The Laptev Sea hasn't frozen
economist.com
economist.com
We're all in some form of climate denial right now. Even if you are able to acknowledge that climate change is happening, you likely aren't being realistic about how unavoidable its impacts are, or the full magnitude of those impacts.
I still see people talking about life in 150 years as if it will be a simple continuation of the "progress" we've seen in the last 150, completely oblivious to the way that progress was achieved and the inevitably and unavoidable consequences of it.
Good.
When scientists and politicians publicize scary, doomsday numbers that aren't ever realized, the public's natural response is to be more critical of the things those people say in the future. That sort of thing results in climate deniers, anti-vaxers, anti-maskers, and a whole slew of conspiracy theories.
If you want people to take climate change seriously, you need to publish conservative numbers and ring the bell when things end up worse than you predicted. Include a word of caution that things could be worse when you publish the conservative numbers, but don't start out with the worst-case scenario if you want to be taken seriously in the future.
Of course you can be too conservative with your predictions, but I don't see a lot of that except as a knee-jerk reaction to the overly-alarmist predictions.
The truth is that most (Western) people simply don’t care that much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Ice-fre...
> Many scientists have attempted to estimate when the Arctic will be "ice-free". Professor Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge is among these scientists; Wadhams in 2014 predicted that by 2020 "summer sea ice to disappear," Wadhams and several others have noted that climate model predictions have been overly conservative regarding sea ice decline. A 2013 paper suggested that models commonly underestimate the solar radiation absorption characteristics of wildfire soot. In 2007, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Naval Postgraduate School, California, predicted removal of summer ice by 2013; subsequently, in 2013, Maslowski predicted 2016 ±3 years.
Looks to me like there have been plenty of overly-alarming predictions about a Blue Ocean Event over the last two decades.
You actually expect them to nail it down to the year? lol
The last prediction from that quote was made in 2013 and predicted 2016 +/- 3 years.
Inaccuracies aren't the issue here. The problem is that well-intentioned scientists and politicians are making overly-alarming predictions that keep eroding the populations trust when they keep failing to come true. How do you convince someone to believe you when you say climate change is a real, serious, and immediate threat when they have been lied to about the subject over and over again?
Maybe it's too slow but the end is near for fossil fuels, it's either because humans will end up extinct if we keep burning it at the current rate or because it's not economically competitive anymore.
As corrupt and as rotten as politics is, there is a limit to how far you can push for coal and fracking before it just becomes silly.
That'll happen anyway with carbon taxes. Or at least it'll cost a lot more and many people will do less of it. Until we have carbon taxes, you could choose to do it voluntarily to help out.
> pave forests with solar panels
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that.
> What happened to nuclear
Expensive and difficult to build. But if you like it, France, the UK and India are still doing it. And you're always free to advocate for it. "They oppose nuclear" isn't a great reason to stop working with people on solving the problem of climate change. Why be so prescriptive in solutions by saying "nukes or bust"?
> geoengineering
You mean the thing that's already gotten us into this mess?
> fair revenue-neutral carbon taxes
Cheers to that. A lot of the people you dislike politically support those. Work with them.
Preventing climate change from getting worse requires coordinated action at the national and international levels. There are many proposed solutions, but so far none of them have been implemented and it's unclear our government systems are sophisticated enough to do so, to the detriment of us all.
Incidentally, I think the primary driver of state-level bans on single use plastic straws was to reduce plastic waste, especially in the oceans.
For example, in the 50s and 60s we had rapidly rising levels of smog and other particulate matter pollution in the US, and scientists warned that bad things would happen if we didn't get this under control.
We did get it under control, and indeed massively reduced it, and the bad things did not come to pass.
And now, bringing up those predictions from back then and saying that since they did not come to pass we shouldn't worry about current predictions on climate change or do anything about them is a staple of climate change denial arguments.
Checked Asthma rates lately in the United States? 1 in 8? Higher? That is not normal, and indeed a "bad thing".
Isn't that basically saying "just pray that it's not that bad, and that you can react fast enough if it is bad"?
This seems to give up on any rational attempt at handling risk solely because you're giving in to the least rational instincts of the herd...
Yes, people are bad at dealing with probability. No, that doesn't mean that we (and especially leaders) don't have a responsibility to do better.
No. It's basically saying "do not erode the public's trust in you by making frightening predictions that probably wont come true".
> Yes, people are bad at dealing with probability.
I rarely see climate change projections tempered by probability. I'd be much less concerned about overly-alarming predictions if they were published with an associated probability and margin of error.
> I rarely see climate change projections tempered by probability.
Honestly, if this is true, then it seems like the only thing you have ever read about climate are popular press articles. The error bars on every single prediction are on every graph or study that climate scientists produce. Mean sensitivity itself still has large error bars, but beyond that the amount of emissions we produce is inherently unpredictable. It is not possible for a climate scientist to say with any certainty how much coal we are going to be burning in 40 years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm
> Warming expert: Only decade left to act in time (2006)
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna14834318
> (1989) A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
> He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
At least to me it seems the greenhouse effect now is out of human control. I do not see mankind preventing it from raising much higher, for years to come, before we'll do anything about it.
The greenhouse effect is totally human controllable. You don't even need to stop using fossil fuels or resort to absurdities like industrial carbon sequestration. Geoengineering used to be a thing; if climatologists believed in their models, they'd be able to come up with a solution that works. Painting Australia white, pumping sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere; whatever. Someone could at least make a suggestion which doesn't involve everyone living in a yurt and eating gruel. One becomes suspicious people whose only solution is the latter are millenarian cultists rather than science minded.
> Those articles may still prove to be correct.
The very article you link points out that scientific consensus is 2040-2100, and the author of the paper is quoted as saying that, because of the variance in his own model, 2030 is a more reasonable estimate.
> the other two
Refer to time of action, not time of consequence. There's a ~30-40 year delay between greenhouse gas emissions and fully realized warming. A ton of gas released today doesn't cause warming tomorrow. Because these targets haven't been met, even if all emissions stopped today, enough ice would melt over the next century that the Solomons, Marshalls, Maldives, and other low-lying island nations will be swamped.
>> governments must adopt an alternative scenario to keep carbon dioxide emission growth in check and limit the increase in global temperatures to 1 degree Celsius
>> If the world continues with a “business as usual” scenario ... temperatures will rise by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius
> https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna14834318
That's reality, inevitable 2°C raise even if humanity left planet today, 4°C–5°C raise with a “business as usual” scenario.
> Many scientists have attempted to estimate when the Arctic will be "ice-free". Professor Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge is among these scientists; Wadhams in 2014 predicted that by 2020 "summer sea ice to disappear," Wadhams and several others have noted that climate model predictions have been overly conservative regarding sea ice decline. A 2013 paper suggested that models commonly underestimate the solar radiation absorption characteristics of wildfire soot. In 2007, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Naval Postgraduate School, California, predicted removal of summer ice by 2013; subsequently, in 2013, Maslowski predicted 2016 ±3 years.
If only people would devote half as much energy to debunking denialists as they do scolding 'alarmists'.
Back when I was in high school, the eco-panic 10 year prediction was that oil would run out and the world economy would collapse. It didn't. I see some of my classmates on facebook from time to time. They remembered this instance of crying wolf and updated their priors accordingly. Now they ignore legitimate climate worries. It's unfortunate.
If the current trend continues and nothing done by 2030 the repercussions will be so severe to the environment they threaten future organized human existence.
So basically we still have time to avoid the worst outcome, the loss of the ability for organized human existence. Not that we will all be dead by then.
Apparently scientists had been seeing temperatures dropping for quite some time. (I also remember winters having more snow than they do now).
Later all that changed to global warming.
No, not good.
Just because it will make people take climate change seriously, this is not, by any measure, good. It's a dangerous and irreversible change and if most people want to deny climate change or downplay it, it shouldn't take a catastrophe to change their minds. The data is there, just because people find the prospect of awful things happening in 2030 not scary enough, doesn't mean we should be happy these things will happen sooner. COVID probably changed a lot of people's minds on healthcare and politics. Would we classify that as 'good' as well?
And why do you think I'd be happy if bad things happen sooner?
Imagine an aviation engineer being "too conservative" with potential dangers (i.e., accept too much risk) because if you raise an alarm and it turns out to be not as bad as predicted, you will have cost the company $$$ and hurt your career. Would you call that a good thing?
Fundamental attribution error tempts you into believing that it's OK to lie for a good reason. Others see it differently.
Those are not reasonable comparisons. Climate change predictions amount to milestones on our slow journey to oblivion. Ideally we want to be spot-on with all our predictions, but being on the "too conservative" side doesn't immediately put human lives at risk.
"The earth goes through natural warming and cooling cycles."
"This year has been abnormally cold."
"They said X thing was going to happen years ago, but it still hasn't."
It's hard enough to address these legitimate doubts without creating even more ourselves.
It should also be acknowledged - perhaps first and foremost - that we are also all in a very real form of climate ignorance. Being "realistic" about the impact of climate change requires believing our best science as it stands today, but also understanding that the science is incomplete and certainly wrong in various large and small ways.
Simply put, if climate denial leads to inaction, then that's the bigger problem. Also, climate change is an existential threat, the degree and vigor we use to respond to it should definitely be strong. Debating over which models are more accurate or not is mostly a waste of time.
"What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"
We should definitely be arriving towards decarbonization, but the reality is that there are other priorities. Climate change is a problem the world is facing, along with malaria, poverty, conflict and more. We absolutely should not prioritize getting to zero emissions above all else. Bombing coal plants in other countries would make great strides towards getting to zero emissions, but surely you agree that such efforts go too far.
> Current climate policies: projected warming of 2.8 to 3.2°C by 2100 based on current implemented climate policies;
> No climate policies: projected future emissions if no climate policies were implemented; this would result in an estimated 4.1 to 4.8°C warming by 2100
What may be an average of two degrees Celsius might be four or five on land and one and a half on water.
[0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-does-land-warm-up...
And that is generally trotted out as an argument that we should ignore the facts. If it "sounds" bad to work towards the most accurate understanding of an issue, we should be striving to change that bias, not surrender to it. Otherwise we veer towards dogmatic interpretations that inevitably become false or contradictory, which I would argue is ultimately a larger deterrent to swaying hearts and minds.
Nobody is making that argument. The issue is that the most accurate understanding of an issue can not be realized until the issue is fully actualized. In other words, if we wait for the global atmospheric temp to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius to ensure our accuracy, it is far too late to do anything about it.
Uncertainty exists, yes, but that uncertainty is mostly in timescales and consequences of environmental outcomes, not the environmental outcomes themselves.
Having said that, I think that even the most optimistic interpretations of climate change are compelling enough to warrant immediate and dramatic action. But we should all strive for the most accurate interpretations of the science, which means being flexible and not dogmatic.
It's going to be real bad. REAL bad. All the evidence points towards that. Most people are in denial about how bad it's going to be.
Many people will have kids because that's all they can do with their lives and the kids won't get the (easy) chance to become a great scientist, leader or similar. It's sad, many children will be subject to completely idiotic parents and so much potential will be lost.
If everyone who was worried about climate change made their contribution by not having kids, then the next generation is just going to be all kids raised by climate deniers. If anyone should be having kids, it should be the ones who are worried about the future!
I don't plan to have children anyway, but I've concluded for instance but there's no point in making sacrifices today in the service of enjoying a comfortable retirement, because by that point western society will no longer be any fit state to provide for a conventional "life of leisure" retirement.
In general, catastrophe has to happen and impact many people first before they acknowledge the danger (and then move to Facebook to complain about politics not warning them).
People living in mild latitudes hear about the warming but experience unusually cold summers and winters due to phenomena like polar vortex disruption[0]; the claim may be hard to take at face value.
Warming in longer term if left unchecked, sure, but “climate destabilization” could be a more fitting term for the time being.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Polar_v...
See https://xkcd.com/1321/ for how what we call unusually cold today used to be normal.
Also just attributing climate change as the root of every problem.
Extra hot summer? Climate Change.
Extra cold winter? Climate Change.
Unusually moderate summer? Climate Change.
Unusually moderate winter? Climate Change.
More than usual wildfires/tornadoes/hurricanes/blizzards? Climate Change.
Insect apocalypse? Climate Change.
Sharks washing up on the beach stabbed by sword fish? Climate Change.
It puts you in denial when literally every issue is attributed to climate change.
It's like this board I worked on that only had 128 MB RAM. We were very tight on memory. Anytime an unexplained issue came up, low RAM was blamed by default even if it turned out later not to be the root cause.
Do you not see the logical connection? How if global homeostasis system that regulates temperatures and weather across the entire globe suddenly destabilizes, you start to see changes in things like local temperature, weather etc?
How is that unreasonable? What kind of cause are you looking for exactly? That it's done by aliens?
Scientists have published hundreds of thousands of pages of specific RCA for specific things.
Ocean acidification is really scary (and fast) on its own but it's just one out of many apocalyptic problems we face.
Then I hang out with my four year old. She doesn’t understand racism, politics or climate. But she knows that she really likes everyone, respects others pronouns and likes sharing what she has.
There’s hope. As cynical as I am, there is hope. And the fact that you feel so strongly fills me with as much hope as watching my little one learn about the fucked up planet she’s inheriting.
Why can't we just look at each other and imagine the child that person once was, then maybe we'd care more about others like your 4 year old does.
There's hope because 4 year olds aren't racist and "respect pronouns"? I hate to break it to you, but no children are born racist and they will believe and copy whatever you tell them whether it's religion, racism or alternative pronouns. None of this puts food on the table, though, does it?
My (privileged) five-year-old has emotional tools that I didn’t have until I was 25.
I do think we’re generally getting better at raising empathetic kids. It’s not uniform, but it’s better.
To put this in perspective: Hitler was once a sweet 4 year old. Stalin was one too. Mao? Yup. Putin? Sure he was. Everyone on this planet was once that sweet 4 year old not grasping any of what you mention. And yet, look where we are.
Your despair is probably a result of being fed emotionally manipulative stories from the news and social media for too long. The real world has never been better, and it hasn't stopped improving. Try looking at some of Bill Gates's writing for inspiration. That's somebody who's not afraid to see the bright side of life while not ignoring the dark.
okay ... are you ready?
> She doesn’t understand racism
give her and her friends blue t-shirts and an equal number of other kids red t-shirts. do this for several weeks. lo and behold the basis of racism unfold.
racism is an inherent human feature which can only be overcome by education. something adults have to provide for children.
I disagree. We can accept that we have a feeling of impossibility and still continue engaging in behaviors we predict to have a more positive outcome than any others. After all, have you ever been wrong? I have.
Occasionally the bulk of our actions create emergent shifts. It seems we will have to make adjustments and there may well be horrid consequences but the severity of those remains under our adjustment.
I'm surprised to read this on Hacker News, one of the homes of "impossible" successes.
You could try participating in politics! It's not exactly fun, but it's a lot better than dying.
In response to a sister comment, realistically, to address climate change, we would need to:
- build roughly 300 GWh of grid storage worldwide, lithium iron phosphate seems a leading contender although sodium-[sulfur|nickel] has the obvious abundance advantage
- replace gas heating systems with heat pumps and district (waste) heating
- implement carbon capture at all steel/concrete production plants (or less likely use low-carbon processes)
- replace fueled vehicle use (most of which is personal cars) with electric
- build some amount of non-polluting power stations, I'm not sure what exactly but by now it's the easiest part
- I'm not sure exactly but maybe you can replace torch manufacturing with electric arcs and lasers or something?
- also some carbon capture unfortunately probably the crushed olivine thing I'd guess
Someone's probably made a projection for the cost of this but it's useless with any shift of this magnitude.
> Nobody has a realistic plan for addressing climate change.
A lot of us are aware that there are all sorts of self-reinforcing feedback loops that we have not found yet, and those will definitely influence the events. But models cannot account for hypotheticals.
This is nonsense, food production on a per-capita basis is increasing and population is leveling off.
Things are just starting to change now. Our food production levels are the result of previous efforts. Not future efforts dealing with future changes.
That's what we're worried about, not "the current steady state trend is currently going up, it's all fine!"
1. First, you are correct, the Earth was much hotter in the past, and I haven't seen anything convincing that global warming will lead to a fundamental "runaway greenhouse" effect a la Venus that makes life as we know it on Earth unsustainable.
2. That said, a huge climate change in a relatively short amount of time could easily lead the the deaths of billions of people, with a B. One third of the human population lives within 60 miles of the coast. Rising temperatures will lead to huge portions of the planet that are currently densely populated that will no longer support humans. The resulting migrations, "resource wars", and overall increase in extreme weather events (more hurricanes, more droughts, more floods) will lead to death and misery to a huge portion of humanity.
And regardless, if you think moving a third of humanity to vastly different lands will be hunky dory smooth sailing, you should study history.
This does not seem likely, the bar for a region being "unable to support humans" is very high. People already live in cities that need to support themselves with food from elsewhere, and worldwide calorie production per capita is increasing.
A huge portion of our farming is currently unsustainable. Yes, we are producing more right now, but this production is on a clock. Even without any change in climate we are screwed. Look at how many places in the world are currently undergoing water system collapse. California, a huge crop producing state, has areas that have sunk nearly 30 meters because of pumping too much water. Those same areas are highly dependant on bringing in water from long distances away. Now add unstable weather patterns the the propensity for longer droughts and tell me what you think will happen?
We are not dealing with a climate change problem. We are dealing with
A long term water supply problem
A soil salinization over vast areas problem
A soil decarbonization problem over vast areas
Increasing temperatures that are pushing our current high yield crops to their limit problem
A globalized transportation system that will quickly spread crop diseases problem
Humanity is playing russian roulette with these issues. We will get a perfect storm one of these years, for example across the midwest US being hit by a drought and crop rust and we could see a near complete failure of our corn harvest. We are talking about the potential loss of 750 million tons of calories that will rock the world to its foundations.
Huge swaths of the globe will experience fatal web bulb temperatures multiple times a year by the end of the century. Very clearly this makes a region "unable to support humans".
An example of a climate effect that nobody mentioned is ocean acidification. It turned out that if you add CO2 to water, you get carbonic acid. This melts calcium carbonate at the bottom of the sea. The buffering makes the pH of the oceans relatively constant no matter what CO2 levels happen to be.
Unfortunately that buffering takes place on the order of thousands of years. Which is fine when CO2 slowly increases in level. But when it rises suddenly, as it is doing right now, the oceans turn into a mild acid. Mild, that is, except for corals and shellfish whose shells dissolve. And anything that depends on them. Which, given how ecosystems connect, is pretty much everything in the ocean.
Already, 3/4 of coral reefs in the world have experienced bleaching event. Similarly mass die-offs of shellfish have been widely reported in fisheries. Future projections are..bleak.
All of this from a level of change that would have been fine if it was spread over 10,000 years rather than 100.
Something like 40% of humans worldwide rely on fish as their primary source of protein. What happens when there's no habitat to support that food source? Mass disruptions and migrations.
So yes, the earth was warmer before, but that warming happened over geologic timeframes that allowed ecosystems to adapt and change. 100 years is long on human timescales, but it's an instantaneous disruption on geologic timescales.
And despite the convenience of your neighborhood supermarket, we are not that detached from our ecosystems. The empty shelves at the start of covid should have been a wakeup call that our supply systems are still interconnected.
If we didn't need to eat, we wouldn't be worried very much about global warming. I do need to eat, though, and I'd rather avoid having to eat global warming deniers when things get rough.
The earth was warmer in the past, but it also didn't support planet-scale agriculture of hyper-specialized, high-yield grains that are expected to feed 8+ billion people.
Moving our agriculture north doesn't work either, because of the poor quality of soil in what is currently the tundra/taiga.
If you have a handful of magic beans that will grow a magic beanstalk, that will be resistant to the temperature and weather and soil changes caused by global warming, sure, by all means, share it with us, and I'll stop worrying. We don't have that handful, though, and I'm not keen on hope-based planning.
And this is assuming much at all happens. I've been watching this issue for over 30 years and no longer believe they can predict with much accuracy at all. I was quite an alarmist in 1990 but not any more.
Imagine writing a program to model this. With the interrelated variables (more CO2 means plants grow faster which uptakes more CO2. More heat means more evaporation, more small cloud cover, which means less heat. Industrial output means more air particles etc etc), the flux and all the various unknown factors (what will the energy output from the sun be in 50 years?). You mess up one small thing or make a bad assumption and it blows up. I honestly don't know how any rational person has much faith in the granular predictive power of this at all if they stop and think about it for a bit. Models are good to see how stuff works. Models at this scale to predict? Highly doubt it.
That being said, man does influence the climate to an extent it is clear. We should be cleaner. We should get off fossil fuels in an orderly fashion as they are filthy anyway. But, we don't have "12 years left to do something!". That is and always has been complete bullshit.
It's most especially annoying to hear the latest iteration of projections based on tenuous models touted as "fact" and anyone who doesn't believe is some kind of conspiracy theorist. The continual stream of failed predictions from the doom promoters is reason enough to be suspicious. The earth warms and cools. With or without us.
Finally, to all the 20 somethings turning red and mashing downvote right now, you will live long enough to see. In 30 years things will not be significantly different. Florida will still be there. There will be no mass climate migrations. The polar ice caps will still be there. There won't be a huge increase in anomalous weather events. But there will probably still be a loud group of people proclaiming "We only have 10 years to DO SOMETHING!".
It's happened numerous times before.
Consider the impact of ecosystem-related consequences others mentioned on habitability and food production. Once mass migrations and food shortages start, and starving migrants show up at the borders of higher-latitude/elevation countries in amounts orders of magnitude larger than before, what do you think will happen? Will these countries, worrying about how to feed their own citizens as crops fail due to weather anomalies, open up the borders and accept doubling their population? Will the migrants just accept being refused to enter? In the meantime, powers will be jockeying for mining rights of newly-unfrozen, but still not habitable lands. With all that pressure mounting, how long it'll take until someone starts shooting, someone else shoots back, and we'll have a WW3 on our hands?
If climate situation degrades fast enough, we'll wipe ourselves out way before the changing weather does.
1.5 million people emigrated out of a population of around 8 million.
"Of the more than 100,000 Irish that sailed to Canada in 1847, an estimated one out of five died from disease and malnutrition, including over 5,000 at Grosse Isle, Quebec, an island in the Saint Lawrence River used to quarantine ships near Quebec City. Overcrowded, poorly maintained, and badly provisioned vessels known as coffin ships sailed from small, unregulated harbours in the West of Ireland in contravention of British safety requirements, and mortality rates were high."
So some of them travelled thousands of miles while literally starving.
You can look at the map at https://www.thirteen.org/dutchny/interactives/interactive-ma... to see how much land was added. Most of lower Manhattan is built on what was ocean in 1609.
It's an engineering problem, and NYC can afford to solve it.
We weren't here then
To take your example from the gold smithing era. The earth warmed from -.5 -> +.6 degrees over the course of about 4000 years. We've warmed that much in the last 100 years.
Solutions that require the cooperation of the entire human race will never work, yet that is what keeps being pushed upon us.
The only real thing that can save us is for a small group to come up with some kind of technology that can make sweeping changes on a massive geological scale and ultimately reverse global warming without humanity having to do anything.
People aren’t going to change their lifestyles to save the world. Many people don’t even change their lifestyles to save themselves when it becomes medically necessary.
Personally, I’ve come to accept this is the end. If I must die to global warming, at least it will be an interesting death, I could have been shot and killed by a mugger or killed in a car crash instead.
Not to prove the OP's point about climate change denial. But that's overly pessimistic.
Climate change is a slow motion train wreck. Things will slowly, steadily, exponentially get worse. But you probably won't be alive to notice the worst of it. 200 years from now, things will look extremely different. And we'll be lucky if we've managed to ride through all the changes and migrations and potentially famines without starting a dreadful war and blowing ourselves up with these delightful world-ending stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
I'm really starting to think the answer to the Fermi paradox is there's a great filter and it lies in front of us. Technological civilizations wipe themselves out because they unlock powerful technologies before developing the wisdom to control them.
Happy Thursday everyone!
USA and Australia are the only two developed nations that continue to deny climate change. The entire world signed the Paris Agreement.
While the USA slowly is slowly led into international irrelevance by the Republican Party, China just joined South Korea, and Japan in pledging to be carbon neutral by 2050.
> While the USA slowly is slowly led into international irrelevance by the Republican Party
Anti-US, Anti-Republican bias is becoming very tiresome.
Or, you know, fixing the US political process so that a handful of ideologues aren't in a position to ignore popular sentiment and derail even the mildest form of action.
Do you have a suggestion for how to do this?
Don't get excited yet. Roving bands of raiders is still a potential outcome of climate change.
Try and find a pay phone in 2020. In 1980 they were everywhere.
The human race cooperates via market mechanisms. Those need to adjust to reflect the costs of global warming.
1. Marine cloud brightening can be accomplished with, essentially, salt water jets on the back of container ships.
2. Selective iron fertilization has, additionally, positive ecological effects that need to be understood.
3. The lofting of sulfer dioxide into the upper atmosphere is not that expensive. On the order of 10 billion per year. We need to start experimenting to learn the dangers and adapt.
We don't want to be in a place where we have to do this in an emergency. We need to more fully understand the science of it in less dramatic ways.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/climate/climate-change-ge...
[1] https://www.silverlining.ngo/safe-climate-research-initiativ...
[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/20/131449/the-us-go...
> If you’re Bangladeshi, and you’re standing up to your knees in water and starving at the same time, when you want to geoengineer is right now–“and I don’t care about your reservations, scientific or otherwise. I don’t care that it still feels okay in Canada–we want this fixed now.”
> Perfectly reasonable position, I would say, but a possible source of international conflict of a very grave order.
> I talked–actually, the head of the Bangladesh Institute of Strategic Studies about this (you didn’t even know that existed, did you?). Well, there is one, it’s quite serious–run by a General, bright guy. I said, “have you heard about geoengineering?” and he smiled–seraphically–and he said, “Mmm. Yes. Your question?”
> And I asked the question, “Do you think that this is something the Bangladesh government might want to do a little bit, before, let’s say, the US government or the Chinese government?”
> He said, “yes it has crossed our minds.”–and then he stopped talking.
~ https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo...
For the past 20 years western liberals have entered into the collective delusion that it is possible to reduce global GHG outputs to a level where warming will stop or reverse.
This should be obvious to anyone who has ever made a personal sacrifice for a cause and tried to convince others to as well. I’m vegetarian, and convincing even the most cute animal loving people to reduce consumption (forget stopping entirely) is shockingly hard to do. Convincing the entire world to replace fossil fuels was never going to happen.
The tragedy here is that the only trans-national political movement seriously concerned about this problem insists on directing all investment and attention away from the only viable solutions to the problem they care so deeply about.
Can you imagine if there were across-the-board actual enforcement in place for any of those measures, what it would have looked like? And that was an acute event, not something that's slowly boiling the frog.
I'm sure everyone's received a delivery of a box within a box.
But the vision seems cool. The battery doesn't have to be big. As long as it can charge fast, and is long lived, it can keep delivering power & energy, coming back down, charging, & doing it again. Persistence.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r6CPFJ1AX1ZULacguTf6...
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alexander+bell+kites&t=ffcm&atb=v6...
[2] https://newatlas.com/magenn-mars-floating-wind-generator/111...
Ask Europeans how much fun it is to have civil wars in the neighbourhood.
It's absolutely no trouble until it spills over the border into your country.
The moment you choose to close your eyes what's going on in your neighbourhood the fabric of your society tears apart because the morality in the society crumbles.
You will have people who know people and love people beyond the border, you will have people who believe in a philosophy that teaches to help those in need,you have people who are not happy about how your society works but were keeping it to themselves because killing other human beings was not an option but now it is an option obviously. Not only that, there will be people competing for power in your lucky society and the people in need and all the issues in your society will be tools to gain power. Things wont also happen in one day, those in need will have things to offer to people in your society - anything prohibited, anything that those in power deny to those who want power.
It will spill over, there's no way around it. Unless maybe you have some kind of monarchy where everyone knows it's place and follows the orders, doesn't question authority and doesn't aspire to move between classes. How do you turn democracies into this thing? To decide who is the king who is the servant you will need civil wars, so it will definitely spill over.
It's not a pleasant option, but it is an option that countries can choose to take if the circumstances suggest that it's in their best interest. The last 25 years have seen a trend of more open borders in and around Europe, but if the circumstances change, that trend can reverse itself.
And while such closed borders are more common in various dictatorships, given the political trends we're seeing in many elections worldwide, it's not particularly implausible that such policies could get majority support also in democratic countries if the economic conditions deteriorate, for example, because of climate change.
Global warming will make that look like a small band of visiting tourists.
Global warming will impact the poor far more than the rich, and there will be BILLIONS of refugees running towards borders.
One would hope it would be gradual and not as catastrophic as a bloody civil war, but a series of warming-fueled storms or a pronounced month-long heat wave could have similar effects.
At some point, nations will close borders.
Resource/Environmental wars are never apparent as such. Since they involve movements of entire ethnicities, they become ethnic wars that are actually resource wars where the haves vs have-nots to deal with the environmental or resource disaster are delineated along ethnic divides.
The Sudan crisis was explained to me as being fundamentally a water war in this way.
Why would it not be logical to start gearing up for this inevitability now, then? Why wait?
If they get in a war over dwindling water and it goes nuclear, the effects could be felt globally. Ironically, a big effect could be global cooling, which would set crop yields around the world plummeting. That would only last for a few years, maybe 10 tops, and then we'd be back to warming, but a hell of a lot of people would have died due to widespread famine during that time.
China also makes heavy use of Himalayan glacier water, but I don't think they'd nuke anyone over it. A few other countries also depend on the glaciers, but India, Pakistan, and China are the only ones with nukes.
All the nuclear doomsday scenario estimates are based on the cold war NATO-Warsaw Pact nuke arsenals, where something like 30000 warheads might have been fired. That's a huge number of nukes, the world does not have nearly as much nukes now, and even less so for the smaller powers (90% of all nukes are held by USA and Russia).
India and Pakistan together have ~300 warheads; if India and Pakistan blow all their nukes, that's comparable to something like two years worth of nuclear weapons testing back in the 1960s, and the 1960s tests were nowhere close to triggering a worldwide famine.
See the paper "A regional nuclear conflict would compromise global food security", PNAS March 31, 2020 117 (13) 7071-7081 [1]. Here's an article about it [2].
They are looking at a war with 100 Hiroshima-sized detonations in the most populated urban areas of India and Pakistan.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/13/7071
[2] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-india-...
It's a bit weird to guesstimate about so horrible hypothetical events, but perhaps the consequences of such a war might be comparable to all the many cities burned in firebombing and otherwise during WW2 - which, again, did not trigger a global cooling that might threaten global agriculture.
But at the same time, I think the level of crisis is perhaps bigger than we realize. Climate scientists talk about the conveyor systems of the ocean, that literally keep the ocean flowing around the world. It's not spoken of very much, but the threat really does go up to "the ocean stops circulating" (is drastically drastically reduced in circulation). The ocean acidifies, runs out of dissolved oxygen,... dies.
Meanwhile we're already in an era of mass extinction for the animals. How many more shocks can the animals take?
Maybe the rich can get by on a deadening husk of a world without really noticing, maybe human life goes on. Who am I kidding, of course it does, but my general gist is that the current pattern of extreme weather & disasters being localized is knitting together as the crisis marchs into ever more dire territory into something truly globespanning & globe-wrecking, where earth itself will visibly no longer support the same everyday vitality of life, and where we have to find new means to artificially sustain the ecosphere & pollenate our farmlands.
The same goes for pollinators - while there are many commercially important plants that rely on pollinators (e.g. almonds as one of main exports of California), the staple crops that feed humanity - wheat, rice, corn, potatoes - do not require pollinators and would be viable even if all insects died.
So even the horrible ecological disaster scenarios threaten human wellbeing and comfort, but they don't really threaten the existence of humanity; fucking up our ecosystem would be a great cultural loss but industrialized farming could still march on.
People say this northern land thing with no actual experience of what unsettled lands look like.
Google Muskeg if you want to see your promised land.
https://www.google.com/search?q=muskeg&hl=en&prmd=imvn&sourc...
There’s also the boreal forest, but the consensus is that’s at a tipping point and will eventually perish in wildfires. Might be useful savannah eventually but will not be pleasant during the transition. There have already been massive wildfires in northern canada and siberia.
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.3198892#click=https://t.co/3NEaJz0R...
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/for-the-love-of-peat/
“ Soils in the boreal forest are typically podzols (from the Russian word for “ash”), gray soils that are thin, acidic, and poor in nutrients. These soils lie beneath a mat of coniferous tree needles and other organic material that accumulates due to the slow decomposition rates and limited soil microorganism activity that occurs in the cold climate. Tannins and other acidic compounds from this layer cause the upper layers of soil to become acidic (Lakehead University 2007). Podzols are formed when precipitation exceeds evaporation, and nutrients, minerals, and organic matter are leached by downward-moving acidic water from the upper soil layers. These soils are unsuitable for agriculture, but can support numerous species of trees, shrubs, and other plants that have adapted to these soil conditions.”
http://www.ramp-alberta.org/river/boreal/canada/physical+env...
In essence, with warming climate and mass wood fires we would expect also the soil in these areas to change in ways that are better for agriculture; the only question is about the speed of that change.
Also, the whole point of slash-and-burn agriculture in northern europe was that it was infertile and lacking nutrients otherwise - it was not a way of increasing the quantity your fields, you would abandon your fields after a couple of years to overgrow with forest, and slash-and-burn a new one for that temporary influx of nutrients in soil that is otherwise lacking them.
These areas have no soil worth speaking of so agriculture is not an option, the ecosystem will not be stable so no foraging or hunting, and the grounds will be extremely unstable as they'll be thawing continuously, and the surface will just be soggy bog.
As all extreme locales the long winter night also tends to trigger depression in many.
This is by no means meant to minimize what's happening in the Laptev sea. There's a lot going on up there, and the level of badness, while overall large and larger than ever, is variable.
Does anyone know when 'records began'? I was trying to find out how long the local climate there has been measured.
> The sea has a severe climate with temperatures below 0 °C (32 °F) over more than nine months per year, low water salinity
Given the low salinity and below 0 °C for so long, you would expect it to be frozen most of the time.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2020/07/laptev-sea-lapping...
Edit: Another graph goes back to 1979.
If I'm not wrong this should be the point from which frequent reliable measurements had been taken. (It also roughly matches with my memory about that topic).
[1] Two new studies substantially advance understanding of currents that help regulate climate, https://phys.org/news/2020-10-substantially-advance-currents...
More focused on the Atlantic conveyors & new discoveries there. But very Arctic related, about the thermohaline cycle that has allowed warm water to sink & cool & how that has worked.
[2] 'Sleeping giant' Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-gia...
Laptev sea specific... for now! Laptev Sea hasn't frozen... oh and the methane & other hydrates are dissolving, & also present at much higher concentrations at the surface than usual.
[1] https://polarbearsinternational.org/research/research-qa/how...
Forming low clouds over dark blue oceans is very efficient.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-gia...
“ Scientists have found evidence that frozen methane deposits in the Arctic Ocean – known as the sleeping giants of the carbon cycle – have started to be released over a large area of the continental slope off the East Siberian coast, the Guardian can reveal.
High levels of the potent greenhouse gas have been detected down to a depth of 350 metres in the Laptev Sea near Russia, prompting concern among researchers that a new climate feedback loop may have been triggered that could accelerate the pace of global heating.”
Catastrophic climate change is now on a timeline of months rather than decades.
This will be done, if ever it is needed, by depositing hundreds of millions of tons of reflective material (basically refined moon dust) into Lagrange Points which will block a proportionate amount of energy from reaching the Earth.
The solar energy output from the sun (measured as 'total solar irradiance' or TSI) is not constant. It ebbs and wanes in a fascinating quasi-periodic fashion on daily, 11-year, 210-year, 350-year, etc. cadences. It also shows an overall increasing trend over millennia timeframes (3 - 4 billion years ago the sun output only ~70% of its current energy). Since about the 1940s up until quite recently we have been experiencing a period considered a "modern grand maximum" in solar activity. [1, 2]
All this is simply to show that the sun is not an absolute constant, as Aristotle believed, but a dynamic and fluctuating system which directly impacts -- actually that understates it, variance of solar output has been the primary driver of our wildly varying global climate for the Earth's entire history. Which makes it all the more notable that anthropogenic climate change has now begun to bend the curve in similar fashion to our mighty star.
Crucially, the technological moderation of TSI is not a risky endeavor even remotely like detonating nuclear bombs to dust up the atmosphere. This would not be a last-ditch gambit. The impact of adding reflective material between the Earth and sun is miniscule on the scale of how much material could be placed into position at a given time, e.g. using rail-guns on the surface of the moon. It is a multi-decade effort that requires constant upkeep to maintain, or otherwise naturally dissipates over time. It is easy to measure precisely the impact achieved and therefore precisely control how much of a hand we put on the celestial scale. And once established and in place, e.g. 50 years from now, will cost likely on the order of $500 billion per year in upkeep. That is to say, an absolute bargain in terms of the economic impact of doing nothing.
It is neither physically impossible, nor constrained by the practical extraction of natural resources that would need to be brought to bear, nor dangerous, nor requires exotic undiscovered materials or magical technology that could not be fabricated given proper funding over the next couple decades.
I have no doubt or concern that our technological capability for generating clean energy will continue to grow exponentially, hopefully culminating in abundant and asymptotically free, clean energy within the century. And I have no doubt that while reaching that crowning achievement that humanity is entirely capable of either extracting excess CO2 directly from the atmosphere, or moderating TSI in order to achieve an optimal climate equilibrium.
This is by no means easy, or even guaranteed. But I firmly believe that we are not doomed, and that we remain entirely in control of our fate. In my opinion, the solution will not be found in the direction of policies that tax, ration, or restrict abundant energy, for that is an unethical chokehold that will be felt most directly by the poorest peoples among us.
We must strive for technological solutions that make energy cleaner, cheaper, reliable, safe, and abundant for energy is truly the path out of poverty. We have fewer humans living in poverty than at any time in human history [3], and we must continue on that path.
I think as our energy and space technology continue to rapidly advance, the hardest part will be deciding not how to set the thermostat, but exactly where to set the thermostat, because there will be winners and losers regardless.
[1] - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41116-017-0006-9 [2] - https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~infocom/The%20Website... [3] - https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
I think this is the key takeaway. Talk of walking back modern prosperity for the sake of the planet will never work -- the haves won't give up what they have, and the have-nots won't stop striving.
Fear is a powerful motivator for division. Aspiration is a powerful motivator for unification. Focus on aspiration.
There are many methods that just work and are useful for other reasons:
https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2020/Q4/this-white-...
As to where to set the thermostat: probably as a default keep things constant as they are today. If Russia would prefer a warmer setpoint, it can offer money to countries that don't want one to compensate them for their troubles.
I don't think it actually decays like radiation half-life though.
I wonder what kind of orbits it's going to have, because we speak of many megatons here, even if finely dusted.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0701/0701513.pdf
That particular paper is considering an Earth-Moon Lagrange Point, which is much more accessible than Earth-Sun points, but the dust cloud would be highly visible in the night sky which IMO is disqualifying as long as other alternatives exist.
So, are there any realistic state-wide plans to prepare for the worst? Like, move cities away from shores, prepare for certain regions to become very hot (unsuitable for farming), etc.?
https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/countries-regions/countr...
No. We'll get drought, famine and resource wars, take it or leave it
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uVr0ODIKv_s/VMGAo_qUiQI/AAAAAAAAA...
This is a widely held belief, but I would need to see some solid evidence to believe that its true. Anecdata: Shelf turnover from the brief period when I worked retail, and the typical contents of my pantries. Also, the panic buying at the beginning of the pandemic stressed the system, but certainly didn't crash it.
Can we use the number of seasons of The Walking Dead as a proxy to estimate that?
I'm not a climate scientist but I majored in physics and like to think I'm not completely ignorant. The IPCC reports have a lot of systemic nudges towards underplaying risks, as part of attaining consensus.
20 years ago there was room for doubt. I was out there in the trenches arguing against global warming, because I was, in retrospect, a denialist. Now, frankly, I'm terrified. We are in real trouble.
Look at this puppy - it can walk on its front legs!
The Sun is more active now than over the last 8000 year
Tough choice. This is like picking who to do a life saving surgery between an actual surgeon and a clown.
You aren't being skeptical, you're just poisoning the discussion.
When every storm, fire, drought is provided as evidence of global warming it makes reasonable people suspicious. Don’t provide anecdotes. The world is a big place and anomalies are always happening. Show good, comprehensive data and be skeptical of the rest or you haven’t earned trust.
It’s dangerous because you can see in the comments that there are intelligent people that want to do very unnatural things to the air or water to fight global warming, and it feels to me like children playing with fire. They don’t understand the consequences of what they are doing, but are scared into doing reckless things because they believe it’s do it die. Maybe it is, but I’d like to see better science than this before we go that route. Remember the historical environmental catastrophe for our planet is ice, and the natural pattern is to swing in and out of ice ages. If we accidentally kick one of those off, say goodbye to 90% of life on earth.
the fact that a major ice formation is not freezing (coupled with anomalous temp fluxes in other areas) IS the model and is the point of concern.
in that context, the "child playing with fire" is not taking any kind of notable actions.
reasonable people trust scientists across the globe who spend their entire careers studying this who all say the same thing in the same way.
we are doing this it is bad it is going to get worse we need to change
defying that is idiocy
This appeal to authority is another example of what I am talking about. It's meaningless because if there was a scientist questioning global warming they wouldn't be able to hold a related job or get funding. Additionally, people tend to conform, especially in fields where your career depends on your reputation. For example, the scientific consensus prior to World War 1 was that citrus didn't cure scurvy, even though it had been doing so for hundreds of years prior and had been scientifically proven before.[1] So people started dying from scurvy again. Even the very well prepared, intelligent polar explorers were unable to deal with it properly even though they researched and planned for it, because they relied on the consensus of the scientific community instead of good science.
[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cur...
A trend like this is the very definition of climate change
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2020/10/Figure-3.png
The article had very little data, agree