How climate change is melting, drying and flooding Earth – in pictures
nature.com
nature.com
The same people telling me the world will spiral out of control in just 12 years are also saying that we shouldn't build any nuclear power plants, or that the root cause of climate change is "institutional racism"[1]. It is really starting to look more like a religion to me than a science, and I don't say that lightly.
1. https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/xwneej/racism-climate-cha...
You can use that with anything.
When a school shooting happens I always hear how video games and scary goth music push them over the edge.
Because at least two of them have an obvious link to temperatures (especially if you think about what average temperatures and weather do to birds/insects' primary food sources)...
We also know that depression (and as an indirect result, suicide) have known links to weather in some territories, so it's not implausible that climate change could impact that too. Though I'd expect higher temperatures to lower depression rates, it's possible suffering through even hotter summers without A/C could exacerbate depression among poor people, since there's nothing you can do to escape it.
If back to back heat waves brought on by climate change threaten you (maybe your grandma's sick and can't take the heat), and you can't afford any of the solutions like a nice air conditioner, maybe you get desperate and turn to crime so you can find the money to keep grandma from getting injured by the heat? I wouldn't personally say 'I bet that happens' but I also wouldn't bet money against a study being able to pull it out of the data. We had old people dying in homes not too long ago as a result of a power outage in the American southeast - Florida I think? - and it was a news-level scandal.
If hot summers and reduced rainfall kill crops, that's going to boost poverty levels in farming counties...
They provide the conditions for the herd to congregate, accumulate and then stampede. And the herd will. Until the underlying architecture gets fixed. Too much attention is paid to which direction the herd is stampeding in rather than the underlying architecture that enables it.
Nuclear is not a panacea, but we should build more because this is a global emergency. There is a racist component to the reaction to climate change because of who is being most immediately impacted (equatorial countries and the poor), but intent doesn't matter, because only action matters.
The science is bland and harsh, and doesn't care about how people consume it. You can put CO2 in an aquarium, seal it, and easily measure the greenhouse effect from CO2 yourself. You can even work out the basics of the relationship of CO2 concentration to degree of warming. This is happening right now - it's not predictions, it is our reality. It will happen to you regardless of how you feel about the discussion on either side of the issue.
Some of these effects are two or three or more steps removed from the warming caused by co2, and there is a "cascade of uncertainty" in predicting them.
I agree with the GP that being climate (and atmosphere) omnipresent, it is easy and tempting to draw long causal chains from it to the most disparate effects. And that, given the theme is central to our time, and given the number of scientists of all disciplines working to study these effects, in the most rigorous fields a publication bias on the effects found must exist. In the less rigorous, most probably anything goes.
huh?!?
temperature raise is a lot more pronounced at poles, not at equator
Closer to the equator you'll find Kiribati, where salination of farmlands and aquifers has already happened. Luckily the rest of the world is still online and willing to keep their country on life support, but the prospects for kiribati to independently support itself in the long term are non-existent.
Carbon dioxide also raises ocean acidity which kills off corals and crashes fisheries, leaving coastal communities without reliable protein sources.
I hope you can see how an indifference to climate change on the part of predominately white countries to can be construed as racist. When someone says that, he or she is talking about all the non-white people who are currently suffering due to changes in their climates.
This is hilariously misled. Food must be imported into Hawaii because it's an island with very little arable land, not because it's "in the tropics." Equatorial nations have by far the greatest access to food when compared to any other place on the earth. That's why biodiversity is the greatest near the equator -- there are more resources.
> I hope you can see how an indifference to climate change on the part of predominately white countries to can be construed as racist. When someone says that, he or she is talking about all the non-white people who are currently suffering due to changes in their climates.
Yes, but they are not disproportionately affected due to some conspiracy, but rather just because money protects you from consequences. If you're poor, you can't move, and you can't buy water. That affects you less if you have a stable income and marketable skills (which are easier to access in the west).
I live out here in the pacific, I travel all over Oahu every day. People lived here for over a thousand years without foreign goods. The food scarcity is manufactured to suck money back to the mainland U.S.
Hah--oh wait, you're actually serious?
When you use words like "hilarious" and "hah" I feel annoyed, because I need a little more respect and acknowledgement for the work I am doing in horticulture, food security out here in the pacific. I have a hard time listening to what you are trying to say when you are typing laughter at me. Do you want to try and share your thoughts without implying that you think my world is a joke?
Put another way, Kendi is pointing out different manifestations of the dangers of equating (dis)belief with knowledge.
People say crazy things about quantum mechanics too, but we keep building and programming microprocessors according to the science as we understand it. And they work!
Anthropogenic climate change affords itself to a wide variety of crazy statements because it arises from, and affects such a wide variety of human activities. Basically, there is no segment of the human population that will remain unaffected in some way--either directly, by sea level rise or shifts in fresh water, or indirectly, by all the people who are being directly affected.
Because it is physically real, it can't be ignored forever. I fear that the longer we go as a society without addressing it, the higher the general level of social anxiety will rise. That could go a bad way: more and more people seize upon conspiracy theories or tune out. I hope instead we find the collective will to face our fears and take action to address them. I hope that like starting a difficult and scary project, once we see signs of progress, it will become easier to conceive of further progress.
But in the case of QM, either the crazy stuff is wrong- repeated experiments falsify it, no gadget can be built on the principle; or it is "not even wrong", i.e., irrelevant. But many of the climate change findings are either predictions with a timespan of several years or decades, or historical explanations (this and this happened because of climate change). The first type can only be put to test years from now, the second type never.
Basically the science says we will transition to a zero-emission society. We can either plan for it and have a managed transition, or we can be forced into it by external forces, essentially a collapse (good luck feeding 10 billion people with widespread crop failures).
The earlier we start, the smoother the transition will be. That is basically what all the protests are about, people just want to start the transition already.
1. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolutio...
1. https://www.axios.com/climate-change-scientists-comment-ocas...
Someone at Reason read the UN/IPCC report, said there is no doomsday in it: https://reason.com/2018/10/11/how-big-of-a-deal-is-half-of-a...
There's also a lot of questionable stuff.
The NOAA data adjustments and climate scientists openly discussing getting rid of the 1940s warmth: https://realclimatescience.com/61-fake-data/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T86IIKK9FRg
Lack of warming trend in the raw data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mWanx8ojmOkcazzRhDao...
The new USCRN data showing no significant warming trend in the USA in 12 years: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/11/08/the-uscrn-revisited/
The Canadian data purge: https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1174909654297538560
Edit: so you edited in some more bullshit sources. Let me look at just one. As I mentioned in another comment, we don't have time to go back and forth over every piece of bullshit since nonsense is a lot easier to write than it is to convincingly disprove (since the nonsense doesn't have to make sense). I clicked only one (so it's a random sample), and I chose it because it triggered my interest (it seemed data-based): the USCRN data link. The article helpfully links to the NOAA website where you can make your own plots. I am not a climate scientists, but the first thing that I notice is the timespan: look at the variance in that data that is linked. It jumps from -4°F to +7°F anomaly. No wonder that, over this timespan, you don't see anything. The article even mentions how variable this data is: "0.6 ± 0.9 °C". You can't say anything either way because you don't have enough data (a variance larger than your base value?!). But of course, the article sees it differently: "no statistically significant warming since the start of the record". Sure it's not significant, but neither does this disprove anything. What it definitely does not do is prove that there is no warming. If anything, the 0.6 value should tell you that it is more likely to be warming up (at a rate of 0.6°C per decade) than not (the odds of it being greater than 0.6 are equal to the odds that it is less than 0.6; and the odds that it is greater than zero (and we are indeed warming up every decade) is 83% (0.6±0.9 means it can be between 0.6-0.9 and 0.6+0.9, so between -0.3 and 1.5, so there are (rounded to one decimal) 18 possible values and 15 of them are positive, and 15/18 is around 83%). Again, all of this is uncertain because monthly data since 2004 is not a lot of data with this amount of variance, and I'm estimating uncertainty on uncertainty here, but the takeaway so far should be clear.
But that's not the end of it. The author is literally turning a blind eye to the data that we do have. First they go "we have no data, and the data we do have suggests that the earth is warming up, so let me just deny that global warming is real", but then when you click through to the website, you discover that there totally is data. See those checkboxes at the top of the options? They have data going back way beyond 2004. Select any year you like, but be sure to take a long enough range (30 years or so) so you have any sort of reasonable sample size. If it looks like a bunch of random data to you and there is no clear trend, I would agree: the author of your article picked the least clear "Time Scale" option available.
I didn't quite understand the difference between the Time Scale options "previous 12 months" and "12-Month" so I downloaded the whole dataset and computed averages per year. They match the option "Time Scale: 12-Month", so that's what that means: the year's average. You can just set that Time Scale option and don't have to go through the trouble of downloading things and validating what you think the option might mean (see what I mean by "disproving bullshit is more work than writing it"?). Now, over 30+ years and with the year's average, please tell me you see a trend there? This new USCRN data is just not active for long enough to draw conclusions, and the high-uncertainty conclusions that can be drawn (referring to the article you linked to, namely the 0.6°C per decade, give or take 0.9) suggest that it is going up rapidly.
I wonder if all this work has been for nothing, it took more time than I had hoped... I just hope it makes you rethink what you believe or look at your sources more critically (instead of only looking critically at the generally accepted sources).
The whole reason the USCRN was built was because of the problems with the historical network. The USCRN was designed to get more reliable measurements.
The aforementioned spreadsheet illustrates the problems with the USHCN data.
Would love to see someone put there name on a list that says "these weather events were caused by climate change" and "these were not, we expected them".
One of the biggest things that bugs me about the talk from the public about climate change is that it is all focused around what politicians say. Last week I heard graduate students talking about the major effects of plastic straws. My dad (a Fox news watcher) constantly talks about Al Gore. As a scientists I don't care about those things and those things aren't talked about in the scientific community. We're all confused at the right for not believing in it and we're confused by the left because we have prominent politicians (like Bernie and Warren) saying that nuclear and sequestration are false solutions (but these technologies are highly encouraged by the IPCC and every single climate scientist I know. Only Yang and Booker are pro nuclear?! AFAICT only Yang is pro sequestration?! This is ridiculous. All of them should be! They're all claiming to be listening to the scientists!). So I get your sentiment. Personally I just don't understand why this is happening and what we can do about it.
> The same people telling me the world will spiral out of control in just 12 years
If it makes you feel better, the scientists are talking about decades. And different events in different time spans. Some of the predictions have already come true, such as more intense storms, more fires, and more droughts. This will only get worse. But the spiral out of control is much further off and is more related to food/water scarcity. That's where the 1.5C-2C warming is a huge danger.
As to the racial and economical aspects to climate, there is truth there. But I think the conversation has gotten out of control. Countries like India are already being hit really hard by climate change (a lot more of their land is vulnerable to floods compared to 20 years ago). But the talk here should be really focused about how we can't just ask/expect other countries to not grow their economy for using the same tactics we did (i.e. coal, oil, and natural gas). The US is only 15% of the problem (Europe 10%) and all of us going to 0% isn't solving the problem. We have to go negative and/or ensure that there are cheap enough technologies that developing countries can use that don't pollute. At least I see this as a more humane alternative than shutting down other countries growing economies. IDK about you.
and every single climate scientist I know. Which I assume to be more than the average person.
edit: forgot that italic is single star not two
If SpaceX and others continue to make getting things into orbit much cheaper, what's the argument against putting highly reflective barriers in the Lagrange point, which is a point constantly between the Earth and the Sun. If we deflected even 1% of sunlight, wouldn't that be enough to lower temperatures back down towards 0 C, as opposed to +1.1 C where we are now?
And why not focus the sunlight-blocking onto the poles, which we need to maintain our climate and which are experiencing even more rapid change?
Is the argument against these strategies that relying on geoengineering will take focus away from transitioning our energy system? I just think we have no hope of transitioning our energy system in time, emissions are STILL rising year over year...we have to think about how to cool the planet while we decarbonize our energy.
But more importantly, you are underestimating the scale. The earth is big, and L1 is far away. A device that blocks 2% of the sunlight at that distance would have to cover 4.5 million square kilometers, a disc that size would be larger than the moon, or about the size of the entire United States including Alaska.
It would also require engines that need to be constantly refueled, because solar wind, which is really strong at the scale we're talking about, would push it away in just a few months.
And the screen would need to be smart, because L1 is only quasi-stable. The actual point where there is zero differential gravity is, well, a point, and any deviation from that point will inevitably increase until the object eventually falls into a regular orbit, so to stay there you need to be constantly monitoring your own orbit and correcting for deviations. Only L4 and L5 are self-correcting (which is why there are no known natural objects at L1-3 of any two-body system)
Yes, let's talk solutions! It you don't like one of these solutions, come up with a better one. Anything but working on solutions is an excuse (i.e. complaining about people that aren't on board or trolls). Don't miss out on the big adventure.
But hey, I get it. There are profits to be made in Geo-engineering, while no-one will get rich quick from abstinence, right?
I have said this for years. We will not take any action until it is too late, and then we will speed up our demise by trowing a 'Geo-engineering' hail-Mary (using engineering in the name is supposed to give it some merit it doesn't deserve)
Geoengineering imply that we are better than nature. We mess up Earth and we're going to fix it not by stopping pollution and our bad habits, we'll just create this bandaid.
It's much more of a gamble too.
We only have one Earth. Why can't we just pollute less? And address the problem directly. We use too much oil and are throwing plastic into the sea.
Your proposed solution sounds like it cost a lot. I think there are other cost effective ways to go address this problem and can lead to a win-win for everybody (well except for oil industry).
Shadowing 1% of the earth would require 10 million tons of mylar foil, which would be 100,000 launches with SpaceX's yet to complete Starship at a payload capacity of 100t (as it was announced, seems to be down a lot for the prototypes) to low earth orbit. That's not doable yet - and it is just the problem of launching the mass, nothing else.
what if we launched a bunch of mirrored balloons?
Also, assuming you need to reflect 2% of the incoming light, and using 8ft diameter balloons, you would need approximately 2,744,628,480,000 balloons.
{1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nine_(tensegrity_sphere)
combine that with the ideas of
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_platform_station
and PROFIT!
One of the criticisms of Javascript developers is that they make things slow with bad practices and by adding needless frameworks to their apps. Then in order to solve that problem, they bolt additional frameworks on top to do complicated, hard-to-debug compilation steps, or to optimize specific code paths, or to defer loading to make things appear faster than they are.
What they don't realize is that all of the bloat in their apps came from things that seemed like good ideas at the time. If they were actually smart enough to engineer their way out of the problem, they would have also been smart enough not to engineer their way into it in the first place. So when they add their new speed-solutions on top of the existing codebase, often they introduce new bugs or limitations that end up making their app even worse in the long run.
Wherever possible, a solution should not be significantly more complicated than the problem. Occasionally, you can get genuine speedups from adding new libraries, but this should not be treated as the norm. Usually, the best way to make apps faster and lighter is to stop using so much stuff.
And as it is with Javascript, so too is it with climate change and geo-engineering projects.
I don't think these people will open their pockets to build an unproven space mirror to solve a problem they vehemently refuse to acknowledge in the first place.
* Also it won't do shit to solve ocean acidification, another serious aspect of Global Warming.
Geoengineering will make lots of money for whoever ends up doing it, but on the scale we are talking about they are mostly infeasible decades long projects that will take why more money and political will than just stopping emissions.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/07/how-t...
It's just land the size of the United States to erase our last 100 years of emissions. Trees have the side benefit of being neutral or useful in many contexts. There is plenty of room.
That is a false statistic.
This is not a compelling argument for a skeptic.
>99% of all numerologists agree on the science
You need to highlight the backing by the rest of the scientific community to give confidence that it’s a real science.
Same for psychics, priests, and on and on.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but the burden of proof decreases as the claims become less extraordinary. I'd suggest "a whole line of science which until this point hasn't been controversial" can probably be trusted, and that immediately choosing to disregard a group when it says something you don't like strikes as more reactionary than skeptical. I very much doubt you considered all of climate science a hack science until it started to butt up against your personal beliefs.
Nope. Once you’ve there is backing from fields that you already trust experts in, then you can be relatively sure that the field is following scientific methods closely, etc.
>a whole line of science which until this point hasn't been controversial
Any science that makes predictions on complex systems without the ability to run tightly controlled experiments is pretty controversial to many in hard sciences. To see why: see social psychology for an example of a field filled with trash.
>I very much doubt you considered all of climate science a hack science until it started to butt up against your personal beliefs.
I very much doubt you read my comment if you think this has anything to do with my beliefs. I was pointing out a fallacious argument from authority that holds zero weight to people who don’t believe that authority.
If saying that 99% of climatologists agree was enough to settle the argument, it would be enough for 99% of police to agree that police abuse isn’t a problem.
99% of the sailors on a lifeboat say, "We need to paddle West, or we'll all die."
Sure, you have every right to be skeptical. But don't you think we should probably paddle West?
If someone starts trying to paddle East, shouldn't everyone in the boat try to stop them?
Yes, the sailors may be mistaken. But given the divisions of labor we have, and our limited understanding of the world, don't you think we should follow the best advice we can get?
Is there some better way you can imagine to gather the best advice?
In your scenario, there's no way for the sovereign individual to go East unless he can find the ones in the 99% with the cognitive dissonance. Abandoning ship would be the metaphorical equivalent of becoming a hermit and giving up on society.
There's no Other Earth. If Climate Change is real, then we all need to paddle in the same direction.
A man, Allan Savory, acting on what was near unanimous scientific agreement on the cause of desertification, could have remained a mere scientist raising the alarm about deserts. Thinking he knew what the solution was, and getting the approval of other scientists, he went on to kill tens of thousands of elephants.
https://www.fastcompany.com/2681518/this-man-shot-40000-elep...
How do you think we should decide what to do?
I say we elect representatives, and they act as though scientists are the best way we have to measure reality. If they're concerned about the proposals of the scientists, it seems to me as though they should ask for ways to try experiments out, to see if they work, and to try to scale those up. Something like that.
What do you think?
If yes, what do you think should happen next?
Beyond that I am filled with doubt. I've read a lot about the replication crisis in science. It started with psychology but has hit medicine especially hard too. Ioanndis' paper had a big influence, where he argued 50%-90% of all research findings are false. The papers about how scientists routinely misuse statistics also. I've seen first hand how enormous quantities of what appear to be scientific knowledge, things people believed were watertight consensus truth for years or decades, simply evaporated once someone who was serious about statistics sat down and tried to replicate the findings.
Likewise with economics. Is an economist making a prediction? Unless that prediction is "the current trend will continue" they are virtually always wrong.
Put simply, I don't trust academia much. I think most people trust academics far too much. The track record of failed predictions whether it be on the economy or the climate is enormous, and there are no repercussions.
Some of the most powerful arguments climate skeptics make aren't actually criticisms of scientists. They point out that academics are frequently portrayed as saints who float above mortal vices like self-interest or greed, vs "Big Plastic" or "evil lobbyists" or whoever who are assumed to be corrupted by their salary. But climate scientists and charity workers like money too. They have the same distorting incentives everyone else does. Important predictions = grant money, it's obvious. Why do people get so upset by this basic fact?
All that said, in the end, it's right and good to move away from fossil fuels. There are plenty of arguments for this that are stronger than "scientists say we'll all die, and this time they might be right!". For instance dwindling supplies of oil, coal and natural gas in regions of the world that are friendly and stable is, by itself, a good enough reason to switch to green power. I have no problem with carbon markets or government subsidies to this end as long as they don't destabilise the grid.
I do have a problem with people presenting any random weather event as "proof" that small children shouldn't go to school though. That's not a useful next step regardless of your presuppositions.
99% of Christians believe Jesus Christ was a magical being
Would you be satisfied by 76 Nobel Laureates?
http://www.mainaudeclaration.org/
> As of 1 February 2016, 76 Nobel Laureates have expressed their support of the Mainau Declaration 2015.
This particular Nature article gives a brief overview of a number of the consequences of global warming accompanied by photographs. Every article can’t be everything all at once.
Bad weather event: see, that's undeniably the effect of global warming, we're all gonna die by 2030.
Climate improves: climate change is not weather, you can't judge by short term effects.
TBH I don't know what this post is doing on HN anyways. I like to browse HN for technical news, not this kind of stuff.
Reality: Even with China still misbehaving about CFCs emissions, the Ozone Layer already recovered quite a bit and it's set to be fully healed by 2060.
But well, on the bright side, at least that time, ALL nations comited to stop using CFCs. This time, the idea is: stop all emissions in the western world, and allow Asia to keep increasing theirs.
But what are you on about with the world freezing. That's new to me.
Well, because this was a thing in the 70's, so before you were born. I remember the headlines in pop-sci magazines were screaming about "the coming ice age" and artists depictions of glaciers in New York, Chicago, etc.
It doesn't invalidate the current climate science, but plenty of people remember that old sensationalism.
"Global cooling was a conjecture, especially during the 1970s, of imminent cooling of the Earth culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect."
I would describe it a sample of irrelevant pop science noise from the past, that AGW deniers like to mindlessly compare to the current well established theory of AGW.
“An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.” – New York Times, Jan. 5, 1978
Here we have the paper of record making some rather official pronouncements and claiming the weight of scientific authority in said pronouncements. That sounds like more than "irrelevant pop science noise" to me.
Now, hardly a month after that second quote, we also have this one:
“A poll of climate specialists in seven countries has found a consensus that there will be no catastrophic changes in the climate by the end of the century. But the specialists were almost equally divided on whether there would be a warming, a cooling or no change at all.” – New York Times, Feb. 18, 1978
Which is a fairly significant change in position that should not go unnoticed, but it does nonetheless leave me somewhat skeptical of Wikipedia's claim (I'm still reading the source of that claim).
But even if the reporting on the state of climate science in the 1970s was wrong: why was it wrong? And what has changed to fix it?
On the other hand there were dozens and dozens of news reports, over a lengthy period, about acid rain, climate and ozone in the early and mid eighties. The world bothered to do something about two. We hear far less of those two and the Millennium Bug these days. Which is taken as proof nowadays that they were never a problem in the first place. Errr...
Which is not the same as "just fading away".
Edit: 1985 Helsinki Protocol (UK and USA conspicuously absent), and superceded by the 1988 NOx Protocol that includes UK and USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_Oxide_Protocol
At the same time there were also reports of heating, which were more frequent. Though there weren't exactly loads of those yet either.
Now, there were certainly one or two that blew it up, e.g. the remaindered paperback I picked up for 50p or something round about 1980. I'm pretty sure BBC's Horizon never touched it, though they did do the odd "out there" programme each series. They did one myth-busting von Däniken's silliness sometime in the early or mid 70s.
I'm incredibly concerned by the inaction, and the direction of the action being taken (Especially by climate activists), but I'll give people credit - at least there is a demand for the first problem to be taken seriously.
We do have the skills for massive amounts of thin film production that's necessary for solar and lithium ion batteries. And somehow, we are massively reducing the cost of wind as we scale to ever larger turbines!
We need to lean into our current tech skills, particularly those that get cheaper as we deploy more of it. That description does not fit nuclear, as it has a negative learning curve for costs.
Don't wind farms actually warm the earth by robbing kinetic energy from the wind (which cools the earth)? I read that local climates actually get warmer where there are huge wind farms
If we can terraform Mars by nuking the poles, maybe we can use nukes to trigger huge volcanic eruptions that will cause global cooling by putting tons of dust into the atmosphere
The biggest risk is religious zealots commanding a nuclear arsenal. No, that isn't Iran.
What adds insult to injury is that if the global community treated this as a life and death situation, we could probably find a way to mitigate it so that it's not too horrible. It won't happen, and that lack of activity is being led by the current "Leader of the Free World".
Now we use methane from burying it to produce green power.
Carbon can be recaptured and reused. Wait until we see a planet about to smash into us before we start worrying about the end of civilation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/science/climate-change-ma...
Once the permafrost starts melting in earnest, or the Greenland ice shield is gone, there is literally nothing we can do to stop the climate spiralling out of control. Right now it looks like these tipping points will be reached much sooner than we anticipated.
We’re at a natural cyclical high, and the century-hence dire predictions are objectively well within noise levels (1° and 1 foot).
Capitalism is moving us to lowered emissions because we prefer them when possible (my office is 100% solar). Emerging nations will get there too. Strange how the imperative of radical change is directed at US, not others producing far more emissions.
In the 60s big fears around climate getting colder and fears around a new ice age.
Looks like the only thing wrong with the current climate models is the conservative timeline.
Which climate change model do you find correct? Why are there model(s), shouldn't only one correct one exist? Are people still making new models?
In the cold war people built concrete bunkers in their basement for fear of a nuclear Armageddon.
In Rome, if you couldn't pay your taxes you were forced to sell your children into slavery.
And here we are, where past presidents are buying ocean-front property so clearly the elites aren't truly as concerned about it as they publicly state.
As for living in the present... I'm in my 50s, and have a chronic respiratory illness that developed a few years ago, but it has probably been latent since childhood. Today, it's an annoyance to treat and a mild disability. As a child, it would have flat out killed me. That's the change of half a lifetime.
It’s not like this threat went away. People just stopped paying attention to it.
It just was. It was what we were born into, and grew up with. Peace movements and CND were big in the sixties and seventies. So was John le Carre, and all those Cold War movies - good, bad, and awful. Aside from that, most of us couldn't care less. We made jokes about it. We watched Threads in 1984 without a care, after watching it however...
Climate change is a bit too abstract for me.
Yes, I agree with you, it's terrible. The challenge is indeed enormous. The future looks bleak, specially to young people who will actually have to deal with it. Even worse, people in poor countries will probably be the most affected by this crisis. Is it already to late? I wonder.
Nevertheless, it's good to see people fighting for awareness. The recent protests are very important. Also, we are always seeing new technologies, and even old technologies that can help being developed and improved.
This type of language really bothers me. That methane and other feedbacks are accelerating global warming are proven facts.
Why? It seems like the statement agrees with yours: "The sudden thawing of Arctic permafrost is of great concern to scientists, who say that the methane and carbon dioxide gas that the process releases is accelerating global warming."
It's really mindblowing that feedbacks aren't more present in conversations about climate change considering these are probably the most dangerous and IMO terrifying aspects.
Even the IPCC has been evading the subject:
> Mario Molina, who shared the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1995 for his work on depletion of the ozone layer, said: “The IPCC report demonstrates that it is still possible to keep the climate relatively safe, provided we muster an unprecedented level of cooperation, extraordinary speed and heroic scale of action. But even with its description of the increasing impacts that lie ahead, the IPCC understates a key risk: that self-reinforcing feedback loops could push the climate system into chaos before we have time to tame our energy system, and the other sources of climate pollution.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/09/tipping-...
I understand that "X says that Y are Z" is less strong a statement than "Y are Z", but with something as complex as this, it's hard to state it as fact without coming across as if it is your own research or conclusion. I can write 2+2=4 without that, but I can hardly write that donald duck running a leading economy is bad for the whole planet without it seeming like an opinion to those who either looked at different examples as I did or those who are not completely convinced it is a fact. (That was exaggerated obviously, but you get the picture: if I had written the donald duck statement like "scientists say that $complexSystemThatFew(IfAnyone)CanTrulyProve", it seems more likely to be true than without it, regardless of whether it truly is a fact.)
Maybe you are right. I read it that way but I'm not a native speaker either.
Edit: I guess it would have helped if they said which scientists.
I would understand a mainstream journal use that type of language, but not a scientific one.
Do you need to see that proviso expressed every single time?
That's precisely my point. Saying "scientists say X" does not transmit that X is accepted by the scientific community.
> Do you need to see that proviso expressed every single time?
I do since I consider climate change a serious and urgent matter.
The other overlooked fact is that the greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere for a long long time. So, once the climate changes it won’t be a 1-day/1-week or a 1-year event. We talk a lot of geo-engineering etc.. but why not make small sacrifices now (eat less meat, buy local and used stuff, no single use plastic, less air-travel etc..) and save the beautiful planet that we already have. Yes, it will cause some economic dislocations but we will be fine. Companies will adapt or healthy and environment friendly alternatives will come up.
Take this seriously folks. We don’t have another planet to go to and our children are counting on us.
My impression ist that people are talking about sacrifices for the sake of sacrafices and not to solve the problem. If the global warming (and related problems) would be (magically) solved tomorrow, they would be disappointed because no sacrifices were needed any more.
Are sacrifices even enough to solve global warming?
And sacrifices have a marketing problem. It's hard to sell them to billions of people.
Europe seems to be more in tune with top-down. In the US, bottoms-up seems to be the only option. Once people change their purchasing decisions - e.g. stop buying anything that comes in individual plastic packing etc, companies will be forced to make changes. Another example - stop giving non-sensical loot bags in b'day parties or stop taking or giving gifts altogether.
"Nuclear is ideal for dealing with climate change, because it is the only carbon-free, scalable energy source that’s available 24 hours a day. The problems with today’s reactors, such as the risk of accidents, can be solved through innovation.
TerraPower, the company I started 10 years ago, uses an approach called a traveling wave reactor that is safe, prevents proliferation, and produces very little waste. We had hoped to build a pilot project in China, but recent policy changes here in the U.S. have made that unlikely. We may be able to build it in the United States if the funding and regulatory changes that I mentioned earlier happen." -Bill Gates, Dec 2018 [1]
And even before that it's already the safest form of energy. [2] Fear has shot us in the foot and continues preventing us from making substantial progress.
1) https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Year-in-Review-2...
2) https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy
If we want to we can start building reactors too, but the big changes need to start yesterday.
"The problems with today’s reactors, such as the risk of accidents, can be solved through innovation." - this is an example of wishful thinking. We don't know how we would solve the problems, we are just assuming someone will figure out a way. That assumption is probably influenced by survivorship bias. There's a bunch of technologies where the problems weren't solved, but we don't hear about them much.
The mean time to build a reactor is about 7.5 years[1], so if you wanted to transition all remaining fossil-fueled electricity generation in 12 years, currently with 120,000 TWh of fossil fuel consumption[2], assuming 1GW of generation per nuclear power plant, you would need to start building approximately 14 thousand (edit: originally read millions, corrected as pointed out in comments) nuclear power plants today.
[1] http://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucle... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
Then we get
120000 TWH/year * (1 / 24 / 365) hours/year ~= 13.7 TW
So you would need 13700 reactors, not 14 million.
Edit: maybe you were just off by a factor of 1000 in your calculation?
Also, yes, the TWh was a per year amount.
Data is pulled from MLO on Mauna Loa in Hawaii, the gold standard for data going back to 1958.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth
List of Icehouse and Greenhouse Periods
A greenhouse period ran from 4.6 to 2.4 billion years ago.
Huronian Glaciation – an icehouse period that ran from 2.4 billion years ago to 2.1 billion years ago
A greenhouse period ran from 2.1 billion to 720 million years ago.
Cryogenian – an icehouse period that ran from 720 to 635 million years ago, at times the entire Earth was frozen over
A greenhouse period ran from 635 million years ago to 450 million years ago.
Andean-Saharan glaciation – an icehouse period that ran from 450 to 420 million years ago
A greenhouse period ran from 420 million years ago to 360 million years ago.
Late Paleozoic Ice Age – an icehouse period that ran from 360 to 260 million years ago
A greenhouse period ran from 260 million years ago to 33.9 million years ago
Late Cenozoic Ice Age – the current icehouse period which began 33.9 million years agoscience should be totally based on facts, but what I saw is that, some studies are sponsored by big industries, some are supported by political parties, some individual opinions are threatened, how chaotic.
If anyone wants to brainstorm... what would it take for universities to announce cross-campus climate change initiatives dedicated to rethinking basic social systems? The California-China Climate Change Institute is the only one that I know of (1).
(1) https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Jerry-Brown-to-...
There are other symptoms: plastic is everywhere; insects and birds are vanishing; etc.
We treat the world as source and sink when it is really cyclical.
Applied ecology ("Permaculture", regenerative agriculture, "food forests", etc.) shows that we can supply most of our needs locally and within our Solar energy budget: food, waste processing, medicine, fuel, building materials, etc. And it's fun and easy.
That said, snapshots of floods and droughts - which happen all the time regardless - are a distraction. At an extreme, they give ammo to the deniers as they can look at such and article and say, "Floods? Droughts? No news here. Mother Nature at work."
https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/imagery-and-data has a nice display of actual images.
I wonder if you taught them philosophy, if all would fall into place.
My world view changed dramatically over the past, say, five years, with all the news that has been coming at us, friends that talk about it, and a tiny bit of research (actually that's just opening Wikipedia whenever someone on reddit says something that sounds off). Climate change wasn't a big topic for me before that, partially because my parents hardly talked about it, school barely mentioned it, and I didn't have to make many choices of my own. Now I do and now it's also a bunch in the news, and now I also bring it up with friends and talk about it to colleagues. It just takes time to spread through society.
I don't agree that there is a certain group of "ignorant people" that can never be taught versus <insert name for the opposing group>, especially when you put it in a way that makes it sound like the group of ignorant people on this planet that can never be taught is very large.
> I wonder if you taught them philosophy
What does that have to do with anything? I don't know exactly what philosophy is, but I'm pretty sure I don't need it to understand that the climate is going to shit from our carbon-based waste gases.
The gist of the so called environmentalists is (factually, these really are their proposals when you look at their numbers): ok USA and EU, you have to urgently stop your emissions, even if that means total economic breakdown. China and specially India, it's ok you can continue your emissions, and increase then by even more than the all 1st world will cut theirs (even if they cut it to 0), that's just fine since your are entitled to it because you didn't do it in the past.
End result: a planet with even more emissions than today and a destroyed economy in the western world.
But somehow, this will save the planet according to people pushing this catastrophic scenario.
Sorry no, these people aren't pushing major climate action to save the planet, they are doing it because they think it's hip to push this idea that the Western way of life should be destroyed to give way to their political ideology.
Climate action, measuring exactly this, has China as doing "OK" and India as doing "great" when their comulative projected ”increase" by 2030 will be similar than all present emissions by USA and EU.
This is the ideology being pushed at the moment.
No, those are not factual. It's a strawman.
1 China 6.4 2 United States 15.0 3 India 1.6
2.5 times China and almost 10 times India. Countries that are already rich enough to invest heavily in pushing renewable energy and nuclear energy need to aid countries trying to get people out of poverty. You can't do that by providing direct energy cause that is not how energy works. So you do it by allowing emissions to these countries while reducing your own to fall given that you already use so much more per capita.
You want to see hypocrisy? How about the US's hypocrisy in stopping solar subsidies to build local solar industries? This discussions is not about who is entitled to more emissions. It is about a pragmatic approach to reducing emissions. While you dish out "facts", also care to read about policy and arguments.
The point is simple: you want to pretend your are saving the planet by allowing China and India to increase their emissions, more than USA and EU will ever be able to cut them (even if they cut it to zero).
Explain how that can possible save the planet please.
#1 🇨🇳 China 9,839 27.2%
#2 🇺🇸 United States 5,269 14.6%
#3 🇮🇳 India 2,467 6.8%
India's total emissions are a fraction of US and China's. You are guilty of the same hyperbole you claim to be fighting from the other side.
"Per capita" is not a narrative. It is a measure of how much room there is to reduce emissions while maintaining quality of life. It's not like you can just go to war with India and China and clear this up. You can't bring them to the negotiation table claiming moral superiority.
What you are suggesting is not a strategy for efficiently negotiating our way out of this deep hole, but rather a dictatorial approach which can only be enforced by a dictatorial regime across the world.
As developing nations build up the energy base, it'll be easier and cheaper to do it with renewables than with fossil fuels. That changes the equation tremendously.
Could the democrats have done better? Definitely. Are they better than the republicans in responding better to these issues? You have to be obtuse on purpose to believe otherwise.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21083712.
Edit: actually, your recent history on HN consists of massive flamewar and abuse. That's extremely not ok, and I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
I don't want perfect to get in the way of good when it comes to this issue, but this is a multifaceted, complicated topic, with far reaching implications, and it cannot be solved via an emotional battle royal of half formed politically oriented thoughts.
Semi-related, but I played a game forever ago called "Fate of the World", which attempted to put the player in charge of a global government to address climate change. It was almost viciously hard (The game designers may have been trying to make a point) but it was extremely interesting to see how you had to try and manage emissions from various regions, as well as political/social stability, ideally without destroying their economies (you need them to keep paying taxes to fund all this) all while trying to manage/reduce the damage caused by the shifting climates.
If you eliminated US/EU production of CO2, atmospheric CO2 levels would still rise. The slight warming that would take place as China and India modernize their life will still happen.
Thank you for confirming my point.
>If you added in a carbon tax that it levied on imports from countries that don't implement an equivalent system you can bet that China would lower its emissions too. If you're very fancy you can also offer to install alternative energy in foreign countries at cost price.
So the pitch here is... Let's risk war with a Nuclear power with a tariff stick and for a carrot offer a way to a worse standard of living then US/EU. This sounds real viable.
If after reading that you came up with:
> It's 100% politics and money generation.
Our world view is so different, that I am not sure that further debate has much point.
Have a nice evening/day