I'm rich and live in a Western country. This won't affect me so I don't care.
I live in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains and I'm terrified.
UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C
131–140 of 349 posts
Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm, then I wonder why rich nations have much higher per capita CO2 emissions than poor nations ( https://www.unep.org/explore-topics/climate-action/what-we-d... )?
You're not replying to a comment saying "poor people are the biggest contributors of CO2 emissions", you're replying to a comment saying "driving people into poverty is the biggest contributor of CO2" So the thing to look at isn't poor people's emissions, it's rich people's emissions, given that (relatively speaking, bc increasing money supply just decreases its worth) the richer rich people are, the more poor people…
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Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that the key problem - all current "green" or "zero" tech is simply a trick, with shuffling emissions to other countries, selling-buying quotas, maybe reducing emissions a little in the best case. Until we have a working industrial scale CO2 sequestration factories we are essentially doing nothing, or close to nothing.
How are solar panels or windmills a trick?
They're not removing co2 from the atmosphere. So they help reduce new emissions, but they don't help with the existing ones.
Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C
#134Such pathways require global cooperation and will fail unless all major nations are on board. In particular, Russia is making no effort, and has no incentive or motivation to make any effort due to their vast tundra landscape. Step 1 is to get Russia on board by some means, without Russia any of these goals are senseless.
If your solution involves Russia getting on board then you've already failed. Russia is actually encouraging climate change because it opens up more shipping in the arctic circle. This is to illustrate that in the short term climate change leads to winners and losers. In the long term we probably all lose, but we're not known for our long term thinking.
Not sure why it is downvoted, but Russia is massively on the benefiting side of global warming. It reduces the amount of useless land, and massively increases crops yields throughout its territory.
Geopolitically, it benefits from additional pressure on Europe to accommodate the migrations caused by climate change, and all the instability it causes.
Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> buying single-use goods over and over is cheaper short-term than buying something made to last Do you have examples of these — single-use goods that are contributing to global warming and that poor people are buying over and over, more so than wealthier people — or in general, any empirical evidence that poor people are following this economic strategy, thereby contributing to global warming? There's often a huge d…
I think you've misunderstood my position. You mention: > that poor people are buying over and over, more so than wealthier people Not only is this a line of argument I disagree with, I even explicitly said I disagreed with it in this part of the comment you are replying to: >> I think the idea is that if more people were middle-class, we'd see consumers make better choices (personally, I don't see that happening with…
> I think you've misunderstood my position.
I'm definitely confused about it now.
You said: "The poorer you are, the less you can individually consume, and the more you must go for things that are cheap at the expense of other things (e.g. buying single-use goods over and over is cheaper short-term than buying something made to last)." I disagree that the part in parentheses follows logically from the part outside the parentheses, and I disagree that the part in parentheses necessarily represents the economic strategy of poor people. So, I'm not sure what your view is on that, or what exactly you intended with that sentence.
Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C
#136We are too politically polarized to solve problems in this class, which requires political unity because of the scale, cost, and speed requirements.
All of our major political forces play games, constantly make moves in bad faith, talk out of both sides of their mouths publicly vs privately, so we are screwed.
The reality is that IF climate change science were a big hoax (sadly, it's not) there WOULD be a team using it for political games, so there will always be a large class of people who believe that's what's going on.
Maybe if we didn't spend decades politicizing every microscopic issue including in science, technology, and medicine, we could have policy makers advocate for positions based on science and everyone would trust it. That's not the world we live in and unfortunately, it looks like we never will.
Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C
#1371.5*C ? What kind of fictional reality are living in? We are way past 2.4*C projection and are actually on track for 2.9*C or so. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/09/cop26-se...
Let's be perfectly clear: the projection you are citing is on the extreme end of a spectrum. Other projections differ. Per the (non-headline) part of the article:
> The estimate stands in sharp contrast to optimistic forecasts published last week that suggested heating could be held to 1.9C or 1.8C, thanks to commitments announced at the talks, now in their second week and scheduled to end this weekend.
> Those estimates were based on long-term goals set out by countries including India, the world’s third-biggest emitter, which is aiming for net zero emissions by 2070.
> By contrast, the sobering assessment of a rise of 2.4C from Climate Action Tracker (CAT), the world’s most respected climate analysis coalition, was based on countries’ short-term goals for the next decade.
It's worth pointing out that the "world's most respected climate analysis coalition" bit is some rather blatant editorializing. There's simply no way that's an objective fact (what did they do, survey the entire world?) Even if there were a way to defend such a statement, it's little more than an appeal to authority, to try to get you to believe this estimate, versus other estimates.
After the past three years and watching their coverage of Covid (an area of science I know well, and in which I read the primary literature), I give zero credibility to the Guardian as a source of objective information. They routinely play these kinds of rhetorical and selective-reporting games to play up the most extreme angle for any story.
It's sad, but we've gotten to the point where you simply cannot trust major news organizations to report on science without ridiculous levels of clickbait spin.
Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C
#138There is no chance of removing existing CO2 from Air to make any sort of difference. There is no chance of meaningfully reducing CO2 emissions, because outside of Nuclear (and hydro/geothermal but only if you have the geography for it) there is no alternative to replacing fossil fuels. At some point the public will realize the lie of solar/wind as a replacement. We lost 50 years of greatly reduced emissions had nucle…
> there is no alternative to replacing fossil fuels. At some point the public will realize the lie of solar/wind as a replacement. What lie exactly? Scotland had produced enough to power itself twice on Wind alone. [1] How is nuclear a better alternative than Wind or Hydro when - Nuclear is extremely dangerous with toxic waste needing special storage facilities. Criminal & Environmental contamination risks. - Disaste…
All the possible "extreme" dangers and disasters have end result comparable with 1 day of using coal at the scale humans are using it.
>- You need a large water source for cooling, extracting, processing - Limited Resource
Seas are going nowhere. Most NPPs are at the coast.
Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C
#139Re: UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C
#140Let me just leave a Unicode ‘degree’ symbol here for anyone who needs one: ° (on iOS and possibly MacOS you can get one of these by pressing and holding ‘zero’ until the alternate characters appear)
On macOS's US and US International layouts it's alt+0 – on many European layouts it's shift + the button below esc (eg. §).