IPCC’s starkest message yet: extreme steps needed to avert climate disaster
nature.com
nature.com
That is, certainly, a recipe for catastrophic war.
If climate change is the existential crisis some insist it is, our only solution is technological. But those who wish to use climate change as a Trojan horse to enact their social whims will reject any discussion of the sort. Because solving climate change isn’t their goal, it’s the means to attain their goal.
Climate change itself is probably a recipe for catastrophic war and the resurgence of fascism. There are estimates as high as 1.2 billion for people that will be displaced by climate change[1]. Even a much smaller number of refugees from the middle east and South America has helped push politics in many western countries towards isolationism and increased xenophobia. What would 1.2 billion refugees do?
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/climate-refugees-the-...
What you're missing is that if underdeveloped countries were even capable of reaching the same stage of development we and East Asian countries enjoy, they would contribute as much, and that is actually their goal.
Sure if any country starts to contribute more, they should also take more responsibility.
You cannot for example tax someone on the amount of money that they hypothetically can have or want to have which you even claim they are not even capable of having.
So are they going to give all those away for free to poor countries? And also pay for massive programs to recapture the carbon they've already emitted? And mitigate already-locked-in effects of climate change, such as drought and extreme weather? Those are the only conditions under which your "why don't they improve their own countries" suggestion is fair.
Some of the first refugees will be from California. The reservoids that are not at record-low took 20 years to fill, they are never coming back.
[1] https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/US-CAL-CISO?wind=false&s... (Scroll to "Origin of electricity in the last 24 hours" in left nav; during daylight hours, 75%-90% of total generation are low carbon sources; and I expect that to hit 100% in the next 2-3 years based on CAISO's generator interconnect queue)
[2] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_c... (refer to California solar [yellow] and batteries [gray] coming online this year)
[3] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
[4] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/07/1037369959/new-protections-fo...
All the argicultural land in california is about to become a lot less valuable. It's destruction of wealth and nature on a collosal scale. The idea that allowing climate change to continue is good for buinesss is idiotic, and could result in violence unseen since 1940's
Same way you wouldn't want to support economic policy farming corn in the Arizona desert. Put solar panels there instead (or other crops that are low water intensity). Higher level, there is a lot of inefficiency in US Ag policy causing suboptimal outcomes. Systems get addicted to subsides or resources where costs are not properly allocated.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Water_in...
Santa Barbara probably would be fine, along with the Bay Area and some of the LA suburbs. Divert less irrigation water from the Sacramento/San Joaquin system, pump more into the California Aqueduct, central coast has water. Alternatively, pump more into Bethany Reservoir, divert to the South Bay Aqueduct, and Silicon Valley has water.
Sea level rises are merely one of the things that can cause mass displacement, no matter how much other people moan about it.
I’m fairly optimistic about the future — I see this warning from the UN and think “this degree of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is achievable in this timeframe” — but even so I’m still expecting New Orleans and a significant depth of the Italian coast from roughly San Marino to Trieste to disappear.
The problem is that, right now, EU countries are forced to accept poor immigrants and integration is not easy.
Integration is not easy for a number of economical reasons and not due to xenophobia. EU economies, especially in the south, are not doing well. There are not a lot of jobs, life got progressively worse in the last 20 years, crisis after crisis. So naturally, migrants will end up working for 2€ per hour picking up tomatoes or selling drugs and stealing bikes.
Eventually, it will become politically unsustainable and local populations will vote to quit the EU and stop the immigrants flow. The nordic countries have a rape problem linked to immigration. My grandma is afraid of walking in her own city. I'd say we're about 50% there.
We already saw it happen in the UK. The only thing keeping the other countries in is that their economy are too weak to survive on their own and they came to rely on the single market.
That is precisely why it will cause a catastrophic war -> do you expect them all to just lie down and die peacefully?
NIMBYs bemoan that local school districts can't accommodate extra kids and that local roads can't support new traffic. Yes, they cite true facts to hide the reality that "they want to see their home prices accelerate".
In this case, the elite (super wealthy and their cronies in politics, think tanks) tell us that embracing refugees help humanity, learning cultures, etc, while they purchase citizenship in, properties to live in, jets to fly to, New Zealand.
These days, everyone uses truths, but see what they are hiding behind their truths!!
Sure, some of them will flee to Mexico or Cuba (from Central Valley and Florida); some will flee Bangladesh to India; some of the migrants that end up in Europe will be from other bits of Europe.
But I suspect quite a lot of sensible Egyptians will look at the wrong kind of water being in the Nile Delta and reach a perfectly sensible conclusion, go to an agent and ask: "أود شراء تذكرة ذهاب فقط إلى أي مكان ليس تحت الماء حاليًا." only to accidentally find themselves shortly thereafter in Zagreb taking a crash course in Croatian.
WTF? Please explain, esp. why not instead a resurgence of [communism, religion, authoritarianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, wizardism a la Harry Potter, Pokemon-ism, etc, etc.]
When I read a post containing such phrases, I am likely to suffer a severe attack of "give-a-sh*-ism" (as in "I don't give a sh* about this.")
B -> C, reduction in standard of living requires a powerful central authority (rather than our current one being sufficient)
C -> D, a central authority will become hostile to its neighbors.
I'm not sure any of these suppositions are something I agree with. But that last one in particular... That one in particular seems a bit much.
The problem is still the same.
Also forcing the industry not to put polutants in the water and air has it's cost, I would like to understand why the future generation needs to pay so our generation can keep spending money on shit like ctypto, apps, luxury.
I am assuming you think that if we just do nothing some billionaire would discover how to reverse this, but any facts to prove that in 50 years this will happen and the solution would be instant and cheap? And before someone would scream "think about the poor" I would say that there are solutions like fixing tax loopholes where bilionairse move to some different country or some giant company uses some shity loophole not to pay the taxes.
it's the reverse -> allowing them to pollute and cause damage has it's cost, if a child with astma dies of air pollution, they aren't paying compensation. When someone got lead poisoning or died of black lung, companies wheren't paying for that either. If that person's family now needs support and welfare, if the pollution needs cleaning up, it's always the taxpayer picking up the tab
Edit, so from my understanding OP was selfish and thinking at his personal costs and not the costs for current children or future generations.
Edit for the downvoters, it is even worse:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/cms/asset/d9fdb266-1231-4...
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2007.216...
How so?
It is actually higher: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/cms/asset/d9fdb266-1231-4...
and then we have climate emissions on top of simple resource depletion. We're screwed if people don't even know these basic facts.
It is a shame this information is locked behind a paywall though. Telling people "your ecological footprint is massive" is fine, but better to understand how to reduce said footprint.
I'm guessing this calculation is taking into account production fuel costs, food production, commuting gas, etc. North America, and the US in particular, has enjoyed externalized transaction costs for a long time.
For example, if we grew all of our food in greenhouses, we'd use about 0.1% of the land but food would be about 10x as expensive.
B: Whether the people who blame capitalism are correct is irrelevant, they are sincere is that they have beef with capitalism. Accusing sincere people of insenserity is precisely the kind of thing that makes discussion unproductive
C: There is a wide range of people who insincerely advocate climate inaction, because it furhters their financial interests
The biggest lever is governmental regulations. Especially enabling capitalism to make good decisions. If externalities were priced into (for example) air travel, shipping or meat, the market would find ways and massive innovation potential could be leveraged.
As long as we are able to (relatively) cheaply consume while the externalities are payed by us all in the end (or the next generations) there won't be a solution. Neither socially nor technologically. At least imho.
The assumption that reduction of carbon emissions is a reduction of standard of living is flawed. A long list of developed countries have a tiny footprint per capita. Standard of living and living wastefully are not the same thing.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
There is a huge effect when cutting emissions of the top 10%, even a tiny bit. [1] The graph is likely hiding that if the top 10% was segmented more, it would be very hop heavy - even limiting it to the median of the top 10% should do a lot.
The US is also uniquely positioned here to cut their emissions in half and still have more emissions per capacita than Europe[1]. And no, the problem is not that the US is large and cars are required; cars are fine for rural people, but they are not fine for the spawling car-dependent suburban areas US cities keep creating. [2]
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region
[2]: (video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o&
Oh, you think the current order is the result of economic freedom? You don't realise that's it's a result of economic tyranny where polluters and pillagers of national wealth are protected and coddled.
We could employer individuals to claim compensation for 2 million deaths caused by air pollusion globally. We could enable farmer who's lifehood has been destroyed by climate change to claim compensation from Oil companeis and other emitters.
If your plot of land decreased in value because it no longer has access to clean water, if your house has been destroyed by a flood, if you had a heart attack from abnormally hot weather of if you used to be a toure guide to the barrier reef -> join a mile long queue for compensation from Exconn mobil and others. After all, that's the cost of doing business, right?
We could also disempower the central authority from using violence to protect private jets, pipelines, coal mines, and other climate destroying assets, and see how long they last.
> our only solution is technological
I've been hearing this argument and waiting for 30 years. Even better if you sit around waiting around for 'free market' to provide you with a magical solution. Should we wait for another 30 and see where it leads it? I mean it's easier that actually looking at yourself critically, right?
We are going to have to solve this problem with the technology we have. The clock has run out.
Or. We don’t. And we let those after us live with the consequences. I just worry that everyone who says “ok, let’s live with the consequences” has not chosen to properly inform themselves of what they are.
One of the most obvious impacts of a fight against climate change is that plane travel must get more expensive. Both to reduce demand and to give room for clean alternatives.
So your standard of living is reduced with fewer international vacations. But the alternative isn't "no vacations", it's "more local vacations".
I am a staunch defender of climate action and have made many lifestyle personal decisions on that topic but this whole lifestyle 'consumer effort' message is as flawed as OP's claims. We need to look at the 'bang for buck' data.
Air travel is 1.9% of global emmissions. [0]
As a comparison:
- Energy use in Offices and Shops is 6.6% percent.
- The steel industry emits 7.2% of global emissions.
- Residential energy use is 10.9%.
- Road transport is 16.2% of global emissions.
You see where I am going with this.
Before guilting people into catching a plane for Christmas why not:
- Force steel industry into carbon scrubbing + emission mitigation R&D
- Overcharge large commercial/office areas for lighting/AC energy
- Overcharge large households using energy above a given quota per square foot
- Exponentially progressive tax on personal vehicles above 2000cc.
Notice that all of this is policy driven, not 'consumer effort'.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sect...
That's policy, not consumer choice.
My point is that there is a lot of low hanging fruit corporate emitters that should be curbed before targeting consumers.
Increasing the price of steel will just trickle down to consumers. In the end, they're the ones that pay for everything.
2% of a lot is still a lot, and keep in mind that these 2% of emissions are being emitted by a very very small group of people (relative to world population)
> Overcharge large households using energy above a given quota per square foot
That's a terrible metric, it just encourages bigger houses. Better just to make energy more expensive, and tax house size (which most countries already do)
> Exponentially progressive tax on personal vehicles above 2000cc.
Quite standard across the globe
Technological progress is just a function of energy in a civilization. I highly recommend Smil's Energy and Civilization to understand this better.
The problem we are facing is directly a consequence of unsustainable energy usage, as such technology cannot be the solution.
Our quality of life will change whether we like it or not. In theory it would be preferable to choose that path. But people's in ability to accept that reality means we are choosing the hardest possible path.
We're already seeing wars over resources this very second. We will see global starvation this year from limited fertilizer production.
It's already happening and even in the comments on HN people aren't willing to entertain the necessary steps to prevent the worse case.
> requires the power of the individual to be reduced
> empower central authorities
> our new rationed, austere society
> a recipe for catastrophic war
> our only solution is technological
That's, like, six unfounded predictions presented as truth with zero supporting evidence.
> those who wish to use climate change as a Trojan horse to enact their social whims
And, of course, one baseless accusation.
Cows use 3/4 of our agriculture land, same amount of land as all current forests. Beef / dairy is also a leading defforestation driver. And for cheese/milk there is a lot of plant-based alternatives.
If we could afforest this land again, we would not only stop Anthropocene extinction, but we would also remove a good amount of CO2 from the atmosphere (maybe several decades worth).
Then, why stop there and not afforest steppe countries (Mongolia, Kazahstan, Sahel ...) and pay their indigenous populations not to devastate it with their herds of camels/horses/sheep ? We could easily cover large swaths of land with new forests. We could even reforest our deserts, it seems very easily and cheaply (few percents of world's gdp).
Why look at Mars, when we could start some serious geoingeneering here at Earth, with few seeds and some inovative methods (like Miyawaki, syntropic agriculture ...).
Indians in Amazon did this. They converted pretty arid land into rainforest (terra preta). Some speculate, that extinction of Indians in this region and follow-up grow of Amazonian rainforest after Spaniards came and killed them with viruses caused little ice age in 16th century.
Why not repeat it (plant new rainforests and new forests) and solve few problems with in one go. You know, we don't have only CO2 problem. Our children, or children of our children, will know tigers, giraffes and rhinos only from picture books, right after dinosaurs and mammoths (which we also ate to extinction, btw).
We don't need bilionaires to do this. No technological solution will appear in a reasonable timeframe. We need public to take their heads out of their a$$3$ and demand political changes.
Of course, this problem is very complex and needs to be attacked from multiple dimensions. But some solutions are easier than others, and people are ignorant (this post won't even reach front page), our leaders are only interested in their pockets and status quo (and so they lie and then do nothing). I'm hopeless and depressed.
(english is not my first language, sorry)
[1] I know that animal agriculture being 51% of greenhouse gases number has been questioned a lot, but from what I can tell it's closer to the truth than those who want to say it's 18% or less. Ether way, it's large. New stanford study agrees that "reducing or eliminating animal agriculture should be at the top of the list of potential climate solutions" https://news.stanford.edu/2022/02/01/new-model-explores-link....
Elect people who care. There are a lot of them.
Betting so many chips on this one institution seems like not a great idea, especially since it is the one that has been driving the bus that got us to this location.
Before we can design a better democracy, we will need a better metric on what 'right' means.
For example, a political candidate could have a profile, and voters would be able to get a faster and better idea for what type of a person they really are, as opposed to the meme-war-based approach we currently have. How one would go about designing a workflow for what information does and does not get included would be a complicated but fun exercise, and perhaps the public could learn a few things about abstract thinking if the followed along as the project moved forward.
What domains are there other than politics where hardly anything materially important is upgraded over time as new capabilities and technology become available, and new problems arise? That hardly anyone seems to question (or is able/willing to even consider) whether the design of our democracy is remotely optimal suggests to me that the public has been subjected to some effective "marketing".
The people not doing this is what OP means by "not having the collective will."
For decades, climate change was studied, warned about, and yet the way it was referred to and is still referred to by some like so: "more news regarding the debate on climate change" rather than "more news regarding climate change" — as long as it's a debate, it's undecided, you don't know if you should do something or care because the scientific community has yet to reach consensus, and government inaction is seen as a reflection of this apparent lack of consensus rather than simply governments' unwillingness to go against the grain of business and the comfortable status quo.
Even though the rhetoric surrounding climate change does seem to consider it a fact as of the last few years, you still have "experts" on both sides of the fence saying that it is and isn't real, which further enables people to put it out of their mind as something that's for other people to worry about because they're not in on it.
And for those who do accept that climate change is a reality, I wouldn't mind betting that a non-trivial subset of those people largely think it's too late to do anything urgent or drastic and are therefore content to endure some bizarre weather while society slowly transitions to eco-friendly models in the next fifty years.
It probably couldn't have gone much better, and if big bad business was truly all powerful, I doubt we would have seen any changes in society, but business has also driven the R&D of more efficient solar technology and the rapid expansion of wind power installations. I think the crowd that consider wind farms to be a blight on the landscape have mostly gone quiet after realising that J. M. W. Turner probably wouldn't have wanted to paint electricity pylons, freeways or Airbuses either, yet they're here to stay.
I'm surprised geothermal didn't take off, though I probably shouldn't be surprised given that I know practically nothing about geothermal power extraction and thus have an overly simplistic model of a magma steam engine system in my head that probably isn't at all viable or efficient.
Apathy is their weapon, and it's very effective.
Psychologically speaking, these tactics are approximately the same as the church's use of hell, in the sense of "fix your shit now, or else you're going to hell". This was very effective when the church held a huge amount of political sway + serious control over the media (no internet back then, people weren't even literate). It wont work nearly as well now.
Don't get me wrong--I'm no Homo Economicus fan, not saying people are fundamentally selfish--I just think people are fundamentally averse to change, to breaking their habits. The climate change leadership needs a new tactic. I'm totally in support of e.g. tax cuts and incentives for renewables, reducing carbon emissions, etc. Or other ways of raising awareness and taking action that give people what they want/need, right now, rather than being entirely concerned with an image of the future (that for many people with no families, no kids, no legacy, doesn't even exist).
"Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality."
http://www.denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf
If this paragraph makes no sense to you, it's because - with the exception of the proposed geo-engineering project - it sounds like something that could have been written last week. It was actually written in 1975 when climate change meant the coming ice age. Here's Spock to tell you more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQSBn50o_8M
It's a good thing they didn't try to melt the arctic, right? But notice how there's absolutely no communication of any nuance, uncertainty or the possibility that the scientists were wrong. Only laments about how the "planners" were too sluggish to react to the scientist's warnings. Absolutely nothing changed except the directional temperature change of the proposed projects.
Growth is the goal of every central bank, every parliament, every authoritarian, every economic or political entity with any legitimacy.
And this religious belief in growth is looking like it is going to kill us.
It's not taboo, it's just basic antropo-ecological mechanics: if you don't focus on growth the other who will and will do more of it will outcompete you out of every niche. So selective pressure will increase the number of growth focused civilizations comparative to others.
We actually need more growth and we need to think outside of nature's and Earth's box... We have the technology to practice closed-circle-agriculture and that only needs power (more nuclear + more renewables) + raw materials (more extraction, more oil but less of it burnt as a fuel), let's just forget about maintaining the "natural balance" and put serious research work into techniques for manipulating and tweaking so called chaotic systems... There absolutely no reason why Earth can't support even a 10 trillion humans population if we just quit on "nature" (keep it just in small reservations), and go full nuclear (imagine 1+ billion reactors!) and fully embrace semi-synthetic food (sure, first iterations on sythetic proteins were carcinogenic as hell, but we know how to solve such problems now, or how to avoid them with bugs and closed-circuit-shrimps and lab-grown-meats etc.).
Yeah, a couple tens of millions might die of extra cancers and other pollution induced illnesses, but we can compensate by accelerating population growth (baby factories/camps can work if campaigns to motivate people to reproduce more don't work - though I'd guess we're good enough at the technology of brainwashing and economic incentivization by now to make masses of people do anything if we put our best efforts into....).
We just need a solid serious global responsibility frameworks instead of our anemic "globalism", so that if anyone just dumps X tons of eg. mercury in the ocean, they don't receive just sanctions but also swift targeted assassinations of all guilty parties +/- a sprinkle of tactical nukes for good measure and punishment against "pissing in the pool"...
And it's much much nastier problem that they won't have even the remotest chance to engineer their way out of that we really don't like to think about.
The problem of being left behind! Of being a laggard civilization/species/etc. That will manifest either in pseudo-predictable ways when humans meet other civilizations and it goes like with the conquistadors and amerindians (conquest and extermination, minor asimilation). Or it goes in an inconprehensible for us way but probably still really bad when Earth-origined-super-AGI meets X-origined-super-AGI that is more advanced than it and either canibalizes it or preemptively extincts it before even making contact, for its/their own self-preservation.
Any slow down is a silent cosmological civilizational technical debt trap in a way! At least by temporarily increasing risk of extinction by wrecking some parts of our life support systems a bit we can have the hope of whatever comes after us (I don't believe much in the future of bio-humans beyond 2-5 generations from now) has at least a fighting chance to engineer their way out of the mess we're leaving them, and at least they'd have their science well sharpened and minds battle hardened by the trials!
When you get down to it, what is growth? Growth means tomorrow is more comfortable than yesterday. Try getting elected telling people tomorrow won't be as easy as yesterday... much easier for voters to stick their fingers in their ears and shout "lalala"
It seems more likely that my random sample is from somewhere in the middle, and if an ~equal number of humans will be born after me as before, then at our population growth/levels, we don't have much time left until extinction or a population collapse from which we never recover.
I don't know that there's anything helpful in this thought, though - can I increase my odds of being born in the earliest percentile of the species by my actions?
Now civilizations as we see them today might, but I think they entirely deserve it.
I see this statement frequently made on discussion forums like this, and I'd like to tell you this is a tremendously arrogant belief to hold.
Human's have existed only for a very short while and during one of the most stable periods of climate in this history of the planet.
I understand denial is necessary to cope, but when you really understand the scale of the changes coming it's hard to image anything other than extinction happening.
All of the magic humans have done is not because of our innate abilities but because or our access to abundant energy. First in the form of solar energy harvesting through agriculture, later through fossil fuels. Unfortunately we pushed the system too far.
Perhaps we'll achieve medical immortality some time in the next couple decades, and then decide to stop making so many humans.
This is really just kind of an abuse of statistical thinking - you're not wrong at all that populations recover, but in our case if that happened we're back to saying that we were born in the first 5% of humanity, which I'm saying is likely not the case.
For example, if the population stays at 8B between now and infinity, and we assume a uniform distribution of % chance you're born at any time, then it's just as equally likely that you'd be born at the beginning as at the end. There's no higher chance that you'd be born in the middle, whatsoever.
Now actually the population is likely to grow, so if anything it's much more likely that you'd be born towards the end. That begins said, some people have to be born first and of course if they thought this way, they might say things like "oh what a coincidence, this is highly unlikely" or "It's far more likely due to exponential growth that any one person exist towards the end of humanity, so therefore this must be the end", but of course, this thought could have been had by cavemen 1000's of years ago and they'd be wrong.
And yes, if everyone has these thoughts, then about 5% of people will be wrong when they think that surely they aren't in the first 5%.
(And I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that "between now and infinity" is hyperbole - percentiles of a uniform distribution like this don't make sense if there will truly be a countably infinite number of people. )
It's the brightening, more than the expansion, that'll do it. It'll ruin the carbonate/silicate cycle in a few hundred million years, progressively forcing plants into worse and worse metabolic pathways, so reducing the total energy available to the biosphere, until finally plant life is basically wiped out. IOW, 700-900MY from now, is the end of large fauna on planet Earth, followed soon after by the end of nearly all smaller fauna, too, and all or nearly all plants. Back to single-celled and very simple multi-cellular life, until most of that's killed a few hundred million years later, too, by the loss of all surface water.
There will be little or no life left on Earth way before the sun significantly expands. Barring significant geo-engineering efforts.
But more likely there are many filters, and maybe technology destroying the ecosystem we depend on is one of them.
Let's be honest about it, most developed countries are making geo-strategic decisions in the context of +7 C in <= 100 years... we're just not being f honest about it! (Avoiding it is off the table, just as well as "zero covid" was off the table since month three of the f pandemic and we should've just accepted that it's gonna become endemic and most measures are waste of resources.)
Let's accept that "massive" climate change will happen, and that our goal is how to slow things down and how to avoid it being an actual disaster for HUMANITY!
(It will be a disaster for many other species that we'll go extinct as we'll probably massively increase use of herbicides and fertilizers and GMOs in order to satisfy humanity's material needs against a backdrop of populations displacements and fertile lands distribution shifts. But it doesn't have to be a disaster for humanity... ugly as it may be, it's a live-and-let-die universe and irreversible biodiversity loss will happen, but humans are quite capable of not only maintaining but also accelerating, as it's our duty to, technological and scientific progress, as long as we don't stupidly turn against each-other! We have and entire universe to infect and conquer ffs, let's just not kill each other in the next century!)
Because this is not a disaster that stops at any point in the foreseeable future. There is no other side to get "through" to.
This isn't like an Earth quake or even a nuclear war where a single event happens, the world is changed but then stasis begins to return.
Next year the impacts of climate change will be notably worse than they were the previous year. This will be true for the rest of your life. Positive feed backs and the geological history of the planet both indicate that after a (currently unknown) limit, things will start escalating rapidly and irreversibly until the surface of the planet is no longer recognizable.
The focus should be on how to psychologically begin to deal with loss at this scale. But, as anyone can see in the comments here, people are very unlikely to be ever ready to deal with the psychological stress this imposes on them. Instead we'll see subtle but steadily increasing madness consume the population. HN is a great place to observe this.
And the fact "the surface of the planet is no longer recognizable" doesn't mean uninhabitable.
And "to deal with the psychological stress this imposes on them" people can also simply choose to care less, focus socially on accelerating tech development and individually stay entertained while competing in the new worldwide casinos and global-events-betting-markets etc. or playing games in the metaverses whose outcomes results in real-world-money redistributions.
> we'll see subtle but steadily increasing madness consume the population
Maybe your definition of "sanity" is a bit bit constrained and needs to be adjusted then :) To keep the optimism up, maybe future challenges will usher in an era where we finally evolve psychology and psychiatry beyond the pseudoscientifc nonsense they are today, and we replace the "war on drug" with "full access to BOTH drugs and safety information about using them" + a culture focused more on using them for freely managed performance enhancement instead of plain aimless entertainment and "feeling better".
I see a lot of future's problems as opportunities tbh... and challenging stress to force us evolve faster if we modulate it right. This is what I care about most now really, working of figuring out how to "modulate things right" to be able to squeeze the positive after effects even from clearly destructive events like wars and genocides.
One man's hell is another man's heaven I guess: I've always dreamed of finally seeing the opportunity to push the masses out of this mentality combo of christianity/islam/buddshism and other maladaptive crap that paradoxically combines well with eco-scientims or passive-observe-but-not-influence-science. (Real scientific progress was/is always engineering-driven and theories come after evidence they are derived from... the modern "use theoretic speculation to design experiments" is a dead end, all interesting experiments were designed by a desire to "engineer something" even particle accelerators emerged out of desires to build-devices-to-measure/separate/produce/concentrate some isotopes or particles etc. in the hopes that at least they'd be interesting for poisons or guns.)
Let's start engineering cool solutions (pushing reflective particles into the atmosphere to reduce warming, using modern biotech to completely extinct tropical disease vectors to keep the newly-becomed-tropical areas human friendly), then engineering solutions to the new cool problems that the first solutions generate and them on and on and on faster and faster and faster!
The "madness" is imo a (maybe rough) transition to a more fertile era of though, science and engineering...
What are we to do? Tell them to stop? Tried that unsuccessfully. I would ignore us if I were them. USA and Europe still emits tons of CO2. Has been emitting worse then them for many many decades. This carbon emitting elevated much of the wealth of the country. We are basically telling them to not become wealthy like us. They wonder why we haven't done much to reduce emissions.
We were too late, it's happening now. What do we need to do. Ignore carbon taxes that do nothing.
Instead, build renewables, build batteries, build solar panels. The remaining amount of fossil fuels is a hard limit. Staying on them is idiotic to say the least.
It's not just transportation and centralized energy production. Plastics, lubricants, wax, sulphur, ashphalt are other products of oil. What are the non-petroleum options?
We also need non-carbon emitting things like concrete.
Why do we just go to it? No regulations, no taxes, maybe even funding for any corporations who work on doing these things?
Wait nobody is doing this? The government is restricting and slowing this effort?
Actions speak louder than words, why are the world's nations saying they'll do something while their actions say they have no intention to do anything?
Is there an unspoken denial of climate change by the world?
Where have carbon taxes been enacted and in those places, have they failed to reduce consumption?
> What are we to do? Tell them to stop? Tried that unsuccessfully
Reduce our own consumption, institute carbon taxes. Tell them if they don't do the same, their imports are embargoed. Actually follow through and accept the rise in cost of goods.
Yes. Oil/Gas usage is inelastic to price. The only appreciable factor toward reducing oil has been the proliferation of hybrids and EVs and its nowhere near enough.
Before the carbon tax we had practically a 100% combined road taxes on gasoline to begin with. Tacking on only a tad bit more isn't producing any new reduction.
>Reduce our own consumption, institute carbon taxes.
How? Carbon taxes didn't work.
>Tell them if they don't do the same, their imports are embargoed. Actually follow through and accept the rise in cost of goods.
So pay more taxes for what? We are going to pay more to punish them? That doesnt sound like punishing them at all. Sounds like punishing me.
Give me some examples.
> Oil/Gas usage is inelastic to price.
Horseshit. Here's a report from the Congressional Budget Office saying the exact opposite.[1]
"The relationship between gasoline prices and the demand for automobiles was the subject of several economic studies in the 1980s in the aftermath of the gasoline price shocks of the 1970s. Those studies found that higher gasoline prices increased the demand for smaller, more-fuel-efficient vehicles relative to larger, less-efficient vehicles. That relationship continues to hold with recent vehicle sales, according to several current economic studies."
> Carbon taxes didn't work.
Saying that over and over doesn't make it true. You haven't given any evidence to support your claims. I have.
1. https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/88x...
Canada works fine as an example. BC did a carbon tax provincially and was found to be taking a beating pretty badly. Much of the claimed success of their carbon tax was that emissions did drop briefly, but only because of the financial crisis. After the financial crisis finished, everyone in Canada recovered, even the atlantic provinces more than BC. Worse yet, new homes being built in BC practically came to a halt because concrete emits so much carbon. It was adding a tremendous amount of new cost to new homes. BC never recovered from the financial crisis until about 2017.
You know the best part of following the disaster the BC carbon tax? It was John Horgan's realization. He switched virtually all his environmental points away from carbon neutral to 'cleaning up wildlife habitats' and actually doing something for climate change like becoming a low-carbon... not zero-carbon... low carbon product producer. Kind of the point of my posts. Though you'll also notice... BC is the worst polluter in all of Canada. It is their forest fires from mismanaged forests that are killing Canada... and the NDP aren't even considering doing anything about carbon emissions anymore. It's beautiful to see someone's political ideology to evolve.
Alberta and Ontario politically scrapped the carbon tax because of the disaster that it is. Federal came along an implemented one and has now even raised it. All these have been in power for years and have achieved absolutely nothing.
>Horseshit. Here's a report from the Congressional Budget Office saying the exact opposite.[1]
Not up for debate.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040915/how-does-law...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/ifdp/2016/files/i...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomkonrad/2012/01/26/the-end-of...
https://www.reed.edu/economics/parker/f10/201/cases/oil_dema...
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/oil-p...
You may say horseshit as much as you please but oil is an inelastic commodity. There is no denying this. This is why carbon taxes are literally doing nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_fuel_taxes_in_Canada
The Carbon tax isn't even a significant increase in the taxes on gasoline. If taxing it is reducing usage, then that's already happening, the marginal increase by the carbon tax is only a small drop in the bucket compared to the rest.
That's right... these fuel taxes are regressive. If a progressive tax means mainly rich people pay taxes. The rich are who can buy EVs and will disproportionately be avoiding the taxes. Increase in price of oil/gas means the poor and even middleclass can save up less to buy an EV.
Even better... clearly fuel taxes have far exceeded the laffer curve: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/laffercurve.asp
So why has this carbon tax done nothing? No plan to put solar panels on every home or buy everyone an EV? Why has literally nothing been achieved? They maxed out that tax. They dont actually receive more tax revenue to do anything with.
If your goal is to do something for climate change, carbon taxes aren't doing anything at all and clearly you think they are. That's how bad carbon taxes are for helping with climate change. People think they are doing something. If you are like me and want to do something for climate change, you vehemently oppose carbon taxes.
>Saying that over and over doesn't make it true. You haven't given any evidence to support your claims. I have.
It will be amazing the day that this breaks. It will come and we will see it the day it happens, it will coincide with an options expiration day. It will cause a major recession if not depression. This is the day that Alberta, Texas, etc become Detroit. Suddenly an elastic commodity feels the weight of tremendous taxation and will send oil prices to negatives where options and producers basically say they cant afford to produce. Then post-crash literally nobody will be there to buy. They just abruptly have to shutdown everything. Not exactly nostradamus, just explaining what has happened before.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/wcs-wti-alberta-oilsands-1....
When Alberta had their insane carbon tax it happened locally. Oil prices around the world were normal, Alberta dropped briefly below $10/barrel in 2018. Never recovered until post-election in april 2019 and first thing Jason Kenney did was obliterate the carbon tax. Literally Bill #1 passed by a true majority government whose popularity peaked because they were to eliminate the carbon tax.
It's not some gradual slow reduction in production encouraging people to swtich to EV, it's a sudden we cant afford to pay our workers. We will stop producing until oil prices recover. Yet the economy still needs fuel to be produced but none will be coming to market. Diesel semi trucks being bought today are meant to be amortized for 20+ years. We need fuel for that long, fuel will happen that long.
If an election happens soon when this breaks. Then people will just vote out the clown politicians, cancel the carbon tax. If the election isn't happening anytime soon... this will be a revolution. Not by me... i'll be driving my cybertruck.
If they're produced with green energy (i.e. oil is only used as a chemical input instead of an energy input), then they aren't adding carbon to the atmosphere. Continue using them in good health.
When natural gas regularly goes below 5-8% of grid production then we should probably shift focus to intermittency and storage but for now trying to solve the intermittency problem at the expense of generating less energy overall simply means more natural gas will get burned overall.
Frankly, I don't know enough about this to evaluate the problem critically. Some of the points that were made, that I thought were interesting:
- climate kills very few people currently.
- way more people die in "cold waves" than "heat waves".
- we spend way more money on heating now, rather than cooling. This will have to change obviously.
- hotter climate will encourage food production.
- a economic analysis (need to find the reference) was done projecting climate change impact and apparently, it's minuscule. On the order of 5% by 2100. Global wealth is projected to increase by over 300% during this time.
- so called "developing nations" have no money to move to alternative energy sources.
Some things that were not addressed, that I'm specifically curious about, living in a coastal area, is sea level rise.
I must admit that part of the reason I found this podcast so compelling is that the interview implies that while it's a real problem that has to be addressed, it's not, like I said a civilization killer.
If you are genuinely seeking the data and arguments on the issues, please at least read the executive and technical summaries of the report, here: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/
The reason I made the post was to get some critical feedback on the podcast. I'm curious, how much of the report have you read yourself?
I have not read this one yet, but I make a point of trying to read the summaries of IPCC reports before getting into arguments about it. They are impressive documents, even though written by giant committee.
"Climatic changes already are estimated to cause over 150,000 deaths annually."
https://web.archive.org/web/20220302105033/https://www.who.i...
> - hotter climate will encourage food production.
"By the 2040s, the probability of a 10 per cent yield loss, or greater, within the top four maize producing countries (the US, China, Brazil and Argentina) rises to between 40 and 70 per cent. These countries currently account for 87 per cent of the world’s maize exports. The probability of a synchronous, greater than 10 per cent crop failure across all four countries during the 2040s is just less than 50 per cent."
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/09/climate-change-risk-ass...
> - a economic analysis (need to find the reference) was done projecting climate change impact and apparently, it's minuscule. On the order of 5% by 2100. Global wealth is projected to increase by over 300% during this time.
"By mid-century, the world stands to lose around 10% of total economic value from climate change. That is a real scenario if temperature increases stay on the current trajectory, and both the Paris Agreement and 2050 net-zero emissions targets are not met, according to new Swiss Re Institute research."
https://www.swissre.com/institute/research/topics-and-risk-d...
> - so called "developing nations" have no money to move to alternative energy sources.
The so-called developed nations can help with that transition, though. Many so-called developing nations have plenty of sun available to them, for example.
I found the GDP impact paper referred to in the podcast:
> While climate scientists warn that climate change could be catastrophic, economists such as 2018 Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus assert that it will be nowhere near as damaging. In a 2018 paper published after he was awarded the prize, Nordhaus claimed that 3°C of warming would reduce global GDP by just 2.1%, compared to what it would be in the total absence of climate change. Even a 6°C increase in global temperature, he claimed, would reduce GDP by just 8.5%.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2018/MurphyNordhaus...
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-09-10/nobel-prize-wi...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/oct/12/naturald...
It's too late to stop using fossil fuels. It's a forbidden fruit that has pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty and the third world countries want first world lifestyles. We are better off trying to mitigate.
The danger zones are huge, and understandably people,ant to keep using them until the last possible moment. Like all projections show Manhattan may one day be under water, but we will only slowly abandon it as it floods rather than evacuating dry land in advance.
Much of the climate change hysteria is only viable if you assume that human ingenuity and innovation will utterly cease for some reason.
Not a very smart bet. Instead it's far more likely much of the climate change hysteria is merely a way to exert control that governments wouldn't otherwise have. For example, this article didn't even mention China or India once. If you are going to screech about carbon and not even mention the two biggest producers of atmospheric carbon then it's not a serious discussion - at all.
Let's talk about China and India. These are the only ways they can keep their carbon emissions from going up:
1. China and India stop economic growth, remain poor - Easy for us in the West to say as we live in large houses, drive SUVs to the Starbucks drivethru. Difficult for them to accept because they're just trying to get enough food, clean water, and medical care.
2. Invent clean technologies that can replace fossil fuels 100% in every application. Rich countries pay the full cost (maybe adjusted for India and China's historic emissions contributions) for immediate rollout in every developing country.
3. Do neither and wait for the inevitable riots and wars to break out.
What option is the best one?
The fact that we have cognitive blinders that tends to try to go between two extremes in the middle, even when one of the extremes ("extreme steps needed to avert climate disaster") is correct and the other is incorrect ("we can't stop using fossil fuel and we should just move people from disaster zones") is incorrect.
You are not taking into account the scale and width of the impact of climate change, the effort to implement what you've described, and the breakdown in society that it will cause (along with second order effects).
In the early parts of covid there was almost a breakdown in civil order because of a lack of toilet paper. When that is people dying in heatwaves, mass migration, and starvation it will not be possible to handle it in a methodical fashion.
We can stop using fossil fuels. Electric and renewable can work to replace all our needs, and we can modify our lifestyles otherwise. It isn't great but it is the best alternative.
That's such a ridiculous statement in face of recent events - Europe can't even replace fossil fuels imported from Russia in years from now with the insane political will behind such a move - and this is some of the richest countries in the world with very left leaning/pro green energy governments. This isn't replacing fossil fuels - it's replacing one source of fuels used with another.
If you want to connect this to European situation, you can see that one nation depends on fossil fuels to maintain geopolitical relevance, and you may look at political parties allied and supported by that nation and the energy policies they support.
Since it's extistential for Russia (and US/Saudi petrochemical concerns) to keep people on fossil fuels, they undermine moves off it it. They flood global anti-environment movement with money and delay and obstruct fixing this, and make people believe it is less possible that it is. They are completely ambivalent to what will probably be the death of a majority of the world's population under worst case scenarios before the ended of this century (https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6wg3/pdf/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_SummaryForP...), which is currently the most likely outcome.
Anyway, we have change our ways, or doom our children. That's the choice ahead.
Politicians don't seem to have got that memo: https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/peek-insi...
Or maybe they know the memo's are BS? It's always fun to compare what people say/supposedly believe to what they actually do.
There is only one solution to speed things up: governments must raise huge taxes on energy use and pollution.
Is this a matter of deferred gratification and societal-level self control, or of epistemology and institutional trust?
History will not be kind to either.
that is where this is heading.
me personally? i saw all of this coming, bought farmland. started a market garden and cows+chickens on rotational grazing.
no oil required to produce food.
a lower standard of living for everyone is fine with me.
I don't think so. People like John Kerry - that so-called 'Climate Czar' [1] who keeps on dashing around the world in his private jet to tell the world they should be ashamed about their holiday travel plans - won't reduce their standard of living. People like Jeff Bezos won't, not will Gates, nor will just about anyone who wears a nice tailored suit while banging the climate drum. They won't because they need to fly to those important meetings at nice resorts where they discuss how other people need to reduce their 'climate footprint'. They are important people.
This whole disaster scenario is nothing new, it is not the first nor will it be the last. Whether it is a boiled earth scare, a frozen earth scare, a nuclear winter scare, a poisoned planet scare, a dried-out planet scare, a too-many-mouths-to-feed scare, a peak-oil scare or - to go bit further back in time - a heathen scare, a Catholic/Protestant/unbeliever scare or (even further back in time) a barbarians-at-the-gate scare, imminent disasters have always been a good way to try to get the populace to bend to some rulers will.
Me, I'll gladly ignore this just like I ignored all the other scares. I'll concentrate on independence just like I've been doing since more or less forever. That we happen to lower our ecological footprint doing this is just a nice side benefit but it is not driving. What is driving is that want to cut as many strings - which all too often end up acting like stings, not strings - between those rulers and our family as possible. This means energy independence (nearly there, waiting for remaining materials to be able to go off-grid when needed), food (getting there but with a whole forest full of moose, deer and boar we'll manage if needs be) and water (we have a reliable well which can give water without the need for an electric pump) independence, etc. I only use older hardware for computing which I can repair when needed - this is how I acquire it in the first place, dumpster-diving to save the planet. We have enough bicycles and spare parts to move an orphanage, a few old tractors including a two-wheel diesel-powered Irus which is older than I am, a bunch of horses plus the land and (horse-drawn) equipment to feed them and us, etc. The harder they pull those strings, the more of them I intend to cut.
[1] how long will it take for some do-gooder to suggest an alternative for that Russian word, Czar?
Don't just snipe. Snipe and then provide a solution to that which you just sniped.
My point was only that it's a form of religious faith to think that our current form of international corporatism is the only way to generate wealth in the future. I don't even think it's doing a particularly good job of that now.
>> Who said anything about it being the only way?
I'm not being sarcastic, by the way, and I don't agree with your premise.
Any intelligent capitalist sees the climate and other systemic issues as strategic risks/opportunities. Don't look at (late coal baron) Robert Murray and think that is all capitalism is just because he is part of it.
In other words, TPTB employing as a facade the big global institutions under their control to sprinkle some fake respectability on their plan to enforce drastically reduced living standards on the middle classes, as part of their simulacrum of global communism that will enable the ultra-rich to maintain their hegemony in perpetuity, whilst reducing all others to cattle in their technocratic global slave system. Quelle suprise
I swear science is turning more and more corrupted into a substitute for religion for people. We don't have religious faith anymore to guide us and give us comfort, so we're relying on the "experts" that the "higher powers" tell us to listen to. Can't believe in the man in the sky, but we'll believe what the people the media told us were experts have to say!
As for the whole science-as-the-new-religion thing, well, that's just a cheap shot. You're just seeing a lot of people disagreeing with you and going "oh, these people are obviously all brainwashed by the new dominant cult and that's why they're so stupid".
Would you not say that there's many many people that don't truly understand the intricacies of what science is and what it's become, but still follow it without asking questions?
Academically, I would assume that for the majority of people, science was something you were taught to blindly trust growing up, being told that scientists have your best interests in mind while they spend time finding out everything about the world and coming up with reasons/theories for the way the world works and interacts with itself. The world wouldn't be anything without science, they say.
Religion is based on a set of beliefs, followings, teachings, determined and taught/shared by "qualified" individuals like priests/pastors - followers were raised from a young age to follow, internalize, and spread their faith.
When you go to church (catholic in this example), you're asked/silently obligated to donate to the church when the collection plate is passed around. You're giving money, and debatably power (in form of money) to the church to keep spreading their beliefs.
I think it would be foolish to assume that there weren't rich kings/countries hundred of years ago giving money to the church to influence certain activities/actions through religious decree/law.
Today, we have numerous examples of corporations lobbying governmental and scientific institutions to push whatever is the cause de jour. There was corn syrup lobbying in the 2010's and who knows how far back, you had the food pyramid in the 90's that heavily promoted food groups that the USDA itself was subsidizing.
There's so many outside influences, blind faith/trust, etc. etc. that I feel comfortable in todays day and age saying that society in general "trusts" science like they would "trust" a religion to keep them safe and alive, and healthy.
And that's just inane. Like, yeah, rich people are greedy, yeah, systemic problems exist, yeah, economic inequality is bad and the influence of the super-rich is a problem.
But I don't see how you can go from any of that to "therefore, richer countries shouldn't give aid to poorer countries because that's a trick of the super-rich to make us all into slaves".
If nothing else, helping poor countries worldwide develop reduces the power of the super-rich over society, since it means they have fewer super-poor exploited populations to draw from and need to make more concessions to workers instead of just relocating to some poorer place.
It’d likely cause a lot of inflation on manufactured goods, but it’d make manufacturing here a lot more competitive, and greatly increase the leverage of blue collar workers in developed countries, which should reduce income inequality within the country - it would make the rich poorer, but the poor potentially also richer in real terms.
It’s the only way I see of realistically tackling climate change.
I think cause and effect is mixed up here. I think the damage humans are causing to our planet is scary. Fear is just the emotion we feel when something scary is happening.
Sure, people don't need or want to live their lives in fear. But, can you think of a time you changed your behaviour on account of something you were afraid of?
I bet you can. I bet politicians really can.
Nobody in this conversation is enacting "top-down emotional terrorism" –– not me, nor the IPCC –– nor is anyone claiming that's a good idea. In fact, that would be a very bad idea. (If there's one way to get folks to do literally nothing it's to paralyse them in fear.)
If you read the report, you'll see concrete recommendations that are to be enacted at the governmental level, rooted in the reality of a changing environment. The consequences of failure are intentionally stark -- we made them ourselves.
You're falling for the individualism trap. Climate change isn't your problem, nor is it my problem. It's everyone's problem.
Everyone's problems are solved by high-functioning institutions. Motivating action to avoid consequences at society-scale is a great way to get institutional gears moving.
> “Cannot swords be turned to plowshares? Can we and all nations not live in peace? In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity,”
> “Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond,"
> “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?”
Personally I don't think the anxiety and mental breaks I've seen in my millenial and gen-z peers from the whole "11 years left to do something" is really worth it, what good is world peace if our lives are defined by guilt and hopelessness.
This is what gets me. Children having “climate anxiety” is messed up. There is nothing they can do to fix it and they shouldn’t have to worry about it. The constant repeating news cycle of climate fear is clearly targeted at them.
Never happening. Young people are already facing a lower standard of living the previous generation. If you think they’re going to accept an even greater decline you’re not going to win. We need to get the current technological solutions (e.g. clean energy solutions) down to roughly the same cost as fossil fuels, and we need new technological solutions in areas where we can’t solve emissions without a reduction in standard of living.
But of course that these type of institutions have learned that focusing on the good things in life doesn’t attract any funds, so here we are.
But the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans is a math problem and doesn’t respond to market incentives: it is pure externality.
You could be right but it’s worth thinking about the shape of problems. Crucially, we’re already seeing the effects of global warming, including positive feedback loops.
Correct, they are in fact worse than most calculations, in terms of absolute values and acceleration. It turns out that we are not being pessimistic and scared enough.
Obama is a climate denier?
if sea levels rise by two feet he'll lose a bit of land around the edges, but it's hardly "at sea level"
This guy has been digging up old NASA publications showing what they claimed, in 2000, that the temperature was between 1950-2000 and what they claim today that the temperature was between 1950-2000.
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/spectacularly-poor-clima...
What a surprise. Waiting for the inevitable ad hominem attack on the source vs. a discussions of the facts he presents.
It is obvious that digging stuff out of the ground and then burning it for 2 centuries cannot possibly have any side-effects.
It's all good, we will fallaciously reject anything inconvenient until catastrophe hits. It's worked so far, right?
Edit: Check out this chart. Scrub the metals, and compare the remaining sources. We've got a long way to go before batteries achieve parity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Ene...
The energy density you get with gasoline is a complete waste because the majority of the energy never makes it to the wheels of a car.
I don't think it's wise to assume the same situation will automatically happen with climate concerns.
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is "is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change." [0]
Would you prefer that this type of institution "focus on the good things?" Instead of doing their job?
Perhaps a stretch, but it sounds to me like you're saying hospitals should tell you about how good your cholesterol levels are instead of mending your broken arm.
When the leaders start leading, instead of making life more difficult or expensive for average people, I will start listening again.
And I’m a bike riding hippie!
This has changed over the last decade or so, previously the same party was banning onshore wind farms and removing legislation on lower energy house building.
This mirrors the public sentiment, climate change denial is a minority opinion here now.
What the politicians won’t admit though is that we can’t solve this problem without changes to our lifestyle. Even the Green Party won’t publicly acknowledge this.
What is there to "believe"? No belief is necessary here. It's a cold scientific fact that if we don't drastically reduce the amount of Co2 we emit, the coming decades will be pretty horrible for billions of people.
The army didn’t teach me that.
You are mistaken. Why write that when you are unsure, without looking it up?
Recently, I stumbled onto this video [1] and have trouble refuting the data and claims.
Any experts that can explain what am I missing and why is this guy wrong?
Being calm, deadpan, deep voiced or British seems to be equated to "smart" or "correct". Even the comments on that video are falling for it.
XKCD once again has a diagram for exactly this problem. Even focusing on just the last 100 years ignores the bigger picture.
Thanks for the XKCD reminder. I have used this in the past as a nice way to illustrate the cause for alarm.
One of the most indefatigable climate anti-contrarians is Andrew Dessler, climate scientist of Texas A&M University. You could read his book, or just his Twitter.
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Climate-Change-De...
Show us, where is Heller lying and what does not add up? If you can point at someone who actually refutes Heller's claims that would suffice as well but make sure to point at the actual correct [1] data-backed refutation, don't just say someone wrote a book. Until such a time I will believe my own observations based on historical data which do not seem to indicate a climate 'emergency' but which do show climate change, no matter which part of history is studied.
[1] where 'correct' stands for 'actual', not 'corrected to fit a narrative'
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_tempe...
Instead of cherry-picking that particular fact, I suggest you direct your temperature extreme studies to the world generally instead of just the continental U.S.
Instead of cherry-picking that single example I gave you could try to actually refute Heller's - and Schellenbergers's, and Lomborg's and many other's - position on the 'climate apocalypse'. Realise that the more ad-hominems you throw, the less chance you have of convincing sceptics of your position.