Why many scientists are now saying climate change is an all-out 'emergency'
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This is basically correct, and it is the thing that every climate activist does not seem to understand.
When you start treating your favored issue in moralistic terms, and insisting that it's an emergency that must be acted upon now, then you have entered into the realm of political economy. You're now making a statement that the issue you're advocating for is more important than other issues, and people take umbrage with that.
It may seem obvious at first glance that if we're careening towards 1.5C with myriad and unknown feedback loops that might lead to ecological disaster, we should stop emitting carbon, and pretty quickly. We only have six years.
Except to do that, we have to end almost all transportation, reduce electricity usage substantially, stop using all concrete, stop flying airplanes, stop eating beef, stop using petrochemical fertilizers, etc. It is not an exaggeration to say that billions of people would die within 12 months.
You might complain and say, my goodness, we've had fifty years to be reducing these things, of course we can switch to sustainable energy and materials. But we didn't. So now we have to decide what's most important, and if it's your position that the most important thing right now is to stop emitting carbon -- or even by half, within six years -- then your position is utterly insane and divorced from reality, because yes, many people will die as a direct result.
And if you associate yourself with the position that "we have to take immediate and drastic cuts that will cause huge numbers of people to quickly die," then people might get upset with you.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38065125 (citations)
It would already be happening and we would have noticed.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/07-11-2022-statement---...
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/05/1136897
https://www.v-20.org/new-health-data-shows-unabated-climate-...
I am not worried if you don't believe. It doesn't matter if you do. Doesn't matter if I do for that matter. It only matters if people who have big levers do.
It was also hard to believe at first because, if it were so bad, surely someone would have done something. Alas, it's just not sufficiently in the public's, and thus policymakers', perception.
My first thought would be lung cancer, but the WHO says:
> Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer, responsible for approximately 85% of all cases.
> lung cancer [caused] an estimated 1.8 million deaths (18%) in 2020
So the 15% of lung cancer deaths that weren't caused by smoking would only account for 300k deaths.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/lung-cancer
> Particulate matter – often abbreviated as PM – is everything in the air that is not a gas. These are very small particles made up of sulfate, nitrates, ammonia, sodium chloride, black carbon, mineral dust and water that are suspended in the air that we breathe.
> Particles with a diameter of 10 micrometers (10 millionth of a metre) or less can enter deep inside a person’s lungs. But the most health-damaging particles are even smaller. Those with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less – abbreviated as PM2.5 – can penetrate the lung barrier and enter a person’s blood system. These are extremely fine particles: 2.5 micrometers is about one-thirtieth of the diameter of a human hair.1
> All studies of the mortality impacts of air pollution consider our exposure to particulate matter. Some studies also consider the impact of ground-level ozone. The death toll from ozone is much lower than that of PM, but it is still considerable: it’s responsible for hundreds of thousands of premature deaths every year. Other air pollutants are rarely considered in global studies.
These claims appear to be based on studies in which PM2.5 levels have been correlated (by statistical models) with increased risks of heart disease as well as respiratory problems.
I haven't been able to find anything describing exact mechanisms.
But Pope et al [1] concluded that "a decrease in the concentration of PM2.5 of 10 μg per cubic meter is associated with an increase in life expectancy of 0.77 year."
For comparison, the EPA's clean air standard for PM2.5 is 12 μg per cubic meter.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.123.0... (“Projected Change in the Burden of Excess Cardiovascular Deaths Associated With Extreme Heat by Midcentury (2036–2065) in the Contiguous United States”)
I understand the idiology of science existing in a abstract realm detached from reality and politics, but also, I can't fault them from feeling the heat under their feet. Climate change is not existential for us, but it's gonna suck and can be entirely prevented if you can only somehow get through to people
> And if you associate yourself with the position that "we have to take immediate and drastic cuts that will cause huge numbers of people to quickly die," then people might get upset with you.
People got upset with Nelson Mandela also, enough to lock him up for 27 years. I wonder if he'd say today he'd rather not have made people upset to help solve a big problem
People need to accept that this statement is just incorrect. We cannot stop it in the near future. Even if we had the means of producing non-CO2 energy in quantities enough to provide all our energy needs today (that is, net-zero CO2 today), what we've already added will still continue to add heat. We do not have the facilities to produce bio-jet fuel in industrial quantities at inexpensive prices. It's going to take years to convert the elect grid to wind and solar, and that's even when people want to do it because it's cheaper. We need some way to replace all the fossil fuel used in agriculture, somehow make concrete net-zero, efficiently create steel without CO2. Ain't happening any time soon, even everyone wanted it.
> ... if you can only somehow get through to people
Actually, a large number of people have actually decided. They want to ignore it. It's not the choice you want, and I don't think it's a responsible or wise choice, but if you want to actually solve the problem, you need to deal with that reality. Just saying "well, if we could only pass a law and force people..." is foolish (which is the next step after "getting through to people" doesn't work because they already made their choice).
If you want to solve the problem, make people want to do it of their own free will. For instance, make it cheaper to be net-zero CO2 than to burn it. Make it cheaper to take out CO2 from the atmosphere than to burn it. Make it so much cheaper to use less than people want to use less. Unfortunately, there are some hard problems from a chemistry standpoint here.
What people do, based on their opinion as informed by the information they get, matters.
> It's going to take years to convert the elect grid to wind and solar, and that's even when people want to do it because it's cheaper.
Exactly. We still have years (sufficient years to avoid much worse than 1.5 degrees), and we had more years before. It's starting to happen now because it's cheaper, not because it's the right thing to do for those alive 50+ years from now (estimate, idk the exact value). That's perhaps the most depressing part: we can't make people care about things that aren't exceedingly obvious and it causes a lot of suffering. Even now, with events starting to happen that would have been very unlikely without the already-here warming, we're nitpicking over what might be the cheapest path instead of making a comprehensive plan with all available options included in optimal proportions to minimise the total cost, and breaking ground such that we're at least going to be finished transitioning the electricity generation part of the equation in 20 years or so. Don't need to force anyone if you can offer them nice jobs building the infrastructure we need anyway.
> make people want to do it of their own free will. For instance, make it cheaper to be net-zero CO2 than to burn it.
Thermodynamics wants to have a word with you :( if it were that simple, that's what would have been done. Who wouldn't want cheaper energy? Don't even need climate change to want that.
Since that didn't happen before, I don't see why it suddenly would now if we only want it hard enough. We might get lucky with breakthroughs, but in the meantime, it makes sense to try and get through to people that maybe they should look at heat pumps for their next gas burner upgrade (for example, and as local climate permits of course)
It wouldn't. It hasn't happened so far or at least what's been happening has been painfully slow. We don't have the time to convince mom-n-pap who don't see why their SUV is a problem. We don't have time to convince your average gym bro who has suddenly adopted an all-beef diet to look swole. We don't have the time to convince big oil to stop investing in and opening new oil refineries.
What we do have the time for is organizing enough people who see where we are heading and voting and electing for representatives that support a green/fossil free agenda. Removing all the ridiculous farming subsidies on beef/animal agriculture, stopping with bailing banks and oil companies and holding them accountable with jail time and company-ending fines when they mess up seems to be a step in the right direction.
Creating enough criminal/punitive and economical/taxation incentives to FORCE everybody to get on board with a fossil-free world is the only clear path to mitigating what's already happening and accelerating in nature. Everything else is just waiting for the hammer to fall.
Tell the truth. Display a counter reading "39 years, 11 months, 29 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes until the astroid hits Earth".
> This is basically correct
Why is it correct? Says who?
> and it is the thing that every climate activist does not seem to understand.
I think it is you that does not understand how and why people are reacting.
> then you have entered into the realm of political economy.
False assertion.
"You like having an economy: in general, having money and trade. If you do not do these things, nobody will have money."
... is not a political statement. To say it is, is to say that a statement such as:
"Watch out, there's a car coming!"
... is a manifesto about transport issues.
> Except to do that, we have to end almost all transportation, reduce electricity usage substantially, stop using all concrete, stop flying airplanes, stop eating beef, stop using petrochemical fertilizers, etc.
That sounds largely correct.
But then:
> It is not an exaggeration to say that billions of people would die within 12 months.
Yes, it is. Stopping personal ICE vehicle transport, stopping non-essential flights, stopping all meat eating, stop using all petrochemicals...
That does not spell doom for billions.
Yours is the emotional exaggeration here.
> if it's your position that the most important thing right now is to stop emitting carbon [...] then your position is utterly insane
This is a standard, if very strange to me, right-wing political tactic: take what you are doing, accuse your opponents of doing it, then mock it.
It is, in a word, BS. It is crude appeal to emotion, and it is lying.
An honest response would be "we have left it too late and so now billions will die". But you are being nothing but dishonest, while role-playing some kind of square-jawed straight-talker or something.
It is too late. The only question now is how bad it will be and if the blows can be softened.
If you're too busy for more than 3min of reading, read this:
https://www.okdoomer.io/10-reasons-our-civilization-will-soo...
If you've got an hour, read this:
https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to...
Both well cited, both lacking rhetoric, both taking a cold hard look at where we stand.
While your are trying to mock your perceived opponents by misstating what they are saying and doing, and you should be ashamed.
If you truly believe that then why are you wasting time on HN?
Can you point me to what I could do with an extra 15min a day that will avert global collapse?
... Thought not.
I think there is a lot possible still. People would not die from smaller cars, less travelling, and smaller houses. Until the 1960s, people almost never took an airplane. Airlines sold the idea that 2 to 3 long distance vacations per year are necessary for mental health.
Literally nobody is suggesting we do that.
That's one of the dumbest strawman arguments I've read recently.
We've basically done nothing so far, and we're all out of ideas.
We could instead do things like just reverse the tax cuts for SUVs and Trucks and apply taxes on top of them and phase out the "light truck" CAFE standards.
And fewer pedestrians might die from overweight vehicles.
> Literally nobody is suggesting we do that.
Okay, well what are we suggesting? Do we want to stay within the 1.5C warming target?
* If we banned all global commercial aviation tomorrow (~750Mt), we would save 4.5 Gt over 6 years, delaying our lock-in date by about 5 weeks.
* If we banned all global passenger vehicles tomorrow (~5Gt), about 30Gt over 6 years, we delay the date by ~9 months.
I'm sorry, but if no one is suggesting we do these things, why is so much ink spilled over the 1.5C warming carbon budget?
If you don't want to breach it, we _have_ to do these things, there is no other choice. You can't just tweak US CAFE standards a little bit. Even if you immediately ban every single car and truck on the road on the entire planet, you're nowhere even remotely close to where you need to be to prevent 1.5C warming.
If you ban all cars globally, all trucks, all global commercial aviation, if you immaculately create 50 billion carbon-free solar panels to provide free and green solar renewable energy for every single residential household on the planet, you've still only delayed things by a couple years.
Fertilizer is about 2.6Gt annually, 15.6Gt over six years. Are we going to keep that?
What are you suggesting we should do?
And this is exactly what the point of my comment is all about. Things like the linked article in this story are designed to allow people to moralize about climate change without affirmatively supporting a particular policy choice. It's just a club to beat people over the head with, without actually describing what the solution is.
It gives people the idea that we _could_ meet these targets if we wanted to, maybe with some minor changes, some cost that someone else could absorb.
But we can't. The only way we could meet the 1.5C warming target is with massive, drastic changes to the lives of all of us, changes so large that our lives would be unrecognizable, and indeed, enormous numbers would die.
No, we've fucked that up and that ship has sailed.
The people raising the alarm over that level being breached aren't actually suggesting that there's any reasonable way to prevent it.
That may very well be a messaging problem, but mostly because of people like you that have managed to entirely misread it.
> What are you suggesting we should do?
Something along the lines of the carbon wedges proposal from 2004:
http://www-g.eng.cam.ac.uk/impee/topics/stabilisationwedges/...
Each wedge is a 25GtC reduction of emissions over the next 50 years.
We should have started 20 years ago, we could choose to start now.
Note that "banning all cars" is not one of the proposed wedges.
A favorite "political issue" could have connotations of being some curious side hobby that absorbs a person's time, like a guilty pleasure for which they might make apologies for their interest, like being into trains in public transportation, or nerding out over Federal reserve policy.
If someone is a climate scientist, and reviews a bunch of models and research showing catastrophic consequences for the planet, and wants to communicate about that, labeling that as a "favorite view" is a representation that misses 99% of what's important about why a person is motivated to communicate about it, because nothing about it has to do with the selection of a personal interest or the satisfaction of becoming immersed in it. So it's not a description that passes a step zero sanity check.
Next is the notion that by communicating about this they have inappropriately crossed lines from science into politics. I think talking this way repeats something that I believe is a pretty fundamental confusion regarding the fact value distinction. And without getting into a long version of it, I think Hillary Putnam is a pretty excellent philosopher on the specific question, and on the ways that people use the fact value distinction to attempt to insulate policy from being informed by facts in ways that allow people to be more deeply harmed.
But no, the state of the Earth and the environment in the choices we make about it are all already intrinsically political, in the sense that there's something important at stake where we have to collectively weigh what choices we want to make, and this is not a case of a frivolous one that's a mere indulgence. There is no pre-existing state of nature that has become newly violated by climate scientists sounding the alarm. We can and do allow our best and newest information to inform policy. This is about as wrong as it gets.
>And if you associate yourself with the position that "we have to take immediate and drastic cuts that will cause huge numbers of people to quickly die,"
I pretty closely follow the state level organizations and my home state that work on environmental issues, and I've even volunteered with them from time to time. I could tell you as a pretty ironclad matter of fact that they don't advocate for anything like you're claiming. In my state they're advocating for things like incentives and rebates to install heat pumps and solar panels, as well as regulations that help utilities more effectively accommodate renewable energy. Stuff like that. As other commenters in this thread are noting this is a massive strawman.
Sorry, but what are we talking about? You cannot make even a tiny dent in climate change with rebate programs for solar panels. Yes, it's going to help at the margins, but it's the kind of small-fry change that doesn't change anything in any meaningful way.
This thread is about preventing 1.5C warming. According to climate scientists, we have ~250Gt left in our carbon budget before we lock-in that 1.5C warming. There are all manner of media stories beating people over the head over this.
You can ban all cars, all trucks, all electricity, all global aviation, do it tomorrow, and you've only delayed things by a few years.
It's already worse. It's not going to get better for hundreds of years. But IF we were seriously head in that direction IMMEDIATELY ... we can could stop the MUCH MUCH worse from arriving ... forever. We missed our chance to avert what we've got. It's not a case of ALL or NOTHING. We -can- make changes to avert some of the damage that's already arriving ... for ourselves and our descendents.
Look, global warming exists, it's (at least partially) man-made, and that's really bad.
But it's one issue out of many man-made or man-fixable issues. Fighting poverty is another. Curing diseases like malaria is also important. Curbing starvation. Spreading democracy and the rule of law. Then there are women's rights. Education. Racism. Avoiding WWIII. I am sure I forgot many large issues. How do we prioritize? Do we have to prioritize or can we deal with all of them at once?
Richer societies can afford to heat their homes with more sustainable solutions.
More educated societies are more likely to introduce nuclear power or build windmill parks.
War could worsen the greenhouse effect.
Interestingly, lot of those things are connected:
Global warming is making droughts and floods more likely, thereby directly increasing the chance of starvation by threatening global food supply
Global warming is making warmer some parts of Europe, making ideal habitats for mosquitoes where they were not thriving before. Just this year Paris had to fumigate (first time in history) against a new invasive type of mosquito, known to be a malaria spreader. Additionally, Zika virus, once confined to parts of Africa, is now present in Greece, Turkey and other Balkan countries.
Global warming is likely to create a large societal collapse. When societies collapse, education and women's rights get thrown out of the window, so does the rule of law. Conversely, educated people and women are shown to care and do more about climate change.
Based on that, I think it's easy enough to prioritize...
Climate Change has felt like the Truck Almost Hitting The Pole[1] meme for decades. We're always A Mere N Years Away From Disaster, and then after N years, we're again M Years Away From Disaster. This has been the message since I can remember.
1: https://tenor.com/view/truck-crash-test-pole-doesnt-reach-gi...
Unfortunately, humans collectively are very shortsighted, and it’s hard to communicate issues with seemingly intangible or long-term consequences. So we continue to argue pointlessly while slowly boiling like the proverbial frog in a pot.
1: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/climate/climate-and-ext...
You can raise the alarm and be accused about alarmism. You can say nothing, keep publishing in ivory tower journals and be guilty of gross-negligence of monumental proportions.
It shouldn't be like this. Science is like a pair of glasses through which we can see a bit further than our noses. Breaking them is an act of supreme idiocy.
There is simply no chance the key carbon producing 'developing' nations are going to curtail emissions. They simply cannot afford to do this given the economic and social stability costs associated with the migration. This, and parts of Europe (namely Germany) are now dependent on higher emission inputs as a result of Russia's Ukraine gambit.
The vast sums expended on climate change reversal are better now spent on climate change adaptation, though I fully expect this to be another trillion dollar boondoggle enriching NGOs, consultants, advocacy groups and corporations.
Sorry to be the bearer of the bad news and I accept the massive downvotes as my penance.
I'm afraid you need a different straw man.
I’m cynical against peoples behaviour, I truly believe we won’t change and funds/research should be directed to mitigation than prevention.
The greater direct effect at much lower real personal cost, for billionaires, plus the greater likelihood of their influencing others to follow suit, makes the calculus a bit different for them.
The tragedy of the commons is a real sonofabitch.
The "tragedy of the commons" is a propaganda tool used to justify privatization of the commons. The commons were reasonably well-managed until a small number of people decided to extract maximum profit from them (and damn the consequences).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine
The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back
Do we (as a society/species) though? If we cared about climate change we'd be doing something about climate change. And we're really not.
Everybody cares about somebody else making changes in their life to reduce pollution but how many people actually make meaningful change in their own lives?
And if you ask somebody to consider drastic change in their own life – driving as little as possible, never flying in airplanes, buying significantly less stuff in general, not having kids, not eating meat, living in apartments rather than single-family homes, etc. they'll just say the corporations are the problem and anything they do wouldn't matter at all.
I'm kind of at the point where I say we just all let our own metaphorical 4x4 engines run and see what happens. Most of us reading this will be long dead before anything heinous happens to us (or we're wealthy enough to be insulated enough from the effects to where we'll get by OK).
Well, fast forward a few years... the message got out. The public knows it's bad. No, it's a crisis. Or emergency, or whatever. It's the climate apocalypse. Okay.
It's numbing by this point. It's like we found ourselves on the ladder of climate grief and jumped up from denial, missed every other rung along the way, and fell straight down to burnout.
COVID provided temporary relief, Greta came and went, Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement tried, the IPCC lost more and more of its clout, the American conservative media downplayed all of it, China wouldn't do anything unless the US did... and sooo... here we are in 2023, scientists all yelling and screaming that the world's burning up and it's all going to hell, and by and large the public just shrugs and goes, "Yeah, we know. Waddya want me to do about it?"
What is there to do? Collectively, as a species, we decided we don't care about this enough, that we'd rather prolong the status quo than risk any drastic action. Sure, we'll ride our bikes more and buy carbon offsets when we fly, maybe eat one less steak a week, consider an electric car... it's nowhere near enough. Guess we'll just let the next generations deal with the consequences. Shrug.
In the last decade we've had several culture wars, a global pandemic, Ukraine, Hamas... each of these got more meaningful action and mindshare than the climate, even though none of them have as far-ranging impacts. I guess humans are just bad at dealing with long-term changes that start small and snowball into something terrible a few decades later.
I guess at this point the only realistic thing left to think about is how to respond to the changing conditions, from aglands going away to wildfires to climate migrants/refugees to border instabilities to raw resources for batteries. I think we've already moved on from the question of "how bad is it, really?" (oh yeah, guess it's pretty bad), past "what are we going to do?" (silence), and to "how can I compartmentalize this so I can carry on with my day".
It's so sad, but... whatcha gonna do?
To your point that as a society we have decided to prolong the status quo, I suggest a different perspective. I know that I won't move into a city and give up driving. It takes way too many things that make life worth living. I expect that you and others have a different perspective. I can accept that. ut hte discussion should not stop at that apparent impasse. The discussion fails by presenting a limited palette of unpalatable options as the only solutions instead of looking at wider range of options.
I rarely hear about options that we can do locally that will help reduce the impact of carbon in the atmosphere. A common wish list item is not just bicycle friendly roadways but bicycle focused roadways. To do this you need to realize that everywhere there's a roadway, you need to make it bicycle friendly because people are not to give up where they live. I can get behind that for all year riding. There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.
EV problems are almost all engineering problems. EVs that are good for 50-100 mile range like my Chevy volt is a good local car. Citroen has a design that's cheap to build, uses standard electronic components could be built in and for local community. Batteries are getting cheaper, lighter, with more capacity. Longer range travel has a variety of options ranging from short haul electric air, long distance rail and better charging networks
Community virtual power plants. Batteries are getting cheap enough that you can drop in 4 kW of battery plus inverter for a few thousand dollars. Use those batteries to peak load shave which takes polluting plants off of the grid during high demand times. This is not something should be controlled by a public utility but by the local community. Vermont is doing this now to avoid the need to build more power plants. They even install solar panels at customers houses to add more power to the grid.
Provide tax disincentives for maintaining a lawn and irrigation system. Make it easy to rewild anything covered with turf-grass. This is one of those long-chain effects. Rewilding does a very good job storing carbon and moisture in the soil. It provides food and habitat for insects, further enables more plant growth in environments that are drought resistant or at least tolerant. Rinse and repeat.
Rewiding will also cut down the amount of pollutants created by two strokes lawn equipment. Some communities have started on this by mandating battery-powered lawn equipment only.
Convert nighttime lighting 2700 K temperature lighting. More efficient, less damaging to the nighttime ecology. Reduce lighting intensity after 10 o'clock at night and use more motion sensitive full-cut off lighting. This easily saves 50% or more of nighttime power which could be used to charge batteries for the next day for peak loads.
On airflight, mandate that air flights cannot create contrails. It's already known how to minimize them by changing altitude to avoid parts of the atmosphere which are prone to trigger contrails. You want to avoid contrails because clouds. Low altitude daytime clouds reflect heat upward. Reduce the number of clouds the ground gets hot. High-altitude clouds hold in heat like an insulating blanket. Minimize high-altitude clouds especially over the polar regions and a significant amount of heat radiates in the space.
Here's an interesting article on radiation cooling both in the atmosphere and on physical devices that can be used to supplement or replace air conditioning. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13729 this is a well covered topic if you're an atmospheric scientist.
There are several geo-engineering experiments that we should be checking about. There are some that are using calcium carbonate I believe to absorb CO2 the ocean. There is the ever popular iron fertilization which does work but it's very finicky apparently. Use them.
It seems like every month there's a new chemical process which is efficiently does direct air capture for CO2. Pick a few, techniques, build a few machines implementing these processes in cities and on a bake-off. See which one works the best and when you have it working, open a mutual fund to individual people can invest in and profit from direct air capture.
You might not think any of these items will have a big effect and you are right. We got to where we are by a thousand bad decisions but these ideas are like compound interest in that they build the previous day, week, month, year's effort. If we keep making more small wrong decisions, the death cult of climate change will be right. But we need a plan a model a way to sell small right decisions the individual people can do in their own land in their own life and their own cities. I have no illusions that will be easy or that everyone ago yeah let's march in the same direction but we need to introduce these small small ideas and plans on how to implement.
If we can show that these changes don't have a big negative effect on people's lives, then will be able to start going after the production side of the CO2 problem. Change works only when you give them something good first before you take away what they know no matter how bad it is.
One plan to keep thinking I gotta find a way to do it is to build 24 inch stoves that cheap-add landlord's use in crappy apartments to replace gas ovens. But instead of using the traditional resistive heating elements make them induction. Make the oven convection and if the house doesn't have enough current capacity, put a battery in the unit and use that to supplement the house current when cooking. The other thing is to leverage the New York State in window heat pump project to put heating in low-income housing in the hands of the tenants not dependent on the ancient gas boilers or even worse open air gas heaters found in many crappy old apartments.
Small stuff like this has a big impact not just on the environment from people's lives. I know I can't do it myself had talked up whenever possible to try and find other people willing to work with me on it.
It is discouraging that we are in a multi-situation failure scenario. There are some speckles of hope. There are people out there trying to reforest deserts to bring moisture back into the soil and make a self-sustaining environment. You see the videos on YouTube and a lot of the work makes sense. How real it is? I don't know. It's YouTube but reversing densification is one way to make things better around the world and it's relatively cheap. Some of the things I suggested could also be applied to troubled places to improve their environment.
I think the important thing is not to get discouraged by the magnitude of it but to pick something and make a change happen. Make something positive, constructive that other people can buy into.
Don't let the climate change death cult wear you down.
But I don't think that's quite enough, mathematically. You nailed the heart of the issue:
> It takes way too many things that make life worth living. I expect that you and others have a different perspective. I can accept that.
> Change works only when you give them something good first before you take away what they know no matter how bad it is.
Fundamentally, people don't want to lose something they've had already. Many don't even want to be inconvenienced. They view any sort of minor intrusion on their lives as government overreach -- maybe partially by personality, but also due to the intense conservative propaganda advancing this "me vs them" viewpoint on purpose. It's faux Old West ruggedness mixed with weaponized individualism. We've stopped being able to even think about collective problems, much less solving them.
For what it's worth, I don't live in a city either, but in a pretty rural area where EVs aren't super practical, frequently fly (and don't care about the contrails), etc. So this isn't me soapboxing, just pointing out that my own climate scorecard is pretty terrible too.
Maybe given a few hundred years people will trend towards wisdom and more ecologically sound behavior. But we don't really have that kind of time. It's kinda like wartime drafts... you can build up a standing army of volunteers if you have the decades and resources to slowly accumulate them, but in the heat of the moment, sometimes you just need to round people up against their will.
Climate isn't quite THAT urgent, but if we wait for volunteers... well, we've already been doing that for three or four decades. The environmentalists have been doing it forever, and other people do it here or there... and mathematically it just doesn't add up to enough. That's how we got here in the first place.
It's not a "death cult" to want stronger reins on private liberties in order to secure a collective well-being. It's an ideology, but one that half of America does not want, and without them, the rest of the world doesn't stand much of a chance. Unless China singlehandedly decides to do something about it, which might make a big enough difference.
But not everything in the world can be solved by individual willpower alone. Sometimes it's individual will that's the problem to begin with. Our freedoms aren't infinite, and our choices have very real life-and-death consequences for others in the world.
We all have crappy environmental records. :-) Last year flew to Scandinavia, drove 4000 km through Estonia, Finland, and Sweden in a 300,000 km old diesel Volkswagen van. Yeah, that was a skidmark on a white couch.
The right kind of volunteers can make a difference. It's more like we have to form a life cult where people do the research, do the planning, take the action to make change happen. For example, have rewilding yards to show the demonstration to your city Council to show what you mean and give them a proposed code change that's not threatening but has a right mix of carrots and sticks. Just watch the ADU conflicts on zoning changes, that tells you a lot about what you have to do.
On lighting, a small group of 10 people over the course of a year did all the right things politically and got a small city here in Massachusetts to convert over to proper nighttime lighting. Now they're working at replicating that success in other communities by training people how to find the decision-makers, to volunteer for the right committees to understand how to communicate without offending or triggering reflexive action.
I think what we need to do is replicate the success of crazy Republicans at building occult and political force. I don't know how to do that, it may be distasteful but there's no denying their success.
I feel like many of the points you raise are in large part "failures to communicate". As a friend says I'm great at process, I'm great at design but I have no skills in the political and we need people who are good at the political and work with the people who are good at design.
(I’m cynical of peoples behaviours but do know climate change is real)
The government has never had an "Oh shit!" card, except in scifi movies. It has always had to make a sales pitch for population buy-in. And it did a crap selling job during COVID because of polarized media companies and fractured government.
Yet the one technology that could actually solve this problem (nuclear energy) is off the table for some reason. We have unlimited clean energy at our fingertips. But instead of discussing it as a solution we’d rather resort to doom and gloom emergency language.
Germany has been adding 1GW of PV every month in 2023. That's one typical, large nuclear every month.
While I don't see nuclear energy as the folly I used to, I don't think it's the answer either.
Compare what PV has been able to achieve with way less subsidies and it becomes clear that nuclear - from a cost perspective - is a dead end.
Just look at the medical isotope shortages that have occurred. As a species we can't even see the need to have redundant sources of life saving materials that can only be produced in specialized reactors. What if something happens to them unexpectedly or they need maintenance? Shrug... is the answer we get.
In the US electricity production accounts for ~25% of greenhouse gas emissions. Nuclear may be able to help with some of the other ~75% as well, but certainly not nearly all of it. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Also, when you do the full analysis, we only need a 10% bump in generation to accommodate every single US household have 2 EVs - and that's if they don't shift to charging at night and insist on charging during the day during peak load.
Add in the fact that the average US household can produce 50% of their power using solar power and you realize there's no need for any bump-out of generation at all.
Why promote nuclear with all of its attendant complications when you don't need to?
We've known that climate change is a problem for more than 50 years now. Just because we chose to ignore it doesn't mean there was no climate change.
Oh how I wish you were right about it being a false alarm
Climate scientists have for years warned that we were running into a catastrophe and now you blame them for... trying warn us?
What other strategy for publicizing would you have preferred? That climate scientists sit on this knowledge until the problem is a crisis right here and now, so that we would take it really, really serious?
That doesn't seem like a rational strategy. But that's just my understanding of your argument.
> But we’ve been hearing “just x years left until catastrophe” for decades now. It always results in higher taxes, fewer freedoms, and the crisis never abates.
Not as "[creating policies to address climate change] always results in higher taxes...", but as "[creating policies to address whatever hyped up crisis] always results in higher taxes...".
In other words, a history of alarmism and bullshit has this person jaded and eroded their trust in policymakers. I'm probably wrong. Anyway...
For climate change specifically, I see lots of people crying about alarmism, and I've made basically the exact same comment you're making now. What are you supposed to do if there really is something alarming goin g on, meekly suggest a diet and hope people realize it's existential? I personally think governments aren't doing enough and we are totally fucked despite ample warning from scientists (doing the right thing) because we'd rather die than lose some modern conveniences.
The wolves are coming, but this person has seen "crisis" and "emergency" called for every little thing and now they just don't believe it anymore. And we get to be eaten by wolves now!
Sure; and every year that number as been getting smaller.
Just because you ignore it doesn't mean that it will go away magically.
I would be interested to hear how freedom (presumably personal liberty) have been in recession due to climate change discussions.
Irrelevant if you agree with the purpose or not, this seems pretty straight forward.
That's why we have laws and taxes; so people can't be too much of d*ks towards one another. If even a minority of people can't be decent human beings on their own will and still behave like in the middle ages, punitive coercion in form of taxes or incarceration has been known to do the trick.
Government regulations often represent losses of liberty when applied to individual citizens. The government has a monopoly on violence, they can forcibly make you do things, with guns.
e.g. California now forces people in buy and install solar panels on their house if they are building a new house. What do I do if I try to build my own house without solar panels? They cost tens of thousands of dollars so it is realistic that someone wouldn't be able to afford them. Well the government will not give me a certificate of occupancy. What happens if I just live in my house anyway without solar panels? The government will condemn my house and show up to demolish it eventually. What happens if I try to stop them from demolishing my house? They will arrest me and put me in jail, if I resist they will shoot me.
This is a loss of freedom: before I was allowed to build my own house without being forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a thing, and now I do not have that freedom.
This type of thing plays out in a million ways: cars, generators, gas stoves, etc.
Green versions of technologies are better, a first-principles understanding is that more efficient things are better and cheaper and should naturally succeed in a market. A good example is lawn care products: gas-powered mowers edgers, blowers, etc are being phased out naturally because their electric alternatives are better and cheaper. This same thing will play out with electrification of other things given enough investment and scaling-up. Which we are currently seeing already. Take cars: the % of electric car sales is going up on its own without the government needing to force people to buy them (though yes, government incentives are accelerating this). This is by dint of the technology just being better and more efficient, companies like Tesla investing in the technology has proven it to be better.
My example of the solar panels is only a small one, there are other things like the ULEZ cameras in London which literally restrict freedom of movement for people, which are even worse, but those types of things are not happening yet in the United States so I won't dwell on them here.
It's too late to put the genie in the bottle now, but if anything, the government of the world haven't been strict enough in the regulations, haven't taxed enough the top earners, haven't done enough to curb the giant corporations.
As for fewer freedoms, I am not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean by freedom the manner in which large corps exploit their own workers, other countries, and eventually throw the whole world under the bus in the singular pursuit of profit? Or the freedom of cowboy bank-boys destroying the life savings and retirement funds of millions and putting yet other millions out of housing, just so they can satisfy their own gambling habits? That kind freedom, if anything, has become much much more and has gone unchecked for far too long.
> If you live in a constant state of emergency, eventually people become numb.
We share a finite world and its finite resources with one another. The freedom of rich douches to buy a Lambo to compensate for the gaping void in their soul comes at the expense of others, and luckily, more and more people start realizing this.
Not everybody stays numb in the face of a never-ending crisis. Some people, like me, get progressively angrier at the state of things. You can see it by the tone of my writing, you can see it by the millions on the streets protesting the oil giants, old dudes sending young boys to fight their wars, old dudes racking massive profits with 310:1 the salary of their own workers. I hope new generations are even angrier than us, and fight for a lasting change, because if they don't, they might be the last ones.
What we are seeing recently in Maui, California, PNW, and elsewhere are primarily the consequences of an artificial blip of decades of over-protection of adjacent forests and waterways because of misguided environmental activism. When you refuse to allow forest culling or occasional fires and hinder development of dams and levees, later fires and natural movement of rivers becomes uncontrollable. While more land was developed and the population exploded, the resource management expansion was missing. Climate change may have an effect on these recent incidents, but thinking of it as the main cause is misleading.
The connection between the frequency of tsunamis and global temperature is mediated through several mechanisms such as sea level rise, glacial melting, ocean acidification which affects seabed stability, and the destruction of natural barriers such as coral reef systems.
So yeah, saying that climate change will be really bad in 30-50 years, and also saying that we have less than 5-10 years to prevent it are not incompatible with each other. I hope that clarifies it for you.
Moreover, climate modeling is hard. While most scientists agree that climate change is caused by man made emissions, there is still a lot of debate as to how much time we have and how bad it will be. So if you are seeing contradictory headlines, that's because the science is a work in progress. If that bothers you, maybe just ignore the headlines for now and understand that we will never have 100% certainty about how long or how bad or when things will happen, but we do know the general direction of where things are headed and we do know that we need to act soon.
You're out of date.
It's much, much worse than that now.
And for the record, I don't think we are taking this issue seriously enough. Even if the most likely outcome is a slow "boiling the frog" type of scenario, if there is even a 1% chance that a series of tipping points could result in cataclysmic climate catastrophe (which I believe to be the case), then we should absolutely be prioritizing this issue.
Are we all going to die by 2030? No.
Are we going to have significant impacts by 2100? Absolutely.
Will warfare exacerbate the problem and kill off even more people? Certainly.
Will civilization collapse? Maybe, but probably not. Regional collapse is likely.
Will humans go extinct? Almost certainly not.
You can't buy incandescent housebulbs any more?
That these tepid admonitions of yesteryear have turned into dire warnings should come at the surprise of no one.
The time to take this serious was 20 years ago. Now it _is_ an emergency.
I'm in the camp of what ever it is that we can sufficiently predict, we should also prepare for it, like it isn't likely that some space rock is going to hit earth in the next yew years, but it's a sufficient enough probability that there is work being done to track them and at least have plants on what to do if it comes to that, but this is not the case with climate change.
It is a very common error of thinking, especially in people obsessed with what Douglas Adams called "the movements of small green pieces of paper", to think that people with lots of money are very smart.
This is mediaeval superstitious thinking: "he is better off than me, therefore he is more fortunate. He has been given good fortune by god. He must be holier than me, and if I become more holy, I will receive god's favour too."
It's nonsense.
Smart people are not doing this. Rich idiots are.
Stockton Rush was a rich CEO and clearly smart enough to found a company that could build submersibles.
He decided he knew better than everyone else in the world and built a submersible out of composites.
Turned him into a physics jelly sandwich over the wreck of the Titanic.
Being smart and rich doesn't mean that every idea you have is always right.
More or less the same thing applies to the chemists who thought they discovered a room temperature superconductor or Musk buying Twitter. They're all definitely smart, but they make mistakes just like everyone else. When all is at stake is money they often have enough money that they can make a lot of mistakes and lose a lot of money and people only remember the ones that succeeded.
And A lot of what separates smart rich people from smart not-rich people is that rich people can try 20 different stupid ideas before finding a good one, without going completely bankrupt.
But looks like everybody hates this question.
1. [[citation needed]]
2. There are billions of christians and muslims. Both are foolish superstitions with no evidential support whatsoever. Lots of people believe foolish lies; number of believers is not even loosely correlated with truth.
> Nobody is asking how are we going to evacuate the entire population of Bangladesh
Yes they are, and the real answer is "you don't, and they die."
> what will happen to my ten million beach front property
Yes they are, and the answer is it will be destroyed. But millions play the lottery, although only the companies running lottery always make a profit. Millions commit petty crimes, because everyone tends to think the bad stuff (getting caught) won't happen to them, but the good stuff (winning the lottery) will. Millions smoke, although once addicted it's not very pleasurable any more but it is expensive.
People like and choose to believe comforting lies, but they hate facing uncomfortable truths.
This is not a big revelation. It is not a profound insight and it doesn't prove anything much.
> But looks like everybody hates this question.
A lot of people hate foolish, pointless questions. Perhaps that is what you're missing here.
Supporters of climate change have the worst messaging discipline possible. I can't think of a less persuasive message than "impoverishment" (degrowth) or "abort your children".
Climate change is well past the cried wolf threshold.
In reality, climate science has gone from somewhat uncertain (around 1995: Kyoto) to progressively more certain as measurements have confirmed modellable outcomes.
Our need to change our behaviors has been increasingly important for the past few decades, it's only become an all-out emergency more recently as it's become painfully more obvious that large amounts of humanity are unwilling to change our economic preferences even when faced with obliberation.
1970s: ICE AGE coming!
1988: NASA said, A gradual rise in average sea level is threatening to completely cover all Indian ocean nations in the next 30 years. The maldives will have its drinking water supplies dry up by 1992.
1989: UN said rising seas could obliteration nations.
1989: NASA said, NYC's west side highway will be under water by 2019
>You appear to be making up your own narrative here.
I'm not making up anything.
Climate change proponents sure do seem to lie in their predictions though and boy do people get upset when you call it out.
Like, years ago did you know florida mostly went under water destroying basically all of florida? Al Gore said it will happen for sure.
When I search this I don't get a link to a prediction by NASA. Can you please cite your sources? And preferably their sources? I can see a possibility of cherry-picked quotes from the most pessimistic end of a range of scenarios and predictions. I can also see the possibility of someone maliciously attributing the prediction of another to NASA in order to smear NASA.
As an aside, I'll remind you that in the story the wolf ultimately did come, and the herd and boy were both lost.
Within any scientific discipline there is a broader consensus and there are more bold exceptional claims on both the high and low points. One could safely argue the consensus view on this topic has been moving too slowly.
A few years back a heatwave-induced mass die-off of snow crabs killed an estimated 10 billion crabs. People eat snow crabs. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/10-billion-snow-crabs-di...
Heatwaves are longer duration. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/21/us-heatwaves...
This is already impacting us.
What has become more serious is that the incoming data and predictive models are starting to line up with greater accuracy and those forecasts are very worthy of concern. In the face of warnings that drawing down our bank account is going to leave us broke, is the answer "oh, I've been hearing that for a long time now, what's the worst that can happen"?
> Since this article was last updated, the slowdown in the rate of average global surface warming that took place from 1998–2012 (relative to the preceding 30 years) has unequivocally ended.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/did-global-...