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The concurrence of three climatic events

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Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#351

Post by data_maan »

q1w2 wrote: post #311
Ancalagon wrote: post #272

A lot of comments deriding this article as alarmist. Excuse me if I'm incorrect in saying so, but even the data seems to tell me that alarmism is where we are at: This articles data. Incredible floods in Pakistan. Heat domes over the PNW. Fires in Australia, Canada, California. And now a warming event in the North Atlantic unlike any other. All of that and this is likely to be one of the coolest summers for the remai…

Climate Change is a real threat, but listing individual weather perturbations as data points is like giving personal anecdotes as evidence of societal changes. The strongest and most accurate evidence for global climate change are GLOBAL indicators, such as sea level rise, global average temperatures, etc... Every weather event you list, can probably be countered with a mild weather event somewhere else. It's mock sc…

This post is wrong as it downplays the severity of individual events and only focusses on global ones.

Last year's floods in Pakistan that displaced millions (barely reported on in the west) were such a local event.

Saying "oh, this is fine, because somewhere else the weather was mild" is disturbing.

The whole reason why climate change is so problematic is that the change in the global indicators will cause many many "individual weather perturbations", as you call them, which will displaced millions and disrupt supply chains.

The fact that there is some mild weather event somewhere else doesn't offset these negative effects in any way!

It is not mock science!

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#352

Post by alehlopeh »

kersplody wrote: post #194
boc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is the only practical solution. The only way to get humanity's energy equation to balance is to dramatically reduce the population or dramatically reduce energy use per capita or invent and deploy a mythical free energy source within the next 30 years. And this just covers replacing black energy with green energy -- even more energy will be needed to address the climate problem.

And that’s practical how?

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#353

Post by data_maan »

deanCommie wrote: post #316
black_puppydog wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that even if it might work, and even if there weren't any other side effects like acid rain, this would essentially make every piece of sky on every day hazy. We'd essentially trade the very concept of "blue sky" for a livable temperature. Kinda hard to put a price on that for me. Maybe I'd prefer living with genuinely less comfort but blue skies.

> Kinda hard to put a price on that for me. Maybe I'd prefer living with genuinely less comfort but blue skies. If all you have to trade off is comfort, maybe you can't. If you were one of the literal HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of people who are living in parts of the world that could become unsurvivable in the next few decades, or get flooded by rising sea levels, you'd have a different perspective. For what it's worth, I…

I think there's also a balance here to make where we don't even know the effects on non-blue skies on animals, who perhaps depend on the sky being as it is for things like orientation?

Would a billion+ animals deserve to die (that did not contribute to climate change), to save millions of other animals, called human (who actually contributed to this situation)?

It's an impossible question, but still needs to be posed.

Thr fact of the matter remains - we humans seem to try to be doing anything (geo-engineering, clever carbon offsetting schemes, etc) than the only reasonable thing: cutting down on consumption, de-growth.

Somehow the human mind seems completely incapable of accepting this fact (let alone acting on it) that for once we need to be humble and self-limit ourselves.

Seems to go against the grain of the credo of most societies on earth (in particular the western one).

Let's see how many people prove me right by downvoting ...

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#354

Post by dredmorbius »

ericmay wrote: post #349
dredmorbius wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting question, and one I've looked at answering in part by looking at technology in terms of its mechanisms. As I see it, it's possible to frame all technologies as being fundamentally based on one of the following mechanisms, interactions, or focus points: - Materials: stuff, its properties, abundance, and sourcing and disposal issues. Wood, stone, ceramics, metals, fluids, chemicals, nuclear materi…

Not disagreeing with your post here but curious about this point: > Steve Keen (amongst others) shows that economic productivity scales near-linearly with energy consumption, yet we are using fossil fuels at rates millions of times greater than they accumulated. The only way I can see (without spending more than just a few minutes thinking about this comment) this being true is with 100% efficiency and I wonder if th…

Steve Keen, Robert U. Ayres, Russell Standish, "A Note on the Role of Energy in Production" (March 2019):

Energy plays no role in the standard Cobb-Douglas Production Function (CDPF), and a trivial role in a three-factor CDPF where it is treated as a third input, independent of labour and capital. Starting from an epistemological perspective, we treat energy as an input to both labour and capital, without which production is impossible. We then derive an energy-based CPDF (EBCDPF) in which energy plays a critical role. We argue for the redefinition and measurement of real GDP in terms of exergy. We conclude that the “Solow Residual” measures the contribution of exergy to growth, and that the exponents in the EBCDPF should be based on cross-country comparative data as suggested by Mankiw (1995) rather than the “cost-share theorem”.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...>

For an excellent discussion of efficiency of energy use over time, see Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization (2017), which shows the actual attained efficiencies of various fuels usage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_and_Civilization:_A_His...>

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262536165/energy-and-civilizati...>

Note that due to conversion efficiency limits, most generally those of Carnot engines, achieved efficiency in converting thermal to mechanical energy trends around 30%. That can go higher in some applications (e.g., dual-cycle steam turbines combined with usage of residual thermal heat in cogeneration plants). But for the most part large-scale modeling relies on the 30% figure. See for example the Lawrence Livermore Labs energy-flow Sankey charts, in which ~30% efficiency simply assumed for the model, rather than explicitly measured, based on modeling:

End-use efficiency is estimated at 65% for the residential sector, 65% for the commercial sector, 21% for the transportation sector, and 49% for the industrial sector, which was updated in 2017 to reflect DOE's analysis of manufacturing.

https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/styles/or...>

https://gs.llnl.gov/energy-homeland-security/energy-security...>

TL;DR: results are based on overall inputs and outputs, don't get caught up in considering minutiae of conversion efficiencies.

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#355

Post by data_maan »

coldtea wrote: post #76
matthewdgreen wrote: post #16

"The end of global industrial civilization is where we are headed right now, not at some future dystopian moment. I wish I had a hopeful word to end with. But I don’t." That's a pretty terrifying ending. Many of these trends (reducing sea ice causing increased ocean warming, burning of forests and permafrost) may be irreversible once things pass a certain point. At very least we may need to engage in some sort of lar…

Don't worry. Magically awesome, yet uninvented, or in perpetual "in the next ten years" state technology, with Star Trek scope, will save us with a technical solution. If not, we're all just going to Mars in 10-15 years, with colonies and terraformings. Even if we haven't managed to even get back to the moon for 50 years. That's what everybody insisted for the past 20-30 years, so must be true. All we need to do is k…

I think not everyone here understood the irony...

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#356

Post by data_maan »

giarc wrote: post #168

This article and discussions here in the comments motivated me to send off 3 emails to relevant ministers of my provincial government. When I had my first kid, the environment and what our Earth would look like when she was my age really got to me. I realized that small, individual actions aren't going to cut it (ex turning off a light). It's not to say I don't do those things, but I had to do more, things that may a…

We need more people like you!

Most of us (me included) just lurk on HN and post the odd comment, without pushing for change. We're pathetic!

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#357

Post by nomel »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #350
nomel wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fires in Australia, Canada, California. Please don't use California as an example here. It's supposed to be on fire. Several species of trees and plants here cannot germinate without fire. The loooong known problem [1] is mismanagement, building houses where places burn, and blaming the wrong people, which leads to overgrowth from lack of fire. Fires aren't, by any measure, optional. If you impede them, they will c…

Fires in CA are normal, but not all fires are equal, and the fires that have been in CA recently are worse than they would have been even with the excess ground litter. The fire season is longer, the droughts are worse, the fires are more intense, fires are happening outside of their historic range, and trees are not surviving the fire assuming they weren't dead already due to drought. Timely article, "Anthropogenic…

> even with the excess ground litter

With the nearly 30 years of mismanagement, I'm having trouble understanding how that conclusion can be so easily made. From your link:

> While an increase in temperatures and dryness has been identified to be one of the major drivers of increased summer forest burned area (BA), the extent to which such changes are due to natural variability or anthropogenic climate change remains unresolved

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#359

Post by jgoodhcg »

jcpst wrote: post #230
jgoodhcg wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chose to live in Michigan mostly for climate crisis and natural disaster reasons. One of the largest fresh bodies of water, no earthquakes, hardly any tornadoes, no hurricanes, ocean levels won’t impact directly, forest fires aren’t common in the scale of California. Projections show it will still be farmable in 50 years. The downside is it’s a Midwest flyover sate, and the winters can be tough. The lack of sun and…

Michigan is where my research led me on this. In several ways looks an improvement to my current life in Kansas.

Summer is a great time to check it out.

Re: The concurrence of three climatic events

#360

Post by data_maan »

jtolds wrote: post #198
brindidrip wrote: post #63

So given this context and assuming it is accurate, where do you think would be the most viable areas to live? If I were to consider for the US, I'd say inland northern states like Wisconsin and Michigan thanks to the Great Lakes...

I made a bunch of maps to answer this question! https://www.jtolio.com/2022/07/anthropocene-calamity-part-8-...

Wonderful read!

But a few thing I'm missing are: - second (higher) order availability: even if the hospital you need to go to is within biking distance, is the hospital itself sourcing it's materials (needles, plasters etc.) locally? Otherwise you might end up at a hospital that can't treat you - in your modelling you only accounted for weather effects and elsewhere assumed that, hopefully, immigration will somehow be managed well. Suppose it will not - how will you manage that and ensure you will not loose everything, when everyone suddenly moves to where you are and all wealth is taken from people who have some? Is Traverse city perhaps sufficiently insulated so that people won't easily reach it? Does it have a strong police?

Lastly, I'm recommending the "nodes of persisting complexity" article, if you're interested. They carry out an analysis like you do, but at country level. Sadly, the US doesn't score too high.

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