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Comment by sleepysysadmin | Hacker News Reader

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25874471

Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII (bbc.com)

Which makes sense, tons of unemployment and work from home means far less emissions to be expected. This must be great for climate change? How come we're losing ice faster? That doesnt make sense. It should be the coldest year for a long time right?

https://www.space.com/nasa-confirms-2020-hottest-year-on-rec...

So the fix to climate change is reducing emissions. We do that because of a pandemic and it makes climate change worse?

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The negative effects of climate change are caused by the total level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, not the current rate of emissions. The world reduced the rate of emissions by 10% last year. That's better than nothing, but the overall level of greenhouse gases still rose by a lot last year, so it makes sense that ice would continue to melt faster. This trend will continue until we have net negative emissions, which is pretty much only possible if we first have close to zero emissions from power generation, transportation, and agriculture, as well as cash subsidies for carbon removal and sequestration.

The fix to climate change has never been reduced emissions, it has been negative emissions or zero emissions if you're willing to accept a slower, inferior solution. Reducing emissions just buys a little bit of time (but not much, based on what most of the world considers "reduced").

What happened in the past when volcanoes erupted? Wouldn't the world consistently get warmer and warmer as greenhouse gases rise?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle

Well, in some cases, much of the life on earth went extinct. It's also not clear how long it took to make earth a good place to live again. The planet's ecology might be able to "heal" the damage we're doing, but it's probabably more on the scale of centuries or millenia, than decades.

This is why we need to teach calculus in schools.

We've dropped the second derivative of f(t) to the lowest value in decades. Why is f(t) not itself also low?

The fact that some of the crap spouts are slower doesn't mean the pool isn't filling.

You can think of it like this: There is an very large pool about 2/3 full of human crap, being filled by a number of spouts. Some of the spouts kinda stop ocasionally, but not for long.

There is a sinkhole, but it's not big enough, so it keeps filling.

When it fills up, you and everyone you love included, along with all of humanity, will have to drink from that pool forever as their sole form of sustenance, possibly dying of it. It's taking the plants and kelp with it, too, so eventually there will be nothing we can recognize as good.

The only way out is to make the sinkhole bigger or close every spout and try to make it _very_ clear what happened so future generations don't mess with it. Every other path leads to everyone and everything dying a horrible death.

The effect of greenhouse emissions vs climate takes _decades_ to be seen. The paper here is not to be linked to the reduction in greenhouse emissions from 2020.

I don’t think this post deserves the downvotes- it’s a statement of confusion, but the confusion comes from an honest, understandable place and there’s a clear answer to the question.

>I don’t think this post deserves the downvotes- it’s a statement of confusion, but the confusion comes from an honest, understandable place and there’s a clear answer to the question.

The data is clearly saying the opposite. Put that in the context that we had a short term trend of global cooling from 2016-2019. If 2020 is the hottest year ever surpassing 2016. There's no explanation other than there's something wrong. https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2893/nope-earth-isnt-cooling/

The one thing I wonder. Contrails have a beneficial effect on climate change. I wonder if the lack of air travel perhaps that's why the climate got so bad.

Lets step back though. I'm downvoted because you are not allowed to question climate change.

I am confused. Just because temperatures went down in the short term doesn't mean those weren't some of the hottest years on record. 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 are still unusually hot years, probably hot enough to melt ice.

This is, as was pointed out, a stupider question than mere chance or lack of knowledge would explain. You appear to be asking intentionally dumb questions in order to provoke us for some reason.

It's not an honest question, it's sealioning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning). Notice how despite demonstrating a lack of basic knowledge on the subject the followed up your post with more specific completely different question based one even more disinformation?

Sealioning is the favorite debate tactic of climate change "skeptics".

Ah, you appear to be correct. He’s intentionally refusing to understand the answer to his question, even though it’s quite clear.

The climate is changing because of the amount emitted. We've emitted a shit tonne. We're still emitting too much, even with covid and a recession. So climate isn't getting better.

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