Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave
severe-weather.eu
severe-weather.eu
People dying is what it's going to take to muster up enough of a fight to make the actual change. But the sooner we can hit the panic button and get people focused on the magnitude of the issue, the less people that need to die to get the population properly motivated.
https://ieefa.org/france-boosts-renewable-energy-spending-to...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/climate/coronavirus-coal-...
https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissi...
China is also, by far, the leading producer and user of electric cars with almost half of the production and sales (more electric cars are sold in china than western europe + US combined). Half of all EV's in the world are driving around in China.
Further, chinese people use a fraction of the electricity that north americans do. Canada: 14,600 kWh/yr, USA: 12,150 kWh/yr, China: 5,300 kWh/yr.
In terms of CO2 emissions, it's the same story: USA: 17.6T/yr, Canada: 15.7T/yr, China: 6.4T/yr, on a per capita basis.
It's hard to remember what with the shiny new tier 1 coastal cities, but try not to forget that, on average, china is still quite poor with only 1/4th to 1/5th the per capita income of the richer advanced economy nations like the US, Sweden, UK, Germany, Japan, etc. China is on par with Mexico, Malaysia, Panama, Russia, or Bulgaria.
In short, the story is not so simple.
China strictly controls how many people are allowed to migrate from the countryside to work in the cities, so it is, in some respects, multiple distinct economies with a centrally controlled standard of living.
Algeria being a former French colony, being close by, and already having a large population of Algerian descent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerians_in_France says there are 10 million people of Algerian origin in France. That’s over 10% of the population), France probably will be a major destination.
What should have been proposed was a unified Europe border force. Where each member state takes its share and also send resources to help manage the southern border.
Leaving the problem to Spain, Italy and Greece is the worst approach. The 1 million migrants in 2015 really was a dry run for what will happen when Africa is too hot.
The EU needs to plan now for receiving these people, because you can't send them back.
[1] https://frontex.europa.eu/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Border_and_Coast_Guar...
[3] https://www.euronews.com/2021/04/27/eu-plans-to-boost-power-...
[4] https://www.euronews.com/2021/01/20/eu-migration-chief-urges...
weather != climate
We make fun of the climate change deniers in this scenario because the cold winter often is evidence of climate change. Record heat waves can also be evidence of climate change.
Or, that will just get the rest of the nations of the world to focus on preventing climate refugees from entering their nation, and perhaps use their militaries to secure remaining resources.
No it wont. If anything it will just start a war and/or a(nother) refugee crisis. Plus dead people. I think hoping for disasters to catalyst change is a sadly naive worldview.
>we can hit the panic button
What panic button? Where?
We seem to be having several "once in a thousand years" heatwaves per decade these days.
- there are no climate change
- climate change is not because of humane activities
- climate change isn't that bad
- climate change might be good overall
- climate change is business as usual: improvise, adapt, survive
You can find more claims and counter claims https://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-cold-weather.htm here. I picked up that one following your question about cold winter.
The people who profit from the current state of affairs need to be convinced to modify their plans. Perhaps there are other ways to persuade them, but fear of something worse than not profiting from their current investment plans is the only thing I can think of at this point.
Millions of people die from AIDS, malaria, and the lack of potable water and food each year. But most of those deaths happen other continents, so nothing is done about it.
The transmission of HIV could be virtually ended in the US with drugs like PrEP that have been on the market for a decade, halting a 30+ year AIDS pandemic. That didn't happen, and PrEP's price in the US rose from $1200 to $2400 for a 30-day supply in 2019, despite costing ~$40 retail in other first world countries. Now that one formulation recently became generic, it costs $1400 retail, or $600 with coupons, for a 30-day supply. As of 2020 there is a program for those without insurance, but if you're a working adult with insurance, you aren't eligible.
As long as there is money to be made, people dying will be acceptable to those in power.
The haute bourgeoisie will not, have not done anything to help.
Mike Muir was right. Give it revolution!!
https://www.terraformation.com/
Seems crazy now, but vast forests covering most of Algeria may be entirely possible in your lifetime.
Hardly "vast quantities". And it's not cheap, they're currently using "reclaimed" solar panels to provide power. At scale, this not possible and not cheap.
More to the point, their main goal is to plant and grow trees, not provide fresh water.
It presents a difficult problem for entrepreneurs to tackle. Definitely the potential to change people's lives for the better, though.
In the end, all fresh water goes back to the ocean so it's not like we would be creating an imbalance, there's just a risk of causing local damage.
Sea-water is about 3.5% salt by weight. Are you saying that the brine water coming out is 3.5 * 1.025% salt, or that it's 5.5% salt? Do you have anything you can cite? What % of the water that goes in the inlet makes it to the "brine" outlet?
The problem is the criminal mispricing of water in most of the world. Anything that interacts with saltwater - especially brine - is in a completely different class of infrastructure that requires constant maintenance, something that most political systems are especially bad at. It's compounded by the artificially low price of water and accompanying lack of funds.
Humans have built over three million kilometers of natural gas and oil pipelines globally. The longest undersea pipeline is over 1,200 km long, which is at least twenty times longer than the longest pipelines we'd need to build for ideal brine dispersion in the worst case geographies. For better or worse, the problems with desalination are economic and political, not technological. We just need to spread out our impact so that it's within the margin of error of ocean currents and evaporation.
For instance, according to a recent research paper[0] from Saudi Arabia, sea-water yields hydrogen, chlorine and lithium all from a single multi-stage process. These are all useful materials for industry. I imagine the process is both energy and capital intensive, but SA would be a good place to begin something like that.
[0] https://phys.org/news/2021-06-electrochemical-cell-harvests-...
The best bet in actually desalinating population scale levels of water would be investment into nuclear power. And the desalination could double as a buffer for the nuclear plant so that it could be run at peak power and efficiency nearly full time.
Gas burns and makes CO2 which increases temperature which increases the likelihood of more dehydration events in future. This is the wrong choice. Actually the long term right choice is not to burn gas anymore.
Letting people die is obviously the wrong choice too.
When all choices are wrong we must find another choice that can be right. Somebody wrote solar energy, somebody wrote nuclear energy, somebody argued that both are wrong. I don't suggest a solution but I point out that limiting ourselves to binary choices is the wrong way to think.
I don’t find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_desalination an easy read, but I think it says using PV to get electricity and that electricity to drive reverse osmosis is one of the best solutions.
Certainly, given that solar power is cheaper than nuclear (in the current political climate), nuclear can’t be the better choice for peak loads, which happen when there’s a lot of sunlight.
Nuclear is a great use-case since the problem with nuclear is it needs a constant water source. If you’re desalinating you’ve got that problem covered.
Remember, nuclear power plant is merely a very large heat engine. The main problem is terrorism there.
Are there numbers for this? One one hand solar might provide more energy than nuclear if you're only interested in heat generation, but on the other hand using heat to desalinate (ie. boiling water) is also less efficient than using reverse osmosis.
That statement doesn't make any sense to me. If you need more power, install more panels. Space certainly isn't an issue in like northern Africa. It is cheaper to order a gigawatt or more of solar panels than building a new nuclear reactor, and faster to set up too. Even Germany today has way more solar capacity than it ever had in nuclear, and it is less a great place for solar than Africa.
That's because it never had much nuclear capacity, not because it now has a lot of solar
If we had to desalinate all that water and actively distribute it instead, it'd be a significant fraction of our current global power consumption. The power sources need to be concentrated near the desalination plants and at least half the world lives 100km+ away from a coastline. At 3 kWh per m^3 of water[1] and ~3.5 m^3 per person per day [2], that's an extra ~3800 kWh per year, which would increase per capita energy consumption by 25-30% [3] in the United States just for desalination.
We have enough challenges replacing existing power infrastructure with solar and wind. Placing the burden of desalination on top of that is unrealistic, especially since the NIMBY fight over solar installations of that size would probably be just as fierce as for a nuclear reactor.
[1] https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/energies/energies-12-00463...
[2] https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie...
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...
I was only answering to the original post which suggested we would build nuclear power plants to desalinate water. There I commented that solar would be cheaper (and more environment friendly) for the same task.
Solar is relatively inefficient, but it can't be used to build a dirty bomb or worse. With large patches of uninhabit{ed,able} desert, many African countries have more than enough space to build large solar farms if they can find a solution to the sand blowing onto the panels.
https://www.sydneydesal.com.au/caring-for-the-environment/10...
I power my water maker with about 1400 watts and can make 35 gallons an hour. The panels, electronics and water maker were ~ $5000. I did the work myself at a slow pace, so not sure what the labor costs would be.
I set my system up in about 2 weeks. The requirements are a bit of time, seawater access and some capital.
For context, according to CEIC data [1], the average salary in Algeria is about $300 per month. That "dirt cheap" project of yours is more than a year's worth of labor.
Locally priced goods may be cheaper, but the US does benefit from a more direct shipping line with China (where most of these products come from, especially cheap solar panels). There's repair costs to be taken into account and if these become a necessity, you'll also have to take into account some kind of protection for when those without the means to buy one of these setups become desperate.
It's true that solar is relatively safe and cheap compared to other power sources, but projects like these are difficult to map to places where they can make a life-or-death difference. If things were that easy, we'd probably cover a patch of Sahara desert with solar panels and power the entire African continent for decades, with power to spare to export to other continents.
[1]: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/algeria/average-monthly-wages
Evaporative is interesting too, but solar isn’t too bad to maintain. Most of the maintenance would probably be keeping the filters, pumps and membranes in working order.
I think in either system, teaching the locals to setup the system and maintain it themselves is important for keeping the costs down.
$1000 would buy a pretty large solar still and you can spend the extra $4000 on a solar phone charger if that's something the locals need. Meanwhile there's little that can go wrong with a solar still and if something does go wrong, they can likely fix it (even if temporarily) with duct tape. Losing their cell phone charger and cooktop to electrical failure sounds like less of a problem than losing their water source.
An inductive burner, cell phone charger, desalinator, etc all sound great on a $200,000 boat where the owner is wealthy enough to keep it maintained and probably keep spares. But putting expensive and complicated electronics in a village so remote that they don't even have reliable water seems like a mistake.
You might be right though, if it’s remote enough and you have room, perhaps a solar still is the cheapest and simplest option. It seems like it would have to be very large to give comparable amounts of water. Do you know someone selling such kits?
In any event, maybe this gives folks some ideas for lowish cost options.
For example: https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desali...
Achievable, yes, but only for the rich for now. eg Gulf Arab states and Israel are early adopters, the latter with some EU subsidies to defuse water rights as an point of conflict in the Jordan watershed.
Capital and permitting costs presumably dominate.
FWIW on several occasions we came lose to losing the North American Great Lakes to nuclear accidents, the second largest freshwater stores in the world.
The thing we don't have enough for in many places is agriculture, industry, watering lawns, bathing, etc.
Although as usual the human problem of doing a suboptimal job of allocating a scarce resource applies...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...
An alternative to desalination is capturing humidity from the air, e.g. by isothermal membrane-based air dehumidification [2] or passively using condensation [3].
I’m involved in building a fund to invest in startups in this and other areas related to biosphere resilience, and would love to get in touch with people taking such technology to the market.
My guess is we will be needing adaptive measures sooner than most people expect.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iYodKQP72mg
[2] https://www.osti.gov/pages/biblio/1476418
[3] https://newatlas.com/science/passive-drinking-water-harveste...
Some suggested nuclear power, but I think there are better forms of energy production, especially since you don't need base load or capacity, so solar and wind are much better here.
Of couse solar space conflicts with desalination itself. You could just use the sun to evaporate the water in the first place.
So we need to go olivine mining at a greater rate than we have done oil extraction... Will there be millions of olivine rigs, olivine pipelines, olivine wars?
Somehow I don't think it's gonna happen...
Given that formulation I assume that the amount of olivine needed is the same order of magnitude as the 1 liter of oil to produce the CO2.
The world is consuming 97 Mio barrels of oil per day [2]. I doubt we can mine that amount of olivine on a daily basis. Is it even available in that quantity?
How is olivine considered an adequate option to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere?
===
[1] that Wikipedia article above.
In energy-tech, a useful metric is energy-return-on-energy-investment -- a saudi oil well returns 40 units of energy for each unit of energy required for extraction, tar sands are something like 3:1, solar panels are something like 5:1.
Taking that mindset, what's the ratio of CO2-sequested-for-CO2-required-to-mine? Yes, we can get better numbers if we electrify all the heavy machinery and power it with solar, but given that heavy mining trucks are largely fossil fuel powered, where are we today?
Something a little more simple and using abundant resources.
https://climatebase.org/ https://lowercarboncapital.com/ https://climatetechvc.org/a-running-list-of-climate-tech-vcs...
The new nonprofit founded by Aubrey de Grey https://viento.ai/ works on this issues.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-alberta-h...
West of the Cascades, yes. Eastern Oregon and Washington are quite dry.
Lytton, BC is in a similar geographic position. It's inland of the coastal range.
It gets 430.6 mm (16.95 in) of annual precipitation, compared to 1,189 mm (46.8 in) for Vancouver.
Portland's dewpoint I think peaked around 65F.
(Edit: links)
[0] https://twitter.com/tnrd/status/1410415425146458114?s=21
[1] https://twitter.com/emergencyinfobc/status/14104142964507484...
[2] https://twitter.com/cbctanya/status/1410415894979698689?s=21
So I’m not interested. You wanted the world to burn. So let it burn.
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/nuclear-power-is-a-losing-pro...
Actually, the best practical example is environmentalists-crawled Germany vs. energy-exporting France.
Take the bipartisan infrastructure 'agreement' (not final). Republicans refused to do anything but support more cars...
Earth science should not be treated as religion.
50% of the population may be climate deniers (need a reference though), but there is a large group of progressives that loved the green new deal also, which did not include nuclear energy, so there is blame on both sides.
I'm serious. If wasting money on nuclear is the price we have to pay, we should pay that price. The key word there is "if". In reality if the people treating the issue seriously get behind nuclear the goalposts will move again. Al Gore's shoe size or entrees or thermostat will prove it's all a liberal hoax and we'll roll on just as before but considerably warmer and with a few energy companies a bit richer.
Today, people are instead advocating nuclear power as the unproven solution to a real crisis. The problem is not of technology, but of policy and political will. Renewable energy has been a real option since the 80s. Lithium Ion batteries were invented in the 90s, and proliferated less then 15 years later (and are arguably the wrong solution for large scale energy storage). If we would have gotten behind renewables in the 70s—like we should have—the technology would be even more favorable. However in the 70s we went all in on nuclear and it failed. Nuclear has failed to scale to be the dominant power generation method in the past despite political will and ample funding, and we have no reason to believe it will be different this time around.
There is also more to the climate disaster then just polluting power generation. There is a genuine lack in green infrastructure. Highways and airports are the favorable transportation infrastructures, even though they are the most polluting. Buildings keep being made out of polluting cement, water is wasted on inefficient agricultural practices to grow unessisary crops in arid places, etc. It is as if there is a genuine lack of interest from the political class in tackling the climate crisis. As if the climate crisis is not a problem of technology but something else, like say policy.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1035521/popular-votes-re...
The Republicans have won the larger percentage of the popular vote once in the last seven elections. Most Americans prefer the non-denialist party but they are denied equal representation at the state and federal levels of government.
Two-party system sucks.
Of course, that involves giving up one’s pickup trucks/SUV, international vacations, and 3k sq ft detached single family homes on quarter acre lots.
So…not going to happen. Blaming politicians is a waste of time, it is the people as a collective that have chosen the path.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2010/07/14/jesus-chris...
[2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-change-study_n_320405...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/26/ji...
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/fox-news-buries-al-gore-s...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/25/utah...
I'm sure plenty of them are tweeting away about how this heatwave is a clear sign of climate change (because that's what their constituents want to hear), and yet any meteorologist worth their salt would be hesitant to make that connection - weather is not climate. Climate is a meta-phenomenon.
When they use climate as cover for whatever policy agenda they intended to pursue anyway, it cheapens the discourse - political opposition that agrees on the facts likely disagrees about the solution set, particularly if it is ideologically-driven, and lumping people into childish categories like "climate deniers" only serves to harden positions.
And yet - a lot of these so-called "climate deniers" will happily buy an electric F-150 because Ford has made an attractive product that makes good choices easier. No need for a rancher in rural Montana to downgrade to a Prius to signal that he cares about the climate.
In the end, politicians are not even the right vehicles for this type of change - there's no good evidence that nation-states can achieve a game-theoretically stable set of climate policies given the harsh economic consequences of taxing the crap out of your country's industrial output. Far better results can be obtained through good old-fashioned free market capitalism.
When good choices are easy to make, those choices will be made. The market will abide.
Sadly I don't think most people are ready to make the necessary sacrifices to stop climate change. At least not yet. And I think we will pass the point of no return before people are ready to make those sacrifices.
The problem is not technology or scientific, the problem is human nature.
My friend’s mousepad fused to his desk and he had to scrape it off with a butter knife.
I’ve had to build makeshift doors to isolate a tiny cooled room in my house. I haven’t worn pants in days. My partner and I went through a 1.5L spray bottle misting ourselves in the couple hours leading up to midnight (!)
Now we’ve just gotta hope that nobody lights a match in this giant, extremely windy basket of bone-dry fuel. The fact that there is a fireworks stand open on the main road in my town right now is, to put it mildly, very unsettling.
Does anyone have any idea how this heat wave will conclude? Does all that energy just fade out into a nice polite rainstorm, or should we expect something more dramatic to cap it off considering the unprecedented circumstances?
I don't know if he's commented on it yet, but if he has, >99% chance he's correct.
Incongruence detected.
Portland, OR example: https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=PQR&issuedby=P...
EDIT: Look through the history to get their perspective on what happened - just click "previous version" to go back in time!
Whole regions becoming unlivable will affect us all. We can't wait around until some invention saves us. We need to act now. We can turn this around with WWS alone.
Syria for example has been in over a decade of civil war, refugees spilling over deep into Europe affecting local politics, as the ME region was already saturated with displaced people trough Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yet most peoples take on Syria is a regurgitated: "The Syrian people rose up against an evil dictator regime! Arab Summer!".
When in reality the people in Syria went trough a 10 years period of drought [0] prior to "shit hitting the fan". A combination of the climate getting hotter while water is getting more scarce in the region, as Turkey controls the majority of freshwater inflow into Syria and large parts of Iraq [1]. An inflow that's steadily getting smaller, as Turkey is expanding its own agricultural infrastructure projects, with plenty of dams, in Southeastern Anatolia.
In 2008 Syria sought more drought support from the UN, and particularly the US. The cable can be found on Wikileaks [2] and the warnings by the Syrian UN representative and minister of agriculture read pretty much prophetic in hindsight.
[0] https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Fu...
[1] https://climate-diplomacy.org/case-studies/turkey-syria-and-...
It reached 40 degrees on Monday with humidity around 60%. It was still 32 by sunset. I lived in Panama for ten years. I've never felt heat like this.
And more or less we're going to dig up all the dinosaurs and plants that died and turned into oil/carbon and put them back in the atmosphere and return to that if we do nothing. But we have a record of what that looks like and its not Venus.
That's also a very silly things to "fear" since to turn into Venus you gotta do things like melt all of Antarctica, Greenland and the Himalayas first which will take a couple hundred years. There's an awful lot of thermal mass in all that ice.
Disruption to agriculture and food production though doesn't require turning the Earth into Venus.
[1] which can mean anything from "soon" to "100.000 years" depending on who does the talking
For the past 1,000,000 years, through many interglacials, the carbon level has never exceeded 300 ppm.
If you look at what "should" be happening right now then we should be cooling. The last interglacial ended 10,000 years ago and the fast Milankovich cycle caused by oscillations of the axial tilt is in a cooling (decreasing tilt) trend. If prior ice age cycles held we should be seeing cooling and the formation of continential glaciers in northern Canada. That natural cycle has been decisively broken.
I think you are misinformed. Some areas have it for sure, but in some very large population areas like the Pacific Northwest (say, 20M people), it is very rare. I know that 0 of the houses in my neighborhood have AC originally. [1] Any AC that someone has now was purchased in the last few days, and many people cannot afford to purchase a window unit or portable unit.
[1] This is knowable because nighttime sound has skyrcoketed. It used to much quieter at night here, but now, after 8pm or so when the car noise is less, you can hear the blasting of everyone's new window unit as it struggled to keep up.
Afaik that depends on the specific region in the US. Some states have hot regions where AC is common, but plenty of others don't because heat didn't used to be as common as it's now, thus the sudden need for cooling to such a degree that even public cooling shelters are a thing [0]
Another factor, even for places with AC, is that their infrastructure and AC is built to certain heat expectations, if the weather goes outside these expected then the infrastructure can't cope. A version of that was the Texas electricity grid failing during the sudden high demand of a "real" winter.
[0] https://www.axios.com/northwest-heat-dome-global-warming-591...
It's also arguable that AC is part of the problem, e.g Singapore.
The worst part of this is Earth is all there is for us. There is no where else to go. We are this tightly interconnected ecosystem where all beings are completely bound to one another. Our home is surrounded by darkness for millions of miles. There is no option B. There won’t be, that’s just the way it is. Mars won’t be option B. Don’t kid yourself. If we don’t right the course on greenhouse gas emissions with urgent changes to limit emissions now, then we will have lost the habitability of Earth. I can envision us having to live inside year round without being able to go outside. Does this feel so much like a remote possibility now? It seems year over year temperate days become more elusive. Fires. Droughts. Extreme weather events. Floods.
The destruction and extinction of entire ecosystems hangs in the balance. The crazy thing is we can stop this. But only with urgent individual and societal actions and sacrifices now to address the climate crisis.
As a society, we've chosen to manage resources via capitalism. If you use less water, what that means is water is cheaper so some corporation can afford another few acres of almond trees. If consumers cut their waste in half, the slack would be picked up at the corporate level.
I genuinely believe the only answer is violently enforced regulation. Set a standard like the Geneva convention that says how much pollution and waste you are allowed to generate on a per-area basis, and actually go to war against countries that don't meet the goals. Throw executives in jail that increase profits by migrating production to countries with less regulation around emissions and waste.
This is a tragedy of the commons problem, and you aren't going to fix it by having even a large percentage of the population agree to be respectful of the commons. You have to declare war against those that aren't respecting the commons. I don't see another path that will actually result in meaningful change.
Every scientifically-correct, readily-implementable strategy to address this crisis will be killed at some point for infringing on sacred "individual liberties". Look at Biden currently doing huge damage to the international solar industry as a byproduct of Washington's floundering ideological crusade against "authoritarianism" [1].
[1] - https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3139062/u...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/18/james-lo...
However, it is interesting that people find "solutions", before they've even described and analysed the entire problem set.
I think an infinite metadata approach also gets you there.
It appears that culture becomes homogenized in a direct relationship with information transfer.
So if we continue on the path of generating metadata for EVERYTHING, we will arrive in a world where we can obtain detailed supply chain information just by virtue of the fact that a thing exists.
Transparent supply chains and homogenized culture seems like a good recipe for internalizing externalities without regulation per say (rather propaganda).
Neither violence or authoritarianism are necessary to solve the problem. We who live in democracies "just" have to elect governments sufficiently not corrupt that they will impose the required environmental restrictions on industry, and use strong economic pressure on other nations that don't get their houses in order.
This is essentially the operating definition of "authoritarianism" in Washington, though. If you can't be bought, you must be anti-freedom.
Fully agree. War is worth avoiding at all costs.
> We who live in democracies "just" have to elect governments sufficiently not corrupt that they will impose the required environmental restrictions on industry, and use strong economic pressure on other nations that don't get their houses in order.
I may be overly cynical but I just don't see this happening. But I would absolutely rejoice if it did work out that way.
Just vote, people.
Heavy sarcasm
> I genuinely believe the only answer is violently enforced regulation.
I would like to point out that 'violence' is not _strictly_ necessary, except as a defensive measure. An internationally-organized working class could simply refuse to work on destructive projects (new oil pipelines, etc). Unfortunately, people in power tend to react with increasing violence when their power is threatened (see for example the police response to DAPL protests), so you do have to be prepared to respond to violence one way or another during the transition of power. i.e. better organized = less violence. Unfortunately we are very disorganized currently, and organizing is (in my experience) hard. Better get on that.
[1] This word makes the whole term sound undemocratic but actually refers to the proletariat as a whole enforcing their will (which must by definition be determined in a democratic way) despite the will of the existing ruling class without the need for negotiation.
Never let a good crisis go to waste, heh?!
There are things we can do as individuals, but we need all the other individuals in the high-consumption parts of the world also to do these things.
One drop of rain doesn't carve a river but water does carve rivers.
And enforcing rules like the Geneva convention will not work for the same reason. There will always be entities that bend or circulate the rules. (Example: Geneva Convention and the US and China (Not bashing the US here, just stating facts)
There will never be any saving the climate unless the US and China are onboard, and currently they are not. I might see that the US could be in the future, but currently China is hell bent on being the number one super power and they are ready to break some eggs on the way.
>> As an individual, there isn't really anything you can do. Going vegetarian doesn't help.
These words are expressed as absolute. "isn't really anything" ... "doesn't help" Yet the reality is such activities are positive in a small way. They may be far from sufficient, but they are not nothing.
To be clear I am not arguing that individual action alone will be sufficient, nor am I against collective action enforced by rules where appropriate. It's just the tenor of your post is wrong. We can have both individual and collective action. And individual action alone, even if insufficient, is certainly not nothing. Less GHG emitted is better than more. Even at micro-scale this remains true.
We can apply that to global warming. If you do your part by recycling, this makes you less likely to feel the need to participate in bigger discussions around controlling emissions.
If you are going to spend energy every day on climate change, spend it in pursuit of bigger wins. We aren't going to solve climate change without bigger wins, and if we do get the bigger wins we probably will solve it without the smaller efforts
Without agreeing or disagreeing with your rationale, for me it would be better if you'd make this more clear from the outset.
Something like: individuals can only make very limited positive impact, which in many instances is confounded by psychological factors driving behaviour in the wrong direction.
Your understanding is better than your initial communication.
There are in fact aspects of your argument that I disagree with concerning the Overton Window, but we needn't go there for now.
At least you are no longer infuriating to me.
One thing I want to mention is that it is not known if this heat wave is caused by climate change or not. A UW professor named Cliff Mass, who specializes in climate science and has written books about the weather of the Pacific Northwest, has specifically said (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...):
> Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well.
He also said in the same article:
> Let me end with the golden rule of temperature extremes: the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming. Think about that.
Cliff is kind of a pariah among meteorologists and climate scientists. He _loves_ that fact, and revels in this idea that he's the lone genius who got it right while the rest of the community got it wrong on climate change. But he's not viewed as someone who makes credible statements, particularly as they pertain to questions about climate.
Many of his blog posts are deliberately misleading or contain incorrect information. Others I'd categorize as "You're not wrong... you're just an asshole." He has a decent understanding of some of the meteorological phenomena that are unique to the Puget Sound region, but even there I take every word he writes with a grain of salt. Sure, read his blog to understand how the snow is going to be this weekend at Crystal. But I'd leave it at that.
Based on what evidence? Cliff Mass is a tenured professor of Atmospheric Science at UW, has written the definitive book on Northwest climate (https://www.amazon.com/Weather-Pacific-Northwest-Cliff-Mass/...), leads the University of Washington Mesoscale Analysis and Forecasting Group, is the chief scientist of the Northwest Modeling Consortium, and is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society.
Your comment seeks to discredit him in the very space he is broadly recognized for as an expert. I can't accept a vague attack on him that provides no supporting evidence. It comes off a lot like the attacks made by extremist climate activists when Cliff Mass corrects their understanding and brings them back to a balanced reality of what is going on.
"the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming... "
Is it wrong? If so, how so?
[0] Figure 1.1f here: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/3/2019/11/05_S...
I think I now understand what Mass was doing. Something like: "The bigger my overall remuneration (salary + bonus) the smaller the relative contribution made by my fixed salary."
Right answer, wrong question.
http://archive.kuow.org/post/modern-seattle-building-doesn-t...
However, after looking at our Bureau's temperature history it says otherwise: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/history/temperature/
2020-07-10 - "How a ‘Heat Dome’ Forms—and Why This One Is So Perilous (A massive, intense heat wave is settling over the continental US. The ravages of the Covid pandemic are going to make it all the more deadly.)"
https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-heat-dome-forms/
2019-07-29 - "What exactly are heat domes and why are they so long-lasting and miserable? (Since late June, bouts of extreme heat have scorched both the United States and Europe. To blame are large, stagnant zones of high pressure known as heat domes.)"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/07/29/what-exact...
2018-07-29 - "Scorching, long-duration heat wave to roast much of U.S."
https://www.axios.com/scorching-heat-wave-hits-us-millions-a...
2017-07-22 - "Meteorologists keep mentioning the 'heat dome' - What is it?"
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/What-s-a-heat-dome-11240...
2016-07-22 - "'Heat Dome' Causing Excessive Temperatures In Much Of U.S."
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/22/487031278...
I don't mean to make light of important meteorological events, especially as they relate to climate change, but can anybody with better knowledge tell me if this is a significant incident, or just another "super blood worm moon to appear larger than it has since 1944"?
Yeah... um... call me skeptical on that claim. So far as I can tell, Covid didn't break anybody's air conditioners. It didn't (so far as I know) leave people more susceptible to heat. That article seems like attention-grabbing nonsense. (I'm not blaming you, just commenting on what your search turned up.)
But the facts are, that the earth is warming more and more every year, and if you are under 40 then you have never experienced a year of below-average temperatures. The headlines are repeated because we break new records every year.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/10/if-you...
When heat waves hit Europe in the summer, there are thousands to tens of thousands of deaths. It's nothing to sneer at.
https://www.climatesignals.org/data/record-high-temps-vs-rec...
https://skepticalscience.com/Record-high-temperatures-versus...
Cliff Mass's blog has been providing good context about the meteorology of the heat dome.
Get 50 people chained up in front of the gates, and stop workers and coal coming in.
Maintain this human blockade until the last coal power plant is shut down. Ignore arrests and ignore the police.
Screw the impact on the 'investment'. The grid will handle the loss of electricity anyway.
That's about 12,000 people across the USA who could actively shape the future of humanity.
No, it won't. And if you do it in the midst of a hot summer, or a cold winter, people will die because you killed them.
There are responsible ways to close those plants without killing people.
What you suggest has only ever worked through history when protesting slowly enlightened people and the majority of people chose to support the protestors over time.
I think the US is so divided and fed up from BLM and the election chaos at the moment, so enacting change that way is a hopeless cause.
https://mobile.twitter.com/JimBair62221006/status/1354175511...
I don't understand the downvotes. These tweets are documenting record droughts/floods and crop losses in the last year and people are dying of starvation and the numbers of people starving will only go up.
We need to make an effort to stop climate change. If we can stop climate change in a good way it can give us a better quality of life. Less conflict, less resource scarcity, investing in a prosperous future.
First, skimming the article for the causes of "heat dome" I am not seeing connections to climate change. Maybe I didn't read carefully enough so let me know but this could just be a "thing".
But more importantly, short of that connection it looks like you are trying to appeal to guilt and fear and that's just not something that attracts mentally healthy people. Nobody is interested in that emotion so if it's warranted you have to work much harder to make a case.
Besides our cars have good AC.
OTOH, you can't blame a person - or company - for playing according to the rules of the game.
It comes down to: "Why should I eschew a car and take 250% longer to travel places on COVID infested public transport, when my neighbour Bob jumps in his BMW SUV and drives."
We need leadership from lawmakers or nothing meaningful will happen.
I think last year was understandable why some would shy away from it, but if you'll ride in an airplane I don't see why you would be unwilling to take the train.
Plane vs train? Two different use cases which people would rate differently depending on benefit vs risk/cost.
I can easily see people happy to use a plane to travel long distances with a known set (to the carrier) of people but not want to use a public train with strangers getting on and off at each stop.
Here in Australia where we have limited number of COVID+ people and track'n'trace is feasible it makes a huge difference.
We have cargo ships right now that are burning dirty oil and producing massive amounts of pollution. It has been estimated that just one of these container ships, the length of around six football pitches, can produce the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars.
The earth isn't dying, the earth will be fine, it will recover over time, humanity on the other hand needs to be reduced.
If it isn't climate change, an epidemic or something else, then it will be war over resources some time in the future.
On the other hand, climate change will probably lead to war anyway, since resources like water and places to live will decrease from that, so war is probably in the future anyway, since world population continue to rise, especially since the Chinese seem to allow 3 children moving forward.
We should have a human focus, because it's a global common ground.
We should bother because this is all about what kind of life we will have in the future.
Some will die, some will always survive. That doesn't really change. But if we can stop climate change in a good way it can give us a better quality of life. Less conflict, less resource scarcity. That's why it's worth bothering, to build prosperity, invest in the future.
It's actually not a science/technology problem. The problem is human nature, and that's not solvable with technology. If it was, then everything would be rather simple...
Maybe you can also see why the young climate activists use banners with "system change, not climate change": They don't believe, either, that our current sociologial systems are capable of solving this, the "system" needs to change.
I'm not an expert, but it seems that all known political and/or economic systems fail in the face of greed and selfishness. Or maybe greed is the effect of a failed political system, either or all known systems are a failure from my perspective.
I think capitalism balanced by laws has worked best so far, but you seem to need so many laws that it creates loopholes. I.e blacklists doesn't work that well, especially not a complex blacklist. (And I'd even suggest that the blacklist has been trojaned by lobbyists and other agendas.)
Beyond that, the consensus is that population will naturally plateau in the near future, no need for killing people you don’t like.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-popu...
This is high school level knowledge. Where does this meme that human population is growing out of control come from? I keep seeing it repeated here and it is puzzling.
We would still consume too much resources even with population decline.
Sure, lets say we fix climate change. I think the only viable way to actually do that is for everybody agree to live as people did a few hundred years ago.
People seems to believe that we can solve climate change with technology. I think that's a pipe dream.
I also think that it's a pipe dream thinking that the world will band together and "solve" the climate crisis together. I think Covid-19 has showed us that humanity does not band together in a crisis, each country and even each individual will use the crisis to make moves to benefit them.
And it doesn't matter what you do as a individual, most resources are consumed by large corporations anyway.
Yes, they did. The strict one-child policy (which still had some exceptions) lasted for about the first half of the 1980s.
These measures are not as extreme as the last time they stimulated their population growth, which lead to the one child policy. We'll see if they feel that this stimulation is enough or if they will try to increase the incentive even more if they don't feel as if it is enough.
https://www.bloombergquint.com/global-economics/china-to-all...
The point of view expressed here somewhat ironically show a severe lack of humanity. If anything it seems more humanity is needed here.
It’s not uncommon to hear people talk about various types of population control/reduction while being seemingly oblivious to just how tragic and psychopathic the point of view is.
If you find yourself agreeing with, say, Thanos, and also think it’d be great to see half the world’s population reduced by half, I think that’s a pretty strong signal that you need to really think about what you’re saying and if something can be done to increase your ability to empathize with people in need.
Another approach, that doesn’t involve letting people die, directly or indirectly, through our (lack of) action, would be to address issues that cause long term high population growth, in addition to for instance developing technologies and making cultural/lifestyle changes to accommodate more people on our planet to the extent that’s needed.
My point is that there's no need for population control. The problem will eventually solve itself.
I think humanity is doomed as long as there are egotistical and greedy people and there's nothing you or I can do as individuals.
The problem is lack of resources, so I don't think the problem is solvable with with technology.
And just for reference, I actually am very successful in a field where you do have to empathize with people to be successful. That's actually what makes me bitter, I empathize and all I see is greed and selfishness. It's human nature, and that can't be solved with technology or science.
In practice, it seems like the majority of people who call for population reduction are white/western supremacists who lack empathy for humans born with less privilege.
Birth control should be freely available to every human on the planet. Beyond that, I don't think there is any moral policy available to reduce population.
I didn't really mean to suggest population control, even though I wrote just that. The problem as I see it is that everybody tries to approach the problem as if it will be solvable by technology.
The only way I see that we can solve a climate crisis or the survival of humanity long term is to actually work together. Which I'm pretty certain will never happen, since there will always be greedy and selfish people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
If we can end war and poverty (and that's a pretty big 'if'), I think global population would stabilize and this would be a non-issue.