Trees Across the U.S. Are Sprouting Leaves Earlier Than Usual This Year
wsj.com
wsj.com
* not controlled for GHGs
I'm also very interested in climate change.
I can't believe I didn't put the two together. Wow. You've made a very interesting connection.
A slow train wreck that was avoidable.
Avoidable? Yes, but for which price? Our economy, and thus wellbeing, depend on having huge quantities of cheap energy available.
You think pollution is bad? Ask the hundreds of million of people who chose to move from the pristine country to a polluted city along the last centuries!
Pollution is bad, but lack of energy is worse. When our technology will let us stop polluting without giving up comfort, that will be the right time to stop polluting.
The world may gain an estimated $78 trillion over coming decades by making this energy transition.
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2022/06/08/how-replaci...
Technology has reached this point a long time ago. Politics have not.
Your sources and mine must differ. As far as I know, renewable energy sources cannot yet guarantee a steady energy flow, to source big industry, when it's cloudy and not windy for a week.
I hope we'll get there soon, I really hope.
We've deliberately made choices to not prioritize better sources of that cheap energy over the years. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous...
"By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers. 'The Department of Energy has a multibillion-dollar budget, in excess of $10 billion,' Reagan said during an election debate with Carter, justifying his opposition to the latter's energy policies. 'It hasn't produced a quart of oil or a lump of coal or anything else in the line of energy.'"
> You think pollution is bad? Ask the hundreds of million of people who chose to move from the pristine country to a polluted city along the last centuries!
This was not because they loved pollution, but because the other options were also bad. Ask people who live in LA if they preferred the smog from the 1970s, or the people of Cleveland if they prefered the burning river.
If I ask the people who lost their manufacturing job to China, what do you expect as an average answer?
No amount of polluting LA is gonna make American labor cheaper than China's.
I think the only thing wrong with it is that it puts too much blame on Reagan and not enough blame on the powerful interests he was working for.
IIRC, the Democrats controlled Congress throughout the 1980s, so it's not like he could have done it without 'collaborators'.
That’s a monumental amount of resources but wouldn’t have had a particularly noticeable lifestyle impact. We would likely have had more nuclear accidents, but those are really local events.
The path was basically eliminating coal, home heating oil, plus drastically reducing oil use by adding in road electrical power delivery for cars. The specific implementation would have depended on massive R&D plus either carbon taxes/banning coal, or larger nuclear subsidies.
In economic terms, 1-2% of GDP is the difference between a year worth celebrating and a shitty one.
OK, I exaggerated a bit, but it is absolutely not negligible over a couple of years, and a catastrophe over 50 years.
Basically you get one bad year, and every year after that you don’t notice the difference. Much like how our military spending is a lot of money but you only notice when it changes. The economy might even be larger today if we had gone down that path because of increased efficiency and cleaner air.
> a catastrophe over 50 years.
It is a palpable obscenity for you to use the word "catastrophe" to refer to a 2% decrease in the GDP but not for the complete devastation of our biosphere.
I heard a theory once that only a certain number of human souls were ever created, and after that, a lot of people got born with partial souls or no souls at all.
I found it charming but unconvincing, but sometimes I wonder...
Given we have entire industries devoted to providing us constantly new levels of comfort without considering energy consumption that's a goal that can't be reached.
Pay now, pay later usually works out to be more painful when addressed later.
The "asking" to give up comfort is an attempt to avoid the later worse consequences that will not be voluntary.
I generally believe that on a day to day basis medieval peasants were about as happy as your average person now (perhaps more so). I'd probably trade places with one if I could still get access to the medicine which ensures that my kids don't die in childhood.
My point isn't to say that modern technology is bad or doesn't provide value but that "the economy" as a single entity is almost pointless to try and evaluate with respect to a problem like climate change. It is not all or nothing. It never has been. The complexity of our lives and our happiness and flourishing doesn't come down to a glib one to one identification with the current economic order. We can and must (and should have been) thinking and speaking about this issue with more nuance.
How can you be this short sighted. How is a dead world in exchange for a few decades of obscene comfort worth while in the slightest?
How can someone honestly say "what about the economy!" when we will be seeing droughts, storms, heatwaves, etc that will cripple said precious economy while sending the quality of life down the gutter?
Was all the plastic treats worth it? Were the wars waged all over the world worth it for the "economy"? Sure you got to structure your entire society around little moving couches and lived in absolute comfort while the lowest were ground down by your little economy.
We have optimized out all that makes us Human for the sake of this god damn ponzie scheme. We outsource child care to afford dignity, outsource art to computers so we can sell trinkets for our bosses more efficiently. We built walled gardens on every block, destroying any kind of commons for shared experience so that each and every person has to buy into silly little monetization devices to even get to know others in their community.
Absolutely inhuman.
other factors play into that too, like drought. but largely in the 20th america everybody migrated away from rural areas because of machines.
You appear to be arguing that it is too expensive to save the biosphere from destruction. I'm curious what sort of value you think money will have in a ruined ecosystem.
> When our technology will let us stop polluting without giving up comfort,
On one side you have a livable planet for our descendants; on the other, your own personal comfort; and you pick the second.
Humans really horrify me.
We knew. The evidence was there. And excuse me princess, if you think it's our job to personally persuade you to the correct position, how about you save all of us some time and just don't opine on a goddamn thing. Because if you're not willing to put in the relatively easy work of looking at the available data, you clearly aren't ready for the much harder work of correcting the issue.
I'd even accept, "Well, I was lied to and I fell for those lies." But I've not seen one person go that route. Probably because the entities that lied to them then are still around them today. If you were also a member of certain think tanks, finding out that they were perpetuating lies, kind of calls into question everything about them. Including your perceived status as a thought leader. So the institute can be wrong, but it can't be deceptive. And if the institute is wrong, it's really the fault of everyone else for not doing a good enough job of being logical and rational.
Take for example Penn Jillette. He was a fellow at the Cato Institute. One of their big positions is that climate change is not a thing. As of 2008, he was espousing the position of the institute, that there was not enough information on it. Today, he says that it's pretty clear that it is now happening, but back then, they didn't have enough evidence and didn't do a good enough job of convincing people like him.
But he has to convince himself of that because otherwise, the Cato Institute used him, not for his ideas, but simply because he has influence.
It's times like these that I come to understand the revenge violence against the previous establishment that tends to occurs during popular revolutions.
This was definitely the mildest winter I've experienced in my life. And if I'm remembering correctly, NYC was reclassified as a "humid, subtropical" climate zone a few years ago. Looking forward to the future palm trees on the east river. /s
NYC saw the warmest January on record, and measurable snow didn't start in NYC this year until Feb 1, the latest in 150 years. https://www.wunderground.com/article/news/news/2023-01-30-ne...
I'm having trouble reading your comment as anything other than misleading about how warm this winter has been.
I'd need to look up the numbers but I felt like while we didn't get much snow at all that we got a *lot* of rain. There were a number of rainstorms where if it'd been rain we'd have been pounded. And when it did snow, not much stuck and/or it melted away in a couple of days. This isn't the only year I can remember that, but it's at least unusual.
Weather ≠ climate.
Just ask California over the last little while.
In fact it may snow more often as the climate warms a bit in some regions: as warmer air holds more moisture. Then when it slams into a cold front it sheds that moisture, and with climate change destabilizing the jet stream ("polar vortex") the cold Arctic air may jut farther down hitting the warm-moist air that comes up from the south.
As the joke goes: The mildest winter of your life so far
Here in SF we’re having what is definitely the hardest winter I’ve seen in my 8 years here. Can’t remember the last time SF had so much weather. Even thunderstorms! Multiple!
In San Diego its basically sf weather this winter. Highs are rarely above 60, lows even in the high 30s, the water is mid 50s,and it seems to be rain like once a week.
In Buffalo it's been a really weird winter—mostly unusually mild, punctuated by a few very severe events (giant snowstorm in November, 2-day blizzard in December, ice storm in February) but returning to mild shortly after. Honestly this past week or so is the first time it's felt like a normal winter.
NYT - You Call That Snow?! See How This Winter Stacks Up. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/01/26/upshot/city-s...
> False springs are not uncommon in the United States, and their frequency and severity can vary depending on the region and weather patterns. In general, false springs are more common in areas with a continental climate, where there can be large temperature fluctuations in the spring.
According to a study by the USA National Phenology Network, false springs occur on average once every three years in the United States, with the highest frequency in the Midwest and the lowest in the southern and western regions. However, the frequency of false springs can vary greatly from year to year, and some regions may experience multiple false springs in a single season.
False springs can have significant impacts on agriculture, particularly on fruit crops such as peaches, cherries, and apples, which are vulnerable to frost damage during early growth stages. In recent years, false springs have become more frequent and severe due to climate change, leading to increased risks for farmers and gardeners who rely on healthy plants for their livelihoods.
Me: provide references.
> Schwartz, M. D., Ault, T. R., & Betancourt, J. L. (2013). Spring onset variations and trends in the continental USA: past and regional assessment using temperature-based indices. International Journal of Climatology, 33(12), 2917-2922.
Ault, T. R., Henebry, G. M., & De Beurs, K. M. (2015). False spring climatology in the contiguous United States. Environmental Research Letters, 10(4), 044022.
National Phenology Network. (2019). First Leaf and First Bloom Maps. Retrieved from https://www.usanpn.org/data/spring
Harrington, C. A., Gould, P. J., St. Clair, J. B., & Carlson, M. R. (2010). Modeling the effects of winter environment on dormancy release of Douglas-fir. Forest Ecology and Management, 259(3), 798-808.
Using ChaptGPT for research is interesting, and I think it's a cool way to learn new things. But I think if someone is going to share that information with someone else, it's appropriate to manually find and cite creditable sources, at least sufficiently enough that the ChatGPT aspect becomes irrelevant in a way other than discoverability.
At least the https://www.usanpn.org/usa-national-phenology-network exists!
Sounds like it's successfully approximating a human (I wish I was joking).
The current "state of the art" for human commenters who are acting in bad faith is to google their position and cite articles and papers that don't even support their claims knowing full well that people will have to waste time reading your BS sources to disprove you and that even if they do you've still one because you've got them to stop arguing against your position and instead argue against your sources. These miscreants are often successful in using their false appeals to authority to convert people to their side.
Of course ChatGPT doesn't know what "bad faith" is but regardless it's almost performing on their level.
We are marching toward a world where dishonest spinsters and BSers pretending to be experts are going to be replaced with bots.
What could go wrong?
Add that to the context of so many existential issues we need clear communication on (freedoms, the global economy, reformation of society, climate change, Putin and Jinping's last gasps for "legacy"). All the while dodging machine generated hallucinations of off-by-that-much pronouncements on the world around us.
We have a perfect storm brewing.
Its trained largely on the public internet. That it reproduces bad faith argument naturally and fluently should not be surprising.
It's just generating them based on learned patterns, nothing more
The person’s comments was suggesting a fluke event. No comments were given to have dialogue with the comment, which only downvoted.
If people wish to create a toxic environment for opposing view points, that is their choice. However, it is toxic none the less.
Not everything is associated with climate change or politics.
Scotland made the change in 1600.
As far as shedding leaves earlier in the fall, I heard they determine that based on when they've collected enough CO2. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the less time it takes the trees to meet their goals.
Further out where I live it's not perpetually gray, it's more of a mixed bag. Currently clear skies.
I once read that some estimates indicate we're already more than a quarter through the expected climate change, which makes all of these extreme weather effects make sense.
Non-stop fracking burnoff is bad enough, it makes people ill dozens of miles away enough to put some in the hospital but we have allowed industrial toxic zones right among populated areas, schools, etc.