And yet, we still have actual supposedly rational people being paid to say "global warming is a myth" or "we are just in another cycle of ice ages". It boggles the mind.
From this chart, I'm still amazed that the massive behavioral changes in 2020 due to pandemic had seemingly no impact on CO2. Makes me think personal transportation in the US is not worth bothering about if we care about global CO2.
That’s not how it works. Think of co2 level like a bathtub. Two factors influence the level of water:
* Natural cycle. This goes up and down year on year: that’s the rise and fall you see in the chart. In real life it has to do with northern hemisphere summer and leaf growth.
* Human activity. We’re pouring water into the bathtub and the water level rises
So during the pandemic we just poured water less quickly. You wouldn’t expect a drop from that. You’d just expect a slower rise.
To actually fix climate change we have to:
1. Get human emissions to zero
2. Start taking co2 from the atmosphere, actually lowering the water in the tub
It’s a big task and we haven’t even really started. Our emissions rate has been growing, not shrinking.
But we are laying the groundwork with renewable capacity and with rapidly advancing carbon capture and storage. SomI still hold out hope we can do it. But to do that we need to understand the basic shape of the problem.
The orange part in the long term chart confused me, it looks like as if that's not real. But it looks scary. Do we know what caused co2 dropping from 300ppm to 200ppm previously? There seems to be a pattern where it goes up and then back down...
CO2 goes down due to chemical weathering - basically it binds to the rock and is then washed into the sea, where it is subducted into the mantle due to plate tectonics. It comes back up from volcanoes - the deep carbon cycle.
The amount of weathering depends on the access the atmosphere has to the rock. If there is a thick ice layer, the rate goes down. Water plays a role as well, and the fastest weathering happens in the tropics and not the deserts (where you have mechanical weathering which does not bind CO2). Accordingly, the configuration of continents can play a role as well, which is interesting if you go back far enough. On the other hand, the volcano emissions appear somewhat constant over time.
In total though, there are still many open questions. Why does CO2 appear to go up so fast after an ice age? Does CO2 or temperature go up first? In the records, the temperature increase appears rather sudden, on the timescale of decades. How does this happen? (Note though that that has no huge importance for our current problem since the situation is different. But the reaction speed of the system is relevant, for example.)
Note: If we wait long enough (~tens of thousands of years) the CO2 level should go down again from weathering. There are proposals for carbon capture that uses this mechanism (by grounding the rocks and distributing them openly so the atmosphere can reach a lot of the rock surface, thus increasing the weathering rate massively).
Note2: You need silicate rock, which is not distributed evenly.
I am no expert on it but apparently some of the natural pre-industrial-human trend does match with the timings of ice ages/glacial maximums and glacial minimums, on hundred thousand year time scales.
I’m not an expert of anything, but I’m pretty sure you can’t pick one monitoring station on one island in the Pacific and extrapolate that to the entire planet. Especially on an island of active volcanos that spew CO2.
And not surprisingly there is a disclaimer “ The Mauna Loa data are being obtained at an altitude of 3400 m in the northern subtropics, and may not be the same as the globally averaged CO2 concentration at the surface.”
The trend in global co2 almost exactly matches every other high precision co2 monitoring station run by other observatories/climate scientists in dozens of locations around the globe.
That chart switched from ice core to volcano data in 1958 which is why there is the sudden huge shift. Also, an active volcano is an interesting place to do CO2 observations given that volcanoes may well be the largest natural CO2 emitters on the planet. In any event I virtually never see any intelligent discussion of the subject, just cherry-picked data followed by disparaging anyone who might merely express doubt, let alone disagreement. That may well be effective for establishing partial consensus, but it’s not a particularly good way to increase knowledge and understanding.
Edit: Responses like child’s being a case in point. Anyone that opens with “So…” and follows up with a straw man or even a complete non sequitur such as in this case is not contributing to the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity.
Edit: As for CO2 sensors mine has been sitting in the mid 300s for the decade I’ve had it.
So your theory is that the hundreds of climatologists who've peer-reviewed co2 sensor data/papers based on information from mauna loa have all wilfully disregarded the existence of the volcano and its gases? That's interesting.
You should get your CO2 sensor checked, or move it to a place that is sampling outside air.
If you have only seen cherry-picked data and have not seen intelligent discussion (and such discussion is something you really want to have), then I suggest you read the IPCC reports and participate in discussions regarding the IPCC reports.
Your comment about the CO2 observation station on the active volcano is difficult to evaluate. I have never come across any convincing evidence that this matters. Have you?
The Netherlands. You'd think that a country that has most of it's important urban areas literally below sea-level would be a little more concerned about the changes to our climate. But nah, most of us still ignore it.
A Dutch expression [1] is "Na mij de zondvloed". It roughly translates to "The (biblical) flooding will come after I'm dead". Unfortunately this is a common attitude here.
I am so angry about this. We had the solution for climate change. We had it for dozens of years now.
It's called nuclear. It has its downsides, but they are significantly smaller than downsides of fossil. Even with a few more meltdowns here and there it'd have done much less damage. And if we'd have used it by now we'd have learned to control it better and safer.
But we didn't use it. And there is just one guilty party for that: the green activists. They opposed Nuclear rabidly while never proposing any practical solution instead. We should talk about this. We should point our collective fingers at them.
Because today, the same luddite, anti-tech activists are busy delaying evolution and progress in other areas as well. Their dream of an egalitarian, resource-constrained, pseudo-agrarian society is a nightmare of stagnation and regress. They must be confronted and stopped. If it's not already too late...
It's a war, a culture war. A war between dreams and nightmares, a war between tradition and innovation, a war between progress and stagnation, a war for the future. And it's our only hope.
> But we didn't use it. And there is just one guilty party for that: the green activists. They opposed Nuclear rabidly while never proposing any practical solution instead.
Say what you will about the values or reasoning of "green activists," the idea that they have wielded enough influence to sway energy policy is risible. Market forces, NIMBYism and fossil fuel lobbying dollars were sufficient to spike nuclear power.
> I am so angry about this.
> It's a war, a culture war.
Greens are a right-wing bogeyman. You're meant to be angry at them.
Politicians respond to public perception. Their main skill is to make themselves popular in order to be elected.
When green issues started entering the public conscience politicians quickly adopted them and proposed quick&easy fixes.
Fear of the unknown of the nuclear made them regulate and red-tape it out of the market. Just look at what Japan and German politicians did when Fukushima happened.
That's IMO one of the problems of nuclear. It's politician-unfriendly.
So let's suppose that you're elected President. You want to build nuclear. Chances are pretty good not a single will get completed during your term, which means you won't get to take credit for that achievement. If it all goes well, the main beneficiary will be your successor. If it goes wrong (including just being plain unprofitable), it'll be your legacy.
And unless your only mission in life is to get nuclear built, that's a bad thing because there are other things you probably want to achieve. Nuclear is unfortunately so big and so expensive that it constrains your other options.
If it wasn't obvious, my comments were made from an American point of view. The greens are, I'm given to understand, an actual political force in Europe, not merely a bogeyman.
Germany's certainly doing an admirable job with renewables in general, and increasing their wind power capacity specifically. Not to mention the manufacturing and tech associated with that stuff. I live in the US near a turbine made by Kenersys in Germany and it kills me that it made sense to import that, instead of buying one manufactured locally.
This is is ridiculous. Check the graph of Nuclear Energy costs once. It starts to increase exactly when huge amounts of regulation was started on Nuclear. Claiming that this was the secret machinations of the Fossil Fuel Lobby and not the works of the openly protesting Green Activists is being dishonest
Nuclear is dead. Back when it was new, it still had something to offer, but today it's a complete dead end, for practical and economical reasons.
It's not getting built because it's hard to make money from it anymore. If it was a solid money making proposition you'd see lots of resources being thrown into overcoming any activist resistance, and shoring up any concerns. Compare this with oil. Ecologically awful, but it makes lots and lots of money and as a result it's not having the same issues.
Which red tape and regulations? You're not seriously asking people not to keep a good eye on nuclear powerplants, are you? Because accidents are not a good thing.
And yeah, I get they don't kill that many people, but evacuating a large amount of people and cleaning up is an enormous expense. Which is part of the problem really. You can build a really solid powerplant, which will cost $$. Or you can let people do it on the cheap, and deal with the consequences when it leaks, which will cost $$$.
Now looking at that graph I think one thing becomes very clear: no sane person would buy power from a nuclear plant if they could get it from solar or wind instead.
But if you do that, nuclear becomes even more expensive. It's nearly all capital costs. If you're only selling power during half the day, you make half the money, and take twice as long to pay off the loans.
That introduces the very real possibility that you'll never pay it off. And so why would anybody want to build one?
People will say “but what about the third world???” and feel very comfortable with their position in a socially conscious first-world country. Yeah, well, where do you think those poor people in the third world are getting the money for their evil coal power plants? Countries like Japan and Australia.[1][2]
We have to reform our investment laws and hold first-world multinationals and governments accountable. They’re the ones funding all of this trash.
From a quick google scholar search, it seems that there is a trade-off between heating/cooling costs between summer and winter:
> The results indicate that the energy savings ratios of the rooms with the sedum-tray garden roof and with the white roof were 25.0% and 20.5%, respectively, as compared with the black-roofed room, in the summer; by contrast, the energy savings ratios were −9.9% and −2.7%, respectively, in the winter.
It seems that covering the building with a green garden is better than painting the roof white, but the heating costs were higher in the winter for both designs.
I guess that changing the roof could work in climates where the winter is not too cold.
On a side note, I wonder if it would be better to work on better insulation (both roof and sidings) rather than re-roofing a house.
Note: I am not a civil engineer so I have no clue if the paper is good or not.
Depending on your climate, once you get sufficiently cold, many of your buildings will accumulate their own layer of white stuff (snow) anyways in the winter. This study was conducted in Chongqing which basically doesn't have snow.
I suspect that the effect of this is highly location specific, both in terms of climate, as well as average insulation.
I wouldn't really say this is true. Snow pooling up on roofs is a bad thing -- that's a lot of moisture and weight. Homes in snowy places have sloped roofs to avoid it. When I bought my house in Massachusetts, the previous homeowner even gave me a tool to push snow off the roof, if needed.
You're right, you definitely don't want giant snow piles on your roof of your house, and yes, sloped roofs will help you avoid giant snow piles.
But you still often end up with some covering. Not 100%, but I think high enough to meaningfully affect the cost-benefit calculations. Not to mention large commercial buildings with flat roots.
It has been a requirement in Montreal for all new roofing for a few years now. Either green (vegetated) or light (with a solar reflection material). So most people have white elastomer roofs installed.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I believe it’s the only Canadian city with that requirement.
Montreal has more days where heat is a problem (ex: for elderly people), than when cold is a problem. There are a lot of efforts put into reducing heat zones, from too much asphalt, not enough trees, etc. (I once ran for borough council :-)
Since 2010, most Quebec building standards have also been updated pretty massively. I don't have references, but where I live, we had 1" insulation in the walls, and now the minimum requirement for new buildings is 1.5". Doors and windows tech have improved a lot too in the past 10-15 years. Overall, as I went through upgrades, our heating bills went down pretty significantly, but AC usage keeps going up.
It is not one country to be blamed, we all have to reduce and cut the Carbon footprints before it is too late. I am not scientist but Nuclear plants though are better option but it still poses threat to environment extraction of resources leads to threat and then we have seen fukushima nuclear disaster after Chernobyl disaster which was classified level 7 on scale [Read : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...] and disposal of radioactive materials. There is a recent article i came across which shows how testing nuclear bomb, even after decades posing a serious threat [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/nuclear-fallout-show...]
So i agree totally agree that now is the time and we have to be quick investing, installing renewable energy and encourage our coming generation to participate in it, otherwise we are screwed.
Also, i would really encourage everyone to save and conserve energy. Doing our small bit makes a big difference
Now. We need to build a collective fund to buy out all fossil fuels, and to put them in an unusable form (e.g. by mixing them with other fluids or with sand).
It's similar to what is done with biochar after it is produced: the biochar is ground to powder and mixed with compost before being sold to farms.
> Yet China and India continue to build new coal-fired power stations. And the G7 - Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US - won't give a date to phase them out.
The rich don't want to give up coal because they have gotten too comfortable with their overconsumption lifestyle, and the poor can't afford to not use coal because life in poverty is worse than life with climate change consequences.
Now is the time to invest big in renewable energy research and encourage our children to participate in it, otherwise we are screwed.
We need nuclear to bridge the gap, and actually let us phase out coal. Yet there's so much fearmongering over it. It's killed far fewer people than coal per energy unit, but people still freak out about it. I'm Canadian, and the people I know who are the most anti-nuclear are the ones from the main fossil fuel province. Even if they don't live there anymore, are against fossil fuels, and have an engineering degree, they've had the fear of nuclear ingrained into them.
No, we need to invest more in solar and wind. They're already cheaper and safer than Nuclear, and will only continue to get cheaper.
You say that nuclear has killed fewer people. That's true, but this is not the main problem of Nuclear. The main problems are 1) that catastrophic events can and will happen in the future. That's why nobody wants to live next to a nuclear power plant. 2) Nuclear waste storage.
Why would even invest in nuclear power plants now that it's pretty clear that other alternatives are cheaper and safer? (I'm not saying abandon nuclear power research, there are definitey niche cases where it makes sense, like space exploration).
These arguments have been circular forever. There’s likely not enough materials for solar everywhere, or enough space for wind everywhere, but investing on all forms today is more valuable than continuing to argue
What material are we going to run out of for solar? Silicon (sand) is the main ingredient.
Running out of space for wind? Huh? Yes obviously we use the best places first but the entire Earth has wind, and almost every land usage can be co sited with wind towers.
Solar panels are mostly sand. If you somehow run out of some of the trace elements in PV panels you can always build mirrors for solar-thermal. That has the added benefit that it produces power at night, but the drawback that it costs a bit more than PV.
> The main problems are 1) that catastrophic events can and will happen in the future. That's why nobody wants to live next to a nuclear power plant.
The chances for such events are vanishingly low when it comes to modern reactors. Seriously, as hard as it is to believe, we've come so, so far from Chernobyl. Thorium-based reactors are meltdown-proof [0], and Thorium comes with the plus in that it's not as easily weaponizable [1].
> 2) Nuclear waste storage.
Thorium reactors also produce less dangerous waste [2], which is great! They're not a panacea by any means- it is still technically possible to make weapons using Thorium reactors even if it's more difficult, and fuel is harder to prepare, but I do think the upsides greatly overcome the downsides.
Solar and wind aren't viable everywhere, which is why we need nuclear. The sooner we get over our inveterate fear of it, as difficult as it may be, the better.
We are rolling out solar and wind much faster than any meaningful amount of nuclear can get through even a pre-planning phase.
The reason is simple: it's far cheaper and quicker. Fear has relatively little to do with this. You can roll out facilities with GW of capacity in under a year. The total capacity of nuclear in the US is something like 94 GW after about 7 decades of nuclear being a thing. Wind is 120 GW. 17 of that got installed last year. Over the next decade, that is likely to continue to grow to a couple of hundred GW of capacity.
In general, countries world wide are rolling out impressive amounts of wind and solar every year. Quite many countries have hit the point where it is double digit percentage of energy generation and generally the dominant form of energy.
Quite a few of these countries are actually on track to be 100% renewable powered by the mid 2030s. Some are projected to hit their targets early. Nuclear is generally not a part of those plans in most of those countries. Mostly, no new plants are being built in these countries. No plants are being planned even. And actually, no plant could feasibly be planned and built until the mid 2030s in any case given how slow and expensive building such plants is and how politically sensitive that is.
Renewables outgrow everything else by no small margin almost everywhere on this planet. All we need to do is do more of that faster and at the same time figure out storage and long distance transport (i.e. cables) of energy.
It's not just fear. Building a nuclear power plant is a complicated, decades-long, tremendously expensive engineering prowess. Due to the catastrophic failure modes of nuclear reactors compared to other power plants, it requires a huge amount of safety and regulation (and it's why it has killed less people than other energy sources). It also requires a large and steady amount of water to work with current designs, so you can't build them just anywhere, and you need to extrapolate 50-100 years into the future to take into account droughs and rising sea levels.
I'm all for nuclear, I'm amazed at the power density of nuclear fuel (I saw recently that a few hundred grams of plutonium contain the same amount of energy as a fully fuelled Starship), but reducing the counter-argument to "fear" is not useful. Let's try and solve the real problems instead: the cost problems, the building time problems, the nuclear waste problems and the proliferation problems. The fear and political reluctance will then go away by itself.
In parallel, we should not waste time and enforce more energy-efficient housing, mandatory remote working whenever possible, promote better transportation options than cars, connect grids together, put solar/wing/biogas/geothermal plants everywhere, find more efficient ways to ship cargo across the planet, etc.
We don’t need to “bridge the gap” we need to radically alter all of our lives immediately. The pandemic has shown it’s possible. there’s no way to consume ourselves out of this crisis. At very least because if climate change doesn’t do us in, microplastics will.
And yet, because climate change isn’t as immediately scary to the average person as Covid19 was/is, we can’t even seem to agree on the easiest to implement solutions. We can’t even agree to the “wear a mask” equivalent, which isn’t surprising since we couldn’t agree to just wear masks!
I am generally an optimistic person, but I think we are completely and utterly screwed on climate change and I feel quite depressed and helpless about it.
The current behaviour about climate change looks a lot like the behaviour we have seen about Covid-19 a year and a half ago: the changes today are not seen everywhere nor often, as was covid in the first months, only local in China, and everyone was like "it's gonna be ok". Then everyone started to panic when it got to their door. So when heatwaves, sea risings, ... will hit hard those big actors like China, US, Brazil, ... things may change. In the meantime, why would they care, it's somewhere else, someone else's problem. Why would they break their economy?
You're definitely right about the overconsumption lifestyle. This is a quote from a Bill Bryson book I was just reading called Notes from a Big country:
What is saddest about all this is that a good part of these goals to cut greenhouse emissions could be met without any cost at all if we merely modified our extravagance. It has been estimated that the nation as a whole wastes about $300 billion of energy a year. We are not talking here about energy that could be saved by investing in new technologies. We are talking about energy that could be saved just by switching things off or turning things down.
Take hot water. Nearly every household in Europe has a timer device on its hot water system. Since people clearly don't need hot water when they are at work or fast asleep, there isn't any need to keep the tank heated, so the system shuts down. Here in America I don't know how to switch off my hot water tank. I don't know that it is possible. There is piping hot water in our house twenty-four hours a day, even when we are far away on vacation. Doesn't seem to make much sense.
According to U. S. News World Report, the United States must maintain the equivalent of five nuclear power plants just to power equipment and appliances that are on but not being used-lights burning in rooms that are unoccupied, computers left on when people go to lunch or home for the night, all those mute, wall-mounted TVs that flicker unwatched in the corners of bars.
> Now is the time to invest big in renewable energy research and encourage our children to participate in it, otherwise we are screwed.
We need to look at getting our environmental footprint under control. Renewable energy may help with that in the short term, but switching to renewables at scale will also have a significant environmental footprint. Remember, climate change is the environmental issue of our generation. Prior generations had their environmental issues (ozone hole, acid rain, deforestation). Future generations will have their environmental issues, for as long as we don't take responsibility and curb our resource use.
The US has been reducing its use of coal power pretty significantly. In 2016 Coal accounted for 30% of all power generation. This has now been reduced to 19%. It’s been replaced by renewables and natural gas plants.
It’s not rich nations that are the problem. They have and continue to drastically reduce their CO2 output (China not withstanding). The problem is poorer countries that are just now coming online with electricity. Coal is the cheapest way to do that.
The uncomfortable truth here is that if we want to stop this, we need to stop these undeveloped countries from…well…developing. Which we aren’t going to do because we aren’t monsters. So what now?
For any given limit we wish to hold on warming, there is a total acceptable amount of CO2 emissions we can allow for the world.
Once emitted, CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a few hundred to a thousand years. Rich nations have emitted more than their fair share for a couple hundred years--that's a large part of how they got rich. Of the CO2 now in the atmosphere, over 60% came from North America and Europe and 47% from the US and the EU+UK.
Emitting more than your fair share to get rich is fine, if:
1. Once rich you use part of that wealth to switch to low or zero emissions, and
2. Either do something to take the CO2 you emitted out of the atmosphere so that there is room in the global CO2 budget for someone else to become rich the same way, or help them become rich by subsidizing them so they can skip the high emissions stage and go straight to the low/zero emissions rich stage.
The current rich nations aren't doing well on either of these.
I don't know, but I have a hard time buying the private jets as the problem. How many of them are flying, in comparison to normal airliners?
It's like saying that the 3 Ferraris in the city are the problem, not the million Volkswagens (or whatever).
Heck, if this helps those folks focus on the problem at hand, I'd rather have them fly private than go through the stress of flying regular (which in my view is mostly horrible).
They are not a big problem per se, but the message that sends is pretty bad. I think many people are worried about "green" policies exacerbating inequality, with the rich flying and doing what they want while the poor aren't allowed cars.
I agree w/ you about the message they send (ie. it's pretty much hypocrisy).
But the inequalities were already there. It's not like if they stop flying private, they'll all of a sudden be less wealthy. At least they spend their money, instead of hoarding blindly (not that flying private changes this by much, I have to admit).
The inequalities may be there, but even rather poor people (in the US) are quite rich in an absolute sense, at the moment. Radical green policies would cause real, tangible changes to people's lives; if you actually wanted to reach realistic climate targets, many people wouldn't have cars due to carbon taxes, electricity costs would be much higher, etc.
Someone indirectly advocating for such things while flying in a private jet is a pretty bad look. It reminds me of a medieval king gorging himself on food while telling the population to slim down.
It's a matter of perception. It'd be like having an obese personal trainer lecturing you on proper diet and exercise. Everything they're saying might be true, but at best it comes off as hypocritical, at worst that they're getting paid to lie to you.
This is one of the reasons it's such a big problem that the US government is a gerontocracy. Old people don't care about climate change because it won't affect them.
Conservatives in government don't believe in climate change and liberals in government say they believe in it right up until they actually have to do anything. The common pattern is that they're all in their 60s, 70s, and 80s and will be dead before the most dire consequences arrive.
If they don't care what will happen after they die and they're already successful people... why would they be working at all? Surely they'll be at home burning through all their money and not worrying about anything?
That's an excellent question and I think it's some combination of hunger for power (eternally unquenchable) and using staffers/aides as elder care workers, like Robert Byrd did.
Most old people, yes. Most young people don't care about climate change (regardless of what they say) because doing something about it will affect them.
To some seeing records such as these fall is heartbreaking. It’s agonizing and vexing when you wonder what can you do to help slow down climate change? The reality is we aren’t doing nearly enough to slow it down and the Earth is gradually destabilizing. We see insane cold snaps such as those that impacted Texas this winter, and at the opposite end of the spectrum heat waves unlike anything humans have ever experienced before. The worst part is these will continue to get worse year after year while greenhouse gas emissions rise. Imagine the record high temperatures falling this week and year. In 5 years or 10 years they might even distant memories as we continue to see records broken and the planet become less livable.
The worst part of this is Earth is all there is for us. There is no where else to go. We are this tightly interconnected ecosystem where all beings are completely bound to one another. Our home is surrounded by darkness for millions of miles. There is no option B. There won’t be, that’s just the way it is. Mars won’t be option B. Don’t kid yourself. If we don’t right the course on greenhouse gas emissions with urgent changes to limit emissions now, then we will have lost the habitability of Earth. I can envision us having to live inside year round without being able to go outside. Does this feel so much like a remote possibility now? It seems year over year temperate days become more elusive. Fires. Droughts. Extreme weather events. Floods.
The destruction and extinction of entire ecosystems hangs in the balance of our climate. The crazy thing is we can stop this. But only with urgent individual and society actions and sacrifices now.
Climate change is only going to make weather more erratic and our political systems won't be able to cope with the necessity of changing national borders as climate change shifts what areas are arable and inhabitable. I'm not very optimistic about the future.
Is there any reason to maintain nations with changed borders? I feel it's more likely we would abolish or abandon most existing states and form refugee societies in the habitable regions
This seems really unlikely. It seems more likely that walls will go up and the good-weather nations will get very defensive. Bad-weather nations will either descend into chaos or adapt--some nations like the UAE and Singapore thrive under extreme heat, with sufficient technology and political stability.
In our podcast, we had professor of climate law (he is JD/PhD) talk to us about climate change. One of the irrefutable signs of climate change is that our weather is getting hotter... more record-setting years than the past. Yet, this alarming evidence doesn't concern most conservatives, who simply refuse to accept the science. Aren't they afraid of what's going to happen to us humans?
I thought we went from global warming (hotter) to climate change (not hotter everywhere).
And based on what I’ve read, we’re WAY past fixing this problem. Even if CO2 emissions went to zero tomorrow, the earth will continue to warm and make vast swathes uninhabitable.
> Even if all emissions were to stop today, the Earth’s average surface temperature would climb another 0.6 degrees or so over the next several decades before temperatures stopped rising.
Limiting additional temperature increase to 0.6C would be a huge win. We are a WAY past not having to adapt to major changes in climate.
We're certainly not way past preventing the most catastrophic outcomes.
Unfortunately, there's absolutely zero evidence that we'll actually do anything meaningful about our CO2 emissions, so IMO we're most definitely screwed.
I think it's infinitely more likely that a nation like China will unilaterally engage in geoengineering (e.g. depositing particulates in the troposphere) than we are to actually collectively curb our CO2 emissions.
The article points out that we cannot attribute this event to climate change. Fair point. It also points out that these heat waves are more likely given climate change. Fair point.
Unfortunately, there is no depth to the article. What would I like to see? First, describe what caused the heatwave. Second, describe how much more likely these heatwaves are with climate change. Third, describe how climate change will impact the severity of these heatwaves.
Even though climate models are different from weather models, I am guessing they provide enough information to provide estimates. These estimates would provide people with more concrete examples of what we can expect if we don't alter our behaviour.
If you go longer form, then you are basically asking for the slide show that Al Gore was presenting 20 years ago and was later turned into An Inconvenient Truth.
My expectations may be unrealistic in terms of the amount of research, but I think it can be done in an article that is not much longer than the one published. I think it's fair to assume that climate change is a thing, so further proof is not required. I think the public needs more context with respect to how it could end up affecting their lives, and a weather event like this one appears to be an ideal opportunity to present that.
Get used to it. There are places in the world where it's that temperature at night plus high humidity and no one has air conditioning. Eventually people might only be able to live in Antarctica excepting of course it will have melted done to the actual ground.
I really hope it's not too late to prevent that, but if we wanted to colonize Antarctica, we'd pretty much have to get rid of the ice anyway so we can grow plants there and access the natural resources laying underground.
Otherwise, we'd be stuck eating krill and penguins, and I don't know how I'd feel about that. Vegetarians surely would not like that.
Interesting that your reading is “get used to it you lazy, weak Canadians” and not “a country that is seldom in the news except when you want to make a joke about the cold is now in the news because of the heat”. It makes for a striking argument to illustrate global warming and climate change.
Unfortunately it will change nothing, at least nothing significant enough to prevent destruction. Those who profit monetarily or politically from global warming will continue to ignore it, or ridicule those who do not.
Even if Antarctica becomes temperate and eventually pleasant to live on, climate change doesn't change the number of sunlight hours you get in the winter
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
long term co2: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
And yet, we still have actual supposedly rational people being paid to say "global warming is a myth" or "we are just in another cycle of ice ages". It boggles the mind.