US-Canada heatwave 'virtually impossible' without warming
bbc.com
bbc.com
It made me really sad to think about the fact that we'll probably see mass-extinction events (for animals, etc.) in the near future or at least within my lifetime because while we all 'care' there's no political will or consensus to combat climate change; it's also not a one nation issue.
I've also been religiously recycling in my personal life but every now and then I read articles about even recycling from a lot of places ending up in landfills which really frustrates me as it takes away any agency I really have on this action.
[0] https://www.complex.com/life/bc-heat-wave-cooked-more-than-a...
It will. It is.
I think the fact that people don't seem to be aware of this is a massive failure of our society and in particular the education system. I do not know, but I would like to believe that it would have made a difference if we were all aware of how huge our impact is on the biosphere is.
Refs: [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
It's generally agreed that we are already living within a mass extinction event[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene#Biodiversity "Humankind has entered what is sometimes called the Earth's sixth major extinction. Most experts agree that human activities have accelerated the rate of species extinction.The exact rate remains controversial – perhaps 100 to 1000 times the normal background rate of extinction"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17910054-the-sixth-extin...
1. As the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the partial pressure of CO2 also increases. This tends to increase the concentration of CO2 dissolved in seawater.
2. As the temperature of the seawater increases, the solubility of CO2 decreases.
(1) is much stronger than (2) so far. Atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased much more than CO2 solubility has decreased due to temperature.
What is your power source?
And some individuals have an extremely outsized effect on climate change a pollution, namely top management of fossil fuel companies and other gross polluters, as well as the politicians who enable them. They carry by far the largest guilt out of any of us. I'll accept my <millionth of a percent of guilt, if they accept their extremely outsized and enormous portion of guilt, and actually do something about it.
As a shorthand, we refer to these corporations as the entities guilty of gross pollution, rather than name every single individual in management positions in said companies, but we all know that the individuals in top management are responsible.
Similarly, the politicians are generally responsible for decisions and actions taken on a societal level, so they bear significantly more responsibility than Average Joe down the street, who's just trying to stay cool during a massive heatwave.
But at the individual level, it is understandable that people do this during heatwaves. Use green energy ;).
[1] residential buildings traditionally do not have airco’s in countries such as Germany or The Netherlands.
>there's no political will or consensus to combat climate change; it's also not a one nation issue.
Think about this in the context of the warmist's proposals for limiting energy consumption in the developing world. People who've never had access to AC at home will be priced out of the market due to rising energy costs. Those who have no electricity will have to wait longer or perhaps never enjoy electric lighting.
There's also the OPs complaint that he has no agency in this - but he chooses to have AC. I wonder how many tons of CO2 are emitted so people in offices can wear suits and jackets and work through the day, rather than shorts and t-shirts and siesta in the cool.
A whole lot less than 1.5 years ago!
I suspect that because humans live in all sorts of temperature zones the combination of the two basically makes it a wash energy wise.
We should also seek to oppose new car-centric development that increasingly destroys what remaining natural habitats we have. Watching Canadian Geese (as mean as they are) get run over by cars in the parking lots of furniture stores selling cheap crap shipped over from other countries is so stupid and unnecessary. And we can prevent it too.
http://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal-with-c...
I did try to convince people to use nuclear power for a couple decades. Now I’m told it’s too late.
The windmills and solar are still coming…
(gridwatch is currently broken but you can see that we're now gas-with-some-renewables if you look back a few days: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ )
The key to getting this to work in other countries is to exclude the coal extractors from the political process.
Recycle if you want, but don't stress about it (especially religiously).
One, for the landfill reason you mentioned, and two, while it does feel good to 'do something about it', the scale of individuals recycling doesn't make up for massive companies generating waste without recycling. If you want the agency back, you'll likely have to get into politics, activism, and/or join those companies and change them from the inside (note: incredibly difficult side quest)
There were a lot of happy little crabs about.
"The Holocene extinction, otherwise referred to as the sixth mass extinction or Anthropocene extinction, is an ongoing extinction event of species during the present Holocene epoch (with the more recent time sometimes called Anthropocene) as a result of human activity."
What exactly is meant by boiling here? It's not literally boiling I assume. What's the temperature threshold change at which animals start to die in the ocean? I would assume it's very small.
> I've also been religiously recycling in my personal life but every now and then I read articles about even recycling from a lot of places ending up in landfills which really frustrates me as it takes away any agency I really have on this action.
It depends on a number of factors, including the market value of natural gas at the time. You can always feel good about recycling aluminum however. This is very easy and cost effective so it pretty much always happens.
Horizon Zero Dawn game> "Another problem to add to our big steaming pile. Apparently a fisherman in the Banda Sea captured video of a Hartz-Timor Horus unit refueling via biomatter conversion along the shoreline of Pulau Wetar. On a pod of endangered dolphins, no less, quite possibly the last of their kind. Not to get graphic, but it looks like what happens inside a blender, as if the robot was whipping up a big pink swirling milkshake of dolphin chum. Our suppression team has scrubbed it from 43 networks, but it's still propagating, so it's only a matter of time before it goes viral. A prepared statement feels grossly insufficient. Any suggestions? This one's a real stinker."
This event should be a warning call to all people who believe that a global warming of only 2 degrees Celsius will be barely noticeable.
One positive effect is that scientists have collected a lot of data that will help them improve climate models.
Karl Popper — 'A theory that explains everything, explains nothing'
>massive amounts of energy are added...
Yes, but the claim (as presented in pop culture) rests upon the premise that the current climatic system is the standard which must be adhered to. The Earth's climate has varied throughout humanity's existence and before.
Additionally, human emitted CO2 is narrowly focused upon as the sole culprit. Other potential mechanisms are dismissed or downplayed.
Unsurprisingly, the conclusion is for more governance. Issuance of carbon-credits as a permission slip to consume energy. Whereas before the petrodollar has been backed by the US military.
Nonviolent Solutions like reforestation are downplayed. Instead forests are mismanaged and allowed to burn. Carbon could be captured as usable wood products. Not only are there problems with the observations and questions about the premises, but the conclusions are inconsistent as well.
"Settled science" was used to buttress cannabis prohibition. Today CBD is touted as a miracle cure. Pick any topic where large institutions fund research. You'll frequently (not always) find something rotten when results correlate with policy proposals.
Every known example of where science has gotten it wrong is also an example of where science has corrected itself. The overwhelming majority of the people most knowledgeable about climate science believe the massive amounts of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution are largely responsible for the disruption of the weather system.
Is X sufficiently high to discount the previous two facts? Scientists are studying perturbations of Earth’s orbit to see the effect that has on climate. Some study the effects of solar dynamics on Earth’s climate. It’s not that CO2 is the sole culprit. It’s that CO2 is the one we can control. It’s not that climate doesn’t change it’s that we are changing it faster than nature can change. It’s changing fast enough that there will be dire consequences to the current world political system.
Of course more governance is needed. The free rider problem mandates that the solution be enforced by government.
That's a bit of survivor's bias isn't it? Where science hasn't "corrected" people disparage dissent or are unaware. If you're game, we might observe that humans are flawed and unable to make perfect observations. Thus empirical knowledge is always flawed and will continuously be "correcting", but never arriving at the zenith of truth.
>Of course more governance is needed. The free rider problem mandates that the solution be enforced by government.
This assumes one accepts the doomsayer's premises. These are the issues being disputed.
1)That men and their CO2 emissions are solely responsible for climate and weather.
2)That there is an optimal climate and fallible men can identify it.
Separate is the issue of "Free riders" and how that relates to the necessity of government mandates. The EPA sets standards for pollution. Those who are within the confines of those standards can do harm with their pollutants. Later they can claim they were within the established guidelines, absolving them of responsibility.
In this case the government regulators have created a scenario where polluters can "ride freely". Consider how this differs from the premises of natural law. If each individual owns himself and his body, those who's industrial factors damage the property of another should be liable for damages - regardless of EPA standards.
IMHO, if we are to examine the moral question we need to ask not just about the premises of the doomsayers, but the potential outcomes of the favored solutions. Even where I disagree with their premises, I can appreciate the questions and arguments around the mechanisms for warming. However, the proposed solutions are plainly harmful.
Where empirical observations required for climate science, apriori knowledge about human nature, reason and logic can be applied to their carbon credit central banking schemes. We know humans are flawed and greedy. We know the world is a complex place. Allowing the further privilege of centrally planning the world's energy consumption invites not just moral hazard, but catastrophic tyranny.
Therefore, if you disagree about the specifics of AGW, fine. That is a separate issue. Consider the moral hazards of the doomsayer's proposals.
Finally, avoid the trap of false alternatives. There are options besides inaction or adopting the warmist's proposals. Reforestation, forestry management and carbon storage through use of wood products is a viable alternative. Ask why this profitable solution is not given precedence over violent, government mandates.
So relax and have a cigarette...
People should understand what that 97% number means. It means that from the papers that addressed the global warming or any effect AND made a position on it, 97% acknowledged that at least to some degree that humans do indeed contribute to global warming. That is the bar for the 97% number.
97% does not address: - how much humans contribute to global warming
- how large the positive feedback effects are (without these, there is little warming from CO2 alone)
- how bad global warming will be
- what are the right policies to address it
What happens in public discourse is that people just dangle the 97% to justify anything, literally anything they say.
You don't want diesel engines? but 97%....why do you hate polar bears?
You don't want to ban plastic straws? 97% of scientists want to ban them
You don't want to live in a small house? but 97%...why do you hate the planet?
You don't think *this* hurricane is caused by global warming? 97% of scientists disagree
Thermometer shows 100F today in Arizona, it's because of global warming, 97% of scientists agree.
It's getting ridiculous, to be honest. It's the pinnacle of appeal to authority.
The 97% I alluded to is not what you claim it to mean.
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/17/do-scientists-agree-on-clima...
Look at your link on NASA's page, the statements from societies are something like this:
> The Earth’s climate is changing in response to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and particulate matter in the atmosphere, largely as the result of human activities.
Which is what the 97% covers, maybe a bit more.
I haven't seen any further statements based on the 97%: for weather events, for policies, for gravity - this is where the fallacy happens. And you did it too in your post, the OP was calling for nuance in regards to gravity, weather and policies, and as a reply you just pulled out the 97%
The claim I make is that it is not an argumentative fallacy to appeal to the advice and knowledge of a large majority of experts in their area of expertise. For instance, note that I don’t appeal to climate scientists for advice on how best to implement policies to reduce CO2 since they aren’t policy experts. It is reasonable to appeal to their authority on the necessity of doing this though.
Is there any guess as to how long this will take? It seems like the interpretation is weather will become a bit more stable after some time, at a +2* new normal.
The denialist theory is that CO2 have no impact on temperature.
So let's build two closed of greenhouses with the same sun exposition, fill one of them with old ambiant air with 450 ppm of CO2 and one with current/predicted ambiant air (750 ppm of CO2), same humidity (or rather, a bassin with the same quantity of water). After a day under the sun, check the temperature of both greenhouses (well, actually, the energy contain in the air of both greenhouses would be better). If one of them have more energy than the second, this "CO2 have no impact on the climate" theory should die and his proponents shut up.
Your experiment would be better formulated as such:
1) Establishing the optimal climate and weather.
2) Create two entire solar systems.
3) Place humans on the Earth of one solar system*
4) Observe the climate of both Earths
5) Decide which one best meets your standard of the ideal climate
As with any scientific experiment, you would want to conduct it multiple times to ensure the results are reproducible. Measure the deviation of each climate and count the number of experiments to determine your degree of certainty.
*3. Make sure humans don't appear (naturally?) on your non-human bearing earth. The question of if humans are a part of nature and therefore part of the ecosystem will arise.
If humans are part of nature, you may then ask if any changes they may or may not contribute are therefore natural.
Traffic deaths would rise because people would increasingly drive under the influence.
In this situation you could say: "This crazy unusual number of traffic deaths near this bar is obviously the result of drunk driving."
In this situation you could not say: "My town had the lowest number of traffic deaths ever recorded last year, so alcohol has not increased accident rates."
And we know that climate change causes more drastic heat waves. If that weren't the case, you'd be correct, but alas.
> If that weren't the case, you'd be correct, but alas.
Why so snarky?
The evidence in my analogy would be blood alcohol tests of the people who crashed, and the evidence in the case of climate change is the measured/calculating heat trapping ability of the atmosphere.
My point is, we have evidence enough that is is valid to say the former, and that is what differentiates it from the latter.
That’s valid, wasn’t clear to me from the example in your initial post.
- [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-web-pages...
I'm sorry, I really don't touch politic topics and don't want to limit my thinking to binary left/right leafs of thinking, so regardless who ordered this, it was a fatally wrong and inhuman decision.
When something like global warming become a religion any comment perceived as attacking itself no matter how innocent and truthful will bring out zealots looking to defend their faith. I think we should keep religion out of science.
Portland reached 116F recently
https://www.oregonlive.com/weather/2021/06/portland-records-...
Here's Portland since 1938
https://projects.oregonlive.com/weather/temps/
This has Portland yearly records going back to 1875
https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/USA/OR/Portlan...
There's no evidence to say that the 1930s were higher in the Pacific North West (which reached a high of 105 in 1935), or that it's ever been 110, let alone 115
The argument for climate change is: "humans are polluting the planet and it's causing a change in the environment and will have a disastrous effect on the climate." The arguments I hear against climate change always seem to concede that humans are polluting the planet, but argue in different ways (natural cycle/not really happening/etc.) that this pollution has no effect.
Even if this were true, why would it be a bad idea to reduce the level of pollution in the environment ? We know we're screwing up, why don't we do our best to clean it and make it usable for the next generations ?
I suspect it is something like psychological security (“I’ve only known a history of rapid progress and I’m not emotionally prepared to confront the possibility that life will be worse for my children and grandchildren, nor that I was complicit”).
At least that’s the average joe climate denier. For the very wealthy it’s simple greed. They’d rather ruin the world irreparably than pay taxes (this characterization doesn’t seem to do justice to the fact that their wealth is derived from cheating society by externalizing costs by way of pollution).
It's greed for basically anyone above the poverty line. There's functionally no difference for wanting a better life for you and your children and to increase your wealth for what is, in the end, the same goal.
Unnecessarily driving an SUV, eating far too much meat and running the lines supplying peoples with those meat is morally not that different.
At the very least it's a difference in degree. If we use wealth as a proxy for power then a given billionaire has at least the same political power as 10K median Americans. And of course the median American has expenses which constitute a much larger share of his income than that of our hypothetical billionaire, and they need to work such that they can't devote their full time and energy to climate problems while our billionaire can live a lavish lifestyle on capital alone.
Beyond that, I find it particularly ludicrous that there's no difference between being an end consumer and literally being at the helm of the supply chain. A consumer has virtually no ability to control the emissions involved in the supply chain while obviously the supply chain helmsmen very much do have that ability, and the creation, refinement, and transport of those goods is overwhelmingly the cause of those emissions in the first place. You might argue that consumers can choose low emissions products but we don't even have the ability to assess which products are "low emissions". And this isn't even touching the "advertising/promoting a carbon-intensive lifestyle" or lobbying to maintain a system that incentivizes pollution.
So while "not that different" is relative, I can't imagine anything more different than our hypothetical billionaire and median American. The idea that eating a cheese burger is morally equivalent to investing in and lobbying for the fossil fuel industry is nothing but repugnant ideology.
And yes, you as a consumer can make a large difference. You can choose to not eat meat, not drive a car, buy your clothes from eco-friendly shops and dedicate your life to make a change. It's just not as convenient as saying 'rich man bad'. People who try can change the world - see beyond meat and Tesla for success stories. Not doing so, but instead chasing a life of personal wealth and well-being is, simply stated, greed. With different amounts of money involved, sure, but the exact same greed. People starving in Africa do not have a choice, yes - but we do. We just choose to blame 'better connected' people because it's easy.
I fully agree with you, however, that lobbying for the wrong thing is definitely bad and something that can be done far more effectively by billionaires. Still, it does not absolve you from your own failures.
That might be true if votes weren't for sale (lobbying, campaign contributions, etc), but they are and thus political power is proportional to wealth. Our hypothetical billionaire can advocate to preserve policies that allow him to profit by polluting the environment, which is to say plundering society (in that the environment is a shared resource--it belongs to all of society).
To use your metaphor, the disease is that there isn't a mechanism to decouple political power from wealth.
Not so well off people might - correctly - see that they will be disproportionately hit. So for them to push against policies (perceived or in reality) making them poorer is not totally insane.
I can't tell what point you're making. Do you mean "the wealthy will likely gain by combatting climate change"? If so, no doubt some will benefit from it, but they won't benefit as much (in the short term) as they would if they continued to externalize costs into the environment.
> Not so well off people might - correctly - see that they will be disproportionately hit.
I don't buy this at all. There's no fundamental reason that carbon policies would disproportionately impact the lower and middle classes and indeed many of the policy proposals are expressly designed to minimize or negate the burden imposed on those classes. The only reason policies tend to increase the burden on those classes is because the upper classes lobby accordingly.
Why? The biggest climate change issue, carbon, doesn't require any lifestyle changes. Solar/wind/batteries + nuclear reactors can provide us with all the electricity we need. Cars/trucks can be electrified in the near term too, although there are non-electric green options too (fuel from captured carbon).
Maybe if your precious "lifestyle" involves rolling coal as you drive to you private jet to then go shoot some endangered lions. Maybe if your lifestyle involves a love of smokestacks or indulging a hypochondriac fear of that windmills will give you cancer. Those people will see an impact. But us normals can still drive cars and have air conditioning in our apartments.
I think you are right about people's thoughts on this.
But it's important to counter that it won't be massively expensive to switch away from fossil fuels, and will likely be cheaper. Decarbonization while maintaining lifestyles, and increasing the energy consumption of developing countries, will not require sacrifice from everyone. No, it simply means disrupting the usual energy sources with new technology, and fossil fuel companies are hugely influential, and have situated themselves deeeeeply within the power structures, especially after the energy crisis of the 1970s.
So because a very few investors have a lot of money at stake, and because they are so extremely influential, and so good at manipulating popular opinion, and even better at influencing power to act in favor of fossil fuels, we see very little action. The only tech missing from the decarbonization transition are some industrial processes like steel, ammonia, and concrete. We don't yet know if hydrogen or carbon capture will be better, or some other new chemistries. But it will be solvable and the worst case cost will not be drastic.
Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels currently. Batteries are on their way to be cheaper than gas powered cars. Batteries are already cheaper than natural gas peakers, and will soon be cheaper than coal.
Christopher Clack's latest models, which model the electrical grid down to the distribution level along with weather patterns, show us a path to save lots of money while decarbonizing the electrical grid at the pace we need to. Yet nobody talks about this on the news, we only get paid PR to subtly tell us that we need fossil fuels. And in the Murdoch media empire, they are so far detached from scientific knowledge, and so deep in the pocket of narrow investment interests, that we have entire political tribes fighting against their own financial and survival interests, merely to help out fossil fuel investors.
I've come to view my own personal choices exactly as you. It's not as much about changing my personal footprint, as it is using my dollars towards investment in changing infrastructure.
I had to replace my 50 year old gas furnace last year, and it was suuuuper hard to get anybody to even propose a heat pump rather than natural gas. So I made sure to call tons of local HVAC places, and make sure that everyone that wouldn't bid on a heat pump knew that the reason I wasn't going with them was because of that. For deeply conservative, low-information and low-innovation parts of the economy like residential HVAC, it will probably take regulation for them to offer the better choices. But I can at least try to let them know that they would have a customer base if they ever decide to try something new.
Or it may mean admitting politicians from a different viewpoint might be right.
The question for an economy is, does the flow of money lead to outcomes we want? I'd say if it flows through paths that lead to the growth of businesses that are good to reduce climate change impact that is something we want. On the other hand, if it flows through paths that lead to growth of purely financial constructs, wealth concentration (which also concentrates control, quite the opposite of the mantra of capitalism which is supposed to be freedom to do your own thing), or more unwanted telephone calls, or overpriced medicine, that's something where we would want to redirect some of the flow. For an economy, money is more about the flow, like blood. Where it passes things grow. So we want to look at the paths of the flows. "Cost" is of little use here. Of course, if you have a concrete thing you are looking at and want it to be more efficient cost again makes sense, but in this discussion here we are trying to make different kinds of decisions, where "cost" is less helpful, since we don't even have anything concrete that we want to make more efficient.
DISCLAIMER - These are the thoughts of someone not trained in (apart from a few semesters on the side while studying something technical) or working anything related to economics.
And if your nation adopts those policies, and another one doesn't and increases, you're much worse off. It's basically a prisoner's dilemma on a geopolitical scale, and there's no single guaranteed strategy to win it.
Then the relative economic benefit of ignoring climate change will further pump up the economies of countries like China who will then pollute more and gain more power, etc.
I don’t know what the solution is, if humans are even socially/politically capable of a solution, but make no mistake this is how it would play out if the western nations were all to take drastic measures against climate change.
Ultimately, the issue is that it is a competitive advantage to ignore climate change (right up until it’s too late), and global competition dictates our social evolution.
We may need green tech that is so overwhelmingly cost efficient that nobody will ever want to pollute again.
And to be fair, why would China or India care about becoming greener when the United States, with all of their wealth and power, can expel 16.1 tons per capita per year without repercussions while China gets told of for their 8.0 tons? Let alone India, with their meager 1.9 tons per capita; why people from these countries be expected to give up on the quality of life and luxuries when the Americans get off scot free?
The oil kingdoms won't be giving up their emissions any time soon, tiny, overpopulated islands won't either, but even large countries such as Australia, Canada and Estonia pump CO2 in the air at twice the rate of China.
Saying "China won't do it so what's the point" is just pandering to the polluting masses to pretend they can't do a thing to change the world. Telling people that it's okay to let the tyre fire burn itself out because there's a much bigger tyre fire four streets down is still a terrible idea.
People won't give up driving cars every day, they won't give up AC and they won't give up cheap plastic. The best we can do is probably what we're doing now, using "green" technologies to delay our inevitable demise by reducing the footprint.
Green alternatives that are cheaper or as cheap as traditional items won't be available because oil is dirt cheap and easy to produce, the infrastructure is already there and everything from gas to processed food depends on oil products.
Huh? I live in New York and we've never had "rolling blackouts."
I can't speak to California, but in New York, no power failures due to "green energy" have ever happened here.
The few (half a dozen in the past 55 years or so) significant power outages here in New York have been due to regional grid failures and local failures due to severe weather events and/or equipment failure[0][1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_in_New_York
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy#United_States
Where, exactly, in New York are "rolling blackouts are the norm due to unreliable green energy"?
Somehow, while living in New York for the last 50+ years, I missed that.
I don't mean to blame green energy for the grid not being able to handle the recent heat wave. But I do blame the closing of the Indian Point Nuclear power plant. Nuclear is a fantastic source of carbon neutral energy but plants are being shut down in both New York and California, without alternative energy sources in place to pick up the slack
>Con Edison urged customers across New York City and Westchester to conserve energy as much as possible, in an effort to avoid further outages due to equipment failure.
I can't speak to California as I don't live there, but your original statement about rolling blackouts in New York was flat wrong.
The recent issue in New York during the heat wave was about aging infrastructure and equipment failures, not "green energy" or the closure of Indian Point.
That might change in the future, but your statement that New York experiences "rolling blackouts" is just false.
In fact, there have never been rolling blackouts in New York. Ever.
I wholeheartedly agree that nuclear should be part of the mix and that in the absence of viable grid energy storage, solar and wind energy can't provide base load[0] power generation.
For the record I do believe in climate change, and think we need to deal with it. But to answer your question, if climate change indeed _weren’t_ caused by human CO2 emissions, then why would atmospheric CO2 even count as pollution?
Combating climate change isn’t some simple and easy change. It would require people to dramatically change their way of life, usually for the worse (smaller dwellings, less AC, fewer children, less meat consumption, no non-essential international travel, etc.)
It wouldn’t be worth doing if atmospheric CO2 were benign.
Even on the opposite side you have to decide where to draw your line, how much to spend on tackling it; how much is enough, how much is a waste that could be spent on something else.
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels shows how to think about energy and how to choose the best energy source: https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Case-Fossil-Fuels/dp/1591847443
An interview with the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip3XoAKRKHs
One of the larger problems is that to many people climate change has become a political issue instead of a physical phenomenon. Climate change is used as a lever to achieve political goals just like racial relations, gender confusion, migration questions and many other unrelated things. This has made it a political act to either affirm and reinforce anthropogenic climate change or relativise or deny it. Just like with the other mentioned issues this politicisation makes it much harder to come to rational conclusions and act upon them. The tactic of using one thing to try to force through other things - "climate refugees" (migration), "green new deal" (welfare state), "the great reset" (globalism) - only adds fuel to the metaphorical fire, making it even harder to act rationally.
Another big problem is that climate-related eschatology has a rich history of failed predictions which makes it rather easy to claim that the currently fashionable scenario will probably end up by the wayside just like all the previous failed predictions did. Add to that the exaggerated emotionally laden calls for action because "the world will go under/be uninhabitable in X years" (where X tends to be in the near, not far future) and the stage is set for the defence of any stance on the issue, from "everyone is going to die from climate change" to "the world will thrive like never before".
Christopher Hitchens mused about "how religion poisons everything" in his book "God is not great: how religion poisons everything" [1]. Were he still alive he could write a similar book on politics: "How Politics Poisons Everything". It would be a good read and it would not change the situation one whit, alas.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43369.God_Is_Not_Great
The truth should be good enough, something that used to happen once a century is about to happen once a decade, then every few years...
I'm willing to assume that professional climate researchers are aware of the 1930s heat wave.
Of the 13 provinces and territories, 9 of the 13 records were set in the 1930's or earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_temperatures_i...
Did you find a flaw in the researchers' reasoning? Or do you have knowledge they do not?
"According to the analysis, if the world warms by 2C, which could happen in about 20 years' time, then the chances of having a heatwave similar to last week's drop from around once every 1,000 years to roughly once every 5-10 years. "
Apparently you haven't been paying attention to all the failed predictions by alarmists over the past 3 decades including:
The End of Snow (2000) https://www.climatedepot.com/2018/01/04/flashback-2000-snowf...
The predictions of Glacier National Park being ice free by 2020:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/08/us/glaciers-national-park-202...
Not only is it extremely, extremely unlikely that 2C warming is experienced in the next two decades, it is completely counter to the trend: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2021/07/uah-global-temperature-u...
All of this article is based on flawed computer models of non-linear dynamic systems that become exponentially unpredictable as a function of time. What were the odds of the 1930s heat waves, which were far more drastic, and far more sustained? No answer there.
"Overall, we rate the Climate Depot a strong Pseudoscience source based on the promotion of human-influenced climate denialism propaganda and the use of poor sources who have failed numerous fact checks."
I'm not sure how an anecdote of one climate prediction failing (your CNN article) is a rebuttal against decades of climate research and unanimous consensus from the vast majority of scientists.
As for Dr. Roy Spencer—his credentials are impressive, but he is just one scientist. The scientific consensus on climate change is established, and "nearly all actively publishing climate scientists (97–98%[3]) support the consensus on anthropogenic climate change"[0]. I don't particularly care for the opinion of one lone man.
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[0]: Anderegg, William R L; Prall, James W.; Harold, Jacob; Schneider, Stephen H. (2010). "Expert credibility in climate change". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 107 (27): 12107–9. Bibcode:2010PNAS..10712107A. doi:10.1073/pnas.1003187107. PMC 2901439. PMID 20566872. https://doi.org/10.1073%2Fpnas.1003187107
Same thing happened with Galileo - I'm not saying anti-climate change perspectives are tantamount to Galileo, but it's precisely that line of thinking that marginalized and abused countless (correct) counter-orthodox scientific arguments.
"All across the region, in the US states of Oregon and Washington and in the west of Canada, multiple cities hit new records far above 40C."
Not sure how you can point to 1936's records of 111F and say that was "worse" than 121F today.
There are too many forces pushing it further than to prevent it, and governments won't come together to actually do something about it until it's too late.
Everything that has a beginning has an end, and maybe this is ours. Over time the earth will heal without us, so instead of worrying about something out of our control (as individuals), how about we just live our short meaningless lives as comfortably as we can and do whatever we want until we die.
I think it's really that simple.
There is very little incentive for us regular people to support heavily polluting industry unless it's required for self preservation in some way. Technology will also find good solutions for reducing the impact if industry is forced down that road.
If you think of climate change and imagine superfund sites, factories dumping sludge in rivers, etc., then you are conflating two concepts that are only tangentially related.
One of my favorite George Carlin bits on this subject: https://youtu.be/BB0aFPXr4n4
A change in odds by a multiple of 150 does not equal "virtually impossible". Imagine 1/1000 vs 1/150,000 odds for a multimillion jackpot. Our weather and climate system is unfathomably complex. The odds that a compter model is correct is "virtually impossible".
Ie., a more accurate claim is something like, `15x to 1500x`, with `150x` the best mean according to the model.
(Or even `1.5x to 15,000x` -- it would be useful to know).
I suspect the housing market in most places hasn't baked that information in (with the exception of e.g. property on the coastline that will be under water in the near future)
No. The climate is a complex system. We can't predict what's going to happen two weeks from now, never mind decades in the future.
But that won't stop lots of people from telling you they can do it with their crappy, buggy, closed-source program that prints whatever they want.
What are those but moral and/or intellectual superiority declarations? And they're false too! We historically never cared or done as much for the environment as we do right now. Cars are getting stricter pollution norms on a schedule. Home appliances are rated by efficiency, we even banned some things like traditional light bulbs. Vacuum cleaners have a maximum draw power by law! Garbage collection is more expensive if not sorted. We pump money into renewable energy. We banned plastic cups and bags and even straws. Industry besides being regulated and checked is economically incentivized to consume as little energy as possible. We have naturally protected areas and species, we regulated fishing, etc, etc. We even have some clear positive results like pollution going down in big cities compared to last century.
Maybe it's not enough right now. But it's downright dishonest to say we don't care or do. The solutions left to be found are nowhere clear or easy. We don't have infinite resources to do things, we can't force every country to do the same, change takes time, etc.
If I exercise once a month and spend the other 29 days sitting around, is it dishonest to say I care about physical fitness?
>The solutions left to be found are nowhere clear or easy.
They're very clear, they're just not easy, because they're unpopular, because they involve people being less greedy and selfish. We could tax pollution and punish polluters far more than we do now. We could take some of the unimaginable wealth away from billionaires and use that money to improve infrastructure and other parts of society to be more green. But we won't, because greed and selfishness are virtues of modern life and we believe that a single person should reap all of the benefits from the work of the thousands of people below them.
There are debates right now in Germany about how German steel producers could become uncompetitive internationally if stricter emissions requirements come into force as planned. I assume the same sort of debates crop up anywhere that makes any attempt to address climate change.
In fact I think the recycling and banning plastics movements are actively harmful to climate change mitigation because they give people a false sense of security: “see, we’re doing something!”
If we can convince countries to stop killing their own people, we can convince countries to curb their emissions. We are not doing close to enough, and the measures we have taken so far can hardly be counted as half-assed.
We haven’t actually been able to do this. Not even close.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Allied-powers-World-War-II
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/yezidis-iraq-syria-genoci...
https://www.npr.org/2017/03/16/520440725/u-s-military-works-...
lol.
No, it’s far more dishonest to suggest that we actually do anything to protect the climate.
Every single thing you mention is just symbolic virtue signaling, as we’re hurtling at full speed into a brick wall.
- "not it is not real"
- "it is just a flu like any other"
- "all things will be ok"
- "oh sh* it is real"
- "f** it is real"
- "we are screwed run for your lives"
- "..."
- "no we have not said it is not real, we ..."
Point being, just shut the fork up and listen scientist in the first place not wasting time. By the way when down vote could you at least comment :D
Edit: Sorry for misunderstanding now I see multiple ways how what I said may come out wrong. Dialog was meant to be voice of non-believers. Global warming science is settled and it is real and may be a threat for all life on planet. What I find strange is struggle smart people need go through to convince people without knowledge that what they say is truth. Like frustration person with vision (scientist) would experience trying to convince blind person about the look of the reality. It is not about knowledge it is about trust. And in this case it seems oil money was blinding factor for many for very long time.
This is the same part of the mind that rejects any thoughts of death, even though we know it's certain for everyone.
Tell me with a straight face all the human industry doesn't affect the weather.
Covid is much less serious than climate change.
I believe the scientific consensus on the seriousness of Covid (death rate of 1 in 100-200, nonzero but unquantified risk of long-term side effects), and I think our measures to combat Covid were an extreme overreaction. I also think climate change is by far the most serious problem facing humanity and that no reaction would be too extreme.
It is some strange irony of being human - only when we start experiencing issues we perceive it personally as real danger then it becomes real, and often at that time is too late. Way too late.
And we are already 20 years late with global warming fixes. I am not saying it is end of story, but time for making a dent is quickly closing and we are still at the stage of convincing people it is real.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_we...
https://www.science20.com/news_articles/stop_conflating_weat...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/dont-be-fool...
The way this sort of research works is by modeling weather under different conditions and determining that certain weather patterns are statistically more likely under conditions consistent with global warming. This isn't just "it is hot for a week so that must be global warming". It is "the air patterns that are required for this sort of thing to happen are highly associated with higher average global temperatures". The causality is going in the other direction.
An old friend of mine is a professor who studies climate change. They fairly consistently get hate mail from people who insist that computer modeling as an entire discipline is utterly worthless and should be dismissed without any investigation. There are no reasoned criticisms coming from the denier community.
But the BBC article... "the research has not yet been peer-reviewed.
"They used 21 climate models to estimate..."
"They compared the climate as it is today, with the world as it would be without human-induced warming."
This is not empirical science. And by using a 1000 year model they are starting their analysis, conveniently, after the peak of the Roman Warm Period.
They don't seem to be using a 1000 year model, they are just saying the rate of occurrence. And when do you think the Romans, and their related warming period, were exactly?
Edit: oops I did mixup the late Roman and Medieval warm periods. Anyway both the RWP around 2000 years ago and the MWP 1000 years ago are what geologists call interglacial periods. The earth is currently in an ice age (when there is permanent ice at either of the poles) but every thousand years or so the climate warms and the ice retreats for a couple hundred years. Unfortunately most climate change studies only consider data from 1850 onwards, and those that do go back further only go start at the last glacial period about a thousand years ago.
Edit to match your edit: Neither the MWP nor the RWP were global phenomenas - they were hotspots at different times for different regions. What we are currently experiencing is a GLOBAL increase.
Also worth noting this from your article... "During the following Little Ice Age, which lasted roughly from 1300 to 1850"
There's that 1850 again, the climactic minimum, and coincidentally the exact year that climate change models start from.
"1550 to 1850 AD Little Ice Age Coldest temperatures since the beginning of the Holocene. Populations die from crop failure and famine in Europe." http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/fall12/atmo...
> there's an hot summer
Didn't you notice that, lately, every summer is "a hot summer" and "warmer than before"?
The summers were "getting warmer than before" for the past 400 years, before anthropocentric global warming. Look at any long term trend for temperature. e.g. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming/last-2000-years
These are such weak arguments. It's pretty settled that humans do influence climate. Why do we need to appeal to fallacies when discussing about it?
https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/wp-content/uploads/N...
Nearly everything shut down, commuting stopped, people worked from home, etc. etc. It's hard to imagine any sort of voluntary program that would bring bigger behavioral shifts.
* Reducing living standards is counter intuitive when consumerism is the norm, in France the Yellow Vests movement showed that it's very difficult to tax carbon if it punish poor people. Inequality and carbon emissions are deeply intertwined.
* People will just consume, feel guilty, maybe take some individual "steps", but there is too much behavior inertia and dependency. Nothing changes because everybody feels responsible and thus feel unable to protest since it would be hypocritical to do so.
* Companies will keep causing emissions unless those companies disappear
A french think tank called "Shift Project" is writing a public plan, hoping to attract attention during the 2022 presidential elections.
It looks like that any real step would result in additional precarity and poverty, which makes it very difficult to act for other political reasons.
Sometimes I think that convincing conservatives of taking action, disregarding inequality, would actually be good enough, considering the situation.
I'm part of the poorest 20% in my country, and honestly I'd rather have more poverty and solve climate change. It's a price I'm willing to pay.
I agree, trying to force change on people which they think is against their own comforts, interests or beliefs is almost always a losing proposition. Providing incentives for desirable outcomes and letting people choose is much more effective in the long run and doesn't breed nearly as much resentment (they feel they retain their agency). Our best hope is a play into people's own selfish desires and channel that into a productive outlet (e.g. "install this CO2 scrubber on your roof and make passive income!")
Climate change is an issue that needs to be addressed immediately but unfortunately it's an uphill battle with human nature and the status quo of our culture/society working against us.
The chaos associated with this stuff is an opportunity for many.
The atmosphere belongs equally to everybody, so polluters should pay compensation to everybody. The only practicable implementation of this is a carbon tax and dividend. And rich people tend to pollute more, so it will make poor people better off.
In the long term, poor people will be better off, yes, but not in the short term.
I'm not convinced. Carbon improves the living standard of everybody. Even a fair and progressive carbon tax will hit poor people harder in relative terms. So even if it hits rich people harder, it will much unpleasant on poor people than it will be on poor people.
To give an example, removing 5% of the income of poor people is much more unpleasant that removing 30% of the income of rich people, for plenty of reasons that are explained in studies on inequality.
So I don't disagree that rich people pollute more and will be taxed a lot, but it doesn't change the fact that poor people having been benefitting from CO2 emissions, so the 30% of rich people, as individuals and not corporations, are not responsible for the majority of CO2 emissions.
Cutting the emissions of corporations will also affect poor people in unpleasant ways.
The tax is redistributed equally as dividend, so your net tax is negative if you pollute less than average.
But on the other hand, the atmosphere and oceans storing more energy is not strictly what's causing our problems, but rather the severity and unpredictability of the weather.
Charles Eisenstein's book "Climate - a new story" convinced me that biomass and large healthy ecosystems act as a buffer on weather, that forests change the atmosphere around them and attract rain fall, all kinds of complex interactions that we've taken for granted.
The way I see it, the more life we wipe off the planet, the closer Earth gets to a primordial version of itself, firestorms and all. It's not the case that Earth's weather just calmed down enough for life to survive, but that the increased complexity of a planet covered in plants has a homeostatic effect.
I think we have to be much more creative than 'reduce consumption', find a way to get the labor and energy of billions of people to go toward increasing biomass and biodiversity instead of merely harvesting it and taking the good weather for granted.
Let's stop wasting time talking about giving up comfort in the hope that maybe the whole world will follow and the 2° will maybe become 1.5°. Stop it!
Climate is changing: it's a fact, let's stop whining, let's accept it and especially let's face it.
The question must not be: "what can we all do do mitigate the problem?"
The question must be: "what can I do to enjoy life as much as possible within the current framework and without stealing from my neighbor?"
And what about the next generation(s)?
Climate change might have disastrous consequences in my life time (I’m early 30s) but it’ll pale in comparison to what coming generations have to face. Whatever we can do today to give them a leg up is valuable.
You need too large a we to able to do anything at a global scale. Much better to start facing it: install AC, move to fresher countries, accept that a big change is already happening and do whatever you can to cope with it.
A carbon emissions tax could be politically viable if it was coupled with an income tax reduction so as to be revenue neutral. That way most people wouldn't be worse off.
Even better: Couple the carbon tax to a flat tax credit which is revenue-neutral to the government. Such a tax would be naturally progressive. It also avoids a perverse incentive to keep polluting to maintain the tax base.
Yeah, OK, if they can fly private jets for leisure, why should I bother recycling a mountain of materials to offset that?
Honestly, the wealthy act with such impunity that it looks like some heads are going to roll when people realize the changes to climate and nature are here to stay.
2) Distribute the revenue from the carbon tax directly to the population via a UBI, reverse income tax, or something similar.
This gives an incentive to reduce individual carbon use but makes sure that average people don't lose out in general
Carbon taxes are stupid because it's just another metric that can and will simply be gamed by the industry without any net positive effect.
It would be sufficient to just price goods and services according to their environmental impact. Example: most Spanish vegetables and citrus fruit should be priced at least 3-4x higher. Why? Because environmental costs aren't priced into the products and current irrigation practices are unsustainable [0]:
> In any case, it is apparent that if the full cost recovery principle is applied to intensively used aquifers, many existing uses would not be economically viable.
This applies to most industries today. Crabs caught in the North Sea are shipped from Germany all the way to Morocco for shelling and then shipped back to Germany for sale. Same with fruit produced in Argentina that is shipped to Thailand for packaging and then back to continental US for sale. This wouldn't be economically viable if it wasn't for huge discrepancies in cost of labour combined with heavily subsidised fuel costs.
Take away subsidies, stop nationalising environmental costs (that's what a carbon tax is) and make manufacturers take responsibility for the entire product lifecycle.
The latter is especially important: you cannot just start pumping out millions of car batteries per year without a solid plan for reuse and recycling. Same goes for wind turbine blades, IoT devices, etc.
Want to sell millions of phones in my country? No problem, as long as you also provide a way to reuse and recycle them and make up for the environmental damage caused in the production process.
This alone could be sufficient to steer things into a more sustainable direction and away from self-destructive behaviour.
Taxation is not the way.
[0] https://easac.eu/fileadmin/PDF_s/reports_statements/Spain_Gr...
Sounds like a fire started in town and spread to everything flammable, as opposed to the town being engulfed in a forest fire. Trees may not have been dry enough to catch fire.
Absolutely no one (afaik) disputes there was once an ice and now there isn't.
But there is a long way to go to prove there is anything we could have done about it or that if we should even try and get back to that climate.