if someone can explain how global temps are measured and weighted i’ll give you a cookie
The concurrence of three climatic events
81–90 of 408 posts
Re: The concurrence of three climatic events
#82> The IPCC suggests that current sulfur aerosol levels are contributing in the neighborhood of 0.5° C to total global cooling, offsetting warming that would otherwise rapidly occur. > By cleaning up shipping fuels, massive regions of the world’s oceans that were protected from heating by shipping sulfate aerosols are now experiencing rapid warming. This includes the main shipping routes between Asia and the Western U…
It's pretty easy to predict how and how quickly "reduce emissions and begin effective-but-insufficient-on-its-own geoengineering" becomes "only do geoengineering."
It's relatively much easier, especially politically. And the entities most poised to begin it are exactly the behemoths who benefit from fossil fuel use in the first place. It'll rapidly become another money-and-PR funnel for the same couple hundred individuals who got us here in the first place.
Re: The concurrence of three climatic events
#83He tries a little too hard to make gradual global changes more tangible (what does 930 Hiroshimas even mean?), but in general he does a good job of stating the obvious for us lunkheads. The developed world is nearly at civil war in large part about the tiny number of refugees we have today---we will be completely unable to deal with climate refugees in the tens or hundreds of millions, and it won't be wet bulb temps that finish our society off, it will be us doing it to each other.
Re: The concurrence of three climatic events
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am very familiar with how a wet-bulb thermometer works and some of the ways it's useful (like at altitude for weather forecasts, and as one of the ways to build a hygrometer) but I'm struggling to make the connection that you've made as to why it'll be a household term. Mind explaining?
At a certain wet bulb temp humans cannot cool themselves off - they die without access to some other means to get cool (like cold water, air conditioning, etc).
To add to this with an article I just found
“The [wet-bulb] temperature reading you get will actually change depending on how humid it is,” says Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “That’s the real purpose, to measure how well we’ll be able to cool ourselves by sweating.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jul/31/why-you-need...
Re: The concurrence of three climatic events
#85I read the whole article. I looked at all the graphs and charts. I still don't understand the near term significance, even with the detailed explanations. Assuming I'm exactly average, that means 50% of the population won't understand it either. Of that 50%, how many will actually care? Nothing will happen until it is too late. His final words weren't encouraging and I can't say I feel any better either.
> near term significance
The North Atlantic heat flux of the air-ocean interface changed and some one more knowledgeable might tell how many terajoule stay in the atmosphere a little bit longer probably altering the weather pattern as we like to know them.
Re: The concurrence of three climatic events
#86I fear that this is the year "wet-bulb temperature" becomes a term regular households across the world become deeply familiar with. It may be as ubiquitous as the term "social distancing" became. I've always naively thought that climate disaster was still 10-20 years out, but it seems like it's going to begin in earnest now and instead be completely catastrophic after these next 10 years. What can I as an individual…
I am very familiar with how a wet-bulb thermometer works and some of the ways it's useful (like at altitude for weather forecasts, and as one of the ways to build a hygrometer) but I'm struggling to make the connection that you've made as to why it'll be a household term. Mind explaining?
Because a wet-bulb temperature of 35C is generally considered deadly, perhaps as low as 31C. Global warming that kills large swathes of Burma or India would be a household term I'd think.
Re: The concurrence of three climatic events
#87As this post hints at in the discussion of sulfur emissions at sea, all it takes to significantly slow global warming is one country or sufficiently motivated non-state actor deciding to go all-in on geoengineering (like seeding the stratosphere with sulfur dioxides). Compare this to the collective action problem of everyone, including rapidly industrializing poorer countries, spending trillions to decarbonize their…
According to the 'novel' The Ministry of The Future, that could be a state Actor... . I put 'novel' in quotes because it's a really weird novel.
A lot of novels are weird. It's straightforwardly a novel you don't need to put it in quotes.
Re: The concurrence of three climatic events
#88Re: The concurrence of three climatic events
#89As this post hints at in the discussion of sulfur emissions at sea, all it takes to significantly slow global warming is one country or sufficiently motivated non-state actor deciding to go all-in on geoengineering (like seeding the stratosphere with sulfur dioxides). Compare this to the collective action problem of everyone, including rapidly industrializing poorer countries, spending trillions to decarbonize their…
According to the 'novel' The Ministry of The Future, that could be a state Actor... . I put 'novel' in quotes because it's a really weird novel.
A novel novel, got it. I actually thought it was a pretty straightforward read, but to each their own. According to the novel Termination Shock it could just take an eccentric billionaire to launch a geoengineering effort like that (though with some blowback from state actors) - of course there aren't any of those around, so that's clearly fiction...
Re: The concurrence of three climatic events
#90whoever is using the ocean as a giant heat sink needs to stop (joke)
Turns out AI will be the death of us all, but not in the way we think…
All those GPUs need cooling somehow.