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As the world burns, here is some nice data to look at: https://berkeleyearth.org/june-2023-temperature-update/
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It's the rate of change which matters, much less so than the magnitude of the change.
This. The time for nature and us humans to adapt to these new circumstances is vastly shorter than in any earlier age of the planet. edit: bryanlarsen pointed out that there was an even more extreme event in earth's history.
15 thousand years ago Canada was under 3 kilometers of ice. Now it is home to 40 million people and covered in wildlife.
The human population went from 2 million to 8 billion during this warming period.
All the evidence points to a warmer planet supporting more life, not less.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the rate of change which matters, much less so than the magnitude of the change.
This. The time for nature and us humans to adapt to these new circumstances is vastly shorter than in any earlier age of the planet. edit: bryanlarsen pointed out that there was an even more extreme event in earth's history.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/what-is-the-sixth-mass...
As the world burns, here is some nice data to look at: https://berkeleyearth.org/june-2023-temperature-update/
2. Which is exactly what dishonest people do with them.
3. Things over the past few years aren't as bad as they seemed now. These past few years are likely going to be the coldest years of the 21st century.
4. The Antarctic sea ice graph is beautiful. We're smashing every record.
Ok, so what's the actionable take here? Are people going to use this to try and push wealth redistribution and authoritarian controls which is about the only thing I've ever seen from "climate action" types? Or does this imply those wouldn't work anyway now? Is anyone or any government going to look at actual motivations to help live in a warmer place? And/or to pull carbon out of the air, or get more nuclear, or wha…
>It's going to be hard to get people to care about this if the takeaway is going to be "other people have to do what we say" as it usually is with climate stuff.
Eh, more like hold the ultra-wealthy accountable for profiteering off, or at the expense of, the planet? and the (comfortable) existence of lots of people based on how things are going?
(The really cool thing is, most (all?) of the individual climate-shaming is propaganda from corporations who know damn well that individuals contribute very little to climate change compared to corporations themselves and the wealthy capital class.)
> The report finds that these billionaires’ investments give an annual average of 3m tonnes of CO2e per person, which is a million times higher than 2.76 tonnes of CO2e which is the average for those living in the bottom 90 percent.
Yes, I understand that's via investment, but that's still kinda precisely my point. Why shouldn't they be held to account?
Meanwhile in the UK summer has been grey, rainy and miserable.
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> Temperatures in Europe have increased at more than twice the global average over the past 30 years – the highest of any continent in the world. https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/temperatures-e... And since, then https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/wildfires-greece-burn-f... So, no, Europe is not least affected or best off.
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Scientists and researchers in this area work very hard to not just account for heat island effect, but also a myriad of other effects. https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/3071/the-r...
“Scientists” aren’t a single unit. Some of them are responsible in their methodology, others get endless news coverage for their alarmism.
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The low-hanging fruit have mostly been picked by now, regulating demand-side is not a solution and will lead only to immiseration and state overreach. Unless you are fine with only flushing your toilet on Wednesdays, this is not a desirable future overall.
> regulating demand-side is not a solution I think it's more accurate to say that consumer-side regulation is not a solution. I'm willing to bet there are tons of industries out there that can significantly reduce their energy usage, but it's either undesirable from a profit perspective or infeasible from a cost perspective. That said, the "obvious" solution at this point seems to be larger supplies of non-carbon-rel…
As with food calories: either for an individual or a population group, if you don't have enough, more is very, very much better.
This is not the same as more being always better. Sometimes the same or less in a smarter implementation produces better outcomes, and sometimes it takes a regulatory shove to get there.
Societies that require everyone to have a car just to have a basic acceptable level of mobility and participation, and which expect even moderately high performers to fly multiple times a year, case in point. Huge amounts of energy deployed for marginally better outcomes.
The mistake is in observing a strong positive correlation on part of the curve, and extrapolating that to interpret it as a linear relationship.
There are parts of the world which still need a lot more deployable energy. Getting household white goods to the majorities in poorer countries, etc. The same additional amount in the hands of the top 80% or so of Western hands would be frittered away to no noticeable benefit - we could get by with a lot less.
Ok, so what's the actionable take here? Are people going to use this to try and push wealth redistribution and authoritarian controls which is about the only thing I've ever seen from "climate action" types? Or does this imply those wouldn't work anyway now? Is anyone or any government going to look at actual motivations to help live in a warmer place? And/or to pull carbon out of the air, or get more nuclear, or wha…