World on 'catastrophic' path to 2.7C warming, warns UN chief
france24.com
france24.com
Even if we get to catastrophic 5 or 8 or 10 degree warming, it won’t wipe us out completely and we will still have to find a way to pay back our pollution debt.
Why is this supposed to be encouraging? Because every little bit of pollution avoided today is a little bit less pollution to clean up in the future.
Every bit does count.
Even if avoiding 2.5 degree warming seems impossible, let’s at least make it 3 instead of 5 or 8 or 10.
I use “pollution” to make it clear that this is not just about CO2 but also about every other type of trash that we dump onto this planet.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/climate-change
Discussion on HN:
Or develop a shipping fuel additive that accelerates the production of clouds.
These won't solve the problem, but they can buy time. We need time.
But not human life.
Could humans survive this? Probably yes - we are resourceful and adaptable. But probably with a vastly smaller population and with a type of civilization radically different to our own.
Yes, but it didn't become that this fast.
> Could humans survive this? Probably yes - we are resourceful and adaptable.
No, and we're not.
I agree that 5-8C warming will lead to mass death through war, famine. But why would Siberia be too hot for habitation for the remaining population (whether that's 100 or 500 million people)?
When permafrost melts, it turns into a bog. Over decades and centuries, many of those bogs would dry out, but most of Siberia will be one great big morass for generations after it melts.
8 or 10 degree warming!? It wouldn't "wipe us out completely", but mostly, and certainly civilization would not survive, so how are we going to pay back the pollution debt?
A good way of looking at the situation is that the Earth will be fine regardless - it's been through worse (the Premian-Triassic saw extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species), it's humanity that will be in deep, deep trouble in the near future.
Is it any wonder they want to watch the world burn?
> We have found that, if unchecked, ICT GHGE relative contribution could grow from roughly 1–1.6% in 2007 to exceed 14% of the 2016-level worldwide GHGE by 2040
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596...
collective action, largely regulation and government intervention, is the only way anything will ever change. And yes, pricing those externalities in is certainly going to make prices increase, and if your iphone costs 50% more then you'll have your "personal incentive" to hold onto it longer as well, if that's really the hill you want to die on.
phones don't matter in particular, though, and the price wouldn't go up 50%. And broadly speaking electronics are good on climate in general, climate change is largely due to energy consumption and things like not commuting are easy wins in terms of personal energy reduction. Sitting at home on your xbox tonight is way better than you driving to a concert, sitting in your home office is way better than you commuting 30 minutes each way to work twice a day.
But it's something that is near and dear to people so of course that's the thing people who are opposed to climate interventions choose to focus on, because what if it meant you had to give up your phone, is THAT what you want, huh!?!?!? Nah, I want companies to be forced to make efficiency improvements and emissions capture technologies that they don't do because it's not economically viable and nobody's forcing them, I want farmers to be forced to use low-methane-emission feeds that they don't do because they aren't economically viable and nobody's forcing them, etc etc.
Cumulatively that stuff won't add up to even 50% except for a handful of goods probably. It's just something industries use to drag their feet.
It is the environment of social norms we’ve created. Wastefulness is for all intents and purposes just a facet of our culture from consumers up to corporations.
We don’t worry about the costs we needn’t immediately bear.
So yeah - wasn’t an indictment of people or a shrugging off of responsibility on the part of corporations and governments to regulate and manage the issue.
I just also lament seeing the manifestations of it in the average person, feeling compelled to throw more useful shit out to replace it with moderately newer shit of practically identical utility.
Yeah, there is little to be optimistic about.
A lot will also depend on the state of society in general when the things get tough, will extreme heat or extreme rain come during a war, or economic downturn, or in a pandemic?
This would mean 200 million refugees compared to 44 million refugees that we can expect when we manage to pull of a climate-friendly scenario (which looks rather unlikely at the moment).(1)
I suggest you have a look at the sixth IPCC assessment report released in August https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/ especially chapter 12 of the full report.
(1) https://www.pri.org/stories/2021-09-13/report-climate-change...
Admittedly, we're only going to be dealing with 550 million people being added to our combined 360 million people, as compared to Northern Asia and Europe, which will be dealing with literally the rest of the human species.
The first wave is going to be all the pacific islanders looking to move when the fish stocks collapse in the 2050s to places like China, Japan, and Australia (while it hasn't completely overheated yet).
The next two centuries are going to suck unless we actually do something about it. Presumably after that we'll have taken so much of a beating that some new equilibrium will have been achieved.
Migrants are also part of the problem. Integrating other people has always been hard.
It is very difficult to quantify accurately, because this is unprecedented in the history of the planet, never mind the history of the human race.
I know why we use it. It sounds more severe than "warming", and more active. That's not my problem with it.
My problem is that it misleads about the physical mechanism. Temperatures don't go up because of additional heat inputs to the system. They go up because of the greenhouse effect.
A better description would be something that evokes, somehow, that you are wrapping something in insulating blankets until it overheats and dies. It's less "heating", more "smothering".
"Heating" conjures this mental image of the Earth in a pot on the stove. That's dramatic but not how it works. It's more like the Earth is your beloved dog, who you've just locked in the car with the windows up on a hot day.
Additionally, a phrase like "2.7C degrees of heating" has a little of the problem that popular science-speak often does, where it insists on saying, say, "power", where "force" would have been a more accurate word, and no less communicative to those who don't know any physics anyway. Because "heat" is measured in units of energy, while "2.7C" is in units of temperature. Granted, if you multiply this temperature delta by the thermal capacity of the Earth, you do get a change to thermal energy. But again, what's misleading is the idea that humans are directly injecting that energy. They -- we -- aren't. We're shifting an equilibrium, in an energy flow -- from the Sun to the Earth, and radiated from the Earth to space.
A good thing about the focus on temperature, though, is that that's more directly relevant to the environmental issues. The thermal energy of the Earth is not really relevant. The temperature is.
Anyway, I wish that our efforts at communicating urgency could also embed some communication of the underlying scientific concepts, the causal mechanisms.
Maybe "smothering" does it.
They'll be convinced only when it (drought, desertification, flooding, hunger, etc.) affects their own neighborhood.
The data is clear. It has been a warning for 50 years, now it's been proven not only right, but conservative. The more data there is, the more people who want to disbelieve will refuse to see it.
For Mr. and Ms. Average Person, what do they gain in understanding by you saying "smothering" or "warming" over "heating"? Do you think that will lead to increased activism? More efficient activism? Or is it solely to satiate the scientists who already understand the difference of heating vs. warming?
While I think precision in speech is a good thing, there is a point where it really just doesn't matter anymore - because the end result remains exactly as intended.
When I'm explaining security concepts in a security awareness presentation, for example, I sometimes make a non-perfect analogy to get my point across. Anyone who understands why the analogy isn't perfect probably doesn't need the talk. Anyone who doesn't understand why the analogy isn't perfect probably doesn't care about the nuance. The average person doesn't care if it's a gigabit or a gigabyte of data stolen, they just care about the end result - data was stolen. The same applies here.
I personally don't care whether the earth is technically "heating" or "warming" - I only care about the end result and what I can do to help.
A&W tried introducing a 1/3 lb burger, and it failed horribly because the average consumer couldn't understand that 1/3 is greater than 1/4.
Now with climate change, that same person is going to shrug off 2.7C because "2.7 isn't much". Re-frame that as 5-10F, and that person is suddenly going to be much more interested, because a 5-10F increase in summer temperatures anywhere in the US is meaningful.
Why then they didn't come up with a 1/5 lb burger?
The average reader of France 24 understands Celsius and has no clue what a Fahrenheit is. No one uses Fahrenheit apart from the US. It's like imperial units, totally irrelevant if you are addressing a global audience.
Depending where you live though, adding 5-10°F isn't entirely ignorable. If you live in Texas, that's taking a 100°F day and making it sound even more brutal. Or as a Coloradan, it's experiencing temperatures you never thought you'd see in the mountains, and being able to intuitively associate the increase in temperatures with the increase of wildfires.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/08/global-heati...
When an official says "unless governments credibly commit to immediate, massive decreases in emissions, we're screwed," it just amounts to "we're screwed."
Encouraging and striving for some radical new technological innovation is all we can do.
Fatalism leads to giving up, which leads to us hitting all those higher numbers, which leads to an unnecessary amount of extra suffering.
In general, you should rather expect negative feedback loops. For example, the warming response to increased CO2 emission is logarithmic, meaning that the more CO2 you emit, the weaker effect additional effect has, and quite significantly so. Of course, our problem is that we are emitting so much, and our emissions grow so fast, that this diminishing effect is of little consolation. The point is, negative feedback loops are much more likely than positive ones.
The question becomes, are unknown feedbacks more likely to be positive or negative? I'd lean toward negative, which is what most experts think, but definitely an unknown.
There are also instances when politicians do want to change something, but their cluelessness shows - solar freakin' roadways anyone?
No, we opted to provide incentives to fossil fuel producers and consumers. That is how we got into this mess.
Pointless wars are bad for other obvious reasons.
> “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” he added
I understand that many Democrats purport you support the Green New Deal while advancing much more moderate proposals. Democrats think that “making a big opening bid” and paring it back is a way to anchor expectations. Except how this reads to non-Democrats is that “socialist takeover of the economy in the name of climate change is the ultimate goal,” and subsequent moderate measures are just seen as stepping stones toward that end.
It’s like leading with “Defund the Police” and trying to backfill with moderate police reform proposals. It’s a way to keep activists engaged, but it just makes moderates distrustful off your true intentions.
An entire political party not providing a single solution for society’s largest ongoing problem is what should make moderates distrustful.
Actually proposing solutions opens one up to the types of attacks you constantly make on this site, that’s the price to pay for taking threats seriously and actually trying to solve problems. You can deflect to other topics, but in the end, no amount of wordsmithing changes that fact.
We would need to do fuel reprocessing to manage the waste output and also need to enter serial production of reactors so they could all stop being one-off designs that take forever and literally billions of dollars to certify. Build them where cooling water is available and build wind and solar where practical anywhere else.
If fusion ends up working out and/or something better comes along, switch to building that over nuclear fission plants whenever that time comes and sunset the fission plants at the end of their lives. Waiting for a more convenient answer is no excuse for inaction today.
We're going to need more power capacity that we have today, because we'll also have to be switching all transportation and manufacturing to electrical sources as well. Shipping is either going to need vessels with nuclear power, or that burn ammonia or hydrogen. One of the only things that we don't have any decent known answers for is what to run airplanes off of. Maybe they keep burning carbon fuels and we explicitly build carbon scrubbers for what we know they produce.
If you wish to keep 'the world as we know it'? Yes, that ship has sailed. What we're fighting for now is the degree to which the world we know will be destroyed.
But this is absolutely not acceptable in any mainstream economic discussion, even from the left, and absolutely counter to the very definition of a for-profit corporation.
Even slowing down growth is seen as 'too risky', while the world burns. Better we buy new iPhones every month to help propel the economy.
For example- launching enough thin, reflective mylar film to the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point to reduce incoming solar radiation by ~0.1% would take about 500 Falcon Heavy launches (highest capacity rocket currently available). This would take several years and around $100 billion. Once Starship is ready and in use, this would go way down.
$100 billion and several years is practically nothing for the US, China, or one of several other countries with the capability to do this.
Obvious downsides include denying the use of the L1 Lagrange point to human use permanently, eventual degradation of the sun shield as solar wind pushes pieces of film out of place, and of course possible mass famine and plant die-off due to lower solar radiation.
Teller, E., Wood, L., & Hyde, R. (1996). Global warming and ice ages: I. Prospects for physics-based modulation of global change (No. UCRL-JC--128715). Lawrence Livermore National Lab..
Talk != action, not even if the talk is "credible". You think this is an existential problem? Great. Start doing something. Don't tell me what you're going to do, do it.
I don't think that's the best solution, but at least it's one I can personally enact, and if deontologically expanded it does lead to solving the problem. Don't play negative or zero sum games and ostracize those that do.
Not to mention, many behaviors are in fact impractical. The vast majority of people can't afford equipment and clothes that can last a few decades, as used to be the norm, for example. In much of the west, responsibly grown sustainable food is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than fast food.
People don't like that. A friend of mine likes driving his car, and does so a lot to go places on the weekend and stuff. He'd like to see the government mandate reduced car usage. I've asked him: you're free not to use your car, why do you still use it if you believe it would be best if you didn't? Because he likes it and if it's not made into law, he won't do what he thinks is best.
"We should outlaw personal air travel, but until that has happened, I'm going to fly around the globe" is what I see in far too many proponents of those rules.
I have no idea what goes on in their head, it's completely alien to me.
Individual action just isn't enough. Hell, you could wipe my entire country of about 5 million people, and the impact on global CO2 output is on par with the average annual increase in CO2 output over the past two decades. A year or two later, the world would be outputting more CO2 than it did before our genocide.
If only the voters of the green party in Germany would stop/sharply reduce flying, that would be ~10% of Germans (~16% projected votes, ~70-75% citizens are voting).
Since they do fly more than the average person [1][2][3], and since they are more likely to be part of the upper class which tends to contribute more per capita, the impact would be even larger. They could single handedly massive reduce the pollution from air travel just by changing their own habits. Yet they don't, keep on flying at higher levels than other groups while demanding legislation to stop them.
It's like a cliche movie killer who asks to be stopped.
Look at vegans who are vegan for moral reasons. They don't say "we shouldn't eat animals, and the state should outlaw it, but until no one is allowed to eat animals, I'll have a steak every day". They start by themselves and then try to convince others and (sometimes) call for legislation.
"Since my influence as an individual is meaningless, I'll continue to be (an outsized) part of the problem instead of being part of the solution" is just completely alien to me, I literally don't understand the reasoning behind it. Would they own slaves if it wasn't outlawed because one slave more or less doesn't change the big picture?
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/gruenen-waehle..., 2014
[2] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/umfrage-zur-flugscham-gr..., 2019
[3] https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/klimawandel-gruene..., 2019 for green members of parliament who fly more than any other party per person
'There is no proof' 'It could actually be harmful because false sense of security'
This problem is analogous to the conflicting messaging about climate change that's been coming from politicians, industry, media, over the last couple of decades.
> With only 1.1C of warming so far, the world has seen a torrent of deadly weather disasters intensified by climate change in recent months, from asphalt-melting heatwaves to flash floods and untameable wildfires.
I'm really bothered by the recent trend in science reporting to take a carte blanche approach to attributing every natural disaster to climate change. Yes, it's indisputable that climate change is absolutely changing our weather patterns, and it's very probably causing and/or strengthening the consequences of disasters happening now, but it's just plain bad science reporting to lump up all recent natural disasters and go "see! Climate change!". And yes, I'm aware that this might be the only way to catch people's attention to the current crisis, but that doesn't excuse the disservice to bone fide science reporting.
/rant.
A better framing may be to say something like this: "All physical systems of this planet are interconnected. While we cannot be absolutely certain the worsening of weather is related to our behavior, there is mounting evidence that our behavior does, to a great extent, influence the climate. So it is in our hands to alter our behavior so the future generations can enjoy the earth like we do today. We owe it to them."
This is very reductionist. Science is not certain, but we are talking about ~90% certainty here. What we cannot do is point at a given specific event and say “this was caused by climate change”. But we have a significant statistical sampling of weather events and we definitely can say that this is unprecedented and caused by global warming. Simple Bayesian statistics show that what we keep seeing year after year is all but impossible without sustained global warming.
> A better framing may be to say something like this: "All physical systems of this planet are interconnected. While we cannot be absolutely certain the worsening of weather is related to our behavior, there is mounting evidence that our behavior does, to a great extent, influence the climate. So it is in our hands to alter our behavior so the future generations can enjoy the earth like we do today. We owe it to them."
That is not a better phrasing at all. You’ve lost all of your audience by the end of the first sentence. A single hurricane is not caused by global warming (though some events, like the melting of the permafrost, the melting of Greenland’s ice, or the collapse of Antarctica ice sheets definitely are); but collectively all these freak events and these 1,000 years floods every other years are consequences of global warming. It is too late for the future generation to “enjoy earth as we know it”, and trying to make it sound like it is a possibility is doing humanity a disservice. That ship sailed, the objective now should be to do everything we could to mitigate the effects of what we’ve already done. We need more than a little urgency to do this.
I was actually curious if climate change results in more hurricanes. Apparently, not so:
"Because of climate change, tropical cyclones are likely increasing in intensity, have increased rainfall, and have larger storm surges, but there might be fewer of them globally. Tropical cyclones may also intensify more rapidly, and occur further polewards. These changes are driven by rising sea temperatures and increased maximum water vapour content of the atmosphere as the air heats up."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclones_and_climate_...
- record breaking rainfall
- record breaking droughts
- record breaking glacier melt etc.
followed by "the previous record was set last year"
> Many scientists believe that with a warming climate, certain natural disasters, such as floods, heatwaves and wildfires will become more frequent as well as severe. Scientists also say the world has warmed by about 1.1C which they believe has already begun to increase the frequency and severity of natural disasters and, as climate change continues to warm the plant, anticipate further increases in the frequency and severity of these disasters.
Or whatever. I'm not a climate scientist. The point is, nobody can say for certain that the current set of natural disasters is climate change, or sheer luck. That's not a political statement, that's a scientific statement of fact. Science cannot change the facts to suit it's disposition, regardless of its good intentions.
That's more like the expression of a computer scientist or a programmer mindset for whom every events can be precisely traced back to a single set of clearly identifiable causes.
Just because we will never know which drop of gas is responsible for a particular event it doesn't make the whole climate science crumble.
Scientific method is way cooler and useful than that because despite these unknowns we can actually move forward with our understand of the world. That's why it's false to write things like `Many scientists believe`. No, they do not believe. There are no debates. We know it.
I posted this list before but I need to add a new sub step:
- there are no climate change
- climate change is not because of humane activities
- climate change isn't that bad
- we can't say climate change is affecting the weather <- you are here
- climate change might be good overall
- climate change is business as usual: improvise, adapt, surviveWe are and have always been the problem. I feel like we legitimately are parasites, we even ravage/consume ourselves.
Shit like this makes me hope we never get off this planet to just infect more planets and systems.
IMO this is the buried lede of the whole topic, any solution we come up with is going to look like a "controlled crash" in the sense that nature will force us to crash at some point
It feels too big and without tangible ROI for private companies, too long term for politics, too hard for governments to justify the shot in the dark.
2. Business model: government contracting. Or carbon credits, eventually.
3. How to convince people: Good question. Probably by doing it small scale and getting convincing scientific evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that Stratospheric aerosol injection "is the most-researched SRM method, with high agreement that it could limit warming to below 1.5°C." People might not believe the IPCC, but with more empirical evidence they might.
Tangible ROI: avoiding rapid climate change and enabling companies to transition out of fossil fuels. It's happening, we just need another couple decades. It isn't a shot in the dark, it is building on a scientific legacy. This isn't crazy business. It's science and engineering.
This. All these “geoengineering now!” pleas are infuriating. It’s like a programmer’s simplistic solution to a complex problem, except that we don’t get to roll back a dodgy patch. We already have tools to avoid the worst if we wanted to, and waiting 20 years for the next technological breakthrough is dangerously stupid, particularly considering how little we know about how the biosphere works in general and the likelihood to fuck it up.
If we learn that doesn't make sense to do it, we shouldn't do it. But we shouldn't ban the science and sit on our hands, waiting for people to stop having children (children are far and away the biggest contributor).
also, olivine beaches.
Geoengineering is absolutely to be discarded in these discussions. Technology will kot save us this time.
Geoengineering is a broad category, and it'd probably be better if we split it into specific strategies.
Why are olivine beaches at least as likely to make the problem worse?
Why is injecting Sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere at least as likely to make the problem worse?
Why are shade satellites at least as likely to make the problem worse?
Are the risks associated with these strategies really worse than 2.7+ C of global warming?
Sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere: unknown impact on ozone layer. Unknown possible chemistry in high radiation environment. Unknown effect on weather patterns. Unknown chance to fall back down to earth. Reductions of incoming solar radiation have unknown effects on all ecosystems on the planet. Extremely dangerous to try.
Shade satellites: similar concerns as above, except for ozone layer, chemical reactions, risk of raining down. Production of the huge number of satellites needed to matter has risky environmental costs. Huge number of objects in orbit will greatly accelerate orbital collisions, may destroy the constellation before it has any real effect.
The risks are currently inestimable, while the risk of 2.7C is at least understood.
On the other hand, reducing carbon emissions is doable, and has little risk of negatively impacting the environment. It's the right solution, and any time wasted by delaying it with promises of Geoengineering is criminal.
We know a lot about sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere, because volcanos.
We should really try all these things at a small scale, with science and R&D, so we can learn and reduce the unknowns. It isn't extremely dangerous.
For instance, the best geoengineering is cloud creation (marine cloud brightening) which literally just involves lofting seasalt into the lower atmosphere.
Why not? "Technology caused the problem, so it can't solve it", that sort of thing?
I'm a bit stumped to see nobody trying to model social dynamics in potentially catastrophic contexts. Sure, some people are doing the usual "It's gonna be war and crime and bla" but I'm talking about almost quantitative modeling. How to see society as chemical or proteic reaction bath and try to see how we can dope the material here and there to smoothen the future problems.
Cities are the only places that know how to scale, that have the capital and human infrastructure to handle influx, and that can and will command resources when there are scarcities and constraints. I would double down on cities. Everywhere else will be a crapshoot.
See: The Obamas buying an $11 million ocean-side property. They either don't believe any of it, or they don't care how bad that looks. Similar to rich climate change evangelicals flying around on private jets all the time. Are they rationalizing? Are they pathological liars? Are they in denial? Standard hypocrites?
Or see: Chuck Schumer & Co. pushing the fraud that we have to act immediately on their proposed green agenda to save the US from climate change. It's all bunk, they're lying very belligerently. The US isn't an isolated magic realm, climate change is overwhelmingly global. There's nothing they have proposed that will matter stacked next to China's rapid emissions expansion. They conveniently ignore that of course, they go out of their way to not talk about that aspect, and then lie and claim their plans can rescue the US from global climate change.
With most people you can't have a rational discussion about any of this. For the same reason you can't have rational discussions about Covid. Out of control emotion, irrationality and propaganda rule the day.
And even if the US completely changed... there's oil and coal distributed fairly evenly across the whole world. Even if the USA used all its power, it couldn't stop the rest of the world from exploiting every last drop of oil and last chunk of coal. Tell me where I'm wrong, what could any group do to stop every drop of oil in the middle east and Nigeria from being pulled out?
For example, Netherlands was able to completely revolutionize their cities and optimize them for bike travel. Now biking is the main mode of transportation.
A lot of the changes we want to see individuals do, the system discourages it or makes it hard to do those changes.
Electric cars have dubious benefit for the environment as well, so I don't think using that as a solution is fair.
EVs are just the tiniest inconvenience to Americans over gas and still they won't embrace it. It's much cheaper than the other things we need to do.
If your plan is "US moves the population into apartments and builds mass transit for all" then you have no plan.
If your plan is "Let's make everyone drive EVs" you also did nothing, and fucked over poor countries while doing that.
If we're going to do something, we need to do it right, which means:
1. Listen to climate scientists about what's the best way to mitigate as much as we can.
2. Mobilize every single branch of the government to respond to the realities of climate change.
3. Make the hard decisions and push companies and cities to follow them. We've done this before with the new deal. It's not hard to imagine that level of mobilization.
4. THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE: Plan how you're going to minimize damages that we can't prevent, and minimize damages that are going to be caused by this "move fast" approach. Keep people on your side while making these changes. These changes should come with a quality of life improvement for most Americans.
It's important to remember, climate change was NEVER an individual failing. It was systemic ignorance and failure. Which means the response to it needs to involve as many, or more gears that climate change denial did.
The US is not capable of doing that. There's not the will. Literally 40%+ of voters are completely opposed.
If this is a reference to either party, people who identify with either party all actually are suffering under the status quo, and would be fine with making changes if the changes also take them into account and increase their QoL.
So no, I disagree, the divide is barely there and has been fabricated.
I'm an anarchist, I've had successful conversations with essentially everyone on every side you can imagine. The problems are the same. Just that US has allowed media to drive a "us vs them" mentality.
If you want to make a dent in the problem you need useful mass transit everywhere. Useful is more important than everywhere - useful will get people out of their cars, while everywhere gets people driving by and ignoring it because when they last looked it wasn't useful. (best to assume once every 5 years unless someone else finds it useful and raves about it)
EVs are way better for the environment than gas cars while asking so little from the user. And we still won't make this tiny sacrifice.
But who would pay for this? At the end, the States can only take the money in the pocket of its citizens, present or future.
Once renewables become the most cost effective option, people will switch regardless of their politics or location.
I would argue the huge investments needed to conduct modern fossil fuel exploration and get the remaining (and least accessible) material from the ground may become unjustifiable if demand drops sufficiently.
Only 26% of eligible Americans are unvaccinated, and that number is still shrinking every day. Yes, there is a depressing number of hardcore anti-vaxxers, but it's a much smaller minority than 35% of the population.
According to polls, one-third of the unvaccinated say they would get the shot if they were given time off work to deal with the symptoms. That suggests their "vaccine refusal" is related to their precarious economic circumstances and isn't a political stance. That brings the number of hardcore vaxxers down even further, to around 17%. This is probably still an overestimate, since some proportion of this population are minors and not making their own medical decisions, or may have other non-political reasons.
As far as I know those 35% are still around so it seems like they've successfully saved their own lives.
See, that kind of hyperbole makes me question the whole climate change narrative. There's virtually 0 chance that Covid is going to kill me. I'm vaccinated because I don't like getting sick even if I don't die at the end of it, but Covid is actually very mild. When the same people who treat it like the bubonic plague are always the ones who are telling me that the world is going to end in 10 years unless I vote to pay higher taxes, I'm inclined to discount them.
The same UN report that points to high-C temperature increases claims in economic terms only a smaller rate of GDP growth for a high-C world, compared to GDP growth for a stable world. That means we may well have both climate disaster AND flying cars and disease and aging elimination and all the benefits that "progress" makes available, now not just from traditional tech but acceleration in energy and biology development as well.
If that is true, then even a dramatic rise in episodic disasters just becomes a cost of doing business. I don't think that's true, but I also don't think we are headed for population crash. And I would be very, very, very surprised to see e.g. travel rationing.
Much much more work to do on localized analysis and narrative.
In 200 years? Yeah, dramatically reduced counts of humans is possible.
But in 50 years- global population will be greater than it is now.
In reality, it's the massive industry that has no reason to be clean.
And it's the transportation infrastructure in the USA that favors cars over everything else.
And its massive deforestation across the world.
And it's massive CO2 causing evolution of H2CO3 in the ocean, systematically destroying oceanic life.
In reality, it's capitalism, hockeystick required growth (as opposed to sustainability), bad/no planning at larger governance levels, and obsolete-by-design goods that used to be durable.
I'm going to remain a staunch Capitalist. I wasn't wrong about market based economics. I won't be admitting to such a thing.
The greenest, cleanest, nicest nations in the world are all market based economies, and that includes the nations of Scandinavia (which are all market based economies; none are Socialist nations). There have been no actual free market economies in existence in the past century. Hong Kong perhaps came closest. The US for its part hasn't been anything close to a free market during most of the post Civil War era, however it remains a market based economy as with all of Western Europe. The US and all economies of Europe (as well as all relevant economies of Asia) are highly regulated, and nowhere near free market systems.
The most polluting nation in world history, modern China, is very openly anti-Capitalist and very aggressively pro-Socialism. They have never been Capitalist, nor have they ever had a free market economy. Their system is becoming less market based by the day, and they're set to double their emissions again in the coming decades. They currently operate under a totalitarian Communist one-party dictatorship. Socialism with Chinese characteristics, as they're so fond of saying.
To be fair, compared to the other vaccines that we're used to (except for the flu shot), this vaccine appears really weak. I wonder if giving it another name (immunity booster?) would have helped.
But I’ve yet to read how today’s whitepaper sought to compensate for creeping but heat-producing urban and suburban sprawl.
What I really want to see is how are the rural regions faring decade-over-decade.
The capital issue really is political, as not doing it will cost way more in the long run. Pricing adequately carbon emissions would be a first step.
Nuclear plants don’t need rare materials, and the waste in current designs cannot be used in a nuclear bomb (well, they could be used in a dirty bomb, but then there are loads of cheap as chips chemicals that are much better for this use).
It is true that it is too late now to rely only on that. We still need all the tools we have, and we should build as much reactors as we can, and as much wind turbines (and solar panels where it makes sense) as we can. We are not in a situation where we can prioritise one or the other, otherwise we end up with gas and coal, like in Germany.
That's just coal power plants. No oil, no gas, no other sources.
Construction on a new reactor, Flamanville 3, began on 4 December 2007.[4] The new unit is an Areva European Pressurized Reactor type and is planned to have a nameplate capacity of 1,650 MWe. EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[4] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[5] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
I'm not discounting nuclear and see its value for base load power, and I think anti-nuclear energy people are puritanical idiots and definitely do not want to vote for anyone who is against nuclear, but I get the sneaking suspicion that nuclear power is often mentioned as a way to misdirect away from wind and solar for political reasons which is a shame since these technologies are such easy wins that can be implemented right now.
I'm not against nuclear power. But if we are to be adult about it, we need to be clear about the risks (and not pretend that there is a risk in assuming the same type of society in 1500 years). We also need to be clear what it means to take this risk if all we are solving is a 'problem' that our best efforts at modelling CAN NOT REPLICATE, and evidence for which only exist if one cherry-picks the dates.
I just don’t understand why no one talks about how we produce more and more people, each consuming a lot.
Because most people frown on genocide.
And it's not like it's a secret that people living is why CO2 emissions happen. A big part of the Paris Agreement includes details about the varying development states of different places around the world (the average Ghanian is responsible for way less carbon emissions than the average American, but it's not fair to enforce them staying that way).
But fine, I'll bite; lets talk about it. What do you suggest? Who are you suggesting we have fewer of?
We don't necessarily have to kill everybody to get them off the planet - if we focus on space travel and terraforming, we can reduce the population of a given planet to an almost arbitrary number... once we figure out a way to safely get somewhere else.
Edit: as an example of that, look at that map of mismanaged plastic https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution#share-of-global.... Do you think that fighting against plastic straws and bags had any kind of meaningful impact?
And something else, Asia consumes the most energy in the world by far: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-consumptio.... At some point you have to face reality, even if you don't like it.
China is in Asia.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t...
I’m not ready to subscribe to the panic just yet. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still worth taking measures to limit co2 but I’m not going to panic about it.
But we're already there. Things are catastrophic right now. Wildfires are intensifying, hurricanes are intensifying, we're having "hundred year" floods every 5-10 years, the coral reefs are dying from the carbon dioxide in the air. And this is just the start, things are going to be far worse in another 50 years unless we take action now.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/07/23/pet...
I think that this is their point: predictions cannot be made with our current understanding of climate.
That is simply not true. Global average temperature has been stable for 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age. It is that long-term stability that made the rise of human civilization possible.
When was that?
If you look at this estimate of temperature on Planet Earth[0][1] you can clearly see the last time the planet saw > +2C was the Pliocene.
Even if you look more closely at just the Holocene you don't see > +2C anywhere[2]
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_pala...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med...
They don't? Which models are you referring to? The model forecast in James Hansen's 1988 congressional testimony was almost spot on.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hanse...
> Scenario B and C had an ‘El Chichon’ sized volcanic eruption in 1995.
EDIT: Looking at the graph once again, he predicted in scenario B that we would see more than .6 deg C of warming between 2000 and 2020.
But it appears that we've only had about .3 deg C of warming in the past 20 years: https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/global-land-o...
This chart is to the same scale as in the realclimate link. As of 2020, we're about 0.1 to 0.2 degrees below the Scenario B forecast, at +1 instead of ~+1.15.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/
What do you think a good 1988 model prediction would look like?
Looking again at your original link, Hansen's scenario B predicts a ~1.45 deg increase from 1988. So, in answer to your question, not that.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/graph_data/Glob...
And, where do you see 1.45 C forecast for 2020 outside of Scenario A? Scenario B doesn't even come close to the 1.25 indicator line.
The NASA chart shows a rise of about .7 during that time.
This is simply false. The last time global average temperature was more than 2.7°C higher than modern times was over 100 thousand years ago.
If you instead only look at model runs with co2 levels close to reality you find that the models have done an amazing job of predicting current warming levels. 50 years more than one study showed 1C of warming by 2020 if co2 levels were around 420. Which is exactly spot on to where we are.
Climate modeling predictions are some of the most stunningly accurate predictions in the history of earth science and someone should have gotten a Nobel for it by now.
This temperature rise is totally out-of-context for us, and will cause a lot of pain.
The same increase over a century is disastrous, because infrastructure and capital doesn't change or move nearly so rapidly.
They will loose land, health, money etc.
People whoms homes will be burned etc.
We will experience future animal diversity reduction. This is something very depressing but depending in the Person how much you care for such things.
Also we will experience more dramatic Events as well. Like droights and lots of rain. The Impact on you might range from 'not leaving my flat today' to 'I lost everything'. Your surroundings will slowly change. Woods will start looking different.
And still we are not very certain about all those things. It could get much faster much worse through tipping points.
It also forces future generations to already plan their future accordingly: they will know that they will experience an increase of sealevel of 60cm and more.
If the AMOC collapses as we are already starting to see [0] then at least the European portion of the HN community will be deeply impacted.
If the American South West continues it's path of aridification [1] then plenty of HN member will be impacted as well.
[0]. https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/oceano...
This prediction is for 6.75m of sea level rise or 22ft.
That said, why should we generously assume the models are correct? Because, despite the hundreds of lines of hand-waving in this topic, they have not proved to be correct.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/08/us/glaciers-national-park-202...
Glacier NP isn't the only place that I've looked up and wondered, "wasn't that a lot bigger when we were here ten years ago?", either.
Or am I misunderstanding what you are writing?