'No One Is Safe': How the Heatwave Has Battered the Wealthy World
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
People want to make as big a pile of money as possible, as quickly as they can, with the idea that the pile will be big enough to allow them (and just them) to be secure for the rest of their (and just their) lives.
That attitude runs directly counter to the long-term planning, and sacrifice for the greater good, that is necessary to combat things like this.
Some Asian nations, with their focus on Society, may be better equipped to deal with this, than nations that heavily promote individual achievement.
In a society as cut-throat capitalist as the US, yes. In "welfare states" such as Europe, where everyone has their basic needs in life (housing, healthcare and food) at least somewhat met, this desire is far less pronounced.
Still though, even in Ireland, where there is a strong social push-back against the greedy ego mentality, there are still people willing to sell out their environment, country, and grandmothers to get a leg up.
These people have done very well for themselves in the last couple decades, and especially well the past few years.
To further show how right you are, these people have invested considerable resources (that have paid off well) in messing up the basic needs you mention of housing, healthcare and food - and I would add media to that list.
To me, this is the core of neoliberalism, and it is a worldwide plague.
What I'm talking about is a widespread attitude among 'normal' people, where anyone with a whiff of too much ego about them is nearly ostracized. So much so, that it's almost a crab-bucket mentality, rather than plain down-to-earthness.
As an example, the normal American style of telling people what you're good at goes down like a lead balloon in Ireland - saying anything positive about yourself without sandwiching it in layers of self-deprecation is seen as unforgivably gauche.
And yet - despite the above - Ireland has no shortage of neolib politicians and moguls, who have rotted our infrastructure from within - such as with tax havens, a very shortsighted and shitty strategy. The have become incredibly wealthy in the process, doubling their wealth or so during the pandemic - and they get away with it because they own the media. It's as if they're invisible, and thus immune to any social pressure.
https://www.npr.org/2017/02/21/516375434/does-studying-econo...
The collectivist mindset is more around top down direction. They'll happily throw trash on the street, but if someone threatens to fine them for doing it, they'll stop and not complain.
I think this continuous stream of weather caused disasters, record breaking heat waves, droughts, extremes, etc are slowly getting us ready to make some tough choices. The past year has shown that we can do that in a hurry when we have a pandemic. It's a matter of public opinion and once that shifts, things just happen really quickly and get a dynamic of their own. That change creates opportunities for companies to capitalize on. The changes are massive; therefore the opportunities are massive too. The NYT is right that that will involve a lot of money. They seem miss the notion that there's also a massive return on that investment. In a way capitalism and greed are working better here than politics and activism.
The first not so tough choice will be the timing of the complete death of the ICE vehicle industry. Weather it's 2030, 2035, or 2040 doesn't actually matter at this point because it is basically happening already. The consensus seems to be that the phase out of ICE vehicles is now inevitable and most manufacturers are already investing to survive beyond that. That creates a dynamic that basically makes it happen faster. Which seems to have taken a few manufacturers by surprise. Tesla paved the way for this in the last fifteen years. Now others are also having success in the market with EV only products. Sure most of these will happily churn out ICE vehicles as long as they can get away with it but increasingly they are looking towards EVs for growth, good press, profit, etc. Companies merely holding on to what they have without investing will simply be wiped out. To some extent that is already happening as well.
The same transition is happening in the energy sector. Wind and solar are basically killing more co2 intensive forms of energy generation like coal and increasingly also gas. There too people are haggling over when the final plants are being shut down. But economics are driving that transition faster than years of activism could. Wind is cheaper, therefore coal plants are disappearing by the double digit GW per year now.
These natural disasters that are widely attributed to climate change are just going to make it happen faster. But it was already happening anyway.
I would like to know how the place I am currently living at will be different now vs 10-30 years from today.
The AR6 version is supposed to come out next year.
I particularly find skipping to the graphics page and looking for maps useful for answering peoples geography related questions.
One thing to keep in mind is that report was overall meant to illustrate the difference between a 1.5 and a 2C outcome, but at this point 1.5C is toast and 2C would be an optimistic outcome so you can just skip to the 2C graphs for your estimating purposes.
This is just for the CO2 already in the atmosphere. Add to that at least 10 more years of emissions that continue to grow at an exponential rate. Then another 20 years of decreasing CO2 emissions, and it might be better to look at: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will-look-l....
A volcano could erupt tomorrow and create much cooler climates around the world.
Al Gore’s movie from the early 2000s said Florida would be underwater by now. What’s the actual sea level rise in the intervening period been? A cm or 2, if that?
Would our could?
If a volcano could erupt then perhaps the sea also could rise?
It's sad that it's so hard to talk about which of these are more likely without bringing up one's whole political identity into the discussion.
I doubt the movie expressed absolute certainty, but it was indisputably meant to be alarming.
> the sea also could rise
It wouldn't be surprising, since they've been rising for 20,000 years. The strange thing about sea rise is that the tens of meters of rise from before the industrial revolution were good and natural, whereas the centimeters since are evil, and definitely due to CO2 emissions.
Well, seasoned reasonable discourse from the scientific community started in the 70s (as well as knowledge of the issue among oil companies).
So, you'd expect a 2000-dated discourse to be slightly more alarming, yes.
Oil companies don't have any special ability to predict the future state of a complex system.
> So, you'd expect a 2000-dated discourse to be slightly more alarming, yes.
Actually, the UN said in 1989 that whole nations might be wiped off the map if we didn't reverse global warming by 2000, so I might expect a 2000-dated discourse to have some humility, considering that the doom prophecy totally failed to materialize.
But anyway, how did Gore's predictions fare?
No, but they definitely have the scientific knowledge to understand the scale at which they pump CO2 into the atmosphere and the first-order consequences this has.
> But anyway, how did Gore's predictions fare?
It's like when you fly a plane, never trust the instruments: "yeah, sure, the altimeter is going down, but you know, we're still in the air. Besides, the altimeter has a margin of error, so... we're good."
We have a song for that in France: "Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise, tout va très bien, tout va très bien...".
Check your hypothesis. There have been times in the past when CO2 went from, say, 3000 to 4000. Did the global average temperature do what you think it should?
> It's like when you fly a plane
I'm not seeing a number of correct predictions out of total predictions. What do we usually think when somebody has a hypothesis, and based on that hypothesis they make some testable predictions, and the predictions don't come true?
I've seen dozens of instances of fairly scary predictions from 2000ish which were originally for 2050 and are coming true the last five years.
Weather maps predicting scorching heat in France which i remember thinking "there's no way this will ever be that bad", and what do you know, it is that bad.
Warnings about floods, glaciers entirely disappearing, heat domes.
Warnings about the possibility of methane reservoirs releasing into the atmosphere as permafrost melts.
These aren't warnings anymore, they're news stories from the past couple years.
Do you somehow believe it's just a coincidence? That it'll get better, we don't need to do anything?
Everything about what you're saying is a choice you are making. You are choosing to dismiss evidence. Choosing to adopt an attitude which lets you ignore reality. Choosing to put your fingers in your ears. Choosing to compare events that happen over millennia to events that happen over decades.
Make better choices.
Scaremongering is a double-edged sword. I'm not a fan either. It can cause some people to pay attention and care about the problem. But it also causes other people to dismiss the worry as exaggerated (because by definition putting too much emphasis on the extreme range of the probability range is by definition exaggerating).
But it's a mistake to confound the scaremongers with the underlying science that provided the inputs for the worry.
The uncertainty bracket is large. You can't really know if we're going to experience problems at the scales that most people would recognize as "doom" by 2020, 2040 or 2140. But that doesn't mean the underlying model is wrong, it just means that the uncertainty bracket is large.
If the practical every day problem starts at 2040 or 2080, is this any better? Because you'd be dead and it will be somebody else's problem?
Or because when the problem will become manifest we'll just fix the problem then?
The inertia of the system goes both ways. The observable parameters have long changed and the system has been slow to move towards the predicted target. This also suggests that corrections to the parameters will take a very long time to fix.
I completely agree. It's so large that it's expected that any near-term predictions will be false, and that's what we see. By now there's a huge graveyard of false climate doomsday predictions that are swept under the rug by the media, seemingly because it's so useful for them to have something scary to talk about.
We know that the atmosphere's temperature goes up and down, and does not require human activity to do that. It has ranged from about 10C to 25C over the past 2B years (obviously with no human intervention). Earth has been about as cold as it ever gets recently, so even if there were no emissions by humans, it wouldn't be surprising to see the earth heating up. That's what it's done many times in the past.
We're being told that it's definitely due to CO2 emissions, when we lack the computational ability to prove such a thing. Because of this insistence on the CO2 hypothesis, all talk is about ceasing emissions. If we thought the earth was heating up of its own accord, all talk would be about configuring society to have huge amounts of reliable clean energy, which pretty much means nuclear, rather than solar and wind.
Note the same anti-human pattern as in the case of sea-level rise: it's fine for nature to add e.g. 2000 ppm CO2, but it's evil, wrong, and potentially disastrous for humans to add 100.
I think this whataboutsim about nature is missing the point about how we actually want to live.
Socially conservative people should probably care more about conserving our way of life as in having children running on meadows instead of being trapped under domes or underground. Instead they're focusing on preserving their relatively recent life-style of reckless burning fossil fuel.
We may be wrong and maybe it will turn out that all this caution was not necessary. But it's not that we're saying we should all curl up in a corner and die.
There are alternative ways to deal with resources that can give jobs to people and let humanity thrive in other ways. What are you people really afraid of exactly? What kind of fearmongering have you been exposed to? That all the last decent people will disappear when coal mines will close? What is it, really? Even if all we end up doing wasn't really necessary to "save the planet" but just to have better air quality in our cities, would that be that bad?
This is right. Nor is there going to be any such system. The climate is a complex system, meaning it's fundamentally not amenable to simulation. All the models are toys compared to the reality. None of them even attempt to actually simulate what's going on. Not only is it impossible because we don't even know what the phenomena are, it's extra impossible because there's not enough computational power. I doubt humanity is capable of accurately simulating the sugar in a stirred cup of coffee, much less figuring out what's going to be happening with the atmosphere tomorrow, much less 30 years from now.
The models are (unavoidably, necessarily) just toys. They don't predict the future. Anyone who tells you that they are predicting the future with them is malicious or extremely naive. The models just masquerade as science to support political goals.
What political goals? Source would be appreciated as well.
Is there a problem with that? Don't think so.
By the way, it's quite hard to nail down what exactly a certain region will look like in 30 years. That depends a whole lot on the assumptions that you take. The models used for such work (IPCC etc) are rather suitable to compare actions, e.g. "If we don't take measure X and Y now, then the average temperature in this region will be 0.7° higher 30 years from now, compared to taking that measure."
Addressing current/emerging problems over future problems will be the next policy battleground on climate.
Heavily tax mass transit but allow private jets, etc.
Use the revenue to subsidize green projects.
https://econormalisation.kapsi.fi/ this was an incomplete but interesting take on a possible solution.
Besides the normal peoples guilt will be a huge blocker for anyone to even start thinking about personal cap.
I hope I'm wrong but living in the UK, I really don't see how we get from where we are now to somewhere sustainable fast enough to make any sort of difference.
It may be unfortunate, but it's also necessary. Investing in improved insulation is a good thing regardless, but I expect air-con to also be necessary. Given where we are right now and the huge inertia in the system, even in the best possible case of 100% of world governments and people getting on-board with reducing emissions as fast as possible right now, we're still looking at severe impact from climate change, and we will have to adapt to cope with the weather events (like heatwaves) that that creates. Hence, air-con. And flood barriers. And making plans for how to use public buildings as heat shelters or disaster evacuation shelters.
(All IMHO, I am not an expert, etc)