Given the lag in the climate, isn’t 1.5C warming more or less unavoidable now? We would need extremely steep emissions reductions that aren’t happening.
I enjoyed ‘Under a Green Sky’, which combines a brief history of palaeontology (and amusing academic point settling) with the prediction that warming will eventually cause huge releases of hydrogen sulphide.
We are perhaps entering a negative feedback loop where disruption makes countries less keen to work together on emissions reductions as metaphorical bridges get pulled up (is Russia going to bother even pretending to care any more?).
So historically in the climate modeling world, +6-8 degrees was considered the "we're all screwed" tipping point; this has led to recent optimism where it now looks like we'll probably level out at +2-3.5 degrees, and only some of us are screwed.
The major tipping points that are estimated at 1.5 degrees are Greenland, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and coral reefs dying off.
The former two have an associated sea level rise of about 3.5-4.5 meters all together.
So I think this article isn't changing the "some of us are screwed" narrative substantially; it's more interesting because it pulls out all of the major forecast disasters and gives estimates of when (temperature wise) they'll happen.
As the sibling comment mentions methane contains carbon, but yes it’s worth pointing out because the short-term GHG potency of methane is extremely high. There’s potential for some terrible feedback loops here.
> The impact on the climate may mean an influx of permafrost-derived methane into the atmosphere in the mid-21st century, which is not currently accounted for in climate projections.
(Note this is an unexpected type of abrupt thaw; the models probably do include the impact of more gradual permafrost thawing. Cold comfort though, and polar ice is melting at a faster rate than predicted overall.)
Probably not. However, it seems that regardless of what they predict, nothing will happen.
Humanity is like a toddler, only learns when you feel the consequences, rather than learning by being told about it. Also like a stubborn toddler like first needing to experience an almost trauma to change behavior, and apparently we haven't had that trauma yet.
Maybe, but it's not like great trade-off on a global scale.
Extreme latitudes are colder because they receive their sunlight at an angle. The tilt of the Earth and the seasons make things more complicated, but conceptually, if you are at latitude 45, you are also at a 45 degree angle relative to the sun, so sunlight is only 70% as intense as it is at the equator.
With increased global temperatures, northern latitudes may have longer growing seasons, but they'll still have a different, probably inferior climate to what you're losing further south.
So while there may be winners and losers on a global scale, the winners will probably win less than the losers lose.
I don’t know why, but the author’s writing style in Under a Green Sky irritated me so much I couldn’t get past the first few pages. Maybe it changes if I stick it out.
I think I know what you mean. He has quite an arrogant streak and is amusingly dismissive of large swathes of people (“the Basques are so dour!”). It’s worth persevering with, imo.
I do believe that we are doomed as mass extinction is now inevitable. I also believe that PTB will launch wars of depopulation to ‘thin the herd’, as it were…for survival of the species.
We can’t fight the planet. We quadrupled our population in just one century. Should have invested in anti ageing tech, reproductive technology and controlled our consumption/population. Point of no return now.
IIRC (sorry, no sources) there is no real "lag" or "inertia" in climate. It has been demonstrated that if we stopped any emission right now, the climate would rapidly stabilize to its current state (in a couple of years).
However, and maybe it's worse, human civilizations do have huge inertia when it comes to changing our way of doing things. I have no doubt that someday in the future, we will be a zero emission species. But I'm really unsure it will be soon enough.
I’m fairly certain that’s not the case, because even with current levels of warming all the polar ice that can melt at current temperatures has not yet. A short video on background:
That means some level sea level rise and any other climactic changes resulting from melting polar ice are coming regardless of what we do now. We can influence how much this happens, but we’ve already committed to a lot of damage.
Our current situation is like a big glass of ice tea that you have set out in the sun. For some time it will remain cool and refreshing, but once the ice cubes have finished melting it quickly becomes warm and blah. We need to move it back into the shade, but that's not possible until we've invested heavily into carbon sequestration, and that's not even fully feasible yet. There are a few pilot programs here and there, but nothing that could be scaled up affordably. Not even close. Worse, any solution requires political will to implement, and as you can see from even this thread there are rich and powerful interests willing to spend a lot of lobbying money to make anything like it as politically unpopular as possible. Even in a normally calm and rational HN forum you have them stopping only slightly short of calling climate change activists the new Hitler. Carbon Capture is supposed to be the supply side of the carbon market, but since the technology doesn't exist those markets have never worked.
This goes against everything I’ve read on climate change and its long term effects. The world’s oceans are extremely slow reacting components of the climate. Wikipedia ”climate intertia”. If you have more recent data then please post.
There's an interesting movie called Don't Look Up[0] which is a metaphor for climate change politics.
> The impact event is an allegory for climate change, and the film is a satire of government, political, celebrity, and media indifference to the climate crisis.[6][7]
After watching, I agreed that when the world eventually burns, people will be live streaming and tweeting about it instead of going out and actually doing something about it. We all have a part to play in this, and armchair activism behind the comfort of social media will do jack shit to solve this problem. Addressing climate change head on will be the biggest amount of cooperation humanity will ever have to do. After we address it, it will not be as hard to maintain decent temps. We can sail on this rock for millennia once we get out there and make shit happen.
The truth is, no one is willing to give up their comfort and luxury that's necessary to decrease global energy usage without putting lives at risk. It's technically possible, but people are use unwilling currently. I think as things get worse there will come a point where people start doing so out of overwhelming climate anxiety
Man that movie was horrible. Unfortunate because it might've been helpful in convincing people to believe in consequences if it was good enough to finish.
I keep seeing people talk about the seriousness of climate change, but when it comes time to propose policy solutions, the answers are "$X trillion of dubiously helpful spending and restrict the supply of energy." I think we all agree (even the so-called "deniers") that climate change is a serious potential problem. What our civilizations disagree on is the solution.
When the revealed policy preference of world leaders is to shut down the AC in summer in a desert, turn off the heat in a Scandanavian winter, and restrict energy supplies to developing countries, you don't have a workable solution. Current policy prescriptions are going to kill a lot more people than the warming they are trying to prevent. Further, it suggests that the most ardent activists are not actually serious about solving the problem: If they were serious, they would propose something less anti-human.
Creating more studies about how bad it could be actually hurts the cause of stopping climate change at this point. It doesn't convince anyone.
Restricting access to cheap reliable energy is definitly going to cost lives. Ask any developing nation and they see the effects. It is one of the biggest issues that comes up whenever they try to get a global agreement. It's why China and India still insist on using coal to generate electricity.
Burning coal also costs lives, both directly through pollution, and indirectly through climate change. "X costs lives" isn't a worthwhile argument unless you show that it costs more lives than the alternative.
Without considering climate change externalities, the math on coal power is that it is clearly very beneficial for human flourishing. Even considering CO2-related externalities, burning coal as a bridge to nuclear and battery technology does seem to be a good option (China is basically doing this), but I'm not sure I've seen a rigorous analysis.
China has been installing more solar than any other nation. Also, continuing to use fossil fuels is going to cost way more lives in the medium and especially long term.
Yeah I kinda wonder if that's ever going to happen. They aren't using coal because they like it, it's cheap and they have a lot of poor people with very real energy needs.
If the rest of the world cut back to India's per capita levels of fossil fuel use it would be a tremendous improvement. India's greenhouse gas emissions are 12% of those of the US per capita (around 50% total).
Even cutting back to China levels would be a great improvement. China is around 50% of US emissions per capita.
And yes, per capita is the correct way to distribute whatever total greenhouse gas allowance we decide we need to live with because the atmosphere is a shared resource that doesn't care about arbitrary political boundaries. For an illustration of why per country makes no sense see the hypothetical here [1]. Where countries are relevant is enforcement, and in developing some sort of system to allow people to trade (directly or indirectly) some of their share of the global greenhouse gas allowance, such as by some sort of cap and trade system or some sort of carbon tariffs on imports/exports.
Most countries seem to recognize that to successfully address climate change the rich countries will have to give aid to the developing countries to help them move off of fossil fuels. The big hold out is the US.
Per-capita doesn't work because denying AC doesn't have the same effect in Nevada and Alaska ... and heating the reverse. There are a lot of places where humans can live "for free" energy-wise, and most places where they can't.
I think the energy crisis in Europe makes it very clear that when the choice is between people's livelihoods and climate change:
So let's get real: we need to get all humans up to at least European per-capita energy expenditure levels. Timing can be discussed, but it's when, not if.
And lowering per-capita energy expenditure ... more than 10-20% is just not in the cards.
> > I think we all agree (even the so-called "deniers") that climate change is a serious potential problem
> What gives you that kind of optimism?
I think OP meant that if someone claims that climate change would is not an existential threat, they are claimed as deniers. There is one axis for balancing short term vs long term issues, and so called deniers believes that we are on the in the correct point or right of that in that axis. Activist believes we are in the far left end of the axis, that we are risking long term for fixing short term issues.
> When the revealed policy preference of world leaders is to shut down the AC in summer in a desert, turn off the heat in a Scandanavian winter, and restrict energy supplies to developing countries, you don't have a workable solution.
Which world leaders have revealed these as their policy preferences?
They haven't. The actual policy preference is to build renewables, but it helps to use rhetorical tricks or cherry pick a few nutjobs to make it appear ridiculous in order to get to the desired conclusion that actually we shouldn't be building renewables.
"Revealed preference" is about revelation of your preferences through your actions, not about what you say. Politicians around the world have decided, through their policies, that grid stability and increasing energy availability is not important. Gavin Newsom has preferred to have you suffer through the hottest summer on record (and he knew the temperature was going to rise) rather than build a nuclear power plant. Angela Merkel prefers that you suffer through winter rather than recondition an old nuclear power plant. This is why it is "revealed" preference: it's not about what you say you prefer, it is about what your actions show that you prefer.
Edit: They also prefer that to coal power, or any other course of action.
You have fallen quite a ways short of demonstrating those "revealed preferences". All you have demonstrated is that those two people apparently don't agree with your preferred courses of action and that you don't have a particularly good grasp of how long it takes to get a nuclear power plant built in the United States.
> They also prefer that to coal power, or any other course of action.
Pretty sure Newsom is in favor of increasing grid capacity by way of renewables. Just because you don't agree with a course of action doesn't make it not exist.
Look around, 90% of the gadgets you use everyday aren't keeping you alive. The vast majority of the things we produce and buy are absolutely not a prerequisite for life, or even comfort in general.
Will you die if I tell you the tesla cybertruck won't be released ? Or the iphone 15 will be skipped ? Or that you model S will be capped to 70mph
It sounds like you want a climate policy that allows us to migrate off fossil fuels while energy remains as cheap and abundant as it was for the past century.
Have you considered whether this might be physically impossible? If so, would you prefer no action and dealing with the full effects of climate change, or would you prefer to accept a flawed climate policy that migrates off fossil fuels while civilization deals with the impact of expensive and/or limited energy?
Nuclear is expensive. Depending on your source this can be a factor of 6 on capital costs for new nuclear projects compared to oil/gas (per kWh), and possibly even a factor of 3 on levelized electricity costs.
Rising energy prices means poor folk will have to turn off their AC in the summer and turn off their heat in the winter.
Sorry, nuclear doesn’t pass the bar you’ve set.
(Note: many sources do suggest nuclear levelized cost is not much higher than other energy sources, but even then it’s a massive capital investment so any nuclear policy would look like “trillions in spending and limiting [fossil fuel] energy”, as earlier derided)
Wright's law is a very powerful force. It brought down the cost of solar and wind below the cost of fossil fuels. It will do the same for nuclear power. Using current energy prices to make predictions about developments in solar power in 1990 would have said the same thing you say about nuclear energy today.
By the way, nuclear and photovoltaic solar technologies are about equally old - the trope that nuclear power has had a lot longer to become scalable is incorrect. Solar has become scalable due to the amount of money being poured into it. If you pour a lot of energy into nuclear reactors, the price will go down by a lot, too.
Taking the least charitable interpretation of opposing policies while assuming the policy you advocate will lead to drastic cost-saving technology improvements.
A true straw man classic.
You could have saved a lot of text in your original post by saying something like “we need more nuclear than is currently planned to achieve climate goals sustainably”. A lot of HN (myself included!) would have agreed with you.
Talk about strawmen: Nobody said that nuclear technology didn't need to go through a lot of technological improvements - look at the difference between 1960s photovoltaics and modern ones.
Every other technology in human history has improved significantly with investment. You can look at all of the studies about Wright's law: when Wright's law gets studied, it is found to apply to every product, resulting in 10-30% unit cost reductions as production doubles - the only question is how big the reduction is. Whether you are talking about vegetables, power plants, or microchips, production gets cheaper the more of them you produce.
Batteries, by the way, are undergoing similar improvements. However, there are a lot more open questions in terms of the scalability of battery technology, and it is nowhere near the scale where nuclear is today.
Also, if you agreed that nuclear power would have made energy cheap and plentiful, why did you argue that there was no way to keep energy cheap and plentiful without fossil fuels?
Finally, I just noticed that you put some brackets in a quote of mine: "trillions in spending and limiting [fossil fuel] energy." I never said "fossil fuel energy." I said energy. Energy restrictions are about restrictions at point of demand irrespective of the technology that generates the energy. The "peaky" and unreliable nature of renewables requires this (until batteries are ready). When you want to argue with someone, don't try to put words in their mouth.
I agree nuclear is needed for a sustainable energy mix due to reliability, not price. Your optimism on price seems unfounded. As you said, nuclear is the same age as PV. PV gets more interest now, but nuclear used to have WAY more interest. The world has had no shortage of multi billion dollar nuclear investments. Why would continued nuclear investment fare better price reductions than continued solar investments? If anything mega projects have evidence of getting more expensive over time (US at least) and nuclear afaik is always a mega project
Regardless, even if you’re right, the point is that you can’t know that for sure yet to are so quick to talk of the revealed preferences of opposing policy, as if everyone took a look at free energy and said “nah I’d rather have blackouts”. When in reality everyone looked at how expensive nuclear was and didn’t share your excessive optimism on future price reductions
> I never said "fossil fuel energy." I said energy.
“Limit fossil fuel” I meant supply side restrictions on cheap non renewables which would outcompete expensive nuclear on one hand, or cover the gap from insufficient/peaky energy production via solar/wind (should we not pursue nuclear). I didn’t realize you were talking about demand side restrictions.
We could have implemented less painful solutions 30, 20, or even 10 years ago, but we didn't, so now we only have drastic options remaining. Time is precious and immediate action is needed, even if we don't agree on the best solution. All options should be attempted.
> When the revealed policy preference of world leaders is to shut down the AC in summer in a desert, turn off the heat in a Scandanavian winter, and restrict energy supplies to developing countries, you don't have a workable solution.
There aren't a huge number of possible solutions here. In fact, there are only two: 1) decrease energy usage, or 2) increase sustainable energy production. Claiming that one of these is not a workable solution is not particularly helpful.
> Current policy prescriptions are going to kill a lot more people than the warming they are trying to prevent.
> Current policy prescriptions are going to kill a lot more people than the warming they are trying to prevent.
If you think climate change is real, I don’t understand how you can believe that the current prescriptions (which aren’t even addressing the problem head on) will kill more people than the effects of climate change. The effects of climate change will probably kill at least several tens of millions of people and more likely the count may an order of magnitude more through direct and indirect effects (including displacement, riots, disease, etc.).
I think most people are in agreement that an aggressive CO2 tax (greenhouse gas tax, to be more precise) would be effective. Just make it expensive to cause climate change, and the market will take care of it. The problems are that accounting for all emissions is difficult and that the price points where it would be most effective strongly overlap with the price points where it would be a dramatic shock to the economy.
There are milder versions like the cap-and-trade schemes that the EU or California implemented. They aren't perfect, but any perfect solution would be outright rejected for the massive impact it would have.
Cap and trade is largely a failure. The problem is that a proper carbon market should have sequestration plants on the supply side and carbon emitters on the demand side. The emitters need to buy carbon offsets at the price that the sequestration plants need to pull it back out of the atmosphere. The problem is that right now sequestration is so expensive that it would be ruinous to burn fossil fuels, much of the economy would suffer. But if we aren't funding sequestration it doesn't happen and everybody dies. Our brave politicians see this challenge and immediately bury their heads in the sand and hope that they won't be the one holding the bag as the problem grows steadily worse.
Indeed. The use of private jets to assemble all the business leaders to one central location to talk about the issue of climate change does not do much to reassure people the issue is a serious one. I'm not against wealth, but jet engines emit more carbon into the atmosphere than most individuals do in a year. The fact none are willing to forego their private jets for commercial air speaks volumes. Either they don't seriously believe in the threat or they don't think any of these plans are going to have any serious affect. The environmental movement has come to resemble more a corporate marketing campaign than any kind of serious science.
What about the unnecessary face to face business and company meetings ? They make up the bulk of air travel. Ban all those until zero emission flights are a reality
Cancel it all, really. But that's the thing, for some reason business leaders are largely immune to any changes necessary to fight emissions, until the politicians decide to pick a specific boogeyman and go hard on it. And even that fails most of the time.
Even here, while we technically have a law to keep employers from trying to keep individuals from coming to the office unnecessarily, there are so many social factors and caveats it is very, very difficult for individuals to call upon that law.
But that's just the point. It's not just business leaders who are disregarding their own actions. The environmental agendas are fully behind them. They've been co-opted as part of this corporate boondoggle. It leads you to believe they don't even truly believe the hyperbole about a catastrophe.
use all the solar, wind, geo and hydro you want. even use as much nuclear as you want and build any nuclear plants that you can build cost competitively (but you probably won't be able to).
They should start with making WFH mandatory wherever possible. Don’t have the stats but it will certainly cut lot of commute related pollution and leverage newer technologies to collaborate.
I think the problem is that it just so happens that the areas and peoples getting the worst impacts happen to not be part of the developed West. Why worry about a few billion people less in the third world if your home transforms from a frozen tundra into a lush paradise?
The premise of the Green New Deal is that the solution to climate change just happens to be the same things democratic socialists have wanted the whole time. Isn’t that a coincidence.
You mean a climate and social justice policy proposed by the party of climate and social justice contained provisions for achieving climate and social justice?
Couldn't you just write this honestly and without snark? You're actually mostly right here, but if you're writing to persuade or educate, all the air goes out of your comment with the last sentence. You have an interesting thing to say, and instead of saying it, you're sneering at the room for not already knowing it --- if they did, your comment wouldn't have been interesting!
"Isn’t that a coincidence", implying that all your readers know what's "coincidental" about it, which further implies that there was no point to the comment --- it was obvious all along. But, in fact: there's nothing obvious about what you want to say, which is why you should take the time to say it properly, and in detail, instead of sneering at the room. You wrote a Facebook comment, not an HN comment.
Certainly part of what pisses me off about this is that when you're writing well, you're a valuable corrective to a lot of groupthink that would otherwise go unchallenged here. Instead, you're writing stuff that anyone from the Sunrise Movement could knock down with a meme.
He has a series of reasons he doesn't buy the Green New Deal. I know he must, because I'm a liberal, and I can rattle off a bunch of reasons. But he didn't state them. Instead, he just sort of acted like everyone knows what those reasons are. But lots of people don't. They don't because nobody will talk to them honestly and just lay out the problems. That's why I used the word.
This is part of a longstanding psychodrama of mine regarding late-period Rayinerism, though. You might just need to be read in on it.
In the US the explanation is simple: the far right conservatives in Congress don't want to do anything to address climate change or even want to do things to make it worse (less renewables, more fossil fuels), and the Republicans who are not far right and are open to dealing with climate change are afraid to go against the far right because the far right voters are the ones that most turn out for primaries.
And so it is only Democrats proposing anything that seriously addresses climate change. Like most big bills in Congress such proposals end up with other things attached.
Normally what would then happen is that there were would be bipartisan negotiations to get a bill with mostly just the parts that both parties could agree on, but the far right wants nothing to do with that and so few or no Republicans in Congress will have anything to do with the drafting of the bill.
It's right there in the name. They're not exactly hiding the fact that they've wrapped up their climate and social goals into it. The Green New Deal was essentially nothing more than the democratic socialists' platform written down in the form of a non-binding resolution.
If the democratic socialist faction of the american Democratic Party invented the whole concept of Climate Change, just so they could do what they wanted the whole time, which apparently was "Build Offshore wind turbines bigger than the Eiffel Tower and also capture the energy of the sun via quantumn mechanics to cheaply power highly efficient union-made Electric Vehicles and stop funding some of the most regressive nations on earth via fossil fuels" then that is seriously inspiring in a solarpunk kind of way.
I'm not sure there's much evidence for that view unfortunately. But I may now pretend it is true because it would be a much more interesting world to live in if it was.
No coincidence. It's because right wing politicians decided to align themselves with corporate interests rather than embracing the idea of decentralized energy independence.
And then right wing voters went along with it because "that's my team".
What is “corporate interests”, exactly? Biggest corporations today are overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party, though in fact the oil industry is pretty much the only exception. Look at who they donate money to. At best, you might ask why Republican Party is putting their oil interests ahead of everyone else.
> You seem very angry at the idea that planet might be saved or that people may have access to good paying jobs.
No, my concern is that climate change has become a new vehicle for ideas with a poor track record. I worry that the economy will stagnate and people won't have access to good paying jobs, and the planet won't be saved anyway.
If by chance, a real "climate change denier" existed, and I know they don't, it's only people who are concerned about government overreach and totalitarian measures enacted by innumerate hippies that will do more harm than good.
But, if one did exist, where would you differ from them on actual policy?
You don't want people to do studies. You don't want governments to fund stuff. You don't want governments to restrict energy (by which you mean fossil fuels, not cheap renewables). You appear to be suggesting that even the believers don't actually believe.
I mean, there's a whole range of opinions on climate change from eco-communists to eco-capitalists to eco-futurists to eco-fascists, even fossil fuel companies have published net-zero plans, but your take seems to be just "don't do stuff".
Can you expand on that a bit more, because that response feels very like climate change denial to me, which you say you're not, and indeed no one is, doing.
My policy preference today is to invest heavily in things like hydro power and nuclear power as a base load solution, while also increasing investment in energy storage technologies to allow renewable-based energy to have 90%+ reliability. I know nuclear energy is expensive now, but Wright's law has done a lot for every other energy technology, and it will do the same for nuclear power.
And yes, I think that you should be burning oil or coal until you can get over 99% grid reliability with clean sources. Politicians should recognize that restricting energy supplies during times when there is high demand has a human cost, and that people will die without that energy.
A lot of people talk about "cheap renewables," and while renewable energy is pretty cheap when it's on, it's very expensive to produce 1W of solar power at night. We are in a situation where grids have to burn excess power when it is plentiful, and struggle to supply power when it is not. When the demand for energy is higher than the supply, you get energy restrictions. Energy restrictions are not about "total MW produced this month vs total MW demanded," they are about "total MW produced this ~hour vs total MW demanded." Once we have a scalable technology for grid-scale energy storage, renewable energy looks amazing. We don't have it now.
An actual climate denier would have no problems with continuing to use dinosaur-based power forever. I disagree.
As for studying the problem, it looks like the focus of science is skewed heavily toward computer models of just how bad things might be rather than computer models that will help us stop the bad things. This is why people make models of pandemics, for example.
I think he's saying its not a serious discussion. It shouldn't be a surprise many are not on board with a plan that is largely performative and doesn't do a thing but send the majority into poverty.
My chunk of the planet was suppose to be underwater 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, last year, in 3 years, and in 7 years. We are a naive species that does not understand climate or how and why it changes.
I guess most convincing would be, for example, to stop manufacturing new phones every year. It's hard to believe that climate change is that bad if biggest companies still produce most environmental damaging products and people enjoy to buying it. I would call it "pure hypocrisy".
Who could possibly believe that climate change is problem, when new cars, phones, houses, etc. are still manufactured and there are ton's of ads for buying it.
Most climate change zealots (note I’m not implying climate change didn’t exist, I’m talking about the activists) believe the decisions that led us to this point are a sin in a religious sense, and require atonement and punishment. They see an era of scarcity and sacrifice as a fundamental necessity and thus any solutions that don’t demand it as I sufficiently putative.
There could have been a viable solution: 1/2 surviving child per person and tech to preserve genetic material of every human being.
Climate change is not something we could have stopped or influenced. We could have only made a difference in how we chose to perpetuate our species and the eco system we need to survive as a super apex predator.
Our politicians failed us. But it’s our collective fault because we elected them and got our priorities wrong. I also blame the proliferation of religions that chose politics over a search for divinity. The zeal to keep adding members to the flock exploded exponentially.
We used science and tech to keep the ageing barely alive but not thriving. It costs environmentally more to create and raise a child than to keep us living longer and maintain lower rates of obsolescence. Our survival/thrive/productivity rates are not efficient.
We have just begun to understand the expansiveness of intelligence and it’s knowledge amplification. Automation and AI is just the tip of the iceberg. Too bad we find babies cute and hug the age of retirement.
It’s like blowing our lungs out into a balloon that can be the size of the room but we prick it when it’s the size of a grapefruit because we think that’s the limit of it’s expansion. What a waste of air..waste of materials and for such short lived fun.
Everyone dies, but we really didn’t have to die like a dumbass species that forgot its collective survival instinct and latent potentials.
[..]The most insidious threat to humankind is something called “extinction debt.” There comes a time in the progress of any species, even ones that seem to be thriving, when extinction will be inevitable, no matter what they might do to avert it. The cause of extinction is usually a delayed reaction to habitat loss. The species most at risk are those that dominate particular habitat patches at the expense of others, who tend to migrate elsewhere, and are therefore spread more thinly. Humans occupy more or less the whole planet, and with our sequestration of a large wedge of the productivity of this planetwide habitat patch, we are dominant within it. H. sapiens might therefore already be a dead species walking.
The signs are already there for those willing to see them. When the habitat becomes degraded such that there are fewer resources to go around; when fertility starts to decline; when the birth rate sinks below the death rate; and when genetic resources are limited—the only way is down. The question is “How fast?”[..]
This past year I went from seeing Climate Change as a "challenge to be overcome" to something that is simply happening during my lifetime. I suddenly realised that the truth is, in 20 years time 30+ degrees Summer Days will be completely normal in the Netherlands. I was jokingly asking myself when Switzerland will introduce the Siesta.
I my attitudes went from Denial to Activism to Acceptance. Interesting how the mind works. Anybody else experiencing an attitude change?
> My attitude went from Denial to Activism to Acceptance.
Just like to put out there that it it may be too late to stop climate change altogether, but things can get much worse and can get much better, and it is very much worth reducing emissions, preparing for a changing climate, and generally striving to survive.
It is worth it, and therefore worth gentle evangelizing. A lot fof people are still thinking "screw it" because either they don't believe they can do anything or because they don't yet care.
I've stopped at Activism. I accept that it's already happening, but how bad it gets is entirely up to us.
I don't get the <throws hands in the air>It's just a done deal, back to netflix</> attitude, and prefer the 'Hey, our generation(s) have a task, let's get it done' one.
It is on purpose. The "we are fucked, nothing to be done" narrative is another weapon in the propaganda arsenal for fossil fuel producers. And it works on a lot of people.
Climate change is continuous. 1.6 degrees is worse than 1.5. 2.2 degrees is worse than 2.1. Every ton of CO2 reduced improves the situation. This is true regardless of the harm already caused.
Short of running for office, I just don’t really feel that my actions can affect anything. I will choose green options when available, I pay for an energy supplier that claims to be 100% renewable powered, I don’t have a car, I haven’t flown in years, I eat mostly vegetarian, but at the end of the day all this really does is slightly assuage my guilty conscience.
I’m not convinced activism is much more effective - everyone hates extinction rebellion every time they block a highway and politicians get points for saying they’ll stop it happening again. It really feels like the only real way a single person can make a difference is by running for office, and I would be a terrible politician.
FWIW there was a good comment piece in nature recently about activism. Summary thread: https://twitter.com/ThierryAaron/status/1564276454904430596 .
There was another study - can't find it now :( that showed that actions from Insulate Britain (blocking roads) were effective.
If you don't believe in protest, keep in mind that it isn't the only form of activism which is possible. You might look around your local community and ask, "if the worst comes to pass, what will we need to survive?" Can you help tend a community garden so that there's local food production if food becomes scarce? Can you learn about your local environment and ways you might find water if there are shortages? Can you learn to maintain the machinery necessary to sustain human life?
No individual makes any real difference. But collectively we all do. I've learned over the last many years that few people get convinced or motivated by preaching, but living the life shows it can be done and leads by example.
I went from activism and being anxious all the time to acceptance. I feel like regulation is the only way we can improve the situation. But most of the people in power are owned by rich corporations/people. And their only goal is to make more money. I don't see much a common person can do to change or improve things.
I live in a country where I still don't have the right to vote (maybe a decade from now). Instead of being anxious and getting stressed out everyday from thinking about the worsening climate, I feel it's better for my health to accept the fact and move on.
Acceptance is an understandable psychological reaction. There is just too much horror going on on this planet to let it affect our psyche too deeply. However, it is important to cultivate a rational ethical attitude that despises such things regardless of one's psychological state. Moral sentiments need not be accompanied by moral affections. The insight that something is fundamentally wrong can guide action out of duty, and does not require inclination.
I had serious anxiety a few years ago about this, and ended up in Acceptance. I'm not happy ending up here, but I figure I got about 30 years left. That's pretty good, I'll take it.
The thing that's been the most jarring to me about climate change has been just that - the change. Every year feels different. You might have intense rains one year, drought-like situation the next year. One summer might be brutal, another pleasant.
I feel unmoored and untethered. The reasonable predictability of weather patterns is completely broken now.
Weather patterns have never been that predictable. Sure there are some patterns, and weather predictors know important things to watch (like El Nino/la nina), but those are not on a predictable cycle so much as they last long enough that you can put reasonable ranges on what can happen a few months in advance.
> I my attitudes went from Denial to Activism to Acceptance. Interesting how the mind works. Anybody else experiencing an attitude change?
The titanic is sinking, the best thing you can do for yourself is pop a bottle of champaign, find the most comfy chair and enjoy the spectacle.
Everybody cares about climate change, nobody will ever give up technological "progress", we're doomed, but hey, at least you can get free same day delivery on toilet paper
> I my attitudes went from Denial to Activism to Acceptance.
I think the next step is adaptation. Try to build some sort of resilient life for yourself and your family, try to help out the local community as much as possible etc. Try to not be too terrible to the people who will really suffer the most (Africa, parts of Asia etc.). This is kind of where I am right now.
My wife and I are very conflicted about moving to Utrecht because we very much want to live in a bike-friendly city where our kids can be independent (where we are now, Ireland, is horrible for this) but we also want somewhere that isn't too hot in 30 years. The Nordics might manage to have both?
Honestly I've been considering moving to Ireland and one of the reasons is because Belgium might get too hot and i'm not a fan of winter depression. I worry the gulf stream might slow down tho but I assume that won't happen anytime soon.
Having not been to Ireland but relating to this a lot in the US, my guess is it’s about biking not generally being safe. Kids can’t drive, but in the US at least we’ve built a ton of places where you basically have to drive to get around, so parents end up shuttling their kids around to wherever they want to go.
The main thing is that Ireland has far more suburban sprawl and the bike infrastructure is almost entirely unprotected. Though I admit my standards are high - I think most European urbanity isn't at the stage where I'd like an 8 year old ride a bike to school.
Cycling increases your reasonable travel radius substantially. In a dense city with good transit this might be less of a big deal, but outside of cities in sprawling suburbs it’s more important.
School isn’t the only place a kid might want to go; their friends might live further away, there might be a park that would take quite a while to walk to but is an easy bike ride, etc.
As I said it depends on the area. Where I live right now (Philadelphia) you can get by on foot and via transit pretty easily. Although I do wish it were more bikeable; I could get to my local hackerspace in about 20 minutes by bike vs. 40 minutes by transit.
I’m about to move somewhere slightly less dense though, with no local transit to speak of. From my house to the local high school is 27 min on foot vs. 7 by bike. From the high school to the neighboring town is 41 minutes on foot vs. 12 by bike. From there back home is again 41 minutes on foot or 12 by bike.
You can probably see how this might make an after-school trip possible that wouldn’t be otherwise.
1.93 for the first distance, 3.06 for the other two. So probably would be a fast cyclist given that’d be an average of 15 km/h.
That speed is totally doable on a bike, but there’s some time taken up at intersections so top speed would need to be higher to make up. (Although the main roads on these routes don’t have many signaled intersections, so maybe not too much faster.)
I’m looking around street view in Dublin and it looks similar to my own city (Philadelphia) in a lot of ways. Narrow side streets yes, but it seems where there are bike lanes they’re extremely unprotected/not even buffered, and there are plenty of wide streets without bike infrastructure of any sort. And ultimately you do usually need to be on a main road some of the time when going to many places. (In Dublin’s case I notice there’s a river running through town that only the larger streets seem to cross.)
Compared to Utrecht (which was the initial point of comparison here), it looks awful for cycling.
Only in the last year? That's impressive. I had a colleague at work about 5 years ago have a total meltdown at her desk as she realised that we are very unlikely to find a solution to this before extreme, severe damage is done...
I think doomerism is pretty common now, especially since groups like XR have started to become far more individualistic and neoliberal in their messaging, switching from more intense protests and occupations to more often just posting "please don't fly" things on Facebook.
My theory is that so many people in Europe especially are so incredibly wedded to their western democratic liberal ideals that they, as Jameson and Zizek said: find it "easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism", where for "capitalism" if you don't agree with a totally Marxist analysis you can really substitute any structural issue that is causing us to not take anywhere near enough action on the climate.
And it is, isn't it? It's far easier to imagine that we will keep accelerating towards climate catastrophe than to imagine that the structural changes that would need to occur for us to stop it will actually happen.
Nah let's pump and dig every fucking last gram of resource on this planet and burn it to make our gadgets, we need more shit to buy and more shit to throw away, that will surely help. I heard the iphone 17 will solve climate change, coupled with the airpod 4 max S plus it might even cure cancer
We aren't exactly overflowing with "solutions to climate change", and capitalism seems to be incentivising for further and further exploitation of the planet, rather than a reduction. Can capitalism support a degrowth economy?
Also I literally said
> where for "capitalism" if you don't agree with a totally Marxist analysis you can really substitute any structural issue that is causing us to not take anywhere near enough action on the climate.
If you don't agree that it's capitalism, choose your own systematic issue...
Capitalism and market economy is all about degrowth. It's a system that tries to make same amount of stuff using less and less resources. Because of it, we get constantly more efficient, and can support a higher standard of living using less resources. It's a system where the most efficient survive.
Resource over-use is caused by government intervention. It's the governments who try to pump up their GDPs with various policies, which causes ever-growing consumption and resource use. They literally control the interest rates to get everyone to consume as much as possible.
Increase in efficiency allows population to grow without using more resources.
However, whether it grows is another question. Today, we are seeing a massive collapse in populations around the world, which is a huge problem and no one really knows the root cause.
I dont think that will be an issue in your lifetime, unless you are in an area prone to storm surge. In which case your elevation is ALREADY a problem.
> "Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails, and we should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future -- even from one year to the next -- once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed," Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist and one of the study's co-authors from the British Antarctic Survey, said in the release.
The actual number is 25 inches, and most consensus suggests collapse over centuries.
There is some concern that a bracing portion of the glacier may collapse soon, which would take Thwaites from 4 to 6% of contribution to sea level rise.
I definitely know what you mean. I just assume climate change is a given, and when I bought a house (in the UK), I made sure to buy one at a higher elevation and checked out how it would be affected in climate and flooding models.
The truth is richer European nations are unlikely to be the worst directly affected. No doubt there will be crop failures, disasters and deaths, but we will probably escape the worst of it. We have the resources to build effective infrastructure. The warmer climate could even make Europe more hospitable once we've adapted to it.
However, we won't be able to escape the consequences of the enormous humanitarian disaster due to many in poorer countries becoming climate migrants. I expect populist right wing parties to take an even tougher line on migration as the crises deepen, and possibly society in general to become more authoritarian as a result. Significant wars too, possibly.
Accepting it as inevitable means accepting hundreds of millions of people being displaced. If we want to deal with that gracefully, we need to start planning for how the rest of the world will absorb those individuals. Otherwise I fear we're going to be responsible for a lot of horrifying acts in the next century...
I have gone from activism to some kind of cynical acceptance. Fundamentally people don’t really care so you might as well go on that cruise or fly out to see the coral reefs before they die.
Try to account for possible scenarios when deciding where to live. Not too far south, on high ground.
I do find it hard to get used to the idea that everything will (probably) keep getting harder. More frequent pride spikes, weird weather, more instability. But even within that I think you can carry on happily if you only focus on what you can control. Possibly this attitude is what helped get us into this mess in the first place.
The problem isn't the people, it's that the power structures in our society are designed to concentrate power and to transmit themselves from one generation to the next, and they are not designed to make sound decisions. I think of it as a parasite that has latched onto our society. It feeds on our culture, our creativity and innovation. It seeks to conflate itself with our society and to tell us that, without it, there would be chaos and violence, that we need it to survive. But it's not true.
I understand the despair. But it is not too late and the problem is not "human nature". The problem is a status quo that can be abolished.
I'm still an activist. But I've decided that if the EU continue to move as slowly, if my country leaders keep their path and if my fellow citizens still vote for the same idiots (or change to fascists) next time, I'm out.
All the money my local bank is putting in local project will go to Total and Exxon, i will stop my hiking vacations and choose all inclusive hostels on others continents, and visit cities or areas that will become unlivable in the future.
Or maybe not. But i decided that this next five years will be the last years I'm really caring.
Yep. I remember a few years ago I was all gung ho about us fixing the problem based on the napkin math alone. Came out to mankind having a budget of something like 10 quintillion man hours until climate was permanently fucked with sealed fates. Seems like more than enough to orchestrate a solution.
Now I realize it just doesn’t matter to the people really behind the wheel.
Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we’ll die. Fuck it
climate change it not a binary outcome, so stop interpreting and talking about it as such. Yea we probably won't be able to avoid some significant consequences but that doesn't mean that the only other outcome is a quickly deteriorating hellscape.
I may be misreading but tipping point as defined as "self sustaining effects" just mean that we can't fix them by stopping the bad stuff, we also would need to start proactively gardening our own planet, which is something we've done on accident over the last century, it's possible to interrupt them.
I agree there has been a tremendous failure of leadership and that the people benefiting from the status quo are incapable of changing course, but let's get them away from that wheel.
Your choice to take a vacation was not a vote for more fossil fuel drilling, even if our economy is structured that way and our cultural myth is that a dollar is a vote and makes you complicit in the supply chain. You're trying to meet your needs to experience novelty and relax using the means at your disposal; the kerosene in that airplane could have been produced any number of ways, it could have been drawn from the air using nuclear power and Fischer-Tropsch synthesis if we structured our economy to meet the needs of society instead of structuring society to meet the needs of the economy.
> Your choice to take a vacation was not a vote for more fossil fuel drilling
I don't know how you can say that. I know exactly where jet fuel comes from and knew my flight to Britain was going to melt something like 2 m^2 of arctic ice.
Sure, but your goal was not for that to happen, was it? I assume you weren't trying to cause harm, even if you were aware of it; you were trying to get your needs met.
Don't get me wrong, I try to avoid travelling and reduce my footprint where I can, but like they say, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Consuming less is great, but the problem is that this economy is structured in a way that will kill us, not that we need to consume things to live.
Nobody’s goal is to warm the planet. Not even the most evil, mustache twirling capitalist wants to the worst of the global warming predictions come to light.
Big change has to come from the bottom up. If the electorate doesn’t ask for changes to be made, politicians aren’t going to make them. Now that climate is a political left/right issue, it’s even less likely for meaningful change to happen. The right seems to have forgotten how much of our existing environmental protections were put in place by Republican administrations (especially Nikon’s).
It’s this: western standards of living are fueled by armies of child laborers picking our cacao, coltan mined and smuggled out of conflict zones, abused sweatshop workers sewing our clothes, and barrels and barrels of oil to move the machines forward.
I doubt many of us will give that up voluntarily. Most people don’t want to walk away from Omelas.
You said western standards of living, but don't you really mean modern standards of living? I don't think people in Russia or Japan or Singapore or China are doing much better with respect to cacoa, coltan, etc...
Good luck with all that. Whether you vote Democrat or Republican it doesn’t really make a difference. The specter of corporate interest is eternally allowed to possess legislative avatars and parade about guaranteeing that status quo.
If there is a physical signal strong enough to orient the capable majority of 8 billion people with a common vector field in regard to the climate situation, I haven’t seen it yet.
Electoral politics is largely a failure. It's the last mile of any political movement, where activism has succeeded, the culture has changed, and the politicians are ready to sign off on it - nothing changes through electoral politics that hasn't a already changed from boots-on-the-ground activism. We are seeing people realize this and embrace other forms of political action. Think about the rise of "quiet quitting" - people are pushing back against this fatal culture of working endlessly to produce useless crap that's destroying our environment.
We're on the cusp of something major. There's no guarantee it will get here in time to save us. But it's a real possibility.
NB: You are using a non-standard definition of "electoralism".
Democracy is not optimal for decision making (far from it), but at least it does allow the activists to have boots on the ground. Under other forms of government, activists tend to go more like IEDs on the ground.
Still, considering the worst-case scenarios, if we're going to go authoritarian (a big IF!), I'd rather get there instead of being decimated by global warming rather than after.
You're right, my bad. I meant electoral politics. I've edited the comment. Thank you.
To be clear I do not advocate authoritarianism and would like to see direct democracy (or more direct, at the very least). I don't believe authoritarianism is compatible with surviving climate change, and even if I did I didn't think it would exacerbate climate change, I wouldn't advocate for it because I believe horizontal structures make better decisions & create more just societies then heirarchical ones.
Regarding large scale decision making, I believe in democracy; the way we currently implement it, with many layers of indirection and a senate (in the US) which is designed to defeat the will of the people, is not the only possibility.
If you're able to help to any degree, for any reason, then you've done your part. It'd probably be healthier if it were hopeful and motivated by wanting to build a better world, but if it's nihilism and rage, then that's okay. If all you can do is work less or consume less, or just not to stand in the way, then that's okay; that's enough.
> Whether you vote Democrat or Republican it doesn’t really make a difference
What? Democrats just passed the Inflation Reduction Act, while Republicans are the lead villains in the world when it comes to aggravating the problem.
That's why we need to have an actual political revolution, even if it is bloody. I don't understand this modern liberal obsession with doing everything within the law. A lot of meaningful historical social changes were done by breaking the law. It's absurd to think we won't have to do so
Well people are waking up, and then we will hopefully have some figurehead that mobilises the wider public. I do not care if it's a majority (I am not a fan of democracy), but if it's enough to overpower the rest then that's hopefully enough. Clearly, capitalism is not an eternal fact of nature, it will eventually die
Mentioning Greenland ice sheet in this context is always a bit of a red herring.
It is important to note that in the language of these simulations no "overshoot" is included in the temperature trajectory. A 1.5°C global warming is talking about the long term (millenial timescale) stable temperature we reach after our little "experiment".
If we can "quickly" (a few hundred years) return to 1.0°C or even less warming, compared to pre-industrial levels, these tipping points have not actually happened yet. (https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1418830/latest.pdf summarizes this very well)
Nico Wunderling shows that while for some systems (like the Amazon rain forrest) peak temperature (even over only a few years) is most important, for slower systems like the Greenland ice sheet the target, long-term temperature is most dominant.
Priotizing the most urgent matter should therefor lead us to talk about the quickly acting tipping points, often related to biological ecosystems. For those it is most important to actually stay below 2°C of warming. For the Greenland ice shield there is ample time after the year 2100 for us to prevent the worst.
None of these tipping points are exponential. Global warming is most likely an S-curve with a few degree maximum. Mispresenting the issue as an exponential is scaremongering.
I think the worst case is not how much of the world is forest. The worst case is failure of the world agriculture system, widespread famine, poverty, disease, war, death, and eventual failure of the human race.
If you're worried about whether stuff will continue to live on earth it's not a big deal. If you're worried about whether humans in particular will continue to live on earth and the parameters of what 'live' means you should be very, very concerned.
Covered with forests except for the parts that are new shallow oceans. This includes parts of the world like the American Midwest. Some countries will simply cease to exist.
I don't understand this comment. It comes up a lot, but nobody is seriously concerned about the Earth. Clearly global warming is a threat to humans and our way of live. Pretending that people worry about the Earth is a strawman.
Even if it is not, how is it of any consolation that a round rock revolving around a burning ball of hydrogen and helium will be fine? Even stating that "humanity will survive (but millions or billions will suffer and die)" isn't any consolation at all.
A common argument from climate change deniers is that the planet was warmer before and things were fine then. So I guess the comment plays into that, as the changes we are facing might not be new for Earth, but they are new for a Earth with humans.
Having a more accurate image of what is happening is important. I think many people imagine the planet becoming an inhabitable desert, all life dying and oceans boiling off. This is a wrong image and causes unnecessary pain and anxiety. I know a young person who killed themselves because of climate anxiety.
I'm optimistic that humans and most animals could adapt into a warmer planet.
That is the point of the comment. No matter how bad it gets, biological creatures will adapt as they always have while lots of existing species will become extinct; none of this is new. The question is can people adapt and remain what we think of as people in what we think of as our civilization. Given the current horrific weather (droughts/floods/heat/cold/storms/fires etc) how will humanity adapt without seriously changing what we think of as life. Perhaps we can live underground, or all move to the poles, or try a new planet somewhere. But if weather continues to get worse and worse eventually fewer and fewer people will survive, and we might become like the majority of species that no longer exist.
Even the conversion of all known organic carbon [0] on Earth into CO2 isn't going to be close to Venus.
Sun expanding over the next billion years might just about do that, unless the water vapour dissociates and the hydrogen escapes, but that's about the only way we get even close to Venusian conditions, IIRC.
[0] as in, the biomass and all of the fossil fuel reserves; I'm not including carbonate rocks, though it looks like including inorganic minerals still wouldn't be Venusian even though it would be far enough from today that it might as well be as far as "life" was concerned.
No, but what if we got half way to Venus-like temperatures and only made it to 200C?
In reality, the planet will stall out around 100C due to all of the water that needs to boil off and the huge steam clouds that would then increase the planet's albedo (but also trap heat). That's probably the top of the S-curve for the lifetime of mankind. Having the solar rays split that water and let the hydrogen escape to make an actual Venus like atmosphere is a more geological timescale process.
While I was exaggerating somewhat in my original post, I should point out that most climate change papers stop around +7C or so because after that it's assumed most everyone is dead and the models won't be valid anymore. Plus, there won't be anybody around to care.
How do you explain the presence of carbon in permafrost? For the concentration of carbon in permafrost to exceed the present concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, wouldn't the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere at the time the permafrost was initialy frozen have had to exceed the current concentration of carbon in the atmosphere? Which would imply that the current level of carbon in the atmosphere is not the cause of the increased temperature?
>For the concentration of carbon in permafrost to exceed the present concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, wouldn't the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere at the time the permafrost was initialy frozen have had to exceed the current concentration of carbon in the atmosphere?
Do you think permafrost is giant bubbles of air that got trapped in frost or something? Your comment baffles me somewhat.
What do you think of the concentration of carbon in our current atmosphere when you see a rotting log?
Or build more wind and solar. Already Des Moines gets 80% of its power from wind, and the state is building more all the time. CA is doing some solar steps, but it is taking a lot longer (on a much larger population, so I'm not sure how their progress compares). Most states are not doing much. Europe is also making some steps, but they could do more.
The key to all this is starting ASAP and building constantly. Iowa has been building wind turbines at a rate of about 2/day (a bit over 500 per year) for many years now.
> And they have problems with excessive heat in the summer, because they cannot be properly cooled when water temperatures rise.
Incorrect, the can still be cooled but rivers must be kept below 28 degrees [1]. Because apparently the fish in this one stretch of river are more important than global climate change. Perhaps the takeaway is that we should reconsider the acceptable impact on local environment given the impact on global environment. Similar deal with America lithium mines held up behind environmental review.
Low river flow means more of the water goes into the heat exchanger, and leads to higher temperatures. It's still ultimately due to of heating the river, it's not that there's insufficient water to actually cool the reactor, just that there's insufficient water to cool the reactor while keeping river temperatures below 28 degrees. Say there's usually 100 cubic meters per second of flow, and the heat exchanger requires 10 cubic meters per second. If flow reduces to 30 cubic meters per second that's going to raise the temperature of the river but the plant can still be cooled if the people in charge decided reducing emissions is more important than heating a stretch of river.
Whatever environmental issues caused by heating a river is tiny comparison to global warming. If say I'm handwaving environmental issues, yet you neglect to specify what I'm overlooking. If you have reasons to think that heating a river is more important than averting climate catastrophe, I'm all ears.
And lastly, plenty of nuclear power plants are cooled by ocean water, or by wastewater [1].
You realise there's more to GHG than just electricity generation, right?
I mean it's a big, low hanging fruit because renewables are so cheap now, but even after getting that done we have transport and agriculture and land use chemical feedstocks and old leaking mines and wells and on and on. Plenty to do.
That's why we're also electrifying transportation, should push for heat pumps in buildings, etc, but yeah, there's a lot to do. Not dealing with electricity doesn't help the rest, though.
Though if you take care of car based transport (replace with EVs and/or electric trains), and electric you have done the vast majority. The rest of just a long trail of small things that don't really add up to much together.
massive construction of NPPs, with the last big share of works taking place in the 90s. the large majority of them are still in use today. average NPP age in France is ~30 years.
this is what allows France to produce electricity at ~50-100 grams of CO2 eq. per kWh, a performance that is only rivaled by countries with also nuclear- and/or hydro-heavy grids. for comparison, Germany sits between ~200-600 gCO2eq./kWh (last year's average). Germany's grid is renewable-heavy, but also intermittent, relying on the use of GHG-intensive backups (coal, gas). [1]
But, beyond conspiracies, he has a simple point. If climate change is is going to be a civilization-ending force, why would someone who ought to be well-informed sink a large amount of wealth into an at-risk property?
> If climate change is is going to be a civilization-ending force, why would someone who ought to be well-informed sink a large amount of wealth into an at-risk property?
If it is going to be a civilization-ending force, wealth won't matter and all properties (and even the very concept of “property”) are at risk.
Your question makes more sense if the conditional is changed to “if climate change is going to have little effect on society at large but severe, highly localized effects... ”
Property—at least real, as opposed to personal—property seems to be unlikely to survive as a thing in the absence of civilization, even the species survives, and “civilization-ending” was the scenario being discussed.
> Will the species go extinct or would communists take over?
Well, species-ending would be compatible with civilization-ending, but not necessary to it. Ideological communism probably wouldn't survive the end of civilization, either; the problem it addresses would no longer exist nor would there be means to implement most forms of it, nor would any people that survived probably have much energy for theory.
"A civilization is any complex society characterized by the development of a political state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system)."
Even in most post-apocalypse antiutopia science fiction, all of these attributes are present except perhaps urbanization. E.g. a roving gang with a warlord at its helm has a political state and social stratification, and they would still have access to pencils.
> Even in most post-apocalypse antiutopia science fiction, all of these attributes are present except perhaps urbanization.
That's the key one for real property (well, settled agricultural society probably more than urbanization per se, but if you have one you probably have the other.)
> E.g. a roving gang with a warlord at its helm has a political state and social stratification, and they would still have access to pencils.
But probably not have a system of real (as opposed to personal) property. Which is my point.
Even if he's made more since then, 10-15% of your net worth definitely isn't peanuts.
Not to mention being as high profile as he is, and talking "my legacy this and that", you'd think he would have paid more attention as to what kind of message he's sending by doing that.
"Parts of Martha's Vineyard are only feet above sea level today. Recent projections target Edgartown as the first town to submerge.
In less than a hundred years, you might be strolling down South Water Street in a kayak. A hundred years - nothing in geologist years. In fact, it doesn't seem like a terribly long time in our years either."
They are expecting a government bailout when sea levels raise. You could make a big difference just by getting a lot of people to demand the government make all houses within 10 feet (pick a number) of sea level not eligible for government flood insurance. This will make all private insurance change their risk models.
Some conservatives (those with a libertarian bent at least) have long noted that government bailouts as flood insurance has been a moral hazard allowing people to live cheaply in places they couldn't afford to live in otherwise.
Miami beach is a better place to look at. There's no chance it doesn't go below sea level at some point this century and there's no way we could build walls around it yet people are still paying millions for homes on the island.
Don’t know if people are following news carefully, but things are getting worse all over the world at the same time. One third of Pakistan is under water while China is seeing unprecedented drought.
We are running past safe conditions, for civilization, human life or maybe most of (complex enough) life on Earth. We are already past some of those tipping points, even before reaching an average of 1.5C globally (specially when there are regional differences, and for arctic regions the average is more in the 4ºC area, and that is where most of the permafrost thawing happens).
And besides the known ones, there may be more tipping points that we are becoming aware of, like the increase of methane emissions from wetlands because hotter conditions, another positive feedback loop that may had been unexpected for some. And as feedback loops are becoming important protagonists on emissions over fossil carbon, things are getting out of our hands. We must do far more than just slow down if we want to survive in the long term.
I seriously disagree. The “climate” part of climate change isnt the threat to civilization, it’s the “change” part.
Sure, with an average warmer global climate, many places will become worse for human life and worse for agriculture with warming. But there is an absolutely enormous amount of land that moves into a better habitable and agriculture zone with warming as well. It’s not that a warmer climate makes human life impossible; we currently thrive from the Equator to Scandinavia just fine. It’s the change part thats the problem. It’s difficult to deal with whole agricultural areas needing to switch crops. Cities suddenly flooding when they used not to. New areas entering a death zone of heat index that previously were manageable
Our current civilization is fragile. There are a lot of connections, a lot of interdependence, a lot of points of failure. Think what happened with COVID, both in spreading speed and the immediate consequences that could had been far worse, civilization-wise, like an economic crash or disruptive trends that started there and that are still lingering on.
Yes, change is a problem. You can't just move a city, you can't make millions or billions of people lose what they had without ripples. But is not change to a new stable. It won't be a new stable. Even if we drop everything, stop emissions, commuting, economy and even our existence, things will keep changing, because at some point feedback loops will take the lead. We are at a point where doing less won't solve anything. And where risky path of actions will be taken.
I wonder how long it'll be before population starts moving. Traditionally Southern Europe, Southern USA had the best climate, now they seem to be places to avoid.
Among the areas expected to be the most affected by global warming are large parts of China, India and Pakistan. 1.5C on average might be 5-6C there, which is enough to make large, densely populated areas unlivable (as in you will die without AC).
2+ billion people living there having to move elsewhere is nothing we've seen before, the only direction they can really move is north, into Russia. All countries mentioned have nuclear weapons.
>1.5C on average might be 5-6C there, which is enough to make large, densely populated areas unlivable (as in you will die without AC).
Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh has this forecast for next Tuesday: 44C(110F). And that temp is there most of the summer.
"Saudi population has grown rapidly since 1950 when it was estimated to be 3 million, and for many years had one of the highest population growth rates in the world at around 3 per cent a year."
- Conservatives in wealthy, cold countries refuse to stop polluting.
- Pakistan becomes uninhabitable.
- Conservatives in wealthy, cold countries pull up the draw bridge and refuse to let in migrants.
- People in Pakistan die.
- Conservatives in wealthy, cold countries blame the people in Pakistan.
This isn't an intentionally politically charged post made with animus. It's just factually outlining what's currently going on and a plausible sequence of events from here.
I understand your view but its more than this. China is biggest polluter now. Russia has most space but avoids immigration from Asia. Fast growing populations of lots of hot countries is a big problem that has no easy solution.
If it wasn't for Russia's nukes, now that their military is weakened, this would have been a good time to take over and let environmental immigrants come to Russia.
Before becoming too alarmed, one might want to read about the Holocene Climate Optimum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum). Temperatures 8000 years ago were significantly higher than 200 years ago. Did the lucky people 8000 years ago just barely escape disastrous climate tipping points? Or maybe such tipping points aren't so likely...
Anybody who says that the Earth has been this hot before and survived is technically correct, but they should look at this map and consider the implications:
The late cretaceous was a lot longer than 8000 years ago.
Lots of people did die 8000 years ago (of course!). It was also the time when important agricultural plants were being domesticated and civilization was beginning - probably because the climate was nice, allowing that to happen, when it hadn't for the previous 200,000 years of Homo sapiens' history.
We have already blown past the CO2 levels of the Holocene maximum, so looking back to it as a stopping point isn't helpful.
The Cretaceous had CO2 levels around 1000ppm so we aren't there yet. We are currently at around 418ppm and rising about 2ppm per year (but that rate is increasing). If we don't change our ways soon this scenario becomes increasingly likely.
Also, there is an alternate theory that Humans finally developed agriculture because the climate change had made their previous hunter-gatherer lifestyle untenable and they were forced to improvise. Many species of animal died out.
> Before becoming too alarmed, one might want to read about the Holocene Climate Optimum
People are alarmed because a) the compositions of today's atmosphere is much different from 8000 years ago. So very different feedback circle become relevant for the future dynamics of the weather/climate, and we have every reason to expect that no limiting feedback circle kicks in before it does not get a lot worse than today. b) we are already well beyond the Holocene Climate Optimum (see the "2016" marker in the diagram of the Wikipedia page) and the increase of temperature (the derivative of the curve) has no known equivalent in the current Cenozoic period of earth's history.
> Did the lucky people 8000 years ago just barely escape disastrous climate tipping points?
I would rather rephrase the question into: Why did climate stabilized in the Holocene the way it did? and thus avoid "tipping points", because tipping points are not directly observable. They are features of (complex) dynamic systems. It makes only sense to discuss actual tipping points in the context of models that describe those systems.
"the compositions of today's atmosphere is much different from 8000 years ago. So very different feedback circle become relevant for the future dynamics of the weather/climate"
The CO2 level is higher. But the usual "tipping point" dynamics (eg, melting of permafrost) involves just the change in temperature, unrelated to the cause of the warming. And when the "tipping point" is supposed to cause yet more warming because it leads to release of yet more CO2, starting from a higher CO2 level actually reduces the effect, because the warming effect of CO2 is proportional to the logarithm of the CO2 concentration (so releasing X amount of CO2 causes a smaller temperature rise if the CO2 concentration is high than if it is low).
"we are already well beyond the Holocene Climate Optimum"
From the Wikipedia page: "the 2021 IPCC report expressed medium confidence that temperatures in the last decade are higher than they were in the Mid-Holocene Warm Period". That doesn't sound like "already well beyond" is firmly established.
My sentence about "very different feedback circles" indeed does not accurately express my intent. I should have written: "We should expect a very different pattern of feedback circles becoming relevant for the future dynamics of the weather/climate as was important to stop the temperature rise 8000 years ago."
climate change matters a lot more when you have trillions of dollars of infrastructure. before cities exist, it doesn't matter if a river moves half a mile. once you build a city on that river, the river moving now costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
If y'all think extinction for billions is just around the corner, consider that Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh has this forecast for next Tuesday: 44C(110F). And that temp is there most of the summer.
"Saudi population has grown rapidly since 1950 when it was estimated to be 3 million, and for many years had one of the highest population growth rates in the world at around 3 per cent a year."
Out of curiosity, how is this paper any different from the multitude of already known catastrophic outcomes from exceeding the 1.5deg temperature target?
It appears to be a reassessment of many papers on the topic published since 2008, trying to identify which of the proposed 'catastrophic' tipping points presented in those papers are most likely to occur specifically in the 1.5-2 degree range (as opposed to the 2+ degree point, which people also look at)
> We carry out the first comprehensive reassessment of all suggested tipping elements, their CTPs, and the timescales and impacts of tipping. We also highlight steps to further improve understanding of CTPs, including an expert elicitation, a model intercomparison project, and early warning systems leveraging deep learning and remotely sensed data.
It will most likely and it's sad. How can I prepare my children for a world with such aclimate, energy, food and water shortages, more refugees than ever before and so on? Maybe I must ensure they are worth enough for the system to be taken care of.
In Germany some PR campaign made people like my mother think "the greens plan to destroy our wealth" because they fear higher energy prices etc. but to be honest the conservatives now in charge for almost two decades did exacly that with not investing enouth in our grid and so on. It's so ironic that in the end the short term conservative approach destroys the mid and long term living conditions for so many.
Not exactly. Contributions that imply or explicitly mention martyrdom are met with suspicion, because they also imply unproductive flamewars are soon to follow.
No, worst case is that “climate change” is used as an excuse to destroy democracy and rule of law “to save the world”, because radicalised people attack anybody who even sounds like they may have any doubt. It wouldn’t be the first time a true and just cause was abused for that end.
Please cite any instances where serious climate change activists threatened democracy or the rule of law or even discussed it.
It would be completely counterproductive. One of the biggest problems with Climate Change is that it requires mass collective action, and that requires a stable and rational government or organize. Were climate change activists to promote anarchy it would be impossible for them to achieve their goals.
They do not promote anarchy, they promote totalitarian rule. Put all those 'climate change deniers' in prison, force them to eat bugs instead of meat, deny them any human rights, that kind of thing.
literally no one with power has seriously proposed anything like this — quite the opposite in fact, the previous US president suggested that windmills cause cancer
Forgive me for interrupting your attempts to refute the "Liberal Fascism" trolling...
One scenario I've heard, and has me a bit worried, is climate crisis begets a right wing reactionary environmentalism. Basically all the same nativist, anti-immigration, isolationist, anti-trade, yadda yadda, but with an "environmental" justification.
So instead of mitigating or undoing the damage, the reactionaries would be energized by protecting what we have from "the other".
Not too hard to imagine a crackdown, if scarcity leads to hunger leads to unrest.
If ecofascism triumphs over the current surge of ethnonationalism I'll still take that as a win. Doesn't seem likely though given current events and the totality of human history though.
You think famines are unlikely? They've been the irregular default prior to the modern age; I think it will require active efforts to prevent them no matter what happens with the climate.
Climate change might actually increase amount of arable land, by millions of acres, in higher latitudes: Sweden, Finland, Greenland, Canada, etc. It will also increase total rainfall. https://phys.org/news/2018-05-climate-arable.html
Yes, it won't be seamless, but we can adjust to new conditions.
This isnt completely true. The biggest greenhouse gas CO2 is not a pollutant in any conventional sense. The gas is actually pumped into greenhouses to help plants grow faster, and helps plants grow in more arid environments, and reduces water consumption by plants.
So efforts to reduce CO2 might not bear environmental benefits beyond fighting global warming.
It's pumped into greenhouses because they have to be sealed to prevent heat from escaping. In nature plants aren't CO2 limited, typically they are either nutrient, light, or usually water limited; and the warming planet is exacerbating water distribution issues. Increasing CO2 does little to increase plant growth because the bottleneck is elsewhere.
Plants lose less water to the environment when CO2 concentrations are higher because they don't have to open their pores as much to effectively breath. That is why CO2 helps plants grow in more arid environments.
And CO2 is definitely not pumped into greenhouses to help them stay warm. CO2 is a very weak greenhouse gas, and the tens of vertical feet in a greenhouse couldn't possibly trap any measurable amount of heat from heightened CO2 concentrations.
The glass of a greenhouse is responsible for the 'greenhouse' effect, not CO2.
The point is that adding CO2 is necessary to solve a problem that greenhouses create, the enclosed plants deplete the available CO2 and stop growing. It's not applicable to the world at large.
In an open atmosphere plants aren't limited by available CO2, they are limited by sunlight, temperature, soil nutrients, or usually water availability. Adding more CO2 has little to no benefit for the plants.
"Has plant growth increased alongside rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
It turns out the answer is Yes – in a big way. A new study published in the April 6 edition of the journal Nature concludes that as emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels have increased since the start of the 20th century, plants around the world are utilizing 30 percent more carbon dioxide (CO2), spurring plant growth."
- https://www.noaa.gov/news/study-global-plant-growth-surging-...
I mean, a little, but the closed nature of the greenhouse is still the bigger problem.
1000 cubic meters of air only has something like 150 grams of carbon in it; even if your plants in question are 95% water, you're still only talking a few kilograms of plant growth before you completely exhaust the air in an enclosed space.
> In nature plants aren't CO2 limited, typically they are either nutrient, light, or usually water limited; and the warming planet is exacerbating water distribution issues
Plants actually require extra water when CO2 levels are low, such as they are currently, which is why we see so much desertification of the planet.
High CO2 levels reduce plants need for water, reducing desertification
Increased CO2 concentrations do impare human cognition, but that is more about relatively sealed spaces with lots of people like a classroom where CO2 concentrations can be 3 times atmospheric levels or more.
Downvote away, but the fearmongering is so tiresome (and has been for 30 years). The carbon emitters they want to eliminate are people.
On geologic time scales the CO2 level has been way way higher than it is today and the planet was still teeming with life.
Hey, speaking of tipping points, wasn’t climate change supposed to mean a constant stream of cat 5 hurricanes crashing into the eastern seaboard? And yet we just had a very quiet start of our hurricane season. Ah, but that’s weather, not climate. And yet whenever a bad weather event occurs, that’s evidence of climate change. Absence of bad weather is also evidence I guess. Almost like the whole thing is unfalsifiable. The climate changed before we ever got here and it will continue changing well after we’re gone.
Just as the petrochemical lobby has an interest in downplaying effects, there are plenty of other people with a profitable interest in the fearmongering as well. Their salaries depend on you being terrified and they’re doing a great job of it. They use your tax money to fly to climate conferences in Bali, Singapore, Paris, Rome. I’d take them more seriously if the conferences were held via Zoom or in places like Cleveland or Houston.
The politicians who keep telling me that this is a huge problem still fly their private jets everywhere and still own plenty of beachfront property. I’m more worried about a True Believer funding some kind of bioweapon to “heal the planet” and kill us all.
I'm sick of armchair climatologists like yourself. It's amazing people who have just read maybe a book or two and some youtube videos think they know better than an entire scientific community full of people doing this full-time for their entire adult lives. Get your ego checked.
Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment," Green Book Award winner, and the best-selling author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities (HarperCollins 2021) and Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (HarperCollins 2020).
He’s been called an “environmental guru,” “climate guru,” “North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy,” and “high priest” of the pro-human environmental movement for his work.
Michael has broken major stories on crime and drug policy; homelessness; Amazon deforestation; climate change; eco-anxiety; fracking; and California’s fires.
He is a leading energy expert who testifies and advises governments around the world including in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.
He is founder and president of Environmental Progress, an independent nonprofit research organization that incubates ideas, leaders, and movements. Michael And he is cofounder of the California Peace Coalition, an alliance of parents of children killed by fentanyl, parents of homeless addicts, and recovering addicts.
Michael is currently writing two books. In Spring 2023, Carus Books will publish The War on Nuclear: Why It Hurts Us All. In Fall 2023, HarperCollins will publish the third and final book in the trilogy Shellenberger is writing about threats to civilization from within.
He has been a climate and environmental activist for over 30 years. He has helped save nuclear reactors around the world, from Illinois and New York to South Korea and Taiwan, thereby preventing an increase in air pollution equivalent to adding over 24 million cars to the road.
In the 1990s, Michael helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, inspire Nike to improve factory conditions, and advocate for decriminalization and harm reduction policies. In the 2000s, Michael advocated for a“new Apollo project” in clean energy, which resulted in a $150 billion public investment in clean tech between 2009 and 2015.
Dr. Bjorn Lomborg researches the smartest ways to do good. With his think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus, he has worked with hundreds of the world’s top economists and seven Nobel Laureates to find and promote the most effective solutions to the world’s greatest challenges, from disease and hunger to climate and education.
For his work, Lomborg was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. He is a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and is a frequent commentator in print and broadcast media, for outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, CNN, FOX, and the BBC. His monthly column is published in many languages by dozens of influential newspapers across all continents.
He is a best-selling author, whose books include "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet", "The Skeptical Environmentalist", "Cool It", "How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place", "The Nobel Laureates' Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World 2016-2030" and "Prioritizing Development: A Cost Benefit Analysis of the UN's SDGs".
He previously served as the U.S. Department of Energy’s second Senate-confirmed Under Secretary for Science from May 19, 2009 through November 18, 2011. As Under Secretary for Science, Dr. Koonin functioned as the Department’s chief scientific officer, coordinating and overseeing research across the DOE. He led the preparation of the Department’s 2011 Strategic Plan and was the principal author of its Quadrennial Technology Review. Dr. Koonin particularly championed research programs in High Performance Simulation, Exascale Computing, Inertial Fusion Energy, and Greenhouse Gas Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification. He also provided technical counsel on diverse nuclear security matters.
He joined the California Institute of Technology’s faculty in 1975, was a research fellow at the Neils Bohr Institute during 1976-1977, and was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow during 1977-1979. He became a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech in 1981 and served as Chairman of the Faculty from 1989-1991. Dr. Koonin was the seventh provost of Caltech from 1995-2004. In that capacity, he was involved in identifying and recruiting 1/3 of the Institute’s professorial faculty and left an enduring legacy of academic and research initiatives in the biological, physical, earth, and social sciences, as well as the planning and development of the Thirty-Meter Telescope project.
As the Chief Scientist at BP from 2004 to early 2009, Dr. Koonin developed the long-range technology strategy for alternative and renewable energy sources. He managed the firm’s university–based research programs and played a central role in establishing the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Koonin is a member and past chair of the JASON Study Group, advising the U.S. Government on technical matters of national security. He has served on numerous advisory committees for the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense, including the Defense Science Board and the CNO’s Executive Panel. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a former member of the Trilateral Commission. In 1985, Dr. Koonin received the Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist Award and, in 1998 the Department of Energy’s E.O. Lawrence Award for his “broad impact on nuclear many-body physics, on astrophysics, and on a variety of related fields where sophisticated numerical methods are essential; and in particular, for his breakthrough in nuclear shell model calculations centered on an ingenious method for dealing with the huge matrices of heavy nuclei by using path integral methods combined with the Monte Carlo technique.”
These three authors (among many others) are critical of the concept of a "climate catastrophe". Are they people who have just read maybe a book or two and some youtube videos as well? I guess you would not given the mountain of evidence against such a claim. Now image one of them had posted a critical reply to this thread, what would your response be? 'Get your ego checked'?
Imagine making this post in the middle of China being in historic drought conditions. Historic flooding in Pakistan. Drought in the American west. Historic flooding in Kentucky. All of this in the past month.
Also, please cite that Hurricane study. Your strawman private jet flying climate scientists should also be named. Two faced politicians aside, you do realize that people like Joe Biden have been riding the train for years to get to and from DC? Bernie Sanders doesn't own a private jet. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn't own a private jet, heck she was vilified in the media for upgrading to first class once.
From that paper, which doesn’t talk about 2022 at all:
In summary, despite new research that challenges one aspect of the AR5 consensus for late 21st century-projected TC activity, it remains likely that global mean tropical cyclone maximum wind speeds and precipitation rates will increase; and it is more likely than not that the global frequency of occurrence of TCs will either decrease or remain essentially the same. Confidence in projected global increases of intensity and tropical cyclone precipitation rates is medium and high, respectively, as there is better model consensus. Confidence is further heightened, particularly for projected increases in precipitation rates, by a robust physical understanding of the processes that lead to these increases. Confidence in projected increases in the frequency of very intense TCs is generally lower (medium in the eastern North Pacific and low in the western North Pacific and Atlantic) due to comparatively fewer studies available and due to the competing influences of projected reductions in overall storm frequency and increased mean intensity on the frequency of the most intense storms. Both the magnitude and sign of projected changes in individual ocean basins appears to depend on the large-scale pattern of changes to atmospheric circulation and ocean surface temperature (e.g., Knutson et al. 2015 ). Projections of these regional patterns of change—apparently critical for TC projections—are uncertain, leading to uncertainty in regional TC projections.
There are other ways to get places than private jet or ferry. Obviously you can’t convene a global panel in walking distance if everyone in the world.
Given the lag in the climate, isn’t 1.5C warming more or less unavoidable now? We would need extremely steep emissions reductions that aren’t happening.
I enjoyed ‘Under a Green Sky’, which combines a brief history of palaeontology (and amusing academic point settling) with the prediction that warming will eventually cause huge releases of hydrogen sulphide.
We are perhaps entering a negative feedback loop where disruption makes countries less keen to work together on emissions reductions as metaphorical bridges get pulled up (is Russia going to bother even pretending to care any more?).