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Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

nature.com

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Re: Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

#21

Post by sarbaz »

familysized wrote: post #7
sarbaz wrote: post #4

So, is there any convincing reason to think that any emissions targets will be met? Does anyone buy the line in the article about India? Surely they will become an emitter at least as significant as China. Isn't our money better spent preparing for the inevitable effects of climate change?

What's wrong with the line about India? It's absolutely correct - per capita emissions from India are very small. > Surely they will become an emitter at least as significant as China. Looking at a country's total emissions makes no sense because the population needs to be taken into account. India will eventually have the largest total emissions, which is fine because per capita is really low.

I was referring to the article's claim that because India is "emerging as a leader in renewable energy" we can expect it to contribute significantly less to climate change.

Re: Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

#23

Post by sarbaz »

mempko wrote: post #19
sarbaz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects. I'm not entirely sure. People seem to be convinced that climate change will destroy all civilization, but in the distant past the earth has flourished with significantly higher temperatures than what we have today. Once our climate reaches a new equilibrium, humanity will adjust and everything will probably be OK. And we can be c…

All but one major extinction event in the past was because of global warming. What you are missing is that during those times , the temperature change was over a much longer period of time than now. What we are doing is unprecedented and there is little reason to believe anything will flourish.

But not all instances of global warming caused mass extinction events. I think that there is a correlation here rather than a causation. In fact, looking at historical charts the earth's temperature undergoes a relatively significant change every few 100k years at least. So extinction events are only a tiny minority of those events, around 5/5000

Re: Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

#24

Post by jsingleton »

dcolkitt wrote: post #18
mattigames wrote: post #11

Is so obvious where this is all going: The wealthy -the factories owners and their close allies- the very same ones ignoring the pledges to stop contributing to climate change will be the only ones protected enough from most damages of climate change, only the wealthy will afford to live in the cities with livable temperature, to buy potable water, only the most resilient of the poor and middle-class will survive, an…

Frankly this kind of doomsaying view has no basis in reality. While it's true that unmitigated global warming will impose a very large economic cost, it's simply not the case that it's going to turn the world into some unlivable hell-scape. There's just no basis for that belief in the actual evidence. The best estimates say that global warming will lower per capita GDP by somewhere between 5-20% by 2100. That's a tra…

Talking about things in terms of GDP glosses over the human suffering that it represents.

> a 10% increase in per capita real income is associated with a 1.5% decrease in the crude death rate

It seems reasonable to assume that the inverse is also true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate#Economics

https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-...

Re: Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

#26

Post by jsingleton »

carapace wrote: post #22

Flagging climate stories? WTF?

Perhaps a vested interest controls lots of accounts on here and wants to bury stories of this nature (pun not intended)? The comments don't appear to have descended into a flame war so I suspect a bot net has manually flagged it to death.

I've seen it a lot on here and it makes me think it's not worth engaging with HN any more.

Re: Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

#27

Post by currymj »

sarbaz wrote: post #16
currymj wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even if we miss a target, more emissions beyond that target still make things much worse. it's not like we can just declare bankruptcy or something. ultimately we have to reduce emissions as much as possible while preparing for their impact -- and I am not an expert, but I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects.

> I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects. I'm not entirely sure. People seem to be convinced that climate change will destroy all civilization, but in the distant past the earth has flourished with significantly higher temperatures than what we have today. Once our climate reaches a new equilibrium, humanity will adjust and everything will probably be OK. And we can be c…

i think the idea of reducing emissions is to reach a new equilibrium as quickly as possible, and one as close as possible to our current climate which we know is pretty good.

climate change is likely not going to destroy all civilization (notwithstanding sensationalistic New York Magazine article) but adding decades or centuries of "adjustment" -- droughts, floods, crop failures, less predictable extreme weather, displacement of people in coastal regions -- is likely to be very expensive.

hard to imagine that all this cost over several generations is outweighed by oil and coal being somewhat cheaper than renewables/nuclear.

Re: Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

#28

Post by Hextinium »

sarbaz wrote: post #16
currymj wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even if we miss a target, more emissions beyond that target still make things much worse. it's not like we can just declare bankruptcy or something. ultimately we have to reduce emissions as much as possible while preparing for their impact -- and I am not an expert, but I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects.

> I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects. I'm not entirely sure. People seem to be convinced that climate change will destroy all civilization, but in the distant past the earth has flourished with significantly higher temperatures than what we have today. Once our climate reaches a new equilibrium, humanity will adjust and everything will probably be OK. And we can be c…

The issue is not that we all face a catastrophic cataclysm but that climate change makes the earth significantly less amenable to us. Cropland destruction, lack of drinking water and relocation of population centers due to changing coastlines are extremely expensive and preventing that would be advantageous. The earth will be just fine without us.
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