Earth entering ‘uncharted territory’ as heat records quickly shatter

Yes, I know it's utopic, hard to regulate, implement and will never happen. But drastic decisions need to be made. People think we need cars so it's fine to destroy life to use cars. Well, humans lived a good bunch of years without cars, and humans won't be able to live when cars destroy the planet. So stop producing cars, stop producing fuel, and people will struggle but survive. Continue producing cars and fuel, and we'll all perish to greed and stupidity.

I don't seriously propose this though, it would be pointless to propose because it would never be accepted. Even Japan dumping a tiny bit of tritium into the ocean has turned into a big controversy. Seriously suggest something like the above and most people will think you're an insane troll.

This is not true. None of the required materials are rare.

- conservation doesn't work in the developed world: there's simply too much sacrifice required, too quickly.

- conservation doesn't work in the developing world: no way will people agree to freeze development while watching rich people in the developed world.

- decarbonization/etc are cute but even if we did EVERYTHING and ASAP, it still wouldn't be close to enough.

I'll know we're serious about climate change when we invest $trillions into R&D and seriously consider large scale geoengineering, no idea too weird.

We're getting there: consider this $52B proposal ($100+B with the usual overruns) to temporarily protect NYC/NJ from sealevel rise: https://www.google.com/search?q=nyc+sea+level+rise+protectio... - now multiply to Miami, Jakarta and dozens of other cities.

https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/#cid_457

We are looking at a minimum of gigatons/year of carbon dioxide removal (CDR in the report), with tech that has not yet been developed.

And yet, still, people slowing down our current trajectory. We are nowhere close to making the reductions in emissions in CO2 plotted there.

Even this whole thread is filled with science-denying pedants that didn't even bother to read the attached article. The impediment to technology change is political, not technological, and we need to start holding our colleagues to a higher standard for evidence and scientific accuracy if we want to politically enable the technological change that we need.

We also have several other routes for capturing and storing carbon from the atmosphere or ocean, other than by life forms, and it's likely that we would prefer those methods for all sorts of reasons.

Ultimately, any sequestration is going to be far more expensive than just not emitting the carbon in the first place. And today, we have the technology to interchange 95% of our economy to be carbon free, without any reduction in standard of living, and in fact we would have a better standard of living because energy would be cheaper and we would have less disease from pollution.

It's politics that is now the rate limiting step, not the tech. By the time we get that 95% of known solutions implemented, we will have lots of options for the remaining 5%

And sequestration of carbon will certainly be required, starting around the 2050 era (according to an IPCC special report), but we should let that tech bake for 30 years before we start massive deployment so we can get the best options without too much lock in. Hopefully in 2030s there will be a robust carbon trading network which will cause larger scale deployment of carbon capture and sequestration, then we deploy gigaton scale in the 2050s

We're not going to remediate climate change, full stop. If there was a time to do anything for climate change to change course it was probably 40 years ago.

Climate change is here and the cascade of events has been in motion for a while. The next couple of decades will see an exponential acceleration of ice melting, marine ecosystems going bust, and of course a slew of effects on land, from wild fires to floods.

It's here, it's happening and we have to adapt. Hopefully we'll be able to keep a certain way of life of abundance similar to what we're used to. But we might be forced to change some things or do without others. Time will tell.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_The...

In Our Time did an excellent podcast on it:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08hpmmf

I use them in the evenings, on deep dimmers, because I've given up trying to find LED bulbs that aren't "substantially blue" in the evenings - I've reviewed quite a few (https://www.sevarg.net/tag/spectrometer/), and having run out of the cheaper ones, I don't feel like spending $30-$40/bulb for testing the higher end ones that actually come with spectrum data showing there's still a substantial blue spike in the "messes with human sleep" chunk of spectrum. Their CRI is high, but they don't dim to a nice dull red, and that's what matters - at least for my sleep.

Though admittedly I also enjoy curling up with a good bit of fiction (on paper) and a kerosene lantern - especially in the winter, when the heat is welcome.

I built my own solar (large ground mount), I run around most of the miles in a PHEV, I'm all for reduced carbon impact. Where it matters. What I'm not for is senselessly pissing people off to "make a good point" or whatever, and the actual incandescent ban seems exactly like that.

I guarantee people I can see at night wouldn't run hundreds of watts of LEDs, were they to be lighting the outside of their house with incandescents. And we see this in the light pollution metrics over time - LEDs are more efficient in lumens out per watts in, but they tend to get used to just add more light, run them longer instead of turning them off, etc. And that's not just using more energy, it really screws with a wide range of nocturnal animals.

I think around the time half of people publicly agree it's happening, there will be strong support to do something reactive, and do something. My hope is that this interim time between now and then, the people who should be deciding if and how to do such a thing, are making good progress for why or why not, and how or how not to execute on it.

The other thing that keeps me up at night is that one single billionaire might try to just 'fix it' on a secret mission, botch it, and now we're all in on one person's decision. But we're already in bag on so many other topics - the next pandemic being just as existentially scary to me.

I put a lot of energy into trying to accept that I can do a little but I can't do a lot. Life is short, and maybe 6 generations of invention and progress and explosive population growth and technology have cost is some more of that limited shortness. It should be ok to have faith in technology but I sure wouldn't use it as a coping mechanism. This topic can be all-consuming; terminal patients can still live their life and find beauty in the world.

And even if we do something about it, it will be too little, too late, and too wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med...

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Share the charts, you can't expect "anyone who has seen" those mythical charts to just happen to be the same ones reading your comment. Supporting your claims is always a good start instead of "as it's already known" when it's definitely not the scientific consensus, hence the article talking about uncharted territory.

Just show, don't tell...

Whatever floats your boat, but "extreme weather and fires that block the sun eventually driving the world into an ice age" is not the win for humanity you might think it is.

Even if it is, why do we need to keep hearing about it? Oh yeah, this kind of news drives clicks. It creates fear and “climate anxiety” which drives more clicks. As citizens there is little we can or will do to fix this. It’s down to politicians agreeing on a strategy globally. With high inflation, and the rising cost of living, citizens have plenty of more pressing things to worry about without the media piling on more misery.

If individual citizens can affect their local politics to mitigate climate change, it is important to do so.

For example, consider that humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years but only in the past 10k did civilization develop.

Was it because we sat on our hands? Did it take us that long to domesticate plants? Domestication of wheat does not take anywhere near that long even if you’re not really trying. One theory it’s that until 10k years ago there was a big ass ice age that made living pretty rough.

Once conditions became favorable human behavior changed pretty rapidly. To make all this.

So why should we be afraid of climate change? Because climate wise these 10k years have been pretty favorable for humans and there’s absolutely no reason to believe the next 10k will be if we fuck it up.

Where I am, when young, we never had heat like this in June/July. And in the winters the lakes would freeze enough for you to drive on. I have been unable to walk on frozen lakes for at least 10 years, never mind drive. So everyone, keep driving your SUVs :)

Your does point out something, though, that really really bugs me from climate activists/politicians. The idea that you have to "believe" in climate change, like you'd believe in religious proclamations. I don't give a sh*t if you believe -- and making this ideological creates tribes where one group is like "I believe climate change isn't happening/is God's will/is natural, so I will run my F150's AC with the windows open and breathe in exhaust proudly because internal combustion and burning oil is what God has ordained as the pinnacle of human achievement". Belief whatever. I'm much more interested in action. Why does it seem good to some people to... just waste resources without much return? Irresponsibly manage our farmlands for short-term profit vs long-term yield? pin success to ownership of fossil fuels in specific places rather than a more flexible and less geopolitically fraught paradigm? There are a lot of visible problems to address, to your point, efitz.

For instance the sea level is expected to rise much more than an inch in the next century. It is projected to rise 10 inches in the next 30 years.

Armageddon is presented as an inevitable sudden destruction. It’s closer to an asteroid strike. Climate change is also Armageddon except it’s caused by us, it’s something under our control, and we continue to dither about how bad it will really be instead of taking explicit action. I’m an alarmist because I consistently see a lack of any real progress being made on tackling this problem in a timely manner. Remember, it took ~300 years of burning fossil fuels to get us here. In fact, most of the damage was done even more recently since it took a while for us to really scale this up. And this system has lag. That means that even if we cut emissions to 0 today (COVID is the closest we’ve come), the Earth would continue warming for a long time (decades?). Waiting for the damage wrought to be “visible” to us is waaay too late. Not to mention that it will easily become economically infeasible to address and eat up our economy in the process.

Dying of heat exhaustion if caught out in a wet-bulb event? It's pretty hard on the elderly you know. Or how about getting killed so the climate refugees can loot your air conditioner? Starving to death in a drought-induced famine? My suspicion is that people who don't have kids is that they're not much of a fan of dying regardless. Source: I don't have kids and don't want to die in any of the above ways.