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Advocates want to name heatwaves like hurricanes to raise awareness of dangers

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Re: Advocates want to name heatwaves like hurricanes to raise awareness of dangers

#151

Post by perl4ever »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #139
rhino369 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will be able to smell the bullshit. The idea that climate change will be apocalyptic (for first world nations) in your grandchildren's time frame is just as loony-toons as denying it exists at all. The scientific consensus is nowhere near that bad.

Unfortunately, so far I have seen the opposite - people lapping it up and the "consensus" on the Internet (Reddit in particular) being that we're all doomed, with the more extreme outliers thinking about suicide because they genuinely expect the world to _inevitably_ become a literal Mad Max desert dystopia within the next few decades. We've swung way too far from "completely ignoring the problem" to "absolute frenzy…

>Reminds me of Y2K.

Well, people say Y2K wasn't a problem because we buckled down and solved it.

I just saw an article that claimed the UK was back to like 1890 levels of CO2 emissions. Maybe it's still salvageable if the US gets shaken out of its stupor. Maybe decarbonization will just happen anyway through market forces as renewable energy improves.

Re: Advocates want to name heatwaves like hurricanes to raise awareness of dangers

#152

Post by perl4ever »

bzb5 wrote: post #105
kyleee wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people were worried about catastrophic global cooling

Just like now we are worried about catastrophic global warming. Only that, of course, now we are right. ;-)

If you look at a temperature graph all would become clear. It's not like the data they had was fake or misrepresented, it's just that the trend is noisy and became clearer later. Now that it is clear, it makes no sense to say "we could still be wrong". It's like a stock market graph; you don't know if a few days ago was the peak, but in a year you do. Or in case of climate, 30-40 years.

Re: Advocates want to name heatwaves like hurricanes to raise awareness of dangers

#153

Post by ciarannolan »

umvi wrote: post #65
roamerz wrote: post #61

While we are at it we should name some of these west coast fires after the politicians who have supported shutting down the forests to sensible resource management.

Yet west coast politicians want to stop calling them "wild fires" in favor of a new term "climate fires". So the question is, how much of these wildfires are due to climate change, and how much is due to bad forest "resource management" (not sure what this entails - preventing more frequent smaller fires with firefighting which causes bigger fires years later?) and how much to some other reason (water table depletion…

> Yet west coast politicians want to stop calling them "wild fires" in favor of a new term "climate fires".

According to who? You?

Re: Advocates want to name heatwaves like hurricanes to raise awareness of dangers

#154

Post by tetris11 »

bamboozled wrote: post #134
rhino369 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will be able to smell the bullshit. The idea that climate change will be apocalyptic (for first world nations) in your grandchildren's time frame is just as loony-toons as denying it exists at all. The scientific consensus is nowhere near that bad.

What are you basing this on? If the heat doesn’t kill people, famine, floods, fires and wars likely will. It might not be the apocalypse, but further rises in temperature could easily topple civilisation as we know it?

Paired with social uprising, drought, and mass immigration.

1176 BC, the year the bronze age around the Mediterranean collapsed for all the above reasons (plus earthquakes).

We should learn the lessons of what history says about this period. It took 300 years for them to recover...

Re: Advocates want to name heatwaves like hurricanes to raise awareness of dangers

#155

Post by smegger001 »

umvi wrote: post #112
gremlinsinc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spanish Flu killed about 600k Americans. We're on target to hit 400k+ by January. So, it's a safe bet we'll beat the Spanish Flu by next spring. These are people who didn't need to die, who wouldn't have died for another reason. Do you really place such a low price tag on people's lives? What if it were your life, would you gladly sacrifice it?

> The spanish Flu killed about 600k Americans. USA population was also only 100M in 1918. So 600k back then was .6% of the total population. So far covid has killed .06% of the total population, or one order of magnitude less.

Spanish flu pandemic lasted a little over 2 years, we are just now coming up on 8 months.

Re: Advocates want to name heatwaves like hurricanes to raise awareness of dangers

#157

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

rhino369 wrote: post #130
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #20

While we are at it, can we change some vocabulary used for sensitising climate change from ' For the planet ' to ' Your children will die soon, your grandchildren sooner '?

People will be able to smell the bullshit. The idea that climate change will be apocalyptic (for first world nations) in your grandchildren's time frame is just as loony-toons as denying it exists at all. The scientific consensus is nowhere near that bad.

>People will be able to smell the bullshit. The idea that climate change will be apocalyptic (for first world nations) in your grandchildren's time frame is just as loony-toons as denying it exists at all.

Who said apocalyptic? I said, sooner; even a millisecond reduction in lifespan is sooner.

> The scientific consensus is nowhere near that bad.

Behavioural changes due to climate change leading to increase in skin cancer already has scientific consensus even in our lifetime.

>(for first world nations)

Oh, right /s.

Re: Advocates want to name heatwaves like hurricanes to raise awareness of dangers

#158

Post by makomk »

perl4ever wrote: post #150
rhino369 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will be able to smell the bullshit. The idea that climate change will be apocalyptic (for first world nations) in your grandchildren's time frame is just as loony-toons as denying it exists at all. The scientific consensus is nowhere near that bad.

I'm taking no particular position, because I don't go out of my way to read on the subject, but I did notice an article recently which said that we seem to be firmly on the worst of the likely IPCC scenarios from a few years ago, not in the middle.

The media have been pushing hard on the idea that we're living in the worst-case RCP8.5 IPCC scenario. The article that particularly annoyed me was the Atlantic one which based this claim on a Twitter thread that, if you actually clicked through to it, showed us right in the middle of the middle two IPCC scenarios plain as day on the graph. (The tweet actually claimed that we were closer to RCP8.5 than he'd like, which is of course true since all the emissions scenarios are relatively close together early on and he wants us on the best one.) It's not true, of course. Similarly, RCP8.5 is not the "business as usual" scenario that happens if we don't take action, as the media also likes to suggests - it actually requires a rather improbable combination of events. The media are actively making people less informed on this stuff in order to sell fear and a narrative.

Re: Advocates want to name heatwaves like hurricanes to raise awareness of dangers

#159

Post by DataGata »

mrmuagi wrote: post #143
cos2pi wrote: post #102

It's worth mentioning here that heatwaves are the leading cause of weather-related death in the US for the past 30 years. https://www.weather.gov/hazstat I'm not advocating for the personification of all extreme weather events, but the lethality of heatwaves is often overlooked.

It doesn't kill you directly, but the vulnerable are easy prey (elderly, immobile, etc.). A story that was shared with me about the lethality of heat was basically an overweight individual fell off his mobility scooter and was knocked unconscious, and just cooked to death.

I am terrified of a hurricane knocking out power throughout Florida followed by even a mild heatwave. Nursing homes could barely handle keeping their staff from going to the bars and getting Covid- are we to believe they are prepared to deal with hundreds of cheaply built old-person dorms turned into sous vides?

Re: Advocates want to name heatwaves like hurricanes to raise awareness of dangers

#160

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

perl4ever wrote: post #151
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, so far I have seen the opposite - people lapping it up and the "consensus" on the Internet (Reddit in particular) being that we're all doomed, with the more extreme outliers thinking about suicide because they genuinely expect the world to _inevitably_ become a literal Mad Max desert dystopia within the next few decades. We've swung way too far from "completely ignoring the problem" to "absolute frenzy…

>Reminds me of Y2K. Well, people say Y2K wasn't a problem because we buckled down and solved it. I just saw an article that claimed the UK was back to like 1890 levels of CO2 emissions. Maybe it's still salvageable if the US gets shaken out of its stupor. Maybe decarbonization will just happen anyway through market forces as renewable energy improves.

> Well, people say Y2K wasn't a problem because we buckled down and solved it.

That's why I think it's a good parallel:

1. Something that would be an issue if nothing was done.

2. By the time the public got into a frenzy over it, things were already being done.

3. (Hopefully) will turn out to be a non-issue because things were done.

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