I'm not necessarily worried about climate change per se. It will result in hardship for many, for sure. Temperature changes will render some areas uninhabitable, it will cause mass migration, and probably destabilize the world politically.
What am more worried about is the direct wholesale destruction of the biosphere. There are absolutely bonkers numbers about extinction, ocean acidification, runaway permafrost melt that actually could choke out a majority of people.
Worse still, these effects aren't easily solvable by stopping emissions, or blocking out the sun with mylar sheets, or any of the "low hanging" technological fruit -- the stuff that could be solved with today's space technology or electric car tech.
In order to actually solve these "deeper" problems, we will need an absolutely massive bio-engineering effort that is probably only possible with some kind of entropic breakthrough.
Evolution is basically hyper-organization, a point of locally super low entropy that only happens by hundreds of millions of years of energy expenditure. When a species dies, it's not those individuals, it's every one of those individuals that ever lived that dies. All that concentration of local entropy, destroyed forever. It's like using every GPU on planet earth to train a hyper-smart GPT-4, for many human lifetimes -- and then hitting rm -rf on the weights.
You mean the Holocene extinction event which is directly tied to climate change? It's one big connected system.
Also the low hanging tech you talk about is a compete cluster bomb of terrible ripple effects. They don't solve the issue only kick the can down the road while causing massive other problems.
We don't talk about birth control enough. Some parts of the world have exploding populations, and while they don't consume much CO2 at the moment, they will - either as a result of the migrations they do, or through development.
Its not just a matter of birth control. In many of these countries, there are ingrained patriarchal practices which lead to men pushing for their family unit (which sometimes includes multiple wives) to simply have as many children as possible.
In other cases, its a ponzi scheme, where people have an excessive number of children in order to ensure their own livelihood in old age.
The solution is probably to stop sending all forms of food aid, to stop interfering in local and regional conflicts, and to replace all aid with education, abortion and contraception for women.
For example, in countries like Somalia, about half of the population rely on food aid for survival [1], but the fertility rate is 6.07 children per woman. The population is forecast to double in the next 25 years [2].
It would seem reasonable to me that if we are offering food aid, that we also require all recipients to undertake long-term contraception.
Telling people to have fewer children in an area where few children make it to adulthood due to factors like poor healthcare, war, crime, etc... is kind of cruel and likely to be ineffective. There's a lot of evidence that simply improving the standards of living will reduce birthrates naturally.
Thank you! There's lots of evidence that living beings of all kinds actually feel compelled to reproduce _more_ when faced with stressful selective pressures.
We don't have a population problem, we have a crisis in greed and hypercompounding concentration of capital and dominating, ineffective forms of power. We have a status quo that abhors any idea of slowing down, even though studies show slowing down would naturally reduce rates of energy consumption and carbon emissions. We have a trickle-down rent extraction problem that's pushing people and communities around the world to the brink.
I expect the vast bulk of his flights are for him and his staff on his charity foundation flights, not joyriding. Those jets are passenger jets for a reason. Otherwise, they'd be flying commercial.
Think of the obscene amounts of pressure people face when "hustling" to pay rent. It burns people out and pushes them to sacrifice. All because of concentrated purchasing power and artificially scarcity of time and housing.
Hustling is literally "going fast to get stuff done within a short amount of time". In order to go fast it takes energy. People are wasting energy to perform obligatory busywork for impatient people who have more money than them and are also performing obligatory busywork for people who have even more money. It's a viscous compounding of sacrifice.
I'm not pointing at Bill Gates, I'm talking about the larger network effect of time-crunch-pressure-relationships. Everyone knows there's a gun at the end of the line, if you were to stop paying rent and try to stay put in your home you'd be stepping out of line. Poor people know this more viscerally and immediately than rich people, but rich people know it just the same and are also terrified.
I mean at a minimum their CO2 usage must be astronomical. Likely some of the highest per capita CO2 usage of any human beings ever.
Of course they also use their money to invest in development projects which will I would imagine have significant environmental effects.
In the case of Gates he has been widely criticized by people like Vandana Shiva for his agricultural ambitions pushing chemical intensive agriculture all over the developing world, which Shiva says will have massive negative environmental effects.
Gates also pushes in I believe the WTO for stronger intellectual property restrictions, which has a side effect of more products in the landfill as they are harder to repair.
Bezos has constructed a machine which consumes huge amounts of CO2 (Amazon) in the form of delivery trucks and a flood of cheap flimsy goods which consume energy when constructed and soon end up in landfills.
There’s a lot that billionaires do, by virtue of the power they have in this world, which damages the environment.
> In the case of Gates he has been widely criticized by people like Vandana Shiva for his agricultural ambitions pushing chemical intensive agriculture all over the developing world, which Shiva says will have massive negative environmental effects.
The alternative being more labor intensive agriculture (so requiring more people) and less buffer in case of a bad harvest (so potential famine and instability).
> Gates also pushes in I believe the WTO for stronger intellectual property restrictions, which has a side effect of more products in the landfill as they are harder to repair.
The alternative is a slowdown in research and development since now the research you paid millions for in payroll and time can now be copied by your competitor with one or two engineers.
>The alternative is a slowdown in research and development since now the research you paid millions for in payroll and time can now be copied by your competitor with one or two engineers.
I'm not going to argue regarding the merit of IP laws, but most analysis indicates that market players ignore most intellectual property, and that replication costs for technology are roughly 60-70% of the cost of the initial research. So you spend a bit more, but end up with a first mover advantage; in network-effect or capital intensive industries, these normally end up being determinative of overall success.
But layer that on with other R&D incentives placed in the market. Canadian SR&ED credits subsidize research costs by 15-35%, for instance, so the total delta between first mover and copy-cat implementations drops further.
The assumption that IP laws actually increase R&D rates is NOT something that is shown by the academic literature.
The rate of innovation to me seems key. In my view, the rate of innovation for 3D printing shot through the roof after the patents expired. Do you have any reading recommendations you care to share? Thanks!
Shiva argues that the methods pushed by industry are what weaken food security. Patent protected seeds that cannot legally be collected put big industry between farmers and their food production.
She argues for a more resilient food system through seed collection and sharing, biodynamic farming practices that promote healthy disease resistant soil, and an end to fossil fuel inputs in farming.
She is advocating for a stronger food system less susceptible to disease and economic disruption.
Regarding intellectual property restrictions: I’m sorry but you’ve bought in to the widely held belief that patents promote innovation. Of course the main function of the patent is to strictly regulate innovation. Large corporations buy up every new idea they can, and use their patent portfolios to threaten anyone who might dare tread on their turf.
Economically, a world without patents would have more smaller incremental investments as innovation occurs in parallel across many companies in industry. With patents, much fewer players buy up rights to yesterday’s ideas and prevent a sea of competition.
Think of the 3D printer. $50,000 when release under patent. $25,000 12 years later when still under patent. $2,000 from many companies three years after the patents expired. $250 and available worldwide from hundreds of companies ten years after the patents expired. There was a LOT of innovation that occurred in the 3D printing space in that decade after the patents expired!
I’m sorry I’m in a rush but here is some further reading:
This has been covered repeatedly on HN. There's no evidence of this. Electrophoresis is slow because of the laws of physics! That's why a 2007 kindle panel's update speed is the same as a 2021 kindle but the contrast ratio and cost is vastly superior since those are things that aren't violating physics! Companies like ClearInk are trying different methods to get faster speed but to achieve that they are forced to sacrifice bistability. Not sure why this factually incorrect trope about patents keeps getting repeated. You can look at my comment history to see that I've been trying to address this issue repeatedly.
We are talking about two issues - progress and existing availability:
1. Improvement on panels - you are right, physics is holding us back here. It is debatable whether cross-licensing so prevalent elsewhere in the industry would help. Even then I'd say Eink is holding industry back because they've closed avenues for other companies to iterate on Eink's core patents. (Again maybe good for Eink, but not good for everyone else)
2. Variety, use, licensing of existing technology - here Eink corporation is holding everyone else back.
They decide on what to manufacture and how to sell it. How can this be good for the consumer / small time startup?
There is plenty of anecdata on how hard it is to make a new product with Eink. They are very protective of their technology. LG can't just decide to make 32inch eink panels and license the tech from Eink.
Eink practically holds a monopoly in their niche.
They've bought most of their competitors in eink industry. SiPix was one of them. They are heavily pushing for vertical integration.
My argument is that with more open patent situation in e-ink world, we would see more/different manufacturers, we would see more interesting devices with different sizes/ratios at a lower cost.
PS I own 10+ e-ink readers in sizes from 5 inches to 13.3 inches and everything in between that Eink has allowed makers to use.
I am convinced that with more competition we would see better variety in large size e-ink device market.
I have an open mind, and would love to see an example of some company being a sole patent holder/monopoly for 20+ years in some industry being good for everyone else.
> I'd say Eink is holding industry back because they've closed avenues for other companies to iterate on Eink's core patents.
As I mentioned in my past comments, I work in the display industry and the only people I've heard the above comment from are people who are not in the display industry. It is the equivalent of someone outside software development making an accusation like Microsoft is holding back operating system development because of Microsoft's patents. I hope you can see the point. If not, perhaps you could give some evidence.
The rest of your post (monopoly, lack of competition, lack of variety) is based on the same fundamental claim you've made above.
It is good to hear from someone in the display industry!
Please do provide some evidence. (not a snark)
So often here on HN we hear from experts in some field that common wisdom is wrong but we do not see the evidence. (HFT insiders come to mind)
I have been hearing the lamentations on the consumer side of eink for over 10 years .
My observation is that there is a dearth of competition and innovation in e-ink display industry.
What are the causes? Physics okay, but what else?
My hypothesis is that it is caused by Eink corporation choosing to go after a big slice of a relatively small pie. They are trying to grow this pie very slowly in a controlled matter not willing to sacrifice any market share.
I would love to hear otherwise.
Why are we as consumers only now getting one choice of a 20+ inch eink screen?
Analogy would be Mac:PC in the 1980s and their experiences with compatibles. Both Apple and IBM regretted allowing compatible devices.
There is also Xerox and before-mentioned 3D printing.
So to me it seems E-ink has taken those lessons(closed system good/open bad) to heart.
I'm confused by your comment. You're making a claim that E-Ink is suppressing innovation. I state that doesn't seem to be the case in my industry, ie: the display industry. And you're asking me for evidence? Shouldn't the person making a claim that a company is suppressing innovation (ie: you) be the one to provide evidence? This is equivalent to someone saying Microsoft is suppressing innovation in operating systems. I would then respond saying I know a bit about operating systems and I don't see that. Then that person saying where is the proof that there isn't suppression by Microsoft. Do you see how your comment comes across?
> Why are we as consumers only now getting one choice of a 20+ inch eink screen?
You as a consumer can buy a mile of E Ink fpl if you like. They'll sell it to you. Then you can go and figure out how to laminate a >20" TFT backplane to it. Good luck getting that size in less than 1 million unit MOQ quantities especially now with all the backplane shortages. Good luck trying to convince VCs to fund your display startup with the billions you'll need to construct a physical factory. If they say they'd rather fund an AI, machine learning, internet services startup, tell us what convincing argument you'd use to convince them otherwise. No snark. Genuinely interested to see how you'll solve this problem that we in the display industry genuinely face.
I am making a claim that there has been insufficient progress in e-ink space.
I would love to hear your expert opinion on the causes.
We have not had the explosion in devices and the reduction in prices that has happened in other areas(scanners, various types of printers including 3D,LCD monitors, digital cameras, mobile phones, etc etc). E-ink is stagnating, this has been the constant lament on mobileread forums for 10 years.
Eink corporation usually gets the blame. Maybe they shouldn't and it would be interesting to hear it.
People want high quality color, people want lower prices, and we are not getting it.
> I am making a claim that there has been insufficient progress in e-ink space.
Insufficient progress? How does one know what is sufficient progress? To provide an analogy to software, you're saying the equivalent of there has been insufficient progress in Linux desktop.
Perhaps E Ink set too high an expectation? I never thought they'd even reach their current level of achievement. In my opinion, they're achieving about as much as what they can achieve with the physics of their material and the level of demand the market provides to them. For example, the most common request I've heard is when are they going to have bistable color. The response I would have is they had that at SID2019 but then nobody wanted to pay $2000 for a 16 color display that peaked at 16" diagonal. That's not 16-bit color, that's 16 colors! So they pivoted to adjust to what the market was willing to accept which was about $100 for a 7 color 6" display. That's what the market was willing to buy. Last I heard even that's thin pickings with no high volume products. In the display industry, if you're not able to sell at least a million displays a month, you're a niche player who won't be able to support having a factory with a fully tuned production line. Backplane vendors will treat you like a red haired stepchild and you'll be perpetually on the bottom of their manufacturing queue.
> E-ink is stagnating, this has been the constant lament on mobileread forums for 10 years.
Physics is a bitch ain't it? Perhaps you can invent a way for a fast moving pigment particle to achieve bistable and consistent positioning. You have access to E Ink displays after all, you could invent your own drive scheme if you believe they aren't doing the best that physics allows.
> People want high quality color, people want lower prices, and we are not getting it.
Yes, I want a $100 iPhone 12 and a $1000 ferrari and I'm not getting it. Why is that?
> Only recently we've had some larger devices. Why is only Dasung able to offer a very limited sized monitors and at a very high price to the consumer?
Volume. How many people are buying? Not a million a month? Then who wants to make it? Price correlates with volume. If you want prices to go down, go find a million buyers and put down the order so that manufacturers can afford to build up a production line for that device.
I believe patents reduce the likelihood of companies building things with compatible, interchangeable parts which makes them harder to repair and thus they are disposed of sooner. I also think it leads to less durable goods such that they come to need repair sooner. For my 3D printer for example compatible parts are available from a number of suppliers and it is easy to repair. Now look at power tools. Proprietary batteries and chargers that change year over year so customers always need to throw out old tools and buy new ones. I assume the battery connectors are patent protected though adapters from China are starting to hit the market anyway. Still grey markets are a bandaid over the real problems.
> Economically, a world without patents would have more smaller incremental investments as innovation occurs in parallel across many companies in industry.
And a complete stagnation in some areas due to the cost barrier of certain research since, as soon as the product will be out someone will start to improve it incrementally without having to recoup the R&D costs.
The world would be vastly better without patents in my opinion. Faster innovation, cheaper goods, less environmental waste. Medical technology would be better and cheaper. High technology like MRI machines would become cheaper, health care would become cheaper, etc. Really massive benefits.
It could be that there are certain fields where patents actually help to some degree. In other words an artificial monopoly is the only way to secure enough funds to cross some threshold for viability. Well, fine. We shouldn’t throw out all of the benefits of open innovation just because a few areas will need help. We can recognize what those areas are and provide government funding for investment, like in health care. Then we still get all the benefits of open innovation and we can distort the market with cash injections instead of planet wide distortions on copying.
That's the first sector where research will grind to a halt. It's extremely costly to bring something to the finish line due to regulations. Think drug research where testing and clinical trials take years. But once the molecule has been synthesized, it's trivial to do so at scale. So what smarter players will do is simply wait for someone to spend years on R&D then copy at the finish line and flood the market.
> We can recognize what those areas are and provide government funding for investment, like in health care
So bureaucrats will have even more say in who/what project gets funding. See how wonderful that has been for the EU tech sector.
About half the planet will die without chemical fertilizers.
> I believe
I need better than that.
> Besos has
Amazon (not Bezos' wealth) has displaced a number of other companies that provided goods to consumers. I haven't seen any evidence that Amazon produces, on the net, more CO2 than them. It arguably produces less, because it replaces innumerable car trips to the mall with one truck that drives far fewer miles per delivery.
> by virtue of the power they have
Doesn't remotely compare to the power government wields and accretes daily. Bill Gates has zero power over my life.
> it is incumbent upon them to provide a reference, not the reader.
According to who? This is not a debate class. If you are motivated to understand another you may well want to look up what they are saying. What are you adding when you reply with “never heard of her” instead of doing a quick search?
I regularly put sources in my comments but this time I was in the middle of other things.
It may be tangled up in the number of children. Spreading resources over more children may put them all further into that 12% category?
Anyway it seems to be true that child mortality has dropped across the board. US child mortality used to be almost 50% (in 1800). Now its around 0.7%. Somalia is about where the US was in 1925.
If a woman has 3 children at those odds, there is a 99.8% chance at least one child will live. If she has 4 children, it goes up to 99.997%. Having 6 children is clearly an overcompensation given this level of risk (99.9997% of one or more out of 6 living.)
I'm saying you're going to be fighting against a strategy that has been used since the dawn of Homo Sapiens to counter high childhood mortality rates. It is an uphill battle, especially in a country without a stable government.
You can achieve the same thing in those countries much more humanely by simply limiting immigration intake to high-HDI countries only (where the CO2 differential from the migration is smaller, and fertility rates are closer), and limiting the overall level of immigration.
Secondly instead of a one-child policy, Western welfare states could just modify their welfare systems to not reward single mothers for having children (by not paying people extra or giving preferential access to public housing).
>Some parts of the world have exploding populations, and while they don't consume much CO2 at the moment, they will
A, the "kicking the ladder" argument. We had a good run in the West over-consuming and producting Co2, and we continue to be at the top (including the Co2 we outsource to our global outsourced factories for our consumption), but others shouldn't.
Before we talk about over-population in e.g. Africa and India, why not talk about cutting down on consumption in the US (#2 co2 global producer with just 5% of the global population - and that's even not including the co2 produced in China for products the US companies ordered/will consume/sell).
Giving a good example how more people can live with less?
Else it's "let us keep our mega-polluting way of life and you better stop having kids so we are not inconvenienced".
(It's also often accompanied with quotes from westerners not having children "for the planet", when they just do it for their career, or to avoid any obstacles like kids on their personal "journey" to consumption and fun).
> A, the "kicking the ladder" argument. We had a good run in the West over-consuming and producing Co2, and we continue to be at the top (including the Co2 we outsource to our global outsourced factories for our consumption), but others shouldn't.
Developing economies don't have to imitate everything the west did. Solar technology and cheap battery storage can be built from scratch instead of retrofitted.
Isn't this the canonical historical justification for colonialism?
That colonialist barons are helping the local population by improving infrastructure for them? (While massively enriching themselves)
I don't think that really worked out well. The exploited wealth (both from resources and labour) arguably contributed to our current position, where unlimited greed at others' expense and total exploitation and destruction of the planet's resources is seen as noble.
Continuing this theme with modern-day Western corporations seeking further profit extraction is a tragedy.
I'm more inclined to think of reducing trade barriers for such nations, of enforcing strict ethic rules for multi-national corporations and foreign nation-state actors.
Yes; going there and building this new infrastructure is counterproductive. It creates dependencies and introduces moral hazards. That's not the way to do it.
The emphasis here is on help building the infrastructure, be it with knowledge, resources or context. Not to force progress, but to support it. Not to maintain strongholds on existing technologies using copyright and patents, but instead share knowledge and make it available.
If only industrialized countries did nothing - it would be a miracle for the developing countries!
Instead, industrialized countries push for their own agendas, plunder them for their resources, install their lackeys into power, play "divide and conquer" games with local populations, force them into unfavorable for the country deals, impose penalties and embargos whenever the developing country doesn't cave in to their demands, and so on...
I actually tend to agree on this part. Commercial colonialism is a real problem and we should force companies operating in developing countries to comply with strict ethical rules. Or else make operating there unprofitable.
(2) Birth control is already being tackled with in developing countries. It's just not being talked much in the context of global warming, because (1).
(3) Talking about population when the majority of CO2 is emitted by a small number of wealthy countries (with low birthrate) seems like focusing on the wrong thing. Especially since almost all arguing about it online are living in one of those wealthy countries. Yes, it would be really convenient for me if climate problem could be solved by telling Africans to get their shit together, but it's not happening that way.
I mean, if you're saying "We should do more," then I wholeheartedly agree. I just don't think it will make a meaningful dent on CO2 emission in the short to mid term.
So we need to "limit population growth" among "some parts of the world" - is it fair to guess that you mean here subsaharan Africa and south Asia? - because they don't consume much CO2 but will? No mention of the parts of the world that, uh, do consume much CO2, and will continue to do so?
Per-capita CO2 usage is not really a relevant measure. What matters a lot more is CO2 efficiency.
That can be determined by CO2 per unit of GDP, and CO2 per scientific article.
For example, Pakistan has about the same level of scientific output as Slovakia [1], and 28x the GDP. Pakistan's population is 40x that of Slovakia.
Slovakia's per-capita CO2 output is 7.1 tonnes, vs Pakistan 0.87 tonnes.
But actually, per unit of CO2, Slovakia is substantially more efficient than Pakistan in terms of economic and scientific output: Slovakia is 4.9x more efficient than Pakistan at scientific output per unit of CO2, and 1.8x as efficient for GDP.
You can see similar things across the world when comparing highly efficient Western countries to inefficient 2nd and 3rd world countries.
But its true that Western countries must decarbonise electricity generation and transport, and then support/force others to do the same.
This is why cap and trade systems are much less fair than a global carbon tax. Countries, individuals, businesses should be able to emit CO2 if they think that the return is justified against the cost. Meanwhile, low-value and inefficient output should be eliminated as much as possible.
You're assuming that GDP and papers per CO2 emitted are good measures of efficiency, and therefore of what are good uses of CO2.
This is a false assumption. The reason African countries don't produce as many papers is not that they're less "efficient" than anyone else, it's the geopolitical history of the region. Likewise for GDP.
I wanted to comment on what you said about a global carbon tax for countries, individuals and businesses though. I really don't think that's a good way to go. I'm assuming you mean a significant carbon tax, because a small tax wouldn't do much in the time we need it to.
A carbon tax for corporations banks everything on the hope that it will be profitable to move away from fossil fuels in the near future. The cost of failure is a catastrophic global crisis. How do you financially factor that in? How much profit does an activity need to generate for it to be worth causing a global catastrophe? The cost is immeasurable, so you can't put a price on it. Not to mention you might create perverse incentives. An oil company might decide it's financially worth it to emit tons of CO2, pay a fine, cause sea levels to rise, and then corner the market on building inland. There is literally no monetary value that justifies the trajectory we're on.
For individuals, a significant carbon tax means rich people get to emit CO2, and poor people don't. Rich people get to sail on their yachts, and poor people starve because they have to pay more for food.
At a national scale, it's even worse. Rich countries that got rich off of fossil fuels get to keep emitting CO2 as they see fit. Poor countries that were exploited by the rich countries for slaves or resources have to beg for help.
Legislative solutions don't have any of these problem. Ban yachts. Subsidize food. Ban cars. Stop oil extraction. Build public transit. Decrease meat production. Embargo countries that keep emitting CO2. Yeah, these are hard things to do, but they're the only thing we can reliably do. Taking the awful system that got us to where we're at today, adding incentives around it to fix it, and hoping that it works well enough within 10 years so that we don't drive ourselves to extinction is not a good plan. I personally think the economic system we have today is inherently unfixable, but even if you think there is a way of using it for good, are you willing to bet the Earth that we'll find the right configuration for it in time to stop global catastrophe? I wouldn't take that bet
Not this again, fine I'll choose not fighting climate change. The deniers won (not you). The Bitcoin guys can keep their paperclip maximizer on, people get to keep their ICEs and gas heaters.
>A carbon tax for corporations banks everything on the hope that it will be profitable to move away from fossil fuels in the near future.
It's almost profitable today without even pricing in externalities.
>The cost of failure is a catastrophic global crisis. How do you financially factor that in? How much profit does an activity need to generate for it to be worth causing a global catastrophe? The cost is immeasurable, so you can't put a price on it.
Failed econ 101... It doesn't matter how high the damage is. The same way it doesn't matter how important food and water is. Food and water is still affordable. Why? Because the value provided by water/food isn't what matters, it's the cost of the next cheapest alternative. If someone sells bottled water for $5000 and someone else for $0.25 I don't have to pay the "death penalty" because I cannot afford the expensive water. It's the same thing with CO2 emissions. A single ton of CO2 could do infinite damage and therefore the price would have to be infinite, that is, if it were impossible to reverse CO2 pollution. It's expensive to extract CO2 from the air but the maximum cost is $600 per ton, that alone reduces the minimum price needed to $600 even though the modeled damage caused by CO2 pollution is infinite.
>For individuals, a significant carbon tax means rich people get to emit CO2, and poor people don't. Rich people get to sail on their yachts, and poor people starve because they have to pay more for food.
What the fucking hell? We are literally taxing the polluters in this case. We are making it expensive for rich people to pollute, we are literally shouting in their face and saying, "You must pay dearly for your pollution, rich prick". We are taking money out of their damn pockets so they have less to spend on pollution. Compare that to the alternative which involves no punishment.
>Legislative solutions don't have any of these problem. Ban yachts. Subsidize food. Ban cars.
You run into the incompetent politician problem, also, you are making the mistake that politicians even give a damn about climate change. In Germany the CDU doesn't give a crap, they will take a CO2 tax shoved down their throat by the greens and never touch it but they themselves are never going to ban yachts or cars.
I hope this planet burns down because everyone involved, including myself, deserves it.
Why don’t we just limit it all around? Why does someone need to have 4 kids which then, in rich countries, forces them to get a bigger car, use more energy, cool a bigger home, etc.
Just implement carbon taxes based on the cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere (probably $200-$500/tonne).
This is going to mean about a 5-10% cost of living increase for the typical Westerner - affordable, and beneficial because it will also mean much less air pollution.
It would also mean that the 2nd/3rd world would build up with renewable energy and electric transport from the ground up, instead of with fossil fuel infrastructure which will be difficult to replace.
It’s a nice idea, but all consumption taxes are unpopular and federal tax revenues are just thrown into one big pile. Can we just spend a trillion a year to remove the CO2 instead?
We already have condensed carbon - in the ground, stable, in the form of coal, natural gas, and oil.
We need to just stop digging it out and burning it.
There's really no getting around the need for a direct and transparent price on carbon. The health benefits from lower air pollution alone would probably pay for the transition itself.
For example, at just about $15/tonne, coal is immediately dead (doubled in price) as an electricity source:
You don't need to limit it, as quality of life increases people have less children. Population growth rate is on a steady decline worldwide, and has or will plateau in developed countries in the near future.
In almost all countries in the global North, the pop. growth rate is already far below replacement. There's nothing nefarious, contrary to your insinuation, about focusing on populations that are actually increasing.
Both can be done at the same time lol! Realistically those populations are gonna grow at a crazy rate. Every country needs to adopt a minimal growth rate and be rewarded for being sustainable.
> We need to reduce the number of humans on Earth.
I'm happy to point out that this is not the case.
We're already peak child and the next two billion will not come from population growth but from population replacement[0] (Thanks, Hans. RIP, I loved you), where children replace the people in previous cohorts that never made it to reproductive age.
The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years. Many countries on earth already and most countries on earth in about twenty years will have problems maintaining their population as it is. Fertility has been dropping all over the globe, with a few exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa.
No, really. There's nothing we can do about the people we already have and there are barely any new babies arriving.
What we do need to worry about is population migrations. We need to make it easier for people to migrate. We need to set up political and social infrastructure to welcome people from places that climate change has made inhospitable.
Since most of the world will be suffering from over aging and from a lack of births, these migrants will be dearly needed.
So, no need to talk about birth control, let's talk about immigration reform instead!
> The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years.
It doesn't look like it. The UN predicts the population will be ~10.5 billion in 2070. Of course, there is a large range of uncertainty. [1]
Given sustainability limits, the cost to the environment (and to humans) of going from 10 to 11 billion is a lot worse than the cost of going from 5 to 6 billion, say. (For example, there's only so many fish in the sea.)
> The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years.
Sorry, I should have been more exact in my choice of words with this regard, mea culpa.
Yes, total human population is expected to grow. But this growth is limited to very few places, especially found in sub-Saharan Africa (and strangely: the USA). If you look at places like West Asia, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, the more-developed-group of countries or the middle-income group of countries you will see that all across the board population is expected to fall within 50 years.
This groups of countries will have a desperate worker shortage in the given time frame and we should start thinking how we can accommodate the needs of both immigrants and residents alike.
Fertility is already falling, rapidly. There's not much that we can do in that regard (some countries are even trying to raise total fertility). We will not get rid of the people we already have. (Well, not in any way, shape or form that is ethically and worth further discussion).
I agree that we need to have a good and hard think about our resource management. We need to reduce waste. We need to reduce our footprint. We need to stop the predatory ecosystem exploitation we're currently practicing. We're moving very fast towards a cliff.
>> The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years.
I really should be more careful how to phrase my argument. Thanks for pointing it out.
I live in India, even after working hard and making good money it's not possible to live a comfortable live here. There's no space for you, everything is packed up in tiny spaces.
Yet some people keep reproducing here, it's true birth rate has fallen in educated people but there are simply too many people at the bottom here in India so our population isn't going to come done anytime soon
Agreed. Yet the term should be foster a sustainable birth rate. A country like Japan is doing this right. Importing migrants from overcrowded countries will only increase the overall number of people reproducing.
There's definitely a sweet spot the world should hit.
i don't why this is being downvoted. He's abosultely right, if you want to reduce CO2, you need to reduce the number things that cause it: Humans.
The alternative: Asking each human to reduce their C02 output won't get you very, especially since most of our individual output is more influence by govt policy rather than our own actions, for instance: commute distances, etc.
Microplastics and other chemicals infiltrating our food and water supply has had a negative effect on male sperm efficacy. We also see population replacement weening in highly developed nations such as the US and Japan. Perhaps there are systems at play beyond our ken. We are merely part of the ecosystem, not its master.
I think you'll find that most of the organizations promoting climate apocalypse agree with your ideas about population control.
Interestingly, they proposed population control before promoting the climate agenda. Many view fear of a climate apocalypse as a vehicle to advance the preexisting agenda.
I also see climate change being adopted by people to advance their unrelated causes.
For example, AOC's "Green New Deal" proposal was full of social justice programs. Socialism is often put forward as the solution to climate change, although socialist countries have a very poor track record of environmental stewardship.
Free markets, on the other hand, produce the necessary surplus needed to address environmentalism, i.e. free market countries can afford to address it. Marginal economies cannot.
> For example, AOC's "Green New Deal" proposal was full of social justice programs. Socialism is often put forward as the solution to climate change, although socialist countries have a very poor track record of environmental stewardship.
Which "socialist" countries are those? Do you mean (ex-)communist countries instead? Socialism != communism.
A better argument you could make is name a socialist country (use whatever definition of socialism works for you) that has a better environmental track record.
The 'good' news is that nature is mostly self-regulating. It will be more than happy to cull our numbers until we reach something approaching sustainability (or much lower than that). Climate change per se won't kill you, but other humans competing for the same space or resource most certainly will and that's how it has been since forever.
The last couple of hundred years are an anomaly but this exponential increase simply can not go on without running headlong into some kind of wall, be it our effect on the environment, resource starvation, lack of space (in a way also a resource) and so on.
The problem with this is that the nature can stay hostile for much longer than humans can stay alive. We literally built a civilisation on top of the corpses of creatures that survived much longer than we ever walked on the earth upright.
I am sure that in some very distant feature the archaeologist and biologist of some species will have a boon on our remains, I don't really doubt that, but the problem is that we are facing huge opportunity for de dinosaur experience.
> The problem with this is that the nature can stay hostile for much longer than humans can stay alive.
Seems to me, as a species we are smart enough to recognize we are all playing guided by game theory, we should be smart enough to step outside of game theory's limitations for mass negotiations. We should able to work within natures limits by group bargaining toward more environmental approaches. Yet we can't. Not even a little. We aren't even close. This has been a well known issue for decades, and nothing, nothing even close to what is needed has been done. Capitalism failed us, democracy failed us, the US failed us, our parents and our children failed us. Not even close to a passing grade.
I imagine I'm not going to make many friends for saying this, but... This was a test. We failed. Why should humans get to survive to the next round? Why are we so sure we are good? All I see is distractions, destruction, pollution and consumption... maybe that's on me cause I had a bad day... We destroyed the planet, killed the majority of insects, and the majority of vertebrates, toxified all the lakes and streams, over fished the oceans then dumped DDT, PCBs, VX nerve agent, and radioactive waste. We aren't done. We keep going. More more more. Now other countries are just coming on the scene and they want some polluting rights too.
That's a difficult to answer question but you can take - small - comfort in the fact that humans as a species are incredibly adaptable and have managed to eke out a living where many other species failed.
To balance that out: our 'modern' way of living is pretty fragile and unless our numbers go down most likely completely unsustainable over millennia at numbers > a few billion unless we manage to move off-planet.
Indeed “global warning” is not much of a concern. CO2 levels aren’t even that concerning, both levels have been significantly higher in the past (and supported life), and pose minimal risk. We can adapt to it, but would cause some hardship. We are also exiting an ice age, who knows what’s really earths “norm” over hundreds of thousands of years.
My real concern are things like man made chemicals, pesticides. Which have made it into every component of our food and water supply. To put it in perspective, I have a very rural farm - no row crops for tens of miles. There are so few bugs it’s spooky. There are significantly fewer birds. My Bees die most years, even in warmer weather.
There’s also estrogen in our water ways, micro plastics, etc
The reason that’s the “real concern” is it can take out all humans very very quickly. Like a generation, where as global warming is survivable.
While the co2 levels and temps have been higher in the past, rate of change is the most important factor here. You incorrectly assess the risk by ignoring the fact that it took tens of thousands of years to move those numbers.
The problem is that most of our food chain is going to have major issues adapting at a speed that matches the rate of change. Pesticides and chemicals are certainly problematic as well, but moving the global needle so much over a 100-250 year timeline is a huge issue.
Not just the food chain but the natural environment as well. Animals can migrate (theoretically, if they have somewhere to migrate to), but trees that sprouted in the right climate a hundred years ago might be in the wrong climate now. And animals that depend on those forests are going to be in trouble if they aren't healthy.
When changes happen on timescales that are slower than forests and ecosystems can naturally grow and spread that's not such a problem because you at least have a mostly-stable ecosystem at any given point in time.
I mean, if the sun increases it’s energy output by 1% or 2% that would dramatically change our temperatures. Much much more than CO2..
Think of how much the earths tilt impacts weather of the seasons.
That being said, 1880 - 2020 is an almost meaningless range of time. Temperatures are seasonal and that’s only 140 data points per season. It may not even be statistically significant and our historic measurements weren’t necessarily super accurate.
We have had a lot ice melt during that timeframe (but it’s been melting for thousands of years). we are exiting an ice age, we should expect the temperatures to naturally increase. The sun could have increased output 10k years ago, but it’s taken this long for all the ice to melt.
I’m not claiming certain things such as CO2 don’t make an impact. I’m saying what you linked isn’t proof, it’s evidence. There’s still many unknowns and we can’t make absolute determinations.
Your assertions are at odds with the data and an entire field of professionals who dedicate their lives to analyzing it. What makes you think you know more than them?
I’ve implemented models for two well cited published papers. While I didn’t develop the model I implemented it. I’m familiar with those “professionals”.
These models are notoriously bad at generating predictions historically. Today, we have better modeling, BUT they rerun the models over and over again tweaking them to get the results they want. Then they don’t do corrections such as Bonferroni correction.
At the end of the day, the data isn’t there.
Finally, the funding and scientific community have a bias. Good luck trying to come out with a paper showing the community is not taking everything into account or has made a mistake.. you can only do that with new data, which takes years or decades
So I guess it's just a coincidence that the predictions about global temperature rise that the models have been making for decades are coming true? And, if anything, it's turning out that they have been too conservative in their estimates of the rate of warming?
>CO2 levels aren’t even that concerning, both levels have been significantly higher
The sun grows stronger over millions of years (and it got colder over the last 200 years), however that doesn't matter because the earth is a balanced system where an equal amount of energy enters and leaves the system. The CO2 concentration will automatically adjust so that temperatures can fall within a narrow band.
Therefore it is completely unsurprising that CO2 levels have been higher in the past, they had to be higher to reach the same temperatures. If we reach historic CO2 levels today then we will also reach higher temperatures than in the past.
I've recently read that the word "pesticide" is a weaponized term, in that you wouldn't label human medicine that way, but for ideological reasons this reframing is done to a plant's medicine.
OTH nobody would use medicine daily and call that a natural state of being (unless you're acutally or chronically sick).
Our food supply depends on these plant-medicines becuase without our cultivated crops aren't strong enough to survive or yield significantly less.
It’s not a plant medicine... it’s a killer of pests.
“Weaponized term” doesn’t necessarily matter. I own a farm and agree our food supply is necessary on them. BUT I think the feds need to look into this. There are likely safer pesticides than others. My farm uses none.
> OTH nobody would use medicine daily and call that a natural state of being
It's amazing how casually we throw around these "observations" which completely and conveniently memory hole our indigenous friends and neighbors, whose traditions of plant medicine nearly universally include routine relationships with plant medicines in sickness and in health.
Pesticide: Pest (meaning should be obvious) combined with the same ’cide’ as in homicide, regicide or genocide. The term is not weaponized, it refers to a weapon.
> When a species dies, it's not those individuals, it's every one of those individuals that ever lived that dies.
It is tragic that species go extinct. I believe 99.99% of all species in earth's 4 billion years has gone extinct. I forget who said it but like individual creatures live and die, species also have to live and die. But it also opens the door for new species. Without mass die offs, we don't have dinosaurs. Without mass die offs, we don't have mammals and humans.
> All that concentration of local entropy, destroyed forever
And look at what the previous destructions created. The beauty of today's nature stands on the graveyards of the natural world that came before it. Those species you mourn today only existed because previous species went extinct and open up the space for other species.
Not saying we should welcome species extinction, especially the ones human cause. But we should be mindful of the fact that past species extinctions is why the current species exist. It's not all one sided. There is "life after death".
Nature is an amazing library of knowledge (pharmaceutical, materials sciences, etc.) for problems we face. Driving species to extinction is the equivalent of burning the reference books.
>I'm not necessarily worried about climate change per se. It will result in hardship for many, for sure. Temperature changes will render some areas uninhabitable, it will cause mass migration, and probably destabilize the world politically. What am more worried about is the direct wholesale destruction of the biosphere.
How is the latter not just a byproduct of the former?
If the world was just warming, it wouldn't be nearly so much of an issue, I don't think. We could just put a big mylar sheet and block part of the sun.
We could do that, I think, in about 20 years, if we really wanted to just get rid of this 1.5degC rise. But we can't, we have the ocean acidification, the desertification, the pollution, the acid rain, the plastic pollution. My point is that it's not really the temperature I'm worried about, it's the everything else.
Because we are ravaging the biosphere in countless other ways than just altering the temperature and climate. "Just" would imply that those are the only causes of biosphere destruction.
Great comment. If layered and localized counter-entropy is, philosohically, the highest attainment of a mainly entropic universe, hitting rm -fr on a species is pretty much the only universal example of evil. The destruction of complexity is the undermining of the universe's attempt to observe itself through forms of processing that arise after billions of years. But of course, their destruction is probably an expected outcome. That doesn't make it any less evil from our puny perspective.
Climate change is real, we are warming up and should/can solve this, but I'm skeptical that apocalyptic narratives help the cause.
"A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."
It kind of seems like this article is saying that if we (in 1989) slow global warming by the year 2000, the worst effects of sea level rise will not happen. It's not saying that those effects will happen in the year 2000.
My understanding in 2021 is that much of that stuff is already happening, since we obviously didn't halt warming. And that it's also too late to prevent more of it from happening, because there is a lag time between prevention measures happening, and having an effect.
We are past the point where just reducing emissions will be enough, and instead will need to also harden the world against inevitable effects of climate change. This is even harder and more expensive than it would have been if we had stopped emitting earlier.
That's kind of like if I were morbidly obese, and my diet consisted of 6 big macs, 6 large Cokes and 6 large fries daily, plus a cheesecake at the end of the day for dessert, and I patted myself on the back because I went on a "diet" by cutting out the cheesecake.
Growth in CO2 emissions has recently plateaued, but the world still pumps out about 40% more CO2, every year, than we did in 2000. Stopping the growth doesn't really matter that much, we need to drastically reduce overall emissions.
It’s even worse. Not only do we need to get emissions as close to zero as possible, we need to suck a whole bunch of CO2 out of the atmosphere. The amount of effort, resources, energy, and collective action needed is extraordinary. The challenge ahead cannot be overstated.
@computerphage: Thank you for the typo correction! I am off for more coffee.
Effectively this is going to require massive and coordinated action. We are going to have to rapidly develop and share the tech, and scale it quickly.
It is also insane how long humanity has ignored this issue. At least we have seemingly moved from ‘12 years left for real action? Hah!’ To ‘Oh shit this is happening and maybe we have that 11 years’
The good(?) news here is that the ocean is a crazy good CO2 sink. If we were to stop all CO2 emissions, global CO2 levels would start to drop dramatically because the oceans would soak up the atmospheric CO2. This doesn’t work endlessly, but right now about half of the CO2 emissions end up in the oceans, and that system doesn’t just stop if we stop producing it.
That being said, it’ll definitely continue to wreak havoc with ocean acidification. But it’s important to know that it’s not necessary to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere to get rid of a huge chunk that has already been emitted.
My concern around the ocean as a CO2 sink is how much longer can it absorb CO2 without pH drifting beyond what can support sea life. We keep pulling the elastic band tighter without knowing when it’s going to snap or what happens when it does (metaphorically speaking).
There’s a book called ‘The Sixth Extinction’ By Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert which talks about this. The sixth chapter is about the rise in ocean acidity.
She also details a critical acidity point (I forget the PH level but I think with current rise in acidity it is modeled to reach that point in 2100) where calcifiers cannot survive due to the acidity essentially breaking down their shells. Think oysters, barnacles, coral. Major parts of the ocean’s ecosystem that could have a ‘cataclysmic’ effect if wiped out.
What's interesting is that we already know it's going to result in economic contraction, loss of profits, and general instability in the financial sphere. So we already know that tacking it will be profitable in the long run versus the alternative.
Perhaps the conversation needs to center on how to factor the long view into capitalism. Because in my view it is pretty shit at that, with often short term profits favoured over long term and the effects of that being felt long term.
Right now our intervention option looks like direct intervention to make things less profitable in the near term, and then we run into the problem of democracy also favouring short-term popularity over long-term stewardship and the immediate pains it bring to voters.
Every politician who has attempted or done this has paid a heavy political price. We won't do enough to stop this problem until hundreds of thousands are forced to find new homes, at which point we'll have our hands full with the immediate problems we've caused by this.
It is not about economic systems, governments, or corporations. People are making choices that do not line up with the bigger things they say they want. Frankly I am getting tired of people with their SUVs, new phones, new computers, plastic everything, and huge homes bitching at me because I am "releasing carbon" when I burn wood. Don't even get me started on the people who bitch about my Nissan versa being gas powered instead of their clean battery powered alternative (Batteries, vehicle electronics, weight, tire size, and the source of their clean energy is my bitch here). People just need to shut the fuck up, live a frugal life and this problem with mitigate itself.
The carbon that has been released into the atmosphere from oil is here to stay. I am not even sure we should go looking for some energy guzzling carbon sink because we really need to give the earth time to breath and settle into the ecosystem that exists today. The earth will heal itself and balance will be restored but we can never go back to pre-industrial revolution levels of carbon.
The last big expansion of wind and solar from a percentage growth perspective happened when oil was hitting 100 USD. We shouldn't discount how efficient markets are at allocating resources. If expenditures into oil (something like 6bn USD per day) went to wind and solar, then much would change.
Government subsidies targeted at technologies perceived to be green could potentially be taking resources away from other energy innovations. In the end, some of those innovations might have resulted in greener energy.
I'm a socialist, but I hate this meme on the left. We simply do not have time to build socialism before tackling climate change, especially with the recent crushing defeats the left has suffered in Western countries. We have to do this under capitalism, or we will not be able to do it at all.
That isnt the only alternative. A state run free market like china would actually be really useful for this global problem, if of course climate change was the priority for the government.
lack of personal freedom and ease of abuse probably make this a terrible choice, but it would without a doubt be better for climate change than currently
> A state run free market like china would actually be really useful for this global problem, if of course climate change was the priority for the government.
The cure suggested here is worse than the disease.
And I'm not entirely sure. Is authoritarian rule worse than billions starving to death, with collapse of the ecosystem?
All the enlightenment ideas fall apart when we actually reach the limit of the earths resources, and can potentially cause our own extinction along with the rest of the animal kingdom
The balance is between (a) effectively addressing an issue & (b) empowering government and risking it abuse its power.
Most long-lived democracies appear to have optimized to mitigate the risk of the second, over the long run, but at the cost of limiting the first.
One thinks the Roman Republic had a pretty good thing going politically... but declaring a temporary dictator in times of crisis only worked until it didn't.
Is it capitalism, or is it our current regime?
I'm not sure that capitalism itself demands eternal growth, or that pollution not be taken into account.
Capitalism doesn't force us to continue to burn fossil fuels. We could impose massive fines or taxes against any greenhouse gas emitter, but we lack social will.
It can only be done under Capitalism, since we're at the point where drastically reducing CO2 is woefully insufficient to curb global warming in the next 50-100 years. We need technological innovation to cool the planet.
You can't do that right now. Basically what you are asking is to ask a lot of people to lose their jobs, starve, for something uncertain (scientifically proved or not) in the future.
In the same time, the only thing we can do, as individuals, is to reduce the emission from our side. But it's wrong to enforce it upon others.
Yeah man, downvote me as you wish, but LOL you won't get very far.
This comment is wrong on several levels. First, citation needed for the starvation hyperbole. There are more than a few competent people predicting that tackling climate change will actually create jobs because we will have to solve a whole host of new problems. Things like distribution, mass manufacturing, long term maintenance of equipment, design of the systems in the first place and on and on.
Second, "scientifically proved or not"? Are you really questioning whether we've proven climate change is occurring?
Finally, if you've been paying attention, you'll notice that the voices telling us that climate change is an individual problem and not a policy reform/regulation problem are basically Big Oil propaganda designed to demoralise you with guilt. It's not about individual action. I would still recommend it for spiritual and philosophical reasons, but not scientific.
I didn’t downvote but would be curious about your definition of “enforcement” that makes it wrong. I assume you mean “morally” wrong here and it seems NOT enforcing repercussions for externalities would be the immoral choice.
When you say "growth has plateaued" do you mean that year on year increases to our output are now constant? Or do you mean year on year output is now roughly constant?
I realize this distinction between derivative values is further complicated by the even more baseline measure of total accumulation. But I do ask in earnest and don't know the answer.
We're on track for a roughly 3C increase in global average temperature according to this chart from the IPCC[1] and this [2] from world data.
And that IPCC projection doesn't take into account the dozens of reinforcing feedback loops contributing to further warming. For example, the Amazon rain forest is now a net green house gas producer due to human activity [3].
And my parents keep asking when I'm giving them grandkids. Why would I make a child go through this? That these things don't keep people up at night is bewildering to me.
Go through what? Raising global temperatures may require moving away from current coastal areas or life changes like that. I've not read anything that would make it seem like a global warming future would be a hellscape not worth living in.
I have young children and have worried for them quite a bit. If they're healthy, if they're getting everything they need, if they're safe etc. I have never once considered global warming as a concern for them. While they're children I'll be able to handle any such changes. When they're adults, they will.
The 1.4 to 2.0C range is where we are going to start seeing large scale crop failures. Also massive fish die offs in the ocean. Unless we drastically change trajectories, this will occur during the lifetime of your children.
You hope you and they will be able to handle these changes, but there are going to be a lot of downstream effects from warming and sea level change.
maybe you're too young, I've heard the doom and gloom sine the 80s and those older than me have heard it since the 70's. If you look out across a sea of people there will always be a group of people holding a sign reading "Repent sinners, for the end is near".
Hearing doom and gloom since the 80s is consistent with the scientific evidence. It was in 1988 that James Hansen spoke before a U.S. Senate committee about human caused global warming. And it's not as though things have been getting better. They're getting worse, and at a faster than expected rate.
Yep, back in the 1970s it was the coming ice age, and it was also the "population bomb." If neither of those happened, we were going to have a global thermonuclear war. Doom-and-gloomers will always find reasons to preach doom and gloom.
> Yep, back in the 1970s it was the coming ice age,
No. That was an artifact of hype in the mainstream press. If you look at the research being published at the time, the consensus was fairly consistently for warming scenarios (by a factor of 2:1 during the most cooling-friendly years):
Contrarian argument, if I was given a chance at existing in a world full of death, turmoil, and instability _or_ the certainty of not existing at all, I sure know what I would want.
The post-scarcity period we experience in developed economies is very much the exception not the rule, if you look at the whole of Human History.
I understand and share you're concerns but you are removing all agency from whatever children you might have. A child born now will in all certainty reach their 20's. If they share their parents values they will most likely be an agent for change in the right direction.
Excess population and excess pollution (per capita) are not necessarily overlapping problems.
I don't about the predictions but the annual CO2 emissions are climbing yearly. 1999 - 24.43 billions tons. 2019 - 36.44 billion tons. I think that's ~49% growth in 20 years. That is a bad forecast if you go 100 years into the future.
We have also had 30+% global population growth in the last 20 years and massive reduction in property.
Around 1980 people assumed rising standards of living would result in dramatic increases in CO2 per person which didn’t happen. Even as recently as 2000 models assumed as much as 10% increases over current levels where likely.
Surely partially due to outsourcing manufacturing to outside the US/western world, and partially due to the rising living standards of the rest of the world.
Yeah consumption needs to be slowed down. Even dumb things like those Bird scooters littering cities...
I saw a t-shirt down here in New Orleans the other day that read “music, culture, industry” with a strike out line through industry. It boggles the mind.
After all how will our t-shirts and musical instruments be made?
This. So much this. We can't blame China for its emissions, while acting like we've solved ours, when all we did was shift our emissions from manufacturing to China.
The closest thing to flat you’re going to find is global CO2 produced per person is nearly flat. Global population has significantly increased, so that still represents growth in emissions but it clearly could have been much worse with massive increases in both population and CO2 per person as the 3rd world industrialized.
No, probably not. But then what's the alternative? The prediction is/was accurate, the error is in the kind of apocalyptic outcome it brings to mind. Reality is almost always far more boring. Silence doesn't seem helpful either, nor does being more vague about consequences.
Sea level rise looks more like king tides periodically destroying coastal occupations until it's uninsurable and everyone moves away. Poisioned aquifers resulting in no viable drinking water source and again, everyone leaves. Coastal erosion intensified means small islands with rich histories become nothing more than a sandbar over the course of decades, and sustains no population as it did before.
Chaotic weather looks like wildfires, tornados, and droughts 10, 20, 50% more frequent in their occurrence. But not a new phenomenon. Shit years for various crops become more common than good years because you're not getting enough sun, false springs and shock frosts destroy fruitings, yields are lower across the board. Prices go up. Buying tomatos peak season costs as much as is once did off-season.
Probably the biggest driver of inaction here is that what comes to mind is sudden shocks, yet the truth is more like a slow strangle. The urgency is just as valid if you take the long view, but it's easier to stick with the status quo when it's just the gradual discomfort of a belt tightening and not a gun pointed at your head. Boiled frogs and all that.
There's another important aspect to chaos. As you increase the energy in the system, which this is, you're also increasing the range over which phenomena can happen.
You cite 'tornadoes 10, 20, 50% more frequent' and you're not wrong, but it's very important to understand we're also looking at tornadoes and droughts and hurricanes (events tied to the behavior of the chaotic system of the climate) two, five, ten times more INTENSE than we're used to.
Chaos does this. The wildest outliers are tied to how much energy is in the system. They may be no more common than before, but the increased energy and increased chaos can produce wilder variances from the norm.
With regard to specifically destructive events like tornadoes, hurricanes, storm flooding and so on, this is way more dramatic than sea level rise. Nothing we can do, even with nuclear weapons, is as powerful as what weather can do with the energy in that chaotic system… because it's way, way bigger than anything we have at our command.
The truth also brings sudden shocks. We've just not quite wrapped our head around where those are coming from, and the frequency of 'em is probably no more common than usual, but the potential intensity of these events is ramping up with the same slow build you mention. We just don't see it until it hits.
One example: I think it's very likely there are industrialized cities that would not stand against hyper-weather of this nature. We're not used to the idea of tornadoes and hurricanes ripping down tall buildings, but we will live to see the theoretical peak energy (the ten or hundred-year storm) go beyond what our cities are designed to withstand. When that happens, we suddenly have areas where ALL the skyscrapers were toppled, on a weather-event scale rather than a terrorist-act scale.
> Chaos does this. The wildest outliers are tied to how much energy is in the system. They may be no more common than before, but the increased energy and increased chaos can produce wilder variances from the norm.
if we're talking about a chaotic system then wouldn't the probability of extreme weather being better for humanity be the same as worse for humanity? Maybe an exceptionally long growing season allowing more crops to be harvested for example.
Two things;
Adding more energy to a system doesn’t tend to produce (calm, sunny, scattered showers). I believe mild weather is a low energy outcome.
Also, humans like predictable weather. Weather becoming less so, good or bad, will make things harder.
This. The chances of a nice stable peaceful growing season… nope. Things will become more volatile, which means the chances of the opposite, ruined crops, increase.
Stability and predictability are low energy things.
The mistake they keep making is focusing on sea level rise, as if that's the only real problem global warming could cause. Even at 1.5 degrees C higher than normal it will take years for enough ice to melt to cause significant sea level rise.
Meanwhile we are already seeing apocalyptic like effects of global warming: the worst droughts and fires across multiple continents as we've seen in modern history, significant increases and severity of tropical storms, increase and severity in seasonal flooding etc.
With Covid-19 a lot of this stuff fell out of the news cycle rapidly last year, but 2020 surely marks one of the worst years in history for climate related disasters.
Yeah the lack of a timestamp is definitely confusing. The page source lists a definitely incorrect timestamp, I guess the time the article was digitized.
Yes. So the argument is that this will probably happen then.
Because we didn't get it better under control by 2000.
The argument is that these island nations might actually already be lost.
Scientists estimate an around 40 year "climate lag" between cause and effect so if you think this is bad, we're only living out the happy times from the seventies with Pink Floyd and ABBA. And then, once you have it there, CO2 has an atmospheric "half life" counted in centuries. It's why climate change is so damn nasty. :-(
It also really doesn't jive well with our short election periods where after a few years, some new guy with a radically different policy will get in charge if the earlier one wasn't popular because <insert too radical climate policy here>.
If you read the headline carefully, it's the global warming that needs to be reversed before 2000; the disappearance of nations can (and will) happen after.
The reason this is true is that CO2 emissions can't really be reversed; accounting for all forms of "capture" (biomass, sea exchange, calcification) CO2 disappears in a reverse power law way, such that after 10 000 years 10% of it is still there (https://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/pics/1210_ZHfig5.jpg)
The statement isn’t that countries will go by 2000; it’s that we have until 2000 to do something about temperature rises which will eventually lead to countries going.
Then the statement is worthless! If any country is every covered in water at any point in the earth's future then it can be proved "correct".
The negative is not even true -- no one can guarantee that no countries will ever be covered in water at any point in the future, even if we had presumably gotten the rising temperatures "under control" twenty years ago.
You're misunderstanding the quote. It doesn't say "...entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth BY THE YEAR 2000" It says "...if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."
Nonsense. Now we prepare for this to happen - by preemptively allocating places for displaced people can go. We do our best to limit how many countries are affected.
There's never a point where all we can do is throw up our hands and do nothing. There's always something to be done, even if it's not directly related to the cause of the crisis.
It said "some nations", mostly small island ones, like Tuvalu and Fiji.
That's not worldwide doom. It's just a very clear indicator of the damage that happens elsewhere, where low-lying cities like Amsterdam, New York, and much of Bangladesh have to either go elsewhere or take very expensive damage control measures.
We're at a point where it's still cheaper to prevent that at the climate level. It just grows more expensive by the day. Things can cost a lot of lives and dollars without being apocalyptic, and still worth dealing with sooner rather than later.
While some ill effects can most likely no longer be prevented, even worse things happen at higher temperatures. Every tenth of a degree makes things worse.
I like to think of it like this - some places are doomed to extreme drought and flodding and others will be mostly spared - but the environmental effects are just one piece of the puzzle, other areas of the earth will need to cope with the refugee crisis we're going to see from parts of the world becoming less habitable.
As these crises put more stress on the rest of the world we're just going to accelerate exploitation to support more people with less stuff - we're essentially burning through the world's buffer of habitability to eek out a bit more profits today.
That could be true for a few small Pacific island nations like Vanuatu. At the high end of predicted sea level rise they would be left with very little habitable land. Even if the land is above mean high tide, every little storm will wash over everything.
Naively using GDP per capita as a measure of the average level of technology people can afford, this suggests that Bangladesh should be able to employ land reclamation measures similar to the Netherlands in the 1960s, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevopolder
There might be other considerations (such as differing geography) that make this impracticable, however.
2/3rds of Bangladesh is <5m above sea level. If that much of the country disappeared, including Dhaka and Chittagong, you could well say they don't have a country any more.
I think without concerted citizen backed action many people won't do anything. IMHO it's not about whether climate change is real or not but whether appropriate action is taken when it counts. And when only few people do anything that is not fair. Therefore I think the message has to be repeated over and over again in increasing volume.
That said, the magnitude of climate change is probably underestimated and talking about average temperatures might also contribute to that.
Sea rise is not the only effect of climate change, and the gradual rise won't be as urgent as extreme weather floods and storms episodes.
You will have also wet bulb temperature episodes, not all time, but more frequently and in bigger areas as time advances. And won't matter if the average temperature is not so high yet, once you get such peaks people (and maybe crops->famines) die.
And last but not least, this fuels positive feedback mechanisms, like less ice reflecting sunlight, more methane released in northern regions, more frequent forest fires and so on that accelerate an already pretty bad trend.
If you think it will cost a lot to try to do something about this, think how costly will be doing nothing.
Absolutely. Wet-bulb temperature episodes are exactly the sort of thing where increasing energy in the chaotic system will lead to previously unreachable spikes in the system: by increasing the ambient energy of the system X degrees, thus increasing its chaotic energy, you produce a maximum peak excursion of X*Y degrees (also accompanied by unexpectedly COLD extremes in a more irregular pattern).
Even in the absence of other weather events these exaggerated peaks and dips are dangerous to life.
It reminds me of the over-population warnings of the 1970s, where prominent scientists and politicians warned that mass starvation was right around the corner. This constant doom and gloom at an extreme level seems to cause fatigue and apathy.
That's exactly what it is. The "science" behind the climate change narrative is sponsored by groups that want to implement a global carbon tax, or any other justification they can think of to create a one-world government. It's exactly the same BS as the COVID manipulation we've endured since 2020.
Water vapor is a bigger contributor to the greenhouse effect than CO2 by three orders of magnitude. The current "models" do not accurately reflect the sun or water on earth.
The fatigue and apathy is because the predictions has been serially wrong. So much so they had to rebrand "global warming" to "climate change".
Normally intelligent people have let their hubris make them victims to globalist propaganda. It's disturbing to see how many people not only fall for it but parrot their programming ad nauseam and attack dissenters pointing out raw fact (like that unadulterated satellite temperate data shows the earth's temperature as relatively flat for the last 20 years, or that the 1930's were warmer than temperatures today).
The earth will be cooler in 10 years, not warmer. We're heading into a grand solar minimum. Wait and see.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt and had a closer look at the first paper. I wasted about 15 minutes of my life.
> Actually, one of the aims of the paper is to show that polarization stems from political, rather than scientific, roots.
Yeah, though luck there. The paper concerns itself with more political propaganda than with climate science. Most of it is just fluff and filler, with quotes from Aristotle to Mark Twain, spends half of its actual content with the premise to discover the true definition of the word climate and then dismissing "climate change" (the scary quotes are form the "paper"). And then we come to this gem here:
> Hence, in scientific terms, the content of the term climate change is almost equivalent to that of weather change or even time change (climate is changing as is weather and time).
Yes. Really. This paper is pulling no punches. Climate is just weather. And weather changes. Thus there is no climate change. QED.
What a piece of wasted bits.
It then spends the next few paragraphs "analyzing" how climate change is actually political in nature, spending more pixels on graphs of the occurrence of the term "climate change" than on actual climate data.
No discussion of the vast body of evidence that we have gathered in the last 100 years. No examination of actual possible problems, like measurement issues, systemic issues or anything the like. Nothing.
This is not a scientific paper. This is propaganda.
You didn't read the article. You cherrypicked the parts of it that you could use to justify disregarding it. That's intellectually dishonest, lazy, and frankly typical for climate change cultists.
The bulk of the article discusses hydrology and how the sheer volume of water on the earth is more significant than C02 in terms of greenhouse effects. There's also a section about far higher historical C02 levels being present when temperatures were lower than today.
Respond to that part of the paper, not the tangent on the term "climate change" (which is also accurate, but not the meat of the argument).
> how the sheer volume of water on the earth is more significant than C02 in terms of greenhouse effects
Where do you see this? I see a long rant about the definition of climate, sprinkled in with some cultural reference and some meaningless discussions about continuous vs discrete sampling (meaningless beyond any first year university course on any scientific topic).
- It's in a journal called "Temperature" with the mandate: "Temperature publishes papers related to interactions between living matter and temperature, with focus on the medical physiology of body temperature regulation." All the other papers fit this mandate, i.e., they're on physiology.
- It's marked as an editorial, not a peer-reviewed article. There are no co-authors.
I have no idea why or how this got published! It's very weird, why would one even submit such an article to an irrelevant journal?
I'll use direct NASA/NOAA data so there's no attacking my sources this time.
Here is a report published in 1999 by NOAA and NASA showing temperatures much higher in the 1930's with cooling through the end of the century. Temperature data outside the US wasn't very reliable in the 20th century, so it's best to focus on the US. Skip to page 37 and look at figure 6. Make a mental note the high point of 1.5 degrees C in the 30's from 1999 data.
Compare this with the same data today and you'll miraculously see the 1930's as much cooler with a warming trend (again, NASA direct data - note the new high point from the 30's is 1.2 degrees C, not 1.5): https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/graph_data/U.S....
My point is that the "climate science" we're bombarded with in the mainstream media isn't hard science. It's a political narrative fueled by financial conflicts of interest and grant money. That bothers me because 1) I like to understand reality, and 2) it is leading to massive misallocations of capital, just like with COVID over the last 1.5 years. I think we should be concerned with climate, but we need to focus more energy on our own sun. I think our sun is far more dangerous than all of the anthropogenic climate change theories combined.
Please see [1], which has before-and-after plots (page 18) that appear to match up with the differences you're seeing and describes why those adjustments were made (section 4, on page 3). For example, it fixes biases that resulted from different time-of-day for measurements, stations moving their thermometer locations over time, and a couple others.
One thing that doesn't perfectly match up is that the peak in the 1930s of the before-adjustment plot in [1] doesn't go quite as high as Fig 6 of the 1999 paper, but it does seem to match Plate A2, so I would assume it is a difference of using calendar years vs meteorological years (section A2 of the 1999 paper).
Regarding your broader point: I think skepticism is great; asking questions is how we learn new things, after all. But it's not so great to assume that climate science must be wrong (or a political narrative) just because you found something that doesn't immediately make sense. Often it simply means climate scientists know something we don't.
Also, since you mentioned concern about financial conflicts of interest, I'd encourage you to consider that the anti-climate-change narrative is just as (if not more) susceptible to those. Fossil fuels are big business.
The first article is also really weird. In the words of the second referee: this is an opinion piece!
I wholeheartedly agree. It's a tiny bit of light scientific "discussion" about vaguely related phenomena, wrapped in criticism of how culturally significant climage change has become. How the hell did this get past the very negative referee reports and get published??
I read the article. It's highly speculative, making extrapolations tens to hundreds of years with very little evidence or physics.
I have publications in this area. And given the above deficiencies, I started wondering about where it was published.
When what I noted above surfaced, I stopped, because life is too short to chase down BS.
You shouldn't be taking that article seriously! And I don't know how it was recommended to your attention, but I'd start wondering about that source as well.
From the first article (which is mostly asking “what is climate“ and “should we expect climate not to change?”) we get its only really solid prediction:
“it can be anticipated that many readers would find this paper useless, if not harmful.” Lol.
The second paper was discredited and withdrawn though that hasn’t stopped deniers citing it endlessly.
25 of the first paper's references are to other papers the author has written. No matter what field a paper is in, having 19% of the references point to yourself is suspicious. For the other references, the high amount of citations from folks as general as Aristotle and Kolmogorov make doubly sure that the paper really doesn't pass the BS test of any researcher.
Most of the reports are quite critical (although I can't tell if referee 4 is being sarcastic or not). I don't understand how this paper got published.
Wow, I don't know this journal at all, but something terribly odd is going on. Did anyone else read the referee reports [1]? I'd call that scathing. If I ever had those reports come back to me for one of my papers, I wouldn't even try to push the paper through. And I've never used that harsh language myself in my referee reports, even for absolute garbage papers. Look at this:
The article by D. Koutsoyiannis "Rethinking climate, climate change, and their relationship with water" is, quite simply, an opinion or editorial piece and most certainly not original experimental research. At that, it remains grossly incomplete given the current state of knowledge in hydrology, water resources, and their relationships with climate.
First, the author uses this article for an absurd quantity of self-citations.
At any rate: I smell a giant rat!
Edit: I started reading now. This isn't a scientific article. I totally agree with referee 2 above! This is an opinion piece! The author explicitly goes into things like google search results for the words "climate change". What the hell is that supposed to have to do with water's effect on climate change? What absolute garbage! I don't trust anything in this paper.
1) hydrology professor shows that water is the largest driver of earth's climate (besides the sun of course) and that CO2 has proven to be an insignificant factor, both based on physics and on history, where CO2 levels were far higher, but temperatures did not rise in tandem.
2) Professor Valentina Zharkova predicting that the coming grand solar minimum will lower earth's temperature by around 1 degree C, based on past minima.
Zharkova has a history of being right, by the way, which is more than I can say for the tabloid science currently being peddled in this thread.
How convenient it must be to always have a paper or two ready that show warming trends are wrong and that it will stop in the next few years. It does not matter that the previous papers in the same vein were proven wrong by facts, like the ones that attempted to draw horizontal lines over the temperature graphs. Just come up with a new theory, pick some data that fits (in paper #2, why solar cycles 21-23 and not the others? No proposed mechanism behind the theory? No problem.), and here's your new justification to do nothing.
So established science is corrupt because of grant money. Yet this Demetris Koutsoyiannis who wrote the first article, who is a professor at an established university in Greece and seemingly climbed the completely normal academic ladder, is somehow untainted by the grant money he presumably got along the way?
I'd say that this article doesn't really show even that much.
According to the article itself, "This is mainly due to using an improved temperature dataset to estimate the baseline rather than sudden changes in climate indicators."
This is an example of the past changing, rather than the present. I'm not sure how to react when the only change was the past got cooler - I wouldn't think that would change anything in the present or future.
I have an alternate hypothesis: the past didn't magically become cooler. The propagandists changed the historical temperature data (yet again) to sustain their narrative because it supports unrelated agendas.
Wait, so suggesting that temperature data recorded in the past was in fact accurate and shouldn't be altered to suit political narratives is far from reality?
> Wait, so suggesting that temperature data recorded in the past was in fact accurate and shouldn't be altered to suit political narratives is far from reality?
Yes. Because it didn't happen.
> You are demanding censorship of this idea?
No. In the same way that it's cool to hear dissenting political views at the local pub, but if a guy stands up and starts raving about the children trapped by the pedophile lizard people, I kinda want him to get kicked out so that I don't have to be associated with society-destroying lunatics like that. You're that guy. That guy isn't being subjected to "censorship of his idea". He's being kicked out of the establishment for being a moron and ruining the mood.
Go write a book about your crazy ideas. Now if the government makes it illegal to publish, you can decry censorship.
Except it absolutely DID happen and I can prove it.
Here is a report published in 1999 by NOAA and NASA showing temperatures much higher in the 1930's with cooling through the end of the century. Skip to page 37 and look at figure 6. Note the high point of 1.5 degrees C in the 30's from 1999 data.
Compare this with the same data today and you'll miraculously see the 1930's as much cooler with a warming trend (again, NASA direct data - note the new high point from the 30's is 1.2 degrees C): https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/graph_data/U.S....
Here is an article summarizing the alterations in case you do not want to read the NASA/NOAA report, but I know you will attack the source, which is why I published the report from 1999 and the same data from 2019 directly first. You can verify everything in this article with the original source materials using the links shared previously: https://realclimatescience.com/2020/10/alterations-to-the-us...
Before I start to even consider these sources, can you tell me in a clear yes or no answer whether they show:
(1) that the data was altered
and
(2) that the data was altered to suit a political narrative.
Only if the answer to both is yes will I even read any of this. I'll wait.
(Why am I being difficult? I believe you're a typical nutcase who sees X happening, and immediately concludes that "X is happening to fit the political narrative")
> So, I've proven conclusively that NASA altered their temperature data in the 20th century from a cooling trend to a warming trend.
So this is your new claim. Please write out in clear text that you've moved the goalposts since last time – make it clear what you're claiming now. Then I'll be happy to consider your sources. Just wanna make sure you don't move the goalposts again - as dishonest crackpots tend to.
Ah yes, the last stage of the crackpot: "do your own research"
I'm not asking you to do work for me. I'm asking you to clearly state your claim so that you can't move the goalposts again. The fact that you've done it once, makes me certain you'll do it again and thus invalidate any work I do. State your current claim in clear text, crackpot.
Well, that could be true of the Maldives[1] (which would be tragic, don't get me wrong) but clearly even flooding lots of major coastal cities wouldn't wipe most countries off the map - but it'd still be huge problem.
But that's what's happening. We take people space away.
And primarily people who did not produce the co2
Globalization brought us also much closer over all.
I saw a view documentary about it and those people are aware why it happens.
While we did a lot of fixing medicine and food for them, climate change is what they are paying for and they didn't knew but we did for a long time now.
Ok but I hope you're not saying OP's article is an apocalyptic narrative. It's a pretty mild projection given that we've already hit +1.2 degrees, and are already seeing effects from that.
I'd say the problem is not enough people understand what the solutions are. Those who push the apocalyptic narrative included, as they tend to be against nuclear energy (a clean, safe, compact, 24/7 source) and even shut down existing plants. Which have been getting replaced by coal!!
It's such a heads-I-lose tails-you-win situation. If I talk about extreme cases I'm accused of alarmism. If I talk about nearly-certain cases that fall short of extinction, I'm told it's not important.
Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent.
No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point. It's time for the "we can save the world" people to stop leading everyone on, unless they can present facts and real scenarios that back up their claims (hint: they can't and never do).
You'll notice that technologically we didn't come remotely close to doing anything in the past decade that will enable us to move as fast as we'd have to. Where are the great energy & resource breakthroughs? They don't exist and by the numbers we needed them yesterday.
The world will add 2 billion people in the next ~30 years. Nearly all of those births will be in the developing world where emissions are going to continue to skyrocket. Solar, wind and electric vehicles aren't going to solve that problem.
The emissions that the US + EU cut, India will add.
China will add an entire US-worth of emissions in just the next 10-15 years. If you had a magic wand and could put the US to zero emissions tomorrow morning it wouldn't make a bit of lasting difference to the situation. This single fact of reality makes all the "we can save the world" arguments false.
And that's merely two countries. Then you have parts of Latin America, Africa and developing Asia, where emissions and population are going to continue to rise substantially.
It seems increasingly clear that the so called experts claiming this can be stopped know they're lying, and they keep lying anyway. What's their plan for immediately stopping all emissions increases across all of the developing world? There is no such plan, they have no intention of implementing or calling for such a plan. Thus, they're lying.
There is no scenario where anybody can get the math to work out on what's happening. And you'll find that nobody even attempts to, they just issue empty statements about how we need to take urgent action and then we can save the world. They'll never present you the real scenarios for the actions necessary to immediately turn back all emissions increases. It's fraudulent intellectually, it takes a small amount of time to analyze the context and know that.
Climate nihilism is the next stage of climate denial. We CAN do much to manage growth and encourage sustainable development. Wealthy western nations need to concretely embrace technology transfer and infrastructure investment. As nations develop their infant mortality decreases, people naturally invest in the children that they have and their birthrates decline to replacement level.
Already we're seeing a difference in how technology infrastructure has been distributed in developing countries. People are coming to depend upon their cellular phone and wireless data connections to be more reliable than their electricity infrastructure.
> Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent.
> No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point.
So, I am seeing this set of ideas getting pushed a lot more these days, which means that a lot of the effort being put into climate change denial has started shifting to climate delay and outright fatalism (which used to mostly be a feature of evangelical "who are we to question God's plan for us?" arguments).
The fact of the matter is that there is a lot we can do in terms of slowing the growth and even reducing global CO2 (and CH4, methane) output, and a lot more we can do in terms of carbon capture, and a lot we can do in terms of mitigation and adaptation (which we will have to do regardless of how successful we are at reduction and capture) that is only going to get more expensive the longer we put it off.
This isn't a case of "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it". Every proposal is competing with every other in terms of cost, feasibility, externalities, and impact, it isn't the case that committing to spending money on the problem results in checks being handed out indiscriminately.
If you have a criticism of some specific intervention, please make it, but it isn't feasible to throw up our hands and do nothing. Because even if the cost/benefit analyses are so incredibly bad that just means that ultimately we only do things in the mitigation and adaptation buckets.
It's really just a matter of money. Wind and solar are enough to produce energy; add in nuclear if you like. We also know how to make Hydrogen and Methane to store large amounts of energy over long time periods, so storage is not a technical problem either. It's just very expensive right now. WW2 was a bigger manufacturing challenge that what we would need to do to become carbon neutral. There are several studies with roadmaps to net zero emissions published. They tend to be very long and technical, so they don't get much media attention.
One interesting facet is that it’s adding an extra 0.4 percentage point a year to annual global GDP growth, which is encouraging
On the other hand annual per capita income from oil and natural gas in producer economies falls by about 75%, which sounds like something that can cause political issues
you aren't presenting any data. I don't have the faintest idea what you mean by "thats just math".
You say so confidently it can't be solved, which I'm going to infer you mean impossible and not just hard.
We could without a doubt drastically reduce co2 emmissions to near zero by switching to nuclear, and paying for nuclear plants in developing countries, banning gas vehicles. Require any current and needed hydro carbon power plants to implement carbon capture.
That is hard, very hard. Might start a war. But it is not impossible like you are stating.
We're definitely going to go beyond 2ºC in the coming decades.
Even if a miracle happened and we stopped all human emissions today, current GHGs in the atmosphere will keep trapping more heat for some decades. This is known as climate inertia or climate lag.
Another aspect I don't see frequently mentioned are feedbacks. Again, even if we stopped all emissions today, self sustaining climatic systems will keep adding more heat to the atmosphere (methane, etc) or the sea (Arctic ice melting).
We're currently at aprox 36 billion tonnes of carbon emissions per year [1] only counting fuel burning. It would be a miracle if we could even reach 50% of that in our lifetime, which was aprox the emissions from the 70s.
And a quick reminder that the IPCC reports/estimates excluded arctic methane emissions...which we a) now know are definitely happening and b) are just catastrophic positive feedback loops.
Can you link to some sources on point B? From what I've read you'll find broad scientific consensus on your point A but your point B is not even close to widely accepted among climate scientists.
That said I've learned the science can change rapidly, so I'm all ears if the position of the majority of climate scientists has shifted.
It looks bleak. There are fewer and fewer options remaining. Carbon sequestration at the source of emissions could reduce some CO2 from big fossil fuel power stations, but won't fix vehicles. We need a miracle technology that can actually extract CO2 from the air. Planting 1 trillion trees might help, but we won't do it.
Usable fusion doesn't exist today and the problem is immediate, it is that simple. We are at the point of solving it with what we have, not helplessly waiting for a deus ex machina.
Everyone (especially the environmental activists) need to come to the realization that we've long passed the point where we have the luxury of being picky over what we replace our fossil fuel (carbon emitting) energy sources with.
While everyone has been arguing about hydroelectric versus nuclear fission versus truly renewable sources versus "just wait for fusion", the energy consumption of humanity has been exponentially growing and satisfying that desire primarily with carbon emitting sources of power.
All options need to be on the table. Mandate solar panels on roofs, mandate battery storage in homes, build utility scale PV and solar thermal plants where it makes sense, build wind farms where it makes sense, get over our fear of fission and build many small, yet passively safe nuclear fission plants and the necessary fuel recycling facilities to reduce the need for spent fuel storage.
Tell anyone who thinks that renewable power sources look ugly to shove it.
Rather than focusing our collective energies on developing more energy generation tech, pivot to figuring out how to sink carbon we've already emitted and use existing generation solutions until the problem is controlled. Then start looking at the future again and offline whatever is obsoleted.
Fusion research hasn’t ever been funded well enough to hit the various timelines. If people fund it, or if computing power gets cheap enough to solve the remaining research problems in-silico rather than with a demo reactor, we could plausibly get it in 5-10 years.
But I agree with @gnfargbl, we should use the naturally occurring one that we orbit.
The issue is a lack of designs with promising commercial application. The world has dumped plenty of money into fusion design research since the 50s but only very recently created a design that could actually generate more power than it consumes containing the plasma field.
The current most effective designs output 1.25w for every watt of input. And only at a very small scale. It's great that we can finally produce net energy from fusion. But let's not get ahead ourselves here. The issue is not funding, it's lack of brain power. Fusion is an insanely difficult nut to crack and trillions of dollars won't do crack it alone.
I had similar discussions ten years ago with a Cambridge PhD in this field, who was of the opinion that the money spent on Iraq War would have been more than enough to resolve all known fusion reactor related questions (he explicitly did not say the result would be a working reactor).
ITER is set to come online in the next couple of years with a price tag of around $50,000,000,000 !!!! And it will spend 20 or so years testing various fuels.
China is building their own tokamak reactor to compete with ITER. I can't find cost figures, but presumably costs are roughly the same, considering the same size and is intended to "compliment" ITER.
These are still merely "test" reactors. They are experiments that may provide some enough data in 10-20 years such that another, even larger and more expensive test reactor may be constructed. Assuming ITER runs until 2045 and a replacement is started on in 2040. With 10 years of construction time, and 20 more years of testing, that means the next generation is set to complete testing in 2070. And hopefully the results of that generation will give us an idea of how to build a commercially viable fusion reactor.
All the funding in the world isn't going to change the fact that testing is a long-drawn out process, and that it must be performed in a somewhat linear fashion. The results of the previous experiments inform the next generation. And we are still a few generations away from commercial viability.
I do want to point out that I'm a strong advocate for fusion research. I just don't see it as a viable solution to global warming, regardless of how much we fund it, because we don't even know what a commercially viable reactor even looks like yet, much less be able to scale the technology out to the point that it will put a dent in CO2 emissions.
$50bn looks (eyeballing it) like less than the area under the graph labelled “moderate”.
You and I both agree fusion isn’t likely to be the solution to global warming, but I do think it could be if people wanted it to be. (I also think nobody with the money to spend really cares that much about fusion, and that PV is so absurdly cheap this is unlikely to change).
There's been a lot of interesting progress recently using high-temperature superconductors that weren't available when ITER was being designed. This should make fusion a lot more attainable and practically useful.
That said, I don't think we should count on fusion to get us out of this when renewables are a good-enough solution that's available now and they're cheap. (If storage is an issue, perhaps that means we should be investing in long-distance transmission lines so we can, for instance, power North America at night using solar panels in the Sahara.)
At this time, albedo modification is not politically correct, because it would still work whether human action is the main driver of global warming or not.
There is also the negative feedback of plants growing faster due to increased available CO2 for them to use.
It would be interesting to see the list of all feedbacks and estimated significance.
There's also the wildcard of algae evolution. Since there are quadrillions of them, evolution happens very quickly so changes in ocean acidification and temperature could substantially change how efficiently they work. They could get better or worse.
Do you have and references on your last point about algae? I have this (totally unsubstantiated) idea that plundering the oceans of fish along with rising temperatures will result in the oceans sequestering incredible amounts of CO2 via algae blooms. Never found much to read on the topic though - in what ways could this be negative feedback loop?
yeah, the n-th order effects like the siberian ice melting away into methane emissions equivalent to 100 years of 2020 CO2 output will just completely obliterate any efforts at mitigating new emissions.
That article doesn't say anything about how much methane is being released. The fact that it's happening isn't being disputed. The prediction that it will be catastrophic is.
Oh, it will absolutely be catastrophic if the Siberian tundra thaws. Have you seen the estimates for how much carbon is locked in the permafrost? It's more carbon than is in the atmosphere today. [1]
Did you mean to write "if it keeps speeding up"? Because it is most definitely happening, it is speeding up [1], and it doesn't look likely to slow down.
The fact that it's happening isn't being disputed. The prediction that it will be catastrophic is.
The NASA article you linked is reputable, but pay attention to what it actually says - it makes no predictions of impact severity.
What the article DOES say: methane is responsible for 1/4 of all global warming, it's increased 9% in the last decade, and 250% in the last 17 decades (avg 15%/year).
Buried in the last paragraph: “The chance of temporarily reaching 1.5°C has roughly doubled compared to last year’s predictions, said WMO. This is mainly due to using an improved temperature dataset to estimate the baseline rather than sudden changes in climate indicators.”
Knowing that a probability has doubled doesn't strike me as particularly useful here. If it doubled from 1e-6 to 2e-6, then it's still almost certain that it won't happen. If it went from 0.5 to 1.0, well, that's a different matter entirely....
I live in a state (California) that prides itself for its environmentalism, and has been vocal for many years regarding climate change. But...that very same state is doing nothing to prepare for it aside from lecturing others and virtue-signalling: there are no new reservoirs being built, despite sustained droughts already happening, the forests are mis-managed and overgrown due to misguided "let's never cut down anything, ever" thinking, with massive fires every year, the electric grid is unable to keep up with demand...
I don't doubt that climate change is happening, but with such ostensibly smart and aware people making such poor policy, and for so long -- I have little confidence in the government's willingness or ability to do any good.
> : there are no new reservoirs being built, despite sustained droughts already happening, the forests are mis-managed and overgrown due to misguided "let's never cut down anything, ever" thinking, with massive fires every year, the electric grid is unable to keep up with demand...
And very unsustainable agriculture which is highly contributing to the droughts additionally to climate change itself. Using high demand water crops in a place like California just wasn't a great idea to start with.
I do get it, using a lot of water in a very hot and sunny place leads to amazing crop results. The only issue with that is that the water they are pumping probably took decades to accumulate to that level, that strategy will just stop working abruptly very soon.
you are under-informed - in research, policy, and budget, the State of California is a recognized world-class.. (long lists of references left as an exercise to the reader)
First, forests manage themselves. There are wildfires because of the drought that you mentioned and higher temperatures.
Second, the first order problem is too many people. The warming/drought is a second order hysteresis effect. Creating more reservoirs exacerbates the first order problem.
Question: How do you folks deal with the hopelessness of it all?
It's pretty obvious that emissions are not going to drop to zero, that the positive feedback loops due to arctic methane emissions have kicked off, and that runaway warming has begun. Best-case equilibrium now looks like 3C by 2100.
Basically, the situation is bleak and in all likelihood irreversible. There will me massive changes in my lifetime and the world we've left our children will be drastically different and obviously worse.
Stop listening to people who have no idea what they're talking about, have an agenda, or are otherwise compromised in their rational position.
If you do that, this entire idea that all is lost will become much more tempered - we have a major challenge ahead of us. Which can be said of any age (ask your older relatives what the age of nuclear weapons felt like).
In short, I deal with the hopelessness by being reasonable, and it thereby vanishes.
It's absolutely no more difficult than colonizing Mars along a similar timeline.
Everything that we face here, in the most extreme possible interpretations, can be survived by humanity with effort and ingenuity, and we even get to build our hardened shelters etc. on nice sunny days with oxygen to breathe and water to drink. Mars is MUCH harder and may also be possible.
If we're really, really ambitious and lucky we may also be able to sustain the global population we've currently got: that's a nice broad gene pool that can absorb a lot of evolutionary shocks, I think. I doubt we can expand global population much, but that won't be happening: weather alone is going to wipe a hell of a lot of people out.
It's going to start to feel a bit like bracing ourselves to live on Mars (except for on our home planet), as climate events ramp up, but humanity is definitely going to get through it. There will probably end up being a backlash against those who got us into this, as well as a predictable backlash against climate refugees that will cause a huge amount of basically genocide. It will be like 'stay where you are!' under conditions not conducive to human life. Even then technology might be able to shelter people to some extent.
"Humanity is going to get through it" doesn't feel like good enough.
Basically it's close to saying your children or grandchildren are going through some Ethiopia-style hunger and Syria-level conflict. But some will survive!
Imagine if we know before 2100 there's a chance of a devastating war all over the planet, we'd try everything we can to prevent it. Of course in reality the richer countries will probably survive (although their morals would probably be gone), although food shortages can also topple countries, doesn't matter how rich they are. Hah, I guess military might is a clever thing to have. Hungry population? The US president has decided to deploy troops to take over the grain harvest of (insert some weaker country here)...
No, it's not good enough. I see I got some downvotes: suits me, not like I actually LIKE this position. I'm just being a bit pedantic, saying that we will not be looking at human extinction no matter what. It's setting a boundary on the doomsaying, and also setting a bar for what we're gonna have to do.
I think everybody in control of things understands we will be seeing just what you say: hunger, conflict, massive waves of refugees, war. Water shortages may be even more significant than food shortages, and given modern supply chain capabilities, wet-bulb temperature conditions might be the most significant of all.
Humanity will get through this. The important question is how: and every downvoter to that comment knows that there are unacceptable answers to this. I think getting through without descending into monstrous behavior and inhumanity IS POSSIBLE and easier than colonizing Mars. But it's gonna be nearly as difficult to make happen, as colonizing Mars.
The easy out is the bad answers. That's not going to be acceptable. We're all stuck on this rock together.
> How do you folks deal with the hopelessness of it all?
Don't have kids.
I know this is a very unpopular point of view on HN and this response will probably be downvoted into oblivion, but the fact of the matter is that if enough people adopt this strategy it will actually solve the problem eventually. Yes, the odds of this happening are vanishingly small, but population control is ultimately the only long-term solution.
Of course... it is more complicated than that. This is a classic tragedy of the commons scenario (or Idiocracy for that matter). The people that don't care will continue on, and the people that do care won't be able to influence the next generation nearly as much.
Western nations are financing 3rd world birth rates at the expense of our own citizens well being. I imagine we should address that first before we even consider asking our own to stop reproducing.
and find a way to work towards something of a solution in your daily life. The work may not go anywhere and the problem may be intractable, but by not having kids and doing some work towards a solution, its at least a local anesthetic for hopelessness.
I'm skeptical that making an argument that will probably only convince exceptionally altruistic people (at least among those who wanted to have kids to begin with) to not reproduce is good for future generations.
Population control is one of the most antihuman positions you can have IMO. The likes of Paul Erlich and anti-human philosophies who sees humans as a cancer and who sterilized millions of Indians and south americans is one of the biggest atrocities ever done.
We had population control 300 years ago before we had the knowledge to create machine and feed them.
Less than 1billion people on the planet and most people starved.
We don't live on an infinite plane with infinite resources. If you ignore the harsh reality of disease and confusion on this planet then you will only aggravate the problem, and be the misanthrope you fear.
We don't need a planet with infinite resources. We live in a universe with almost infinite potential. All that is required is more knowledge for how to turn seemingly useless materials (such as coal, oil, uranium and gas) into useful resources. That's how we historically have progressed.
Knowledge gets created by freeing up time to allow humans to focus on other things than just getting their basic needs met.
This requires machines which require energy as energy is the industry that powers all other industries.
If you really believe we live on a planet with limited resources with no way of creating new, then you, being on Hacker News wasting energy on debating with strangers, seems like an unjustified behavior in itself. So maybe if you acted on what you seem to be preaching I would listen, but for know you don't seem to care about these supposed finite resources.
This view that we have these massive resource limitations is wrong.
We do not have 'resource limitations' for the most part on this planet.
For some things, there's an issue - but by and large, it's not.
Western Nations already have a considerably lower than 'replacement rate' in terms of birth, and the suicidal disappearance of some cultures is not going to move the ball forward.
We do have population issues, but they are squarely in Nigeria, India etc..
We have plenty of resources.
We'll sort out climate change over the coming decades.
I don't feel hopeless because I understand that we are being manipulated by these apocalyptic predictions. They will not pan out. Really diving into the projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, RCP4.5 and RCP6.0 are the most likely of the scenarios. This news headline isn't really "news." We basically knew we had already reached this point. Everyone keeps focuses on the high-emissions scenario, which is unlikely.
Yes it's telling that the people who are spreading all the worst of the climate FUD are the same people who want to provide the solutions or be in power. Fear is always an effective strategy to push political change. That's a big part of what is going on here.
99.9% of all species ever existed are extinct today.
The world have been through 5 mass extinctions.
In other world, nature doesn't care about us what so ever.
Humans are the only species who have ever had a chance to be the exception to this trend by using the same ingenuity that lead us from less than 1billion mostly starving people who on average died at 40 to now 8 billion people and with plenty of food and resources and we keep getting better and better at it. Dead from drought have gone down 98% the last 100 years.
There are no scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate change that we can't deal with today, let alone tomorrow. And we will do that through using more energy, cause at the end of the day, there is not shortage of resources only knowledge. We will find the solutions to the issues that arise over time.
Remind yourself that humans have adapted to quite literally ever problem in front of us. We will have no choice but to adapt to a changing world. It is vastly more practical to mobilize people to engineer and deploy solutions to problems they immediately face.
Humanity as a species will not collapse, we will adapt and press on.
Do things in your regular life that help the planet:
Don't drive; bike.
Don't eat meat.
Stop buying products you don't need.
Plant trees in your city.
Donate to climate action foundations.
You left out the most important action: vote for people who want to deal with the problem. Individual action is nice and all, but this is a problem that is caused collectively and needs to be dealt with collectively.
It's not hopeless! People have overdosed on fear porn. Meanwhile, renewables are getting cheaper, modern nuclear energy technology is clean and safe, and carbon capture is getting more promising by the day.
Things are looking bleak even if we are able to get to complete zero emissions, let alone 50%. Sure, first world countries have chucked a few solar panels and windmills around, but that's a drop in the bucket.
Small changes to personal consumption are not the best way to contribute to fighting climate change. A significantly more effective actionstep would be to donate a small portion of your income to highly effective climate charities [1].
I'm not against changing personal consumption - for example, I went vegan. But this is not where the majority of my impact on the world lies, as even a small donation vastly outweighs the effect that my veganism has.
I think that after the consequences of climate change have finally been realized only a few short decades from now, many people will come out of the woodwork to say that they really did believe it was hopeless the whole time, but that declaring it was hopeless before the consequences happened would have been labeled counterproductive for the people that did not believe so. It would have been declared as giving up hope too soon. Irrationality in the face of obstacles that are actually impossible to overcome stems from the same mechanism which has caused those same people to accomplish goals that are reasonable, like getting better at drawing or running a marathon. There's no sense in denying one if it's inseparable from the other.
My opinion is that there is no solution. It's frequently said in the context of relationships that you can't change everyone. Forcing everyone to align with your worldview is the only real hope we have to prevent the continued destruction of the environment, and yet in the context of human friendships it's considered misanthropic. People still want their power, and their identity, and their freedom, and we are collectively powerless against that instinct.
I do not think we're ignoring the problems on purpose. We're just so bad at taking into consideration the consequences that might not take place in our lifetimes. It's a limitation of our human imaginations.
Our innovations in technology have raised our expectations, and with those expectations comes a baseline of additional carbon emissions. We're not going to go back to the industrial revolution for the planet's sake.
I choose not to put my limited time and energy into worrying about a lost cause, and will have to try to continue to do the things I want to. That battle in itself is already all-consuming for me.
Will we see a world reshaped by climate change? Almost certainly. Is it completely futile to keep fighting to stop it? Absolutely not.
All the projections go to 2100, but do you think this magically stops there? Our actions today are going to determine the extent of the damage to the future. We've already baked in serious changes, but we can avoid a hellscape in 2150, 2200, etc. If we don't our descendents, what are left of them, will curse our memory.
The more damage we do to the earth, the harder we're going to make it for us to even develop the solutions to solve it. Lets be real, carbon capture on the scale to reverse global warming is going to require an advanced civilization, and that won't happen if we've regressed back to some sort of mad max hellscape.
> many people will come out of the woodwork to say that they really did believe it was hopeless the whole time, but that declaring it was hopeless before the consequences happened would have been labeled counterproductive for the people that did not believe so
I believe this is the case, although it's becoming an increasingly indefensible position. The writing has been on the wall for a decade, and the false-hope strategy is clearly not working.
I'd think this site would be full of nerds ;) Think about the experience of being a nerd in HS. If pop culture is to be believed, I only got the extra-lite version of that in Russia compared to the US; on the other hand, I grew up surrounded by Russia, it's like the same thing on larger scale.
The experience is that you are constantly surrounded by people doing stupid, harmful crap in part because some of them are actually idiots, but mostly because of group/tribal/social pressures you don't care and can do nothing about.
What do you do? You do your thing, take care of yourself (broadly, i.e. your family, etc.) and minimize the damage others' ...unwise actions cause you. If you are so inclined you can also laugh when chickens come home to roost for someone due to their willful stupidity.
This approach works well for climate change, too :)
I agree that it’s hopeless and it doesn’t bother me at all. I can’t do anything about it so I might as well enjoy the ride while it lasts. Makes it easy to laugh about the really stupid day to day stuff.
I subscribe to this view as well (no kids to worry about), but the people busy wanting to save the world don't like it, because now they have to deal with denialists and surrenderists.
I feel half bad about it, but the whole pandemic has shown how odd this capitalistic world is. People need to work to earn money, but a lot of work generates CO2, directly or indirectly. There was an interesting article last year about how the flower industry in Europe basically shut down (no weddings and no restaurants needing decorations meant no flying in fresh flowers from Africa, and no employment for the flower growers). Or how some countries need jet loads of tourists to survive...
Predicting the future is the hardest job in the world. Given that, my standards to be anxious about the future based on predictions are very high. Climate scientists are also heavily incentivized to be apocalyptic, since the more dire the climate situation is, the more funding people want to give scientists to study the climate!
I haven't seen evidence presented that climate scientists can accurately predict future climate given correct inputs. (E.g. if you give scientists the correct information on the activity of the sun and amount of greenhouse gasses emitted for the years 2010-2020, and plug that into a climate model from the year 2010, it is unlikely to give you correct temperature for the years 2010-2020).
If they can't predict it that means they don't really understand it.
I would happy to be shown the evidence of climate predictions that are more accurate than would be expected. (E.g. I could draw a trendline from the years 1900-2000 out through 2020 and be mostly right. I would expect climate scientists to be substantially more accurate).
It's chaos math. Chaos is a nonperiodic system that operates within predictable limits that are a function of how much energy is within the system, and something we can study in detail.
Consider the concept of 'period three implies chaos': we do indeed understand chaos, but its sensitivity to initial conditions means we can't make deterministic projections of its future state, only projections of the range of possible future states (and a good solid notion of how deterministic it's gonna be based on how much energy is in the system: period three is arrived at from deterministic oscillations through INCREASING energy, and we know exactly what happens to the unpredictability as we continue to add energy)
Climate is a giant chaotic system of atmosphere energy.
We absolutely understand what, in a general sense, happens when we alter the amount of energy in the system.
You cannot predict chaos, period. What you can do is predict the potential behavior of the whole system, and project the limits of probable or possible outcomes.
We can be very sure a heat wave is not going to hit 500 degrees Farenheit, on Earth as we know it. We can also be sure that heat waves are going to continue to extend their RANGE of possible states in direct correlation with global climate energy increasing. And we are seeing exactly this.
We will also see that as the energy in the climate increases, our ability to predict into the future gets worse rather than better. Not because we got dumber, but because the chaotic system is becoming more chaotic as energy is added. The more extreme it gets, the more capacity it develops to confound projected outcomes due to chaos's sensitivity to initial conditions.
If you wanted the ability to predict more accurately, the only way to get that is to cool off the globe and take energy out of the system. It's the energy that's driving the chaotic behavior.
Am I the only one around here who is old enough to remember this exact prediction from 30 years ago? Florida should have become the next Atlantis 20 years ago. I understand it's a worrisome issue, but like religious predictions of the end of the world, failures work against credibility.
People always say this kind of thing. You're probably mis-remembering a headline of an article you barely read and are suggesting that was the global scientific consensus at the time. If you actually look at the real predictions about the climate, which always come packaged with the level of certainty, worst case, best case etc, then predictions have been remarkably accurate for decades. By comparing this to doomsday religious predictions that of course are nonsense you just add to the widespread public denial.
Well, it's a little tough to find a source for a televised news segment from 30+ years ago, before the rise of the modern internet, but you're just as free to claim my memory is faulty as I am to state my recollection.
My understanding is that in many places in FL places that were dry are now soaking wet. Saw an article about a development where there are puddles everywhere (lawns, sidewalks, etc) because the water table is rising.
If I owned property in FL, I wouldn't be looking at the long term right now.
I lived in Miami for much of the 80s. The King Tides they encounter regularly, now, were unknown then. I can point you at a few dozen houses I know of, that are no longer on the coast, because the ocean is there now.
Former neighbors tell me these days they've never seen the water so high; it's not just me.
It's actually illegal in some states to acknowledge the land lost to climate change [0]. Part of the reasoning behind this is to sew doubt in the veracity of the climate predictions of the 80s and 90s.
As some people have said, a large amount of coastal land has already been lost to the sea, especially in Florida. This situation is going to take years/decades to really unfold, because, for the most part, it's not like houses will be above ground one day, then under water the next. Instead this will be a gradual process whereby flooding becomes more severe and frequent, yet the ground will be ostensibly "dry" 99% of the time (or underwater only 3 days a year). Then it will be 98% of the time, 97% of the time, etc.
[1] is a link to a McKinsey report on climate change and how it will effect Florida and how lenders should prepare.
I'd be very surprised if that exact prediction was made by peer-reviewed climate models 30 years ago, or if a scientific paper from that time suggested that Florida would become "the next Atlantis" by 2020.
It's quite easy to find flooding maps that show the effects of various sea level changes. It's not so easy to find concrete predictions about when those changes are due.
Perhaps we should stick to the science instead of imagining hypothetical news stories from decades ago and complaining they were silly.
Yes, let's stick to the science. Which says we have problems, yes, but the narrative so many on here are parroting (all is lost, the gun has already gone off, the world will be uninhabitable) is not remotely close to the predictions even the IPCC has reached.
A reminder that predictions of the end of the world are, so far, never true, is welcome.
Who is saying all is lost and that the world will be uninhabitable? People are saying bad things will happen, potentially catastrophic things for those directly affected. Some of these things may create large social challenges. What's wrong with acknowledging that? The fact that it makes you uncomfortable to hear doesn't mean it's not true.
I searched for "uninhabitable", and the comment you're referring to says particular places will be uninhabitable. Not the world. This is true, according to scientific predictions.
I searched for "gun", and the comment you're referring to is saying that we are already locked into a great deal of warming due to lag and knock-on effects. This is also true according to scientific predictions.
I searched for "all is lost" and didn't find anything.
Meh, I don't really have a dog in this fight, but the tone of this thread is pretty clear. First or second-level comments from the first page most upvoted responses. There are unsubstantiated claims, needlessly hyperbolic descriptors, even a suggestion to blow up the moon. If this thread isn't perplexing, it's at least entertaining.
> It looks bleak. There are fewer and fewer options remaining.
> the IPCC reports/estimates excluded arctic methane emissions...which we a) now know are definitely happening and b) are just catastrophic positive feedback loops. The gun seems to have been fired.
> yeah, the n-th order effects like the siberian ice melting away into methane emissions equivalent to 100 years of 2020 CO2 output will just completely obliterate any efforts at mitigating new emissions.
> Question: How do you folks deal with the hopelessness of it all?
> Can we just gradually boost Earth a little farther (on average) from the sun? Or we could blow up the moon, reducing tidal fluctuation, and thus coastal flooding. Plus the debris would reduce sunlight imparting a cooling effect.
A ctrl-F for 'uninhabitable' only gives this sub thread and someone saying that some countries (rather than the whole world as you've stated) will be uninhabitable. Which is true.
Edit: At my location in southern Sweden it seems like this expected land rise compensates for ~70% of the expected sea level rise, but the data seems a bit sketchy. I think more research is needed.
Besides, sea-level rise is not uniformly distributed, same as temperature variation due to climate change. But overall, yes, the sea level is rising, and it is accelerating globally.
Are you gaslighting me or what, dude? Because your own very first link shows a clear sea-level rise of almost 20 centimeters from 1900. (this https://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/rlr.annual.plots/20_hig..., if you are incapable of clicking on links in actual webpages).
What are you trying to say? It hasn't accelerated? Because clearly it must have sped up since before records began, otherwise it would not agree with records and reconstructions from 1000 and 2000 years ago.
To be brutally honest, it tests people's patience when someone posts trollish, curt, unsupported comments like "it's not accelerating here at place X" when a specific location is clearly not at issue, out of context, and out of perspective of the global problem. Then we end up down a rathole dispelling the stink around another unnecessary distraction which is clearly motivated by nothing but muddying the waters. It's just obfuscation and FUD, frankly. Sorry that it's uncomfortable when you're called out on it.
Florida is porous limestone. Even the most sophisticated seawalls wouldn’t prevent water from coming in through the sides and up, unless you drilled those walls very deep...and even then you’d have to get water from somewhere once you’ve pumped it all out of the state (an issue already happening regardless of carbon output - look up lateral saltwater intrusion)
This reminds me of a fearmongering TV "documentary" narrated by Leonard Nimoy about 40 years ago I saw that warned that a new ice age was coming and that the evidence was that snow storms were becoming more frequent.
Yeah, I left this part out of my comment. My 4th grade science textbook said we were headed for a new ice age by the 90's, and that we'd be completely out of oil by 2000.
Can you find any sources of such predictions from 30 years ago? It sounds plausible to me that you're remembering criticism of climate warnings from 30 years ago that described their warnings as hyperbolically apocalyptic.
The whole point is that it's a problem that is in no single person's immediate interest to solve. Yet it's in our collective interest to solve it, long term.
That you can't understand this simple concept would be funny, except that it impacts those of us that do, and especially our children.
The rise of technocracy and scientism seems more concerning from where I stand. Oh I know, these experts happen to be infallible. I wouldn't dare dispute their gospel or speak any heresies on this esteemed discussion board.
Just the same the trend is concerning. Especially if we are willing to consider the hypothetical world where experts planning the world's energy consumption might possibly have ulterior motives. Of course that isn't the case. It isn't even possible. I'm reliably informed that all skeptic views are paid stooges of the oil companies.
Scientism is infallible. Sure, private researchers funded by the tobacco companies might have fibbed here and there, but that's only because they're greedy capitalists. Government funded research explaining the dangers of cannabis has been 100% accurate. Mass incarceration is a wonderful policy. Scientific experts are qualified not only in their fields of research, but to make wide sweeping social dictates as well.
The rockefeller foundation is the 39th biggest foundation. Any search term and it will show something. I tried random terms such as "animal conservation" and "Sydney" and there were a dozen results.
Science is about building knowledge, so if climate change against all odds turns out to be false, it will be abandoned and the mechanism that is really behind the data will be the focus of further studies. There is no such thing as scientism but a bunch of different people who are competing for the best explanation of reality. The ability to predict is a very handy thing. Newtonian physics might not be 100% correct, but it makes damn good predictions that made our lives so much better.
>Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science
I did the math, and my child has officially spent more of his summers inside than out because of the constant wildfires.
I maintain that most of the worst predictions assume an inability for people to adapt. Still, it amazes me to no end how many people are willing to barrel head first into an avoidable fate without taking their foot off the throttle. I wonder to what extent people will deny the reality around them.
Based on what people have already been accepting as normal, it does feel like we will get to the point of knife fighting over a cup of water before someone admits that we've had an awful lot of El Nino years in a row.
Last year, the county forester came around and explained to my uncle that the reason so many of his 100+ year old trees were dying was a lack of water, and he needed to thin them out on his property to keep the rest alive. It feels like he finally turned a corner and accepted that something is wrong (he still doesn't believe it's man made, but you know, tiny victories).
Note that climate migration is one of the bad things that are commonly predicted by climate change models. And yes, undoubtedly there are indeed some people who move from wildfire-affected areas to protect their children, either temporarily or permanently. (I know of a few affluent families with children who did so last summer during the California wildfires). The point is that this "solution" will instead be a very large problem when, for example, significant portions of the West Coast of the United States is fleeing.
Or to put this more simply: I'm glad you live in an area that isn't affected by wildfires, but what portion of the California population (almost 40 million people) is that area prepared to permanently house in the next 5 or 10 years?
Wouldn't it make sense to start moving now before everyone tries to move while property values are still high? If everyone will need to moves in the 5, 10, 20 years why put down roots any longer in California? There is this earth quake risk that may take part of California as well soon.
Maybe the media coverage and your perception of it are more short term, but this has been a known issue for a really long time, since the greenhouse effect is well known and can be studied in the field and the lab, and even observed on other planets. Oil companies internally knew this 40 years ago (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...) and some of us have been quite consistent on this for decades. Media scaremongering is a separate and distinct problem from global warming.
The doom didn't stop being impending. As an individual all you can do is doing your part in recycling and saving energy, and gaining citizenship and/or permanent residency in a country that is able to produce enough food for its own population by multiples, and spans enough climate zones to be stable in any scenario (hotter, colder, more dry, or more wet).
Because as with the current vaccine shortage, there's no international cooperation when the countries producing it don't have enough. Food shortages will be similar.
To be clear, recycling is greenwashing. The problem is consumption. It truly does not matter if we put waste in the correct bin if we do not also dramatically decrease our use of single-use and otherwise disposable goods.
Recycling is a marketing tactic crafted by the tin can industry in the 20th century to dethrone reusable glass bottles for products like beer.
Isn't whether these claims are true the relevant argument to be making here? If they're true then steady warnings and coverage in the media are not something to complain about. If they're false, then any amount of media coverage is something to complain about.
It's not simply "steady warnings." It's the doomsayer nature of the news and the fact that they have a provable profit motive for making things as extreme as their viewers will accept.
There aren't a lot of good things that came from the pandemic, but at least one of them is that it drastically reduced the amount of driving that people did, at least for awhile. Traffic where I live seems to be back to its pre-pandemic level but maybe that's just me forgetting how bad traffic was pre-pandemic. Work from home at least has been normalized for office work.
It's not a simple matter of the weather being warmer when you step outside every day. This is a relatively rapid change in global temperature on an archaeological scale, and the downstream consequences could be significant.
I keep hearing about the rapidness being unprecedented, but then also that there are methane seems in the arctic that will be released, which should result in an even more rapid change. If this natural process exists, then really the rapidness of change in global temperatures can't be unprecedented, since any major climate swing would result in methane releases.
It's absolutely unprecedented for human civilisation.
If you want to compare it with catastrophic climate changes in pre-human times, go ahead. But that's far more likely to damage your argument than help it because they were far more catastrophic, up to and including mass extinction events.
The downstream effects are also accelerated due to the rapid change of the inputs.
Normally we study climate change on the scale of 10s to 100s of millions of years.
This current change in CO2 concentration is unprecedented because it happened in the span of a century. 5-6 orders of magnitude faster than anything previously.
"Unprecedented" is a dog whistle which is supported on the basis that technically the rise will have been unprecedented within the anthropocene timeframe, i.e., an ending ice age.
So it turns out that the ideal temperature for global civilization is about 13 degrees celsius, and we had that for a long time, but now it might rise by one or two degrees and that would be a terrible temperature for global civilization? Pretty unlucky when you think about it.
It's not the absolute temperature that is the problem, is the change in temperature. Humans can survive in a pretty large range of temperatures. But the places we currently settle and use for agriculture might become unsuitable. Similarly, the biosphere as a whole can adapt to essentially any temperature; Earth has been significantly hotter than today in the (distant) past. However during times of rapid climate change mass extinctions happen. To my knowledge, temperature hasn't changed as quickly as it is changing today, ever.
It's pretty hard to say how long they usually take because the fossil record from millions of years ago is difficult to date with good accuracy. For example, I don't think we can say with good confidence whether the asteroid that hit us 66 million years ago killed a large fraction of all living creatures within a year, or whether it took thousands of years or longer.
The sources in the Wikipedia article seem to disagree with you on that. Perhaps you want to add your sources to the article and reword it with less strong language.
More like our current civilization was built for the current temperature, and higher temperatures would require changes to our civilisation to adapt to the new temperature.
Those adaptions seem a lot cheaper than trying to coordinate a global effort between hundreds of countries to engage in what is essentially long term geo-engineering.
Is there a good place for me to figure out how I can help and reduce my environmental impact?
If I have $50k I am willing to spend with this goal, what should I do? Should I replace my Subaru with an electric car, buy solar panels, buy another 5 acres and plant trees, replace home appliances, ...?
There's nothing that any of us can do individually. The "turn off the faucet when brushing your teeth" and recycling initiatives are just to make people feel better.
The problem is so large now, only centrally-organized action that reorganizes a substantial fraction of the world economy will make a dent.
Donate it to a 501(c)(3) lobbying organization devoted to environment causes. Donate to political candidates that pledge to do impose a carbon tax.
I only partially agree with that. I would say that people are unwilling to sacrifice anything of real value in pursuit of the goal (OP not withstanding).
"turn off the faucet when brushing your teeth" --> Sure, I'll do that, it's easy.
"Use a paper straw" --> sure, why not.
"Stop flying on planes at all, ever again" --> um, maybe not..
"Stop eating beef. You can eat crickets." --> Nope!
That's really frustrating because it ought to be "Eat less beef and more vegetables, which is what your doctor was telling you anyway."
It's not that hard. It doesn't have to be absolute: eat beef 2 meals a week rather than 8-10 and you're saving a lot of CO2.
It's not just that people don't sacrifice real value. They often don't want to make even the smallest choices. They just look past the vegetarian options each and every single time they sit down at a restaurant.
Presenting it as "veganism and crickets or no alternative" is just a way of deflecting. (Besides, vegans don't eat crickets.)
I think this is best put by David MacKay: "If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little"
Assuming everything is as dire as they say, doing the "small" things simply isn't enough. And it will take a lot of people doing a lot of large things. Everyone wants the government to force people to do the things that they aren't willing to do themselves.
It's political. Support candidates and representatives that align with handling climate change, and support policies such as nuclear energy, carbon tax, getting rid of oil company subsidies, reducing dark money and lobbying, geoengineering efforts, and increasing ability for people to move away from stricken areas (Louisiana).
Fortunately, tech people are moving to Texas and Florida and other places where their vote and donations will matter.
These answers are why I want a tool that is good for my specific situation.
I will probably go back to working in the office, but I commute with a professor/lab scientist who can't reasonably work from home, so me going into the office adds a total of 120mi of car trips per year.
It's a form of coping. It has to be. I refuse to believe self-proclaimed smart people of HN refuse to acknowledge science that has been reviewed time and time again for decades now out of... what? ignorance? ideology?
Instead I think it's a coping mechanism. "There's nothing I can do about it because the problem is so large so I'd rather act like it doesn't exist."
Dr. Peter Carter, an IPCC expert reviewer, makes the point that not only is breaking the 2C threshold by 2100 likely, but also that the equilibrium temperature increase is much higher than 2C: https://twitter.com/PCarterClimate/status/139707600859175731...
Climate Change? I deal with it without emotions. Things are what they are, and I want to optimize the outcome for my family. These are my predictions:
- Humanity will probably lose the fight, not because technology isn‘t available, but but because of political/social reasons, eg: prisoners dilemma.
- here in central/northern europe, i am in the privileged position that nothing serious will happen to me.
- food/water might become more scarce until vertical farming can close the gaps. Energy from renewables will be scaled to cover all needs, including stuff like desalination.
- there will be immigration waves from more and more uninhabitable regions. Leading to social unrests over time. Leading to some kind of national border building.
- armed military will starting „preventive deescalation“ against climate refugees. Probably with autonomous weapons to ease the bad feelings about this.
... so I invest in stocks for „clean Energy“, „Robotics & Automatization“, currently evaluating options for tech-agriculture and will finally looking into weapons (border protection) and surveillance (immobilize society).
>here in central/northern europe, i am in the privileged position that nothing serious will happen to me.
EU almost went into flames with 1M refugees, EU might not be your favourite thing but at some point EU or not countries will face enormous numbers of refugees, way more than 1M and things will have to change for worse for you too because to have military shooting climate refugees with autonomous weapons you will need to have a fascist government. A lot of people will object that, could be religion could be ethics but you will need to shot down your own local and legal people too. You will need central European Putins and Erdogan's to sustain a suppression state.
Some of course will profit from all these but being from a lucky geography is not narrow enough, think more about having connections to the strongman who is going to create and rule the refugee shooting government.
Peaceful life when neighbours suffer is myth. Event at the most stable version of it with distant neighbours in trouble you have cavity search on public transport and 3 hours boarding times on flights.
These things will happen probably, i just tried to formulate the events more rationale. And, accepting that all of this happens, I try to be in a comfortable position. So my family will have options instead of dealing with dispair, despite the world becoming a darker place
Fair enough but these things aren't going to happen overnight. It will likely take decades.
I have experience with 2 countries going down the drain: Turkey and Bulgaria.
The Bulgaria one has an overnight event, the collapse of communism and then it has about 25 year log period decomposition and after things start getting better they also don't get fixed overnight and Bulgaria still holds the title of "The worst country on the X scale in EU" where X can be anything like education, vaccination rates, wages and so on. The problem with the collapse of institutions is that they aren't coming back anytime soon. Suddenly anything with long term or intangible returns like Arts or Science research becomes unfeasible and your brightest start driving Taxi for living and after 25 years your pool of great researchers and artists gets replaced with taxi drivers who once were extremely bright at school but life happened. The culture in everything changes to push for short term gains and frown upon on higher ideals. How do you protect your family from that? With Bulgaria, the answer was to be in close connections with politicians and have your privileges or leave the country. With the ecological collapse the leaving option is not there in any scalable way.
With Turkey, it happened in 20 years. The difference here was that it was more like wealth and power transfer from one part of the society to the other. To some point it made things fairer but the problem with that kind of transfer is that unlike the structured ways like taking high taxes from those who have a lot and subsidising those who have a little, those who do the transfer don't stop until everything collapses. I'm sure you have some idea about the situation in Turkey but you probably don't know about the recent events where a mafia boss that used to collaborate with the state and do their dirty work was "discarded" and now he makes videos from abroad where he tells it all. Every video gets over 10M views on YouTube alone, many of the claims are being partly confirmed by the people involved in these things but no one goes to jail or not even investigated. Only the mafia boss who talks managed to get chased by the police. That's what happens when you have a strongman, how do you protect your family against that? In Turkey, those who did well are those who have political connection, share the wealth and don't talk. This again creates a lot of trouble, that's the NK or Iran version. People can't leave en mass, they simply live the way they are told to live. Unless you can join the elite, you can't protect your family on this version too.
I'm not sure which one is worse, the dysfunctional state or the strongman. On the strongman version, your material wellbeing tends to be better overall with slowly crumbling until it reaches the bottom(it crumbles because you the strongman will need to install figureheads to carry out his agenda. For example, to remove Evolution Theory from schools Erdogan installed the former chef of a Zoo as the head of National Academy Of Sciences. Just recently he installed low grade academician as rectorate at one of the most prestigious universities in the country) however the social and intellectual price is very high. The dysfunctional state version very quickly goes to the floor in terms of material wellbeing however the ethical and intellectual load is fairly low as there is no state to shape you. Some shaping can be good of course but you have full autonomy with your life.
I simply don't see how you can protect your family from multi decade long collapse of the civilisation.
Here are some (generally U.S. centric) suggestions to move away from fossil fuels as fast as possible for a reasonable cost with current technology and with the least economic disruption:
Expand EV tax credits and allow EV conversions to qualify, not just new vehicles.
Electrify the interstate highway system so that EVs can charge while they're moving. This reduces the necessity of hauling around massive and expensive battery packs. Provide the electricity for free for small passenger vehicles that meet a minimum efficiency standard.
Build more battery factories. Especially for lithium iron phosphate cells (or any technology that replaces it), since LFP doesn't depend on cobalt or nickel and is much safer than most other lithium ion chemistries.
Install more domestic wind and solar power generation.
Invest in transcontinental power transmission lines and solar capacity in place like Africa, so we can power North America at night without relying on batteries.
Shut down fossil fuel power plants, but keep some of them operational as emergency backup.
Make an EV charge port required building code for new houses and apartments with parking.
We have the capability to make the atmospheric concentration of CO2 whatever we want it to be with existing nuclear energy technology. The fact that this obvious solution is widely ignored suggests either a lack of seriousness about solving the claimed problem, or the existence of some other objective hiding under the cloak of a global climate crisis.
The fact that nuclear is thrown to the side is evidence that leading through popular consensus is a failing strategy.
China is building literally dozens of nuclear plants for a fraction of the cost we can build them here, simply because the construction projects are not stopped every six months for a new lawsuit, protest, or redundant environmental study.
We need to start building nuclear plants TODAY. Nuclear waste disposal is a SOLVED problem.
If anyone is interested in a fictionalized (and somewhat optimistic) narrative of how this might play out, I can recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's recent novel The Ministry for the Future:
The mindset of there being too many people has nothing to do with killing. You projected that in your own comment. A reduction in reproduction rate can lead to a decrease through natural attrition.
I'm not saying it would have to be a product of enforcement. Although unlikely, it could be one of education. Enforcement depends on the country and it's governance. For example, you would need a constitutional amendment in the US to impose those sorts of restrictions. It would require the representation and buy-in of the people (so education is an important part either way). Then you also have game theory with how to compete on a variety of issues internationally depending on population dynamics.
That's also only half the issue. The other half is the consumption. This would likely be more achievable through taxes, zoning, and the court's (potentially flawed) interpretation of interstate commerce laws.
It's "watershed" because that was the number chosen at Paris. There's nothing scientifically significant about 1.5 or 2.0. They're just numbers that sit along the continuous path from here to whatever hellscape sits at the bottom of this human-created extinction event we've set into motion. I guess the people at Paris were all very optimistic and thought humanity could actually do something to avoid hitting 1.5. They were wrong.
More likely, we hit it, look around and see that nothing has change, and keep going.
Second most likely, we hit it, look around and see the devastation that has been wrought, and the people living in relatively safe zones institute military-backed authoritarian governments who are charged with keeping migrates from effected regions from coming in, and seizing what little available resources remain from weaker, neighboring states.
The article mentions that 1.5°C was the attainable target and 2°C was the hard limit. At this rate we'll blow through them both.
> The 1.5°C mark was established as the desirable target for all the countries of the world who signed up to the Paris Agreement to limit temperature rises, in order to prevent permanent changes that threaten the wellbeing of all life on earth. The agreement calls for limiting rises to 2°C or below.
1.5ºC is the lower bound for the estimated target.
In any case, the 2ºC nominal target was mostly arbitrary.
For those unaware, the problem with measuring global temperatures is that we can measure variation (relative values) with great accuracy (e.g. 0.5ºC increase), but the error bars on the absolute measurement are way to big to make useful statements on what will happen at XºC.
No. It’s already getting uncomfortably warm in Canadian cities in the summer. And we already settled most of the fertile soil.
The bulk of our sparsely inhabited areas are Canadian shield, taiga, tundra. The soils are not well suited to agriculture.
The rapid change will also make our ecosystems unstable, and the melting ice is hurting northern infrastructure. We were already cold adapted.
We also don’t get more sunlight, which is governed by the rotation of the earth and not the temperature. One of the hardest parts of winter here is short days, rather than the cold.
Russia might be the largest benefactor, as they have only very short (inhabited) coastlines but incredible amounts of currently barely inhabited land. That land might become arable, but in the meantime they too have their problems with increased fires, floods and immigration from Southern neighbors. The most important benefit would be the Northeast Passage for ships traveling between Asia and Europe. It runs through the Bering Strait and along Siberia, is 24% shorter for the popular Shanghai-Rotterdam trip, and is becoming increasingly viable thanks to global warming (and Russian nuclear icebreakers).
Canada has a similar story, but the Northwest Passage along Canada is much less exciting, and they have much more population on the coast.
Currently the northern hemisphere is closest to the sun during winter months. In the past when it was closest to the sun during summer months (so, hotter), the Sahara was paradoxically a lush savannah. It's possible that warming could affect air currents in a way that makes the Sahara receive dramatically more rainfall that could turn it back into savannah.
What's the top soil look like in the US NE? It's been a while since I've been to, say, Maine. But I can tell you that the other new farmland folks propose is British Columbia, and it's obvious that they've never been to mid-to-northern BC and looked down toward their feet. You'd be better off trying to grow corn in sand that the stuff that passes for top soil in BC.
This also ignores the fact that when one starts heading north, that Sun in the sky tends to get pretty weak-ass, even in the summer. As a Seattle resident, I about go blind getting off the plane in Miami until I can get those sunglasses on. And I can tell you how much corn enjoys the lack of good sun in comparison to my home state of Indiana: it doesn't.
The northeast US was a huge agricultural region before the great plains. The entire area is covered with the remains of former farms. It is not as cost effective and there were other issues (rocky soil, for one) but it was once an agricultural center and can become one again if the economics shift.
That an over generalization. The more temperate parts of southern Siberia would have a thawing that could potentially open up more agricultural space and increase Siberia's food production capacity.
The two icons below "snow" are boxes (on chrome for windows). It seems those are "freezing" and "extreme hot days" but would be great to use a workaround for fonts that don't display all the unicode chars
It'd be nice if your predictions for south of the equator correctly flipped summer and winter. Right now they show winter as the warmer months and summer as the colder ones.
Russia would get a lot of land out of it, and would get more usable coastline, which they have very little of. Countries like Canada and the Nordics also gain in this respect
Moreover, co2 is an input to photosynthesis. Studies show that projected levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere boost crop yields by 30%. Countries with a lot of agriculture exports stand to become wealthier from this, as well as countries with food insecurity issues.
First of all, weather is a chaotic system. And "good weather" is an extremely narrow band (at any given year try to find two farmers of different crops that both agree that the weather was good). As such, it is much more likely that any climate change (not chaotic on the scales discussed here) will have a negative effect on weather anywhere than the opposite.
Secondly, and more importantly, we are talking about a system that contains huge quantities of thermal energy. This energy will for instance create stronger storms. In general, we don't want to put energy into our climate because of the potential violence that follows from that.
Exactly. Even for places that get "better weather", that still is a huge strain on the existing ecosystem and economy that is built for the current climate. In a century or two some places might be better off, but the transition will be painful.
Also, as the saying goes, the rising tide lifts all boats. Even if only a couple of countries are hit hard, we will all feel the effects in trade and immigration. And it looks like a lot of countries might be hit hard.
I refuse to believe it will be bad for all countries. That doesn’t make sense whatsoever, that just being overly emotional and unscientific. There is always a winner and loser in everything. The key is to figure out which country benefits the most.
Even something like the Pandemic, some businesses have learned to thrive. Humans are resilient and the ones who can adapt to change the best will always win out.
We're doomed imho because humans (i.e. politicians and voters) have no intuition for logarithmic growth.
"What's the doubling time?" seems to be a question that's absent from the public discourse, yet it's fundamental to appreciating the runaway urgency of our situation.
Recommended reading for those interested is "Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters" by Steven Koonin. Presents a great deal of context around climate science and reporting which is helpful when processing headlines like this one.
This will be an attempt to lighten the mood, and it will fail, but still : isn't that a form of "good news" that we feel almost "done" enough with the pandemic that we can start to worry again about climate change?
So, not a single primary source from a peer reviewed journal?
The "New Ice Age" thing you cite for example is well known to have never been a majority opinion among scientists. At no point were more papers predicting cooling published than papers predicting warming.
Ozone depletion, on the other hand, was a serious peril, until international coordinated action banned the chemicals responsible for it, and the crisis was averted. Similarly, acid rain was a serious problem, until we enacted regulations that almost completely eliminated sulfur dioxide emissions.
The prevalence of cellphones causing cancer headlines in your list suggests that you're intentionally picking articles that have a strong anti-science bend.
Really, all you've proven is that articles that are weak on scientific rigor are weak on predictive power.
The universal premise on HN is that the forecasts are accurate and we need to do something drastic immediately.
The forecasts assumed are actually just projections from computer models. The global atmospheric temperature, as measured by satellite, is not doing anything unusual. It continues its gradual increase. We are, after all, still coming out of the last ice age. Fifteen thousand years ago, there was ice a mile thick where I’m sitting.
IMHO, these satellite measurements are the only credible temperature measurements. They show an increase of 0.14 C / decade since 1979. That’s 1.4 C / century, which is inconsequential.
Even if the forecasts were correct, China is now emitting more than the US and The EU combined. No significant reduction in CO2 is possible unless China and India make reductions.
If we were really concerned about this, we’d be switching away from power generation using fossil fuels.
Wait a minute, we are doing that! I believe it’s going to happen over the next couple of decades - either to a methanol economy, a hydrogen economy, or with better batteries. Or all three. And we need modern nuclear power - preferably fusion to supplement photovoltaics.
What is my point?
This: there is no need to panic. The effect of anthropogenic CO2 from burning fossil fuel is acceptably small, and we will stop doing that in a couple of decades, in any case.
Check out Ned Nikolov's work. The greenhouse gas model is as flimsy as the Flat Earth. Reading his stuff reminded me of Leah Remini talking about learning of Xenu and the associated lore in Scientology. I can't believe I was so brainwashed.
That's the baseline they've been using forever. Whenever the protocols are discussed about limiting the change to 2°C, that's what they mean. They've been warning about the dangers at 1.5°C for many years.
It's not an attempt to mislead anybody. They're simply leaving out the "above pre-industrial levels" part that they've said so many times they assume it's not necessary. Especially on HN, where the headlines are sharply limited in length.
I love that this prediction has a clear deadline. Now, what skin in the game does the UN have? Will they pay back any government spending that occurs as a result of this prediction if the 1.5C rise does not occur?
No this is how they justify their existence now. Originally created to stop Hitler 2.0, they've basically given up on that mission and now focus on health and climate crises, whether real or greatly exaggerated.
We should be thankful for their selfless action and wisdom. Carbon credits as part of a new global currency may save us all. We just need digital IDs, a cashless society and digital currency to ensure responsible purchases.
> I saw on Google that it gets 6% brighter every 1 Billion years. That's a really long time, and I'm not sure what that even means anyway.
For our current situation, it means nothing.
The grandparent comment was referring to a period 100s of millions of years ago. Given that the sun's intensity has changed significantly on that scale, it's not appropriate to compare our current situation to that of something that happened 100s of millions of years ago.
For what it's worth, the atmospheric CO2 reduction that followed that period was associated with significant cooling and glaciation, which is further evidence that CO2 is a significant factor in determining global climate change. The grandparent comment was very disingenuous.
Related fun fact: If you buy a house near sea level now, the resale value [edit: for buyers in the know] will not be based on the current sea level, it will be based on the projected sea level 25 years from now when the potential next buyers will still be paying their mortgage.
And in their minds, if they are smart, they will realize that their resale value will be based on the sea level 25 years from their unknown future resale date.
Pretty sure you made this up , or read it as posted by someone else who made it up. My home is in a waterfront community. Homes on the water are increasing in price.
I am and have been a prospective buyer and have been basing shopping decisions on this already. So based on first hand information I
have an existence proof that such buyers are out there already who are factoring this in today. And for the past 20 years in fact… when we bought our previous house we passed on certain locations based on this issue alone.
Now does that mean all buyers are factoring it in? Of course not. People are not used to long term thinking. And there are plenty of people who are in denial, and those people will make fine buyers for the short term. But at some point it’s likely the music will stop.
I made a slight edit of the original comment to clarify the point.
Price increase slopes can also change. The price can be going up, yet still be held back by something when it could have gone up even more.
"No crisis, no funding" - Scientist/researcher on NASA "Earth Observing System circa 1996.
Also "We will spare no tree to save the earth" as we delivered reams of program documentation for program reviews. My suggestion at the time "Can we give them CDs instead?".
I must be the only one in the world who thinks that climate change, despite being a big issue, will be resolved if it ever harms (rich) humans in any meaningful way.
I think once the rubber meets the road we'll resolve and completely reverse climate change. That being said I might be too confident in our species' engineering ability.
Rich humans will be the ones for whom it'll be most easy to avoid the consequences of climate change for a long time. By the time rich people really start suffering we'll probably be way past the point of no return.
Actually it's poor people who suffer both short and long term consequences the most. To tell you the truth I wouldn't even notice if my electricity bill went up by 20% because of switching to renewables, as I don't know how much it is usually.
Seems like this relies on tons of big assumptions. Like that climate change will negatively impact rich people in power in a reasonable timeline.
Rich people may even benefit from climate change in the short term, since during an economic downturn they can move their assets around, take risks, buy cheaper labor, etc, while everyone else is scrambling.
No chance. Once the most cloistered people in our world are materially impacted, it will be far too late to mount any kind of response. It might already be too late.
Rich people will mainly be impacted by the forced migration of climate refugees from impacted countries. Will they be allowed to emigrate from regions beset by flooding (coastal areas), drought (inland areas), and the resulting crop failures?
We could engineer out global warming, but that's just one part of climate change. It might need to be an all-of-the-above type response, including decarbonization, negative emissions, geoengineering and adaptation.
Well, I think there already some geoengineering solutions that —- if worst comes to worst —- look like they might be effective in combating climate change albeit at the cost of unknown and potentially serious side effects.
I definitely think the US will pull the trigger on stratosphere aerosol injection and other geoengineering technologies before letting Miami go underwater.
You could compare with how rich countries handled the pandemic, and then consider that the pandemic was relatively easy with new vaccine candidates almost immediately ready for testing.
Also compare with how we handle various natural disasters. What is California doing about wildfires? The rich people in Malibu still lose their homes.
How about preparing for drought? What is Houston doing about hurricanes? Is Texas ready for the next winter storm?
Rich people will handle this with their own disaster preparation (sometimes) and moving if necessary.
While encouraging to think that some people will have the power to reverse climate change, it will be too late.
We can't wait for the negative effects to reach rich people.
I bet the models backing this claim don't pass the mustard. Can they predict past five year periods? Not likely, then why should we base any policy with these for the next five years?
So my climate denying neighbor sent me this. I know it’s wrong and sinful but I wasn’t sure how to respond to the questions it raises. Anyone have some tips?
Anyone who's still reading something that devoid of any reference to the mass of precise accumulated studies and evidence is beyond discourse, climate denial has become part of their core identity. So send them the latest ipcc report and don't bother with discussions.
Also flip low lying Florida housing to them if you can: easy money.
They did get the "sciency" bits right, though. They just refer to the IPCC. Your guy's arguments are "here's a bit of data they haven't bothered to fit." I can't even make out if the presented data has any basis in fact.
And England was pretty fucking cold in the 17th century. And after a particularly grim winter in 1709, the thaw "brought widespread flooding. This was a major catastrophe for a largely agricultural economy. The crops were ruined, grain prices soared sixfold and many communities were faced with starvation. Per capita gross domestic product dropped by 23%, and did not fully recover for another 10 years, all from a single terrible winter." (quote from the Guardian).
So you are willing to eschew any principals of respecting credentials because you want to agree with a predetermined result? Doesn’t sound at all like science to me.
The IPCC report has scientific underpinnings; it's not a predetermined result, but the reflection of continuing research. It's about the best we can do. Of course it's an approximation with errors, such is the fate of all models.
But to just point at a few short-comings, and do so with blatant disrespect for the context, and then conclude everything it says must be false is what I'd call unscientific. The linked article on wattsupwiththat doesn't even try to provide an alternative explanation. There have been skeptics who came up with reasonable objections and alternatives, but that article isn't one of them. It does falsely represent the 1.5°C threshold issue, though, to the point of manipulative dishonesty.
Steven Sloman at Brown University argues there is good evidence showing when people are asked to explain something in depth, their mind can be changed. Basically, it hinges on the idea of "the illusion of explanatory depth". People don't actually understand concepts as well as they think they do. If they come to that realization on their own (with your help, of course) they may wobble on their convictions, at which point you can point them toward better, more empirically driven conclusions.
So, in the case of your neighbor, ask them to explain their anti-climate change beliefs in depth, in a non-confrontational way. "Oh that's interesting, how does that work?". Kind of a 5-why approach. Hopefully as they dig in they realize, "Hey, I don't actually understand this very well." At which point, you point them to strong counterfactuals to their beliefs.
> At which point, you point them to strong counterfactuals to their beliefs.
This is the hard part. I don’t have these resources at my fingertips for every issue. When I’m talking to my neighbor Karen I can’t just say, there are articles to back up what I’m saying about climate change, COVID denial, anti vaccines, flat earth, getting microchipped, dangers of wireless energy, homeopathy, lizard people, etc.
Right--and part of the epistemic closure that they're in is that they have been repeatedly and consistently exposed to memes that enable that kind of whataboutism. Often they're so detached from any sort of objective reality that they will bring even a prepared and knowledgeable speaker to a halt because the only response is "what are you even talking about?".
This is the crux of the ideological problem we're facing: one "side" might be wrong and one "side" makes shit up and the equivalence has been drawn into the mushy middle's brains that pulling people out of the muck requires probably more time and effort than any one person can manage.
How about this. This article is written by self proclaimed "amateur scientist" Willis Eschenbach and is a certified hack and kook. Everything he writes should be taken with giant grain of salt.
The earth's climate has never been static. I find it odd that people expect some sort of stasis at this point in time just because they happen to be here.
This is a disingenuous framing. Ice ages are part of a geologic-timescale cycle; there have been four significant glacial periods over the last half a million years.
Even during an ice age lasting about 100k years you had interglacial periods on a shorter time scale where the ice shields retreated significantly.
The point is we‘re talking about immense natural geological climate changes happening on the order of 1000 years within the life time of all human kind.
It’s disingenuous framing to imply mankind to go extinct because of the current temperature trends.
Again, this doesn’t mean we should just watch and go on burning coal. But it’s a bit ridiculous seeing intelligent people on HN to get carried away by scaremongering.
It will probably not go extinct, no. But these changes might not be compatible with the kind of advanced civilization we’re all used to and that supports a population of billions. I, for one, am not ready to go back to whatever living standards they had in 1000 AD.
I guess we've decided that temperatures in 1850 were the perfect temperatures, and we're going to stick with them. If humans continue to live in a peaceful and technological world over thousands or millions of years, the natural climate ups and downs will seem to be suddenly forced into an unnaturally straight line, starting somewhere around now, due to everyone being unwilling to allow change.
The distance between the Earth and Sun, which is 93 million miles on average, varies throughout the year. During the first week in January, the Earth is about 1.6 million miles closer to the sun. This is referred to as the perihelion. The aphelion, or the point at which the Earth is about 1.6 million miles farther away from the sun, occurs during the first week in July.
Can we just gradually boost Earth a little farther (on average) from the sun? Or we could blow up the moon, reducing tidal fluctuation, and thus coastal flooding. Plus the debris would reduce sunlight imparting a cooling effect.
This is my problem with HN. People who are good in their respective fields propose insane stuff like this and don't even realize how disconnected from reality it is.
No. Both of those ideas are wildly impractical with current technology/available energy.
In addition to being completely out of reach with our current available energy sources, blowing up the moon would also be a very bad idea. For a hard scifi look at that scenario, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves
I'm more concerned about predicable rain patterns than warmer weather. What happens if rainfall in America's breadbasket starts to decline? Even a small sustained change could have deep ramifications.
It's kinda scary how many people fall for the "we have too many people and we need to reduce birth rates" fallacy. Folks, reducing the birth rate will do nothing for (or; against) the population. Almost all nations on earth are already below the population replacement rate. Birth control will do nothing.
There are many things that we can consider. Like moving everyone to Mars or Pluto (not a planet), building aquatic cities and become mermaids (and mermen), using flatulent gasses as renewable energy! Many, many things!
But birth control is not the answer. The people that already exist are the problem. Not the Babies Of The Future. Even though Future Babies can be scary and I understand that you are all afraid; not letting them be born is not the solution.
Really, have a good look at [0] to understand how future babies are not the problem.
Can people please push for 100% renewable crypto mining and chips in the next 1/2 years? There isn’t a lot of time left.
Beyond crypto need to stop all deforestation now and focus on ways to make cities more livable by decreasing or moving homeless and increasing transit and affordability of housing. Cities need to be more livable and comfortable. This will drive down deforestation of suburbs and the extensive fossil fuel use involved in transportation and movement of people outside of denser urban areas.
There isn’t a lot of time left and action needs to be taken urgently.
Banning crypto mining would be a far easier solution and better for the world and humanity as a whole. No one is going to push for "100% renewable crypto mining", so just ban it completely.
Honestly it is absolutely unforgivable that people still push cryptocurrency in the face of the existential threat to humanity that global heating presents. It's a completely immoral, destructive, evil.
You know how much my household contributes? Add a few more zeroes. Do you know how much that car over there contributes? Very, very, very little. That plane? Hardly anything. Nothing poses an existential threat.
Your comment reads as if "crypto" is synonymous with "Proof of Work cryptos". Are you suggesting a blanket ban on all cryptocurrencies regardless of their electrical efficiencies, or specifically PoW-style mining?
PoW and PoS are both Proof of Waste. It's evil, especially so in this environment.
Humans need to co-operate to survive global heating, we cannot avoid trust, we need to make it easier to trust each other. If you buy into cryptocurrency you are implicitly abandoning hope of humanity surviving this crisis, in fact you're hastening our downfall.
What do you want, us to stop using energy? That's not gonna happen, the best you can do is to have tried to limit carbon emissions decades ago, but it's far too late for anything like that. Fuck it, pedal to the metal.
No, I want us to stop wasting energy on anti-social ideas. I want governments to end an industry that produces a net-negative value and is at least 75% powered by coal.
"Anti-social ideas" is in the eye of the beholder, given that a society is generally a diverse social landscape. I know many people who consider cryptocurrencies to be one of the biggest social boons in recent times.
A unified, international ban on something is a nearly unprecedented achievement, apart from perhaps chemical weapons, and even then i'm not sure all nations had a seat at the table.
You also referred to cyprots as "evil" earlier in this thread. What specifically about cryptocurrencies has given you this strong sentiment? (To be clear i appreciate your passion on the topic, i'm legitimately trying to understand your viewpoint, if that isn't obvious).
On the opposite end of the morality spectrum, some people think it's absolutely unforgivable to continue supporting corrupt governments that irresponsibly inflate their fiat to unusable levels, which is a much more immediate concern for some people than the ice is melting ad nauseum for like 50+ years, and use crypto as an alternative store of wealth when their governments fail them. So, whatever, let China use their energy to solve some stupidly complex algorithms to process transactions. In the end, it won't even matter.
Yeah except for exponential increases in EV adoption, solar/wind power, and energy storage. Change is coming, and it's coming fast. Not saying it's enough, but it will make a significant difference.
If you are rich, you might or might not suffer some hardships. If you are poor, there probably isn't much you can do. The best advice is to become rich.
this sounds like "the beginner's guide to surviving the coming zombie apocalypse". Maybe you can prepare for a few days or weeks of isolation, but climate change does not just go away and get better. How long are your bullets really going to last?
Mining cryptocurrencies using renewable energy means that someone else has to use dirty energy.
Energy waste is energy waste, no matter what kind of energy it is wasting. Cryptocurrencies are, by design, pure waste, and the only rational action is to ban them before they do any more damage.
do you think crypto mining at scale is acceptable if the power sources are solar and wind? if people were really concerned about the environmental impact, the miners would be turned OFF.
I'm fairly certain that most mining operations are based in China and are heavily incentivized to use hydroelectric power, but could be wrong on that. Saw articles of it floating around everytime this gets brought up.
We try to minimize usage of those and we're trying. We're not trying and thinking that renewabling crypto is going make a difference here is underestimating the level of shit we're already in with or without crypto.
Uhh... no. Air travel for example was 2.5% of global CO2 emissions in 2018. This kind of nonsense is almost as bad as denialism because it pushes the false "we can't radically cut CO2 without abandoning all modern technology!" narrative.
Yes, we absolutely can. Coal burning and only coal burning accounts for a whopping 61% of global manmade CO2 emissions. That means oil, gas, and agriculture are responsible for less than 50% of global emissions combined.
Phasing out coal for electricity generation in favor of renewables and nuclear is by far the #1 thing we can do. We could stop using airplanes entirely and it would make no measurable impact compared to closing even 10% of all global coal power plants.
The narrative should be that coal is the enemy. Keep it simple and bang the drum: coal, coal, coal. After coal there's a long tail of CO2 emitters and the next one to tackle is the next largest. That's probably oil for land and sea transport, which is far easier to replace with alternatives (mostly EVs) than aviation. By the time we get rid of >50% of coal power we might already have replaced a double digit percentage of the car fleet with EVs.
You also need to increase taxes on imports from countries that burn coals if you ban coal. There is no point banning coal to import solar panels or EV car parts that are produced with cheap coal electricity.
Sorry are we suggesting that bitcoin is more than air travel?
A significant issue is that we can't electrify international air travel. The 2.5% remains relevant.
> we can't radically cut CO2 without abandoning all modern technology!
That's you projecting, I never said that and you're basically trying to reject my input by misrepresenting me as a dismissible hippy which is a disgraceful way to debate.
I bet my developers in Novosibirsk, Siberia are looking forward to this. It seems like this issue is cared about mostly by people privileged with Mediterranean climates.
I think you misunderstand. 1.5C does not mean temperature everywhere is just going to rise by 1.5C.
This means altering of global and local weather patterns with unpredictable consequences. Some places will get much colder, some will get much hotter. Some places will dry out. Some places will see more tornadoes and flooding.
And some will get both hotter and more humid causing them to be absolutely uninhabitable, because of combination of 100% humidity and over 35 degrees C is basically lethal.
So if you think this is just a "thing", and "what's the fuss, you are going to have more sunshine", you obviously don't understand what the problem is.
Your interpretation of these claims is politically fashionable but far from certain. Climates change by definition and how those changes will affect anything on a macro scale remains beyond us. The medieval warming period wasn’t anthropogenic and affected climate globally in myriad ways. This issue smacks of the privilege of Westerners. Check it.
I know you're being snide, but a warming planet is a profound concern for billions of low-income people across south and southeast Asia, Africa, Central America and low-lying Pacific territories.
I am not being snide. I am being wary of politically motivated Westerners demanding massive societal and economic changes in the name of protecting “billions of low income people.” This is exact same reasoning that the British used to justify colonizing and exploiting some of those places.
The prevailing sentiment in Russia about permafrost is that they can’t wait for it to thaw because it’s probably covering a lot of valuable resources. Breaking up arctic ice makes Russian shipping more valuable and Russia more strategically located globally. It’s hilarious to me how naively Western views on this issue are. Go talk to some Russians, maybe.
As I'm from Central/Eastern Europe, I do talk to them sometimes. Yes they are proud atomic superpower. And when westerners have doubts seeing the dwindling population, unimaginable corruption everywhere and lagging civilian technology - that's just naivete, right?
I should have specified you to ask someone who actually knows something about building on permafrost, sorry for the omission.
The temperature change is not the dangerous part of climate change for countries away from the equator. It's all the other changes that accompany that, which will affect Novosibirsk too directly or indirectly. Like loss of biodiversity, climate refugees, unstable political situation, etc.
I do agree with you that Canada and Russia are likely to suffer the fewest negative effects. But I wouldn't say it would be a net positive for them either. It's not impossible, but there are a lot of unknowns at this point and a lot of potential feedback loops that could be devastating, like mass extinction level devastating.
It's not evenly distributed, neither geographically or throughout the year. Some places will even get colder. Places like Siberia might get colder winners but warmer summers. Generally one can expect more extreme weather.
The people who will be hit the hardest are, unsurprisingly, the world's poorest. Particularly people in rural areas of Africa and India who can't afford having a bad growing season.
That is not always the case. If they have industries that depend on the cold, they may not wish it warmer. If their livelihood depends on glaciers that retreat they may not wish it warmer. If they depend on animal life that would migrate or go extinct, they may not like it. If they are on the coast that will end up flooded, they may not like it.
It is probably the case that there will be some people who "win" a bit as the planet warms, but on the whole I'm not sure anyone will be entirely better off for it in the long run.
Is there a service that helps identify property in northern climates (Canada/Russia/Alaska/etc.) that will be significantly more 'livable' in say 10-30 years time as the climate continues to warm? Would be a lucrative opportunity/ help young people plan for a more realistic future.
Michigan looks pretty good but moving people and infrastructure will be unlikely. Cities will likely adapt and build it into their cost. Miami for example will be underwater but levies and sea walls can be constructed. I don't imagine Miami moving to upstate Michigan.
1.5 C sounds like no big deal to me, being the uneducated American I am in terms of the metric system. Once you plug that into a calculator, I get "34.7" F. HOLY CRAP
That's a big change. Imagine Denver's average temp in December is currently 20 and with the change it would be 40-50. That's a MASSIVE change in Denver's ecosystem.
Skiing might not be a thing in Colorado in 5 years. We might be able to grow oranges soon....
- edit -
Apparently I am stupid. The Google Calculator uses the formula: `(1.5°C × 9/5) + 32 = 34.7°F` where as 0C is 32 F.
1.5 degrees C is 2.7 degrees F - the only thing you missed is that this is a difference, not an absolute temperature. Suppose C to F is 1.8*c+32=f. Take two values for c, x and y. Then:
To elaborate a bit, your calculation is wrong because 0°F is not 0°C. That makes arithmetic really weird when mixing units. 0°C is 32°F, so 34.7°F is actually only 2.7°F more.
I think this is the only common case of units using a different zero point.
That's not how the math works...you seem to have done a temperature conversion and ignore that Celsius and Fahrenheit place their O's at different places
+1.5 degrees C is about +3 degrees F but 0 degrees C is 32 degrees F.
You're confusing the two interpretations of "1.5°C". The calculation you're using is interpreting it as the absolute temperature, relative to Celsius zero (which is not the same as Fahrenheit zero!).
What you actually want to do is find how much Fahrenheit _delta_ is equivalent to a 1.5C delta. Try calculating the Fahrenheit value for 20C, and then for 21.5C, and then subtract.
Or you can look at the equation you're using, where the slope is a clear and constant 9/5. 9/5*1.5 = 2.7
You're getting a lot of downvotes, but this is legitimately the first time I realized that a 1.5C temperature difference really means a 5 degree difference in Fahrenheit. I think it would genuinely help Americans if this were reported in the scale we were familiar with. A 5 degree F difference sounds far, far more scary than a 2.5 degree C difference.
What do you think is more efficient? Some how convincing all Americans to learn the metric system to the point that they can intuit differences in temperature, or, explain it in a way they can understand it by simply using a different unit of measurement?
I mean, I agree with you, but trying to get the entirety of a country to educate themselves in time to do something about it is not really going to work.
Well, it really does say something about our hopes of doing something about it if we can't even get them to learn to multiply a number by 2 and add 30 (see, I'm being generous and rounding the numbers). Hell, let's make it even simpler. Just say "IN FAHRENHEIT IT'S MORE, WAY MORE."
Maybe if we call them "dollar degrees" and "euro degrees" we'll get their attention.
But seriously now, yes, I do think it would be a pretty good idea for Americans to learn the metric system and not just because of the issue at hand, and it shouldn't be that hard. Isn't it intuitive enough to remember "0 is for freezing and 100 is for boiling water"?
What am more worried about is the direct wholesale destruction of the biosphere. There are absolutely bonkers numbers about extinction, ocean acidification, runaway permafrost melt that actually could choke out a majority of people.
Worse still, these effects aren't easily solvable by stopping emissions, or blocking out the sun with mylar sheets, or any of the "low hanging" technological fruit -- the stuff that could be solved with today's space technology or electric car tech.
In order to actually solve these "deeper" problems, we will need an absolutely massive bio-engineering effort that is probably only possible with some kind of entropic breakthrough.
Evolution is basically hyper-organization, a point of locally super low entropy that only happens by hundreds of millions of years of energy expenditure. When a species dies, it's not those individuals, it's every one of those individuals that ever lived that dies. All that concentration of local entropy, destroyed forever. It's like using every GPU on planet earth to train a hyper-smart GPT-4, for many human lifetimes -- and then hitting rm -rf on the weights.