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US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

theguardian.com

71–80 of 160 posts

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#71
post #65
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are mentions in papers from the 1980s, eg https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02507142 (edit: changed link, fixed from earlier where the context was minerals instead of climate and dates were in 70s)

Those talk about tank domes, salt domes, limiting dome height tests, etc etc.

Thanks, updated.

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#72

still, I see no serious action being taken to tackle the climate crisis. Current governments are just putting some dates by which we’ll stop doing x or y, but in really almost nothing concrete is done to stop the worst scenarios.

It's a really hard pill to swallow. It will require expenses and sacrifices far beyond those that covid required, and for far longer.

I have zero hope of it happening. People won't stop driving, flying or eating meat. They won't even drive smaller cars. As I understand it, that would just be the start.

Looking at how we handled the pandemic, I don't think we'll manage.

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#73
While climate change denialists minimize and try to pretend that more analysis is needed before lifting our smallest finger to change the obvious problem (humans burning hundreds of millions of years of sequestered carbon in the span of 150 years)

It’s actually rather urgent that we collectively acted like the singular species we are, and acted yesterday already.

Don’t wait til 2030 to phase out whatever, let’s go full bore and do it now dedicating our full combined engineering might to tackle the problem. IS HUMANITY CAPABLE OF COLLECTIVE ACTION IF OUR LIVES DEPEND UPON IT?

You know those films with alien invasions where humanity comes together to fight it, can you imagine traitorous factions saying the alien invasion is just a myth? Undermining all that is needed for collective action

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#74
post #20

For the first time in my life, I experienced a massive heat wave, torrential rainfall and flooding, a forest fire and hail, all within a single month. I am NOT looking forward to what's coming in a few years.

It's going to be bad. I don't expect to have a conventional retirement like my parents did. By that point, society will not longer be able to support a large cohort of people who just consume and don't contribute.

I don't understand how anyone can still justify having children, knowing how they will suffer as a result of what we have done to the planet.

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if the current events tell us we're in a crisis, were we also in a crisis a century ago? Two centuries ago? Three centuries ago? We can look in history books and see the same kinds of events happening back then. If they indicate a crisis now, don't they also indicate the crisis was happening back then?

How is it that green user names always are climate-drift negationists? Should they not be red instead?

Tells you a lot of how they stand by their values

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#76
post #74
post #20

For the first time in my life, I experienced a massive heat wave, torrential rainfall and flooding, a forest fire and hail, all within a single month. I am NOT looking forward to what's coming in a few years.

It's going to be bad. I don't expect to have a conventional retirement like my parents did. By that point, society will not longer be able to support a large cohort of people who just consume and don't contribute. I don't understand how anyone can still justify having children, knowing how they will suffer as a result of what we have done to the planet.

I believe it is incumbent upon those of us in privileged positions of education and wealth to have children that we teach and raise to be contributors in solving the world’s problems. Raising one child well goes a lot further to helping people out then not having a child at all.

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#77

still, I see no serious action being taken to tackle the climate crisis. Current governments are just putting some dates by which we’ll stop doing x or y, but in really almost nothing concrete is done to stop the worst scenarios.

Most governments might be trapped because reducing emissions does not help to solve the problems people have now or in the near future from climate change. "Inflicting" hard policies on the electorate without benefits in even the medium term is tough.

So governments will need to start with actions mitigating the effects climate change with at least equal effort than emission reduction. Don't see that realization happening at the moment as most policy and international discussions are about emissions. In the end, might even be that adaptation wins out over reduction in terms of effort.

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#78
post #20

For the first time in my life, I experienced a massive heat wave, torrential rainfall and flooding, a forest fire and hail, all within a single month. I am NOT looking forward to what's coming in a few years.

I'm afraid that in a decade, humans will just accept this as our reality and forget that it wasn't always like this. In 20 years, we'll have a generation of adults who'll think our stories of years of generally calm weather sound like pure fantasy.

We already have this every time it snows in winter in the pre-alps. People totally forgot that like 10-20 years ago "extreme snow" was kind of the norm from December to early March.

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#79
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without statistics there is no meat; the Guardian is good at narrative but not so good at objectively reporting on trends. I see only one concrete point in the article; that the heat in certain areas broke records by 5.5 degrees is a relevant factual datum, but to understand what it actually means you have to ask things like: how many standard deviations is that? How long have these records been kept in this many pla…

You get these in the scientific articles, you cannot expect a newspaper article to include these. It should only include the interpretation of experts of these statistics. Not the statistics itself. That data is up to you to look into yourself...if you are an expert in the field.

The questions posed by your parent comment are rather high-level inquiries based on statistics and basic scientific reasoning.

They do not require domain expertise to answer, just a decent command of statistics and a curious mind, and I agree with the parent that they are fundamental to knowing the scientific truth.

> you cannot expect a newspaper article to include these.

Why not?

If you're driving a narrative, using hyperbolic language such as "punishing" or coining terms such as "heat dome", the burden-of-proof standards should be equally high on your part.

I'd expect any scientific reporter in a newspaper like The Guardian to have basic scientific inquiry skills, and if the hypothesis is "this is caused by humans" to try hard to refute it, and not to leave questions like that unanswered.

Is that too high of a standard?

Re: US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country

#80
post #72

still, I see no serious action being taken to tackle the climate crisis. Current governments are just putting some dates by which we’ll stop doing x or y, but in really almost nothing concrete is done to stop the worst scenarios.

It's a really hard pill to swallow. It will require expenses and sacrifices far beyond those that covid required, and for far longer. I have zero hope of it happening. People won't stop driving, flying or eating meat. They won't even drive smaller cars. As I understand it, that would just be the start. Looking at how we handled the pandemic, I don't think we'll manage.

I’m a lot more optimistic. The American idea of a compact car is the British idea of a big car (judging by labelled parking spaces in Davis CA), so that’s culture or fashion, and those can shift fast. And all the big companies are shifting to electric now, so even big isn’t as important.

Vat meat is starting to get on the market, and while we’ll have to wait and see if this is a iPhone moment or a Sinclair C5 moment, the prices have come down rapidly since the first attempts.

Flying is going to be a hard thing to totally green, but it’s not impossible either, merely low priority.

Yes, there will be those that reject everything — I’ve encountered those who think a self-driving car will take away their freedom, instead of regarding it as a chauffeur — but when the economics are against them, when they have to pay extra to be eco-unfriendly instead of paying less? History shows most people follow the money, not just for ill but also for good.

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