Reminder: what is happening now is the result of past emissions and will keep happening year after year no matter what. After humanity finally stops emitting greenhouse gases, it will not get better, it will just stop getting worse. The earlier we act the less bad the consequences.
Whether that is true depends on your sense of scale. After we move to zero emissions, it will take only a couple of decades before CO2 will start to drop again, as the biosphere starts absorbing the greenhouse gases.
There's some latency in temperature, much more in sealevel rise, but generally it isn't as bad as frequently depicted. I only learned this recently, I used to think we are unavoidably messed up for centuries, but that's really not the case. For my son I believe there's a scenario it will get better, not worse, in his lifetime. Though it's not a scenario I think is likely to happen.
I'm not optimistic about our societies willingness and ability to do so, but all action does matter and we definitely have the possibility. Ironically, drastic and massive climate action is also the cheapest thing to do.
2030 seems to be a magical date that is oft quoted. Is it when something will finally happen, or will it just be the date by which the current crop of CEOs and politicians retire (to their secretly built climate-controlled bunkers?
No because the method of achieving that goal is to push the worst CO2 generating processes out to less privileged countries and then blaming them for it. It's just carbon credits with more xenophobia.
The EU has a massive trade surplus, they actually manufacture quite a bit internally including many CO2 heavy industries, they are also importing vast amounts of fossil fuels. Germany was running a larger total trade surplus than China up to 2018, exporting manufacturing isn’t part of the plan.
Last night, I watched NGC's "Before the flood". At one point, a director for a local climate action institute in India was interviewed by Leo DiCaprio.
She pretty much pointed out that climate change is a social issue in no uncertain terms:
As an EU citizen, I applaud the ambitions, but I feel apprehensive at the same time. Regardless how you spin this, affordability is an absolute requirement.
For instance, on the consumer side of things, you see this concern expressed by the 'gilets jaunes' movement who were initially road users (commuters, truckers,...) protesting rising fuel prices as those add to the cost of living (whether real or perceived). Low income households can't afford to buy a new fuel efficient or electric car; or renovate their home to be more energy efficient (solar, isolation,...); or even buy groceries with a minimal carbon footprint (cheap food prices translate into externalized costs e.g. meat industry + availability / convenience).
Like, over the past few years, several cities have enacted a localized carbon levy for anyone who wants to drive into their city centers. While I'm a proponent of the idea, the net result is that visiting family by car has now become an expensive proposition. Public transport is a partial alternative, but it just doesn't offer the same availability / convenience as a personal vehicle.
A concern here is that this levy targets vehicle classes whose emissions are above an established norm. Turns out that a sizable proportion of low income class families living in those cities who find themselves owning a car they can't afford to drive anymore. This was explicitly raised as a policy concern in a parliamentary hearing in late 2020.
That's just one concrete example of why climate change is a social issue.
The problem raised by the Indian director in the documentary is rooted in the exact same challenge: finding balance between enabling 8 billion people to attain a sustainable, modern living standard while at the same time reducing humanity's reliance on fossil fuels.
One also has to understand that in order to attain Western living standards, "the rest of the world" is very much on a trajectory on par with historic social and economic dynamics and changes seen in America and Europe from the late 19th century hence. India and China together constitute about 35% of the global population. As the Indian director rightly questions: How can the West hold a moral high ground at this point in time while not having taken any notable affirmative action over the past 40 years to curb the impact of its own way of living profoundly?
Barring any finger pointing towards who does what, the filmmakers also interview the then-mayor of Miami Beach who first-hand faces the consequences of rising sea levels whilst being confronted with party politics. All he can do is install 400 million dollars worth of pumps just to keep his constituency's feet dry for the next 40 to 50 years.
He simply ends up stolidly remarking: "The ocean isn't Democratic or Republican. It just keeps rising."
Western living standards (especially American) are stupidly high. Just talk to average people.
Just today, I heard one person say they keep the AC on 18C all day because they don't like sweating, one person bought a bigger car to give more space for their dog, one person said she keeps the hot water on in the sink to reduce the hot water flow and regulate the shower temperature more easily.
People in the West need to reconnect with reality, and people in developing countries need to look up to more meaningful ways of life.
We are all sitting in the same boat here. Fingerpointing to the West is insincere because it's the same attitude the West had when nobody cared about the environment yet, but directed outwards. It's also not helpful at all. Developing countries have to also somehow take part in the climate change mitigation efforts, else the West will have trouble convincing their citizens to accept climate change mitigation policies, and the latter will be right in the assumption that their contribution won't matter.
And you have a good point, but eventually, also people in the West will have to accept that climate change will impact them somehow. Sealevels will continue to rise, weather extrems will become worse, viable farmland will become more rare, and overall living cost will rise even without an increase in taxation.
Carbon tax is just a tool to account for climate change in a capitalist framework. Increased taxation on obsolete and inefficient technologies should be offset by deductions and subsidies. If the carbon tax becomes burgeoning, reducing or dropping the VAT could be worthwile.
We talk already about reducing our footprint but it's not going down yet.
How long will it even take for us to do less talking and more reducing? 5 years? 10?
Will we discover that the big co2 emitter (USA, china) might even get further behind and my country is on track (Germany)?
Will the normal and valid economical growth of countries like china eat all co2 winnings for x decades until it reaches a peak?
Or will we see catastrophic events which will erode our society peace by peace?
In Germany the flood destroyed bridges and parts of a Autobahn. Deutsche Bahn Said that's the worst infrastructure impairment they ever head.
Will we be able to keep our existing infrastructure?
All the trees we are loosing to fires and drought how critical are they?
Do we already have calculated in all of this? I read last year that they now incorporate the Siberian Methan and co2 emissions from the "permafrost".
How fragile is our supply chain? Remember the toilet paper shortage.
Those questions are stressing me out sometimes and I do plan do become more robust through getting out of the city as there is not much you can do when sitting in your flat without tools and stuff.
In fact, if we stopped emitting entirely tomorrow, things would get much worse very quickly for a few years, due to the aerosol masking effect. Basically we're actually emitting so much that our pollution is blocking out some of the heat from the sun - remove the pollution and now we have all of the greenhouse gases we had before still in the atmosphere, but we're getting the full amount of heat from the sun. Explained much better here:
If they can make natural gas turbines send soot thousands of feet into the air like coal plants then we could buy ourselves some time. We need soot generators.
If global human CO2 emissions stopped, the ocean would be absorbing some of the current atmospherical CO2, so it would start going down.
The ocean is already currently absorbing, and acidifying as a result. It is not currently in equilibrium.
Of course, as it warms, its ability to absorb lessens. Warm water holds less CO2, used as a denialist talking point to say that the CO2 is from the oceans, not from humans. But it actually makes the problem worse.
But what's even more important about the nature of this problem that local emissions don't matter. If the US stopped but EU and China etc continued, the US heat dome problem would still go on.
That's why this needs to be coordinated internationally. It really matters a lot what the US president and congress does regarding international treaties.
If the US and Canada managed to cut down on their dramatic per capita emission levels then this could serve as an example to others and give some weight to otherwise empty pleas for change. It would also help accelerate green tech to a point where it can compete with fossil fuels on price line it's happening with solar. Others will follow suit naturally at that point
Sadly this kind of message will just result in apathy [in the US]. We've seen from the pandemic that just telling people they're going to die unless they take the most basic health precautions isn't enough to create action. We need a massive campaign of manipulation tactics by trusted peers or they're not going to act to save themselves.
Without being that categoric, I agree there's a psychological side of things that needs to be studied.
I heard there is a brain mechanism that allows us to "ignore the inevitable". This makes doom-saying predictions a hard sell.
The first step to manipulating people is not to say it's manipulation. Call it "marketing" and "lobbying". Everyone does it, climate activists have to do it too :)
For the first time in my life, I experienced a massive heat wave, torrential rainfall and flooding, a forest fire and hail, all within a single month. I am NOT looking forward to what's coming in a few years.
I'm afraid that in a decade, humans will just accept this as our reality and forget that it wasn't always like this. In 20 years, we'll have a generation of adults who'll think our stories of years of generally calm weather sound like pure fantasy.
We already have this every time it snows in winter in the pre-alps. People totally forgot that like 10-20 years ago "extreme snow" was kind of the norm from December to early March.
This is likely just the introductory act. We'll be begging to go back to this era of floods and fires once the resulting & hard-hitting droughts + famines + wars + mass migrations + mass extinctions + etc. take their tolls (and some of them have already started to).
In utah 80% of our water is spent on alfalfa for cattle. The governor is an Alfalfa farmer.
The Great Salt Lake is about to be renamed the Minor Salt Lake as it's bone dry.
Seems to me Utah's biggest industry isn't Alfalfa or Cattle though, it's tourism. Especially skiing. Much of the slopes get their snow from lake effect snow. That's not likely to be as much this year, and might not be a thing at all if the lake dries up completely.
On top of that the lake will create a deadly arsenic dust bowl that will damage the health of all creatures locally including humans for years to come.
Lucky for me, I'm in southern Utah where we only have to worry about rising # of forest fires. /s
I feel like if we had more water...if we didn't use it all, perhaps the lake effect snow would fill the snow cap, and then the droughts would be less.
It'd be a shame if cropdusters accidently put salt in alfalfa fields, a real shame.
It's going to be bad. I don't expect to have a conventional retirement like my parents did. By that point, society will not longer be able to support a large cohort of people who just consume and don't contribute.
I don't understand how anyone can still justify having children, knowing how they will suffer as a result of what we have done to the planet.
So you think extinction is preferable to solving our problems? Suicide isn't a more moral choice when pursued by a species instead of an individual. Furthermore a world full of dumb animals isn't well situated to clean up our mess.
More realistically its just making it other people's kids problem.
I believe it is incumbent upon those of us in privileged positions of education and wealth to have children that we teach and raise to be contributors in solving the world’s problems. Raising one child well goes a lot further to helping people out then not having a child at all.
Sure, only "priviledged" people should have children. Elitist thinking ahoy! Nope man, these days, with the amount of people on this planet, nobody really needs more of them, no matter what nice elitist excuse the individual finds.
"Sure, only "priviledged" people should have children."
No one said that. It was simply said, that those who have a mind and use them - totally should have children - because otherwise only those have children who do not use their mind so much. And this would not be helping.
> Sure, only “privileged” people should have children
That is not at all what I said. If you are trying to have a net positive effect in the world, and you have the means to do so, raising a child with a good education, instilling the best of your values in them, etc., is a fantastic force multiplier and a good way to ensure that someone like you keeps being a net good in the world.
Beyond that, raising children has brought me more joy than anything else. I would not wish a childless life upon anybody. I am optimistic that we can teach teach our children to find solutions to the problems they will have. This is not just passing the buck: every generation needs to work for the betterment of mankind. I just want to help raise the smartest, strongest generation yet.
Wow, what a slap in the face of people who cant get children for one reason or another. Its fine that you are happy with parenting, but please consider what sentences like this can do to others.
> , knowing how they will suffer as a result of what we have done to the planet.
I don't understand how people can still be having children,knowing what we have done to the mammoths. Soon there will be none left, and our children will have nothing but moss and ice. Nothing to live for. How can we bring people into a world like that?
Where did the 'heat dome' term come from? Is it actually a new kind of weather phenomenon (the Wikipedia page is from this year) or just a new term the media has been (ab)using instead of calling it a heat wave as they would before?
still, I see no serious action being taken to tackle the climate crisis. Current governments are just putting some dates by which we’ll stop doing x or y, but in really almost nothing concrete is done to stop the worst scenarios.
Because the climate crisis is missing one of the key ingredients of a proper crisis: there's never a reckoning time that forces the decision makers to the table, and forces all other things off the agenda.
If there was an asteroid coming, there would be some deadline imposed by the astronomical observations.
If it's a pandemic, there's a time when all the politicians have to stop thinking about Brexit and start thinking about lockdowns.
In economic crises there's that Lehman moment when the government needs to decide right then and there what to do about the economy.
In pure political crises, there's a vote of no confidence in the government and the politicians have to think about how to form a new one immediately.
With the climate, there's just never a time when you absolutely have to do something. People have even tried saying "we have to do something by x date" but you can't manufacture a crisis point, in fact those kinds of deadlines seem to have the opposite effect to what was intended. That slowly boiling frog analogy is somehow quite appropriate.
I think part of it is the nature of noise. Once you see an asteroid, you don't doubt that it's there. Government falls, you need a new one. People get sick in large numbers, better not let it grow.
But if it rains a lot or gets hot, that will pass. Once it passes we're relieved and we go back to normal. Even if storms get bigger and more frequent, the day after is sunny.
My last point goes back to the first: a proper crisis forces everything else out of your attention. 9/11, Lehman, Pandemic, those were all things that blocked out the news. That has never happened with the climate. When did you ever have a news day where all they talked about was climate? Where all the talking heads on TV were climate scientists/commentators/lobbyists? Where you could see politicians going from meeting to meeting with only one topic being asked of them?
It's a really hard pill to swallow. It will require expenses and sacrifices far beyond those that covid required, and for far longer.
I have zero hope of it happening. People won't stop driving, flying or eating meat. They won't even drive smaller cars. As I understand it, that would just be the start.
Looking at how we handled the pandemic, I don't think we'll manage.
I’m a lot more optimistic. The American idea of a compact car is the British idea of a big car (judging by labelled parking spaces in Davis CA), so that’s culture or fashion, and those can shift fast. And all the big companies are shifting to electric now, so even big isn’t as important.
Vat meat is starting to get on the market, and while we’ll have to wait and see if this is a iPhone moment or a Sinclair C5 moment, the prices have come down rapidly since the first attempts.
Flying is going to be a hard thing to totally green, but it’s not impossible either, merely low priority.
Yes, there will be those that reject everything — I’ve encountered those who think a self-driving car will take away their freedom, instead of regarding it as a chauffeur — but when the economics are against them, when they have to pay extra to be eco-unfriendly instead of paying less? History shows most people follow the money, not just for ill but also for good.
And the rest of the planet drives with internal combustion engines. The cars Germans replace with electric ones (or obsoletes due to emissions) are sent to other countries.
> Looking at how we handled the pandemic, I don't think we'll manage.
Amidst the chaos, humanity has been able develop a wide range of therapeutics and public healthcare prevention protocols, research and deploy vaccines at global scale in under a year, all while avoiding total economic collapse.
What outcome would've given you hope in humans' ability to solve complex and chaotic crises?
It showed us that most people are unwilling to accept even the slightest inconvenience to save lives and help an unpleasant situation pass faster.
Yes, the scientific community has done the impossible, but us laymen have failed to do even the possible, even when it was easy.
We can solve problems, no doubts, but perhaps we aren't so good at collective, sustained efforts. Climate change will not come to pass like the pandemic. It will last generations if we're lucky.
Or maybe wearing a freakin' mask and washing hands a little more frequently, like people freely and willingly do every flu season? Or once a vaccine was available, getting a little jab in the arm instead of starting mass disinformation campaigns to scare stupid people away from it?
Both ultra-simple and only slightly inconvenient actions, but both would have made a huge difference in the outcome and timescale of this whole mess. Of course humans can't be bothered to give a rat's ass about other humans (or even about themselves) if even the slightest inconvenience is involved. Nope. Humanity deserves what's coming. Humanity is a planetary cancer, and we've brought this all upon ourselves by our own actions.
The pandemic showed us making and using a silver bullet in record time - when a silver bullet is possible.
But the pandemic also showed us a large % of the American population are reluctant to make even minor, temporary sacrifices to protect their country. And that a decent fraction of American political leadership are happy to close their eyes to factual reality.
Protecting your country is a considerably more complex and nuanced goal than “save as many lives as possible no matter what” especially since secondary effects of lockdown also cause deaths.
Long term economic effects for example, and the ability to remain globally competitive economically and in other ways.
The people who opposed lockdowns but were first in line for the vaccine, sure. Maybe they're just in a hurry to get the economy up and running again.
But there are people declining a free a pinprick jab that's been given to billions of other people already, when there's clear evidence it's good for both the nation's interest and their own? The country's not asking us to charge Nazi machine gun nests on the beaches of Normandy here.
Pharma CEOs got billions richer as folks in the developing world die. The pandemic is far from over while variants mutate against vaccinated people.
The first world response against the vaccine is selfish and short sighted in the same ways that make solving global warming incredibly difficult socially.
The vaccine recipes should be free, the raw materials should be coordinated so that vaccine production is maximized. Just like global warming, no one is safe until everyone is, we are from it yet have the capability to do so. Yet we do not, we finagle to ensure profit over life.
Our collective COVID response is exactly why the climate crisis is so hard.
Americans acted the way they did because of bad leadership. A lot of people high up sowed the idea that getting a vaccine is not worthwhile and that masking up was an immediate threat to our freedom, and naturally a lot of people heard that and ran with it.
Those Americans aren’t any different from you and me: they just got their news from different sources — sources that shouldn’t be saying what they said.
Sure, if a technological solution like a vaccine gets developed I'd be optimistic (cold fusion?). But I currently estimate the probability of that really low.
What made me pessimistic about climate change w.r.t. COVID-19 was that most countries only did something once the population was sufficiently affected, even when the consequences of doing nothing were perfectly clear and immediate. W.r.t. climate change most countries won't be affected much or it will be hard to attribute to climate change and the consequences will be hard to predict and delayed.
COVID-19 was the easiest case of a global tragedy of the commons problem and we failed w.r.t. to a globally coordinated solution. Climate change is much harder. Doesn't give me much cause for optimism.
I think most countries only did something when the populace was affected because it is extremely hard to get buy-in from people when they don't see any negative effects of continuing as they are.
However I also see the role of the government as educating the population about the negative effects the population is not seeing yet so I don't use that to excuse the government.
That's what happens when politicians are in charge for 4 to ~10 years. They all vote for deadlines in 2025 - 2030 - 2040, which, on their timeline, means "never"
Most politicians are more concerned about their carrier and personal gains than their country, let alone the world.
So then a lifetime dictator should have a very green awesome success record? Well, I don't know of any data to support that assumption.
Also, most politicians are indeed concerned about their heritage in the history books, so they have motivations to do something beyond their office time.
But what should they do? There is not really a broad concensus on how to transform the whole worlds industry into CO2 free. Because that is not really easy.
I believe it is doable and I actually see much more change into that direction, than I thought possible a few years ago.
But when a vast amount of the population of the earth still struggles to survive - how can they save on CO2. They need to eat now.
I believe it's an unsolvable problem, too many variables, too many incompatibles interests/goals. Humans aren't made to solve world wide / very long term issues. The covid pandemic showed we're not able to handle any kind of global stress collectively.
We're apes trying to live like ants, but we lack the organisation and selflessness. We'll do what we do best, wait until we have our backs against the wall and find some half assed solution, it's going to be a free for all until some kind of reset event happens.
It feels like we're at the beginning of one of these Hollywood "end of the world" movies in which you can see TVs in the background of early scenes showing crazy reports about climatic/social/war events while the heroes are focused on their meaningless daily struggles.
> It feels like we're at the beginning of one of these Hollywood "end of the world" movies
That's very deliberate. We've all been saturated with doom propaganda for decades. Many people believe it, despite virtually all metrics of human well-being improving.
> It feels like we're at the beginning of one of these Hollywood "end of the world" movies
Another common thread among those movies is a large number of people in decision-making positions who could have taken action much sooner denying the very existence of the actual problem until after it's far too late.
Most governments might be trapped because reducing emissions does not help to solve the problems people have now or in the near future from climate change. "Inflicting" hard policies on the electorate without benefits in even the medium term is tough.
So governments will need to start with actions mitigating the effects climate change with at least equal effort than emission reduction. Don't see that realization happening at the moment as most policy and international discussions are about emissions. In the end, might even be that adaptation wins out over reduction in terms of effort.
A politician will not act on anything unless it will hurt their chances of getting re-elected.
Humans in general are very short term creatures and we fail at having a long term perspective on most things.
That's also the reason why I believe that any concrete things set in motion will probably focus on fixing the symptoms of climate change, the short term quick fix, rather than fixing the underlying issues that have lead to climate change. Sadly...
Australia had a carbon price a decade ago. It lost that government the next election, the incoming government repealed the carbon price and have retained government since.
Even now, the current government is resisting any policy that could be considered threatening to fossil fuels.
The voting majority of Australians don't give a fuck about climate change action.
You're looking at this the wrong way: extreme weather is not a predictable, one-off event. With climate change, we would expect to hit the extremes more often, and statistically the data has been showing us moving in this direction for years. Is it a crisis? Well, it only looks like it's going to get worse from here, and it's already not looking good…
you gotta explain the logic to me that should make anyone less concerned about climate crises just because people also used to die of them 200 years ago.
We're not reinventing any phenomena because we're emitting CO2, we're just putting the foot on the gas pedal, both literally and metaphorically. Same argument occasionally crops up during the pandemic. Yes, we've had them before, but that doesn't make this one any less bad, and interacting with animals that spread zoonotic diseases any less dangerous
Well, if the current events tell us we're in a crisis, were we also in a crisis a century ago? Two centuries ago? Three centuries ago? We can look in history books and see the same kinds of events happening back then. If they indicate a crisis now, don't they also indicate the crisis was happening back then?
if a kid threw a small rock at you some years ago and then slowly over the years more kids throw rocks at you, only a couple at a time, and then one day you walk out the door and there are hundreds of kids throwing rocks at you and there is a newspaper on your front porch with headline "Kids throwing rocks projected to increase 50% by tomorrow"; do you think "I guess I've had a kid throw a rock at me before, this is no different"?
You're arguing that it's not a big to deal to kick asteroids onto orbits intersecting with Earth's because in the past Earth also was hit by asteroids.
There is no historical precedent for the CO2 levels since well before mammalian life surged to the fore. Burning hundreds of millions of years of sequestered carbon in the span of 150 years turns out to have consequences. The carbon cycle has been known about for roughly the same time period that we’ve been in accelerated burning mode. Oil companies also extensively researched the likely impact of continued fossil fueled economic activity and the results confirmed what we know today. The oil companies decided to bury these findings and instead paid for the dissemination of rhetoric such as you are emitting here. It’s based on deceptive data and a tactic to always deny the link between human burning of fossil fuels and drastic climate change such as humans have never seen before.
No, it doesn't. It happens because HN shadowbans people who have the wrong opinions. dang and whoever else would say that's not true, but it's tough to debate, because the evidence is conveniently hidden by being unjustly flagged. It's tough to point to a comment and argue that every statement in it is indisputably true, relevant, and polite, when it's been hidden from everyone by some anonymous user without explanation or justification.
This kind echo chamber maintenance goes on day after day, while HN delusionally prides itself on curiosity, civility, etc.
I don't see banning on opinions happening on HN, but I understand that seeing the same rehashed fallacious statements over and over gets old quick. Case in point: the "this is not happening because something similar happened before", with no quantification or data or independent research or citation... is just noxious bullshit that deserves, like I wrote, to get you a red username, not green. What's your favorite color?
The current event I'm concerned about is the increase in average global temperatures caused by the increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. To the best of my knowledge Earth has never warmed as quickly as it's currently warming and CO2 levels haven't been as high since before humans were around.
I'm worried the map shows only US. I mean, global climate is, well, global. So how can one think about his neighbors if they are not even on the map...
Recently, the US has often had extreme cold events while the rest of the world is seeing temperature extremes. It practically looks like a conspiracy of the weather to make Americans disbelieve in climate change.
Having the US be subject to heat waves might just change that.
If you look at current weather forecasts for the places mentioned (e.g. the capitals of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma), the
highest forecast temperature for the next 10 days is 100 F / 38 C, far from the mentioned 110 F / 43 C.
(Yeah, slightly different date ranges, but still a lot of overlap and it's excluded the beginning of this week in either case - which, over here in Chicago, is supposed to be the hottest part of the coming week)
Here in central Kansas it's predicted to hit 100 as well. That's hardly an abnormally high temperature, at least in my (admittedly short) life so far. It might be more than 10 years ago, but not noticeably more.
Considering the source, remind me in one month. I'd like to see if the predicted 110° temperatures actually happened, or if it was just media amplifying the worst possible case for the doom clicks.
To go about this scientifically, we need to be comparing our predictions to reality, especially when the predictions are coming from a source incentivized to generate clicks rather than to provide an accurate view of reality.
LOL, you must have missed Death Valley,CA breaking records with 130 degrees.
I agree, think critically and vette your sources, but this kind of denial sounds like when Republicans stood around in the snow screaming global warming wasn't real because LoOk SnOw It'S nOt GeTtIng HoTtEr
While climate change denialists minimize and try to pretend that more analysis is needed before lifting our smallest finger to change the obvious problem (humans burning hundreds of millions of years of sequestered carbon in the span of 150 years)
It’s actually rather urgent that we collectively acted like the singular species we are, and acted yesterday already.
Don’t wait til 2030 to phase out whatever, let’s go full bore and do it now dedicating our full combined engineering might to tackle the problem.
IS HUMANITY CAPABLE OF COLLECTIVE ACTION IF OUR LIVES DEPEND UPON IT?
You know those films with alien invasions where humanity comes together to fight it, can you imagine traitorous factions saying the alien invasion is just a myth? Undermining all that is needed for collective action
Covid showed us that we are generally inclined to act collectively but very easily fall to conspiracy theories. I hope we ACT, although the pessimist inside me is not so sure.
We have experienced the coldest winter since 2011 in the Southern Hemisphere (at least South Africa) this year. The summer was also warmer than average.
I wonder what less conservative global warming forecasts would look like, and whether the winter this year will be average in US and CA.
"Global warming" involves extremes of temperature on both ends of the scale, and "coldest winters" are not inconsistent with that.
Think about a pot of hot water vs. one that's boiling. The surface of the water in the boiling pot is not smooth, it has peaks and troughs. The level of some of those troughs will be lower than the level of the water in a less energetic pot.
The situation with global warming is similar, although much less simple (pots of water don't have seasons, among other things.) More energy in the atmosphere and the Earth's crust translates into more extreme temperature fluctuations, both up and down. However, the average will inevitably be higher. Basic physics doesn't allow for anything else.
It is more than this, too. It is called climate change for other reasons, and that is because while the global, overall, average temperature will rise, local temps could drop, or even stay the same!
Say we have a 3C temp rise, global average. Some places could have a 10C increase, others a -5C decrease average!
Look at coastal areas, like British Columbia, while inland the temps drop quickly. Or the British isles.
Ocean currents bring warm water north, keeping these places warm, but the currents could reverse! Or vanish!
Now you have temp drops, but in a local region, even with overall 3C rises...
I guess my point is, localized events mean almost nothing. The true tragedy of climate change is that by the time we can really verify it is happening, it will already have happened.
And some areas will have incredibly dramatic climate changes, others almost none. Think 10C average warmer, including for heat waves.
Edit: just realised you sorta said this, just in a different way. Will leave this here regardless.
HEre on HT it may not necessary, but when talking to people not at ease with sciences, this sentence :
> Basic physics doesn't allow for anything else.
is very important. It means : you do not negotiate with physics. So, you do not negotiate on climate change. When I hear some politics I'm sometimes appalled by their lack of understanding of basic physics laws.
For example, in a gas at a given temperature, some molecules are more energetic and some molecules are less energetic. The distribution of energy across molecules is called the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and has been known, well, since Maxwell. The Maxwell-Boltzmann formula clearly shows that, if you increase the average energy per molecule, the probability of "cold" molecules goes down, not up as you are suggesting.
I am of course not suggesting that a can of gas is a good model for climate, but I want to point out that basic laws of nature push to the opposite direction than the one you are suggesting. Your wider point may well be true, but if so, it depends on more complicated mechanisms than just basic physics.
You applied that comment beyond its intent. With more energy in the atmosphere, "the average [temperature] will inevitably be higher. Basic physics doesn't allow for anything else."
How is this falsifiable? i.e. how would you prove that a weather extreme is not due to global warming? (general question, not specifically aimed at you).
It isn't. Climate is a statistics game. You cannot prove or disprove that a specific dice throw ended up 6 because the dice was unfair, but you can still make robust (and thus falsifiable) predictions over hundreds of throws.
It's been a mild summer for central and eastern US. The West has gotten all the heat and we've had higher than average rainfall in the eastern 2/3rds. Even Arizona getting a lot of rain now.
The source the Guardian links to is showing the outlook for July 31 - August 4, while the embedded image and article appear to be talking about July 25 - July 31. Before noticing the dates I'd thought the article was simply wrong and was using outdated data, it's just that next week is forecast to be cooler than this week.
Edit: And then right after posting I notice the date range is actually embedded in the image, July 29 - August 2, Thursday to Monday. At least the first part of the article does seem to be mostly based on outdated data, the outlook now showing much cooler than the snapshot in the article for most of the same days.
It's so frustrating seeing the lack of urgency to do something to reduce our emissions. I fear the US will never take the lead, and the world is hopelessly dependent on China and the EU acting.
Oh wow that’s pretty cool. It looks like there is a current that stays mostly within Canada, with the exception of upstate NY and northern New England.
It suggests that my climate will have more in common with areas 300mi to the NE vs 150mi to the SW. I know that Windsor-Detroit is in a warmer Koppen zone than pretty much every Canadian zone to the east. Continental a vs b IIRC.
The opposition party has dwindling numbers and lives in a wasteland, gee golly whats going to happen?
Yeah I get that their land votes for them, but we can just ride this one out and then have a super pac pay for relocation of a few people to specific counties within states.
Opposition party just doesnt have the numbers to try the same strategy.
It's quite sad that this forum, usually one of the most civil and thoughtful places on the internet, is full of climate change deniers with pathetic arguments that even they must see the issues with.
It seems like you're actually being uncivil and unthoughtful, and actually upset because other people have different viewpoints, which you are calling "climate change denial", when I doubt anyone here actually denies that the climate is changing.
"climate change denial" has become a term that has a more nuanced meaning that what the literal words say. It for example also includes viewpoints that deny that human influence is the main driver of climate change ("the climate has always been changing"), or the viewpoints that the effects of climate change are not bad, or even desirable ("CO2 is good for plants").
Sorry bud, but it's not "unthoughtful" to discount your opinions. I, and apparently a good percentage of the site, have considered them, found them fruitless, and tire of the arguments.
Your beliefs are incorrect. You can think what you want of course, but there comes a point where nobody needs to care what you say.
> In addition, the World Weather Attribution team also found that climate change made this heat wave at least 150 times more likely and nearly 4 degrees hotter than it would have been before humans began warming the climate back in the 1800s.
That depends on your definition of "impact". Everybody currently alive has experienced some effect of climate change already. Where I live for example the number of days with >30°C per year has roughly doubled since I was born.
The impact is happening right now. There will be increasingly more extreme weather events over time, heat waves, cold waves, flooding, hurricanes, etc. The frequency of events and extremeness of events are increasing.
At that time, if things don't improve by a huge margin (like in : never before in human history; except maybe at WW2 levels), hundreds of millions of people will have moved away from their birthplace (taking the place of other who may or may not be happy with it, which may lead to "tension" between populations; see what happens today when a few refugees (yes, a few) reach the borders of Europe...)
My understanding is there will be many more losers than winners.
Then I would kindly suggest governments stop encouraging people to continue reproducing at an unsustainable rate. Reversing overpopulation would make both mitigation and adaptation much more feasible.
Not requiring ones next generation to be precisely from local genetic stock is a good start. Being able to absorb refugees into ones culture vs crying on and on about low domestic birth rates, that’s a pet peeve of mine
> “Heat dome over North America, showing high temperatures predicted across the continent.”
Such is the caption to a map showing no temperatures, or even potential heat but rather a predicted delta from regional norms.
This sort of behavior was exactly why I unsubscribed from the guardian after years of support post Snowden. I have no doubt this summer has been warmer on average. Here in Denver the smoke cover from Oregon’s fires must be contributing a measurable impact itself.
That said our forecast for the coming week is highs between 85-90, which feels in line for most July’s since I’ve lived here.
I mean, the second half of the article is almost entirely quotes from "Michael Wehner, a a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory"
Including the section
“You expect hotter heatwaves with climate change but the estimates may have been overly conservative,” Wehner said. “With the Pacific north-west heatwave you’d conclude the event would be almost impossible without climate change but in a straightforward statistical analysis from before this summer you’d also include it would be impossible with climate change, too. That is problematic, because the event happened.”
That does seem more compelling and newsworthy than "feels in line for most July's since I've lived here." to me? The map might not be the greatest graphic but the article still has meat right?
Without statistics there is no meat; the Guardian is good at narrative but not so good at objectively reporting on trends. I see only one concrete point in the article; that the heat in certain areas broke records by 5.5 degrees is a relevant factual datum, but to understand what it actually means you have to ask things like: how many standard deviations is that? How long have these records been kept in this many places, and how many record-breakings are "normal" (I'd guess that in any given year the hot and cold temperature records would be broken somewhere).
You get these in the scientific articles, you cannot expect a newspaper article to include these. It should only include the interpretation of experts of these statistics. Not the statistics itself. That data is up to you to look into yourself...if you are an expert in the field.
The questions posed by your parent comment are rather high-level inquiries based on statistics and basic scientific reasoning.
They do not require domain expertise to answer, just a decent command of statistics and a curious mind, and I agree with the parent that they are fundamental to knowing the scientific truth.
> you cannot expect a newspaper article to include these.
Why not?
If you're driving a narrative, using hyperbolic language such as "punishing" or coining terms such as "heat dome", the burden-of-proof standards should be equally high on your part.
I'd expect any scientific reporter in a newspaper like The Guardian to have basic scientific inquiry skills, and if the hypothesis is "this is caused by humans" to try hard to refute it, and not to leave questions like that unanswered.
It's not even a norms delta, it's a probability of any deviation from norms. The creators (https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/) even put out a survey a couple years ago trying to figure out if anyone actually understood the data. The maps have pretty much always looked like that in the summer over the past five years.
"The 6-10 day Outlook gives the confidence that a forecaster has, given as a probability, that the observed temperature, averaged over upcoming days 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 will be in the range of one of three possible categories - below (B), normal (N), or above (A). For any calendar 5-day period, these categories can be defined by separating the 30 years of the climatology period, 1981-2010 (30 years), into the coldest 10 years, the middle 10 years, and the warmest 10 years.
Because each of these categories occurs 1/3 of the time (10 times) during 1981-2010, for any particular calendar 5-day period, the probability of any category being selected at random from the 1981-2010 set of 30 observations is one in three (1/3), or 33.33%. This is also called the climatological probability. The sum of the climatological probabilities of the three categories at any point on the map is 100%.
Graphical Information
The colored shading on the map indicates the degree of confidence the forecaster has in the category indicated, where "B" and blue colors indicate "below-normal" and "A" and orange-red colors indicate "above normal". The darker the shading, the greater is the level of confidence. The numbers labeling the contours separating different shades gives the probability that the indicated category (A, B, or N) will occur.
The probabilities of all three categories are implied on the map, and sum to 100%. The forecast probabilities given on the map generally fall far short of complete confidence (100%) in any single category. When the probability of the above (A) or below (B) category is greater than 33.33% by some amount, the probability of the opposite category declines by that amount, while the probability of the middle category remains at 33.33%. In the event that the "N" category is greater than 33.33%, the probabilities of both the "A" and "B" categories is each reduced by 1/2 the amount that the "N" category exceeds 33.33%. When the probability of "A", or "B" reaches 63.33% or higher, the odds of the opposite category reach a minimum allowed value of 3.33%, while the odds of the middle category are allowed to drop below 33.33%.
The dashed contours on the map give the average of the temperature over the set of 30 observations for the calendar 5-day period during 1981-2010, in degrees Farenheit."
Uff, not sure why the guardian picked that map when they could have found something more clear for the average reader, like me...
Yeah it gets cited a ton because the colors look intuitive but really the map isn't particularly useful. Would honestly be better if the hadn't used "hot/cold" colors because as it stands it's basically the metrological equivalent to a stroop test...
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