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Another Climate Truth Bomb

shojiwax.com

22 pointsmathgenius28 comments

Maybe the link should be changed directly to the video it discusses?

The article is purely a link to this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/4S9sDyooxf4

The article itself as I read it doesn't really contribute or expand the concepts in the video and instead is a call to action (not defined) as it assumes you've watched the video, basically I'm just not confident the article contributes anything to the subject its presenting.

To save HN users further time, it's a link to a five month old Sabine Hossenfelder youtube channel video titled I wasn't worried about climate change. Now I am.

As a general summary 2023 average ocean surface temperatures jumped by a bit more than one degree Celsius over the course of a few months. One degree doesn't seem much, but in the climate crisis people are discussing about two or three degrees of warming potentially fatal for human civilization. And also scientists were thrown for a loop because climate models predicted this change not happen so quickly.

Luckily (for some interpretations of luckily) it seems that 2024 ocean surface temperaturs are not rising as quickly as in 2023, but they are still rising. It still seems that we crashed with high speed through several tipping points and continue.

Sorry.

Unfortunately, we aren't lucky. 2024 is just continuing the same insane jump that began in 2023.

See https://climate.copernicus.eu/sites/default/files/custom-upl... and https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-may-2024-streak-glo...

I also don't think we are lucky but hopefully not the worst possible unlucky. I am refering to this diagram:

https://sites.ecmwf.int/data/c3sci/bulletin/202406/temperatu...

Especially that SST as of July 1st 2024 is same as July 1st 2023, in other words, we had a jump of slightly more than a degree Celsius and a year later we are at the same place.

Again, this is very bad news. Sorry.

That's... aggravating.

It's not a day late and a dollar short. It's 30 years late and tens of trillions of dollars short.

Actual climate scientists were warning about the dangers at 1.5C, and had been since the 80s. Now 1.5C is actually here.

So I feel like this needs more than just a "whoops, changed my mind". This needs a "Hey, turns out that maybe physicists don't know everything, and maybe when in doubt we should defer to the people who actually study the field".

Hossenfelder is very smart and (at least within her field) very well qualified. But she seems to like perceiving herself as a gadfly, choosing contrarian positions, usually without being in a position to be proven wrong. In this case she was very wrong, and everybody who actually knew the domain told her that.

I don't need a mea culpa about it. It's not like she was a really important force in climate denial. But changing her mind now isn't really helpful -- and it seems like she rarely has any desire to make an actual contribution.

COVID taught me that we can’t align on absolutely anything.

Problem with climate discussions is that 99.9% of people don’t have any impact whatsoever (drinking through paper straws or buying eco friendly t-shirts doesn’t change a thing).

Nothing is actionable. People who could make an impact won’t because it’s not in their personal interest - e.g. jet flying celebrities or owners of industrial companies.

Maybe Fermi's Paradox filter isn’t some big cosmic event but a simple industry optimization problem. Many planets had intelligent life but industrialization, as a form of energy transformation, boils everyone before they can make a contact or travel through space.

> Maybe Fermi's Paradox filter isn’t some big cosmic event but a simple industry optimization problem. Many planets had intelligent life but industrialization, as a form of energy transformation, boils everyone before they can make a contact or travel through space.

This seems likely. At least it is were we are heading.

There are probably some smart enough to see the benefit of nuclear, which are the lowest cost when all externalities are included (ie gdp drop when everyone nearly dies from fossil fuel based warming, and massive decarbonization enabled by on demand excess energy).

> Problem with climate discussions is that 99.9% of people don’t have any impact whatsoever

Individually certainly nobody has any appreciable impact. But seen as a collective, everyone's individual decisions add up to pretty much all of the impact.

> People who could make an impact won’t because it’s not in their personal interest

And this is true for everyone as long as the incentives are aligned as they are: It is cheaper, more convenient and generally allows for a more interesting lifestyle to pollute.

The video this is referencing is by a pretty internet-famous scientist, Sabine Hossenfelder, who is NOT a climate scientist. She produces videos on various topics in science, in- and outside of her field.

I personally am of the opinion that an academic education in one field does not qualify someone sufficiently to produce critically interesting or novel content in another field (without an existing track record of doing science in that field, at least).

With a degree in Comp Sci I would be very careful to make any educational statements about state of the art medicine, even if I could sufficiently understand and explain basic concepts to people due to my academic education and ability to read papers.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a Physicist and climate science is best understood from a physics perspective, heat equations in particular.

And yet with a minimum of common sense one can see that what she is saying has merit. At the very least the video makes one curious enough to read more. That was also one of the points she makes in the video.

This isn't novel content - this is her reporting on papers she's read. If you only want to consume content from climate scientists, you can also read the papers directly.

My takeaway:

> Because this is what the hard evidence-based science is beginning to reveal about just how far into the deep end of shit creek we have paddled. It is important to at least see what that expert science is saying first-hand.

> We have about 20 years left until global collapse of civilisation as we know it.

I bet they are good friends with Jehova Witnesses, how many times have they moved the date of the end of the world?

Doomer content makes $$$

Real money are made by selling fossil fuels.

Yes, but that also takes real work.

There's always someone ready to predict the end. That includes Al Gore and Greta Thunberg who both predicted we would be far worse off today than we actually are.

If we are going to be done in within our lifetimes, it will surely be because of war or some tremendous nuclear disaster (most likely triggered by a war).

I wonder if past civilizations ever had knowledge of their impending doom, studied it, and still took effectively no action to avert disaster? Will we be unique in seeing the train coming and collectively refusing to take action to get off the tracks?

The city laments of the ancient near east might fall near this, but definitely many Roman writers, like Vegetius, saw very clearly that their civilization was headed for oblivion, and they wrote about it, sometimes quite heartbreakingly. There's a whole genre of literature from the late 19th century that does this same thing with the British Empire - honestly, it's a strong tradition today.

Thing is, what you see in retrospect, is that nothing really dies all the way. Bits and pieces - sometimes very large pieces, in the case of Rome - can be digested and live on for hundreds or thousands of years. The current climate crisis will be a problem, no doubt, but it will be overshadowed rapidly by the conflicts that it sparks. Thirsty people don't worry about radiation.

I don't think as individual we can do anything except:

1. Build energy independence by switching to renewable energy sources for your home.

2. Acquire skills that might be useful in a changing climate, such as gardening, home repair, or first aid.

3. Maintain mental health while dealing with the realities of climate change

I'm playing around a bit with 1 now. I've actually done a bit of 2 and I can tell you that the idea of growing enough calories to feed yourself is fairly daunting, which makes 3 a bit difficult (although I've had problems with that anyway I suppose).

Few more ideas:

Don't buy things you don't need and avoid products that don't last (i.e. break in a year or two). Try to repair a broken product first, before buying a new one.

Minimize commute & travel. Use public transport when you do.

Talk to other people how you did it, so that ideas can spread and norms change.

Little drops of water make an ocean.

I hate this. I will be about 44 years old when global civilization is projected to collapse.

I get so much anxiety not even really knowing what kind of future I should be planning for. Is it worth saving money for some kind of retirement? Is it worth having kids? Should I just be traveling and seeing as much of the world as I can now before it’s gone?

There’s no satisfying solution. I could spend my whole life planning for an apocalypse that never comes, or I can just live my life as we always have and just accept the possibility of me and my family dying young and miserable as a result of not doing anything to prepare for the collapse.

It's ironic that most preppers are actually improperly prepared. Lone wolf preppers hiding MREs in the walls of their condos in the middle of a city is total futility. They should be 1. establishing self-sustaining homestead-farms using organic and natural methods eliminating external dependencies, 2. stockpiling valuable agricultural and food processing machinery, 3. learning how to defend themselves and their property, and 4. networking and aligning with other families to surround themselves with others for mutual cooperation and defense. Or, be a billionaire, buy some or all of an island and keep supplies only long enough for 5 years... but then what?

Like the fall of the Roman republic, it will slip away gradually punctuated by sudden shifts. Food will eventually become absurdly-expensive. Most incomes will gradually become more and more devoted to food, and poverty and disease will mushroom like nothing else in history.

Police departments and militaries will become understaffed before breaking down and ceding their arms to local defense militias and criminal gangs. As a single anecdotal example of unsustainable problems today, Austin PD's morale is terrible and has 250 unfilled officer positions. They don't respond to most calls for 36-48 hours unless there are lives at risk. The falls of major population centers into chaos won't necessarily be synchronous.

Few notes: climate change is a fact we all can observe, there is no point in talking about climate models, who tend to change far faster than climate and have many limits, no point in talking about mean temperature most people simply do not understand AND for good reasons.

The point is ENDING the narrative of "reversing" climate change because even if, and I doubt, only (not also) an outcome of anthropic activities, results could potentially be seen after a century or more and in that timeframe we will be all dead. The point is simply telling that we need to adapt QUICKLY meaning be ready for mass relocations, so wars, displaced productions activities in particular agricultural, long complex supply chain malfunctioning and regular disruptions and so on.

That is commonly named "resilience" but is narrate as an ancillary part of the debate not the main point. This imply we need to build new homes, for various reasons ranging from energy needs to mere relocation needs because actual ones are in a too frequently flooded are, a zone where having enough rainwater it's more and more an issue, where melting permafrost generate too much ground infra disruption and so on. Since we do not REALLY know how things will evolve, it's not only climate but also human wars who will generate much different human scenarios, we should be distributed for resilience and have as much as slack we can for anything (energy, food, appliances, ...).

All the above mean that's about time to drop the smart city push, a nazi-like scenario, modern Fordlandia equally distopic and untenable in a changing world to state a simple thing: we can do the new deal, but the new deal is incompatible with finance capitalism. We must came back to a spread vivid economy where anyone own a bit. That's why we see especially in the west a very hard breaks apply on the new deal. That's why we see more and more neo-malthussian ideas spreading.

A path to resilience is:

- redundancy

- as much as possible (not much, but something is possible) autonomy

- diversity

- simple infrastructure (because they are fast to change/repair/rebuild and cheap)

A simple example: a spread area of single family homes get flooded or hit by an earthquake, well, being nearly all light buildings spread enough the distressed people are not so much to makes rescue operations impossible, posing temporary housing modules and local p.v. (eventually recovery parts of the one already in place) it's doable, all ops can be done normally by air and involve things light/small enough to be easy spread by air. A counter example a dense city, rescuing is damn hard because there is no room to move, too many people to rescue in a single area, NOTHING made to be distributed so most of the infra broken beyond quick restore ability. Much higher restoring costs and much more time needed. It's a very simple example, but good enough to understand. Another simple one: a small "cube" (1000l clean water tank) in line with the aqueduct, fill by a simple float faucet, pushing water to the home with a small pump + a small pressurized tank with the "bubble" to keep the pressure constant and some small potatoes stuff (a clapet valve, a pressostat etc) cost at current hyper inflated prices some 200€, give few days of water autonomy to a home. It's simple tech that allow for comfort during uncomfortable situations and allow calmer and cheaper response.

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