What 3°C of global warming looks like
economist.com
economist.com
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/01/climate-...
China is talking 2060 for net zero.
India is talking 2070:
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/live/2021/nov/01/cop...
The United States is claiming by 2050 but there seems to be no actual political ability to meet that.
I've always viewed it more as an unfortunate coincidence[1] that social conservatism was so closely tied to climate change denial. In theory those folks wanting to make sure their children can hunt and hike like they did growing up should be strongly set in favour of preserving an environment where that remains a possibility. Instead we have the media pushing this shallow form of conservatism where we specifically want to preserve the unsustainable post-war boom years where every river had a paper mill on it, every driveway had two cars (except they didn't and they weren't SUVs) and nobody realized what the consequences of that were.
How do you overcome conservative media when it's pushing such a strong agenda? Inviting them over for tea isn't going to cause a sea-change.
1. Sorta - I think some folks worked hard to make sure this happened.
Both parties are tolerant of drift. Donald Trump wasn't always a Republican.
[DaDa] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_South,_Manhattan#Tel... ?
Even the loudest politicians usually maintain 3 or 4 homes, often with heated swimming pools.
I'm a bit tired of the extreme hypocrisy. If someone like Jimmy Carter or Ralph Nader (they both live humble lives) were to be the leading voice, I'd feel better about things.
Nuclear isn't rejected by the left because of tribalism, as you seem to imply. It is rejected for other reasons, completely unrelated to tribalism, as the article points out. And many on the right reject nuclear for the exact same reasons.
My original remark was about rising above tribalism for sake of the environment. I was specifically thinking about the line in the article:
> Climate is simply too important to be sacrificed to cultural prejudices.
And these same politicians are taking private jets and massive motorcades to summits when there's a much more carbon footprint-friendly alternative available (hint: we've all been doing it for the last 18 months).
They tell us we're "past the point of no return" w.r.t. sea levels rising to the point that some large percentage of our coastal cities will be underwater, yet haven't started building sea walls to at least attempt to prevent the flooding.
And these same politicians are hellbent on importing unlimited numbers of third world immigrants into first world countries, instantly elevating the carbon footprint of those people. All while telling Joe Blow in the first world that he should stop having children, think of the carbon footprint they're producing! How could you be so selfish!
This is why I don't take this stuff seriously. We get lectured about carbon footprint this and "past the point of no return" that by people doing the complete opposite of what should be done to reduce carbon footprint or try to mitigate the disaster that we're too late to prevent.
My conclusion from this empirical evidence is that there are many ways to arrive at solutions, what is important is that someone makes it happen. Anyone claiming that only government, or only free markets can do it, is probably wrong.
At this point it looks to me like China is humanity's only hope since they don't have our society's extremist market ideology.
Sorry, that was a bit sarcastic. Obviously, the market is not a form of direct democracy. It's a form of resource allocation. And a pretty stupid one, where everything is allocated by short-sighted impulse decisions and without any consideration of emergent phenomena.
There are tons of scenarios where the free market simply does not have any solution at all. See the tragedy of the commons or of externalizing cost. Nothing in the free market will ever be able to address these issues. Even the often quoted and constantly misunderstood 'invisible hand' of the market is not some kind of mythical or emergent phenomena of the free market itself; it's the moral and social considerations of the actors themselves that make up the 'invisible hand'.
Pretty stoopid.
then you say ...
"China is humanity's only hope"
what on earth? am i missing a joke?
- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)
- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)
Meanwhile for the same period China has had
- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)
- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007
So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power generation.
Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation, and potentially apply immigration quotas to citizens of these countries.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Developing country is developing
I would say your viewpoint there is overly simplistic.
If China were to put strict, California-style controls on pollution, energy generation would get more expensive there, and goods made in China would also get more expensive. That would be an incentive for other countries to manufacture more of their own goods (or find a new, cheaper country to build things in), and certainly China does not want that, so they continue to pollute.
Note that labor would still be cheaper there, so we could still have cheaper stuff, we just want it even cheaper, to hell with the consequences that we don't see anyway.
It's not just energy either, there's various chemicals and safety concerns that people discovered in the west a long time ago. It's just that the allure of cheap stuff is so great, it was fine to just stop making it in the west and pretend that standards overseas were acceptable.
what is going on in China? that they are having such energy production problems? to the point where they are rationing electricity for months now. Where is all this extra demand coming from? and at what point will it peak ?
the excuse is always well the rest of the world got to pollute so we have our turn now.. seems crazy and childish when this will impact us all.
Blockchains?
(More seriously, I guess an awful lot of it is used to keep producing the cheap goods that Western consumers demand. We need to adjust our lifestyles to "consume" much less, in every way.)
The US i can understand. It's arguably set to be relatively impacted least.
It's a shell game to them, and they have exit plans.
Or is there something particularly thorny about this that could cause massive civil unrest if he were to take that step?
As China continues to modernize and become more energy-intensive, that power has to come from somewhere. If he bans coal too early or restricts it too much, progress that the people saw happening and intensely want could slow dramatically.
People will follow a strong dictator as long as they don’t see a much better path. If they see a much better path, support will wane quickly and possibly in an ugly fashion.
See page 6 of this report from the international energy agency: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/18a6041d-bf13-4667-...
And they appear to be one of the few nations currently pursuing expansion in next generation nuclear reactors that cannot be weaponized: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02459-w
As an example, the heat wave in the northwest of the USA and Canada this year was something I remember reading about as a problem to expect ~2050. Ditto for Siberia this year. Ditto for the snow in Sao Paolo.
I hope my concerns are misguided. I general though, short of a deus ex machina, I have no hope for the world doing anything about the climate emergency, even after it's obviously too late and even after the worlds seen a major city burned/wet bulbed/typhooned off the map.
tl;dr: It's essentially just a humidity-adjusted temperature, like wind chill factor for hot weather. The important figure to know is that a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C / 95°F (equivalent to that temperature at 100% humidity, or higher temperatures with lower humidities) will kill everyone.
This makes me wonder if it is (or will become) economical for cities to use renewable energy to dehumidify the outdoors, and if so whether the yield of water would actually be useful.
Well people will likely first start cooling and lowering the humidity indoors with their ACs. The condensate might be used to feed the household hydroponic systems.
Well, I'm pretty sure the monies spent by certain global corporations also do their part explaining why climate change and global warming has not been taken serious for the last fifty years - when it was first recognized. By scientists of the aforementioned global corporations.
It is well documented how 'big oil' (for the lack of a better name) has lobbied hard and heavy to kill any effort that took climate change serious.
> I general though, short of a deus ex machina, I have no hope for the world doing anything about the climate emergency, even after it's obviously too late and even after the worlds seen a major city burned/wet bulbed/typhooned off the map.
Oh boy, I agree. It pains me so hard and so much but I absolutely agree. Our monkey brains and monkey societies are just not able to deal with the kind of dangers that we've been able to put ourselves in.
(just a minor correction, not arguing against your general point)
This will come with its own risks, but at the time in future when this is done, the risk-reward characteristics might not be so bad.
I'm pretty sure that kind of techo-utopian fantasy is part of the reason why people are so reluctant to face the problem we have. To think that there will be some Deus Ex Machina that saves us all, without us having to actually do the hards things is just too tempting.
If people in Bangladesh are losing their farms to flooding because of global warming, then voters in Kansas will simply... not care.
There is enough public pressure to make even more changes, and the CO2 intensity will keep going down regardless if it's Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden in office.
There's a long way to go and no laurels to rest on.
Maybe stop playing shell games with numbers and dates and just stick with what the IPCC says are the 2100 predictions. They're serious enough and don't make you look manipulative and untrustworthy.
Siberia may get warmer weather, but the grounds will be awful. Melting permafrost and methane explosions don’t make for a very stable situation.
Rather adapt existing buildings to the changing climate.
I'm partial to the northern half of the great lakes.
Predicting which will be most at risk is relatively easy. Predicting which will be least at risk is much harder, as some of the effects are complex. e.g. Things getting warmer seems like it should be good for cold places, but it turns out to have negative consequences as well.
This is way, way beyond what any kind of scientific data suggests, even under the most extreme assumptions for projecting things into the future (and models based on those extreme assumptions are already falsified by actual data anyway).
Or maybe you misunderstood the words I used.
For most first world countries the first order effects are mostly a drag on infrastructure costs and costs of living. Even absurd things like damming in the entire North Sea to protect against sea level rise are viable with enough political will [1]. But places that can't afford that will lose population centers to sea level rise, will be unable to produce enough water for drinking and agriculture, or just become too hot in the summer months to be livable without AC everywhere. And all those people won't just keel over and die, they will have the same thought you just expressed.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/giant-da...
Although the climate crisis is dire, I do not think that climate change alone is likely to kill us all. Resource wars that result from the climate crisis, however, I think could finish off humanity. Arms manufacturers do what they can to increase the likelihood of war.
Not to mention that militaries produce disproportionate amounts of greenhouse gases.
I mean, arms manufacturing is blood money even in "ordinary" times, but it takes another level of self-destructive evil to attempt to profit off the apocalypse.
If you are one of "all those people won't just keel over and die" (as the grandparent post states), then your community will need arms to, well, not just keel over and die. The same applies for any community that might get overrun by their neighbours - if global warming is going to bring on resource conflicts, if you refuse to be prepared and armed as a deterrant, then you will be inviting violence to your home as you will be an attractive victim. Sic pace, para bellum is an ancient principle that's relevant whenever a contest for resources becomes meaningful; so the point in investing in arms companies is not about profit, but about ensuring that your community suffers less in the coming turndown; you and your community will not get a "fair share" of dwindling resources just by existing (that's hard enough even in times of plenty with less motivation to compete for basic resources), it will get only as much as its strength allows.
That feels like an argument to convince people to do something rather than what will actually happen. A bit like "there is no escape, FIGHT NOW!".
But yes, the conclusion would be to either do something before it's too late or to go to a self-sufficient colony on Mars. There's plenty of other angles that support this, whether that's melting permafrost or the studies that calculate that limiting climate change now is far cheaper than mitigating the consequences later.
All of that to say, it feels like you're saying to people "either you fight climate change, or you will get refugees", while in real life that's not really what will happen, I think. I don't think you're completely wrong, but for example the average person can't really run away from refugees, but also can't make a difference in fighting climate change, so many of them will probably fight climate change and get refugees; while a very rich person can change more things but also run away more easily.
It seems to be that the most obvious solutions will be make amazing technology and make it as cheap or cheaper than the dirty competitors -- eventually, even the people that dont believe in climate change will be driving EVs, have solar panels on their roofs, and eating fake meat.
Also, we should all be hoping there are some breakthroughs in nuclear (cheaper + safer reactors that leads to less regulation and allow nuclear to be more ubiquitous )
(I’m not making a claim that we should slow either branch down nor keep people poor so only the rich can keep burning fossils.)
We have only ever managed to get people out of poverty by increasing their per-capita energy usage.
Any once we do, their families demand to maintain said standard of living that can only be met with enormous amounts of concentrated energy.
We have - and continue - to do this using fossil fuels.
Do you have another, secret, method?
They can skip the fossil fuels and go straight to green energy can they not? This will require advances in technology, and therefore should be our focus.
No they cannot.
We cannot even get Switzerland - small, rich, smart, friendly, good infrastructure, top class law, surrounded by mountains and water, etc. etc. to renewables in a decade.
The US needs to get it's act together, but it is possible to have functional civil society and make decisions in the common good.
I think if enough climate events happen to enough people around the country, a majority could develop that wants to take action. Unfortunately, I think getting people to make the necessary changes to have a meaningful impact is politically impossible.
I'm actually sort of mildly positive about living outside Chicago right now since 1) my vague sense is that winters will get less severe (those crazy polar vortexes we've had a couple times now notwithstanding), 2) there's a fair bit of agriculture in the region that's not on the cusp of failing, 3) the elevation is high-ish and we're not on the coast, and 3) we're next to most of the world's fresh water. That said, I'm sure since this isn't a super well considered position, I'm probably missing a ton.
You should definitely assume that a late-winter polar vortex is an annual occurrence. Summers will get warmer, rain storms will get more intense. So you definitely are going to need to adapt. And flooding is an issue, so you better make sure to be in a FEMA X zone.
On the other hand, Illinois and Chicago are really, really low on the climate migration desirability index. Yet there is excellent soil for agriculture and the state is doing a decent job of incentivizing farmers to protect it. There is a huge amount of good water. Etc. You probably don't have to worry too much about being priced out of a house.
Unfortunately nuclear too is a political issue.
But I 100% agree, that a true path forward would involve the left taking actions to fix climate change that would be more popular with the conservative crowd.
If all the coal plants we were closing, were being replaced with nuclear power in the same cities and states, there would be a lot of job protection. And that might help move things forward.
Or a call for Solar Panels on homes, with panels made in the U.S. might be a good compromise as well.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/build-back-better/
> Ensures clean energy technology – from wind turbine blades to solar panels to electric cars – will be built in the United States with American made steel and other materials, creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs here at home.
> The Build Back Better legislation will target incentives to grow domestic supply chains in solar, wind, and other critical industries in communities on the frontlines of the energy transition. In addition, the framework will boost the competitiveness of existing industries, like steel, cement, and aluminum, through grants, loans, tax credits, and procurement to drive capital investment in the decarbonization and revitalization of American manufacturing.
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> The framework will also fund port electrification; facilitate the deployment of cleaner transit, buses, and trucks; and support critical community capacity building, including grants to environmental justice communities. In addition, the framework will create a new Civilian Climate Corps – with over 300,000 members that look like America. This diverse new workforce will conserve our public lands, bolster community resilience, and address the changing climate, all while putting good-paying union jobs within reach for more Americans.
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> The consumer rebates and credits included in the Build Back Better framework will save the average American family hundreds of dollars per year in energy costs. These measures include enhancement and expansion of existing home energy and efficiency tax credits, as well as the creation of a new, electrification-focused rebate program. The framework will cut the cost of installing rooftop solar for a home by around 30 percent, shortening the payback period by around 5 years; and the framework’s electric vehicle tax credit will lower the cost of an electric vehicle that is made in America with American materials and union labor by $12,500 for a middle-class family. In addition, the framework will help rural communities tap into the clean energy opportunity through targeted grants and loans through the Department of Agriculture.
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Clinton's campaign had similar promises around retraining coal miners to provide them good jobs in Wind and Solar.
Clinton's campaign did have promises of getting coal miners jobs in wind and solar, but if those industries can't completely replace what we have now, how can they possibly replace all the jobs?
When a coal mine turns into a nuclear power plant that is something that feels like is going to generate even more jobs than existed previously. Where renewables feel like less jobs. Those assumptions may be incorrect but that is how it is going to sound to the average voter.
What's more is that it's a cumulative problem, so every little bit helps. Factoring in carbon capture, good actors can even cancel out bad ones. Very unlike the pandemic, where a few bad actors have outsized power to make things terrible for everybody.
At any rate, with regards to climate change, it's important to note that actual progress has been made in mitigating climate change, it's not enough to hit the 1.5C target, but we'd be in an even worse place without it. In 2014 the world was on track to hit 4C by 2100, now its at 3C, (primarily due to rapid growth in clean energy). More reduction is possible in the intervening years, and the reduction is important in cutting out the more catastrophic effects of climate change.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/25/climate/world...
It might actually be better to find place that will have plenty of local resources, especially renewable electricity and water, but will be hard to live without supporting tech like AC, heat/insulation, air filtration, etc and even more exotic tech like indoor grown food and general purpose manufacturing like 3d printing.
Beyond the density problem of 'nice' places, the difficulty of living in 'hard' places will provide a forcing function to only allow a population of smart and industrious people to live there, while those who can't hack it flee to the 'nice' places that don't require as much expensive tech to survive in.
In a world ravaged by climate change, you really want to be in the group that is capable of keeping advanced tech running and improving if you want to leave a lasting legacy. Not only because it's going to get harder to live here on Earth, but because we don't have much of a collective future if we never manage to get off this rock.
I do my part in the way I travel and what I eat, but I can otherwise only hope me and my kids are long dead before the earth becomes uninhabitable for a large part.
The pandemic is unusual in that we physically had no options but to work together.
With something like climate change, yes, everyone can be a bad contributor, but honestly, the solutions if they are to be arrived at involve a lot of invention, creation, trying things. Individuals & entities & governments are free to explore their own ways of making wins, and we don't all have to work together. We can ignore naysayers, & do the good work.
Imo, the best way to reason about the impact in our daily lives is to think about systems that exist in much smaller spacetime scales than ourselves. So in this case statistical mechanics. What happens to the atoms or molecules of a system when you dump a bunch of heat into it? What might that look like at the scale of individual atoms and molecules?
This year we've seen floods in Germany, huge wildfires in the US west, snow in Texas (and the Pacific Northwest), storms up the US east coast (wasn't there flooding in New England, too?), and I'm sure other stuff I've either forgotten or not heard about.
I think what's going to compound that is the push for "carbon neutrality", the idea that any emissions will be offset by... offsets (carbon capture, tree-planting, whatever). That tends to only be about the period of time from achieving carbon neutrality forward, but ignores the carbon emitted leading up to that milestone. I'm guessing that reaching carbon neutrality, for many industries, is not going to be a carbon-neutral mission. For example, if we want to move to electric vehicles prior to a carbon-neutral supply chain, then every EV build can have a significant carbon-footprint.
- They are porn for people who are already believer in global warming, and show more material to say "look that what I said will happen" without doing changing anything in their daily lives.
- They are maybe right but display a false negative picture of what is going to happen for people who tend to deny global warming.
The reality is we don't know what is going to happen, that's things we can't predict. So stop be sure about things, accept nuance.
EDIT: I'm not saying we are powerless or don't know at all what is going to happen. We have a feeling of what is going to happen (temperature increase, sea level increase and other things) but we cannot accurately predict what, when and how this is going to happen
Hrm. So, if one follows the scientific consensus[0] and actually takes into consideration the political and social consequences of the scientific consensus one is a ... believer?
I think at that point, you really have to ask yourself where the burden of proof really is. And if not the ones not-"believing" in the fact of global warming are the ones following some kind of believe system.
> The reality is we don't know what is going to happen, that's things we can't predict. So stop be sure about things, accept nuance.
Dude, that bullshit and you know it. We know what's happening. We've known it for a very long time. The scientists employed by companies like Exxon, BP, Total et all recognized in the seventies that there's a huge problem and that we are wreaking havoc with our dependence on fossil fuels. So don't 'We don't know what's happening" me.
We know what's happening, we can model it and we can use these models to create predictions. And the picture is not nice, you know. Funny thing; the predictions by previously mentioned scientists from world-famous oil producers actually created very accurate models that hold up today.
It's only political meddling that 'softened' these models to to make climate change and global warming not appear as drastic as it is.
> doing changing anything in their daily lives.
That's a fallacy. I can doing changing everything in my life and it will not change a iota. This is not some kind of personal responsibility-issue. This needs a concentrated global effort. Not some backyard hippies doing composting.
[0] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/10/more-999-studies-ag...
We also don't know what eventually people will do to mitigate or change the climate actively. So again, what will happen is not set in stone, independent of current decarbonization efforts (and their success or failure).
I'm not really sure if this is tongue-in-cheek, if you're just trolling or if that's a serious argument. I'll try to treat it as a serious argument, just to be sure.
Sure, there are tons and tons of failure modes that are not included in the models. Galactic gamma ray bursts! Rogue black holes throwing the Earth out of orbit! Alien invasion (probably not)!
The question is if they are relevant in the topic of modeling the consequences of continued greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere - and the answer is: no.
So, while philosophically your statement is true that "we don't know what will happen, even if the models are sufficiently accurate" - you still get out of bed in the morning and go to work, not wasting any (much?) time thinking about that gamma ray burst coming our way.
> We also don't know what eventually people will do to mitigate or change the climate actively. So again, what will happen is not set in stone, independent of current decarbonization efforts (and their success or failure).
The IPCC has several modes of mitigation that model possible scenarios. That's covered.
The IPCC does speak towards SRM etc. but I think large scale geoengineering isn't really part of the proper menu there. So no, the IPCC isn't all covering and all conclusive. EDIT: in the sense that it treats certain things as high risk and rather theoretical - which is true, but doesn't mean they should be off the menu.
If we cannot even agree on simply cutting fossil fuels, how on earth can we ever agree on large scale geoengineering projects that will have massive negative consequences for many countries involved?
Further climatic disruptions will make the already dire situations in many countries untenable. That situations like that do not tend to improve by unilateral actions of their neighbors if the threaten to make a barely acceptable situation even worse.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-first-water-war-is-un...
I guess I'm in a sarcastic mood today. Yes, of course that will cause mayhem. It's one of the reasons I see climate change as such a threat to our all civilization. We're fearsome tribal creatures and the coming waves of desperate peoples will almost certainly play into the hands of nationalist fearmongers and firebrands.
I wonder if we will see some kind of -literally - ecofashism rise from that.
The worst part is, once the killing starts, people will rationalise it to themselves, saying "We didn't have a choice".
just to stave off likely claims I am not saying we should prioritize the economy over people, but I am saying we should consider if we can positively address the catastrophe both more effectively (remove risk) and less drastically by directly addressing where people live.
I've had similar thoughts about how we (as humanity) tend to build big cities on some of the most fertile land just because agricultural success drew people proximally to those lands. But then we pave over fertile fields to put up offices that house people who just work on computers... We get sucked into local maxima and find it uneconomical to move out of it (or often an organizational issue where all have to move to not have massive first mover risks)
But that's not all the dangers. The heat dome over the Pacific Northwest this summer isn't something that can accurately be predicted.
See you all in 2050 in our CO2-filtered bedrooms :) Live your lives, folks, we only have so much of it. Earth is beautiful, take it in while you still can.
We have known for the last fifty years that we are doing serious harm to our ecosystem and will run into disaster if we don't stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Exxon knew it by the 1970ies, so did Shell and Total and BP. How they have managed to hoodwink everyone into climate denialism[0] is beyond me, but I guess it has to do with the millions and millions that have been spent lobbying[1] local, national and global leaders.
And that just illustrates the problem with our precious life support system[2]; it's a commons and as such not protected by anyone. If you can profit by externalizing costs created by damaging the ecosystem, it usually pays off. The damages will only appear years and years later and the perpetrators will all be long gone by the time the real consequences hit. Win-Win, I guess? Just imagine not having to pay the cleanup and reparation in the order of trillions of dollars and you _still_ get to keep the few billions you made? Amazing.
If even economy-focused publications like .. well... The Economist are finally taking climate change serious, it makes me sad, because it just goes to show that the situation is dire indeed. Otherwise it would just be the Hippies that are concerned about 'Mothership Earth'.
In the end I doubt that anything will change - but hey! - there's to hopin'.
[0] Or as we nitpickers like to say; denial of the fact that the recent climatic changes have been caused by humans
[1] bribing
[2] Earth and it's diverse and wonderful ecosystems
The predictions of this article is pretty dry in that sense, sea rise, normal heatwaves, droughts, stronger storms, in general the same but stronger, more of it.
It is a safe bet, but the global system is pretty complex and interconnected, and a big change will affect most subsystems in ways that it may not look so obvious now, but that will be in hindsight.
We are already seeing some weird things, like the disruption of the polar vortex, the disproportionate heat near the poles where some of the most dangerous positive feedback loops happens, or the heath dome of some months ago, and still we are pretty low in the change scale.
And all the road to any line set in the sand will be bumpy and with a lot of bad surprises. And it won't be an way back, only forward, no matter at which bad event people decide that it shouldn't happen again.
We keep doing things worse, and faster than ever, there is no hope while no meaningful and disruptive actions are taken. But we will prefer to not cut our leg now, and be left having no way to stop our body dying later.
This is ideal content to get a lot of likes of pity but zero actual demand for policy changes. Everybody is going to assume somebody else has got to finally do something!
You won't sell your elephant that way
Plastics, destruction of the ocean plankton, topsoil etc. have all conveniently been put into a single term called global warming, which is just one symptom of many things.
As a result we still have these discussions whether global warming exists or not, when it's really irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
To collect all the consequences and processes you mentioned, I usually like to use the term "predatory ecosystem exploitation", because that pretty much describes what we're doing to our life support system.
It makes sense as when most lay people think of "warming" in connection with the "global climate" they likely think "weather" and the idea that it will be 2-3 degrees "warmer" out doesn't seem like a big deal. 68F feels pretty close to 71F, no biggie.
At a planet wide scale though, this is a huge amount of energy and causes a massive change in the climate.
There's a lot of "greenwashing" in the world, but the term is generally applied to corporations that use "a form of marketing spin in which green PR and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization's products, aims and policies are environmentally friendly." The term "Climate Change" is the preferred term from the scientific community and isn't promoted by corporations to make themselves seem more green.
The counter-argument: surely Americans are informed enough to understand the phrase "1.5 degrees of warming" means Celsius...I'm not confident average Americans know that. I'm not sure the science education is up to snuff in the USA.
The Americans who don't consider climate change a big deal, generally live in the interior of the country without as many severe weather events. Generally speaking, these folks are misinformed voters and it's hurting our climate policy. They think: Why should they care about "3 degrees of [Fahrenheit] warming", especially because there's no fires or storms near them?
For the electorate it isn't really a matter of information or education. People have things they care about more or are vote based on emotion.
In a way it's like trying to use logic to convince somebody to support The Atlanta Braves rather than the Yankees. They didn't get there through a process of logic and isn't logic that's going to change them.
Do you have a single source that says "Americans think climate change is only half as bad because of F vs C"?
Personally I doubt that a meaningful percent of Americans (or people anywhere) even know this "3" number to begin with, let alone the unit. This isn't something most people are focused on.
Instead, this is just GRIFT to pull taxes from public funds into the pockets of plutocrats (hey where is greta this whole scheme sounds like capitalism again) while telling you that YOU need to live with restrictions that the upper class won't be policed on, like the good subject you are.
All for one and one for - nah, never mind gas up my second leer jet, Jeeves!
Perhaps it is. Or perhaps it's necessary to get things done. Who knows?
It's a kind of an odd argument though. That "discerning Americans" will jump on board when they see some other people doing "some things" such that it indicates to them that it must be real.
Why work through that indirection? It's so arbitrary and can be arbitrarily moved. It's a blame shifting mechanism - I won't worry about this until "gulf stream environmentalists", "china", somewhere/someone else does something that I think is enough. I won't say what that is or what I'll actually do and by when. Or if I do and I make it to that point I can always find some other "issue".
Perhaps that's the point. I mean delay and distract was the big tobacco plan - and many of the same people apparently moved to fossil fuel companies.
A more serious and beneficial approach would be to look at what climate science predicted and what happened. Then look at what their future predictions are like.
If you take the IPCC reports they have generally underpredicted the rate of climate change.
Since when did commercial flight or rail stop being a way to transport people? Oh, right, it's not an option for the elite class because... reasons. They could do all of this without having several dozen private jets flying to the same places.
> It's a blame shifting mechanism
It's NOT a blame shifting mechanism, or at least that's not how I'm using it. What I'm saying is that your privileges are being revoked for transportation, theirs are not. You are being shamed for taking a commercial flight, but they are not, even when using private jets.
Finally, consider the rhetoric they are pushing. They are saying that this is an "emergency," meanwhile they are observably NOT acting like it's an emergency. This is a classic case of "they've got theirs," and it's clear that they don't plan on making any sacrifices that result in a lower standard of living for themselves.
I'm not sure why you are lumping those two modes of transport together. According to one estimate, "a passenger traveling in a private aircraft emits ... between 75 and 250 times the CO2 of a comparable high-speed rail journey."[0]
You're right, though, that private jets are an easy target for a carbon tax, and I don't know of any climate activists arguing that private jets should be exempt from one.
Perhaps the reason it is not high on people's lists of things to fix, though, is that "the aviation industry only contributes around 2% of global CO2 emissions, with private air travel representing an even smaller fraction." (according to the European Business Aviation Association).[0]
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/should-private-jets-be-banned-to-spare...
I think you misunderstand - "commercial flight" is referring to flying on one of the large carriers instead of privately. Both of those modes of transportation move large groups of people, together. Many people, one trip. Rail is available in Europe, but not in the US.
> Perhaps the reason it is not high on people's lists of things to fix, though, is that "the aviation industry only contributes around 2% of global CO2 emissions, with private air travel representing an even smaller fraction."
They are saying this is an "emergency" though. Is it a good idea to fly any plane during a climate emergency that will purportedly starve all of us? Why aren't these people concerned about starving themselves? This is an emergency and they aren't taking their own precautions seriously.
While not activists, the EU, for one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27775620
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-vi... "About two-thirds of U.S. adults (67%) say the federal government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change"
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/18/a-look-at-h... According to this: 59% of Americans see it as a major threat and 23% see it as a minor threat. This is close to the Australia (60% and 29%) and UK (66% and 23%) numbers.
I think the media discussion in America on many issues (policing, masks/vaccines, climate change) presents a distorted view of what the majority believes, because sensational, clashing talking heads drive more ad dollars. So why don't we see more action on climate change in America? Well, some reasons: 1) Lobbying efforts often push back or at least water down any change. 3) America's two party system plays to the extremes in both camps rather than the majority viewpoint, which gets lost. 1) most people have more pressing near term concerns that dominate their choices.
Regardless of the exact numbers, my point is similar to the original article: people don't understand the ramifications here. Even if they intuitively know 3C is almost 2X as much as 3F, they still may not understand the article's points either.
https://thebulletin.org/2020/02/earth-is-heating-at-a-rate-e...
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/09/weather/weather-record-co...
Is it!?
At the very top, there's nations. Whom are meeting as we speak at the climate summit. China and Russia aren't even there. For other participants, they're all eye balling each other to find the sweet spot where they do the least possible whilst not embarrassing themselves. There's the additional complexity of developing nations still using a lot of fossil fuels and feeling they have the right to continue this for a little longer, for historical reasons and due to wealth inequality. Which is a fair moral point, but the planet doesn't care. It's the tragedy of the commons.
At the national level, we bash political leaders for ignoring the issue for decades but our anger is misplaced. As soon as any of these politicians propose meaningful reform, we vote them out. Because the measures obviously will be unpopular. Democracy is voting for what is popular for the coming 4 years, not for what is needed for the coming 10, 20, 50. We simply don't have the political system for that.
At the people/individual level, group A full on denies the issue in the same way you can deny COVID or the earth being spherical. Group B deep down knows what's up yet still is unwilling to make a change, instead just wants to ride it out. Group C is on board with the issue and tries to live better, but it's still questionable if it's enough.
Not at any level do we seem capable to solve a problem of this nature, as evidenced by decades of doing nothing regarding any ecological issue.
A depressing personal example. One of my friends is the chair of a committee of apartment owners in an apartment complex. In this building live rich senior citizens. The committee votes on shared investments regarding the building.
The building is old, poorly isolated and heating uses a lot of fossil energy. Its energy system clearly has to be redesigned at one point, hence my friend put months of work into a plan. Through government subsidy and very favorable capital lending, it would basically mean that the service fee would increase by a mere 120 euros per month for a fixed number of years (I think it was 5-10 years). This would completely redesign the energy system to not use any fossil energy at all, increase isolation whilst improving ventilation.
The inhabitants massively rejected the proposal. These people are rich and already retired, with 100% economic security (government pension + private pension). It's a financial non-sacrifice. And still they reject it.
They reject it still when explained that due to the rising fossil fuel prices, their monthly fee will soon be upped enough to match this investment fee.
So in light of doing some tiny good for the future, part of which you will even live to see, at no meaningful personal sacrifice...the answer is still NO. We will continue our ways, and whatever problem comes from it, is for somebody else.
This isn't some specific group of evil old people. These are lovely grandparents, people you admire and believe are kind and good hearted. Which means its me and you. It's typical of our species.
The way I see it, we can't wait for any of the above people dynamics. Just print 100T$ in new money and get to work. Today. We'll figure it out along the way. It doesn't matter if its "not conventional". Conventional got us into this situation.
My take on his view of all of this is that the climate is going to change, and trying to fight/reverse that is a losing battle. Rather, we should take a multi-pronged approach and attempt to move away from carbon based energy (using carbon tax), but also start working to build up our infrastructure to deal with the changes that climate change will bring. I think the point of his WSJ pieces is to point out that even the worst case scenario of the climate predictions aren't that bad, because people adapt to changes in their environment (humans are really good at this).
Here are the 10 pieces he's written leading up to the climate conference going on right now:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-natural-disaster...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/flood-climate-change-ipcc-unite...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hurricane-ida-henri-climate-cha...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-heat-cold-deaths...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-world-doomed-gdp...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lockdown-climate-fossil-f...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-malnutrition-reg...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-cost-economy-emi...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-adaptation-panic...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-activists-blow-smoke-on...
If one group of people dams a river to adapt to having less water, and another group destroys the dam so they have more water downstream, then pretty soon nobody has water and they're in a shooting war.
If by adapt you mean "grab everything for yourself"... well, I think The Postman was a disturbingly prescient novel. In that story, nuclear war wasn't the real problem, the real problem was "survivalists" trying to grab everything for themselves and preventing society from reassembling. There is no amount of resources you can amass that will protect you from the war of all against all.
We must all hang together, or surely we will all hang separately. We must act now to work together to mitigate global heating and avert climate disaster, or when resources get scarce we will not be able to cooperate to divide up pieces of a smaller pie.
And if you think the climate crisis will not destroy more than it creates... well, you don't understand the speed and scale of the catastrophe. The natural world cannot adapt at the speed we are changing it, and humans rely on the natural world.
Conflict over resources is always going to be a thing. But dealing with the changes to climate change is more than just how we handle limited resources.
Just saying.
Generally, the hope is that we don't have to further destroy the world that we know to keep it from killing us.
Given that most of the world's population is under 30 years old[0], even if you could get every country in the world to simultaneously ban child birth tomorrow, the world population wouldn't even halve by 2070. (You also need to take into account global life expectancy changes that far into the future[1]).
[0] https://socialnomics.net/2010/04/13/over-50-of-the-worlds-po...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/673420/projected-global-...
(Maybe if we saw major surprise breakthroughs in inflatables or low mass self/automated-construction systems?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade
(ETA: And as the sibling comments point out, all of that is after the related serious discussions about the ethics of that sort of project to begin with and if it is a sledgehammer approach to a problem that needs a scalpel and a deft hand.)
From the Wikipedia article: "Creating this sunshade in space was estimated to cost in excess of US$130 billion over 20 years" Honestly that's not very expensive at all when both compared with things like the current infrastructure bill that the US is trying to pass and also considering the impact something like that could have. Yes its expensive, but it seems to me that that this is something that the governments of the world could afford to do.
Engineering and launching a bunch of spacecraft seems considerably easier than changing the behavior of most people on the planet.
One of the problems is the wealthy misdirecting the blame to "average people" and that we all just need LED bulbs or EV cars or what not. Those are drops in the bucket of industrial carbon waste and always have been. All the finger pointing "it's the consumers' faults, we just need them to buy the right things" is marketing/propaganda at its finest.
(Well and also bitcoin/cryptocurrencies have managed to claw back every individual gain anyway in LED efficiency or hybrid/EV gas mileage, so it may take a few more people to convince to stop investing in those schemes. Though there again it is rarely the "I own a couple Satoshi" masses that need to stop it's the biggest and wealthiest miners. And yeah stopping the wealthiest miners would destabilize the currencies because of the Ponzi scheme effects they are built on top of, but that's why it's a lousy investment and, uh, too bad? I'd rather keep the planet than the silly digital money, don't know about y'all.)
Convincing a couple hundred billionaires and couple hundred massive crpyto mining farms to stop should be a much easier problem to solve than the orbital mechanics of a massive L1 project. The fact that we don't think that it is probably says a lot more sad things about our sociopolitics in this age than we'd like it to.
(ETA: That's assuming of course we aren't already on the wrong side of snowball effects and stopping entirely now would hit a hysteresis effect. Pessimistically, sure, it may be too late. But if we are past that "point of no return" a sunshade can't help us either because the snowball effects likely happen even if we lessen the additional energy pouring in from the sun.)