Canada weather: Heatwave hits record 46.6C as US north-west also frazzles

Where did you get your information from?

Ironically your anecdote at the end is a great example of irreverent cherry picking.

If you have only seen cherry-picked data and have not seen intelligent discussion (and such discussion is something you really want to have), then I suggest you read the IPCC reports and participate in discussions regarding the IPCC reports.

Your comment about the CO2 observation station on the active volcano is difficult to evaluate. I have never come across any convincing evidence that this matters. Have you?

The amount of weathering depends on the access the atmosphere has to the rock. If there is a thick ice layer, the rate goes down. Water plays a role as well, and the fastest weathering happens in the tropics and not the deserts (where you have mechanical weathering which does not bind CO2). Accordingly, the configuration of continents can play a role as well, which is interesting if you go back far enough. On the other hand, the volcano emissions appear somewhat constant over time.

In total though, there are still many open questions. Why does CO2 appear to go up so fast after an ice age? Does CO2 or temperature go up first? In the records, the temperature increase appears rather sudden, on the timescale of decades. How does this happen? (Note though that that has no huge importance for our current problem since the situation is different. But the reaction speed of the system is relevant, for example.)

Note: If we wait long enough (~tens of thousands of years) the CO2 level should go down again from weathering. There are proposals for carbon capture that uses this mechanism (by grounding the rocks and distributing them openly so the atmosphere can reach a lot of the rock surface, thus increasing the weathering rate massively).

Note2: You need silicate rock, which is not distributed evenly.

* Natural cycle. This goes up and down year on year: that’s the rise and fall you see in the chart. In real life it has to do with northern hemisphere summer and leaf growth. * Human activity. We’re pouring water into the bathtub and the water level rises

So during the pandemic we just poured water less quickly. You wouldn’t expect a drop from that. You’d just expect a slower rise.

To actually fix climate change we have to:

1. Get human emissions to zero

2. Start taking co2 from the atmosphere, actually lowering the water in the tub

It’s a big task and we haven’t even really started. Our emissions rate has been growing, not shrinking.

But we are laying the groundwork with renewable capacity and with rapidly advancing carbon capture and storage. SomI still hold out hope we can do it. But to do that we need to understand the basic shape of the problem.

A Dutch expression [1] is "Na mij de zondvloed". It roughly translates to "The (biblical) flooding will come after I'm dead". Unfortunately this is a common attitude here.

[1] From the French "Après moi, le déluge" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apr%C3%A8s_moi,_le_d%C3%A9luge

When green issues started entering the public conscience politicians quickly adopted them and proposed quick&easy fixes.

Fear of the unknown of the nuclear made them regulate and red-tape it out of the market. Just look at what Japan and German politicians did when Fukushima happened.

They aren’t solely at fault: the right blocked carbon taxes or any kind of solution they could. But greens had their eye on the wrong ball for sure.

I've done that to my old workshop, just literally painted the roof white. Dropped ~10 degC during summer, no change in winter.

Seems to me that light roofs would help more during summer when there are lots of sunny days than dark roofs during winter when it's mostly cloudy.

None of this is counting infrared/UV, but reducing visible radiation is still much better than nothing.

I suspect that the effect of this is highly location specific, both in terms of climate, as well as average insulation.

Recency bias. You judge everything by what happened most recently.

Old people discovered climate change and tried to warn us.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/234314/global-warming-age-gap-y...

>The second-largest age gap comes with the belief that global warming is caused by human activities.

Denying the human nature of climate change hinders any action we can take. We need to be honest about the cause in order to work on a solution.

Another good link with similar findings:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/26/key-finding...

It's like saying that the 3 Ferraris in the city are the problem, not the million Volkswagens (or whatever).

Heck, if this helps those folks focus on the problem at hand, I'd rather have them fly private than go through the stress of flying regular (which in my view is mostly horrible).

You say that nuclear has killed fewer people. That's true, but this is not the main problem of Nuclear. The main problems are 1) that catastrophic events can and will happen in the future. That's why nobody wants to live next to a nuclear power plant. 2) Nuclear waste storage.

Why would even invest in nuclear power plants now that it's pretty clear that other alternatives are cheaper and safer? (I'm not saying abandon nuclear power research, there are definitey niche cases where it makes sense, like space exploration).

The reason is simple: it's far cheaper and quicker. Fear has relatively little to do with this. You can roll out facilities with GW of capacity in under a year. The total capacity of nuclear in the US is something like 94 GW after about 7 decades of nuclear being a thing. Wind is 120 GW. 17 of that got installed last year. Over the next decade, that is likely to continue to grow to a couple of hundred GW of capacity.

In general, countries world wide are rolling out impressive amounts of wind and solar every year. Quite many countries have hit the point where it is double digit percentage of energy generation and generally the dominant form of energy.

Quite a few of these countries are actually on track to be 100% renewable powered by the mid 2030s. Some are projected to hit their targets early. Nuclear is generally not a part of those plans in most of those countries. Mostly, no new plants are being built in these countries. No plants are being planned even. And actually, no plant could feasibly be planned and built until the mid 2030s in any case given how slow and expensive building such plants is and how politically sensitive that is.

Renewables outgrow everything else by no small margin almost everywhere on this planet. All we need to do is do more of that faster and at the same time figure out storage and long distance transport (i.e. cables) of energy.

Mandating that all newbuilds and planned extensions have PV roofs and local storage would be far more realistic to meet our power requirements.

I'm all for nuclear, I'm amazed at the power density of nuclear fuel (I saw recently that a few hundred grams of plutonium contain the same amount of energy as a fully fuelled Starship), but reducing the counter-argument to "fear" is not useful. Let's try and solve the real problems instead: the cost problems, the building time problems, the nuclear waste problems and the proliferation problems. The fear and political reluctance will then go away by itself.

In parallel, we should not waste time and enforce more energy-efficient housing, mandatory remote working whenever possible, promote better transportation options than cars, connect grids together, put solar/wing/biogas/geothermal plants everywhere, find more efficient ways to ship cargo across the planet, etc.

For any given limit we wish to hold on warming, there is a total acceptable amount of CO2 emissions we can allow for the world.

Once emitted, CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a few hundred to a thousand years. Rich nations have emitted more than their fair share for a couple hundred years--that's a large part of how they got rich. Of the CO2 now in the atmosphere, over 60% came from North America and Europe and 47% from the US and the EU+UK.

Emitting more than your fair share to get rich is fine, if:

1. Once rich you use part of that wealth to switch to low or zero emissions, and

2. Either do something to take the CO2 you emitted out of the atmosphere so that there is room in the global CO2 budget for someone else to become rich the same way, or help them become rich by subsidizing them so they can skip the high emissions stage and go straight to the low/zero emissions rich stage.

The current rich nations aren't doing well on either of these.

In order to do that you'll need to make energy much more expensive - artificially so.

This is really not true:

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/climateqa/would-gw-s...

> Even if all emissions were to stop today, the Earth’s average surface temperature would climb another 0.6 degrees or so over the next several decades before temperatures stopped rising.

Limiting additional temperature increase to 0.6C would be a huge win. We are a WAY past not having to adapt to major changes in climate.

We're certainly not way past preventing the most catastrophic outcomes.

Unfortunately, there's absolutely zero evidence that we'll actually do anything meaningful about our CO2 emissions, so IMO we're most definitely screwed.

I think it's infinitely more likely that a nation like China will unilaterally engage in geoengineering (e.g. depositing particulates in the troposphere) than we are to actually collectively curb our CO2 emissions.