Global warming might not happen quite as fast as we thought | Hacker News Reader

Global warming might not happen quite as fast as we thought

telegraph.co.uk

23 pointselorant27 comments

I may end up sounding like that meme with old pepperidge guy, but I remember when during my childhood almost every winter meant heavy snow and it wasn't that easy to go where you need, but nowadays we barely get any snow at all...

And Greenland is called Greenland because Vikings had a great sense of humour.

Every evidence I have seen so far points to the conclusion that it indeed might not happen as fast as we think: it might happen faster.

Yeah, there’s a lot of evidence that we may have grossly underestimated the feedback effects.

On the flip side, we also underestimated the ability to switch to renewable sources (predictions of the cost and spread of renewable energy have been far too pessimistic going back 2 decades even though these estimates over the past decade or so adjusted for the fact that they were too pessimistic). Further, we’ve already started showing growth without using more energy which shows the tremendous efficiency improvements we’ve been able to make, and was something that wasn’t even considered possible.

IOW, global warming is likely worse than we thought, but our ability to fight global warming and the actions we’ve already taken are also much better than most imagined. Which is why it’s so frustrating that we continue to not go big on many of the options to fight global warming that we have available to us.

I’d also add that many of the changes have enormous clear wins for other reasons: fossil fuels are nasty, so even if global warming just disappeared in some sci-fi miracle we’d still save millions of lives annually and improve quality of life by not having internal combustion engines or methane gas appliances. Improving bike & transit infrastructure would make large populations healthier and save everyone a ton of money, etc.

Well it's not happening fast enough for most climate change alarmists to consider building nuclear power. If it's such a threat surely we would trade nuclear waste problems for climate change.

Nuclear appears to have two problems: it takes so long to build reactors that their solution comes too late, and they are way more expensive than renewables. I don’t have a problem with nuclear, but if wind (or solar) and storage is faster and cheaper, why bother?

> I don’t have a problem with nuclear, but if wind (or solar) and storage is faster and cheaper, why bother?

My understanding is that once nuclear plant is built the capacity vastly exceeds renewables my several orders of magnitude. A coordinated effort to build multiple power plants could probably get a large country to net zero in decades.

> A coordinated effort

This is begging the question. A coordinated effort will solve all our problems in many ways, and is exactly the hard thing about problems like climate change.

People aren't interested in building nuclear because it's slower and more expensive than building renewables + storage.

Is this per unit of power produced, and is it taking into consideration the maintenance costs? I don't know the answers but it seems we could be net zero if we had invested in nuclear for more than four decades since climate change was widely accepted. Renewables are great but until battery tech becomes good enough it is not as viable as current nuclear tech.

A nuclear world is a world without the possibility of war. I’m not ready to live in a globally “average” culture. That’s a dictatorship where I have few rights, minorities are jailed or mass murdered, and there is very little economic mobility.

A global nuclear society requires a global cultural utopia.

I'm not sure that follows. Some countries would reach that goal first and then the others could get the technology eventually, or even if they don't if most of the large countries switch to nuclear it seems it would take care of the main problem.

That’s weird phrasing from a paper that declared it all a hoax

- "Global warming isn't real."

- "Global warming is real, but not caused by humans."

- "Global warming is real and caused by humans, but it's not that bad."

- "Global warming is real, caused by humans, pretty bad, but it won't happen as fast as we think."

Progress i suppose

I’m just waiting for the last iteration, well, it’s happening, and now there’s nothing that can be done, anyway, this is why it happened for very sensible reasons and was utterly unavoidable, i went to a public school btw, then oxford or Cambridge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Sure, as long as a new generation actually has a chance to grow up.

There is no progress there. The people saying these things are coming up with their plan (do nothing) and then generating a rationale to match. Humans have a great capacity to rationalize, they won't ever run out of excuses.

- "Global warming is real, caused by humans, pretty bad, but it's far enough along that nowadays we can pretend to feel bad about it while we continue to cozy up to our terraforming reptilian overlords."

Better view of same story:

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-absorb-co2-human-previously.ht...

Hoping that future drought events don't have a massive impact on forests. The 2018 drought in Germany already induced some heat and drought stress on trees. If the trees die, they will not take up 20% more CO2.

The paper itself:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh9444

https://archive.ph/rTIDU

The climate death spiral says otherwise. The numbers are only going up, not down.

This is awesome news. Sounds like we not only have more runway than expected but also obtain more than expected with every tree and shrub we plant.

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