The terrible truth of climate change
themonthly.com.au
themonthly.com.au
China draws 70 percent of its electricity from coal and is building 300-500 new coal plants by 2030[0][1]. Nothing we do can offset this new CO2.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/04/29/716347646/why-is-china-placin...
[1] https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2019/03/28/china-new-coal-p...
Maybe the tariffs go into some kind of refugee trust, or disaster preparedness account
The problem with using the UN for this kind of action is that the UN has never imposed a tax or tariff. This would be new territory for the UN. I'm sure countries would have some problems with sovereignty. The alternative would be that all nations would act in concert to impose these tariffs.
But then if they did that, you wouldn't have a universal refugee trust. Each nation would still have control over their own finances.
Anyway, I think through the implications of what your proposing I realize why it's been so hard to get anything to change. Any kind of action requires unprecedented worldwide coordination.
Really weird, I don't get this algorithm. We don't even have a downvote for stories.
Frankly, it's a broken system when it comes to politically fraught topics.
Seems like a very important bit of information to disseminate to the public!
https://palermo.gds.it/articoli/economia/2019/07/28/effetto-...
https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/celebrities/114657574/...
The article bases its warning on this "equilibrium climate sensitivity" metric (aka "sensitivity"). This widely-used benchmarks allows the many different lines of evidence to be used together and translated into real-world effects.
The article cites a pre-industrial CO2 measurement of 280ppm, and a current measurement of 410ppm. If current trends hold, the doubling point (560ppm CO2) will occur in 2060.
The rest of the article deals with models that are predicting much higher sensitivity than earlier models. In 2013 the estimate was 1.5 - 4.5 degrees C. The new models are predicting 2.8 - 5.8 degrees C, with eight of the (unknown total) models predicting 5 degrees or higher. These results are scheduled to be published in the 2021 IPCC report.
For comparison, the Paris Agreement seeks to limit temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees C.
What would 5 degrees C warming mean for the Earth?
> The most comprehensive summary of conditions experienced during past warm periods in the Earth’s recent history was published in June 2018 ... by 59 leading experts from 17 countries. The report concluded that warming of between 1.5 and 2°C in the past was enough to see significant shifts in climate zones, and land and aquatic ecosystems “spatially reorganize”.
> These changes triggered substantial long-term melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, unleashing 6 to 13 metres of global sea-level rise lasting thousands of years.
To the extent that the models are right and the study of past warming incidents applies in the future, we can expect sea level rises in excess of 6 - 13 meters (lasting thousands of years) by 2060 and significant shifts in climate zones.
Basically, the last models and sims were run in 2013 and reported in 2015. They have since been updated (and will be officially reported in 2021).
As we have updated our scientific models, it looks like the old ones were quite optimistic. Seems very newsworthy.
Sure there is: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/26/senate-james...
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
The US is around 29% of cumulative emissions, followed by the EU at around 26%. Russia is around 8%, and China a little behind that. India is around 2%.
When the IPCC’s fifth assessment report was published in 2013, it estimated that such a doubling of CO2 was likely to produce warming within the range of 1.5 to 4.5°C as the Earth reaches a new equilibrium. However, preliminary estimates calculated from the latest global climate models (being used in the current IPCC assessment, due out in 2021) are far higher than with the previous generation of models. Early reports are predicting that a doubling of CO2 may in fact produce between 2.8 and 5.8°C of warming. Incredibly, at least eight of the latest models produced by leading research centres in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and France are showing climate sensitivity of 5°C or warmer.
...
Even achieving the most ambitious goal of 1.5°C will see the further destruction of between 70 and 90 per cent of reef-building corals compared to today, according to the IPCC’s “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C”, released last October. With 2°C of warming, a staggering 99 per cent of tropical coral reefs disappear. An entire component of the Earth’s biosphere – our planetary life support system – would be eliminated. The knock-on effects on the 25 per cent of all marine life that depends on coral reefs would be profound and immeasurable.
...
But these days my grief is rapidly being superseded by rage. Volcanically explosive rage. Because in the very same IPCC report that outlines the details of the impending apocalypse, the climate science community clearly stated that limiting warming to 1.5°C is geophysically possible.
Past emissions alone are unlikely to raise global average temperatures to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The IPCC report states that any further warming beyond the 1°C already recorded would likely be less than 0.5°C over the next 20 to 30 years, if all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions were reduced to zero immediately. That is, if we act urgently, it is technically feasible to turn things around. The only thing missing is strong global policy.
I disagree with basically every point you made, but i wonder if extremist lunacy like this might be a necessary evil to punch through the inertia keeping us driving off a cliff, together and and globally.
If the rule we followed brought us here, of what use was the rule?
That's... one possible outcome.
(Hat tip to the "Sunset Grille" webcomic, where I stole this line from a character.)
I live literally on top of an old coral reef. In the desert. This area was under an ocean 10's of millions of years ago.
As the earth warms won't coral simple colonize along the new coastline? Why will they suddenly be gone? (there may be an answer... I just don't know what it would be).
So unlikely that they will simply move. What is more terrifying is that as warming increases and acidity goes up, not only will the coral structures bleach and die out (50% complete), they will begin to actually dissolve, hampering any recovery. This would make the situation irreversible.
But many geological reef formations are very old, 10's or even hundreds of millions of years old.
At the time these reefs were formed, CO2 levels were much much higher than they are predicted to be any time soon.
Yet somehow the reefs were constructed anyway and corals as a species pulled through. In spite of CO2 levels (per Wikipedia) '''between 200 and 150 million years ago of over 3,000 ppm, and between 600 and 400 million years ago of over 6,000 ppm''' (what are we at today? like 400ppm?)
The reef I live on incidentally is thought to have been formed like 265 million years ago. At which time CO2 levels were possibly an order of magnitude higher than today.
So I really am a bit confused still.
This is a wonderful resource to see exactly how massive of a change in C02 this is.
It also goes into detail on many of the effects we are seeing now in response to climate change.
Bluntly, do you know how many people that would kill? Kill by lack of air conditioning, and lack of transportation for food, at a minimum. Lack of growing food, too, given how mechanized agriculture is now. It's not just a matter of needing "strong global policy". You need a way of making that transition without the transition killing large numbers of people.
It's by Joëlle Gergis, one of Australia's climate experts who contributes to the IPCC reports.
She is reporting on recent developments in IPCC model simulations that are being run, and her perspective on this new information and how it should change our understanding of climate change.
Seems highly newsworthy and relevant to HN.
I guess you can only wait and see if the mods reverse the decision.
This seems like a very important article. Just as a point of comparison, tree planting is great and all, but something like ~100 entities are responsibly for 71% of all emissions.
This is just what happens here. Species rise and fall, lands rise and sink, yet the Earth spins on until some other shit starts to happen on the surface. We just happened to fuck it up for ourselves faster. Humans have been good at that since day one.
The stated impacts of further warming aren't grave enough to justify nations taking the steps needed to mitigate them.
For example, the more immediate and impactful conclusions from the report are these:
In urban areas climate change is projected to increase risks for people, assets, economies and ecosystems, including risks from heat stress, storms and extreme precipitation, inland and coastal flooding, landslides, air pollution, drought, water scarcity, sea level rise and storm surges (very high confidence).
Climate change can indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts by amplifying well-documented drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks (medium confidence)
To which most readers would more or less shrug and move on because it's not tangible what these general impacts look like and unclear why they couldn't be mitigated or absorbed at the time of event.
Said another way, it would take a MASSIVE and unprecedented shift to the average, and an increasing portion of the global populations way of living, to slow warming significantly.
Namely, "to restrict global warming to 1.5°C, global ambition needs to increase fivefold." That implies that the current state of the global economy would effectively ground to a halt.
So what people hear is: We must completely change our lifestyles to prevent some chaos somewhere unknown down the line. I think all of social science tells us that humans are bad at this kind of long term planning.
The challenge here is that there is a huge gap between what is meant by climate scientists with statements such as "the very foundation of human civilisation is at stake" and what people can "touch and feel" making the sense urgency seem overblown.
Even things like "Cyclone Tracy is a warning" fall flat because "there have always been storms" and the causal relationship isn't direct - it's statistical and that's not something that politicians and the public generally can grok.
Contrast that with something like WWII which the US was staying largely removed from, until Pearl Harbor happened. That was a direct, causally linked, explicit and objective event that pushed an entire nation to change their behavior - but it was also time limited.
I'm not sure what needs to happen, but my guess is that until there is a "Pearl Harbor" for climate change, which I don't think is really possible, very little substantial will be done.
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/AR5_SYR_FINA...