Climate change driving entire planet to dangerous 'global tipping point‘
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
How pathetic and what an unusual time to be alive.
Take a look at the Australian PM. What a stick in the mud, the whole state of NSW is practically on fire, and all he can say is that isn’t not really caused by climate change, there are “other factors involved.
What these climate scientists have done to predict this would’ve been witchcraft a hundred years ago, the work they’ve done is amazing. The people who matter still don’t listen.
You may be on to something there: if cause and effect are too far related that an ordinary person without any training in the matter will be able to say 'Aha!' then trying to argue that scientists have proven it is a losing battle.
The reason for that is that decades of being oversold by advertising and guys in white lab coats have conditioned people to disbelieve scientists over the words of other lay people that they feel they have a closer connection with. See also: vaccination, various 'truthers' and so on.
Add in another healthy factor based on the fact that people will have to give up some luxuries and you have the stage set for a perfect disaster.
This is a silly recurring narrative that has no basis in reality. Politicians aren't clinging to some particular industry, they're interested in not destroying the whole economy that is necessary for our wealth and prosperity, certainly not for the FUD that is currently being spread in an area where nobody even takes a closer look at outrageous claims anymore for fear of being shouted down and where quoting IPCC reports is considered "being in denial".
What other plausible motive would there be for the inaction?
I mean, if what you said was true and they only cared about people’s futures, they would’ve carved out a transition plan for those jobs to renewables thirty years ago. Nothing has been done really since.
This is the "if you don't agree with me, you must be paid by someone" conspiratorial thinking.
In particular, I find it simply incredible that you can ask a question such as "what other plausible motives would there be for inaction".
Here is one: every part of the economy is deeply dependent on fossil fuels consumption. Economy, like climate, rests on a very delicate balance where changes can have enormous costs in terms of jobs, lack of growth, and ultimately poverty and death.
There's a well-known problem in economics known as the broken window fallacy. Suppose someone wakes up and notices their window has been smashed. They have to get a glazier in to replace it. Even though this helps to employ someone and causes economic activity, it makes no sense to argue that breaking windows helps the economy - that person has had to spend money to get back to where they would be if their window hadn't been broken that could otherwise be put to use actually improving their life.
Much like the broken window fallacy, aggressive climate change action involves throwing vast amounts of resources at hopefully getting to the the same point we're already at and providing things we already have, but hopefully with less CO2 emissions. Those resources then cannot be used for other things. Economically speaking, this makes everyone worse off in order to reduce CO2. There's not really any way around that. The press like to spin all the green jobs action against climate change will create as proof it will benefit the economy, but that's just not how things work.
That is without counting the huge cost savings in not needing to try to counter effects of global climate disruption, which absolutely dwarf the cost of switching.
That's nonsense. First of all it involves spending trillions. Who is going to pay for that? Sure, if you spend trillions on anything, the economy will be invigorated - but whose economy? Buying solar panels made in China isn't going to help your own economy as much as spending the same money on locally made products.
> The only alternative consistent with the facts is they are beholden to fossil industry.
It would really help the cause if people who supported it stopped using such obviously wrong arguments.
Pretty much everything is made in China, yet installing those solar panels will require local companies and engineers. Were they made locally the boost might be higher, but so few products are made locally in our globalised world that it's probably harder to unwind globalisation than fix the climate with foreign made panels.
I've worked with and listened to enough scientists that I've become skeptical of certain branches of science; particularly those that try to make general predictions based on incredibly complex data which encompasses an almost infinite number of variables.
Several things which make me doubt:
- Having worked on extremely complex software projects, I don't believe that any human being is capable of understanding or simulating something as complex as the earth, they will almost certainly exclude the vast majority of variables; many of which may not seem relevant to our primitive human minds but which may in fact be critical once you factor them in combinations with all other variables.
- The earth was hotter at several points in the not-so-distant history. The Earth's climate has been constantly fluctuating.
- Humans only produce 3% of the total CO2 released in the atmosphere each year. I wouldn't be surprised if the annual average fluctuation in CO2 produced by geothermal activity alone is higher than 3%.
- Scientists acknowledge that more CO2 means a greener earth because plants strive on CO2 but they fail to acknowledge the possibility that more plants would take out more CO2 from the atmosphere so even with these primitive models it's looking more like some kind of equilibrium will be reached rather than a 'point of no return' as climate scientists keep advertising.
- Life on earth has always been evolving and can continue to evolve to handle changes in temperatures. The species which don't adapt will die out and this is fine, it has always been like this.
- If the Earth can go from being a burning ball of magma (as it was millions of years ago) to what it is today, then surely it can recover from a few degrees higher than normal. Without hindsight, nobody could have predicted that this burning ball of magma would become the lush planet that we have today and yet scientists are claiming that they can make predictions from an initial state which is much more complex and less predictable than that relatively simple ball of magma.
- Climate scientists need jobs and they wouldn't have any if they didn't continuously create fear to keep public funding coming their way. At some point in the past, for reasons unknown to us, some powerful people decided to give climate scientists a platform and a voice on the world stage and now they make heavy use of it.
Denialism is fundamentally dishonest. Uncertainty does not favor inaction. The more the uncertainty, the more action is justified.
Of course, with hindsight, out of thousands of models, we cherry-picked the most accurate ones, gave those scientists medals and completely ignored the majority of other models which turned out of be wrong.
I think that renewable energy is good and will yield cheaper electricity in the future and won't produce smog so we should invest in it but there is no need to rush the implementation stage. Sometimes it's better to wait for better technology to come along and implement it once rather than keep re-implementing it every few years each time a slightly better solution comes along.
Like every time someone invents a new, less expensive, cheaper to maintain wind turbine, what do you do with all the existing wind turbines? The more you have, the more expensive it's going to be to migrate.
What is your alternative? Do nothing and wait for some future generation to do something? There always were excuses to do nothing, and there always will be. What is different now is there are not any future generations left.
I'm all for taking action against climate change, but I'm not sure this is an airtight argument (although I too have used it before). If there is uncertainty, how can you decide what action should you take? The scale from immediately shutting down all coal plants (to the point of blackouts) to doing nothing is really big.
The last time the earth was hotter is somewhat between 180k to 240k years ago. So "not-so-distant-history" is at least somewhat misleading, if not outright lying.
https://climate.nasa.gov/interactives/climate-time-machine
^ Note that the blue and red areas represent not the temperature in absolute terms, but the change of temperature each year. The amount of blue between 1884 and 1970 would look alarming and frightening if it was replaced with the color red... It's not surprising that some scientists were concerned with global cooling. If the cold trend had continued, today we'd be worried about the 'Fridge effect' instead of the 'Greenhouse effect'. People will always speculate to create fear to get attention and power and money.
Also popular charts like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Com... don't show the temperature, but the change of temperature (draw a horizontal line where the 0 point is). So yes, for 1900 years until only about 100 years ago, the earth has been getting cooler every single year. So the earth has never been so cold as it has been in the past few decades.
In our increasingly secular society, certain lesser fields of science have taken the place to religion when it comes to the business of manufacturing fear and selling solutions.
There has always been a market for this and probably always will be.
Looking all the points you have written, you never believed in climate change because all of them are the same debunked denialist propaganda.
I suppose you have just one proof of scientists doing illegal things and falsifyng data. Beccause you're not accusing them just ebc ause you dewny
https://metro.co.uk/2018/08/29/this-is-how-much-the-earth-ha...
If you scroll down a bit, it has an alarming animated graphic which seems to show a short period of minor cooling/stability followed by a more recent longer period of extreme heating.
The deception of this animation is two-fold:
- Look at how fast the years are ticking when it shows the cooling period vs the heating period. The animation fast forwards through 20 years of cooling and then plays 6 years of heating in slow motion; this makes the animation seem more alarming.
- They cut out the longest, most significant period of cooling between 1900 and 1910. Proof: https://climate.nasa.gov/interactives/climate-time-machine
Another interesting distortion from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Com...
That looks scary except when you consider that this is not the temperature but the change of temperature - When you look at it this way, you can see that the earth has been getting colder every year for 1800 years, it's only in the past 50 to 100 years that the trend finally reversed... After 1800 years, it was going to reverse eventually so this is not alarming at all. I would have been more alarmed if the cooling trend had continued. In the context of this global cooling, some of the rapid temperature drops which led to the little ice age 400 years ago are much more alarming than short-term rises in temperature that we are currently experiencing.
Whether or not climate is changing, it's clear that the information is being distorted to make the data seem more alarming and this is deceptive. There are many such examples of data manipulation all over the internet.
Aren’t there almost certainly other factors involved? Acknowledging that climate change is one factor among several doesn’t seem to me outrageous.
This is the same trick that non-feminist MRAs try to pull when they talk about men being raped as well whenever women being raped comes up. Most don't care about the men being raped and won't really care about asking the question "and how do we stop that from happening", they just want to stop the conversation. Fuck no, if you want to comment on serious issues, comment constructively (on the bushfires example "it's also caused by XXX so we should do less of that/fix that" would be reasonable to ask for, then we can talk about prioritising this over fighting climate change)
Watch The Red Pill if you're interested in learning something real. And if it helps you overcome your biases, you should know that it was made by a feminist woman who also regarded MRAs as the enemy, until she heard their stories.
Once it's available again you will notice that in the latter, the focus is on actually helping men. Thing like the male domestic abuse shelter, Terry Cruz joining the #metoo movement, discussion of toxic masculinity and how it fucks up men+how to overcome the damage it did. All of that is good stuff, necessary and compatible/part of the feminist lens onto the world, figuring out how the traditional view on masculinity (stoic, unfeeling rocks that only want sex and power) fucks men in similar way as it does women.
Now, when you check out https://old.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/, you will notice that they also do that to some degree, but they seem to be mainly obsessed with pointing out women's hypocrisy, shutting down feminism, playing bullshit evopsych games etc. Basically, anti-feminism as a way to continue doing things that hurt the bulk of men, with the promise that if they try hard enough they will be the winners.
Also, before this gets flagged as well, come on guys, just engage. My statement is clear: feminist MRA which recognizes men getting fucked doesn't mean women are doing the fucking and wants to change our social structure to the benefit of both gender roles (or dissolve them)=> good. Reactionary MRA which doesn't actually care that much about helping men and more about shutting down women's rights movements=> bad. If you are a conservative that disagrees with e.g. abolition of gender but agree that men should not have to real men and that women are not fact out to manipulate all men into doing the work for them (something r/theredpill has in their sidebar: https://dontmarry.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/the_manipulate...) then you are part of the feminist MRA crowd, not the anti-feminist one. And if you feel I am being uncharitable, come at me, I have sources and am always up for a good debate with strangers on the internet :-)
That documentary I mentioned, The Red Pill (which is not related to the reddit sub), faced a lot of opposition from feminists and screenings were cancelled because of it.
Affirmative action in Swedish universities ended because feminists were opposed to the fact that affirmative action was helping men (who are vastly underrepresented in Swedish universities). The education minister, from a party that has traditionally supported feminism and affirmative action, said: "The education system should open doors -- not slam them in the face of motivated young women". The message is clear: equality for women, but not for men.
The infamous Dear Colleague policy for handling sexual assault allegations on campus blatantly ignored the rights of men, and suffered many defeats in court, but continued to be popular with feminists until the "non-feminist" MRAs ended it.
I looked at the other subbreddit you mentioned, MensLib, a few times before it was locked down, and I never saw them opposing feminist policies that hurt men.
I'm willing to engage with you if you're willing to move past attributing all good things and only good things to feminism and slandering anyone who opposes feminist overreach. If you can't acknowledge that feminists, like any other special interest group, sometimes advocate their own interests at the expense of others, you've deified them in a completely unwarranted way.
(Also, the Reddit sub TheRedPill is not an MRA sub and doesn't claim to be; it's a sub advocating a "sexual strategy" and their introduction clearly says "I'm not here to parade the concepts of Men's Rights". It's not related to the film I mentioned and has nothing to do with this discussion. I honestly don't know why you brought it up, except perhaps in another attempt to slander MRAs.)
Ultimately the issue is that year after year, Australia has suffered the worst droughts and heatwaves ever experienced. The climate is...warmer.
It doesn’t really matter what else happened, the conditions are badly exacerbated by the climate emergency.
Dry wood and foliage burns easily, that’s what’s happened.
When working on a purely scientific level one should also allow to check assumptions. Otherwise science would degrade into mysticism. At the same time it is in the nature of science to take previous results into account, especially if those have been peer-reviewed and find a wide range of consensus, so more effort can be put into research that is based on that.
On the other hand Scott Morrison is a politician and not a scientist so he has an obligation to base his decisions on public will and take research results into account. He should not do research as a Prime Minister. A lot of modern research is based on probabilities, in the world of politics this translates to risks. In the startup world people are somehow obliged to take high risks, on the other hand governments must keep risks low.
It’s a sort of hapless denial / self-consistency thing they’ve trapped themselves in, to the point that the subject of climate change is taboo, and so is any adjustment to policy that would respond to it. It might not be in HN memory, but the guy who is currently PM came into the House cuddling a lump of coal not long ago.
The factors driving these fires are of course manifold, but the warming climate is making most of them worse. Fire seasons are longer, the seasons when it’s safe to conduct fuel reduction burns are shorter. Rainfall is scarcer, winds are stronger and hotter. We’ve just had the four hottest days on record in the last week.
But anything that might address those factors is climate-adjacent, and even risk-mitigation strategies can’t be discussed. The extremely permissive land clearing policies stay [1], the ruinous water management for the Murray-Darling river system that allows cotton farmers to pay peppercorn-rent for practically unlimited water while downstream towns run dry stays, firefighting resources are cut and / or left to volunteer crews.
It’s pretty outrageous to refuse to acknowlege the major driver of severe fire conditions and try to blame flaming horse shit instead. Or comical, I don’t know any more.
[1] Counterintuitively, clearing is worsening fire conditions https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/to-redu...
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/scientists-say-the-nsw-mega-fire...
Will they? Many of them won't live to see the worst effects. And I can't help but think one driving force for them is simply selfishness: if the problem doesn't affect you personally it's oh so easy to just ignore it.
There have already been deaths from this event and many people are suffering from the heatwave and smoke inhalation. Even major sporting events have been cancelled.
I would say this has exploded into somewhat of a political crisis for the current Australian government. I would say they’re were hoping to see out their careers before shit got this real. Again probably thinking the worst is a long way away; However; Here we are it is worse than predicted.
The older generation are not missing out at all, they’re involved now.
If you’re under 80-90, you’re like going to have a pretty miserable ten-twenty years ahead.
Have to confess this is the point I find most difficult to understand, as it seems obvious it will affect everyone, regardless of income, but most especially the young and future generations. Parents generally want theirs kids and grandkids to have a better life than they did, not worse...
Take coral reefs for example, they are a massive self-interested survival mechanism that over a very long period co-opted some part of of the ocean floor near costs, largely existing as feeding grounds of countless exotic species who uniquely benefit from the arrangement. An arrangement which wouldn't normally be there without massive manipulation of the environment by millions of different fish and plant species.
Then we have humans who by some random luck of the draw are capable of mass exploitation of resources, often at the detriment to the environment but largely until recent times in very sustainable way.
Humans didn't choose the terms of the survival game which we were given for our own short existence and there's a billions other planets out there which are 'pristine' in an idealistic environmentalist perspective.
Our responsibility we give to our own environment, which is a relatively modern phenomenon is interesting to consider in this context. It will always be largely our doing but also our decision to do something about it (or not). I don't mean to suggest any of this justifies the destruction of habitats and hurting our own long-term odds by over-consuming. But I still feel like this trillion-mile-high context is glossed over in many of these environmental diatribes and the endless drumbeat to protect it which we've all grown up with in modern times.
I'd guess, because in the end, it isn't really relevant.
Sustainability isn't really about living in some kind of partnership with nature, it's making sure that our exploitation of resources doesn't reach a point at which our species experiences dramatic loss.
We can't reasonably move to another planet. Barring breakthroughs in terraforming or the invention of FTL engines, we're stuck here. Which means we need to continue to live here for the foreseeable future, and we don't want to cross that tipping point and screw over the up-and-coming generations. We've become largely dependent on a series of things that won't be able to continue to exist in their current form.
We will continue to exploit and manipulate the natural world. We just need to change that manipulation so it can continue to persist. We're not talking about reducing our consumption of power - we instead talk about more efficient or less damaging ways to consume it.
I'd put that into the common knowledge pile.
It's a problem both caused by and solved by humanity. Which is why focusing on this part of the topic is largely irrelevant to the debate.
In that way, the context you mention is almost irrelevant, except as a recognition that life isn’t fair—we didn’t ask to be here, we didn’t plan for our level of foresight, and we couldn’t have known that building our economies around certain resources would lead to global catastrophe.
But, as you mentioned, these are the cards we have to play. We have to do the best we can with that. :-/
I believe the reason this isn’t discussed much is because it is assumed to be common knowledge.
The difficult assumption isn't that we have a stable ecosystem - we survive in a very broad range of ecosystems. The one that risks killing modern societies is the assumption that cheap and abundant energy is available. Sufficient energy could overcome any challenge.
Case in point: the age of cheap oil. Without that abundance in energy there would have been no crisis now, and we'd be looking at a much lower number of people on the planet.
If you want to change 'sufficient energy' to 'sufficient clean energy' then the needle will shift, but maybe not as far as you'd like: even then there is a limit as to how much energy we can get rid off once it has been used and turned into heat.
Claiming otherwise is fundamentally dishonest. "The instruments say our jet engines are overheating. Let's wait to be certain, instead of heading for the nearest airport. Who knows, it might be nothing!" Said nobody ever.
That elephant-in-the-room aside, this season is arguably less catastrophic than bushfires from the late 19th and early 20th century [0]. To date there are less deaths, less houses destroyed and the economic damage is uncertain. Even the area burned is not unprecedented; yet (Victoria in 1851 holds the record). This might be weather rather than climate - bushfires in Australia are not exactly a jaw dropping development and a once-in-a-generation fire happens about once every generation.
It would be wise to wait for the benefit of hindsight and not try to guess while a crisis is still unfolding. That is just a fast way to form bad conclusions.
That's why it worries me that scaling energy production is not getting the focus it needs. We don't need to reduce our energy needs and replace dirty sources of energy, rather we need to get at leas one magnitude of energy more & in a clean manner, to solve all our environmental issues.
Edit: some math https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
Please show any evidence that we are running out of energy.
It took 349,800 years for us to install a toilet. Constructing a pyramid took 346,000 years. Granted, the survivors of climate disaster will have the benefit of legacy technology, but surviving in these new conditions well enough to create a society capable of widescale adaptation of our current society's abilities will take several thousand years at best. As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day.
Ancient Rome had indoor plumbing. What they didn't have is an industrial manufacturing base or the scientific insight that would have made sanitation effective. Those innovations are definitely recent, and something we could lose in a generation or two.
That being said I find doom and gloom predictions of runaway greenhouse effects... problematic. After all, if this is possible and the earth has been much warmer, why hasn’t this happened already?
I just don’t believe we’re that close to a tipping point. Climate is complicated and the earth can’t have been livable for billions of years without some balancing factors, right?
Life on Earth will most likely exist after climate change but it won't be any of the life as we know it.
The stragglers, probably mostly primitives plus a bunch of rich bastards, will repopulate the Earth and pick up in what is left.
May I suggest looking back into the rich history of doomsaying? All the way back to Malthus who, even though he was wrong in his prediction of the planet being incapable of feeding more than a billion human beings, actually did touch upon the problem of overpopulation which is a larger threat than any of the ones subsequently dragged up by the latest crop of doomsayers.
To name a few causes more worthy of attention than the current CO₂ hysteria:
- Population growth. Malthus thought the planet could not feed more than 1 billion people. He was wrong, he failed to foresee the industrial revolution which makes it possible to feed 7 billion and has the potential to feed the 10 billion which is expected to be the number of humans reached before population starts to decline.
- That industrial revolution has given its blessings but it also came with the curse of large-scale environmental pollution. While these problems are being tackled in some parts of the world the same can unfortunately not be said about others.
- Population growth also leads to increased migration which has the potential to lead to increased conflicts which has the potential to lead to the undoing of many of the efforts currently put in the negation of the negative aspects of the industrial revolution. People at war have different priorities from those at peace. Just like with the doomsayers it makes sense to use history as a guide here. Genghis Khan (who, when seen in the percentage of the world population killed (estimates range from 5% to ~10%) still reigns supreme as the biggest killer of them all [1]) started a wave of migration which was felt all the way to the west and north of Europe with one displaced population on the move jostling for space with the next.
So, what can be done about these? The population growth will, bar the intervention of any catastrophic events, probably follow the predicted curve with the total world population reaching about 10 billion people somewhere in the 2100s. It took the west more than a century to realise than unbridled industrial growth and the accompanying pollution was a recipe for disaster, hopefully the now industrialising parts of the world will have learned this lesson well so they don't continue to make the same mistakes. Migration will lead to conflicts, this is probably unavoidable. It can only be hoped that these conflicts don't escalate too far.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_E...
Here's a good start on what Fascism is, the definition of the doctrine as declared by its originator, Benito Mussolini.
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/duce.html
More can be found in Britannica's article on the subject:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism
In short - and mostly from Britannica's definition, supported by Mussolini's words Fascism is characterised by an extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a 'Volksgemeinschaft' (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation.
Even shorter would be 'a militaristic nationalist dictatorial ideology which subjugates the individual for the (perceived) good of the nation'. It is such a close cousin to Communism and Islamism (and other similarly structured doctrines) that this short characterisation also applies to those ideologies.
The earth has been struck by at least one large rock resulting in mass extinctions. The planet recovered just fine along with the atmosphere, but there was significant change to the life left over.
I also believe Earth will be fine this time, and there is some balancing factor that will eventually correct the changes to the atmosphere, but we and the majority of life on the planet will have difficulty surviving in the interim period.
We are causing a rate of change that is very significant. Not unprecedented (e.g. asteroid impact) but daunting nonetheless.
But I also think that most of the people that would agree with that statement don’t actually act like they agree with it. If you honestly think we have “12 years left” (as a certain congresswoman has said) you would be doing things like stocking arms, getting ready to grow your own vegetables and husband livestock, figuring out how barter economies would work in this apocalypse that is, allegedly, around the corner.
Of course none of them are doing this.
There is little point in setting up to grow vegetables when civilization collapses and roving bands of armed thugs raid anyone who seems to have anything they want.
We will either avert disaster together, as a global society, or not at all. Growing vegetables is not a response. Do it anyway, if you like, just don't fool yourself that it improves your or anybody's chances.
We have two large-scale extinction events on record that may have been caused by or exacerbated by global warming: Tirassic-Jurassic Extinction event, and the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (more a series of small-scale extinction events than a single large one).
In world-scale timelines, humans haven't been around that long.
> I just don’t believe we’re that close to a tipping point. Climate is complicated and the earth can’t have been livable for billions of years without some balancing factors, right?
It wasn't. We've had many extinction level events. Humanity should be concerned about not becoming one.
At least that's what paleobiologist on a lecture I visited said. His appeal was: hold on to strict facts and take uncertainties into account. Don't hop on the doomsday wagon. We simply don't know enough about complexities of the climate.
In fact even the climate models of decades ago have turned out to be dead on.
There is no reason to believe the planet favors conditions we are used to, but our civilization depends on those conditions. Drive the planet to another norm, and civilization collapses, and billions starve. A minority survive and rebuild, and (who knows?) maybe learn something. In a thousand years, it will be as if nothing happened, except with a hell of a lot of species missing.
> There's no doubt we have impact, but it's not certain that it's the major driving force
Just false. There is no reasonable doubt that human activity is responsible for about 100% (could be less, could be more) of the current warming.
This is misleading. The rate of human injection of CO2 into the atmosphere has no analogue in the past, at least we've not found a similar excursion as yet. What effect this will have on the global climate system is inherently unpredictable, again, because we lack analogues from the past.
What we do know is that global climate state changes have occurred rapidly; indeed, the whole Pleistocene is distinct in that the global climate system seems to have been in a boundary state in which it flips, sometimes within 50 years, from cold to warm, or the reverse. So that can serve as an analogue for how the global climate system can respond when perturbed.
I say "have been" in the paragraph above because, in terms of atmospheric CO2 concentration, we've already exceeded any level observed during the Pleistocene. (And, not to belabor what I hope would be obvious by now, we have many lines of evidence that indicate with a high degree of certainty that it was human emission of CO2 in the last 150-200 years that has caused the spike in atmospheric concentrations.) Hence, researchers are looking to periods such as the Miocene and the Pliocene for a world that had continents in roughly the same configuration, but was much warmer, and, moreover, was warmer in a global pattern that fundamentally differs from that of the Pleistocene.
We also have paleo-analogues for the effects of large increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration, and those are: acidification of oceans, ocean basin wide anoxia, local (confined, for example, to a particular ocean basin, or to a given depth range in oceans) and global extinctions, and interruption of the global oceanic thermo-haline circulation system.
Another commenter stated that humans are as adaptable as roaches, and I'm afraid that this, too, may be a bit optimistic. In general, species resident at the highest trophic levels, with larger body sizes and habitat areal requirements, tend to be more vulnerable to change, and therefore to extinction, and thus tend to be much more ephemeral than smaller species in the fossil record.
Our ancestors did enough to balance out a natural decrease in temperature that should have happened. And that was without a global industrial system. So of course what we do will massively influence the system. Going “I don’t believe things will be bad” is basically the same as “I don’t believe in climate change”. Both are an excuse not to do anything.
Your beliefs matter not one tiny little bit. We either are, or we are not. If a large enough body of scientists in a field that is not my expertise appear to agree on something then I am going to believe them regardless of what I as a layperson in their field could come up with to say the opposite.
Yes, it is complicated. The earth hasn't been livable for 'billions of years', and enough little people like us doing things that have never been done before and such balancing factors as there are can be upset.
The Earth has many modes of existence, the current one is not a guaranteed one at all.
But as for the abruptness of these changes consider [1]:
> Each successively deeper ice layer represents a snapshot of Earth's climate history from the past, and together, the oxygen isotope record told a story of abrupt, millennial-scale climate shifts in air temperatures over Greenland between extremely cold stadial conditions and relatively mild interstadial periods during the last ice age (Figure 1) (Alley 2000, Alley et al. 2003). There are twenty-five of these distinct warming-cooling oscillations (Dansgaard 1984) which are now commonly referred to as Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, or D-O cycles. One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C
8-15C in "a matter of decades". So my point stands: we've had many abrupt climate changes, at least 15 in the last 100,000 years. So I remain skeptical that we're reaching some tipping point and we'll have anything approaching Venus-like runaway greenhouse effects.
As well as these predictions not really gelling with historical events, I find the level of alarmism to be generally unhelpful. I realize there's probably good intent here and I'm sure many genuinely believe these slarmist predictions but I also think some of it is motivated the desire to get people to act. I think this has the opposite effect. I mean, if you're screwed anyway, why not enjoy yourself?
[1]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...
The earth is cycling between hotter and colder temperatures. There used to be no ice on the poles.
Large changes to the environment kills lots of species and brings about many new ones.
[2019-11-27] Climate tipping points -- too risky to bet against. The growing threat of abrupt and irreversible climate changes must compel political and economic action on emissions.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0
"Politicians, economists and even some natural scientists have tended to assume that tipping points in the Earth system [Lenton TM et al. (2008) "Tipping elements in the Earth's climate system." Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA. 105: 1786-1793. https://www.pnas.org/content/105/6/1786] -- such as the loss of the Amazon rainforest or the West Antarctic ice sheet -- are of low probability and little understood. Yet evidence is mounting that these events could be more likely than was thought, have high impacts and are interconnected across different biophysical systems, potentially committing the world to long-term irreversible changes.
"Here we summarize evidence on the threat of exceeding tipping points, identify knowledge gaps and suggest how these should be plugged. We explore the effects of such large-scale changes, how quickly they might unfold and whether we still have any control over them.
"In our view, the consideration of tipping points helps to define that we are in a climate emergency and strengthens this year's chorus of calls for urgent climate action -- from schoolchildren to scientists, cities and countries. ..."
Several governments make the political decision in favour for short-term benefits, just like they do for other issues. They do not want to risk having today a recession because the voters vote for a good economy now.
Is long-term planning incompatible with democratic elections?
Maybe, but the alternative doesn't necessarily seem to work either. China has an awful environmental record as well.
It seems that humans are incompatible with long term planning for things that extend beyond our lifetimes.
But no-one argues the fact that the average global temp has increased dramatically, compared to the previous thousands of years, in the last 100 years. That's lightening fast on a geologic scale, but still pretty slow on a human scale.
My point is: don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because some people overstated the case doesn't mean it's all bunk.
Why can't governments stop all Chinese imports until the get in line, instead of banning plastic straws?
That's the real question no one asks.
It's interesting to see that there are several countries that emit more per capita than the USA, including Canada and Australia. Maybe the USA should stop trading with those countries?
The optimal place to focus effort is wherever a marginal unit of effort has the most impact. I’m not aware of any research that estimates that, and while I won’t be surprised if some cities in China are more important targets of effort than some cities in the USA, I’d also expect a unit of intervention in a randomly selected city in the USA to be more effective than “the same”[0] intervention in a randomly selected city in China.
[0] adjusted for exchange rates, etc.
How is that metric useful in any way, besides deceiving people and accuse other countries of being the bad guys?
It's industry which pollutes, not people. That's why it's so pointless to blame plastic straws and other silly things like that.
Maybe if we stopped buying things from communist China things would go better.
It should be calculated by indirect impact per human, per country, instead of where it is made.
That's because the US, Europe, Japan, etc sent their polluting manufacturing to china for decades. Go read about the US-China detente in the 60s/70s.
> Why can't governments stop all Chinese imports until the get in line, instead of banning plastic straws?
Because "governments" sent manufacturing/pollution to china decades ago so that the pollution is in china and not in the US, Europe, Japan, etc and they get cheap imports.
> That's the real question no one asks.
No. That is the anti-china talking point peddled all over social media by dedicated group of "people/bots/etc".
Sure, I guess china could stop polluting. But then it would mean that the pollution would be in the US, Europe, Japan, etc like in the 1900s.
Did you know that China has been one of the biggest sources of plastics in the ocean? Do you know why? Because most of the world sends/sent their garbage to china to "recycle".
We can blame "china", but it is we who are producing the garbage and it is we who are consuming so much and creating so much pollution in china. Pollution in china is why london, paris, ny, pittsburgh, LA, etc aren't covered in smog and the rivers aren't filled with toxic slime.
If they were—and if they didn't steal IP from Western companies—their products would be as expensive as ours.
Lastly, you could very well be one of those "dedicated group of "people/bots/etc"." that you're talking about. I see plenty of weird comments defending China here on HN whenever it's mentioned.