Climate Change Tracker

Personally, I wholeheartedly agree. Do you see degrowth as a realistic possibility? How would this happen in today's democracies with economic systems relying on GDP growth?

We saw what a fairly massive reduction in consumption looked like during the pandemic. It basically put CO2 levels back to what they were in 2016. That's no where nearly enough.

You went straight from "we don't have to lose anything" to "except of course for cars, lawns, pools and technology in general" apparently without noticing the contradiction. This is a good example of why degrowth advocates have no credibility and always come across as anti-civilization Amish wannabees.

There is no such thing as degrowth outside of recessions and wars. If you want to reduce your own consumption, do so! The rest of us who believe in material progress will increase ours to make up for it.

Have you analyzed the impact of the total elimination of 4 car garages, golf courses, "trinkets", and enforced 5-year upgrades on devices? do those rank among the highest-impact against climate change, or do you just not like them very much?

Do you expect that the people who would have the authority to make and enforce these decisions agree with you about which things are important or not, and have also done the cost-benefit analyses correctly and in good faith?

And they're resistant to buy-off by the industries that have the most to lose under a degrowth paradigm?

Well, I'm about to renew the annual rail passes (which cover our entire local region) for two of our children, but this approach only works because we happen to live 5 mins walk from a local station and their school is 10 mins walk from another station, on the same line.

Good luck persuading people who don't have the benefit of such "lucky geography" to do the same :/

A high-quality, well-maintained car or a phone that lasts longer is more valuable than the disposable equivalent. Developing dense city centers creates wealth, reduces environmental impact, and improves quality of living all at the same time.

In an economy that really is shrinking, things tend towards stasis and people spend much more time fighting over the shrinking pie. A lot of the built environment needs to change to become sustainable, and that's only possible if the economy is vibrant, housing and transportation are plentiful, and people are motivated to improve their communities.

I don't know the solution to convincing suburban Americans to buy smaller houses and smaller cars, but I think the only way it works is if there is a positive vision of the future with both more wealth and a healthier planet.

Comfort Or reducing their standard of living. Remember for most people in the world this they will keep consuming to get to *a* standard and will not care until they get there. One can say that the average person in a sub saharan african country X consumes 1/10th or 1/50th of the carbon that an american does. But unless N generations of X don't rise well above the poverty line they will continue to emit and it will add up by 2100 or 2200.

You don't even have to go to sub saharan africa. I believe there is non negligible double digit percentage of this country that is on the "edge" when it comes to many important living factors like Health, Education and Childcare Cost. Any of which when breached make one not care about reducing consumption.

We need to decarbonize the fucking electrical grid. Just get it done and that addresses the majority of the problem.

You'd also probably be better off if you focused on just changing the incentives and regulations which promote disposable culture. The CAFE standards need an overhaul and the Chicken tax needs to go away, that would do wonders towards getting us smaller, cheaper vehicles. Right to repair laws and EU regulations around replaceable batteries that are being imposed now on companies like Apple will help a lot. Better public transportation, sure, but that means building it (which means more economic output and jobs, but differently). But we're not going to manage to forcefully stop a lot of people from consuming, so we need to focus on making that impact less, particularly when it comes to GHGs, because that is more or less an emergency right now. We can have scalable carbon-neutral energy which still powers a lot of economic growth for the future up until we're all dead. And if you argue against that you will lose the broader war for the sake of trying to be a perfectionist (#include <leftists_being_their_own_worst_enemy.h>)

While I’m sympathetic to the idea of degrowth, people will not go along with it. Instead I think we should advocate for living in dense areas, eating a lot less meat, reducing waste, etc.

https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ?si=HfRWIIMJbDmFhQ-z

Most Europeans make short commutes, so these cars have a sufficient range for the vast majority of drives. They are cheaper, much lighter, and building them uses a lot less energy.

Plus, existing designs and assembly lines can be easily adapted to PHEVs. And in case of long commutes, there is always a gas engine to fall back to and therefore no range anxiety.

In practice it's rocket science because:

- The climate is a function of a bazillion factors, many of which aren't well understood at all, and climatologists suck at programming them anyway. That's why the models are so unstable and frequently go crazy to Venus or ice-age like conditions even when simulating a theoretically stable climate with no CO2 emissions.

- There is evidence the CO2 greenhouse effect may saturate logarithmically, which if so would completely change the discussion around climate (in reality it wouldn't be allowed to change, but in theory)

- Nobody knows what the effect on temperature of doubling CO2 is! This is called ECS and over the decades, different teams of climatologists have estimated it yet their estimates have been drifting apart not closer together. The much vaunted consensus has actually been collapsing, with some researchers claiming ECS is a high number and others that it's a low number.

Everyone says they would love to live in a walkable city, but for some reason, at least in the US, the biggest gainers in population over the recent decades have been all automobile-centric cities (which are probably more accurately described as a large patchwork of suburbs). NYC would have shrunk due to out-migration to other places if it wasn't for foreign in-migration[0]. Chicago lost people 15 out of the last 20 years[1].

[0]: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/about/dcp-p...

[1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-census-chicago-me...

So solar or wind energy is a prerequisite for CO2 capture, followed by the separation from air by physical or chemical means, followed by the reduction to hydrocarbons, either by direct electrolysis or by using hydrogen obtained by water electrolysis.

The batteries in electric vehicles are a storage technology, so all you have to do is charge your car while the sun shines. If you need the batteries anyway it makes much more sense to put them there so you can also stop burning gasoline.

We need a order of magnitude improvement to make the globally growing car use remotely sustainable. Reducing car usage can be done many ways, eg ensuring gas is taxed enough that gas-based cars don't stay in everyday use, and developing non car transport and urban structure.

We have a small car (that transports four adults in comfort) that weighs almost exactly half what the Taurus does. It's also really easy to park!

> There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it

Perhaps instead of trying to ban new ICE vehicles, the taxes should be gradually raised on diesel and petrol to include an additional levy which covers whatever mitigation strategy is appropriate to deal with the emissions.

Any new technology like making hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide requires the spending of a very large amount of money before becoming cost effective.

There are already several decades since almost all companies have stopped doing long-term research. Now everybody does research for things that will either become profitable next year or in any case when they are multi-year projects they are just improvements of established techniques, with known market, so that there is a very low risk that they might not be profitable.

The only way in which hydrocarbon synthesis would see the level of investment that is required for making it cost effective would be with some form of governmental intervention.

We could have had already today cost-effective hydrocarbon synthesis if a lot of money and research time would not have been wasted with research in various directions that have been considered as futile by most since the very beginning, especially for methods of hydrogen storage and for hydrogen fuel cells.

I'm not sure how helpful it is to compare different cars.

Here's a more apples-to-apples comparison: a 2023 Kia Niro (which is itself a conventional hybrid, with a gasoline engine and a small battery and electric motor) compared to a 2023 Kia Niro EV. Almost everything is the same except the drivetrain. The EV[0] is ~500-800lbs heavier than the hybrid[1] depending on trim level and options, which is basically the difference between an empty car and one loaded with four adults and some luggage.

[0]: https://www.kiamedia.com/us/en/models/niro-ev/2023/specifica...

[1]: https://www.kiamedia.com/us/en/models/niro/2023/specificatio...

> Often asserted, rarely backed up. A LR Model 3 weighs 4000 lbs. A Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lbs. An AWD Camry weighs 3600, an Audi S3 weighs 3500. It's ~15% more for sedans.

Because it's approaching "common knowledge", at least for people paying vague attention to the switch. Here's three articles just from this year - took me 10 seconds to find on Google:

https://www.axios.com/2023/04/28/evs-weight-safety-problems

https://globalnews.ca/news/9587791/electric-vehicle-weight-s...

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/11/1148483758/ntsb-heavy-electri...

Are the high-density shops and restaurants that make those places such desirable places to be going to replenish their stock on mass transit? Or does that fall into your 10% exception?

How about vans for handicapped people? Do they also fall into the 10% exception?

What if it's just a miserably hot day in Manhattan, and you have a crying baby in a stroller and bags full of shopping, and you just want to catch a cab ride home this one time, damn it? Nobody said you had to have a baby and go shopping. Do you get a "necessity pass" then?

> just use car as a luxury instead of a necessity

Just price things accordingly and let people decide what's a luxury and what's a necessity to them. Categorical distinctions don't work very well because they're full of exceptions and ways to game the system, even without getting into the ethical question of who gets to decide what's a luxury and what isn't for everyone else.

There was an interesting article discussed at length on HN recently about using electrolysis for synthesising propane, which along side the book The Material World has made me start questioning batteries as the storage solution of the future.

Which is not enough. We need nuclear + wind/solar + degrowth. Because those energies don't remotely replace fossil fuels.

Still, that is a solution (at least that's the less bad I see). We just need to accept it.

PAGES2K has no credibility unfortunately. If the proxies worked they could just use them for the modern era too and avoid the splicing, with thermometer readings providing only greater detail (which isn't important anyway because climate change is about long term trends).

They don't do this. The main reason is because the proxies fail totally in the modern era, with the computed temperatures being very different to observations. The correct interpretation of this is that the chosen proxies don't work for any era, but what they do instead is sweep this fact under the carpet by replacing modern proxy reconstructions with measurements so you can't spot the divergence.

The proxy timeseries also frequently contradict each other in magnitude and direction. For example many proxies show no change over time. If these were truly proxies for global or regional temperature as claimed then different proxies would agree with each other.

If you look at how PAGES2K was constructed it is a festival of pseudo-science. All the usual tricks are there. They delete or truncate data they don't like. What datasets they include varies wildly from release to release without justification. They include tree proxies that they know are distorted by increased CO2=greening in the modern era, and then claim it's a proxy for temperature (this is how Mann got his hockey stick graph in the early 2000s). They even flipped one proxy upside down, the correct interpretation was that temperature had fallen sharply at that location but because they already know what they expect to see, this was mistakenly interpreted backwards and turned into evidence of warming (see the dispute over the varve cores from Hvitavatn in Iceland).

Proxy reconstructions of the past are unfortunately quite a mess.

That 3% extra per year is enough to tip the scales so that net CO2 in the atmosphere has been growing (don’t need a model for that, it can be directly measured).

For details see the recent little book The Physics of Climate Change.

What explains the remaining percent points then?

Atmospheric CO2 at the first measurement in ~1958 was ~318, latest in 2022 was ~419 (reading a plot on wikipedia[1]). Note that in 1958, the industrial revolution was already in history books, idk what pre-fossil-fuel values were. Going from 318 in 1958 to 419 in 2022 is +32%, you said 3%, so there's a few missing there

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...

Edit: just noticed the article lede says +50% since mid-18th century, I don't need to be interpreting graphs here lol. Either way, you missed an order of magnitude somewhere. But it also doesn't matter, because if 3% would have changed our habitat then it still would have been too much right?

CH4 numbers are also questionable.

Assuming they're not broader than the signal being measured, and they certainly won't be for recent history, it ought to actually make it more useful for politicians

It is a consequence of how we live, including habitat loss, pollution, etc. Nuclear fusion (which almost surely won't happen in a useful timeline) is not a solution to our biodiversity problem, only to our climate problem. But if we could today do nuclear fusion in our smartphones, we would still be in a mass extinction. So we need to change more than just CO2 emissions (unless we don't care about biodiversity, but I do).

Granted, cars and air travel, but I think it is more than minor. But anything that is unnecessary, is important. The point is, travel less, that's the best way to admire the places you admire. Something to consider the next time you plan a vacation.

How about a nice bike ride near where you live and marvel at the beauty that is near you? It's still beautiful. And you did our planet a favor.

Mind that long-range flights are also overall more efficient,[1] as they have a longer low-fuel-burn cruise-phase, as contrasted with take-off and climb, which consume tremendous amounts of fuel.

For ranges at which electric-powered aircraft are applicable, ground-based transport (e.g., electrified, preferably high-speed rail) are even more optimal, though there are cases (e.g., inter-island travel, remote low-population regions) which might not suit those. Those tend to be outlier and marginal cases already, however.

________________________________

Notes:

1. On a fuel/passenger-km or cargo-kg-km basis. Though the large overall distance makes for prodigious fuel burn regardless.

Today’s models predict 1.5°-2.0° C by 2040, and 4° C by 2100 if no additional climate mitigations (not even promised or pledged) are implemented. The 4° C scenario is generally regarded as unrealistic so most climate models have another prediction which accounts for some additional climate mitigation which most countries have promised and pledged and put the increase at 2°-3° in 2100.

[1] https://climatetippingpoints.info/2022/09/09/climate-tipping...

If you list it and it lists you then, due to recursion, you will fill up the Internet and it will have to be rebooted.

Is that just a catchy phrase to earn +1, or you mean that so there is no merit in doing Country-wide policies, enforce and inspect them to see if they are being followed accordingly and if they are effective at all?

"The paper was strongly criticized by numerous scientists for its methodology and for its misuse of data from previously published studies, which prompted concerns about the peer review process of the paper. The controversy resulted in the resignation of half of the editors of the journal and in the admission by its publisher, Otto Kinne, that the paper should not have been published as it was."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_and_Baliunas_controversy

Did it not occur to you to check this?

Hoover dam to be a 'dry hole by 2021': From the MSNBC documentary, Future Earth 2025, quote: "As water levels drop, by 2017 hoover dam will no longer provide drinking water to Las Vegas, Tucson, and San Diego. And it stops generating electricity to Los Angeles. And if nothing is done, the reservoir will be a dry hole by 2021".

This site calls it an unsuccessful prediction, yet there have been tons of water conservation efforts around Lake mead (more specifically the Colorado River). In other words "if we don't do something X will happen" followed by us putting a ton of work into preventing X apparently means the original prediction was wrong.

Other predictions like X could happen in "as little as 50 years" (establishing a lower, but no upper bound), are now marked incorrect 50 years later.

1C per decade and 4C per decade are different. They’re both warming.

I’m skeptic of how hyperbolic we lay out global warming to be - Extinction in a few decades.

But a believer that it will be painful for a large amount of population on the planet. Very painful.