With 2024 and 2023 being 2nd and 1st resp. The last 11 years were the hottest 11 in recorded history. I don't know how more evidence we need. We are standing on the train tracks, the train is coming, and many of us say "Oh just look over there instead, we'll be fine."
Meanwhile - even if you do not care about climate - there is so much money to make with renewables (production, storage, mobility, etc). China and much of the rest of the world are charging ahead, while the US wants to be a petrol state.
There's no amount of evidence that'll help. We have had a sufficient amount of that for a long while. It's entrenched economic interests fostering a lack of political will that's keeping us from taking this seriously.
There's billions being made from promoting the idea of a climate crisis. If you go down the road of "anyone with financial interests can't be trusted", then the number of people you can listen to is very small.
Fortunately there are a few. Climate crisis skeptics are mostly pensioners who take down bogus science for free, as a retirement hobby. It's about as close to the platonic ideal of a neutral third party as you can get. Look into them, you'll see for yourself.
Meh. I used to think that in about 1996. Sea levels weren't rising, environmentalists were (and some continue to be) alarmist media-whoring ideologues whose ideal solution is for us all to make ourselves very small and just live less. But these days I'm persuaded global warming is happening. I'm not sure why I was persuaded but I guess mainly because it got hotter.
Edit: I have no idea now whether the downvotes are coming from denialists or environmentalists. Maybe both, we're all sensitive people.
It getting hotter since 1996 doesn't imply there is any climate crisis. It's also compatible with regular overlapping cycles, or with natural cycles + a small amount of change from CO2 levels that doesn't rise to the level of being a problem.
The temperature records are genuinely fraudulent. Investigate them in detail and anyone will see that it's true. They overstate the amount of warming considerably and try to hide the actual cycles that they once showed before climatologists started rewriting the past. But that also isn't incompatible with there being some warming. Probably the world got warmer since 1975, but before then it was getting cooler. That's why there was so much discussion of global cooling between 1945-1975. It's a history incompatible with industrialization having big effects.
Well, I'll mull it over. I'd like to look at figures for atmospheric carbon in past extremely hot periods (or just annoyingly hot periods), and the modern rate of emissions. It seems lucky if industrialization has an effect that's perceptible yet harmless, that's a fairly narrow window.
It's been a slow steady increase in CO2 since industrialisation.
The atmosphere has become increasingly better insulated in the thermal energy spectrum .. albeit still losing a lot of heat to the outer layers and to space.
Basic back of the envelope thermodynamics tells the story - more trapped energy at the surface layer - land, sea, and near surface air becomes warmer across the globe and that warmth cascades through energy transfers.
For some it's confusing that warmth -> rising air -> inrushing colder air -> circulating air cells -> freezing conditions (just as fridges / freezers heat pump via air pressure).
The first significant paper on this was
Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity (1967)
A great deal of key data (atmospheric makeup, sea tempreture records) came from hard nosed Cold War era research focused on nuclear weapons, sub tracking, and other such pursuits .. much of it "disguised" as environmental research (we listen to whales!) but not at all driven by a 'need' to invent and justify an AGW agenda (as some have claimed).
Sure, but it's not that lucky. You can't set your house on fire by adding more and more roof insulation, it's the same here. The greenhouse effect saturates, it's not linear https://www.scirp.org/pdf/acs2024144_44701276.pdf There's also lots of feedback loops. CO2 levels were much higher in the past but life thrived, it wasn't waterworld, it was just a lot greener. So it only sounds lucky because climatologists have claimed even very tiny changes can cause a crisis.
Remember, we're talking here about a gas that makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere. Water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas. CO2 wasn't measured directly before about 1960, but if you believe the ice core measurements it was about 0.02% in 1850. It would be a very fragile planet that could be tipped into disaster by a change of 0.02 percentage points in the level of a single gas.
There was the Permian–Triassic extinction event, the "great dying", where apparently the only large land animals to survive were the therocephalians and their prey lystrosaurus, and for both their survival seems to be due to burrowing. CO2 had hit 0.25%.
> and try to hide the actual cycles that they once showed before climatologists started rewriting the past.... That's why there was so much discussion of global cooling between 1945-1975.
What discussion, and what cycles, and what rewriting? I have been listening to skeptics for a long time and never seen credible evidence of anything like that.
Climatologists have influence and funding because of their claims about temperature trends. But the records from individual weather stations are aggregated into regional and global timeseries by climatologists themselves, giving them intense conflicts of interest. If the graphs they computed wandered up and down in ways not linked to human activity they'd be no more important to the world than the people who classify beetles. So they have a strong incentive to edit the data as they aggregate it, and they do.
Climatology didn't really exist before WW2. From the end of the war to about 1975 the world was cooling. The then-new field discussed it extensively and projected the trend forward to predict a new ice age. See it by doing a historical Google Scholar search. Watch out that in the beginning they called it "climatic change" not "climate change".
Published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers
ABSTRACT
The mean temperature for the Northern Hemisphere had a warming trend from 1890 to 1950 and a cooling trend since 1950. The eastern and central United States had colder temperatures in 1961–1970 than in 1931–1960
Claims like that are everywhere in the pre-1975 literature. Climatologists warned the US President to prepare America for a new ice age (https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/20...). Papers and news reports show the graphs of temperature they were using and the cooling trend is very clear. Modern temperature graphs look totally different and don't show what they were talking about. The reason is that starting around 2000 climatologists developed a culture of editing data to make it look like the world was warming. They alter the data by cooling the past and warm the present.
This has been noticed many times over the years, by different people.
Example: In 2021 NOAA announced a new global world temperature record which was lower than a previous world record they had announced. Someone queried this and NOAA told them that the temperature time series is a "reconstructed dataset", meaning every time they add a new month's data they recompute the entire historical record. This is a nonsensical violation of causality but the statement was attributed to their "climate experts". https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...
Example: In the first decade of the century, the practice of changing temperatures was still new and rare, but recorded temperatures had stopped going up. For a few years climatologists did nothing in the hope the unpredicted pause in global warming was temporary but it continued. By 2013 Der Spiegel was reporting on the "crisis" in climatology. "Data shows global temperatures aren't rising the way climate scientists have predicted. Now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change faces a problem: publicize these findings and encourage skeptics -- or hush up the figures." https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientist... Two years later they chose to edit the databases to delete the pause and asserted it had never happened: https://bibbase.org/network/publication/tollefson-climatecha...
The temperature record has been fake for a long time. No claims about temperature records can be trusted because they might change their mind about how hot it was on a certain day retroactively, years later.
These arguments give me the same vibe that the reelecting trump arguments had prior to the last election. Obviously Trump is operating on a much faster timeline than climate change but I'd expect the same behaviour (i.e. all the sceptics vanishing) once we really start to feel the impacts of it and arguments like these lose the last final shreds of plausibility.
I can't quite figure out the angle of why either. Are these the astro-turfing bots you hear so much about?
How about I try this:
Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for Jolo rice.
Thinking that anyone who disagrees with you isn't real sounds concerning. You should see a psychiatrist about that, in case it gets worse.
Anyway. You say skeptics will vanish when we "really start" to feel the impact of it. When? Pick a date. Man up, commit. Because everyone who picked a date in the past had their beliefs invalidated. The skeptics win, every single time.
March 2000. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event". "Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
You ask why. How about, because truth matters. How about, because the mitigations climate Kool-Aid drinkers demand are economy-cripplingly expensive. Those two alone are good enough reasons for anyone.
Notice how everything I say comes with sources and facts, and every reply like yours is an ad hominem concern troll? That's how. If you want to win arguments you have to step up and respond to facts.
There are very long-term culture wars, from before the term was invented. Consider:
* Hippies. They were great in many ways, but also fucking stupid, man.
* The New Age movement of the 90s, obsessed with dolphins and crystal healing and mystic composting toilets, and anti-human except when the humans sit in drum circles. Actually these days I've come to quite appreciate the music of Enya. But this cultural movement was also fucking stupid and very enamoured of performative environmental concerns, which fed into a sort of industry of selling concerns to New Agers. There was a lot of guilt tripping involved for anybody who wouldn't recycle, or whatever. So naturally that made me highly suspicious and unreceptive.
* The climategate email scandal of 2009. This one actually swayed me in favor of climate scientists, because I got to see what the emails from inside the echo chamber looked like, and to see how badly they were behaving when motivated by their careers and status, and actually the answer was "not all that badly", and the massaged figures, though shameful, weren't all that massaged, and their attitudes, though biased, were actually fairly sincere. But they were part of a biased "us against them" sort of struggle, where they wanted belief.
So you get ongoing skepticism just because of, you know, backlashes, pushbacks, people rightfully wanting to be independent thinkers in the face of other people who apparently want them to conform mindlessly. The idea that it might all be a popular delusion is plausible because there's always been a lot of popular delusions around, so you've got to respect analytical doubters, if they truly are analytical.
I am still confused why this argument is still valid to anyone...
Not only China has 4 times more population than the US, but they produce all the stuff that the US buys, so if the US had to produce all that stuff on their own they would emit so much more carbon.
Obviously what matters is how much of the world’s products they produce - especially products that require high energy input. I can’t imagine why you think per capita is the appropriate statistic to compare.
This has already been pointed out to you in this discussion, so it seems you are not actually engaging with the information you’re being provided with for some reason.
Whenever you hear a politician say "carbon neutral by 2050", interrupt them. The real goal is to avoid getting too far over 1.5 degrees warming. We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system. The year 2050 is meaningless. Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
You're still hearing politicians talk about climate change? This could be an American bubble but I haven't heard talk of climate change from US politicians, or the other global leaders that filter through our news cycle, since 2023.
I would imagine it's a relevant political football in most first world countries. I avoid American news, but the bits I see make me think it's probably still focused on culture war garbage.
2050 is not meaningless. Its close enough to feel like its achievable but far enough away that you can put off immediate action and still feel there is time to get it done. Reminds of the lyrics of the spirit of the west song:
Berkeley Earth berkeleyearth.org › home › global temperature report for 2023
Global Temperature Report for 2023 - Berkeley Earth
February 29, 2024 - 2023 was the warmest year on Earth since direct observations began, and the first year to exceed 1.5 °C above our 1850-1900 average. ...
Exactly what is it about CO2, a plant food, that scares you so much? You do realize that green plants react to increased CO2 percentage with stronger growth?
He was asking you to try to 'steelman', or take seriously the strongest version of, the arguments of your counterparts, rather than being dismissive.
"Plants like CO2" is not a counterargument to "Increased atmoospheric CO2 will have a number of outcomes that are net negative for humanity", so I presume they're asking you to actually think about the argument being made and respond to it, not some other, made up one.
My new conspiracy theory is that Trump wants Greenland, because most of south and central America will be too hot. There are 800mln people south of Colorado. 30% will emigrate north.
> We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system.
Then I'd be far more worried about nuclear war than minor temperature excursions. Aside from that "non recoverable" damage happens every day. What do you think mining is?
> Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
On average it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler last year than it was the previous where I live in northern CA.
Local weather is what matters to individuals. So is access to affordable energy.
You cannot coerce someone to ignore their local weather and sabotage access to affordable energy because of some global average. It’s a losing battle that’s fundamentally misled.
You have to coerce the individual to follow the strategic direction despite tactical disadvantages. This is what leadership means.
If we all individually spend more money to accommodate the effects of climate change than their causes, then we are wasting enormous economic resources.
Sure, but local is a radius. There's my local, then there's my region's local, then there's my country's local. As wonderful as globalism sounds on paper, if saving the global average leads to a drought or a flood for another country, or another region, then you are trying to convince others of giving up a lot for no tangible relevant gain.
I’m amused that the argument is that we are in a Mr Burns position where different kinds of pollution we were emitting was balancing out and somehow fighting pollution is the reason global warming is worse? While I’m sure it has some effect, the amount of co2 we pump out every year as a species is insane. The effect of ship pollution mitigating that is marginal at best
Some systems pulling the average up and some pulling down but the average of them is net up. I wonder though if it would have been better or worse for us if the net change ended up negative (dropping temps every year) instead. Probably worse, right?
Stratospheric aerosol injection is the leading geoengineering proposal for a reason. If you have well-supported reasons to be skeptical, you should share it, but just saying "idk doesn't sound right to me" isn't convincing.
Even if it were meaningful, is the proposal to fight global warming to keep dirty ships? That’s an insane strategy.
More realistically, there’s vested interests in existing ships and shipyards not being made obsolete so any minute effect is overhyped as “this is how we solve global warming”.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an acquaintance - he was convinced that anthropogenic global warming was impossible because a volcanic eruption emits so much CO2 and was completely unwilling to consider evidence that perhaps humans emitting annually 200x more than all volcanoes combined might have an effect.
You want to unthinkingly reject a proposal that makes things better because you can't understand the third order effects and refuse to accept any evidence.
The amount of aerosol you need to I next is enormous, it needs to be sprayed at an altitude higher than realistic means of injection are feasible, and it has to be done in a way that doesn’t produce so much CO2 that it defeats the point.
Can you imagine an extant tech that can come close to doing that at the required scale? I can’t.
It would be cheaper and more practical to talk about space-based sunshields, and that’s about as practical as prayer. At the altitudes any realistic glider can reach you’d have to use sulfur aerosols and not ice, and in either case you’d need to inject gigatons per year, every year because at that altitude aerosols are very short-lived.
A realistic aircraft capable of those payloads will burn avgas, no solar craft comes close to the capability. The side effects such as a significant increase in acid rain, are not trivial either.
These are fantasies of people who cannot accept the reality of what we’re facing.
Is there a real practical solution to this? It seems like all proposed solutions in last 40 years are a drop in the ocean, or just a money grab scams. Only thing that really worked for such global scale is the ozone layer repair. Global warming/climate change I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
Plenty of solutions, but politicians will never make it happen.
We calculated that capping personal emissions (mostly doable via peer pressure should we get this moving as normal people) to some top 1 percent 25 metric carbon ton and going plant based would get us net-zero while additionally getting rid of the zillionaire problem and adding extra 50-100 gigaton rewilding effect to the table.
With no bigger than marginal effect on anyone's QOL.
But we're SOL as the propaganda machines of the zillionaires keep dividing normal people to fake dichotomies.
No, there's really just a few select politicians standing in the way. Governments around the world have implemented tons of policies to attempt to address the crisis, but unless every country participates, it's economically suicidal. Carbon-intensive industries can simply move to the US, strengthening them, while those countries attempting to carry the burden of preventing climate change will be equally affected by looming disasters.
Because the US is the only country that defected from the Paris agreement. The US is the only country led by climate change deniers. Tons of countries are led by malevolent and selfish leaders, but none are as incompetent and unpredictable as the US.
Climate change mitigation is a collective action problem in the form of a prisoner's dilemma or a tragedy of the commons. If every agent (i.e. country) refuses to cooperate, every agent will suffer major damage from environmental disasters. If all agents cooperate, they only suffer minor damage from economic policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
At first sight, this doesn't seem like much of a problem. The solution seems self-evident, before one considers countries adopting different strategies:
If one country defects, they benefit massively from hosting the world's carbon intensive processes, yet all countries will equally share in environmental catastrophe. Thus, the optimal strategy for any single self-interested agent is always to defect, no matter what the others do. Paradoxically, the optimal strategy for each agent in isolation leads to a catastrophically bad outcome for all agents if they all choose that strategy. Everyone wants to be the parasite, but if no one is the host, we all die.
It wouldn't matter if the US were a tiny island nation, but the US has the largest carbon footprint, the largest economy, and the most capable military. The US led the democratic world. They could have solved the prisoner's dilemma by enforcing global cooperation. If the US and its allies would threaten to sanction those countries who don't cooperate, the payout matrix would shift towards cooperation being a stable Nash-equilibrium. It would no longer be in a country's interest to screw everyone else over, so they'd stop. The US and the entire world would be better off.
* has been the largest cummulative emmitter of CO2,
* has "outsourced" much of the emissions due to its current consumption levels to offshore manufacturers such as China,
* was an early recognizer of the serious implications of CO2 emmissions causing AGW, going back to the 1970s,
* was and still is home to some of the largest fossil fuel companies that have been activly gaslighting the world about the realities of AGW since the 1970,
* is, or at least was, a global leader that was admired with an aspiration lifestyle that has set the tone for lifestyle globally - a lifestyle with consumption and emission attributes that have disasterous side effects if attained globally.
There are some 190+ countries about the globe, it's very much the case that not all countries are equal actors in this issue.
The real solution is pricing the true cost of the externalities fairly and globally.
Everything which isn't sustainable must he taxed to the degree to offset the damage. We know well that economic incentives work best and that markets are efficient to achieve optimal solutions.
The core issue is just game theory to coordinate globally all players to prevent free riding.
I heard about this[1] recently, essentially spurring a massive plankton bloom to capture carbon where it ends up on the sea floor and becomes future oil deposits in a few millenia.
The nice thing about it is that it doesn't require global cooperation.
I was under the impression that there have been multiple large extinction events in the past caused by excessive anaerobic decomposition underwater that led to the oceans becoming swamps and giving off nasty toxic gasses.
Before areas become completely uninhabitable, we will see areas become increasingly stressed: heat waves, more extreme weather events, poorer crop yields, depleting aquifers.
Stress increases conflict risk. Fights for essential resources (land, water, food, shelter) will break out long before those essential resources are completely gone.
If we skip past the immense suffering and death part, we will probably end up on a planet where national borders have been redrawn by war and desperation, and a smaller population that lives in more northerly climes.
Our politicians are already thinking about them, which is why they are cracking down on immigration and generating relentless propaganda demonizing refugees and asylum seekers.
Which was, stop using CFCs, and stop venting them into the atmosphere to "dispose" of them. We also stopped lighting rivers on fire for mostly the same reasons, stop dumping industrial waste in them.
> I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
Ocean shipping produces more pollution than most countries. There are only like 5 countries that produce more carbon than the worldwide shipping fleet. If they cared then "cheap crap from China" wouldn't exist.
It's a scam. They want to monopolize the economy and they're using your environmental consciousness as the wedge to push you against your own best interests.
Ocean freight accounts for 2-3% of global emissions. It is orders of magnitude more efficient and clean than air or road freight per ton-kilometer. It's twice as efficient as rail. The ability to efficiently transport goods enables your current standard of living. A world economy without ocean freight would be minuscule and of course far more polluting, without even considering land use.
Yes, we got to adapt, we won't cool it down and "repair" what is broken.
However we can slow down the effects and try to stop the effects. So it's "only" 1.5° or whatever, not 3°, 5° or 10°. And if we raise average by 10° at least not by the years 2100, but 2200 to give time to adapt.
"Adapting" means resettling people, restructuring agriculture and food production, etc.
(All numbers are quite arbitrary picks, just as any goal one tried to set before)
CO2 output per person in the US (all sources including industry, etc): ~13-14,000kg
Average distance driven per year per capita in the US: ~20,000km
Average CO2 output of current private vehicle fleet: ~250g/km
Therefore, over one third of total CO2 output per person is personal vehicle use. Considering only CO2 output due to personal choices driving has to be well over half.
Most people don't - or refuse - to consider the obvious choice to take personal responsibility. Drive less.
Driving isn't realistically a personal choice. Roadways designed for cars extend from every single point in the country to every other. The support for alternative methods of transportation varies greatly by area, but is generally poor.
Riding a bike or taking the bus is objectively the worse option for most people. That's not personal choice, that's policy.
Reversing course for a car-culture country like the US would take 50+ years. If it's even possible, which I personally don't think it is — the US is too far gone.
To an extent I agree with you. Some places and lifestyles (e.g. means of earning a living) don't make cutting back on driving a viable choice.
However, these things can and do change (introduction of public transport and saner planning allowing local shops and the possibility for children get to and from school autonomously for example).
One problem as I see it is that many people that don't have a viable choice other than driving everywhere are politically opposed to structural change. Adopting this political point of view is also a personal choice.
love how a completely valid point gets downvoted becuase the average person refuses to believe they are part of the problem "no! its those big corporations and airline industry! my daily commute has no input at all!"
I guess returning to the office isn't so great. Pointy hair bosses rage everywhere.
But beyond driving less, surely eating further down the foodchain helps as well. Plants and shellfish are efficient. Cows are not. Eat fewer burgers and a few more lentils and mussels. Unless you are RFK Jr then of course please eat lots and lots of fatty cow, tallow, butter. Go full on Atkins please and follow right behind him.
This also means two thirds of emissions are not due to vehicular emissions. Let’s tackle that first, more bang for the buck?
Also - does that per capita figure include cargo? If so, how much? Does it matter if random individual takes personal
Responsibility and stops driving when all those long haul trucks will still be on the road?
My point is that in terms of personal responsibility nothing comes remotely close to driving but a vanishingly small proportion of people are willing to consider this.
I would say it's often because people see individual examples in action. Some people follow those examples. Then more do. You are more influential than you think.
There are a lot of money scams out there to be sure.
It's unlikely that something like carbon capture will ever significantly reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. It's just too energy intensive.
But there are a lot of practical solutions to significantly curb emissions that mostly just require regulations and taxes.
Things like building out rail transport. Heavily taxing air travel. Taxing all forms of carbon emission (fuel taxes would be pretty effective). Subsidizing non-co2 emissions, pushing for electrification when possible and power generation which uses non-CO2 emission. Stop wasteful pipedreams like "clean coal". Force data centers to be better citizens. For example, make them buy the battery/solar systems to offset their consumption. Make them participate in district heating schemes.
There's also some hope that even without intervention some of this will happen somewhat naturally. Solar and battery is already very cheap. Both are causing changes in the shipping and transit equations.
Technologically practical? Certainly. Kick renewables and electrification into high gear. Treat it like the emergency that it is.
Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.
Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster has a pretty good summary of the challenges and solutions.
There is developing real practical solutions, and then there there is the willingness of governments, big corporations, and the general population, to implement real practical solutions. The latter is much much harder than the former.
As with most difficult problems, this is a messy political problem, not a technical one. There is zero chance we avoid 1.5C gain. The best you can do is make life decisions for yourself to make your lifetime as comfortable for you as you can, assuming it will happen. I started doing that 5 years ago.
I'm not sure what we should do, it's very hard to determine what minimizes harm and maximizes benefits at a global scale. It's certainly not as simple as extremists would like to believe. Certainly it would be much (MUCH) less risky to slow warming as much as possible and maintain constant or slowly reducing CO2 levels.
I think from the standpoint of predicting what will happen, my best guess is that people will use fossil fuels until it is economically not viable to do so. If you want hasten it at an individual level, buy solar panels and have your house disconnected from the grid until fees you pay no longer subsidize fossil fuels. Frown at people and refuse to give them positive social cues when they buy a car that isn't electric. Instead of "oh nice car" just say "it would be so cool if they had a plugin version!". Support electrification of things like heat and water heating so long as it can be powered by non-fossil sources.
In the long run I think solar power, effective battery technology, and the peaking of the global population combine to cause fossil fuel usage to reduce over the next 100 years or so until CO2 levels stabilize. Lots of large CO2 emitters are already leveling off - the output is too high to sustain but at least it's no longer increasing year over year - such as from cement production.
Honestly it's not much but that's what you can do, larger social movements and political action do not work when someone's decision is whether to spend $800 a month or $100 a month to heat their house. Anyone who says it does should buy a thermometer, but instead they will get a plane ticket to the next big city to run around in the street yelling at police (literally the only people paid to not care about your slogans) while nobody really notices.
Electric cars are the savior of the auto industry, not of the climate. It needs to become viable for most people to get around without cars at all. The intensity of their resource consumption, both for manufacture and for infrastructure, independent of their fuel source, cannot scale up for the world population.
If we are in overshoot scenario even reducing emissions may not be enough. There are warming gases currently trapped in permafrost, the natural carbon storage capacity is very dynamic, so global warming may target new (worse) equilibrium beyond what we think we can achieve in best case scenario.
And if my grandmother is dead it's too late to ask her to borrow money. It's easy to chain together low probability what-ifs and come up with everything on fire.
Were you aware that the last time the planet was estimated to have co2 levels over 420ppm the global temperature was 10 degrees Celsius warmer overall? This is the global equilvant of being locked in a car in a sunlit parking lot.
Nobody has to "like" them. The centralized command and control structure is mostly in place to just force them down everyone's throats. Once we have centralized digital currency it will be a foregone conclusion
If only. Given how power and influence works currently, I would guess that those that have real control over these currencies would most likely use that power as they do now - to further their exploitation and pillaging of the earth with environmental considerations coming a distant second (or third, fourth, whatever...)
How will a centralized digital currency affect whether I decide to burn carbon fuels? If it gets obnoxious enough I can just use a different currency instead.
A change in attitudes is not enough. Structural change is needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, the population is unable to achieve results.
The population is achieving results. Most of these results are occurring in China, which has begun an unimaginably huge deployment of renewables and nuclear. Europe is also making progress. The rest of Asia will go next, and then (as it develops industrially) so will Africa. Even parts of North America will quickly electrify: for example, Canada just agreed to reduce tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6% from 100%.
Our ecological goals are to make biosphere damage scarce, but our economic practices aim to make scarce things plentiful. We need something to balance out the effects of scarcity-based economics.
In the very fun board game ‘Evolution : Climate’ you “breed” animals designed to survive the climate conditions on the board. One strategy is to switch to breeding ‘carnivores’ that then can feast on the creations of other players. They downside tho is that once other players evolve their animals to have carnivore protections (fight back, scales, protective shells etc) the carnivores start to quickly starve and that player must quickly change out of this eat everything strategy back to a more sustainable strategy.
In a similar way I think what works is to push back against growth only and growth at all costs approaches and back practises and models and communities that are working in other ways.
The trouble is, when I receive my paycheck, it just comes as "dollars". I don't know whether my employer got them by providing services to communities which are working in other ways, or whether they come from more nefarious behavior--and I have no way to refuse one sort but accept the other.
The kind of community action you're describing happens, but we need to find ways to help it scale.
Living in the coldest corner of my country, this is an extension of Siberia and getting hotter and hotter by the year, I amateurly confirm the global observations. Specifically I estimate the average temperature increase of the latest 3 years to be about 2-3C comparing with >20 years ago. A vital decease in heating costs with a whole month without heating is welcome. The future becomes from manageable to fate.
30 years ago I attended a university lecture in an economics class and the professor spoke about the economic consequences of global warming - some places will be better off and plenty of places will be worse off. There will be water shortages in some places, while heavy rainfall in others. He presented it as a given fact that the global warming is coming - and pretty much the whole audience was shocked. Finally someone asked if he really thinks that it is unavoidable. And his answer was yes, that is human nature. As long as fossil fuels are there and cheap to explore someone will use them.
30 years later it looks like he was right.
Edit: the IPCC was founded in 1988 thus people started in the 70ies to understand that there will be a problem but there was a very long period of inactivity. Personally I am quite optimistic that fusion will become commercially available before 2040.
Denialism is not the majority position of the readership as a whole in my experience.
It's more that such titles attract the denialists and edgelords like bees to sucrose.
Lack of significant action is more a majority position, and that's unsuprising given many people struggle with how to make meaningful change as individuals or accept greater risk and reduced returns as C-suits of corporations.
I can't think of a single time in history that humanity responded to a threat in a fully coordinated manner. Maybe this is the first time, but the incentive stack from the individual voter all the way up to geopolitical grand strategy argues against it.
Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.
We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.
Ironically enough, as climate change becomes worse, we here in Europe might ironically end up with a way colder climate due to the melting ice caps especially in the Arctic disrupting the Gulf Stream among other things.
Also, this kind of "how can climate change be real since it's winter, snowy, and cold" is a climate change denier take. I'd refrain from it if I were you.
It's probably the fact that you created two accounts in 30 mins to astroturf/troll a thread about climate change which is an actual, measurable phenomenon.
What would you explain? Alarmism needs exaggerated alarm, which isn't found in the earlier comment. One could project their own worries about a warming globe onto the comment, perhaps, but that alarm would stem from within oneself, not the comment. Another might see a warming globe as the best thing that could ever happen and there is nothing in said comment that would dismiss that.
It wasn’t auto censored. And you didn’t explain anything, you made a silly and provably false statement and were understandably downvoted almost immediately. Just like if you were to claim the moon landing was faked.
Suppose someone did post that the moon landing was faked. What purpose would downvoting it serve?
1. If posted in good faith, they lose an opportunity to learn. HN should not be joining the ranks of the growing anti-education establishment.
2. If it is trolling, the downvote offers a "read receipt" telling that the wanted attention was found, which only further encourages more trolling. Do not feed the trolls.
There is no situation where downvoting would be a positive contribution. Well, unless you find enjoyment in reading the "why did you downvote this?" comments that sometimes follow. But be careful with that as someday you'll start to see them as just being annoyingly repetitive.
The presence of hyperactive censors has no bearing on the truth of whatever claim they're censoring. People like to steer whether or not they know where they're going.
Your flagged comment goes beyond claiming alarmism (i.e. exaggeration) on the part of others. It's conspiratorial in tone and uses an unnecessary insult.
You are free to say whatever you want. Society is free to dismiss your factually incorrect statements. That isn’t censorship, nobody is required to listen to your nonsense or give you a platform to spout it.
nevermind satellites, just diff the temp records from say, 1950-2000 and the ones reporting that data today and there's a lot of jank. urbanization around the thermometers also makes it appear as though global temperatures are rising, but all the data really says is that cities are heat islands.
first order: verify satellite data. Secondly, move all sensors to locations where they are unaffected by heat islanding and other man-made influences.
yes, if a city gets hotter in temperature because it grows, that obviously is a concern, but it doesn't affect people in the countryside, or on the other side of the planet, etc. (1/1000th as much if anything, i'll hedge).
the second thing will never happen. I am sure someone will reply why it's literally impossible and stupid to put thermometers someplace where the weather is natural. Because if we did move all of the sensors, suddenly there wouldn't appear to be any 1.5C change or anything, and there's thousands of egos at stake, here.
Google "urban heat island effect site:realclimate.org"
Scientists have been aware of the effect and correcting for it since before you heard about it. In general, if you can think of something in five minutes, scientists (whose lifetime job is to consider these problems) have considered that.
top post is from 13 years ago. there are more recent meta studies and research done. ( i know of at least 3, that were 'rebutted' by realclimate.org but not satisfactorily.) it's fine to handwave on a forum "oh of course they've contemplated this you simpleton!" I've kept up with the literature; i've read the IPCC reports, for years. there is contention about this, about the heat record (like, prehistoric).
GISS and GHCN use, among other things, models to homogenize temperatures across UHI and "rural" areas, and these are two i found with a cursory search. there are others. they only agree that it is, for sure, getting warmer. they arrive at different values.
Different.
Values.
The satellite date we've been using since 1978? well, every 10-15 years they get replaced, and the satellites report different TSI values. (i can link a picture of the satellite TSI data as a single graph if you'd like!)
Different.
Values.
> "Instead, most groups (including NASA GISS), were relying on automated computer programs that tried to guess when station changes might have introduced a bias. These programs used statistical algorithms that compared each station record to those of neighboring stations and applying “homogenization adjustments” to the data.
I'm not sure i know the exact locations, but NASA and NOAA do, and people who have seen the data and locations (and therefore know what is rural or not) say things like this about realclimate.org's handwave of UHI:
> "Because urban areas still only represent 3-4% of the global land surface, this should not substantially influence global temperatures.
> However, most of the weather stations used for calculating the land component of global temperatures are located in urban or semi-urban areas. This is especially so for the stations with the longest temperature records. One reason why is because it is harder to staff and maintain a weather station in an isolated, rural location for a century or longer."
further from a paper critiquing the GHCN model's homogenization algorithm:
> "When they were compiling the Global Historical Climatology Network dataset, the National Climatic Data Center included some basic station metadata, i.e., data describing the station and its environment. For each station, they provided the station name, country, latitude, longitude and elevation. They also provided a number of classifications to describe the environment of the station - whether it was an airport station or not; if it was on an island, near the coast or near a lake; and what the average ecosystem of the stations’ surroundings was, e.g., desert, ice, forest, etc"
oh and an interesting note, if you are wondering "well, how many fully rural stations do we have data for at least 95% of the 'last 100 years?"
If you initially make factually wrong comment then you should at least apologize and say that you are sorry for being wrong, not keep pushing your agenda further.
Your behaviour is both incorrect (you were shown at the specific place) and intentional (you have ignored that). So, I have downvoted all your posts in this topic because I have observed the efficiency of the correct words to your ignorance. Usually I am glad to argue about the climate topic, but sometimes downvotes work better.
Ok, so why not just be specific? “On record” usually means since we started recording history , at least 5k years ago.
And have you looked into the records? satellite surface temps and high resolution recording have not been around for very long. 1880 methods were very crude and narrowly scoped.
> “On record” usually means since we started recording history , at least 5k years ago.
I'm a journalist who has published "highest/lowest on record" statistics tens, if not hundreds of times, and I've never heard of anyone thinking it means "since Herodotus" or anything like that.
How would readers know the reference point unless you inform them. Of course they will defer to colloquialisms . In some cases 5000 years , some 1000 years . With something as broad and impactful as this, they certainly assume more than 150 years .
You both have a point, reading further provides context as to which record is being talked about.
There are, of course, many records - newspaper records, human logged records of conditions that day, and human created records of proxy data - ice cores, dendrochronology, cosmic ray induced crystal formation in beach sand, etc.
and scientists edit the historical temperatures because of, and i hope you can see my eyeroll here "anomalous readings" - but they're overwhelmingly erroneous in only one direction. that's strange.
i'm literally in the middle of trying to parse a couple of papers that examine the methodology of at least the NOAA homogenization model.
did you know there's only eight sensors, globally, that we have data for >95% of the last 100 years, that are labelled as "fully rural"? so this means that 99.9% of the stations must therefore be, at least, more likely to be adjusted, doesn't it? The entire premise that UHI is irrelevant because they "normalized" the 99.9% and it showed it was irrelevant is... i don't know, it's something, though.
I agree it's suspicious. Rather than dismiss it altogether, I'm trying to understand the e2e process. i.e. divide 1880-present into Epochs and understand what %-age of coverage, resolution & how precise were the instruments
That’s not the raw data. The original recordings were made by merchants on parchment. They measured the volume of water in a wooden box, to set the buoyancy for their loads
For the interested, here[1] is an article on an attempt to recreate and verify measurements made during the HMS Challenger expedition in the 1870s.
It was recently done so the full results aren't out, but one aspect they noted was that the traditionally-created hemp rope stretched about 10% so temperatures were taken at slightly deeper depths than expected. This can be used to calibrate the data from HMS Challenger.
I appreciated your comment because more discussion will better help everyone understand the various tranches of surface temperature observations.
I did a quick review, and appreciated the article because they were clear about how their methods different from the recordings. For one using different pressure sensors, and they mentioned the depth differential they measured would lead to variability in the ocean temp readings.
Hah. Shall I present it to you on a silver platter then?
If you read the NASA page, they explicitly cite GHCNd, a raw surface temperature and precipitation dataset that goes back quite far. There's many other similar datasets you can find if you're willing to look.
Check out the readme for the csv format description, and /by-year for the raw rows:
picked four stations at random[0] and it's just precip numbers, no temps, no humidity, no insolation, etc.
are you sure you linked what you think you linked?
[0] /by-station and then unclutched my scroll wheel and spun it for arbitrary amount of time, re-engaged clutch and clicked what was under the cursor. repeated 3 more times. i did a fifth, where the one i was looking at was identical to the fourth one, but had a 1 in the least significant portion of the station ID instead of a 4, in case it was like, "4" is precip, "1" is temps, and i happened to click "4" 4 times in a row.
HAHA you're completely right! or, and this is just some advice: don't tell strangers to look up data, link the data, and it not be what you said it was.
If i promise you punch and pie, you'd be pretty upset if it wasn't.
There are tons of raw data available freely and publicly. In my estimation, there is no comparable scientific discipline with a better curated data environment.
What exact raw data would you want? I am sure ChatGPT can throw together some python that will download the relevant data.
If you want the raw data, you'll have to go dig in the archives to find the log books and card decks.
This[1] paper goes into some detail on how the digital records were constructed from the log books, card decks and such. This[2] paper deals with an update of those digital records, including new digitization efforts. You can download the raw digital data from ICOADS here[3].
Regardless, ascii encoding isn’t raw data. You’re making software engineer assumptions. Statistical noise is introduced 4-5 steps before the data is recorded digitally.
Even after it’s digitized, more noise is introduced through recording errors and normalization.
To understand the original distribution, the entire workflow needs to have been recorded
Climate deniers are perfectly trained for finding some weak spots in any data anytime they want. It would be better for them to be trained enough to show at least any links to any studies though. It is so hard to convince a climate denier to give at least one climate-denying source for the sake of experiencing some laugher together.
you're right this is much to complicated and important for anyone to understand. just take our word for it that we have to make things more expensive, raise taxes, and restrict freedoms to fix it.
If you are serious about this, you know full well the data is out there. So stop asking for it and just go get it, go write some code and process it, then come back here and report your results.
Yeah, we definitely need to put more weather stations in urban areas and remove rural ones. That's how we can reach first place every year. Being number 3 is disappointing.
Meanwhile - even if you do not care about climate - there is so much money to make with renewables (production, storage, mobility, etc). China and much of the rest of the world are charging ahead, while the US wants to be a petrol state.
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