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The concurrence of three climatic events

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Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#231

Post by no_wizard »

Trasmatta wrote: post #48
booleandilemma wrote: post #4

This guy's blog is subtitled "Eliot Jacobson's Collapse of Everything Blog". Is this his schtick? Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true?

Climate change is terrifying, but I also have a hard time taking self titled Doomers totally seriously. It makes sense to consider all of the worst case scenarios for any event, and to prepare for them. But Doomers seem to have an obsession with it, and a need to convince others that the worst will happen. I noticed this a lot in 2020. COVID was (and is) awful, but there was so much shit that Doomers claimed would ha…

My take on it is that "well presented doomers"[0], if you will, serve to balance the "well presented optimists"[1] in that they are needed in society so we can have some take on how things could actually go wrong and sound warnings for potentially catastrophic failures. Its important though, that I think it needs moderating, like not everything "Doomers" say needs to be taken at face value, its important that others can come up and really either shore up their case or make a case for different more likely outcomes, for instance. I feel the same way about overly optimistic takes as well.

They serve an important function in society to keep us aware of just how fragile things can be and that we need to be vigilant about understanding the second order affects of our actions as a society.

[0]: Ones that generally rely on nonpartisan facts / science / evidence for making their claims, without resorting to debunked information to further their claims and/or not relying on conspiracy theories, for instance.

[1]: I'd put alot of technologists in this group, for an example. People who constantly hype real breakthroughs and advancements as proof that we will always be trending upward as a species

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#232

Post by tptacek »

candiddevmike wrote: post #174
idlewords wrote: post #52

As 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…

Every time humans try and fix nature, we tend to make it worse due to not understanding the problem or consequences.

That's not the point of the comment you're responding to.

Climate-driven austerity isn't going to happen, because it's an intractable global-scale collective action problem.

If you believe that anthropogenic climate change is going to be a global disaster, you should probably reasonably assume that some country in the world is going to allocate serious resources to mitigating it.

There are 50 countries in the world with resources exceeding that of Portugal or New Zealand. Any of those countries could fund and implement a large-scale geoengineering project. No mechanism exists to ensure that any of those countries get permission to do so.

So it doesn't much matter whether we think it's a good idea. Either:

(1) Anthropogenic climate change isn't going to impose unacceptable costs on the industrialized world, and we'll just blow it off, or

(2) Some country is going to intervene directly in the climate.

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#233

Post by jchmrt »

hammock wrote: post #122
kzrdude wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have any real world examples of this happening? That would help understanding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Pakistan_heat_wave As far as global warming goes, study results indicate that limiting global warming to 1.5 °C would prevent most of the tropics from reaching the wet-bulb temperature of the human physiological limit of 35 °C. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00695-3

Just to be clear, studies also indicate that we will not realistically limit global heating to anything close to 1.5C, unless very drastic actions are taken immediately (actions on a level that would be seen as extremely radical by most people)

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#234

Post by imtringued »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #222
boc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Degrowth is not a solution. Geo-engineering is our only way out of this mess.

Degrowth not only is a solution, it's a guaranteed outcome if other initiatives don't materialize to successfully address the problem.

You underestimate the threat of eco-fascism. By that I don't mean green party politicians, no, I mean literal facists who blame climate change on overpopulation and who believe that the population has to be cut drastically. In the most basic form this would mean closing our borders and making sure nobody can cross illegally by using lethal force, if necessary.

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#235

Post by pyrale »

creato wrote: post #128
pyrale wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change is just one of the things that will get us if we don't find a way to live in our environment. We can't just fuck every other issue to solve that one problem, and hope everything will be fine.

You could include the cost of energy in your statement, and then it says nothing.

Yeah, well, it's up to you to decide what's important to you.

Personally, I don't mind curbing my use, especially if that helps avoiding physical limit.

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#236

Post by hedgehog »

soperj wrote: post #126
hedgehog wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an accurate but misleading characterization of the data. Anyone can go eyeball the chart you linked and then read this for context to form a more complete opinion: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

How is it misleading when they're talking about "exposing more open ocean to incoming solar radiation and heating" specifically? How is it misleading at all when I've literally just quoted data from a really good site?

Presenting a very slightly increasing average antarctic coverage trend over specifically 40 years as a refutation that antarctic polar ice is in retreat is misleading for a couple reasons. First, the last ten years appears to show strongly decreasing coverage trend which shows variability or a change in trend to integrate into any conclusions. Second, over that whole period the minimum coverage has a clear decreasing trend, again that should inform any expectations about where we are going.

Are you staking out a claim that antarctic ice is going to increase over the next few decades?

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#237

Post by scythe »

idlewords wrote: post #52

As 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…

>The only question is which country (or countries) will be first to attempt it, and what will trigger them to act.

The capability + motivation factors certainly point to India as the most likely candidate, since they're among the closest to disastrous wet-bulb temperatures and have a domestic nuclear umbrella that allows them to say "and what are you going to do about that?". If a heat wave makes it impossible or deadly to harvest crops at a critical moment, panic is a possible outcome.

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#238

Post by orwin »

soperj wrote: post #126
hedgehog wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an accurate but misleading characterization of the data. Anyone can go eyeball the chart you linked and then read this for context to form a more complete opinion: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

How is it misleading when they're talking about "exposing more open ocean to incoming solar radiation and heating" specifically? How is it misleading at all when I've literally just quoted data from a really good site?

Because while the winter maximum used to increase (5y average) in the last 40 years, the summer maximum decreased (5y average) over the same period.

> How is it misleading when they're talking about "exposing more open ocean to incoming solar radiation and heating" specifically?

So, if you don't know, during winter there is almost no sun in antartica (and even in the areas you can see it 3 hours a day like in the Kerguelen, it isnt absorbed that much to to a low angle of incidence). So we clearly don't care about random averages of the sea ice over a year, but its state when the sun hit the water, in summer (because the angle of incidence is higher, and also, the sun almost never sets there).

That's why your data is correct, but misleading. What's important isn't the ice sheet surface this winter, during june-july-august-september (sorry to over-explain, but i get that this is a complex issue and this bear repeating) but how much ice was present last summer (this winter if you're in the north hemisphere). And this was the lowest we ever had.

Do you want more clarifications on specific points? I'm not an expert, and this is a complex subject

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#239

Post by data_maan »

phkahler wrote: post #184
booleandilemma wrote: post #4

This guy's blog is subtitled "Eliot Jacobson's Collapse of Everything Blog". Is this his schtick? Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true?

>> Is this his schtick? Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true? I didn't get any "alarmist" signals from this post of his until near the end. If all the data is as it suggests there really does seem to be something going on this year in particular in addition to a trend. But then he said "Infrastructure will break beyond repair." which jumped out as alarmist to me. Like we can'…

I think the point here is the metaphore. When you say "infrastructure" you think of bridges, roads etc. And for those you have a notion of possibility and difficulty of repairing them.

When he says "infrastructure" he means the nature that we draw on (to build our infrastructure) i.e. the weather, the trophic chains etc.

I would doubt that everything from one type of infra can be translated to the other. E.g. when it comes to nature some things are simply almost irreversible, whereas there is no such thing for man-made infra.

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#240

Post by relaxing »

hunter2_ wrote: post #200
flerchin wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But "heat index" is already a household term, and essentially has the same purpose [0]. It's like saying the Kelvin scale will end up in household use: I would disagree because while Kelvin is useful, it's not sufficiently more useful than C/F for most household usage. > people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (130 °F) [0] [0]…

Wet bulb is not just a different scale, it's a different model with different inputs.

If it becomes useful for knowing whether or not you're going to die (and it could), I bet it catches on.

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