> It was the hottest August on record – by a large margin – and the second hottest ever month after July 2023, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service ERA 5 dataset. August as a whole is estimated to have been around 1.5°C warmer than the preindustrial average for 1850-1900, according to the C3S monthly climate bulletin.
Thinking about getting to 1.5 C averaged over the planet is surreal and we are still 30 years out from the promised "net zero". We have some tough times ahead of us.
I seem to recall that the first and second IPCC reports (I haven't read the newer ones) indicated that increases would continue for about 200 years, even if emissions went to zero.
The earth is indeed not in thermal equilibrium due to the speed of the recent CO2 increase, so warming would continue if atmospheric CO2 concentration would be held constant.
However, atmospheric CO2 concentration would not stay constant after emissions stop. It would go down slowly, mainly because it would continue to dissolve into the oceans. This effect cancels out the above point. Which is why the IPCC says that "The global temperature will stabilise when carbon dioxide emissions reach net zero."[1]
Unfortunately, stabilizing temperature does not mean that nothing else changes. The stable higher temperature will still mean that glaciers will continue to melt. Sea levels will continue to rise. Oceans will still acidify further.
Methane tipping points are already met, especially from tropical wetlands and the polar regions. Add to that the conversion of past carbon sinks to carbon emitters, such as the boreal forests and the Amazon and we are looking at a continued rise of both emissions and temps for a long time.
I know about the "flipped s-curve" that is methane emissions (inflection point in 2007) is it really considered a tipping point though? Do you have some good papers on that?
>The rapid growth in the atmospheric methane burden that began in late 2006 is very different from methane's past observational record
>Recent studies point to strongly increased emissions from wetlands, especially in the tropics
>This increase is comparable in scale and speed to glacial/interglacial terminations when the global climate system suddenly reorganized
Overall, there is a growing research output although much is still unknown. See for example:
Yes. IPCC AR6 estimates about 0.4-0.5C of warming is masked due to anthropogenic aerosol emissions. Given the conservative nature of IPCC estimates, it is probably more.
Yes yes the solution here is to physically move hundreds or thousands of years of capital investment, especially forms of capital investment that cannot be moved and are just abandoned/destroyed.
That way we can emit a bunch more to rebuild that already-built infrastructure in a different locale!
There's a lot of time though. It's more a matter of the kids or grandkids moving somewhere colder rather than anything sudden. And the biggest problem with building a new house up north is getting planning permission. The actual construction can be relatively trivial.
It's somewhat ironic all the billionaires are about space and mars and shit - like, ok, super in-hospitable, go for it. While we should be building our space fortresses and geo domes on earth to keep the elements out, and survive on some kind of lab food.
Of course not all the knowledge will be left but enough to easily build basic engines using Stirling or Carnot cycles or even pressurized steam. Solar panels don't have to be 25% efficient, 5% amorphous silicon cells would also be very useful.
On the other hand, looking at lived experience the story is quite tricky.
From the perspective of an individual it is very hard to detect this level of climate change. I can't tell how much warmer any given month was compared to even 20 years ago. We're talking about 28 vs 28.5°C average for a month. (and July and August made news because of pronounced anomalies, other months were probably even murkier stories due to natural monthly variability). This is not perceptible. And no one has an experiential reference point of Average Global Temperature of the 20th Century.
How hot was May of 2003 compared to May of 2023? I could attempt a guess but have zero confidence in it. Do you remember the average temperature of your teenage years summers? "It was hot", "between 25-30..." is all I can give without looking at data.
This is something we should keep in mind when advocating for climate measures, otherwise sceptics have another easy attack - "it feels basically the same, what are you talking about"
Depends where you live. I live in Vancouver, BC, and the effects here are very, very significant. It used to be that wildfire smoke in the city was super rare, but for the past ~10 years there’s been massive amounts of smoke in the city almost every summer. Weeks each summer where the air is filled with smoke, your throat itches non-stop, and it’s not healthy to be outside for extended periods. Virtually everyone agrees this is due to climate change, and it’s a pretty major negative impact on quality of living here, and pretty much everywhere along the west coast of North America.
Or another example, that I don’t have personal experience with - island nations dealing with a big increase in hurricane severity and/or frequency also have very visceral experiences of climate change.
Yeah agreed, I worded that poorly, there’s always multiple causes. Both logging and fire suppression are significant causes too.
It is worth noting, though:
- That paper cuts off at 2017. Things have gotten even worse recently: the previous high (on record) for hectares burned by wildfires in Canada was 7.1 million, this year we’re already at 16.5 million, and still growing quickly: https://natural-resources.canada.ca/simply-science/canadas-r...
It depends on your location I guess? I for one can definitely tell from my own experience, and I'm not even 30 yet.
Proper winter starts much later and is milder than before, it was 10+ degrees Celsius for the past five or so NYE (didn't even need a winter jacket), summer heat waves are more unbearable and last longer, we went from no serious issues with floods in the spring to a number of entire-towns-are-underwater levels of flooding...
Now some of these did happen before, but as an anomaly, definitely not something that happens multiple years in a row.
This is a fair point. Out of curiosity, I went back and looked at the temperatures in my area the year I was born. Our highest temperature of the year was 96F ... on September 24! Let me tell you, if we hit 96F two weeks from now, it'll be front page news and evidence of climate catastrophe.
I think everyone has now fallen into the trap of mixing up weather with climate. We used to deride the deniers who said a cold snap meant global warming was fake, by pointing out that climate and weather are two different things. But more recently we point to every heat wave as evidence of climate change, every cold snap as well -- because 'more energy means more extremes!' Which may be entirely true, but it's hard to deny it looks like trying to have your cake and eat it too.
FWIW, back in 1974, the coldest day of that year was 12F. That would also be considered quite cold today. So that year hit some temperatures in both directions that would be noteworthy today, almost 50 years later.
You can't take the number outside of its context. We know the earth is warming, that's not up for contention anymore. When you hit a 50 year record high temperature, the implication is that it's only going to get hotter.
It's not "doom and gloom because it hit 96F"
It's "doom and gloom because it hit 96F and it's only gonna get hotter"
Except that just like the Air Force’s sunspot count, which is so blatantly false that NASA doesn’t even bother trying to get their own numbers to match up — the NOAA has been using statistical manipulation and outright fraud to create the appearance of global warming.
I honestly don't know what to do when people like you exist that confidently refute the scientific consensus based on whatever they read online.
You're why I think the world is doomed. We can't fix climate change when there's a bunch of people who want to be contrarians so bad they're willing to die over it.
No, I don't, because I never said that, because there was never scientific consensus around that. Anyway, I hope you live long enough to see the world burn.
I can experience it here in North Texas. We've had a lot more snow events in the past few years than the over a decade preceding. It used to be an every few years kind of thing, now there's a couple big ice storms every year. Massive difference.
And it swings the other way in the summer too. Yeah, it's Texas, its hot. Upper 90s most days in the peak summer time. Every now a bad summer with a lot of 100F days. Now every summer has streaks of well over 100F days. This summer alone has been the hardest one for me to experience here in my over thirty years in Texas.
Well, I'm not keeping records, but here (Czechia) the heat waves were really different from the past: twice in one summer for more than three weeks (in total), that simply never happened (I believe I remember reliably - public records agree -, because I don't have AC, so I have to consistently measure temperature and manage it by closing windows at 6 AM, closing the drapes, and during night by creating draft).
The perception of past weather patterns truly is unreliable, but I don't care if I can discern between temperature averages; the more common occurrence of extremes is what matters. I don't know how anyone can look at the reports of fires everywhere and not be certain this wasn't happening at this rate even few years ago.
You are right, the changes are small and usually hard to see directly.
But we also have to remember that warming is not uniform across the planet, where I live the Berkeley Earth site [1] shows an average 2.5 C warming since the 1850s.
It is especially visible if your regular winter temperatures go below 0 C, but not much. Even 1-2 C warming may be seen as a much smaller snow coverage than before.
If policies don't drastically change. Just imagine norwegian electric car subsidies but happening everywhere decades straight - for solar, wind, tidal, battery, pumped water stations, sand batteries. Perhaps a Sahara -> Europe solar megaproject (I remember a good discussion on HN about that).
Separately, I wonder if a geoengineering megaproject is more likely to be funded than small incremental changes due to politicians perceiving more immediate ROI, peer clout, and poll ratings.
> If policies don't drastically change. Just imagine norwegian electric car subsidies but happening everywhere decades straight - for solar, wind, tidal, battery, pumped water stations, sand batteries. Perhaps a Sahara -> Europe solar megaproject (I remember a good discussion on HN about that).
Do you honestly see them changing in the following years? We had Paris 8 years ago and the only thing that caused a small, one-year dip in our emissions was a deadly pandemic...
I do, because there is an entire generation steeped in understanding of climate change already taking up policital roles. Minds may be changing (but not fast enough) so intead the politicians changing will be what saves us.
It wasn’t deadly pandemic that did that; it was biz owners complying with orders to let workers stay at home and not commute in and work their jobs that depend on it. Society didn’t collapse either. It’s a decision.
And how much did it cost? It didn't collapse because we printed trillions of dollars, but now we have a huge debt and inflation, which has made poor people even poorer, especially in poorer countries where food insecurity has resurfaced. If it were a sustainable solution, we would have already implemented it.
> Just imagine norwegian electric car subsidies but happening everywhere
That's hard to imagine, because Norway exported a huge amount of pollution to the rest of the world in order to finance their current policy of green technology adoption. Not everyone has that nice ratio of oil and tiny population.
That's actually the whole deal, even if policies change drastically in the right direction we're still completely screwed. Not quite as screwed but still not notably less. If we stopped our civilization covid-style on a dime and didn't emit any greenouse gasses at all from now on, we're still mostly screwed in the near term. Delayed effects are a bitch.
And policies will only gradually change at best, only after the effects are plainly seen and when it's laughably beyond too late.
Take a genuine look at the science. Scientists themselves are freaking out. There’s no way out of the famine and heat and just the general Collapse that will kill billions.
What's even better is that net zero isn't doing anything for _already emitted carbon_, or the already accumulated heat energy. We can get to net zero and average temperature is still going to keep rising.
I think there are solutions, question is when these will be implemented. I'm referring to planting more trees to cool down cities so that avg temp will decrease, routing rivers/water through city to increase even more the cooling effect (like city of Bishkek)
My prediction is that geo-engineering will be done when a certain death/disturbance threshold will have been reached (too many climate refugees for example and western world can't achieve a closed border, or too many weather disasters that hit the western world and populations are convinced it is because of global warming). However I don't think we will reach it in the next 5-10 years, but maybe after that period.
Also curious if the earth maybe has some tricks (last one I can recall was more clouds were causing more cooling than expected in the climate models) that will invalidate the current climate change models.
I'm not ready to predict, but based on what I saw in Europe in 2015[0] and how things[1] are developing[2] lately[3], I see this as a very plausible outcome.
The US and EU countries get more migrants than they can handle; resentment grows; attempts to solve the problem with bureaucracy and policing fail spectacularly; calls for outright violence grow louder; and the well-meaning citizenry agrees that Something Must Be Done!
Geo-engineering is something, and it will be done.
When we can burn fossil fuels to impact the atmosphere that cause climate change then we can also pump other gasses that will have a cooling effect. We aren’t doing much at the moment because there aren’t economic incentives to do so, but that can change if we have policy changes.
We aren't doing it because pumping gases into the atmosphere does more than just reduce temperature. Sulfur compounds, for example, dissolve in the clouds and make them acidic.
So does the CO2 itself. The oceans are getting more acidic already, killing shellfish and throwing off food webs.
Throwing additional geoengineering on top of the geoengineering we're already doing will almost certainly cause as many problems as it solves. It would be so much simpler, cheaper, and more effective to just stop digging carbon out of the ground and putting it in the sky.
I read somewhere that fine water mist sprayed into the atmosphere may have the same reflective effect as sulphur from the shipping industry without the negatives.
I’m fairly certain we will resort to this type of geo engineering soon - cutting down energy consumption is not a viable path, it’s just not going to happen. Quite the contrary, humanity’s energy consumption is likely to grow a lot.
I agree with you about keeping carbon in the ground - but it will only happen for economic reasons in reality (ie. solar being cheaper than oil and gas) and the transition will take decades.
I hope we don’t hit irreversible feedback effects in the next couple of decades!
I know every generation feels special - the pinnacle of humanity, a special time - but this time around it really feels like what happens in the next 20-30 years can have make it or break it consequences for later generations (not just climate, also chemical pollution, risk of nuclear/biological weapons use and possibly AI - though that could also solve a lot of our problems)
No one knows what fine water mist sprayed into the atmosphere would do. Good god let's not bank on these ridiculous massive-scale hail Marys that may just as well cause more damage than good.
We're far more likely to pump a bunch of sulfates into the air than we are to stop driving pickup trucks everywhere. Humans aren't rational, and this is the kind of irrationality that democracy in particular cannot solve.
> My prediction is that geo-engineering will be done when a certain death/disturbance threshold will have been reached
People seem to be accepting "the new normal" very fast. I'm not sure geo-engineering will be popular, since the status quo bias that's currently preventing us from reducing fossil fuels, will also stop any "artificial weather manipulation".
But let's be fair - "reducing fossil fuel consumption" and "artificial weather manipulation" are on completely different levels in regards to dangers. Nothing bad will happen if we suddenly stopped all fossil fuel consumption and replaced it with renewable energy. We don't know what kind of bad things can happen with artificial weather manipulation, because we haven't really done that before, and you can't really test the impacts in a closed experiment.
I think it's not really clear that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now. It would be pretty massive perturbation on a complex system. I think we should still do it because the alternatives are even worse, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking there are risk free paths out of the pickle we are in.
It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now. The ecosystems on our planet have only had fossil fuel emissions added for around 200 years, and in that time these emissions have had a very negative effect on the whole system. If we stop adding these we return to the normal which has been ongoing for millions of years. It's not a perturbation, it's stopping a perturbation.
By what mechanism would you expect something bad to suddenly happen?
The whole point is that it is hard/impossible to predict, and I am even hesitant to list some ideas because they sound like climate denier conspiracy theories. But just as a hypothetical example, there may be effects from aerosols ejected along with CO2 when burning fossil fuels, which act on shorter time scales in the opposite direction, which could lead to overshoot.
> The whole point is that it is hard/impossible to predict
But it certainly seems much easier to predict compared to the results of further CO2 in the atmosphere. We've lived through the transition period from lower CO2 to current CO2, so it's reasonable to assume we'll see the same effects in reverse. We haven't lived through the period of current CO2 to higher CO2.
> and I am even hesitant to list some ideas because they sound like climate denier conspiracy theories
Understandable, no worries!
> But just as a hypothetical example, there may be effects from aerosols ejected along with CO2 when burning fossil fuels, which act on shorter time scales in the opposite direction, which could lead to overshoot.
Sure, it's possible, but it seems much more likely that continued increases in CO2 will have worse unpredictable effects.
I thought I was adequately clear. If you need me to make my point more clear, here you go:
> > > It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now.
For what most people mean by "right now", something bad happens - many, many people die. You chose that phrase; I didn't. So within the normal meaning of the phrase, you are very wrong.
And I thought I was adequately clear when I initially specified:
> Nothing bad will happen if we suddenly stopped all fossil fuel consumption and replaced it with renewable energy.
Do you really need me to repeat this for every subsequent reference to the hypothetical? You yourself acknowledged it in your first comment, so you obviously understood it.
But if you need me to, fine, replace the sentence you quoted with:
> It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now and replaced it with renewable energy.
Right. (I was actually coming back to edit my post to acknowledge that you said that.) But...
We can't actually do that right now.
When can we? 10 years? With all the combines, and all the tractors, and all the semis having to be electric? Can we even do it then? We maybe can in 20...
If it's 20 years from now before we can do it, that's not "right now".
The problem with the way you said it is that it makes it sound like we could do it now (for reasonably normal values of "now"). We can't.
That's the neat thing about hypotheticals: they let us talk about and consider situations which aren't real. I can say crazy, insane things which have no basis in reality without said things affecting reality in a negative way! It even lets me construct arguments that work under specific preconditions, even if those preconditions aren't met.
It's incredible how rabid people get when talking about phasing out fossil fuel. In your eyes, I haven't stated clearly enough that the hypothetical (which you keep telling me is impossible) is a hypothetical. Now, any normal reader might see that and think "Hm, if that's not possible, he's surely talking about a hypothetical". But not you, you keep going about how I haven't made it clear enough that it's a hypothetical. You even jumped at the opportunity of me not explicitly repeating the complete hypothetical the second time, even though you understood it the first time. Have you stopped to reflect on why you're acting the way you are?
OK, hypothetically, if we had all the electric infrastructure and vehicles ready to go, sure, let's switch now. Hypothetically, that would be fine. But as you said, that doesn't affect reality. So, OK, you win the point. But in the real world, so what? In the real world we can't do it now, so what good is your hypothetical? Maybe we would be better served by focusing on things that actually matter in reality?
Hypothetically my initial point stands: reducing fossil fuel consumption by replacing it with something else, and artificially manipulating the weather, are in completely different ballparks regarding danger.
I dunno, weather modification has been going on since at least the 80s and it’s pretty unnoticeable. I don’t see how we can peacefully stop China and Africa from burning coal, so I’m more interested in unilateral, noncoercive solutions.
In which places with droughts have we used weather manipulation to reduce climate change? I'm not talking about increasing rainfall, I'm talking about reducing climate change. Please share a specific example where we've done so since the 80s.
I've been vegan for decades, and I would love to see humanity move on from meat, but the idea is so incredibly offensive to people that I find it far easier to imagine the the Amazon razed and replaced with cattle feeding lots before that will happen.
It's not incredibly offensive; those are rhetorical tactics and you are falling for them: Act crazy and the other side will give up; it's a simple as that.
They don't care about meat; they care about defeating liberalism. They will shift their belief in a moment.
I'm discouraged that politics ever even comes into this. It makes as much sense as the left likes masks and the right doesn't like masks. I wish everyone could admit this is an issue and move forward.
I’d remember that this didn’t happen by accident. The fossil fuel companies knew this was coming in the 1970s and poured billions of dollars into delaying action and securing their political power. You used to be able to find Republicans opposed to pollution and Democrats who were in the pocket of fossil fuel companies - Manchin is a relic of that era – but the fossil fuel companies managed to get enough control of the Republican Party to make it difficult for anyone opposed to pollution to remain a member. By the time Bush ran against Gore the contrast was stark: someone saying urgent action was needed and an oilman saying the scientists were all wrong and we needed more cheap oil.
What really sealed our fate was electing Obama. I know a Republican lobbyist who used to work on various environmental issues, which wasn’t as oxymoronic as it sounds: he used to get the coalitions of hunting and fishing groups and sometimes farmers who were in favor of things like clean water and air, and ecosystems which were healthy enough to support game. As he describes it, once Obama was elected the Republican leadership were bitterly determined not to give him any wins and told their members that those old deals were off-limits. Their successors don’t even have a tradition of collaborating like that.
Of course it's a political issue. Politics is fundamentally about a struggle for which interests should be given priority over other interests. There are lots of people with a whooooole lot of power who have a lot to lose from taking climate change seriously, how could it not become political?
Reason I ask is because strangely we got a very cool summer for the previous 3 months in Eastern Canada. But that's part of earth so I'm asking about the method, how the weight is distributed, etc.
Our region still has cooling from Greenland glacial melting. The catches are that the reflectiveness is going down and worse ice takes lots of heat to melt but way way less for that melted water to heat further. The previous climate shifts including 5 major extinction event major climate shifts happened over maybe a dozen years. El Nino is just starting now in September the records of the last three months were just when the cool phase La Nina was over before the coming few super heated years. And the civilization collapse tipping point from massive Arctic methane release may happen in the next few years. This climate scientist has been warning of mass human extinction by about the year 2026 for awhile now! https://arctic-news.blogspot.com
Clearly we need to solve this problem, climate change is real, and it's here.
However, we can't just stop using oil. It would lead to the death (by starvation) of most of humanity, mostly in the poorer parts of the world.
We need a well managed transition away from fossil fuel inputs. One of the first things that should be shifted, as much as is possible, is from Industrial Farming which uses massive chemical inputs, and burns up the soil.
Regenerative agriculture can eliminate the need for tilling, capture carbon into the soil, which both then improve water retention, and decrease soil temperatures. These reduce the need for irrigation, increase the ability to absorb rainfall without run-off.
The addition of ruminants to the mix produces fertilizer and meat at the same time.
About 20% of the carbon we've dumped into the atmosphere could be recaptured if widespread adoption of regenerative farming were to happen. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a lot cheaper than trying to use machines to do it.
The single best move we could make would be progressively taxing it: tell everyone that today is the cheapest a gallon of gas will ever be, with guaranteed 20% annual price increases with the tax revenue devoted to assisting low-income households decarbonize. That would tell every business to start investing in alternatives or efficiency improvements, homeowners would shift towards things like heat pumps to save money, and you wouldn’t have as many auto buyers locking in 15-20 years of pollution buying a heavy industrial truck so they can cosplay as a rancher on the way into cubicle land. Toss in credits for carbon sinks and you’d have a good way to support the kind of farming you mention without constantly being underpriced by farmers relying on subsidized cheap oil.
Around the turn of the century, that was a Republican idea but since the fossil fuel industry successfully managed an ideological purge that’s now too politically incorrect to even mention in those circles.
Gasoline use is just a small fraction of the demand for oil, most of it has other uses, and those aren't as flexible on demand as fuel for cars. I'd be willing to bet that they'd start flaring it off if demand collapsed, just to keep the refineries going.
Fertilizer is a major sink of petrochemicals, and there really aren't any substitutes available on a large enough scale.
Yes, I’m aware - you’ll note I also mentioned home heating, which is usually oil or gas. That doesn’t in any way change the fact that raising the price would both give people the right economic incentives to use less and provide funds to assist with capital outlays that might require.
That would among other things be great for letting us conserve usage for things which are hard to make from other sources. That’s a much better use of a limited resource than someone insecure driving a multi-ton vehicle to pick up a hamburger because it’s been subsidized to seem cheaper.
Suburban middle class guy switching from driving an F150 to the Safeway to using an e-bike to get his groceries will not cause anyone to starve, but it will make a measurable dent in CO2 emissions. Do not frame this as an irreconcilable tension between starvation and plenty. The question is whether the average American consumer-bot can be coerced into not squandering the atmosphere at a rate 100x faster than the average human.
The guy is living in the suburbs, which means they aren’t going to the store very often as they probably live far away from it. That means they are getting more than a few bags of groceries, they don’t need an F150 for sure, but they probably aren’t getting to carry this with an e-bike.
Better for the suburban guy to become a city guy and walk or bike to the grocery store a few times a week. They get better veggies that way as well.
One more example occurred in the four days since this post was published:
- "By 06:00 UTC on September 8, Lee's maximum sustained winds reached 165 mph (270 km/h), an increase of 85 mph (140 km/h) in 24 hours, making it the third‑fastest intensifying Atlantic hurricane on record, behind only Felix and Wilma.[12]"
It seems to me that the "alarmist" scientists have been erring on the side of caution so much that the events have been unfolding faster than even some of their most conservative predictions.
And tech carries out churning out artificial intelligence systems that consumes way more energy than genuine human intelligence while being worse off at the same tasks most of the time
I'd like to see that energy calculation. AI could write a whole book in hours or a beautiful image in seconds consuming a few hundred watts of the TPU.
It would take a human weeks/months to write a book and days/week to paint a beautiful images. Also consuming at least ~100 watts idle.
also ai agent scientists in a simulated lab could solve big problems like climate change. AI might be the only thing that can save us, if it don't kill us.
It is a technological problem, and will be solved as such.
We "don't do it", because the currently offered solutions are insane. Expecting people to reduce their consumption will just not work. It's an uphill battle against human nature.
The solutions to global warming will likely look like a bunch of mirrors in the deserts or in space.
So funny to constantly see these kinds of adjectives in titles about this topic. I thought that we had models that showed us just how shitty things are going to be, no? It can't be "unprecedented" decade after decade, either we have models we can rely on and we predicted it or we don't and need to accept that this whole idea of "tipping points" and climate change irreversibility is just a guess.
If we used this language with any other subject, HN would be up in arms about how sensationalist the headline is.
While unprecedented can mean unexpected or out of the norm it can also mean never before seen/done. So technically yes every point on the predictable upwards trendline is an unprecedented amount when we reach it in actuality.
Even assuming that HN readers may feel the word is emotive it's pointless to quibble about it when realistically any discussion about the details of climate change are going to be more emotive with such clinically correct terms as "climate refugees", "ocean acidification", "deadly heatwaves", "longest cyclone season", "3rd once in a century storm in the last decade".
Seasons, global climate related cycles like El Niño, unpredictable weather and so on push temperatures up and down, eventually it will get colder next winter.
But the complex system that is the planet have a lot of tipping points, that once reached things will go increasingly worse with no turning back.
I'm not sure if we didn't reach that stage already, or if this kind of events will give us the extra push to cross the border. That is why is dangerous to keep emitting even if they are not predicted to reach some milestone for some years still, the system becomes fragile and ready to break down with small changes.
This is the part of the problem it’s almost impossible to get people to accept and understand.
The wilful ignorance, even among some of my own relatives, is legitimately terrifying. I tried to explain the concept of a tipping point and got chastised for buying into fake news.
For a while I thought maybe a lot of people just think it’s exaggerated or something. Nope. They fully think the entire concept is a work of fiction, despite the overwhelming (and increasing) mountain of evidence.
It’s legitimately crazy out there.
Climate tipping points are poorly understood and are cumulative. We really don’t know if melting the glaciers is going to be enough by itself to raise the temperature enough to trigger the next domino to fall without further emissions which are also still increasing.
It’s not been over-dramatised. If anything, I believe the consensus view is too reserved in how it views the limits of impacts at 1.5 degrees.
Yes, I have relatives that are medical doctors, physic professors, have doctorates in statistics, are engineers (real engineers and not software engineers), etc. and yet, because of the lies of conservative politics, are convinced that at best there is climate change, but it is from natural fluctuations and not human caused, and at worst that it is a hoax. Either way, there is nothing we can or should do.
I don't get how you can ignore that things have gotten hotter.
Like maybe not believing a climate change model that says that by 2050 half of California will be underwater due to rising sea levels, I understand - it's a prediction about the future, likely to be wrong the way predictions about the future of the market are often wrong.
But like... we've been recording temperatures for over 100 years now, and it keeps going up. How can you argue with that.
It's like keeping a record of your child's height but refusing to admit that they're growing.
"Heat islands" "Fake data" "There was snow last winter" "It's not hot here" "They recalibrated the thermometers" "It's actually cooling since [last record peak]"
There's just a whole host of excuses to gallop through. Knock down one, they'll grab another. Debunk that, and they'll move on to the next one... or return to a previous one.
First world countries already have 1 child per family with the rest of the world also moving that direction as they grow wealthier. This policy wouldn't actually do much to help and would likely cause massive unintended consequences like China is dealing with right now.
Yes I know putting it into practice by law is not practical or even wanted. I just don't believe climate changes significantly improves by having electric cars and replacing old light bulbs with led. We need more deepcutting measures.
Either have less kids or power the world nuclear and all eat vegan (no methane producing animals), or accept the new climate reality and deal with the heat or whatever. Just don't pretend we are doing a good job at the moment because we don't.
Obviously putting humanity below replacement reproduction eventually causes it to disappear, then the planet will recover from whatever we did after a few million years.
But I don’t see how that will make it a better place to live for us. We know that birth rates already fall with higher standards of living, so if you want fewer kids just develop those countries where the birth rate is still high.
Only emissions per capita counts. Just because those countries have more population than entire continents of Africa and Europe, does not mean it's their fault.
USA emits almost 8 times more emission per capita when compared to India. Rather India is so poor, that it must increase it's energy generation by any means possible.
So an Indian on average consumes just 1/8 of a USA citizen.
This is, unfortunately, a case where fairness and feasibility don't align well. Is it fair to expect Indians to rein in their emissions when those are already lower (per capita) than the US? Hell no. Asked and answered. Is it feasible? That's a trickier question, and it won't be possible to answer it without addressing loss aversion.
"we feel the pain from losses about twice as much as we feel the joy of equivalent gains"
https://insidebe.com/articles/loss-aversion/
(link to original "prospect theory" paper - the most cited in economics by some measures - where that text appears)
Loss aversion is usually discussed as part of behavioral economics, but it appears all over the place. For example, many casual games have a "start paying real money or you'll start losing" dark pattern that's based on loss aversion.
With respect to the current question, it's clearly very hard to make people give up a high-emissions lifestyle once they've experienced it. Getting people to maintain a lower-emissions lifestyle is much easier. Again, it's not fair. Absolutely not, and I'm not really suggesting it as The Solution. However, understanding loss aversion might help to understand why people keep bringing it up.
"China, the United States and India — contribute 42.6% total emissions, while the bottom 100 countries only account for only 2.9%.". Asia is the largest emitter with China at 27%". While selling renewables to the rest of the world, China seems reluctant to reduce its reliance on coal-fired power stations.
'Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021.'
Chinese scientists are hardly backward in understanding climate science. So what's the logic here? Presumably if they could maintain energy supplies without coal, they would.
I'm wondering, what's the projected circuit breaker that causes the system to collapse and people to change something if we don't do anything before? Crop yields falling? Starvation? Extreme events? Mass migration?
Could be starvation. Even though we're capable of producing more than enough food for everyone, the combination of sub-optimal eating habits, sub-optimal farming techniques, and comically inefficient/unfair distribution means that we don't. Between those factors and increasing population, even a small decrease in crop yields could cause unprecedented levels of famine.
Could be war. War over food, war over water, war over water for growing food, war over living space as coasts get flooded or obliterated by storms, etc.
Could be disease. There's plenty of evidence that climate change is causing diseases to spread (along with their animal hosts) where they hadn't before. If anyone thinks COVID was the last or worst pandemic we'll have to endure this century, they're fooling themselves. The true worst might not cause civilization to collapse entirely, but it sure will increase a lot of the tension already present.
Most likely, it will be a combination of all of these. The four horsemen are all enjoying the race.
Elections are every roughly every half decade in most of the world, right? I think the leaders know that we won't panic about our climate changing over that time span. What do we call the climate change equivalent of an Overton window?
I posit that the Overton Window is increasingly less relevant in highly polarized political environments.
Taking climate change as an example, a large fraction of the population in some countries is growing more skeptical of aggressive climate change policy, not less. Thats not going to shift policy acceptability even if the public's opinion shifts the opposite direction on average.
>If the C3S dataset only currently starts in 1979, how can you then provide temperatures relating to the pre-industrial era?
>In order to relate global mean temperature derived from the C3S dataset (ERA5) to the pre-industrial era, we use the estimate that the 1981-2010 reference period is approximately 0.69°C and that the 1991-2020 reference period is approximately 0.88°C warmer than the period 1850-1900, the time period typically referred to as the pre-industrial level for temperatures by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
>Note that these estimates were updated during Autumn 2021, due to new findings published in AR6 WGI report “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis”. See more here under “Reference periods and anomalies”.
I’m sure this is all fine and valid, but they really need to work on their messaging. To a skeptic, this is gonna sound a lot like “oh yeah we pretty much just made the numbers up.”
Honestly, at this point I'm beyond caring much what stuff sounds like "to a skeptic". The past 15 or so years have proven to me that "skeptics" can believe whatever TF they want, all logic and and reason be damned, as long as there is a snazzy YouTube video pointing out how it's all a CoNSp1RacY by the Secret Global Elite.
I'm done with trying to convince people who have made it extremely adamant that they aren't willing to be convinced.
Sure, there are some people who are not persuadable no matter what. But there are other people who are not crazy but who see stuff like this and have legitimate doubts.
Sure, we only built gigantonormous infrastructures to measure about everything on every cm of this planet, 10s of thousands of highly qualified experts from all over the world work on this full time and have been saying the same thing for decades, but “there are people” who have “““legitimate doubts”””. Sure.
I’d like to know more about the legitimate doubts. I haven’t heard a solid argument yet. Of the arguments I’ve heard though, the speaker had had low scientific literacy and misunderstandings of the scientific process and the data. They were perturbed by media, mainly. So, I’d like to hear someone serious address the issue.
You don't need a solid argument to have doubts, you need to hear a solid argument (or more accurately, several of them over some period of time) not to have doubts, and even then you should be checking and doubting your own assumptions.
Not everyone is a scientist or an engineer. You don't have to be an idiot to read the above statements and have your main takeaway be "they don't know for sure so they guessed" and it's completely reasonable to still have doubts based on that.
So, you’re saying the models that have been used and refined over decades have been wildly inaccurate? It’d be interesting to me to see that analysis. Maybe it’ll change my mind.
This is the stuff I'm talking about. I make a deduction, and you respond with a defensive statement and change the subject. I'm just looking for evidence of what you're implicitly claiming. Are the models accurate or not?
Anyway, probably just the inherent difficulty of trying to have a conversation online.
Obviously clearer is better, but do you think a scientific body should be expected to go out of its way to convey information in a way that would be difficult for bad-faith actors to willfully misinterpret? Because I don't.
"Bad faith actor" is different from someone who is simply unfamiliar with the material, uneducated, or skeptical for good faith reasons.
Bad faith actors will act in bad faith, we all know that. But yes, you should go out of your way as a scientific body to explain your conclusions to good faith skeptics and people who want to understand your material. And I think that bar goes higher the more bad faith actors you have in your field.
I can't back it up because it was a televised congressional committee hearing and I don't remember the name of the scientist but he said that his data he had been studying and working with that was published in the 1940's was different from the data that is now published for that same time period. He made no accusations he just said his data showed no signs of global warming. So, I guess as a skeptic, yes this does make me think they are making it all up.
What are you skeptic of? There is so much misleading denialism of what is now ao blindingly obvious to any casual reasonable observer, that I propose you apply you skepticism with a bit a cui bono.
Hello Giardini. Oh wow I typed "ao" instead of "so"... the earth is saved!
"casual reasonable observer" being science indeed, check out the IPCC report, it's a super hot read I heard. Or you can publish your own and send it for peer review. I think you have no valid argument to put forward to explain how you are being a sceptic, but hey if you think you do, and if you think you are actually a sceptic, then please carry on I'm all ears.
I'd expect that our current temperature measurements are much, much more accurate than in the early 1900s, so while I'd expect them to be tweaked, not by much.
But this whole debate is pretty much a smokescreen. Sure, there are definitely error bars around temperature records of the past and estimates for the future. But one thing I have never seen be in question is the sheer amount of CO2 we have put into the atmosphere: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... .
The atmosphere now contains 50% more CO2 than pre-industrial times. The oceans are now 30% more acidic. These are gargantuan amounts. Sure, the global climate is incredibly complex, and how the climate reacts in different places in the world (e.g. ocean currents, ice cover, sea levels, temperatures, atmospheric humidity, storm intensity, etc.) is the hard work of some very smart people in climate science. But it's preposterous to me that we think we could raise the main global greenhouse gas by 50% and increase ocean acidity by 30% and not see some major impacts.
So while I think it's important to "worry about the details", only if done in good faith. Nitpicking around whether temperatures have rising 1.1 vs. 1.2 degrees, and using that as "evidence" that global warming isn't a problem or isn't worth doing something about, is what is so ridiculous in the face of avalanches of other data that we are seriously affecting the global climate.
As someone who has lived in South Texas my whole life and seen summers go from uncomfortably hot when I was a child to now dangerous to life, I have to say that my data leads me to believe that we're doomed. I do wish I could believe what you believe though; much like I wish there was a god in heaven who loves and protects me - it seems to really help people get through the day, but I seem to be incapable of believing it myself.
One solution is easy, it is to reduce deforestation. These can grow faster with more CO2 and store them in their wood. But humanity's real problem is not carbon dioxide and methane. The worst are the industrial chemicals and toxic agents that are impregnated in our bodies and brains.
I recently learnt that chopping trees is not particularly a bad thing. The CO2 is already stored inside the tree. The most important thing is to ensure new trees will be growing.
We are still technically getting out of the last ice age.
Warmer climates mean more places are warm enough to grow food. More CO2 means plants grow faster (also more food). Yea, some low lands might get flooded - either build protections or don’t buy / build houses there. But overall for humanity warmer Earth temperatures are good thing. Much better than another ice age.
This is like saying losing weight is good so you should contract cholera. The times where the climate was warmer in the past took much longer to get that way, giving ecosystems time to adapt.
So how do you think we should avoid all the costs and realize the benefits? The costs are enormous. How do we handle massive food production loss, migrations, flooding, etc.?
Our civilization was built for the climate as it has been for 10,000 years. Do we just toss out much of that capital? Who will pay for it?
Nothing about the warming climates makes food easier to farm, hotter temperatures just mess every established system we have. It's catastrophically destructive and everyone/humanity starves.
Since it's a race with time do you guys think burning more energy irresponsibly could lead us to faster innovation in geoengineering advances that would help us fix the problem before it's too late?
We have a very hard time building nuclear power stations. This claim, which seems to absolve energy consumption, is easy to say but very hard to do in practice.
We're technically still in an ice age [1]. How far does this need to go to reach the end of that ice age [2]?
The Cretaceous period was over ten degrees warmer than our current period [3,4,5]. It supported a lot (though much different) biodiversity. How long would it take us to push into these temperature ranges? And how long to exceed them?
How much species diversity will we lose at each half degree increment from this point forward? Will we see some species better equipped (increased as opposed to decreased fitness) by temperature increases? Will we see any quick evolution to support climage changes?
When will temperatures be incompatible with ranges necessary to sustain society? When will they be incompatible with human life? And all terrestrial and aquatic animal life? Will runaway heating (clatrate gun [6], etc.) be capable of achieving any of these?
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation "To geologists, an ice age is defined by the presence of large amounts of land-based ice." (So my question in terms of heating and time - how long until we exit the ice age?)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous "Mean annual temperatures at the poles during the MKH exceeded 14 °C.", "deep ocean temperatures were as much as 15 to 20 °C (27 to 36 °F) warmer than today's"
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous_Thermal_Maximum "Late Cenomanian sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean were substantially warmer than today (~27-29°C). Turonian equatorial SSTs are conservatively estimated based on δ18O and high pCO2 estimates to have been ~32°C, but may have been as high as 36°C."
[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1081 "During this period, we find sea-surface temperatures exceeding 32 °C at 15°–20° N and averaging 26 °C at ∼53° S. These temperatures substantially exceed modern temperatures at equivalent latitudes,"
Climate change deniers tell each other we are coming out of The Little Ice Age that started in 1200AD. Which is technically correct.
What they don’t tell each other is that “Little” is an understatement and we shot way past the prior “Medieval Warm Period” long ago and are only accelerating.
Latest trend is "warming (which is normal) is increasing co2, but the other way around". From the same people who think co2 levels are too low to be significant and that water vapor is more problematic.
eschelon said that we are in an ice age and multiple people asked “how can you call this an ice age?” I either didn’t see the linked reference or it wasn’t there when I read eschelon’s comment.
Either way, I’ve seen the Little Ice Age come up enough lately to be extremely irritating. So, I knee-jerked the rebuttal.
I'm not a climate change denier. I'm very interested in climate science, I'm just not informed as I'd like to be.
I edited my comment to include sources for things I knew off-hand. I left the core comment largely intact, just changing a few words to better flow with the sources.
I want more information and reading around the questions I asked.
From my understanding, it looks like we're about to enter a period that is actually slightly more sustainable for humans on average (increases in arable land, easier to access hydrocarbons - yikes) [1].
But from there, we may quickly slip into ranges that kill everything. Especially if the Clathrate gun hypothesis [2] or similar runaway mechanisms turn out correct.
And obviously even if slightly warmer temperatures are better for people on average, every temperature increment results in enormous and permanent erasure of species diversity. That's an incalculable loss that we cannot recover.
---
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/16/magazine/russ... "And no country may be better positioned to capitalize on climate change than Russia. Russia has the largest land mass by far of any northern nation. It is positioned farther north than all of its South Asian neighbors, which collectively are home to the largest global population fending off displacement from rising seas, drought and an overheating climate. Like Canada, Russia is rich in resources and land, with room to grow. Its crop production is expected to be boosted by warming temperatures over the coming decades even as farm yields in the United States, Europe and India are all forecast to decrease. And whether by accident or cunning strategy or, most likely, some combination of the two, the steps its leaders have steadily taken — planting flags in the Arctic and propping up domestic grain production among them — have increasingly positioned Russia to regain its superpower mantle in a warmer world." (There are lots of other geopolitical takes on climate change that cite similar outcomes for a host of other countries.)
... and based on that chart are now hotter than any time in the last 100k years, heading into the last few million. A few 10s (of million) years at +25c are going to be the "new normal"? I'm trying to understand the point. The rate of change is quite dramatic, and the last time (Eemian) there was anything like this there were "rapid" 12c oscillations.
Humans didn't exist. I suspect most current plant/animal species are "devolved" by such swings.
>and based on that chart are now hotter than any time in the last 100k years, heading into the last few million. A few 10s (of million) years at +25c are going to be the "new normal"?
No, the chart does not say that. The 2050 and 2100 dots are projections from the IPOC RCP8.5 “high emissions” scenario. Also, absolutely nothing on that says we’re going to +25c. That part of the chart (that goes to 25) is in F, and it still doesn’t say we’re going to 25f either.
Lots of people wonder why we have so many climate deniers. A lot of the reason is because of guys like this ^ on the opposite end of the spectrum, spewing their fears into a hyperbolic, warped reality. What we need more of is a balanced, realistic, objective view. That will allow us to get to work on a solution.
> Humans didn't exist. I suspect most current plant/animal species are "devolved" by such swings.
The first apes evolved about 20 million years ago, when the world was much hotter. I suspect we can survive those conditions again.
And regardless of climate change, most current plant/animal species will go extinct (or already have) due to habitat destruction and mass exploitation. As a cause of mass extinction, that's a much bigger problem than climate change.
Don't know about op's point, but seeing those kinds of graphs makes you really think twice about the hypothesis that stopping any kind of human activity will have any effect on a phenomenon that's been naturally occuring for hundreds of millions of years, on one order of magnitude greater than what we're observing (talking about degrees variation, not taking speed into account).
> talking about degrees variation, not taking speed into account
If you discount this of course we aren't effecting anything unprecedented. We were once a ball of magma. But, as has been pointed out here, rate and cause of change is incredibly important. A swing set and an explosion will both launch you into the air.
Looks to me more like we were in a very long, very cool period and are suddenly popping out of it and are only accelerating. That’s fine for the planet. But, sucks pretty hard for any life forms that evolved to fit the Earth in the last 10 million years according to that chart.
Even if that is the case, the agriculture needed to feed the amount of people on the planet doesn't seem like it will survive and be efficient if this keeps on going. It doesn't matter if it's human-made or not, if we don't get it under control, a whole lot of people will die and the current amount of refugees will seem quaint in comparison.
The planet will probably be fine in a few hundred thousand years, it's just us humans that are not going to be here.
> agriculture needed to feed the amount of people doesn't seem like it will survive and be efficient if this keeps on going
The earth is getting greener, rapidly. The maximum human carrying capacity is probably higher than ever and populations are shrinking at the same time.
>> (OP) the agriculture needed to feed the amount of people on the planet doesn't seem like it will survive
> (you) The earth is getting greener, rapidly. The maximum human carrying capacity is probably higher
The actual myth (read beyond the title):
"CO2 is actually the "food" that sustains essentially all plants on the face of the earth, as well as those in the sea. And the more CO2 they "eat" (absorb from the air or water), the bigger and better they grow"
As I understand this exchange, you've challenged the claim that climate change will negatively impact agriculture by pointing out that Earth is getting greener, supported by yours
> Hint: The green stuff is food, for either humans or animals humans can eat.
The page I've linked debunks exactly this.
> A specific plant’s response to excess CO2 is sensitive to a variety of factors, including but not limited to: age, genetic variations, functional types, time of year, atmospheric composition, competing plants, disease and pest opportunities, moisture content, nutrient availability, temperature, and sunlight availability. The continued increase of CO2 will represent a powerful forcing agent for a wide variety of changes critical to the success of many plants, affecting natural ecosystems and with large implications for global food production. The global increase of CO2 is thus a grand biological experiment, with countless complications that make the net effect of this increase very difficult to predict with any appreciable level of detail.
> Sure, humans do that until they industrialize, then they slow down.
Overshoot is not only about population, but also about consumption and pollution.
In terms of useful agricultural output, how many acres of “greening” do you think we might need to offset the loss of one well maintained acre of arable farmland?
Commenters seem to be taking these questions as rhetorical (which they may well be, I can’t really tell), but I’d actually be intellectually interested in genuine answers to them.
It’s pretty useless to debate biodiversity and keeping it intact because the real killer is not the temperature increase by a degree or two but the speed.
Here is a climate professor's site he and his associates are warning of imminent mass human extinction. https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/ Dig back through his posts they are horrifying.
It is written by an actual Rutgers Professor who writes it under a pseudonym to insulate themselves from doxing. With occasional guest contributions from an Australian professor.
I think it’s an ice age while any point on earth (not counting mountains etc.) has year-round ice. We’ll be in serious trouble long before that changes.
As I understand it, there was no glacial ice on earth during the Cretaceous. Water covered much more of the earth's surface. There were lots of dinosaurs, insects, and other biodiversity that thrived during this time.
Our current biodiversity evolved to fit cooler temperatures, obviously, so the quick change is a huge fitness gradient challenge that many species will not overcome. And in certain food webs, it may result in much larger scale collapse.
That’s not quite what the evidence shows. The Cretaceous shows evidence for forest near the poles and it’s missing evidence for multiple mile thick ice sheets such as those that recently covered Manhattan Island etc. However currently there’s a glacier 170 km from the equator as altitude drops the temperature, such glaciers likely existed in the Cretaceous.
I think humans are one of those species, as they cannot survive wet bulb over 95f nor can current populations survive across the collapse of agriculture, hence the problem
Yeah, it is a mistake to worry about the earth in regards to climate change. It will be fine. Biodiversity may in fact increase after the bottleneck. Humans though, or at least human civilization...
That's what I'd really like to read an abundance of information on. Timelines, milestones, etc.
At what stages do fishing and agriculture end? When do our brains overheat? Etc.
In the short term, we're possibly going to have an even better time of sustaining human life and society (see my other comments' sources). Until things progress even further and we severely damage our civilization and possibly kill ourselves off.
What are the things we can do to cope, what are the things we can do to slow or reverse the temperature trend, and what ranges do these things happen?
Can we stop? How? Where should we stop? Should we return back to where we were? Or should we keep going further and then stop? At some point this becomes a biogeoengineering problem.
That doesn't take technology into account, though. Not arguing one way or the other, but humans are well advanced beyond any species, and are ingenious and inventive to boot. I don't think humans are so easy to wipe out, not on the timeline predicted.
Not at all. Many humans are definitely surviving this no matter what. It's just the extra 2 billion or so that won't have access to whatever new "technology" is needed to survive.
It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Same for red meat or cheap air travel.
Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers.
It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.
And yes, I don't believe it's only rich people, it's also middle class people who generate a lot of emissions, and I'm a leftist.
I'm going to guess you've never spent much time outside the bubble of the first world.
After living extensively overseas in Latin America & South-east Asia and seeing how its part of everyday life for most people in the rest of the world to openly burn trash, plastics, car tyres.. litter everywhere, cutting the cat converters off their trucks, dumping construction waste straight into rivers.. it's been eye opening. Nobody in Asia is dropping plastic bags or single use plastic straws unless its a cafe for hippy white tourists.
Meanwhile, educated people in western countries are incredibly eco-conscious, have excellent modern waste management, have amazing huge national parks and conservation areas, clean waterways or have nets to prevent plastics entering the oceans.. are 'banning' gasoline cars by 2030.. and the air quality! Amazing.
The truth is 85% of the worlds population just doesn't care enough at all about the environment and no amount of western policy making will fix the problem. And only an ignorant college educated person from the first would assume that their 'solutions' will be exported globally. sorry to break it to you but the rest of the world doesn’t have any interest in that.
The middle/upper class whites you seem to deride so much are actually participating in one of the most eco friendly societies on earth
You can wax poetic all you want about anecdotal values differences between the first and third worlds, but speaking in terms of actual practical impact: what you are saying is simply not true. Greenhouse gas emissions scale super-linearly with income: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitte...
OP's point was that the global rich (most US citizens included) have lifestyles and patterns of consumption which produce an outsized amount of greenhouse gasses, and any attempts to alter those behaviors are routinely met with anger and political backlash
Yeah and my point is that these studies look at energy consumption they don’t take into account things like burning yard waste or plastic garbage into their co2 consumption which is often done daily to keep mosquitoes away and from laziness. Nor does it look at air pollution nor waterways pollution. So it’s a useless metric that doesn’t even have accurate data or tell the real story.
What will we do when these societies who give no fucks about the environment (compared to the west) get wealthier?
I don't think proposing cutting CO2 emissions is "white guilt" -- I probably missed something, I'm not sure how race entered it. (and I don't mean that snarky! I probably missed it :) )
I'm also unsure if "White guilt" is a good descriptor for the West enforcing emission cuts by force on not-West: that sounds like aggression as opposed to an expression of guilt.
The fun/exciting part: a total mind-bender on this is not-West countries are installing renewables at scale without incentives or "[any color] guilt", solar is cheaper than any other supply you can think of.
Then we can start talking about "solar isn't enough because unreliable", true.
Then maybe we start talking about how it's racist to prevent people from having unreliable electricity, true, but rest-assured, the idea of enforcing cuts on other nations isn't on the table.
To avoid the tarpit of moralizing, I try to stay focused on saying "they're installing solar panels and it's cool if they gotta do coal/tires/etc. while we 10x batteries again like we did last decade" --- this also has the benefit of matching the uncoordinated reality as it stands
Your link has the Chinese top decile with higher emissions than the EU top decile, so your "what you are saying is simply not true" seems incorrect, their central point of value differences and higher pollution in third world countries seems to stand up well.
This doesn't take into account that countries like the US have already cut emissions and emissions have been declining for years. Meanwhile, China has much greater total emissions than the US does and emissions in China are increasing per year continuously as they are in India. Total global emissions are what matters for the climate. Although reducing waste and being more efficient are always helpful, fixating on lifestyles of people like US citizens is not particularly useful.
Source? (AFAIK it does, and it'd be very unexpected for it not to. The rest of the comment is unclear to me. I may be reading it as a strawman instead of a steelman -- would a reply like: 'just because our derivative is negative doesn't mean on a per-capita basis we're less' be accurate? I'm sure I missed something)
It doesn't take into account trends that already exist. In the next decade small reductions to emissions in US transportation per year will be meaningless. Also reducing agricultural emissions which are only 10% of CO2 emissions in the US will have little affect on total global emissions. I'm not sure why there is so much hand waving about the CO2 emissions of China alone.
This being US / 1st world emissions are decreasing? Thank you for looking that up etc., I appreciate it -- I did know that, and seriously, thank you for taking the time to source it: I'm only saying I knew so you can rest assured at least one other person is up on data. These are strange times and it's hard to get a read on if facts are common knowledge or not, and our estimate of that can cause intense feelings.
Putting my comment more simply and extending it so it doesn't feel like I'm passive-aggressively quoting my comment back at you:
I'm curious why we think the per-capita emissions data "isn't accounting for it decreasing"
What I am taking issue with is the assertion from the other poster that "Greenhouse gasses scales super-linearly with income" which links to a page. That page looks at one year, 2021, and makes assertions that don't account for annual trends like the decrease in emissions the US has been experiencing for years and will continue to experience. The US _IS_ reducing emissions. It also doesn't take into account the large expected increases over just say the next decade in countries like China.
Total global emissions are an important factor to consider for the global climate and focusing only on reducing emissions of the US will be meaningless because total global emissions will still continue to go up.
"But it's you reduce the economy, think of what it will do to the poor!" it's incredible how ritch people will happily push the poor in front of them when it's beneficial.
> Meanwhile, educated people in western countries are incredibly eco-conscious, have excellent modern waste management, have amazing huge national parks and conservation areas, clean waterways or have nets to prevent plastics entering the oceans.. are 'banning' gasoline cars by 2030.. and the air quality! Amazing.
The commenter appears to say that people in western countries are already doing a good job on climate. Even though those people emit way more than people from other countries.
According to this next page, in 2021 the "EU27" emitted 2774.93 megatons of co2 whereas China emitted 12466.32. Also, European emissions are falling whereas China's is rising.
Yes, if you count the emissions for the stuff manufactured in China for (not only) european customers.
If you look at consumption-based emissions[0], China is at 7 t per capita, which is 8 t less than the US, 2 t less than Germany and about par with Denmark, Slovakia, and England.
This is per capita data again, which makes the argument circular. In absolute terms, China emits more than twice as much CO2 as the next producer, and only a small fraction of that is exported.
Per capita data makes sense. CO2 emissions don’t change if we cut giants countries into many smaller ones. If China was 25 different countries you wouldn’t be pointing the finger to them.
Why shouldn’t the highest emitters not be the ones to reduce most?
Because we're not having a moral argument but rather a practical one. The fact is that China emits much more CO2 than other countries, even after you account for exports (ie, CO2 emissions "offshored" from Europe and North America). Moreover: while emissions in the west are falling, the are rising in China and India and the developing world, as they must, because they track rising standards of living.
I don't understand the "25 smaller Chinas" argument. China sets statewide emissions policies. That's a reason we pay attention to country borders here, rather than considering an undifferentiated mass of humanity as a map scatterplot.
Ultimately, the reason to point out the gap between China and Europe or North America is that if you concentrate climate mitigation strategies on the west, you won't actually do much to solve the crisis. Fair's got nothing to do with it.
Only in the most abstract sense, because the real debate is over prioritization; if you suggest that equal effort be put into both of these projects, reasonable people will argue that you're misallocating effort.
I think the world would benefit if western nations had a carbon levy on imports as well as a carbon tax on domestically-produced goods. Or, with the added costs, market forces would encourage people to find more efficient lifestyles. If someone wanted a more environmentally-taxing lifestyle, they could play the fair cost.
That import tax is worthwhile if it reduces emissions in the right areas. We should probably be eating less beef shipped out of Austrlia and producing less plastic packaging.
Some trade does need to be shut down, as the externalities aren't being properly handled at the moment.
But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that nobody is prepared to willingly let go of their conveniences. They may say they are but they haven’t seen the real cost to their lifestyle.
The transition is politically impossible. You’ll see some kind of populist revolution happen in Germany, which on paper seems to be the leader in green policies.
What's incredible is missing the fact that CO2 emissions and most kinds of pollution in general are verifiably multiples higher per individual in the West compared to elsewhere. We're just better at keeping them out of sight and apparently out of mind, too.
Thank you. Climate change is a diplomacy issue, nothing the west is going to do in the next 50 years will make a difference with what’s going on in china and elsewhere.
So either you are a realist about this problem, and you admit that either it’s war with many countries to solve this issue, or it won’t be solved (because they won’t stop economic growth for carbon emissions). Possible alternatives are technology.
But guilt tripping the west and stopping people eating steak will. Not. Make. A. Difference.
Except per capita co2 emissions AND total emissions have been falling in the USA.
China now emits more co2 than europe and USA combined. And this is NOT because of exports to the west, those are now also falling yet co2 emissions are still climbing.
This is what I mean. Just these two countries like india and china are emitting so much CO2, that any reduction in emissions by the west by not eating steak just won't matter. Either you stop china doing this (good luck!) or think of another solution.
I think it's actually more complicated, because a lot of the construction, etc. is caused by demand from the western countries. Also, western countries consume proportionately more flights, cars, electronics... pretty much all the actual major industry-sized consumption is disproportionately consumed by the west, even if a portion of individual westerners (certainly not all) are eco-conscious, no-waste, plastic-free vegans.
- politics is top centered around providing infinte fuel for "growth" instead of distributing resources rationally
Yes, this is a political opinion.
The stunt many people do is pretending that climate denialism and politics centered on fueling growth are not a political opinion but "rational" and sustainable.
Agreed, both on the whole and in the details. But if I'm forced into the "either/or" mindset of the OP of a hypothetical choice to shrink GDP by 1% by stopping all vacation car travel or deficit spend 1% GDP as a "Manhattan Project" to get lab grown beef commercially viable, I'm voting for the latter.
The latter sounds like fantasy though, and it's not the lab-grown meat per se I'm talking about.
Also I wasn't talking about car usage exclusively during vacations, I was explicitly talking about private car usage.
People literally get governmental subsidies for building homes in the suburbs, then commute by car and pollute the planet in order to avoid car traffic.
Anyone who fails to see the absurdity of this has drank too much Kool-aid for my taste.
If your issue is global warming you should be campaigning for electric cars rather than against private cars. But I suspect you actually dislike cars in and of themselves, even if they could be grown on trees and powered by banana skins.
I like driving cars or being a passenger in them.
I also acknowledge their importance for society as a whole.
But since you ask:
Cars are not a subject but an object, a tool to me.
"Suspecting" that I "dislike" this tool does not sound like a coherent argument to me.
Yes, I hate cars when being outside them, because they are a major obstruction and source of pollution, noise and overshooting environmental damage.
I hate their artifical abundance, for which I am forced to pay.
I'm not sure what you are talking about with the hypothetical banana car and why you care about my feelings.
Seems like an ideological argument to me.
Do EVs grow on trees?
I agree that global warming is only the tip of the iceberg of the damage we do.
And yes, EVs are marginally better for the nearby environment compared to CEVs.
They don't solve the larger problem though and they still impose huge resource costs.
Subsidizing EVs (again) is putting more fuel into the fire.
In my country, there are and were already so many subsidies and benefits for buying a new car, it isn't funny anymore.
It's always being justified by the newer cars ostensively being better for the environment.
Even before there were affordable EVs, the government paid people bonuses to buy a new car and trash/sell the previous one with this justification.
As a person with a license, but without a car: this is disgusting and reminds me of 1984. One of the many subsidies for buying cars in Germany was called "Umweltprämie" (environment bonus). As early as 2009.
It was basically a tax-funded bonus for trashing and buying cars to fund the industry.
That being said, cars of course are only one particularly obvious example of insane policies.
Europe doesn't have food insecurity. Health is pretty good and there's a safety net. Even China scores pretty well on those points. Yet their per capita emissions are much lower than the US.
There is much poverty in China outside of major cities and near nonexistent safety net in all regards. This is a country where a sizable chunk of population lives on less than 6 USD per day (not enough to bribe the doctor to get "universal" healthcare in case of something serious) and where the gov has recently made posting videos of poor people on social media punishable as "against national interest".
It is a good time to ask ourselves which country contributes the most to emissions and crucial to avoid any mental gymnastics while at that. But unfortunately yes if you dramatically reduce coal usage in China people will die.
First, why are you bringing up US? Many would agree that US healthcare is shit.
But I suspect it's still probably better than China where many people are simply not counted in stats (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990197/ etc). These are also people with least or no access to healthcare and education btw, so we can only guess if life expectancy on paper is better than in reality...
Despite this, they also have a huge length of high speed highways with cars going back and forth. The topology is not much different than in the US. Difference is there, but it's quantitative and will not in any way prevent climate change, especially as it also relies on infrastructure that US does not have and will take a huge carbon footprint to build.
That rail would be nice to have, but it will not yield a decisive difference on the global warming time frame (~20 years).
You could go the Soviet route (had 30 cars per 1,000 people, a lot of train, bus and subway), but do you really want that? Of course, you would want to improve it because Soviet economy was hugely wasteful despite all this. Plus, all the apartment blocks are not going to build themselves, and certainly not without carbon emissions.
This is just a misleading thought framework of discounting any single item as a “decisive” silver bullet. Of course none of them are being talked about as being a silver bullet.
We need a 1000s of bullets fired at changes to avoid even higher costs of climate change on our current path.
It also completely ignores the fact that developing countries move exactly to what the Western world does.
Why do so many people eat insects or are pure vegetarian in India? Because many are simply too poor to afford meat. You know what's one of the first major things Indians change when their wealth increases? Adding more meat to their diets.
Before we can talk about food insecurity, (we have that too in the USA), we need to talk about the insane amount of food waste here. You can downshift the economy and IMPROVE food security if we take that as a priority. It's all about political capital.
Same. I think it's just helplessness, they feel something bad is coming, and they can't do anything about it, so they try to propose radical solutions that will not fix anything but just make things worse.
Look around. Everyone on earth wants to maintain a standard of living. Governments are toppled over this.
And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions. And it’s the largest exhibit that is helping to drive the innovation needed to solve this problem, alongside incredible people from all parts of the globe.
I wish we weren’t dealing with this. I wish there had been a better, more cost effective way to grow. Maybe if you or I hadn’t been born, our emissions might lower enough to make the difference.
But I’d suggest now isn’t the time to count scores. We need to stay focused and continue the work. Despite our flaws we are all worth saving.
>And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions.
These largest economy's also contributed the most over their history, which seems reasonable grounds for contributing more and helping other economies come up to that standard of living w/o making the same contributions
As a US citizen, I’d be happy for us to stand up (ie fully fund) a “solarcorps,” where we send folks to help build out renewable infra in developing countries subsidized or free. Your country provides the local labor who will be paid fair wages, we’ll provide hardware and know how. Conversely, if that help is not accepted and they keep building coal plants (or similar “business as usual”), punitive economic policies are enacted. The carrot is welcome, but sometimes the stick is needed. People are tricky, but physical systems don’t give AF.
Simultaneously, the developed world should partner with China to stoke uptake of EVs globally, and rapidly destroy the market for fossil powered mobility (although there is strong evidence we're rapidly approaching a tipping point wrt EV sales [1]).
I'm unsure to what extent the people of today should be paying for the benefits their ancestors reaped. Yes, some wealth trickled down the generations buts its definitely not a 1 to 1 ratio.
You realize that would cause countless death _today_ if you don’t replace the oil with something else? People will starve, become homeless, and maybe anarchy will reign. Not just in the developed world but globally.
I don't think the op said stop using oil for productive uses. I assume they'd be against any large electric car too. People in rich/not poor nations use too many resources and I'd say even the vast majority aren't actually for building homes or producing food or contributing to making those things efficient/safe/redundant.
What do you think will happen if the temperatures keep rising, the oceans keep rising, and currently livable areas of land that hold billions of people become inhabitable?
The same thing that's continued to happen: We adapt and create solutions.
People have been screaming "everyone will die!!!" via religious based prophecies for... all of human history. The Cult Of Climate Change is no different: a little bit of truth and a lot of faith in Revelations and the unavoidable apocalypse.
Prophecies like "all the icecaps will be gone by 2020" and "billions will die from starvation" (hint: those forecasts failed)
This is no different than the people who follow the pastor that's wrong about the date of Jesus' second coming. every year he looks at the numbers and says "next year, on x date". That date comes. and goes. and the faithful see the failed prophecy and he goes "oh look... I was wrong... it's really next year on y date". The faithful see this each year and their faith grows stronger as each failed prophecy means the next one MUST be true.
What do we think will happen? More failed prophecies. The Church of Climate Doom faithful becomes more convinced that theirs is the One True Faith as each prediction continues to prove them right.
The problem with your argument is comparing climate science to religion. There -is- actual science to support the climate doomers. You can cherry pick headlines all you want, but the models have actually been pretty decent so far. Even a little too conservative.
But it's a political problem in the end, anyway, not a science one.
Just like there is truth in religions - be nice to your neighbors. Do unto others. Truth. surrounded by bullshit (religion, dogma, etc).
There is truth and "actual science"... but there's also half truths, lies, bad prophecies, etc.
"you can cherry pick" likewise, you can cherry pick some facts about carbon... and then ignore stuff like the destruction required to make batteries, the inability to recycle a MASSIVE fuckton of "green" (wind mill blades, batteries, solar panels, etc - all ending up in land fills).
"models" yeah... except that models are limited, have increasing error rates and you end up with the spaghetti modeling with the simple stuff like weather for next week - much less the weather for next year.
Speaking of cherry picking... you'll cherry pick one or two models from a decade ago and ignore the 100+ others that are wrong.
"political not science" it's both. and religious. It's faith in models that have been cherry picked while ignoring inconvenient truths about "green" solutions that are based on bad models that can't be proven and that don't cover all the possibilities.
the problem with your response is your apparent faith in science and, like a Catholic who will downplay problems with priests, you'll ignore the parts you are uncomfortable with.
climate change is real (little c, little c). Has been happening for... all of history.
Climate Change is not (big C, big C). It is a religion.
One is based on facts and science. the other is based on faith.
> What do you think will happen if the temperatures keep rising, the oceans keep rising, and currently livable areas of land that hold billions of people become inhabitable?
[Approximately 600,000 people die each year from extreme heat, while 4.5 million die from extreme cold.](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...) Let's ignore the ratio for now, because there are second and third order consequences beyond extreme heat like famine to account for. 4.5 million people die each year because of inadequate access to cheaper energy. This is of course linear. Every time energy prices go up, so too do the number of people dying. That is the direct cost of the war on oil, coal, and natural gas, and there are many indirect costs (and lives) which go far beyond this. The intention of climate activists is to make fossil fuels much more expensive, meaning many more deaths.
Of course, maybe the goal here is worth killing 4.5+++ million people per year. There are no perfect solutions; only compromises. Maybe many more will die if we don't act. [The IPCC estimates that an additional 250,000 people per year, between 2030 and 2050, will die from the effects of climate change.](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...) That covers all modes of death, such as famine. For those in the room doing the math, many times more people will die today by making energy more expensive. Activists are asking us to sacrifice millions of lives per year today to save an estimated 250,000 lives per year decades from now.
For this reason, I no longer support making energy more expensive. I support environmental efforts to reduce pollution, but I can no longer justify the high cost of human life associated with taxes on energy. Instead, I really think activists should focus on making energy cheaper. This means working on solutions to make renewable energy and nuclear cheaper per unit of energy than fossil fuels. That's a path to saving lives which I think most people can get on board with.
This is my point. We already have major immigration/refugee issues all over the world. Even if we are 100% certain climate change will result in more farm land for humanity, the issue is where are the people now and where will that farm land be then? Do you think Russia (or any other country) will be happy to take in a billion people from South-East Asia? Legal immigration is an issue now. This will be a humanitarian catastrophe larger than any war humanity has ever faced by orders of magnitude.
Famine in Africa is an existential risk with or without global warming. Currently 822 million people are estimated to be malnourished. As per the citations above, global warming will provide only a slightly elevated risk of famine relative to present day.
Overpopulation in Africa is a problem to be solved either way. Ameliorating global warming won’t make any meaningful improvement to that.
I genuinely don't understand how your comment is a response to mine. Where are we going to move the billions of people living in coastal South East Asia when oceans rise and their land becomes un-farmable due to climate change?
Rising oceans aren’t going to make coastal areas in Asia uninhabitable for any appreciable proportion of people for centuries. Asia has huge tracts of unused land. Over the centuries, people will migrate.
I tried to explain to you that overpopulation has almost nothing to do with global warming, and conflating the two diminishes our ability to solve each.
The goal is to make energy cheaper. I would much prefer it to be clean energy, but this is secondary. If we could devise a way to make clean energy cheaper than untaxed fossil fuels, I’m all in. It just hasn’t worked that way so far, and activists are almost entirely focused on making fossil fuels more expensive, rather than clean energy cheaper.
Indeed, we need real order of magnitude numbers here of deaths from energy scarcity vs deaths from future climate change. Otherwise we're just blowing hot air around.
This sort of extremist desperation plants the seeds for justifying horrific, subhuman destruction. There are no limits. This is beyond dangerous, it’s foolish and cancerous.
They may never explicitly admit this, but proponents of "just stop using oil" do intend the mass death outcome. Of course, they have nothing but Good Intentions, these people believe that a steep drop-off in population is inevitable, and they'd rather effect it sooner than later.
It’s extremely depressing that you can’t have more than a couple paragraphs’ discussion without extremism kicking in. No, thinking people shouldn’t drive a 2-ton vehicle for 40km to buy 200g of Wagyu every other day is not the same as planning mass murder. Your comment is inflammatory and delusional.
>people shouldn’t drive a 2-ton vehicle for 40km to buy 200g of Wagyu every other day
Your example describes a fantasy.
The vast majority of people do not travel anywhere close to 40km to buy groceries. Even in a car-centric country like America, the average driver travels just 4km.
If someone has to travel 40km or more to get to a grocery store, it's because they live rural. People who travel that far for groceries do not buy 200g of wagyu at a time. They typically only go once or a few times per month and they stock up.
The population of people who live rural is very small. People who live rural are also quite poor.
The carbon emissions, environmental impact, and fuel consumption of this population of people is so unbelievably small, it's irrelevant.
But, you are targeting this small population of poor people. No wonder you get so much pushback, or "extremism". I guess poor people defending their way of life is extreme.
Here in the UK, if I had to travel 'just 4km' then I wouldn't take a car. In any case it's the other 50% of journeys that are 4km+ (20% of journeys are 10+ miles) that are the problem:
The USA is a young country, built from the ground up around the automobile. Undoing that both physically and psychologically is just not possible in my opinion.
But also not entirely unrealistic or uncommon, and I live in an european city with good public transport. If I want to buy something special like a good cut of beef, go to an asian market, I’ll be doing a 30km roundtrip by car.
From what I’ve seen a roundtrip to Walmart in the US for weekly groceries can be in the same ballpark - even in the city, since the larger stores are always on the outskirts.
You can keep raising strawmen, but the extremism is going from a suggestion of reduced car traffic and reduced meat consumption, to accusations of not caring about lives and mass murder.
Well which is it? Hyperbole or not, the intent behind it is the same, which seems to focus the climate change problem on some of the weakest sources of fuel consumption who also happen to be some of the poorest, most vulnerable people.
I think it's a kind of subconscious projection, that the example you've brought to the fore is those poor people driving to buy their groceries, not the industrial behemoths doing the real dirty work.
That is a strawman you introduced into the conversation. Most cities in the west are planned around cars. I’ve been to a few of the largest cities in the US and don’t think those 6-lane highways were clogged with “the poorest most vulnerable people”. You see the same patterns in south america.
This is really about the average car-centric culture, consumption patterns, the system of centralized food distribution through massive supermarket chains. It’s about urban planning, incentives, regulations and public policies, not lords vs servants. Note that I didn’t suggest individuals should stop driving to fight climate change, these changes can only start happening at a much higher level.
The EPA says emissions from transportation are responsible for 29% of all pollution [1]. This is a bigger slice than industrial pollution, and 58% of it coming from light vehicles, 28% from trucks (including the ones that supply these supermarkets, and not accounting for the diesel used to bring our bananas, garlic and olive oil by sea from across the world).
No, poor people getting disproportionately harmed by many climate change proposals is not a strawman, it's a very real consequence that needs to be addressed.
This is only true if you literally crash the economy and do nothing else. What we can do is instead shift priorities, like food and housing security, while reducing the economy by not doing useless, pointless things. Do we really need all these things we buy at the store now?
We cannot build windmills, solar farms, and nuclear energy plants overnight. We cannot stand up new buildings and create local food supply chains overnight. I was responding to the proposal to cut oil production by 50%-75%, which would be great, but must be done gradually so that our current economic systems have time to respond, i.e. not crash.
Maybe we can announce a ban on pork, beef, plastics, TVs, consumption, etc but it should not be done overnight for the same reasons.
What you have to do is make it worthwhile for people. Steve Keen's idea of a dual price is imo a great idea. How it works is everything has both a dollar price and a carbon price. Everyone in society gets the same amount of carbon credits. You can sell these credits for dollars and vice versa. Those who use a LOT of carbon have to buy them from those that have the credits. What this does is create a wealth distribution down while at the same time capping carbon usage. Those who use very little carbon benefit because they can buy things they previously couldn't, while those that use a lot are punished. Since the vast majority of people are at the lower end of carbon usage, I believe this would be a very popular program.
Because eating less meat, stop taking the plane, reducing our consumption level, replacing cars with bikes and trains and other stuff like that seems radical to you ?
1. What if you are disabled and have no train connectivity?
2. What about workers who need to travel by car to build trains? What about support workers who help those workers? And so on?
See what happens if we stop virtue signaling and think for a few more seconds?
Please stop with this zero-order thinking and spend a few seconds thinking of first-order and second-order effects when what you suggest can impact billions of lives.
Pandemic happened -> Europe went to lockdown -> Restaurants, hotels closed, weddings cancelled -> a drop of flower sales -> Kenyan flower growers suddenly find themselves out of work and out of income (plane-loads of flowers get flown everyday from Africa, M. East and S. America to Europe)
Yeah it was probably okay sailing for rich countries that can conjure up debt and give their citizens some relief, but how about for the poorer countries? India had a lockdown and day-wagers had to walk thousands of kilometers home, and the PM's response seemed to be "Not my problem!"
> What if you are disabled and have no train connectivity?
You likely already have an electric wheelchair or could buy one of the many e-trike or LSV options, and at least the former will benefit greatly from first-class bike infrastructure.
This is such a common concern troll talking point but it ignores the fact that many people have disabilities which prevent them from driving (e.g. blindness or epilepsy) or prevent them from having the kind of income needed to own a car, especially if it needs customization for them to use it. Those people are all better off with reduced car infrastructure: access services don’t get stuck in traffic, transit helps everyone, and all kinds of mobility devices benefit from safe car-free spaces.
> You likely already have an electric wheelchair or could buy one of the many e-trike or LSV options, and at least the former will benefit greatly from first-class bike infrastructure.
Not very useful during winter. There're places with lots of snow (meters) and temp dropping down to -30F and below. Simply can't bike when snow falls heavily. People live in such places. And their almost exclusive options (except air) are:
- cars (unreliable: engine fail or no fuel/battery with hundreds km from the nearest town means death too often when it's -30F)
Yes, some people in certain very remote/extreme locations might need an enclosed vehicle. We weren’t focused on that because most of the human population doesn’t live in those conditions, especially in urban areas, but if you want that tangent buses, trains, and enclosed LSVs are all good choices depending on circumstances. If you live in Yakutsk, your needs are already different from 99% of the people in the world in many ways.
Remember, nobody is saying that 100% of trips should be on bicycle. We’re saying that we should break the previous century’s default assumption of using a multi-ton vehicle per person for every trip, especially in urban areas where cars make everything worse for everyone including the drivers.
See how silly that sounds? These are just two things I thought of quickly. You will end up with ten thousand rules and caveats if we think a bit more. Why wasn't this included in the original comment? If you propose rules, make them at least 50% complete!
> Company provided shuttle buses.
TIL buses are equal to trains and cycles. Also shuttles will pollute more if they are sparsely occupied which is common.
You should read about Mao's idiocy. We shouldn't repeat similar idiocy in 2023.
Reducing massively our meat consumption might have some effects on some part of our economy indeed, same if we choose two divide by 2, 3, 4 the number of cars we're producing.
I never heard that projection before. Because demands will plumet?
Then It might just be not cost effective at all to go dig deeper or use more complex process to get it.
How does that works with current recent trends? Globally we consumed more oil in 2023 than 2022 for instance.
If demand plumet somehow … can we still support a extraction industry ? Recently ( pre 2019 ) shale gaz was worth it because of high prices… then it switched again to lower price and extracting it made little sense ( till next time )
Once oil is used only marginally for fuel and heating, the demand will be a lot less (minus 80% or thereabouts) and going after difficult to extract sources might indeed not be economical but also not needed to satisfy demand (unless this happens very very late).
During the transition there could be cost spikes at demand levels that are awkward to fill without expensive resources, though.
this is a big one. there is a surgery i'll need within 10 years that i can't access in north america. i could definitely give up flight for play, probably for work, not for health
The huge amount of time saved with plane vs boat makes the former the superior option. There's no way a ton of CO2 is worth the comparative QALY loss you get from five days in a boat compared to the other things you could be doing with that time (if you're on a properly efficient liner rather than a super inefficient modern luxury cruise liner). Even the extreme upper end of CO2 externalities don't go above $1000/ton with most reasonable estimates below $100/ton.
in this theoretical world without commodity air travel, we'd have ocean liners fit for purpose. right now the only one i know of is effectively a cruise ship payload stuffed into an ocean liner hull. based on the numbers for cargo favoring sea over air, it seems reasonable that liners _could_ be more efficient than flight
The true genocidal policy is to continue dumping CO2 into the atmosphere in increasing amounts. Personally, I feel it is more honest for us to deal with the outcomes of what "we" are doing now, rather than just leaving it for our children to deal with.
The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations.
The idea that the simplistic socio-economic models/pathways are in any way right or predictive was just a fantasy.
> The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations.
This is very wishful thinking. It's like a doc telling you your body is collapsing due to lung cancer, you need to stop smoking, and you answering "the future is fundemantally uncertain, I'm sure something will come along and figure out this cancer for me, got a light?"
If you take the physics as given, all we can say that is if nothing different from the model is happening, things will be bad. The nature of "different" is, however, extremely broad.
Wishful thinking is that expensive sacrifices for the far future will be politically feasible while at the same time people need to already mitigate the effects of climate change. There need to be way better policy and technological packages than now.
Yeah, the narrative needs to be changed from saving the planet to saving civilization, but sadly a return to say the climate of the 70's (where the winters were snowy and summers weren't weeks of deadly 120 F weather) is even less realistic as people wanting to have a "America Great Again" (with current tech, wahey let's keep waiting for that deus ex machina!).
Not even our children. We will deal with it in 5 years. We're past the fucking around phase, now it's time to find out in increasingly large amounts every year.
"Crashing the economy" is literally the worst thing you could do to fix climate change.
Even in a stagnant economy, people are still commuting to and from work in their gas-guzzling cars, and heating their homes in the winter. CO2 emissions aren't going to change a ton.
But what a stagnant economy does is prevent any kind of investment in renewable energy and electrification, because there's no excess money to use for investment. A stagnant economy is not installing solar panels, replacing ICE cars with electric and installing new charging stations nationwide, or replacing boilers with heat pumps.
And if we want to hasten the changes to renewable energy and electrification, that's what government policy is for -- via subsidies for desired technologies, heavier taxation for undesired ones, and regulation.
"Crashing the economy" to slow down climate change is like cutting university faculty by half in order to combat grade inflation. It doesn't make any sense.
You don't need private investment to do electrification and renewable energy. That can be done by the government. Which doesn't have funding problems, ever.
The government is literally doing that by funding research. The government can fund literally anything it wants to. Private investment is literally never necessary.
What you're describing is a command economy of the type the Soviet Union had -- no private investment.
The whole history the twentieth century is the evidence that such a system doesn't work. And it especially doesn't work as technology has become increasingly complex.
Markets are vastly better-informed investors than governments can ever be. Which is why it's generally vastly better for governments to skew incentives for private investment to favor a particular area, rather than make investments directly.
The rise of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) to become the largest sector in the US economy (22+%) coincides with an increase in proportion of private R&D expenditure compared to government expenditure. In 2010 businesses spend $248 billion on R&D while the government spent $126 billion. In 2021 that number was $587 billion compared to $153 billion. In other words, the share of Business R&D went from 66% of R&D spend to about 80%.
The reason this is not a good trend is that the KIND of R&D businesses do vs government are very different. Government invests in basic research and invention while business invests in innovation.
Less money is going into science and more into squeezing money out of people via innovation. I would argue this is because the sector that makes all the important decisions is now the FIRE sector, which only thinks about the next quarter.
Slashing oil production only works if we make serious investments in other energy infrastructure. It’s only tangentially about “standard of living” - it’s about how you even supply food and other basics of living if you cut off current energy systems.
And while we have made renewable energy investments to some degree - it’s at a dilettante level for show instead of being serious about it. Renewable infrastructure investments should be made highly favored financial investments to accelerate its manufacture and installation. Even with large government financing it would save money and lives.
And energy production is only a part of it, investments also need to be favored for restructuring our economy to alter high energy habits like individual commutes in cars vs bikes buses and trains.
Have you done the cost:benefit analysis? Curious what makes you so confident that "crashing the economy" (you're aware of all the excess death and despair this would cause?) is the best move here.
I mean it's pretty obvious that our current situation is already causing death and despair (droughts, wildfires, hurricanes) and this will only increase on our current trajectory.
I am not sure crashing the economy is a viable solution.
I say this because what I learned so far is that is people will start being cold and hungry then they will focus on immediate needs and that will make sure that no money will be spent on solving climate change. This is a natural instinct: you cannot think about the future if your current situation is suffering.
right, now imagine the hysteria that would come from doing that actively and intentionally to everyone on an accelerated schedule. thwarting cancer by downing a bottle of cyanide
the analogy doesn't hold for me. my mom just finished chemo the other week, and it definitely wasn't close in effect to what she'd've dealt with otherwise. she went on living her life as usual, minus some household chores
I feel like maybe some Western leaders have done a bit of this, and their conclusion has been "Let's let the poorer few billion of the world die rather than fuck up our own electorates' lives.". Obviously with a bit of twist and turns like "My hands are tied, I don't want to crash my economy by being super radical (so I'll adjust things a little here and there like asking car manufacturers to promise to be neutral by 2035), but external effects like death and destruction in poorer countries? Well... that's their own shit to deal with."
> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.
The thing is, we have no reason to believe halting climate will do anything other than boost the economy. The reason for inaction despite the fact that it’ll make tons of new jobs, and remove major consumer costs and widespread reductions to health & quality of life caused by cars, is that certain specific sectors of the economy will shrink. The fossil fuel industry has spent half a century funding science deniers and consolidating their political power to prevent action on climate change or their pollution. They’re not acting on behalf of the entire economy, just their shareholders.
A simple example: beef is a solid order of magnitude worse than other common protein sources (with the possible exception of lamb in some countries). We could see huge reductions in our food-related emissions simply by eating pork or chicken instead, and almost nobody would say that’s an intolerable lifestyle hit but the beef industry isn’t going to let that happen easily because it’s bad for their revenue even if it’d mean most people save money.
> We could see huge reductions in our food-related emissions simply by eating pork or chicken
that would be great, if only more than 2.5 billion people did not eat pork for various religious or cultural restrictions.
food restrictions are among some of the most difficult habits to overcome, proven by the fact that they resisted for thousands of years.
we could also eat insects or worms, but we don't it, what makes you think that 1.8 billion Muslims would suddenly start eating pork like it's not a big deal?
In my opinion Paracelsus said it right: it's the dose that makes the poisons.
Americans who eat the most red meat per capita (a lot more than anyone else), could eat less meat in general.
How?
Simple: by making it a lot more expensive.
Between 2020 to 2022, Europeans consumed 32.4 kilos of pork, while the per capita consumption of beef was significantly lower, at 10.3 kilos in total.
How Much Beef Does the Average American Eat?
The average U.S. consumer eats 25.9 kilograms (57.1 pounds) of beef per year.
For the last 60 years, U.S. meat consumption has risen steadily. In 1961, the average was 93.7 kilograms (206.5 pounds) of meat per year. By 2020, that number had risen to 126.73 kilograms (279.4 pounds) per year.
The most notable period bucking this trend of growth is from 2008 to 2013, a decrease that likely resulted from the 2008 recession.
proving that the economic angle is effective in reducing the consumption of meat in the US.
> that would be great, if only more than 2.5 billion people did not eat pork for various religious or cultural restrictions.
I used “other common protein sources” to avoid having to list every single alternative from fish to nuts, and I’d note that the populations for whom that’s true traditionally ate proteins which were not beef because it’s comparatively expensive: chicken, fish, legumes, nuts, cheese (still way less CO2), etc.
That’s the key thing here: we’re not asking people to eat Soylent green or extruded nutrient pellets, or to never eat beef, but simply to restore the range of foods from their own cultural tradition prior to the mid-20th century western promotion of beef as the highest status protein. My grandfather grew up eating beef twice a year (when his cousins dairy culled the herd) and it was fine - I’m sure he’s do it again if it meant his great grandchildren had a better world.
switching beef with pork wouldn't make a big impact, because
- it's already not the preferred source of protein anywhere
- Americans eat too much meat anyway, regardless of where it comes from.
Reduce is the most important of the 3 Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle) but the western World settled on the least important, recycle, because it can be turned into a profitable business, while reduce promotes moderation, which is like swearing in a church for many Americans.
I am Italian and still eat nuts, legumes and eggs for proteins much more than meat, especially beef.
It's the culprit of the Mediterranean diet and it's shared among many other cultures that built their culinary traditions around the same ingredients. Chinese traditional food is much more similar to my own family's traditional food in center Italy than the typical US diet will ever be.
So maybe Americans should simply embrace other, better diets, instead of replacing some type of meat with some other type of meat. intensive farming of pigs it's not much better than beef
The environmental impact of pig farming is mainly driven by the spread of feces and waste to surrounding neighborhoods, polluting air and water with toxic waste particles. Waste from pig farms can carry pathogens, bacteria (often antibiotic resistant), and heavy metals that can be toxic when ingested.
> It's absolutely not given that removing beef from our diet would make things much better.
It is - the food input & land requirements are less efficient - and it’s absurd to say that eating pork or chicken instead is so miserable that people won’t abide it.
> It is - the food input & land requirements are less efficient
you are assuming that everything else will stay the same, which is a very common bias.
> say that eating pork or chicken instead is so miserable that people won’t abide it.
there are literally billions of people that do not eat various specific foods and beverages in conformity with various religious, cultural, legal or other societal prohibitions.
Try to convince your neighbor to eat dog instead of beef.
Slashing oil production by 50% in western economies is not a reduction in lifestyle it’s a full collapse with a huge number of collateral death.
But still you have a partial point: health/life expectancy and happiness have already started to decorrelate with the economy in the US, and US people consume more resources than other western economies with obviously better material outcome but no better quality of life outcome. This point to solutions were conversely it should then be possible to maintain standard of living with a decrease in the energy consumption. Red meat and leisure only air travel are indeed good candidates because you can live a very happy, healthy and fulfilled life without them. Same with cars weighting 1000 pounds less, putting a sweater in winter at home, having denser city centers with public transportation, etc…
This is not about left or right, this is about having an open look at some ideologies with data. It’s always hard to accept when people make economical theories a part of their identity and values, this a religious crisis for them not a simple discussion.
Let's walk through this hypothetical scenario with a modicum of realism
First and foremost, there's no way to transition our complex society through such an energy bottleneck of this nature without massive unrest. You will literally be killing people and causing mass starvation, so the very first thing that happens is everyone who loses someone or otherwise is hurt by the new regime instantly rebels and you have the largest energy war in history.
Seven billion people? That's just an abstract number to you, I suppose, and of course you will be one of the people who figures things out, why you're a "leftist!" as you told us so being on the right side of history will save you :) but in Reallandistan, the amount of human suffering you just released, the amount of ancient ills which we have finally, as a species , put to bed which you casually reawakened instantly flare up.
But what are several billion dead people? We're saving the planet here!
Do you honestly, really, in the deep quiet parts of your mind, think that it would be better to kill billions than to solve environmental and other problems, as we have been, better and better with technology? I fundamentally disagree with this inhumane approach and want nothing to do with those who might advocate it.
„It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.“
You can do this exactly once. Afterwards the cause will be severely discredited and no candidate doing even moderate climate change policies will be able to be elected.
And what about all the countries that won’t do anything regardless? So we should just tank our own economy while being unable to do anything about our neighbors? It won’t take tanking the economy, it would take world war 3.
Why does a green transformation have to "tank" the economy? Can't we have green economic revival ? Would it not create more jobs to transition faster ?
More jobs = more consumption = more resources. Their idea is for people to consume far less, therefore own less. If people own and consume less there's less incomes.
Don't own a house, only rent a small apartment in a dense urban setting. Don't own the means to your own transportation, only get by with walking and transit. Price meats so high most people can't afford them regularly.
Two out of the three things you mention are so 'undesirable' that the few dense walkable urban areas in the US are more expensive than living in the suburbs. There's a reason why left-wingers use the word "gentrification" a whole lot. In many cases suburban home and car ownership is actually cheaper than the traditional urban lifestyle, for various reasons including but not limited to:
1. Supply being limited because America outlawed dense urban construction decades ago. Dense cities cannot legally expand to meet demand and building up gets more expensive and unrealistic after a certain number of floors.
2. People in suburbs being further away from lucrative jobs - i.e. proximity to one's work is priced into the cost of the home.
3. Various government subsidies and tax credits that distort the market to produce more resource-intensive suburban housing.
"America" didn't outlaw the expansion, the cities did it to themselves. The cities are in charge of their zoning and planning, not the federal government. They could allow for more density, but the voters choose no. Just look at all the nimbys fighting apartment complexes; are they all goons from faceless corporations and the federal government or are they just the local people currently living there expressing their choice?
It's not like the government subsidies and tax credits exist even though nobody wants them. They exist because, once again, that's what voters have suggested they want when they go to the polls.
I do agree, cities should be able to expand their density. I think in an ideal world people should be able to choose to live in generally affordable forms of whatever housing they want. And that's the thing, I'd like to be able to choose the housing style I think is good for my family. Many here would argue I shouldn't be able to make that choice, or that some choices (like single family homes) should be made so expensive most people can't afford it.
and who are the World Meteorological Organization?
> The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics.
Ok - so its the UN. The UN is an UNelected body that presents itself as the face of world government.
> The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations.
I'm glad you agree, it did seem the dumber choice to continue driving at full speed into a brick wall just because the driver next to me won't brake first.
I think the right metaphor to demonstrate the argument being made is you are coupled to the other car and it doesn't matter if you turn off your engine, you're both hitting the wall anyway if the other car doesn't decide to stop too.
I don't know if hope is enough. I don't think people are willing to be miserable for hope- especially when there is no reasonable expectation that others would stop.
I disagree that you need to be miserable. Humans are very good at getting used to their circumstances, and some of the changes would be net positives on the personal level. I know I'm way happier now that I ride my bicycle as my main method of transportation.
But also, climate change is already making us miserable. I went on vacation and it was impossible to be outside between 12-3, so we had to plan our days around that. It's not a choice between happy and miserable, it's a tradeoff between less than ideal situations.
What works for you doesn't work for everyone. There are many, many places in the world where using a bicycle as a main method of transportation would be impractical and miserable. Short of force, this isn't going to happen.
Yes, the entire idea is to refactor our cities and societies so that most people can and do use the low carbon option.
It's not commuting 40Km by bicycle, it's raising the price of gas to the point that people choose to live at a distance where they can bicycle to work. At the same time you need to build housing and bike infrastructure to make sure everyone can have access to it.
Not everyone lives in a city. 'Refactoring' the planet is a pipe dream in the short term. It's not possible in the timeframe being discussed. People in the larger thread suggest that its better to get the dying over with now since it'll happen anyway. When food stops moving, it'll be the cities that fall first. A bicycle won't help.
> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.
It can't. I did the numbers some time ago [1], and they are bad. If you take electricity as a proxy, western countries consume something like 5 times as much as the global average per capita. So if we are willing to let the poorest to get to the global average while not cutting global consumption at all, the west should reduce their consumption by something like 80%. That's not crashing the economy. Thats... destroying the society most likely.
There are two solutions: 1. We force the global poor to stay poor. 2. We figure out how to make lots more stuff sustainably than we currently do.
Feel free to make your choise. Reducing consumption in the west is not going to make a dent anywhere and should be not on your list of worries if you choose 2.
Edit, add [1]: I don't habe the numbers now but you can replicate it pretty easly by taking population and electricity consumption data by country from wikipedia.
You're right that emissions-per-capita in Western countries are unsustainable, and that consumer demand is out of step with the true cost of fuel, meat, etc.
But how exactly would any country succeed in deliberately destroying their own economy? They would face revolts, civil unrest, and the economic vacuum left behind would simply open the door for any country that doesn't play along to gain a monopoly on forbidden economic growth, and potentially establish their own global hegemony.
No economic system has ever had "fair" or equal distributions of wealth, and no system will ever have a fair distribution of carbon emissions either.
Poor people don’t have the luxury of caring about the environment. Making people poorer is guaranteed to make things worse.
I don’t think we need to make everyone’s lives worse. It’s not politically viable. We don’t need to give up computers and well insulated homes and medicine. Technology will help us reduce pollution and emissions. It’s just going to take time.
I’m mostly arguing that this feels like an extremist view, and in the realm of “let’s look for real solutions to the problem”, this doesn’t feel like it should be the most upvoted one in this thread.
> Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers.
That's because I live in a market economy and I have no desire to live in your planned economy without any democratic process in place to represent me.
> but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.
"We should make decisions that will kill people and shorten their life expectancy, because I believe there aren't any other compromises that can be made to impact pollution."
Yea.. it's is weird to say, it's also demented and inhumane.
> And yes, I don't believe it's only rich people, it's also middle class people who generate a lot of emissions, and I'm a leftist.
And the rest of the world that hasn't developed yet? We still just don't spare any thoughts for them at all.
Society would grind to an abrupt halt if you cut oil production by even 20%. Of course, if you did that red meat and cheap air fare would go away on their own.
That this is the most upvoted comment shows just how far most people wander from reality.
> I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.
As someone from Bangladesh—average CO2 emissions under 1 ton per person—I can confirm that it sucks and conservation is a stupid way of mitigating climate change.
The anti-development people are just evil. When my dad was a kid in Bangladesh, 1 out of 5 kids died before age 5. Capitalism and development brought us up to similar levels to where the US was in the 1970s in just one generation.
This sort of fanaticism is why there is no progress on this issue. Let's start by banning low hanging fruit like cryptocurrencies, private jets and superyachts. If it's insufficient we might have to do more, like build sufficient high speed rail and force the third world to contain their population boom, because if that isn't contained nothing will work. Only then would it be reasonable to go after ordinary people.
China releases more CO2 than the US, EU, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand combined.
The West has become really good at reducing emissions and environmental impact. Yes, a fair portion of that reduction is consuming CO2 intensive products made in China rather than locally, but even taking that into account the developed world is probably still less CO2 producing than the developing world.
Not to say that we shouldn't reduce our consumerism, but not by lowering our living standards. It would immediately harm if not kill the weakest/poorer segments of every Country's population.
I'm fairly sure that living standards will be lowered by floods, fires and other climate catastrophes. Not doing enough to stop CO2 production will result in a lot of lowered living standards, including making some areas of the world uninhabitable without air conditioning etc.
> I'm fairly sure that living standards will be lowered by floods
No, it won't as badly.
Doomerism is not a valid rational point of view.
Most of all, floods would happen anyway, so you'll have floods + lower standards of living, including much worse emergency services.
we are not at the brink of extinction and people lived and prospered in almost unhabitable lands long before we had the technology to regulate the temperature.
like for example Northern United Kingdom.
But are also living today in the middle of deserts, with no AC.
Of course we should cut on emissions werever it is possible, worst offenders being fossil fuels.
Edit: on a side note the reason why your proposal will never work is because cutting on emissions is actually easy. For example let's stop keeping pets at home. Pets that usually eat a lot of red meat. It is feasible, won't lower living standards and won't cost much to society. Now convince people that their cat eats more meat in a year than a Chinese average person and that's not sustainable.
> we are not at the brink of extinction and people lived and prospered in almost unhabitable lands long before we had the technology to regulate the temperature.
It's relatively simple (though not necessarily easy) to live in a cold area if you have access to furs and fuel. Trying to survive in an area where the wet bulb temperature is over 35 degrees will require reliable air conditioning and working outside will become virtually impossible for humans.
> Edit: on a side note the reason why your proposal will never work is because cutting o. emissions s it's actually easy. For example let's stop keeping let's at home. Pets that usually eat a lot of red meat. It is feasible, won't lower living standards and won't cost much to society. Now convince people that their cat eats more meat in a year than a Chinese average person and that's not sustainable.
> And yet ancient Egyptians did it 4 thousands years ago.
Have you any evidence of Egypt having those kinds of wet bulb temperatures back then? It's physically impossible to survive high wet bulb temperatures even with an unlimited supply of water without some other form of cooling (i.e. not based on air movement such as fans) as water/sweat evaporation isn't effective.
> Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (131 °F). A reading of 35 °C (95 °F) – equivalent to a heat index of 71 °C (160 °F) – is considered the theoretical human survivability limit for up to six hours of exposure.
> One 2015 study concluded extremes are likely to approach and exceed 35C in the region around the Arabian Gulf towards the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions are not reined in, posing questions for human habitability there.
> In 2020, research found that some coastal subtropical locations have already experienced WBTs of 35C, albeit only for a few hours.
> “Previous studies projected that this would happen several decades from now, but this shows it’s happening right now,” said lead author Colin Raymond, a climate scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The times these events last will increase and the areas they affect will grow in direct correlation with global warming.”
> The study also found that globally, the number of times that a WBT of 30C was reached – still considered an extreme humidity and heat event – more than doubled between 1979 and 2017. There were about 1,000 occurrences of a 31C WBT, and about a dozen above 35C, in Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Australia.
not evidence of something that would kill hundred of millions of humans.
But, more importantly,
The oft-cited 35C value comes from a 2010 theoretical study.
Simply put: nobody knows the real threshold and nobody put it to test.
I'm no denier in any way, but doom prophecies are usually wrong, they are used to scare people into action, but are based on the idea that nothing changes.
For example, planting trees is effective against heat waves, it's cheap and it's being done extensively, everywhere you look
China will aim to plant and conserve 70 billion trees by 2030 as part of the global tree movement
The 35C value is suggested as an upper limit. Lower WBTs have already been shown to be deadly amongst the more vulnerable.
I agree about tree planting being a sensible precaution to take - preventing sun from reflecting off tarmac and concrete is going to help at least a bit as well as the other benefits.
> The wet-bulb temperature (WBT) is the temperature read by a thermometer covered in water-soaked (water at ambient temperature) cloth (a wet-bulb thermometer) over which air is passed. At 100% relative humidity, the wet-bulb temperature is equal to the air temperature (dry-bulb temperature); at lower humidity the wet-bulb temperature is lower than dry-bulb temperature because of evaporative cooling.
Politician A) The one that promises you more economic comfort in the short term
Politician B) The one that promises you sustainability (i.e.: not necessarily growth)
Most people will vote for Politician A. Because most families in this culture want prosperity so they have more income to have a "better lifestyle" (consume more). The problem is that a better lifestyle means a higher environmental footprint.
That brings us to the realization that at some point in time we became an ecocidal invasive species, and having good historians and a good public relations team won't change that in the actually true and objective historic record: the geological and fossil record, which will be the only one that will remain after we starve ourselves to death. In that record we will see how after the arrival of the behaviorally modern human, especially after the industrial revolution, all species above certain weight started dying.
We look down at tribal peoples with dumb narratives such as "they are not making an efficient use of the land". Well, 200 years after the industrial revolution we are learning that the industrial mindset is collective suicide, and perhaps there was something that the tribal peoples were doing correctly, measured in terms of KPIs such as carbon emissions, topsoil, biodiversity, etc.
And the solution is a) reducing our environmental footprint (which is impossible with a growth-oriented industrial mindset) or b) resist growth or c) reduce our population. b) and c) will never be supported by the population.
We will have to rewrite history and rethink the way we educate people, accepting that the industrial revolution was progress in terms of consumption but it was a massive setback in terms of sustainability. i.e.: it is a progress trap, or in simpler terms, it doesn't fucking work.
We are just immature people playing with a credit card and thinking we can afford everything. But everything you spend you'll have to pay later, with interest, and that time is arriving at an increasingly faster rate. We are living lavish lifestyles at the expense of the future generations.
Political leadership doesn't have an answer, neither do corporations. The media serves those groups, so the solution won't come from them either.
I predict that once strong AI is here, elites will not have a reason to collaborate and share resources with the masses, and will have no incentive to share political representation. Plus, the agriculture supply chain is highly centralized and corporations can cause a famine any time they want.
this is the same "it's worth anything" arguments where "maybe" is treated as "it will happen" while ignoring the negative aspects (IE: human suffering, facts that poor people are worse for the economy, green tech is made from worse than carbon and is creating megatons of unrecyclable stuff like windmill blades and solar panels, etc.
Nothing like putting the lives of people on the chopping block for an "if" in response to a religious belief that "carbon is evil".
> It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms.
Maybe because they understand the immediate consequences of such an action and you don't. That's why 0 leaders around the world are proposing that kind of solutions because everyone that knows how world works, how supply chains work and what kind of environment is needed for people to elect leaders like Hitler. You want WWIII? The best way to do it is crashing the world economy.
> I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.
Good luck with that, people didn't work so hard in the west to now switching to 3rd world country standards.
Climate change is a common knowledge, there are green parties in almost every country, if people really wanted to change their way of living they would vote for them but they don't. Clearly they are waiting for a technical miracle to happen or just don't care.
So what does it mean? It means that winter is coming and you should prepare for it. None of the newest models show that we can avoid first level of catastrophe even if we stop all the emissions. Millions or tens of millions of people will die, hundreds of millions will try to migrate. At this stage it's not a question of if but when. Life is not a Hollywood movie.
At this point we are in some sort of 'space station ecosystem collapse' situation and we need to start acting like it and completely change how capitalism works.
You aren't that far off. Young people today can see the writing on the wall: for the first time in history, we have scientific evidence that continuing with capitalism will bring the end of the world. We'll have to choose between continuing with colonial subjugation of the working class by the owner class for another eon or revolution by spiritual enlightenment to take us to an egalitarian future like Star Trek.
Now I'm not anti-capitalist, because capitalism is social darwinism and is a description of how resources get distributed under contention due to scarcity. It doesn't need defending. It also can't be stopped. So it doesn't care if you believe in it or not.
But the rampant corruption and crony/late-stage capitalism we live under today has metastasized. And most people don't know it. I'm sure that 50% of the people reading this are just fine with the status quo. They have high incomes and can take care of their families and that's great.
What they probably aren't thinking about on a conscious level is that the median income for individuals globally is right at $10,000 annually. An American making $36,000 is already standing on 3 other people's backs. HN viewers making $100,000-$250,000 are standing on about 10-25 people. A billionaire making $100 million stands on 10,000 people. Our uber-rich stand on 1 million people or more.
So what we think of as buying a $30,000 automobile and spending that again on fuel and maintenance steals 6 years of someone's life, not to mention the life lost by the owner working to make payments. A $300,000 home ($600,000 with mortgage interest) steals 60 years of life. A house is someone else's lifetime. You can see where I'm going with this.
It's not so much that we can't imagine a life without fossil fuels. That's actually pretty easy: solar panels on our roofs and electric cars, home hydroponic robotic gardens, recycling of all things (even landfills), off-grid living. Solarpunk.
It's that we can't imagine ourselves at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid, toiling our lives away so that someone somewhere can be wealthy at our expense, forever separated from financial stability and self-actualization like the 7 billion people propping up the billion people in "developed" countries. So we project our generational trauma onto the people we depend on most.
That's what the Russia-Ukraine war is about. That's why the Middle East can't seem to get left alone. That's why the Global South struggles to eat. That's why we're seeing continuous decline in all things from economics to health to the environment. That's why we won't solve global climate change. And that's why the most likely future currently is a dystopian one.
We can't change the world, but we can change ourselves. As we each pull ourselves up by our bootstraps since the wealthy do nothing about any of this, we begin to manifest a viable future.
Personally I have stopped fantasizing about disruption and winning the internet lottery. Now I meditate on how to bring $10,000 of resources to every single person in the world through automation to free humanity from forced labor and enter the New Age.
Let's call it what it is: feudalism. The active income era of capitalism has largely subsided. When economic growth comes from active income all classes can see their wealth increase. When passive income dominates you get the opposite: certain sections of the owner class with the most powerful monopolies[0] cannibalize everyone else. And while "feudalism" is a historically complicated term, one common feature was economies dominated by passive income. In that era, wealth went to those who owned the land - a natural chokepoint to economic activity. Today the chokepoints are different but the effect is the same.
I would also disagree that half of HN is "just fine with the status quo" given that this community also likes to talk a lot about right to repair, abuse of copyright and patent ownership, DMCA 1201, platform capitalism, etc.
[0] e.g. copyright ownership over culturally relevant creative works, patent ownership over the most economically relevant inventions, etc
1. How do you know these people are from the West?
2. Crashing the economy may make things worse as people may move to cheaper more polluting options.
3. Also any crashing has to be global if implemented. If the West implements this, will China implement it too? Otherwise, it is useless.
4. We have to get out of the outdated/silly notion that the economy is inversely proportional to a clean planet. E.g., cleaner cars cost more than older polluting cars. So if more cleaner cars are bought, that implies economic growth as well as less pollution. Same for building mass transit. There will be a ton of upfront pollution.
Let's not beat around the bush. This is standard climate change denialism. It's the trope that there is nothing here to worry about because, who knows, the earth COULD have been warmer in the past and it still exists now. It's the same logic that would say that you've decelerated from 60 mph to 0 before without an issue, so you should be just fine after slamming your car into a brick wall.
Let's turn this into a simple debate. How many people will die per 100K per year per degree above per-industrial levels in your estimation? By what percentage will GDP per capita be impacted by the same metric? Instead of entrenching climate change denier / alarmist tribes, let's just discuss models.
About 0%. Looking at historical timelines, the rapid change we are seeing now is unprecedented. The forced heating lines up exactly with the additional C02 and methane we have pumped into the atmosphere.
We are causing this, full stop.
(No need to reply; you've already shown yourself to be a sarcastic asshole who sucks down a big glass oil company propaganda for breakfast. [Insert sarcastic winking emoji here])
> Scientists have been building estimates of Earth’s average global temperature for more than a century, using temperature records from weather stations. But before 1880, there just wasn’t enough data
They always says "on record" or "ever measured" in these headlines. Which means it's since ~140 years, and we know that is very very likely that past temperature have been higher not long ago...
Does it even matter if it was warmer in the past? Right here, right now, we can prove that human efforts have changed the temperature of the planet. Right here, right now, we can see the effects of that change. Increased frequency of storms, increased intensity of storms, shifting of seasons, decline in animal populations, etc. Being a "skeptic" just because you can't prove that it's currently warmer than it was 200 years ago is pointless
You'll see, everything will be fine, even better than fine. Maybe you'll even live long enough to finally understand what this is all about, maybe not, that's not important. We'll be fine.
I just wish we didn't go down so stupidly. I could understand mere greed. I could even understand ordinary ignorance.
Instead, we chose stupidity. The answers were right there. It wasn't a secret and it wasn't all that difficult. Instead people pretended it was a vast conspiracy against them, denying both basic physics and the data.
We still debate why and how Rome fell, but they'll look back at us and say, "yeah, they were just a bunch of dumbfucks."
Part of me feels sad, part of me feels dread, and part of me says, "well, we're just reaping what we have been (and still are) sowing, and we collectively deserve all that is coming." All the suffering sucks though.
This is natural progression. The apex predator takes over and over-grazes the land, so to speak, to the point where it no longer supports the apex, so eventually the apex predator dies off, and the other species that are left can flourish.
The trick is to brake just early enough to hit the apex of the proverbial civilizational corner and come out accelerating until we straighten ourselves out.
Only some are more culpable than others. The climate crisis represents the single biggest failure of humanity. How stupid do our leaders need to be to know about an extinction level event (or at least one that threatens the breakdown of civilisation) with > 50 years notice and take no substantive action? They should be charged for crimes against humanity.
The blame doesn’t lie just with leaders though. It comes all the way from the bottom. Everyone wants their standard of life to improve, they want conveniences, luxuries, socioeconomic status… and they vote for policies that’ll give them those things. It’s a collective problem at a global scale.
Some people just want power and ego and status, some people just want things to be simple and not change from what they know, and a significantly smaller number of people just want to be chill and sensible.
Some conspiracy theorists warned people about the design of your political systems but no one seemed to think it's a legitimate concern. Time will tell I suppose.
I suggest you give up all non-human powered transportation for starters and follow that with a reduction in you electrical footprint: no more batteries - use hand- or foot-crank generation instead.
Once we haven't heard from you for an extended period we'll assume you were successful. Best of luck.
Switching to biking and paying for renewable electricity is quite practical in many parts of the world, so I think your “concern” that this isn’t doable while remaining on the internet isn’t productive.
Because it's always a model, and has plenty of parameters to tweak, there is no "measuring the temperature of the earth at all points at the same time."
Yeah, that makes sense—I thought op was suggesting it wasn’t primarily from observed data. Still, it seems clear that it should be possible to make conclusions about average temperature and trends from a large set of collected data, if it the statistical methodology is rigorous. Simply casting doubt (as it seems like the op is doing) without offering anything to question those methodologies adds nothing of value to the discussion.
To save someone a click, it's this sort of drivel with no citations:
> Furthermore, we have recently detected a number of alarming anomalies in all the layers of the Earth system. There is an extraordinary displacement and destabilization of the Earth’s core, a sporadic and chaotic acceleration of the planet’s rotation, and a shift in its rotational axis. This scenario is compounded by a critical weakening and emergence of atypical anomalies of the magnetic field, and a change in the composition of the upper layers of the atmosphere. These events have culminated in an extreme activation of magmatic foci, and an accompanying increase in deep mantle earthquakes - bringing about a decrease in the thermal conductivity of the ocean. As a consequential result, our oceans have lost their ability to function as a compensatory and cooling mechanism. All these alarming factors indicate only one thing - To Wit, Our planet is on the verge of self-destruction, and humanity has only a few years remaining to avert this impending catastrophe.
We've had a warm few days but overall its been a pretty wet summer in the UK. Last year was warmer.
Re the chart - did temperature recording start in 1980? Can't we have the temperature that is on record (ie back to 1880 or whatever), if you are going to claim this is the hottest on record... Stuff like that is suspicious.
1976 is famous for being a scorching summer (at least with Brits over a certain age), but it's not in the top ten of our temperature records. Seven of those ten are from this century :-(
At the other poster mentioned, records began around 1880.
The conspiracy-minded part of me really wants to link this year to the sulfur reductions in ship emissions kicking in this year. The fact that there's basically only one person really trumpeting this in a way kind of indistinguishable from things I know are false is hard though.
Hank Green pointing out that we could just spray water into the air to get the same effect (and avoid the whole "sulfur" thing in general) gives me a modicum of hope. But If it's all true I just have so many doubts in being able to act on this nicely. How would you even police giant ships to make sure they keep the "water spraying gun" running all the time?
"Just do that simple thing, it will fix the problem" rarely works all that well for the complex system unless "this thing" is "stop doing something that makes it worse".
Like that one time China decided sparrows are a problem then discovered what they exactly eat aside from grain...
I know these kinds of stories, and people like to say them. But they don’t distinguish from “spray water into the air to fix global warming” and “put iodine into table salt to fix an entire populations iodine deficiency”. Sometimes the simple solution works! The reality is that even simple solutions involve a lot of work at a large scale.
Dismissing SRM technology, Prof Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College, London, called it “irresponsible, dangerous and a threat to the manageability” of our survival, saying: “It is not a solution but an extremely dangerous band-aid that covers up the global warming problem without healing it, creating a false and unwarranted sense of climate safety while the core of the problem continues to fester.”
While theoretically capable of cooling the planet, solar radiation management could have drastic side effects by shifting patterns of global atmospheric circulation that can lead to more extreme weather events. It also does nothing to reduce harms of excess greenhouse gases, including ocean acidification.
the ordinary human ego has adopted itself to larger-than-large for survival. I claim that ordinary humans will use their ordinary ego to invent ways to "manage" the changes that are occurring.. and that will happen repeatedly, despite all reason or science.
It is important not to start direct confrontation when someone is showing signs of listening at all.. simple minded responses are ordinary. That is exactly why nation-level Science is being applied, right?. It should not be shocking that ordinary people reply with simplistic responses. The situation is too extreme for the pleasures of ordinary quarralling -- disciplined discourse is called for, even if most people are not willing or able.
> Someone needs to figure out large scale injection of SO2 to the stratosphere. Don't wait for permission, just do it!
I wonder if a hundred years ago someone said "Someone needs to introduce the cane toad to Australia to reduce the beetle population! Don't wait for permission, just do it!".
Not the exact same thing, sure, but we are terrible at predicting side effects.
According to wikipedia (and it's source) vulcanoes are at about 1/10th compared to humans (as in, we dump it into the atmosphere 10 times as much) and wildfires about 1/25th compared to humans. Note: data from before 1995.
I mean… “breathing in sulfur is bad for people’s health” is a documented issue right? Like the sulfur _is pollution_. That’s why we cared to get rid of it!
The "just do it!" part is inspired by Stephenson, sure. I didn't realize before that that it's the kind of problem that you can actually just do, since there isn't a locked door to the stratosphere :)
But the idea itself is much older, and AFAICT very safe. The only thing missing is a practical way to get millions of tonnes of SO2 to the stratosphere aside from burning dirty oil on the ground.
Thinking about getting to 1.5 C averaged over the planet is surreal and we are still 30 years out from the promised "net zero". We have some tough times ahead of us.