IPCC: Climate scientists consider ‘life changing’ report
bbc.com
bbc.com
So far, how much did you lose by fighting for the climate, to get the system to change? Your time? Your wealth? Your reputation? Your comfort? How much?
I can't believe we're becoming fatalist without a fight. I'd rather join the rebellion than watch the world burn and adapt to hell.
I don't think you understand that efforts to prevent climate change are efforts to preserve humanity - the planet will survive in any case, and just form new ecosystems. It's us who'll be the first victims.
Hope for the best and prepare for the worst, but worst increasingly looks like an extinction-level oceanic anoxia event.
Even planning for anything 10 years in the future is a daunting task. For any prognosis there are a dozen more claiming different results or different trends with different outcomes. It's an information flood that does not let you make a definite judgement since it's overwhelming, and even when you try to base a decision on scientific evidence, because there's usually a "model", the certainty of the outcome "depends" (on any number of "variables").
What do? Make a conversative projection on what things are like today, and a plan based on that.
Me, I take a pessimistic view - I don’t think you have to have a large percentage change in, say, crop production, or storm damage rebuilding costs, for economies to feel the effect - prices rise, labour is diverted from growth to maintenance, and adaptations are ultimately made, but in the intervening period expense has been incurrred, and by now the climate has warmed further. The costs end up growing astronomically, and at what point do governments fail due to popular discontent, at what point do further governments collapse and even wars start due to resource cost rises and the need for popular distraction, and mass migration caused by revolution and war nearby?
I’ve put my money where my mouth is - I’ve become itinerant, while I scope out where on earth to live this out - somewhere quiet, and remote, and self-sufficient, that hasn’t yet seen ecological disaster and might escape the worst of climate change due to geography. Sadly, everywhere I’ve been in the past few years, across all continents and hemispheres, even when these places as yet appear verdant and untouched, are feeling the wrath of a changing climate, and human-wrought ecological destruction, from drought to flood, from aquifer pollution to overfarming and desertification, and vast agricultural monoculture, highly vulnerable to moving growing zones and viable climates for pests.
I’d love to be able to do something to prevent this - I recycle, I don’t buy much, I travel overland wherever possible - but I fear we’re too far gone.
What humanity and our civilisation will be in 20 or 30 years I don’t know, but I fear it’ll be unrecognisable and almost unimaginable to us, even now.
I'm in a similar spot but optimistic about systemic action.
I’m not optimistic about systemic action - the people taking it seriously don’t have the power to overcome a far more dominant system: our consumption-driven way of living, and the economies built around it. Mindshare may grow sufficiently in coming decades, but by then it’ll largely be too late, and that growth will likely come from more people witnessing and enduring the effects of climate change - and if we’re at that point, it’s already too late, as systemic collapse beckons as I laid out in my previous.
The climate is a chaotic system - it finds a metastable mode for a given set of inputs, and once moved by changing those inputs (e.g. CO2 ppm) from that point of stability can wander drastically before finding that point again. As forests die, as methane is belched from the thawing permafrost, as marine ecosystems collapse (everywhere is overrun by jellies - even Antarctica), as ice caps and glaciers melt, as coastal plains flood, as grassland turns to desert, core components of the current system of stability are yet further altered, thus pushing the current mode yet further from its stable point and making that stable point harder to reattain.
Like I said, get a climatologist talking in private, and it’s grim listening. They see the bigger picture in their work, but only publish studies on specific observations. Longitudinal studies end up being conservative otherwise they sound radically alarmist and don’t get published.
Anyhow. We should keep on playing while the ship sinks.
https://www.gaffologist.com/ (Ireland-only)
Sorry if it sounds like a plug but it's the best answer I have to your question. I studied physics in college and hoped it would help me work on energy efficiency or renewable energy generation technology, but it turns out that when I graduated (in to the worst recession in a century) nobody had any interest at all in what I was able to offer. I'd still love to work on saving the planet if I could do so while paying rent or a mortgage.
This is certainly true when looking at 2018 from the perspective of 1988 (or even 1998).
The pessimistic oportunist in me thinks it might be wise to start buying up vacation property in Newfoundland.
But global warming will be/is unprecedented and will affect the whole world. Immediate action is unlikely to reverse this process either.
Your comment about population growth issues is disgusting.
Because we have adapted. But how many are affected by the terror it involves? Terrorism = terrorizing people, not just murdering them.
> But global warming will be/is unprecedented
Erm, no.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...
Why do you bother commenting on this if you just flat-out refuse to accept scientific evidence in the original post?
To be honest, we still don't need them. Obviously it's horrible but considering that we accept ~1.25 million people a year killed on the roads (~25k in the EU, 30-40k in the US, or about one 9-eleven a month) it's probably not the best ROI. Though to be honest I think we should put massive barriers between cars and people anywhere we can, or just remove the cars wherever possible, but I'm odd that way.
Like I said I hope I'm wrong, but right now it looks like all the earlier estimates were too conservative and to think that we can cause major disruptions to the world's food supply, as well as making some places simply uninhabitable without air conditioning, strikes me as naive. To think that you can do it while still planning a 401(k) and buying holiday houses on the beach a cheap flight away for when you retire seems especially naive (though I worry we'll still have the cheap flights, which would be a bummer unless they're electric).
As far as population - it's true that we could stand to have far fewer people around, but even if your motivations are purely selfish, making hundreds of millions of people hungry, thirsty, and desperate doesn't sound like a good idea. And of course, most poor people emit basically nothing, so reducing the population of people living on under 5 dollars a day won't do much for the planet as a whole.
There's nothing you'll be able to do about oceanic anoxia, or a myriad other effects that are simply catastrophic.
Speaking of skiing, good luck when those economies collapse when the brunt of tourism goes away.
The perceived need to add car barriers to public events ks nothing in comparison with having to air-condition homes and public spaces around the globe. Also, remember nature?
We can and must do better. And quickly.
What would a genuinely helpful company look like?
Some examples I can think of:
- New materials development (e.g. plastic that takes 30% less carbon to create)
- New carbon-reduced operation pipelines (e.g. a process for manufacturing cars at 30% less carbon)
- A consultancy that focuses on energy reduction across business verticals
- ...
What else?
The only thing in your list that does make sense is an asteroid impact, which we don't have much say over.
With climate change we know a) it's happening, b) it's going to affect us in some pretty major ways and c) we can do something about it.
None of those hold true for your points.
I was more thinking an infectious agent that's modified to be particularly deadly.
I believe that the second law of thermodynamics implies with high probability that humanity will not last forever, so I don't think it's that unlikely that something will wipe us out.
edit: totally predicted...people are reacting with a simple question about actual change by downvoting my comment into Oblivion. You need no better explanation for our fate.
Well maybe because of your general tone and because you didn't seem to react to the OP directly. You see, with a question like "If I must change, why not you?" you imply the OP said you must change while he/she doesn't. But the OP came nowhere near mentioning such thing. On the contrary, OP used we.
why is it out of bounds to ask them what they are doing if the need is apparently so dire?
or does "we" mean what it always means in these discussions....someone else?
will even one person here commit to not flying for a year? the poor don't fly because they can't afford it.
Edit: Hell, ill even provide what i am doing. Not only am i trying to reduce my electricity usage in my house (which was really bugger all to begin with), I have convinced the owner of my restaurant, and have been implementing for months, a system where we source our produce locally as much as possible. (it is costing is approx 5-8% at the moment - as of last months check - but advertising this fact has been a ton more profitable than not putting the effort in).
So that's just a part of what I'm doing. I'm willing to do more.
It is not, I didn't say that. But you could phrase it in a nicer way. And definitely not assume they aren't doing anything.
does "we" mean what it always means in these discussions....someone else?
No. Thinking that way is overly pessimistic.
will even one person here commit to not flying for a year?
Maybe. I haven't been on a plane in years myself.
i don't want to change my lifestyle to lower carbon emissions, because that ends up being a net loss for me.
i want you to change your lifestyle to lower carbon emissions, because that ends up being a net win for me. that's right, i'm talking to all n billion of you!
what can i do to get you to agree to doing that? can i coerce you, or do we end up negotiating or trading?
> In this case, there are 86 lead authors from 39 countries, of which 39% are female.
> These researchers, who are unpaid, have reviewed the available scientific literature on the feasibility, impacts and costs of staying under 1.5C.
> "If one can imagine the governments holding the hands of the scientists, this means you don't know how science works!"
> In this case, there are 86 lead authors from 39 countries, of which 39% are female.
speaks to diversity, e.g. it's not just a bunch of white men from a thinktank in south Florida (born there, nothing against it)
> These researchers, who are unpaid, have reviewed the available scientific literature on the feasibility, impacts and costs of staying under 1.5C.
unpaid suggest impartiality and dedication, the rest specifies the scope of their work nicely, as opposed to very unspecificed term "climate change"
> "If one can imagine the governments holding the hands of the scientists, this means you don't know how science works!"
this is over the top but the point would be it's not a bunch of lobbyists writing the report on the behalf of politicians
Does the BBC now have something like the Fortune "Contributor's Network" - a group of random bloggers who get to write under their domain as if they were BBC writers, weakening the brand but bringing in more click revenue? That'd be my guess as to what's happening here.
Regarding just the first sentence example:
> In this case, there are 86 lead authors from 39 countries, of which 39% are female.
The sentence structure suggests it's the countries rather than the authors who are female. The clause is misplaced and "of which" applies to things not people ("of whom" would have been better). Basically the writer wanted to cram in a bit of extra information, couldn't figure out where or how to do so gracefully and grammatically, yet stuck it in anyway.
aggressive ungracious reading is borderline trolling
I even encountered one commenter recently who claimed that we fundamentally misunderstand the action of gasses in a a gravity field, and he was going to single-handedly prove it all wrong (and invent a source of free energy at the same time).
With this, and the long-term nature of the problem meaning that the can can always be kicked just a little further down the road, I'm not surprised that little gets achieved.
Suppose that on average each person from the most resourceful 1 billion people on Earth installs a device for air cleaning. The machine sucks air in, removes CO2 and releases the clean air. The device works using renewable energy, so by itself it doesn't contribute additional CO2 to the atmosphere. Suppose we want to remove 10% of CO2 from air, or in other words we want to pass 10% of Earth atmosphere through such cleaning devices. The year has about 365 * 24 * 3600 seconds, so to have those 10% in 10 years each device has to process 5e18 / 1e9 / 365 / 24 / 3600 / 10 / 10 = 1.6 m^3 of air per second.
This is not a small number, yet it's not immediately obvious why this isn't possible. For example, energy requirements can be small, because the device effectively doesn't change the bulk of the air. 10 years isn't that much comparing with the speed of raising air temperature. Cost of such a device could be perhaps smaller than a modest car. We still have option to deploy more devices, to separately clean ocean water etc. This is largely technical and not political solution.
What's wrong with this approach?
Should governments in rich countries encourage people to have fewer kids or otherwise constrain their life choices in various other ways? This goes against liberal values. What do most progressives think?
It is sometimes framed as I=PAT equation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT
It's probably important not to take that equation too seriously, as it's roughly an accounting identity based on structural assumptions. If you don't like it, pick any other factors to factorise one side of I=I. But it does provide a helpful perspective: in terms of what you stated, we'd also need to multiply by a coefficient that describes carbon emissions in terms of per-capita energy consumption.
> Should governments in rich countries encourage people to have fewer kids or otherwise constrain their life choices in various other ways? This goes against liberal values. What do most progressives think?
I'm not sure if I am a progressive. My short answer is "yes, governments should constrain life choices to help force a controlled crash ahead of continued overshoot then a forced hard collapse". In the future I suspect we'll end up in scenarios where either we have the luxury of choosing one or more ecologically incompatible liberal values to break, or reality will go on ahead and break one or more of our incompatible values for us.
A liberal perspective of free individual choice in the short term that causes uncontrolled growth and consumption at the population level is not logically compatible with a desire to avoid wide-scale suffering due to famine, resource war, etc in the future (assuming that the latter concern is a value we wish to maintain).
Specifically regarding population, the carbon emissions of a US family* + descendants versus a Bangladeshi family + descendants, projected forward 100 years, estimates that the US family & descendants generates about 40x as much carbon emissions. (picking those two countries as extremes of (high per-capita pollution, low population growth) versus (low per-capita pollution, high population growth)). The US family & their descendants still incurs a higher carbon emission footprint even up to time horizons of 900 years. This is even with a US birth rate of 1.9, which isn't sufficient to maintain population over the longer run.
From an overall population level, arguably "we" the human endeavour should seek to minimise the number of people with affluent high-pollution lifestyles.
On the other hand, of course there is no "we" that includes all of us. Perhaps myself and my neighbours can figure out how to push more of the costs of global warming onto you and your neighbours while keeping a disproportionate share of the benefits, or vice versa. Or maybe together we can collaborate to share the benefits of the current cheap energy jackpot and push more of the costs on to our actual/hypothetical grandchildren.
* i dont mean to pick on the US, I'm australian, we're about the same or worse in terms of per-capita impact of ruining your children's atmosphere and climate. you should impose trade sanctions on my country to encourage my government to stop pushing for new coal mines. my federal government can't seem to think of anything cleverer to do than digging up all of australia's coal and selling it before it loses all market value.
Basically no one in the West other than the very poor live a low impact life.
In the US in particular, we are really only very good at telling others how they should change. Case in point was the "March For Science" that took place a while back...in San Jose the parking for the event was full of giant SUVs...yet they all seemed so angry.
that's a good point, but having found a 10 person video conference unbearable, how could they get much done as 86 people?