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A 3°C world has no safe place

economist.com

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Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#171

Post by jacobolus »

rightbyte wrote: post #117
scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

The same people that can't do a accurate weather forecast more than 5 days into the future are telling you the world is gonna end due to climate change ... and you blame the common man for not freaking out? I mean put your self in peoples shoes.

I can’t predict what my 4-year old will want to eat for dinner tonight or how much, but I can easily predict that he’ll be substantially bigger and heavier a year from now, and predict the change in height and weight within reasonable tolerance.

If some laypeople have not received a basic high school education and have trouble understanding variance, uncertainty, and the difference between short-term fluctuations and long-term trends, that really isn’t the fault of climate scientists.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#172

Post by WorkLobster »

noasaservice wrote: post #27

I'm sitting in my air conditioned room, in the USA. Doing computer stuff, naturally. I look at what I can do about this. I can turn up the temp in my room, and the house. Meager difference. I can use less water - I already am, with getting showers every other day on average. I can eat less meat - which I do with purchase of the beef CSA. I'm big into the repair movement, and repair household equipment and electronics…

> I can eat less meat

It's something I keep quiet about in day-to-day life since it seems to invite reprisal, but if we're soul-searching for what we as individuals can do, I beg you to try eating no meat at all. There seems to be an increasing awareness that animal farming as currently practised is an environmental catastrophe on many levels, including emissions[1]—I dimly recall the IPCC report being quite clear that it's incompatible with a world that isn't ever-worsening, and suspect the obvious conclusion of "stop entirely" has been watered down to "try to eat less" because they fear people will just assume the former is too onerous and not bother.

I have found it to be the opposite—simple steps, fun, healthy—and sort of want to launch into a full tale, but it has been a long week and I was just heading to bed. Still, I'm more than happy later to suggest recommendations and recipes and/or generally chat if you (or anyone) would like.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha...

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#173

Post by r00fus »

hak8or wrote: post #127
scoofy wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. 100 companies are responsible for extraction . They are selling us the carbon we are actively buying .

Thank you, I could not agree more. These companies exist because their services and products are being bought by someone else, and in the end the consumers are either actual consumers or governments (who consumers vote for). I place minimal blame on companies, because clearly consumers don't care, and instead want to buy the cheapest products possible.

That'd be great if they didn't BUY politicians to write laws that subsidize their extraction and hamper legislation to actually combat the externalities THEY produced.

Consumers do care, but their choices are between bad and awful because the economics (structured by the extraction companies) stacks the deck against solutions.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#174

Post by dmitrygr »

tekromancr wrote: post #47
lettergram wrote: post #7

What are they talking about? In the US this will mean more rain in many regions and longer growing seasons. A lot of plants will quickly adapt. Historically, our planet for most of its history was warmer. It’s all going to be fine, while we will need to adjust the world will continue on. Note: I’m not saying it won’t be hard, but this will be a gradual change and will actually assist some places, while others get mor…

That is profoundly myopic. Sure, the "planet will adapt" or whatever. But how well do you think it's gonna go when a bunch of nuclear weapon armed nations decide that the land they live on is no longer hospitable?

Nuclear weapons cause more stability, not less. Nuclear armed countries will never fight each other directly (MAD). So I presume that no nuclear war will ensue. Non-nuclear armed countries might get subsumed

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#175

Post by magnetic »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #130
daxfohl wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of concrete and steel in the urban lifestyle, which according to Gates are the biggest contributors to global warming. Not saying urban lifestyle is the worst, but there's a good chance it's just not enough. My guess is no matter what we do we're over the limit, a reduction in one thing leads to an increase in another, and probably population reduction is the only solution.

“Population reduction” again? It might be the most politically expedient option, but the planet isn't overpopulated. We're just polluting way too much. If you model a back-of-the-envelope sustainable civilisation, you'll find we're nowhere near any sort of fundamental population limit. As a species, our median per-capita pollution is okay. It's the mean per-capita pollution that's the issue.

> If you model a back-of-the-envelope sustainable civilisation, you'll find we're nowhere near any sort of fundamental population limit.

How did you model it? I'm curious about the assumptions you made and how you came up with your conclusion.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#176

Post by bko »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #162
bko wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know who you're referring to as 'we' but in the US, carbon emissions have actually peaked in the early 2000s and decreased in an absolute sense since then, despite growing population and industrialization. We're currently at 1986 emission levels. US has 15% of global emissions, while China has 28% and is growing in both per person and absolute. I don't think you're wrong to be cynical about tackling this prob…

Those stats are not fair because China is the world's factory. If China decides to stop exporting manufactured products to reduce it's emissions, the US would need to manufacture itself, increasing it's emissions.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china

Take a look at "China: Consumption-based accounting: how do emissions compare when we adjust for trade?"

> Annual consumption-based emissions are domestic emissions adjusted for trade. If a country imports goods the CO₂ emissions needed to produce such goods are added to its domestic emissions; if it exports goods then this is subtracted.

2018 had 8.96 bn carbon tons in consumption out of a totla of 9.96 bn total tons (~90% consumption)

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#177

Post by scoofy »

rightbyte wrote: post #117
scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

The same people that can't do a accurate weather forecast more than 5 days into the future are telling you the world is gonna end due to climate change ... and you blame the common man for not freaking out? I mean put your self in peoples shoes.

"Scientists are dumb, and their dumb scientific, totally rational consensus, backed up by tons of data, is dumb"

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#178

Post by nwiswell »

scoofy wrote: post #112
dmead wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking people to suffering annoyances and spend lots of money when the average income has been going down for 40 years. I'm surprised you're surprised.

Living more efficiently obviously saves money . The absurdities of what's happening is literally the Sierra Club opposing density in San Francisco. The environmentalist are literally opposing density across California . Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to Marin County, under the banner of "preservation," we're going to destroy the climate. I just, i cannot believe this is happening. They same people who would hand wash…

> I just, i cannot believe this is happening.

This isn't hard to understand. The Sierra Club is made up of legitimate environmentalists, but they also care about their organization and their livelihoods, and many of the major donors to the Sierra Club are property owners in San Francisco (or Marin, or LA).

Property values are obviously negatively impacted by development / densification, and so to avoid alienating donors, for whom opposing development is the single most important economic issue, the Sierra Club is dutifully NIMBYist.

I can assure you the Sierra Club would be fine with densification in Africa or whatever.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#179

Post by bellyfullofbac »

endisneigh wrote: post #32

I fear the one-two punch of disproportionate use of energy coupled with rampant world-wide inequality (in both resources and income) result in those who caused the issues having little reason to care about the result. In a democratic country, how will a leader convince the population to care about this if the country is rich and currently is unaffected? Well, we're about to see how successful or unsuccessful they mig…

Just look at Covid response. The rich countries are thinking "Us first" and are just doing symbolic gestures to help the poorer ones.

Just like humans would try to save themselves first, even countries in unions like the EU shut down borders between each other when the virus first came there.

On the topic of waste, I had a realization that even as developers we're contributing to a lot of waste. We want conveniences, like inefficient frameworks so you can just write HTML and CSS instead of native UI, and we get to have these conveniences because processors are getting faster, but on the consumer side, it means top of the line hardware from 10 years ago might now be too slow to render a webpage, and is ending up as e-waste...

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#180

Post by magicalist »

bko wrote: post #128
scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

I don't know who you're referring to as 'we' but in the US, carbon emissions have actually peaked in the early 2000s and decreased in an absolute sense since then, despite growing population and industrialization. We're currently at 1986 emission levels. US has 15% of global emissions, while China has 28% and is growing in both per person and absolute. I don't think you're wrong to be cynical about tackling this prob…

> but you should be honest about what reducing emissions means to billions of people that are just now coming into the industrial age.

Isn't that part of the point? If the US has maintained per capita emission levels that would be ruinous if the rest of the world joined us at, can you really say "we" are done with anything?

OP listed a bunch of specific things, moderate efficiencies and switching to natural gas are great but not nearly sufficient.

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