to try to get some numbers on a
| different sense of what's happening. Global average temperature
| is changing because extra energy is being retained within the
| boundary of the planet's atmosphere [0]. So how much extra energy
| is being retained?
|
| A best guess estimate from 2015 would appear to be that
|
| > the earth is getting about 300 terawatt hours of energy per
| hour due to anthropogenic climate change, and humans use about 16
| terawatt hours of energy per hour.
|
| That is, the earth is _gaining 18x more energy per hour than we
| use every hour_ , thanks to the changes in radiative forcing
| driven by climate change contributors.
|
| [0] anyone familiar with complex physical systems will understand
| that when you add energy to such a system, the effects are often
| hard to predict. It is very likely that the temperature of the
| system will rise, but you may also see, for example, more
| movement as well (which is in some sense a related concept to
| "temperature" but not identical, and it adds uncertainty because
| it of the extra degrees of freedom).
| alfor wrote:
| Complex systems usually tend to equilibrium otherwise they
| would be in constant oscillation (positive feedback theory).
|
| As we look back in ice cores, there is variation, but not
| constant oscillations witch confirm a self stabilizing system.
|
| A few negative feedback we don't often hear:
|
| increase of co2 have a huge effect on plant grow especially in
| hash deserted conditions.
|
| Increase in temperature increase humidity: clouds that have a
| huge effect on reflecting radiation (much greater than co2)
| increase precipitation, increase plant growth in deserts.
|
| Not to say that we should continue this experiment, but maybe
| not panic either and see this as the only problem: war, famine,
| poverty are much more important and real immediate problems
| instead of projected possible problems.
| wcoenen wrote:
| > _Increase in temperature increase humidity_
|
| Water vapor amplifies the effect of other greenhouse gases.
|
| https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3143/steamy-
| relati...
| alfor wrote:
| Yes, but also with clouds that prevent radiation from
| reaching the ground.
| brnt wrote:
| Im sure the IPCC authors didn't forget their climate science
| 101 material.
|
| Moreover, we can tackle multiple problems concurrently, no
| need to make it appear we can only ever do one thing. And as
| it so happens, climate change tends to correlate extremely
| well with war and famine. It certainly appears a climate
| solution is going to help many other big problems along as
| well.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > climate change tends to correlate extremely well with war
| and famine
|
| and migration.
| alfor wrote:
| Yes we can, but what are those problems, what is the cost
| involved, what are we willing to sacrifice?
|
| There is many other goals that are largely ignored because
| "climate" is very very popular.
|
| I like the work of Bjorn Lomborg on that front. When we
| rank the problems and solution climate is not at the top.
| alfor wrote:
| The IPCC authors are financially rewarded to continue to
| push in that direction.
|
| Most of them have made career in that field, where a few
| decade ago there was barely any financing available for
| climate.
|
| Those that challenge the current orthodoxy are pushed aside
| and cast out.
|
| This is not science, it's religion.
| kuhewa wrote:
| > increase of co2 have a huge effect on plant grow especially
| in hash deserted conditions.
|
| Which might sound good for crops but of itself can
| destabilise ecosystems, African savannahs are already
| becoming scrubbier with brush and shrubs due to more CO2
| enrichment for at least ~1 million and possibly several
| million years. That will definitely have implications for
| populations of animals adapted for grassland
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > clouds that have a huge effect on reflecting radiation
|
| My understanding is that clouds are _inside_ that part of the
| atmosphere in which radiative forcing has decreased. This
| means that while they may reflect radiation so that it does
| not reach the ground, they do not stop (all) the energy from
| being trapped within the atmosphere.
|
| > war, famine, poverty
|
| All actual problems that will result from significant climate
| change, not distinct from climate change (even though they
| may exist for other reasons too).
| suby wrote:
| The analogy I've seen which I like is to that of a boiling pot
| of water on a stove. As you increase the heat (energy) in the
| system, the water level fluctuates throughout. You have points
| where there's a higher water level, but you also have points
| where there's a lower water level.
| ep103 wrote:
| The thing that blew my mind was that they always report this in
| degrees Celsius.
|
| I'm in America, even despite an engineering degree, I think in
| Fahrenheit.
|
| 1.5C sounds like a small number, until you remember that
| Fahrenheit is ~2x 1C.
|
| So 1.5 degrees C is ~3 degrees F. Which, to me, just
| emotionally feels like a bigger number despite being the same
| empiraclly.
|
| Similarly, it means when the IPCC is saying there might be a 7C
| change in 100 years, they mean a 15F change. 15F is emotionally
| terrifying to me. Its the difference between 85 degrees and
| 100. 7C is an abstract concept to me.
| mulmen wrote:
| UK tabloids apparently choose to use Fahrenheit to
| sensationalize heat waves.
| saulpw wrote:
| The US is basically the only country in the world that uses
| the Fahrenheit scale.
| mulmen wrote:
| This is false. Fahrenheit is commonly used in Canada to
| this day. Awareness of the scale still exists in the UK as
| well. Any commonwealth country is likely to have awareness
| because metrication happened so late in those countries.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| As a Canadian I never use Fahrenheit. The only people I
| know who do are at least 70.
|
| Edit: For weather.
| mulmen wrote:
| Honest question: what temperature scale is on your oven?
| My understanding is that it is likely to be Fahrenheit
| but I don't actually know.
| kaidon wrote:
| The metric system is everywhere but the kitchen :)
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Sorry, I meant in terms of weather. The oven is
| Fahrenheit (presumably because its product being sold in
| America too) but I don't have a mapping for that vs
| weather.
| mulmen wrote:
| Ah, yeah, that's a fair confusion.
|
| I don't think Canadian ovens feature the Fahrenheit scale
| because they are sold in the US. The SKUs are likely to
| be different and changing the display is easy. Consider
| cars which are similar. I assume Canadian cars feature
| speedometers in KPH and external thermometers in Celsius.
| I am curious what units your engine coolant temp uses
| though!
|
| Canada is a commonwealth country and the commonwealth
| didn't begin converting to the metric system in earnest
| until the 1970s. This is over 100 years later than the
| rest of the world. Canada paused metrication in 1988.
| Cooking is likely to have been one of the last things to
| change because it is so common.
|
| Pre-metrication Canada used the _Imperial_ system and the
| US used the _US Customary_ system. This means the
| definition of units like the gallon was inconsistent.
| Units in Canada seem to be influenced more by the
| commonwealth than they are by their southern neighbor.
| saulpw wrote:
| My friends in Canada talk in degrees Celsius by default.
| They have a basic understanding of Fahrenheit (more than
| Americans do of Celsius), but it's not their native
| temperature scale.
| mulmen wrote:
| Yes, they use both. Celsius primarily, but still both.
| Ask them how hot their oven is, or the temperature of the
| pool.
| andrew_gs wrote:
| That's certainly not true for Australia and New Zealand,
| numbers in Fahrenheit are basically meaningless for me.
| mulmen wrote:
| Australia and NZ had much more successful conversions to
| the metric system than Canada but there are people alive
| today who would have used the Fahrenheit scale early in
| their lives. Contrast this with non commonwealth
| countries who converted to the metric system 100 years
| earlier than the commonwealth.
|
| UK Metrication: 1978 (partial)
|
| Canadian Metrication: 1976 (partial)
|
| Australian Metrication: 1988
|
| NZ Metrication: 1976
|
| French Metrication: 1858
|
| German Metrication: 1872
|
| Mexican Metrication: 1857
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| Awareness is not the same thing as familiarity.
|
| If you give temperatures in Fahrenheit, most people
| outside the US (and Canada) are going to need to convert
| that to Celsius.
| kuhewa wrote:
| 90% absorbed by the ocean thanks to a high specific heat it's
| an even more modest number in degrees
| georgeglue1 wrote:
| Do you have a sense of what the % increase in total energy is?
| As in what is the denominator for the +300 terawatt hour
| figure?
| djleni wrote:
| Yeah this stat is a bit confusing to me.
|
| Does this imply in preindustrial times the net energy was 0,
| or is this total energy and there's some number not mentioned
| of loss?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| My understanding (I'm not a climate scientist) is that yes,
| net energy was zero over the "right" period of time (i.e.
| incoming energy from the sun balanced energy lost by
| radiating to space).
|
| The key technical term (IIUC) is "radiative forcing"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing
| klabb3 wrote:
| Yeah, those are interesting numbers. Another one I'm curious
| about is: how much faster are we burning fossil fuels than they
| are replenished naturally? The only number I found was a low
| estimate of 750x, and I think that was for oil. I assume
| "natural" gas is faster?
| tylerpachal wrote:
| Not specific to fossil fuels, but there is Earth Overshoot
| Day[0]
|
| > Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity has used
| all the biological resources that Earth regenerates during
| the entire year.
|
| [0]: https://www.overshootday.org/
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Given many fossil fuel deposits took millions of years to
| settle/decompose/compress, I don't think you get a proper X
| multiplier without an _exponent_ greater than 6.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Yeah the time is interesting but it doesn't directly imply
| anything about the flow. I'm curious about that. Ie how
| much new oil/gas etc is being produced by nature each year.
|
| Found this[1] now, which gives a ballpark of 20-80k
| barrels/y which can vary quite a bit depending on the
| guesstimates of undiscovered reserves. Since we produce
| 80-100M barrels/y, we're drinking from the basin about
| 1000x the rate that it replenishes. Or slightly worse,
| because we're slurping up the yummy and easily accessible
| parts, whereas formation occurs everywhere. Still, the 1e6
| estimate seems orders of magnitude too high (to my surprise
| as well).
|
| Again, this is only for crude oil, and there are certainly
| more factors at play.
|
| 1:
| https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/571/how-
| muc...
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| > anyone familiar with complex physical systems will understand
| that when you add energy to such a system, the effects are
| often hard to predict
|
| This is something that is very underappreciated. It's entirely
| possible that the climate becomes chaotic (in a mathematical
| sense) and there are sudden, drastic changes that cause
| economic and social devastation.
|
| It seems inevitable that people will be complacent until it's
| too late.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > It's entirely possible that the climate becomes chaotic
|
| Ya think ? :)
|
| (no insult intended)
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| I wish warnings came with clear outlines of mass extinctions,
| of changes in resources, and most importantly, of cost to
| property owners in impacted areas.
|
| That last one could finally cause some action because the
| current economy largely ignored anything else.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| But if any of those outlines don't happen when expected or in
| a different way then people call it all bunk - same reason
| people discount it now because of previous dire warnings. The
| boy who cried wolf is the great fable for this, because
| ultimately there was a wolf.
| lapama wrote:
| There is time, but no action.
| shrubble wrote:
| So, does this apply to China, which is burning more coal than
| ever?
|
| The UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, said: "This report is
| a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every
| country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs
| climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at
| once."
| dathos wrote:
| This is not one of those problems that goes away by pointing a
| finger.
| shrubble wrote:
| If one set of countries is lowering what they are doing, and
| another set of countries is increasing what they are doing,
| is that exactly equal in your eyes?
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think we can talk to the developing countries at the
| point when their per capita matches the now lower emissions
| of most developed countries.
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