US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/cl3ger/z/evsoc1g
There's some latency in temperature, much more in sealevel rise, but generally it isn't as bad as frequently depicted. I only learned this recently, I used to think we are unavoidably messed up for centuries, but that's really not the case. For my son I believe there's a scenario it will get better, not worse, in his lifetime. Though it's not a scenario I think is likely to happen.
I'm not optimistic about our societies willingness and ability to do so, but all action does matter and we definitely have the possibility. Ironically, drastic and massive climate action is also the cheapest thing to do.
At the moment that part of the world is the most ambitious part.
> after we move to zero emissions
I wonder if that will happen on a planet scale even in your sons lifetime
She pretty much pointed out that climate change is a social issue in no uncertain terms:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia5fMomBXbE
As an EU citizen, I applaud the ambitions, but I feel apprehensive at the same time. Regardless how you spin this, affordability is an absolute requirement.
For instance, on the consumer side of things, you see this concern expressed by the 'gilets jaunes' movement who were initially road users (commuters, truckers,...) protesting rising fuel prices as those add to the cost of living (whether real or perceived). Low income households can't afford to buy a new fuel efficient or electric car; or renovate their home to be more energy efficient (solar, isolation,...); or even buy groceries with a minimal carbon footprint (cheap food prices translate into externalized costs e.g. meat industry + availability / convenience).
Like, over the past few years, several cities have enacted a localized carbon levy for anyone who wants to drive into their city centers. While I'm a proponent of the idea, the net result is that visiting family by car has now become an expensive proposition. Public transport is a partial alternative, but it just doesn't offer the same availability / convenience as a personal vehicle.
A concern here is that this levy targets vehicle classes whose emissions are above an established norm. Turns out that a sizable proportion of low income class families living in those cities who find themselves owning a car they can't afford to drive anymore. This was explicitly raised as a policy concern in a parliamentary hearing in late 2020.
That's just one concrete example of why climate change is a social issue.
The problem raised by the Indian director in the documentary is rooted in the exact same challenge: finding balance between enabling 8 billion people to attain a sustainable, modern living standard while at the same time reducing humanity's reliance on fossil fuels.
One also has to understand that in order to attain Western living standards, "the rest of the world" is very much on a trajectory on par with historic social and economic dynamics and changes seen in America and Europe from the late 19th century hence. India and China together constitute about 35% of the global population. As the Indian director rightly questions: How can the West hold a moral high ground at this point in time while not having taken any notable affirmative action over the past 40 years to curb the impact of its own way of living profoundly?
Barring any finger pointing towards who does what, the filmmakers also interview the then-mayor of Miami Beach who first-hand faces the consequences of rising sea levels whilst being confronted with party politics. All he can do is install 400 million dollars worth of pumps just to keep his constituency's feet dry for the next 40 to 50 years.
He simply ends up stolidly remarking: "The ocean isn't Democratic or Republican. It just keeps rising."
Just today, I heard one person say they keep the AC on 18C all day because they don't like sweating, one person bought a bigger car to give more space for their dog, one person said she keeps the hot water on in the sink to reduce the hot water flow and regulate the shower temperature more easily.
People in the West need to reconnect with reality, and people in developing countries need to look up to more meaningful ways of life.
And you have a good point, but eventually, also people in the West will have to accept that climate change will impact them somehow. Sealevels will continue to rise, weather extrems will become worse, viable farmland will become more rare, and overall living cost will rise even without an increase in taxation.
Carbon tax is just a tool to account for climate change in a capitalist framework. Increased taxation on obsolete and inefficient technologies should be offset by deductions and subsidies. If the carbon tax becomes burgeoning, reducing or dropping the VAT could be worthwile.
How long will it even take for us to do less talking and more reducing? 5 years? 10?
Will we discover that the big co2 emitter (USA, china) might even get further behind and my country is on track (Germany)?
Will the normal and valid economical growth of countries like china eat all co2 winnings for x decades until it reaches a peak?
Or will we see catastrophic events which will erode our society peace by peace?
In Germany the flood destroyed bridges and parts of a Autobahn. Deutsche Bahn Said that's the worst infrastructure impairment they ever head.
Will we be able to keep our existing infrastructure?
All the trees we are loosing to fires and drought how critical are they?
Do we already have calculated in all of this? I read last year that they now incorporate the Siberian Methan and co2 emissions from the "permafrost".
How fragile is our supply chain? Remember the toilet paper shortage.
Those questions are stressing me out sometimes and I do plan do become more robust through getting out of the city as there is not much you can do when sitting in your flat without tools and stuff.
The ocean is already currently absorbing, and acidifying as a result. It is not currently in equilibrium. Of course, as it warms, its ability to absorb lessens. Warm water holds less CO2, used as a denialist talking point to say that the CO2 is from the oceans, not from humans. But it actually makes the problem worse.
But what's even more important about the nature of this problem that local emissions don't matter. If the US stopped but EU and China etc continued, the US heat dome problem would still go on. That's why this needs to be coordinated internationally. It really matters a lot what the US president and congress does regarding international treaties.
I heard there is a brain mechanism that allows us to "ignore the inevitable". This makes doom-saying predictions a hard sell.
The first step to manipulating people is not to say it's manipulation. Call it "marketing" and "lobbying". Everyone does it, climate activists have to do it too :)
I don't understand how anyone can still justify having children, knowing how they will suffer as a result of what we have done to the planet.
No one said that. It was simply said, that those who have a mind and use them - totally should have children - because otherwise only those have children who do not use their mind so much. And this would not be helping.
That is not at all what I said. If you are trying to have a net positive effect in the world, and you have the means to do so, raising a child with a good education, instilling the best of your values in them, etc., is a fantastic force multiplier and a good way to ensure that someone like you keeps being a net good in the world.
Beyond that, raising children has brought me more joy than anything else. I would not wish a childless life upon anybody. I am optimistic that we can teach teach our children to find solutions to the problems they will have. This is not just passing the buck: every generation needs to work for the betterment of mankind. I just want to help raise the smartest, strongest generation yet.
Wow, what a slap in the face of people who cant get children for one reason or another. Its fine that you are happy with parenting, but please consider what sentences like this can do to others.
More realistically its just making it other people's kids problem.
I don't understand how people can still be having children,knowing what we have done to the mammoths. Soon there will be none left, and our children will have nothing but moss and ice. Nothing to live for. How can we bring people into a world like that?
If you decided to have children, you should keep that in mind before criticizing others for driving a car.
The Great Salt Lake is about to be renamed the Minor Salt Lake as it's bone dry.
Seems to me Utah's biggest industry isn't Alfalfa or Cattle though, it's tourism. Especially skiing. Much of the slopes get their snow from lake effect snow. That's not likely to be as much this year, and might not be a thing at all if the lake dries up completely.
On top of that the lake will create a deadly arsenic dust bowl that will damage the health of all creatures locally including humans for years to come.
Lucky for me, I'm in southern Utah where we only have to worry about rising # of forest fires. /s
I feel like if we had more water...if we didn't use it all, perhaps the lake effect snow would fill the snow cap, and then the droughts would be less.
It'd be a shame if cropdusters accidently put salt in alfalfa fields, a real shame.
(edit: changed link, fixed from earlier where the context was minerals instead of climate and dates were in 70s)
Until their house burns spontaneously due to the heat, of course
This will get worse quickly, because the averages change, but the variance changes as well.
I have zero hope of it happening. People won't stop driving, flying or eating meat. They won't even drive smaller cars. As I understand it, that would just be the start.
Looking at how we handled the pandemic, I don't think we'll manage.
Vat meat is starting to get on the market, and while we’ll have to wait and see if this is a iPhone moment or a Sinclair C5 moment, the prices have come down rapidly since the first attempts.
Flying is going to be a hard thing to totally green, but it’s not impossible either, merely low priority.
Yes, there will be those that reject everything — I’ve encountered those who think a self-driving car will take away their freedom, instead of regarding it as a chauffeur — but when the economics are against them, when they have to pay extra to be eco-unfriendly instead of paying less? History shows most people follow the money, not just for ill but also for good.
But don’t be so hasty to dismiss culture as an opportunity: Musk turned electric cars from a joke into something the rich wanted to show off with.
Amidst the chaos, humanity has been able develop a wide range of therapeutics and public healthcare prevention protocols, research and deploy vaccines at global scale in under a year, all while avoiding total economic collapse.
What outcome would've given you hope in humans' ability to solve complex and chaotic crises?
What made me pessimistic about climate change w.r.t. COVID-19 was that most countries only did something once the population was sufficiently affected, even when the consequences of doing nothing were perfectly clear and immediate. W.r.t. climate change most countries won't be affected much or it will be hard to attribute to climate change and the consequences will be hard to predict and delayed.
COVID-19 was the easiest case of a global tragedy of the commons problem and we failed w.r.t. to a globally coordinated solution. Climate change is much harder. Doesn't give me much cause for optimism.
However I also see the role of the government as educating the population about the negative effects the population is not seeing yet so I don't use that to excuse the government.
But the pandemic also showed us a large % of the American population are reluctant to make even minor, temporary sacrifices to protect their country. And that a decent fraction of American political leadership are happy to close their eyes to factual reality.
Long term economic effects for example, and the ability to remain globally competitive economically and in other ways.
The first world response against the vaccine is selfish and short sighted in the same ways that make solving global warming incredibly difficult socially.
The vaccine recipes should be free, the raw materials should be coordinated so that vaccine production is maximized. Just like global warming, no one is safe until everyone is, we are from it yet have the capability to do so. Yet we do not, we finagle to ensure profit over life.
Our collective COVID response is exactly why the climate crisis is so hard.
Our problems are not technological.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/21/business/covid-vaccine-billio...
But there are people declining a free a pinprick jab that's been given to billions of other people already, when there's clear evidence it's good for both the nation's interest and their own? The country's not asking us to charge Nazi machine gun nests on the beaches of Normandy here.
Those Americans aren’t any different from you and me: they just got their news from different sources — sources that shouldn’t be saying what they said.
Yes, the scientific community has done the impossible, but us laymen have failed to do even the possible, even when it was easy.
We can solve problems, no doubts, but perhaps we aren't so good at collective, sustained efforts. Climate change will not come to pass like the pandemic. It will last generations if we're lucky.
By slightest inconvenience you mean complete social isolation for an entire year, right?
Both ultra-simple and only slightly inconvenient actions, but both would have made a huge difference in the outcome and timescale of this whole mess. Of course humans can't be bothered to give a rat's ass about other humans (or even about themselves) if even the slightest inconvenience is involved. Nope. Humanity deserves what's coming. Humanity is a planetary cancer, and we've brought this all upon ourselves by our own actions.
So governments will need to start with actions mitigating the effects climate change with at least equal effort than emission reduction. Don't see that realization happening at the moment as most policy and international discussions are about emissions. In the end, might even be that adaptation wins out over reduction in terms of effort.
If there was an asteroid coming, there would be some deadline imposed by the astronomical observations.
If it's a pandemic, there's a time when all the politicians have to stop thinking about Brexit and start thinking about lockdowns.
In economic crises there's that Lehman moment when the government needs to decide right then and there what to do about the economy.
In pure political crises, there's a vote of no confidence in the government and the politicians have to think about how to form a new one immediately.
With the climate, there's just never a time when you absolutely have to do something. People have even tried saying "we have to do something by x date" but you can't manufacture a crisis point, in fact those kinds of deadlines seem to have the opposite effect to what was intended. That slowly boiling frog analogy is somehow quite appropriate.
I think part of it is the nature of noise. Once you see an asteroid, you don't doubt that it's there. Government falls, you need a new one. People get sick in large numbers, better not let it grow.
But if it rains a lot or gets hot, that will pass. Once it passes we're relieved and we go back to normal. Even if storms get bigger and more frequent, the day after is sunny.
My last point goes back to the first: a proper crisis forces everything else out of your attention. 9/11, Lehman, Pandemic, those were all things that blocked out the news. That has never happened with the climate. When did you ever have a news day where all they talked about was climate? Where all the talking heads on TV were climate scientists/commentators/lobbyists? Where you could see politicians going from meeting to meeting with only one topic being asked of them?
Most politicians are more concerned about their carrier and personal gains than their country, let alone the world.
Also, most politicians are indeed concerned about their heritage in the history books, so they have motivations to do something beyond their office time.
But what should they do? There is not really a broad concensus on how to transform the whole worlds industry into CO2 free. Because that is not really easy. I believe it is doable and I actually see much more change into that direction, than I thought possible a few years ago. But when a vast amount of the population of the earth still struggles to survive - how can they save on CO2. They need to eat now.
We're apes trying to live like ants, but we lack the organisation and selflessness. We'll do what we do best, wait until we have our backs against the wall and find some half assed solution, it's going to be a free for all until some kind of reset event happens.
It feels like we're at the beginning of one of these Hollywood "end of the world" movies in which you can see TVs in the background of early scenes showing crazy reports about climatic/social/war events while the heroes are focused on their meaningless daily struggles.
That's very deliberate. We've all been saturated with doom propaganda for decades. Many people believe it, despite virtually all metrics of human well-being improving.
Another common thread among those movies is a large number of people in decision-making positions who could have taken action much sooner denying the very existence of the actual problem until after it's far too late.
Humans in general are very short term creatures and we fail at having a long term perspective on most things.
That's also the reason why I believe that any concrete things set in motion will probably focus on fixing the symptoms of climate change, the short term quick fix, rather than fixing the underlying issues that have lead to climate change. Sadly...
Even now, the current government is resisting any policy that could be considered threatening to fossil fuels.
The voting majority of Australians don't give a fuck about climate change action.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/N4thNYyzqzgBCFgF4YCpxlF7gEg=...
Recently, the US has often had extreme cold events while the rest of the world is seeing temperature extremes. It practically looks like a conspiracy of the weather to make Americans disbelieve in climate change.
Having the US be subject to heat waves might just change that.
If you look at current weather forecasts for the places mentioned (e.g. the capitals of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma), the highest forecast temperature for the next 10 days is 100 F / 38 C, far from the mentioned 110 F / 43 C.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/610day/
(Yeah, slightly different date ranges, but still a lot of overlap and it's excluded the beginning of this week in either case - which, over here in Chicago, is supposed to be the hottest part of the coming week)
To go about this scientifically, we need to be comparing our predictions to reality, especially when the predictions are coming from a source incentivized to generate clicks rather than to provide an accurate view of reality.
I agree, think critically and vette your sources, but this kind of denial sounds like when Republicans stood around in the snow screaming global warming wasn't real because LoOk SnOw It'S nOt GeTtIng HoTtEr
...
It’s actually rather urgent that we collectively acted like the singular species we are, and acted yesterday already.
Don’t wait til 2030 to phase out whatever, let’s go full bore and do it now dedicating our full combined engineering might to tackle the problem. IS HUMANITY CAPABLE OF COLLECTIVE ACTION IF OUR LIVES DEPEND UPON IT?
You know those films with alien invasions where humanity comes together to fight it, can you imagine traitorous factions saying the alien invasion is just a myth? Undermining all that is needed for collective action
"nothing is going to happen" (there's no climate change)
"something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it" (the climate change happens anyway, it's not manmade)
Most people are now at stage three
"maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do" (even if we stopped our emissions china would be mean)
Some are progressing to stage four
"maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now" (it's too late now, we're screwed)
I wonder what less conservative global warming forecasts would look like, and whether the winter this year will be average in US and CA.
Think about a pot of hot water vs. one that's boiling. The surface of the water in the boiling pot is not smooth, it has peaks and troughs. The level of some of those troughs will be lower than the level of the water in a less energetic pot.
The situation with global warming is similar, although much less simple (pots of water don't have seasons, among other things.) More energy in the atmosphere and the Earth's crust translates into more extreme temperature fluctuations, both up and down. However, the average will inevitably be higher. Basic physics doesn't allow for anything else.
> Basic physics doesn't allow for anything else.
is very important. It means : you do not negotiate with physics. So, you do not negotiate on climate change. When I hear some politics I'm sometimes appalled by their lack of understanding of basic physics laws.
Say we have a 3C temp rise, global average. Some places could have a 10C increase, others a -5C decrease average!
Look at coastal areas, like British Columbia, while inland the temps drop quickly. Or the British isles.
Ocean currents bring warm water north, keeping these places warm, but the currents could reverse! Or vanish!
Now you have temp drops, but in a local region, even with overall 3C rises...
I guess my point is, localized events mean almost nothing. The true tragedy of climate change is that by the time we can really verify it is happening, it will already have happened.
And some areas will have incredibly dramatic climate changes, others almost none. Think 10C average warmer, including for heat waves.
Edit: just realised you sorta said this, just in a different way. Will leave this here regardless.
Change is good right? Could be bad, could be good but times are changing.
*edit, boosted an existing phrase, Frank Luntz RNC Propagandist
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.c...
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/6/21/1870021...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/in...
Yup, your description is a good complement to what I was getting at.
For example, in a gas at a given temperature, some molecules are more energetic and some molecules are less energetic. The distribution of energy across molecules is called the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and has been known, well, since Maxwell. The Maxwell-Boltzmann formula clearly shows that, if you increase the average energy per molecule, the probability of "cold" molecules goes down, not up as you are suggesting.
I am of course not suggesting that a can of gas is a good model for climate, but I want to point out that basic laws of nature push to the opposite direction than the one you are suggesting. Your wider point may well be true, but if so, it depends on more complicated mechanisms than just basic physics.
Edit: And then right after posting I notice the date range is actually embedded in the image, July 29 - August 2, Thursday to Monday. At least the first part of the article does seem to be mostly based on outdated data, the outlook now showing much cooler than the snapshot in the article for most of the same days.
Can anyone venture as to why it (and the Northeast US) is not going to be affected?
I assume it’s some geographic or climactic quirk since I don’t expect heat domes to respect national boundaries.
It suggests that my climate will have more in common with areas 300mi to the NE vs 150mi to the SW. I know that Windsor-Detroit is in a warmer Koppen zone than pretty much every Canadian zone to the east. Continental a vs b IIRC.
Yeah I get that their land votes for them, but we can just ride this one out and then have a super pac pay for relocation of a few people to specific counties within states.
Opposition party just doesnt have the numbers to try the same strategy.
Such is the caption to a map showing no temperatures, or even potential heat but rather a predicted delta from regional norms.
This sort of behavior was exactly why I unsubscribed from the guardian after years of support post Snowden. I have no doubt this summer has been warmer on average. Here in Denver the smoke cover from Oregon’s fires must be contributing a measurable impact itself.
That said our forecast for the coming week is highs between 85-90, which feels in line for most July’s since I’ve lived here.
Because each of these categories occurs 1/3 of the time (10 times) during 1981-2010, for any particular calendar 5-day period, the probability of any category being selected at random from the 1981-2010 set of 30 observations is one in three (1/3), or 33.33%. This is also called the climatological probability. The sum of the climatological probabilities of the three categories at any point on the map is 100%.
Graphical Information The colored shading on the map indicates the degree of confidence the forecaster has in the category indicated, where "B" and blue colors indicate "below-normal" and "A" and orange-red colors indicate "above normal". The darker the shading, the greater is the level of confidence. The numbers labeling the contours separating different shades gives the probability that the indicated category (A, B, or N) will occur.
The probabilities of all three categories are implied on the map, and sum to 100%. The forecast probabilities given on the map generally fall far short of complete confidence (100%) in any single category. When the probability of the above (A) or below (B) category is greater than 33.33% by some amount, the probability of the opposite category declines by that amount, while the probability of the middle category remains at 33.33%. In the event that the "N" category is greater than 33.33%, the probabilities of both the "A" and "B" categories is each reduced by 1/2 the amount that the "N" category exceeds 33.33%. When the probability of "A", or "B" reaches 63.33% or higher, the odds of the opposite category reach a minimum allowed value of 3.33%, while the odds of the middle category are allowed to drop below 33.33%.
The dashed contours on the map give the average of the temperature over the set of 30 observations for the calendar 5-day period during 1981-2010, in degrees Farenheit."
Uff, not sure why the guardian picked that map when they could have found something more clear for the average reader, like me...
Including the section
“You expect hotter heatwaves with climate change but the estimates may have been overly conservative,” Wehner said. “With the Pacific north-west heatwave you’d conclude the event would be almost impossible without climate change but in a straightforward statistical analysis from before this summer you’d also include it would be impossible with climate change, too. That is problematic, because the event happened.”
That does seem more compelling and newsworthy than "feels in line for most July's since I've lived here." to me? The map might not be the greatest graphic but the article still has meat right?
They do not require domain expertise to answer, just a decent command of statistics and a curious mind, and I agree with the parent that they are fundamental to knowing the scientific truth.
> you cannot expect a newspaper article to include these.
Why not?
If you're driving a narrative, using hyperbolic language such as "punishing" or coining terms such as "heat dome", the burden-of-proof standards should be equally high on your part.
I'd expect any scientific reporter in a newspaper like The Guardian to have basic scientific inquiry skills, and if the hypothesis is "this is caused by humans" to try hard to refute it, and not to leave questions like that unanswered.
Is that too high of a standard?