Florida ocean temps surge to 100F; mass coral bleaching event is found in reefs
cnn.com
cnn.com
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
That's why solutions like EVs and wind+solar win: their success is not conditioned on an impossible fact. Instead, wins can be incremental and progressive. You can put one EV on the road, and then two, and then more. You can put a few windmills in one place and more in another. It doesn't require you to convince everyone.
OTOH, wind and solar can reduce emissions by 70% and save money over the long term while doing so. Wind + solar + short term storage can reduce emissions by 99% and save money over the long term while doing so.
Getting from 99% to 100% will be hard and will require likely either long term storage or carbon capture, which will be expensive. But don't let that get in the way of getting to 99%.
PS. I live in Finland, our electricity is already mostly clean, in large parts thanks to nuclear. Next we will need to clean up heating and industry, probably with a combination of electrification (heat pumps), storage (heat storage, hydrogen), renewables and nuclear.
A decade is very feasible for the electricity generation part of the problem, which is what I was referring to.
Other industries may take longer.
Legit question too. I know we have a bunch of nascent tech, but haven't heard of anything at scale.
Short term storage is batteries.
I called long term storage "expensive" and implied that it's the 3rd step so into the future, so that opens up the options for nascent tech.
Note that you don't need much of a slope to do pumped hydro. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...
There seems to be an obvious contradiction extant in the markets....
Meanwhile California adds about 5 gigawatts of solar power every year.
We can all agree that we shouldn't buy a private jet to fly between our yachts.
But what about that flight from NYC to vacation in Brazil? Is having lots of children gluttony? What about buying stuff online? Living in the suburbs? Driving kids to a better school for a better education? Driving kids to a special music school to develop their talents? Driving to save time vs public transit? Eating meat? That cross-country RV trip? Air conditioning in your house? What about an international flight to a climate conference? Building a big factory to restart American industry? A giant hospital for treating people who made poor health choices? Helicopters to rescue people from accidents during outdoor adventures? Is racking up billions of dollars in assets gluttony by itself, or only when you spend it in a gluttonous way?
> A buoy in the Florida Bay hit 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit at a depth of 5 feet Monday
That's really disturbing. It's one of those things where when you think about it you realize that it's probably more significant than anything else in the news right now and yet most people won't pay much (if any) attention to it and will continue on with their "happy motoring".
We're fucked.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink#Artificial_carbon_...
Theoretically it will decompose someday, but at the point where we have significantly less buildings I assume either other bad things have made this less of a concern, or we'll be advanced enough to recapture that carbon in other ways.
...but yes, if you're willing to "waste" the resources, just thoroughly burying wood away from air should also work.
But it has tradeoffs. It costs money, and compared to eg direct air capture, it uses land that would’ve otherwise gone to growing food or something else, so a not-insignificant opportunity cost.
And we’re not even doing carbon capture on coal plant flue gas, because there’s just no incentive.
If we rolled out serious carbon taxes, this would become more feasible in addition to putting capture on existing plants.
If you’re interested, I highly recommend the AirMiners course, it gives a good overview/survey of the literature. The tldr is that we’re going to need a cocktail of all sorts of these technologies to hit anywhere near our targets, in addition to getting to net zero. We need to be pushing for a carbon tax politically, hard, to make this economically viable to do at scale. People need to become single-issue voters on this, and let politicians know that they are.
Good primer on carbon tax with dividend and border adjustment: https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/
I agree that carbon tax would be good, but unless it's a worldwide implementation it just won't have the desired effect - all it will achieve is disadvantage those who implement it relative to those who don't.
I think the issue is that the scale of the problem is so big. This was close to the best case scenario for this kind of sequestration and it still operated on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years. It’s definitely something worth looking into (and I’m pretty sure people are, haven’t kept as up to speed as I’d like though), but we can’t expect it to save us on its own.
The high amount of wildfires in the Mediterranean right now and other things happening this month are just the beginning.
Some very bad things will happen very soon and some very comfortable ignorant people will be in a world of pain.
Good luck to everyone, I sincerely mean it. I don’t think scientists have been successful in explaining what kind of painful times we are about to face.
Wait until a reasonably-formed tropical storm hits that water and watch it explode into a massive hurricane...
And it is not even August yet. Just hope the wind shear keeps up and prevents organized systems from forming
The information war rages on both sides. But the fact remains that too much doomerism without any clear way for an individual to make a difference and politicians carrying on like normal leads to apathy. Our movies and TV are already saturated with barren hellscapes. Why confront the actual reality when you feel powerless to stop it, and doing anything necessarily means austerity?
This recent version of climate doomerism lacks all practicality and provides no solutions other than total tyranny of the state over the individual, for your own good, of course. It appears to me that the movement has been fully captured by politicians who are no longer interested in actual science or engineering of solutions.
Personally, I checked out about a year ago. As I suspect the people pushing this message the hardest don't actually want to work with me to improve the future, they just want to control my purchasing decisions.
We can't say "everyone has the freedom to pollute as much as they want" and get through this.
From here you could address the wage issues that cause this amount of shipping to occur in the first place. You could make the fleet more efficient and use newer technologies and fuels that pollute less. You could simply incorporate the cost of that pollution into the "cheap" consumer products so conveyed through one of any of a dozen means. You could do all of these at once.
So, my point would be, where is the prioritization here? It seems like corporate profits come first, then environmentalism entirely at the consumers expense comes next, mostly to make the corporations feel better about their blood money. And.. I'm supposed to be on board with this because of "sustainability?"
I'm on board. The issues do actually need to be addressed. I don't believe we are currently doing that in any meaningful way.
For example, living in a suburban house with multiple trucks/SUVs and driving a lot is seen as part of a lifestyle that borders on essential. Suggesting that people can drive smaller, more efficient vehicles will receive such vitriol in so many parts of society. Suggesting that cars should pay for their road use will get people attacking you in online forums. Even the right-leaning Tax Foundation believes that drivers pay for about half of their road costs - and they don't account for things like pollution [1]. Drivers will say that their gas taxes, tolls, and registration fees fund the roads they use, but that really isn't the case. When we map out carbon emissions, cities do very well and suburbs often use 2-3x more than cities [2].
It's not just a campaign against science and facts. It's also a campaign that pushes a narrative that many of the things that pollute are what you should desire in life. You should want a big grass lawn. You should want a large vehicle that can fit 5-10x more than you normally carry on a given day.
I think it's also tough because many of the things we need in order to combat climate change will require an amount of change that can cause resistance. Taking space away from cars for bike or bus lanes means that if you made the choice to live in a car-dependent area, you can find your commute getting slightly worse. It's usually not as bad as drivers fear because more efficient transit options often divert a lot of people who would end up as traffic with the drivers, but it does make things slightly worse. Housing is the biggest investment in most households and two-thirds of Americans own their homes - higher in car-dependent areas. Telling such a large group of people that they made a slightly worse choice is hard. Even if their investment is secure, it might not be as positive as they had assumed.
Right now in Arizona, there are huge water issues in communities that haven't secured long-term water resources. People bought houses, invested their money, and they want the government to ensure their investment is prosperous - which means having access to affordable, abundant water. They don't want to be told that they shouldn't have built outside of the Scottsdale municipal boundaries and that there was a reason the land was cheap there. Likewise, suburban owners don't want to be told that their location isn't as sustainable and that in order to ensure life on the planet we'll need to wean them off of parts of their lifestyle (which will become more expensive compared to urban dwellers).
It's hard to change how people think about their world and their position in it. So many people think of cities as "that's now how I live." We've spent the better part of a century painting a picture of what prosperity means that is now running into the reality of climate change. It's not just the campaign against science. It's also about how we've shaped what people think of as good and desirable; what they see as their lifestyle and even what they see as essential. There are lots of suburban Democrats who believe in climate change, want the government to address it, but will balk at the idea of driving less, increasing housing density, or living in a slightly smaller home that doesn't require as much fuel. They'd rather talk about giving up straws while their cars put out way more micro plastics from their tires. They want to find the things that they can "sacrifice" without major lifestyle changes.
The campaign against science is important. I think the social perception of what defines prosperity and a good lifestyle is also important. It's been shaped by decades of policy and media and it can be hard to combat even when you're in a circle of people who believe in climate change.
Which is why I'm not optimistic about being able to stop catastrophic climate change at this point. The vast majority of people aren't willing to make the sacrifices required - in fact many of them sneer at the whole idea of making sacrifices. The hyper-individualism in the US and elsewhere doesn't allow us to think about changing our behavior for the greater good.
I live in a liberal area. Hardly any Trump voters here. Getting people to drive slightly less or even allowing a bike lane to allow other people to drive slightly less is viewed as the apocalypse.
Remember, a convincing argument to these people was a Senator bringing a snowball onto the senate floor and claiming climate change can't be real because it still snows in DC. They do not give a fuck about the facts, they aren't stupid, they just don't care and think they will be able to survive, and they will enforce that belief by continuing to push for an insular US that shuts out the rest of the world and will likely have to start firing on desperate climate asylum seekers after about 30 years and eventually even that won't prevent the US from suffering under climate change so they will have to find scapegoats to blame the suffering on as things just continue to suck.
Most of them just DGAF because they are 80 years old and won't see any of the repercussions so they are happy to borrow value from the future to enrich themselves in the now. Even plenty of the Democrats don't seem to care to do anything because they'll be dead by then. Fuck, Feinstein refuses to vacate her seat seemingly because she needs the damn health insurance, which is probably the closest to being a normal american she has ever been.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6313629464112
https://www.foxnews.com/science/climate-alarmism-robbing-stu...
Well, that'll be your problem right there
Right now, a majority faction of the people with power stand to benefit from starting a climate catastrophe[1], so we're getting a climate catastrophe.
[1] Or stand to lose from trying to stop one.
I think it's going to keep carrying on like this for a while until people start rioting and destroying the capitalist institutions that have been hiding and dismissing our problems for decades.
Which is exactly what it was supposed to do, to get people to consume less. However, a significant proportion of Washington residents are clamoring for their leaders to now reduce the carbon tax.
Everybody is “green” until sacrifices get put on the table.
Queue videos of crying mothers not being able to drive the truck to the store and feed their children.
Temperature always tries to diffuse, increasing entropy in the process. So if there is an especially hot body of water due to climate change it means that water had to be in contact with air of higher temperature. And the water is currently hitting temps above the air temperature for the area. Key largo for example has highs in the 88-90 range this week. Heat index is much hotter because of the humidity, but that isn't relevant for heat transfer into the ocean from the air.
I get water is warmer on average because of global warming. So I get any hot spots will be hotter on average in a warmer world. I just don't get how water is ending up hotter then the air.
Is there some geothermal source we haven't identified?
Edit: So a number of responses have brought up solar heating, often in very dismissive ways. I'm certainly aware of solar heating of water, but the solar heating is the part of the equation that isn't changing. So yes, solar heating can make water hotter then the air, but I wouldn't expect the offset to be changed with or without global warming. Meaning that the delta between the normal ocean temp and this anomaly shouldn't be larger then the delta between normal air temp and the current air temp.
What I should have made more clear in my comment was that I didn't understand how a heat surge above air temperatures could be attributed to a atmospheric heat source such as GHGs.
In general though, the ocean is _vast_ and stores a lot of heat, and changes temperature slower than the air does. When it's cold outside, the ocean radiates heat to warm the air and vice versa.
A lot of light passes through the atmosphere and that energy is absorbed and reflected by the solid and liquid surfaces below the atmosphere (the amount absorbed or reflected depending on albedo and other properties of the material). The energy heating the ground or the ocean does not all come from the atmosphere itself (though certainly some does).
Furthermore, an increased level of dissolved CO2 in the water is increasing its susceptibility to warming.
And then you have greenhouse gases, which are good at trapping in heat once it's entered the atmosphere. The ocean has the capacity to absorb this heat while it's trapped.
What's happened that you expect the general population to care about? It's hotter, a couple more storms or fires but not too many more.... You call it a catastrophe but the effect on the average persons like in this country is little to nothing.
There are enough extreme events happening now, however, that it won’t be long before everyone, everywhere, has either been directly affected by or knows someone who has been directly affected by an extreme weather event. This kind of rapid change could be the best hope we have for remedying the situation, as rather than being frogs in slowly warming water, we will find ourselves thrown directly into the skillet.
https://calmatters.org/economy/2023/06/california-home-insur...
I also have a growing anxiety of how bad it'll be in 5-10 years (refugee crises, humans/countries becoming more selfish and isolationist, so the rise of tribalism (and great, I don't look like a native of where I live), countries growing desperate for food/water resorting to use their military, leading to resource wars).
There are still technical arrows in our quiver that could save us, but none of them matter if major political parties decide to prevent us from using them. So the real answer is: vote.
This isn't a 'party' problem - this is what the public wants.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/21/us/offshore-wind-delays-infla... [2] https://www.seia.org/sites/default/files/2019-12/SEIA-Sectio...
Maybe. I would say it's more dismay.
The unfortunate truth is that a wide-reaching and long-lasting catastrophe is probably the only thing that will activate enough people's collectivist instinct to demand change. Sriracha shortages won't wake people up, but widespread monthslong food shortages will. Power outages for a few weeks in a few counties in Florida, USA won't wake people up. A hurricane that causes monthslong power outages for 50 million people in the southeast USA will.
The young ones obviously have a much stronger sense of this collectivism, but even then, they are stuck in the coerced-work-to-survive loop that isn't easily escapable without major system failures.
You would think we're proposing a second Holocaust from the reaction. Insane. Accusations that we're trying to round everyone up so we can send them to Trump's camps, to wipe out everyone over 50, etc.
We're fucked. I don't pay attention to this stuff anymore, I've done what I can.
electric cars are still cars recycling means you don’t change consumption at all carbon capture means you continue to emit.
Humans don’t seem capable of change
Sure, climate change is happening and it's making the hot years hotter, but pointing at this year as "the disastrous consequences of climate change" feels like trying to have your cake and eat it too.
I have a feeling that most people have no idea what it means - they don't have the science background to make any sense of it. 101.1 degrees at the surface would be bad enough, but this is 5 feet down. That seems pretty catastrophic.
We are reacting. I'm not having kids. That's my reaction. I wouldn't want to be born into a crumbling civilization so I won't put someone else in that situation.
Beyond that I'm living my life to the best of my ability, trying to make the most of my time here.
Can't really do much else, just grabbing some popcorn and watching it burn I guess.
The IPCC has traditionally been conservative, but all of their low rcp outcomes depend upon direct carbon capture, a technology we haven't really figured out yet, deployed to a wider extent than we've done with anything.
I'm not saying DAC research isn't promising, but a lot of folks are just shrugging their shoulders and assuming that everything is going to turn out fine. It's not. At this rate, it basically boils down to dealing with global warming or dealing with the effects of stratospheric sulfide injection. Neither are going to be pretty and honestly either could have effects so dire it ends human civilization as we know and love it today.
The simplest solution is to stop digging for yet more fossil fuels to burn and to put our efforts into moving completely away from oil/coal/gas use. However, there's a lot of powerful money invested in continuing to make vast profits from fossil fuels and so there's going to be pushback from politicians that sit in their pockets.
Inaction is also a choice, and a terrible one.
'Pour encourager les autres', and all that.
All major nafions, France, Britain and US, famously obtained their freedomz through bloody revolutions.
Except that just leads directly to really really oppressive facism, because plenty of people already want that for various reasons, and the public news already has no qualms about calling people throwing paint on a picture "eco-terrorists" while being utterly mum about the people actively plotting to harm politicians because they aren't facist enough.
Politicians will happily jump at the opportunity to enact what they're actively trying to do.
> raising gas taxes
The first rule of finding yourself in a hole is to stop digging. Unfortunately, the world is continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere at an increasing rate - we should focus on stopping that before we try untested hail Mary's that are quite likely to cause even greater problems (e.g. disruption of ozone layer).
Injecting sulfur into the stratosphere is a simple enough problem that many governments, and a few individuals, could be doing it within a few years.
I agree that the first of those is preferable to the second; it's just that the first of those isn't going to happen.
The game here is to extend the period of time during which those resources can be plausibly exploited. Every additional year translates into trillions of dollars. Allowing the development of a popular consensus that global warming is "bad enough to spray stuff into the sky to cool the earth down" would be absolutely catastrophic, since it would also reduce the window they have to exploit those resources. These companies aren't good or evil, they're just amoral: and they'll do everything they can to prevent and delay that consensus from forming, even if (1) sulfur injection wouldn't directly hurt their business, and (2) opposing action kills us all.
Would it? The entire global economy runs on those resources. I think you're overestimating how willing governments and publics worldwide would be to accept "spray stuff into the sky to cool the earth down" over "change literally everything about how everyone lives everywhere," especially when the second one has a cost in lives much more easily measured (and propagandized!) than the first.
The question isn’t “can we keep using (substantial amounts of) fossil fuels long term”, that’s decided. What’s up for debate is how quickly we’ll reach the tipping point where it becomes obvious to investors that existing reserves are stranded. This will be a long time before we stop using lots of fossil fuels! The battle that (smart) fossil fuel companies are fighting is to push that date a decade or two into the future.
I hope and wish for a future where there is a reasonable accommodation and fossil fuel interests support action on global warming, even if it’s only SRM. In the real world I think these companies are fighting a vicious rear-guard action to get every scrap of profit out of the industry before it folds up and dies. It’s going to be messy and destructive and the strategy right now is to promote denial and sabotage anything that could result in further political consensus for rapid decarbonization.
> Inaction is also a choice, and a terrible one.
Ye, get the American police forces to adopt this motto
Neither am I, but everything I've read seems to indicate that SSI is cheap enough that many nation states could comfortably do it. That all but guarantees it will be done when places like china or india start losing tens of thousands of people to heat waves (See 'The ministry for the future' for a fictionalized account). We as a species are short sighted. We'll go for the quick fix and hope we can deal with the consequences later. The bad thing is we have no idea what those consequences will be or how to address them. It's completely uncharted territory.
1. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/coastline-eastern-us-chang...
I was flabbergasted when I discovered this, absolutely none of the media mentions this. You can read right wing, left wing, looney wing- unless you are one of the 0.1% of people that read the report, no-one knows this.
One you realise that the only 'hope' is a technology that will ,at best, just cost a colossal amount of money and needs to be deployed at the scale of the oil industry, the position changes.
My kids can't afford to have kids so that'll be how my line escapes.
Last year, Two-thirds of Australia's Great Barrier Reef showed the largest amount of coral cover in 36 years. Corals have survived millions of years and are already bouncing back in other places as evidenced by the Great Barrier Reef, which we were all worried about not long ago.
The Earth has been much warmer than this in the past. It’s been much colder too. Life will adapt. The question is whether we will adapt, and more specifically whether our current civilization will adapt. I severely doubt that Homo sapiens would go extinct, but massive civilization collapse would kill billions.
Then there’s what civilization might do short of full collapse. A moderate limited duration refugee crisis and some inflation has led to a full scale resurgence of fascism in Europe. Imagine if we see hundreds of millions of refugees from equatorial regions pouring into countries with better climates while we have crop failures and coastal cities getting flooded. Can our political systems remain sane and rational through that or will we succumb to demagogue cult leaders with easy “solutions?”
The thing that’s likely to kill the most people from climate change is how people react to climate change. Remember that totalitarian schemes were a leading cause of death in the 20th century. Add up the death toll from Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot and scale to current population.
As ocean warms say so long to Salmon on the northwest coast. Whether they will survive further north or simply go extinct altogether who can say.
Departing along with the salmon will be things that us humans in the area enjoy, such as smoked salmon and salmon on the BBQ. In the grand scheme of things likely trivial, but enormous losses to our way of life, not to mention local economies.
Greater than that are the impacts on local First Nations of whose cultures the salmon historically played a incredible role, which resulted in an outsized impact of the fish on their art, story and culture. Will be devastating when the fish disappears.
The biggest unknown impacts will be on the greater forest ecology, as it has been noted that the bears eat the salmon and drag it into the woods, where it provides food for other animals and nourishes the forest in general. As the salmon disappear there could well be a cascade of disruption and extinction on animals and ecologies well beyond what we're aware of.
The salmon will go away and yes earth will "survive" and I'm sure some another fish (or maybe just jellyfish) will fill the void. But the disruptive impacts will be utterly enormous.
This seems hyperbolic. The current spate of "fascist" elected leaders (Orban, Meloni, et al.) don't seem as such to me, though I will admit I'm not keeping a very close eye. Perhaps you know more.
> The thing that’s likely to kill the most people from climate change is how people react to climate change.
I agree. As the human population more than doubled in the past 50 years, climate-related deaths are only a third of what it used to be[0]; not a third of the rate, one-third in absolute numbers. This is mainly due to the increasing material wealth of developing countries that better lets them handle the challenges of climate.
In my opinion, the increasing centralized authority demanded by those that think climate change is a risk so urgent that it transcends legal safeguards against precisely that kind of centralized authority will harm more people than climate change ever will.
Neither Orban nor Meloni are themselves that level of bad. I wasn’t thinking of them but of the discourse.
Now imagine tens or hundreds of millions of refugees combined with massive food cost increase due to crop failures. Orban and Meloni might be way on the moderate end compared to what might surface.
I'm in my mid-40s and don't have kids. In the last 5-6 years I've gone from figuring it'll be ok-ish in my lifetime but will suck for the next generation, to legit wondering if life will be a complete hellscape by the time I'm a senior citizen. And more important, what if anything that means in terms of how I live the rest of my life. For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways.
I hope that it's just doomerism on my part, but the fact that someone like myself is already putting mental energy towards this does say something in my opinion
As someone in the mid 30's who survived a bad accident with a TBI: it's never early enough to start living life to the fullest.
A lot of things you might want to do now and are able to do, you might not in your 60s for health reasons.
Do them now.
Or you can save for a nice retirement lifestyle but end up with a terminal illness or sudden heart attack or stroke and not live to enjoy much of it. On top of that, the older you get the more and more people are scheming to drain you of your wealth. The Big Medical/Big Pharma complex, Long Term Care insurance scams, greedy relatives, everyone will be eyeing your retirement accounts.
Living in the moment does not equate to "have 0 savings" or "spend everything you make on experiences". There's a whole spectrum of middle ground between the extremes.
I understand the argument you're trying to make, but viewing it through the lens of extremes is a baby mistake (maybe a consequence of polarized american politics?). As an adult, you should be able to find a middle ground that works for you.
I'm facing the exact same question. I think I've mostly resigned myself to appreciating the world as it is today, while it's still recognizable. I want to see glacier national park while there are still glaciers. I want to see others before forests give way to savanna. I want to see the old world before things really destabilize.
Don't get me wrong, I've made choices to reduce my impact on the world, and I'll continue to vote for anyone who I think will seriously help on the issue, but I'm not going to live some 'hairshirt' existence of climate piety when my sacrifices amount to a fart in a hurricane compared to the actions of corporations and the ultrarich.
To future generations, the new world will be their "old world". And so it goes.
I reckon that's why there's been a trend of billionaires buying citizenship there. Guaranteed entry if they get citizenship, even if things get bad, and they're not autocratic so they probably won't seize all their stuff.
Wouldn't it be expected that you'd have the mental energy to put towards such things, lacking the tried and true distraction of having puppies?
https://www.humanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/cha...
https://images.wsj.net/im-428434/?width=700&height=434
What are you worried about, exactly?
A better indicator IMO is the amount of property damage from extreme weather events, which has been trending up sharply since the 80s: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/summary-stats#temp...
Worse yet is the threat that few are mentioning: the breaking of the food web. This incredibly delicate web literally keeps us alive and is under threat not only from anthropogenic climate change but also from everything from pesticides, plastic & microplastic pollution, habitat destruction, slowing and impending collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, and 100 other scaled-up threats. We're already in the anthropocene era marked by the sixth mass extinction in the planet's history, and everything from fish to insects are nearing single-digit percentages of their pre-industrial populations.
Disaster can be averted, but only if we take serious action. Good luck with that.
Climate change is one thing, but another is resource scarcity which will also hit (some of) us within our life time. We owe our lifestyle to fossil fuel, and we'll have to reduce it at the time we need it most.
If resources, including livable land, become scarcer then it stands to reason having accumulated more wealth would be the only possible path to help ensure you survive. And even this isn't a guarantee, as the wealth might become worthless and or taken away from you.
On the other hand if you assume we're all fucked and proceed as if that's the case, if the shit hits the fan before you expire then you're even more likely to be on the outside looking in.
It’s going to get ugly. Being anything but wealthy in a sufficiently wealthy country is going to be uncomfortable, to say the least.
There will be famine, fire, flood, pestilence, and all the rest - but unless we entirely lose our heads, which isn’t impossible but remains less than probable, humanity will go on, chastened and winnowed.
We'll either find a way to fix it, or not. But we're definitely not preventing the problem in a meaningful way.
""" UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. """
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
""" The following year that notable news magazine, Newsweek, April 28, 1975, under its Science section in the back, talks about the cooling world. There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may be bringing a drastic decline in food production throughout the world. """
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2009-12-15/html/CRE...
But let me go ahead and try: one anxiety-riddled UN official and a random Newsweek article do not represent, or supersede, scientific consensus. Your points are not only irrelevant, it’s not even clear to me why you felt the need to bring up either of these links as if they carry any weight at all, or are corroborated meaningfully by any members of the scientific community.
If you care, Newsweek and Peter Gwynne, the author of your mentioned 1975 article, have both independently retracted and clarified their positions and recognize the nature and significance of modern climate change: https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-rewind-debunking-global-co...
According to you no links that deviate from the narrative carry any weight, but they were very on point, providing a bit of historical perspective and suggesting that ignoring these sensational headlines and cries about imminent death would be quite prudent. Greta had to remove her twit recently warning that humanity would die by 2023, quietly memory holing the message that used to be plastered all over the media. Irrelevant? How dare you!
I get the idea that you don’t want your kids to suffer. But what’s the alternative? Just let the climate change deniers populate the earth with little deniers who continue polluting? We need coming generations to help us solve this.
Earlier conversation:
https://www.almanac.com/content/hurricane-forecast
https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/2023-atlantic-hurricane-se...
Seems so counterintuitive when you read about these massively hot sea surface temperatures. I think the long term rise in sea level temperatures as a trend is more worrying than any one season, as the overall potential for a super-normal event is apparently rising.
I don't know how the same article can say, 'Scientists are just really scrambling to keep what we have alive. It’s pretty crazy that at this point the best solution we have is to take as much coral out of the ocean as we can', 'while a lot of the coral was in OK shape, up to 10% of it was dying at the lab' and 'This is akin to all of the trees in the rainforest dying' in the same article without addressing the obvious discord of these statements with some objectivism, nor how much of this is about losing diversity for species that are not resistant to warming ocean temperatures (a very well known phenomenon) and how much of this is losing species that aren't resilient or are otherwise rare to start with (the article specifically states, "It includes corals like Staghorn and Elkhorn that are “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act because there are just a few hundred genetically unique individuals left").
We know it's bad, and it's a problem people are passionate about, and it's related to higher global average temperatures, but we have scientific models and don't need to rely on personal verbiage or sensationalism to understand the impact. How does this vary from existing models? Was this unexpectedly early? What is the implication for it happening earlier in the years compared to other years in terms of annual averages?
Phrases like, "depth refugees" and "little hope spots" do not help us all understand what's actually happening or the degree of the problem compared to predictions.
I witnessed the reefs in the Great Barrier reef go through bleaching over the last few decades, and it was horrific to behold personally. This article is making me feel dumber.
The results of the Australian bleaching were unintuitive, because the reefs actually ended up growing back to their highest levels after the events, though much like secondary succession in a forest it ends up favoring fast growing species and that has implications: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/great-barrier-reef-re...
The rapid growth in coral cover appears to have come at the expense of the diversity of coral on the reef, with most of the increases accounted for by fast-growing branching coral called Acropora.
Those corals grow quickly after disturbances but are very easily destroyed by storms, heatwaves and crown-of-thorns starfish. By increasing the dominance of those corals, the reef can become more vulnerable.
I found this article very helpful: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09238-2/
This research helped me contextualize some of this continually sensationalist and frankly utterly shit quality journalism in the CNN article.
Here's the most relevant parts of the nature article. Though the overall article is worth reading, this might be the most helpful part for those who don't want to read the whole thing:
In concordance with the global predictions24,25,26, in the last decade, coral bleaching has increased in frequency and intensity (Fig. 3). Yet, in the last decade, the onset of coral bleaching has occurred at significantly higher SSTs (~0.5 °C) than in the previous decade (Fig. 4). At the thousands of sites surveyed, the mean SST recorded during coral bleaching in the first decade of the dataset, from 1998 to 2006, was 28.1 °C, whereas the mean SST recorded during coral bleaching in the second decade, from 2007 to 2017, was 28.7 °C. This change in coral-bleaching temperature is significantly different (Likelihood ratio test, Pr(>χ2) = 0.001) between decades (Fig. 4). The increase in over half a degree celsius in coral-bleaching temperature suggests that past bleaching events may have culled the thermally susceptible individuals, resulting in a recent adjustment of the remaining coral populations to higher thresholds of bleaching temperatures26,27,28 (Supplementary Figure 19). Coral communities also may have acclimatized to increasing SSTs, highlighting the need for further research to understand the context dependencies of this trend towards a greater temperature threshold.
Our model showed that rates of change in SST are strong predictors of coral bleaching with faster rates of change correlating with higher levels of bleaching (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Figure 20). Global models predict a mean increase in SST of 0.027 °C per year from 1990 to 209029, which is almost double the rate (0.015 °C per year) of the previous 30 years. As SSTs continue to increase more rapidly, more localities are likely to experience coral bleaching. We show that coral bleaching is predictable, at large scales, by the intensity and the variance in frequency of extreme, high-SST events. We demonstrated that equatorial areas and areas with greater exposure to short-term SST fluctuations may be more resilient to high temperature events, and therefore may be important targets for conservation given their increased likelihood of persisting into the future30. Coral bleaching has had unprecedented negative effects on coral populations worldwide, and immediate action globally to reduce carbon emissions is necessary to avoid further declines of coral reefs.
I'm not in denial of the science, but when people write about the science as a personal tragedy and don't include any of the relevant information to contextualize what they are saying, they lose all credibility with me.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/25/florida-ocea...
More here. It wasn't just one buoy - almost all the measurements in Florida Bay were near or beyond records. Yes, it abnormal - this could be a world record for hottest ocean water (previous record was off Kuwait). And it's not just Florida - the Med, North Atlantic, and waters off Peru are all seeing record or near-record water temperatures as well.
TLDR: Anyone trying to insure a property within 100 miles of the south eastern coastline is probably going to have a bad time, much of florida is already in this situation today
Meanwhile he posted this: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1683660816610893826.html
"The causes of ice ages are not fully understood for either the large-scale ice age periods or the smaller ebb and flow of glacial–interglacial periods within an ice age."
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...