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This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

cnn.com

201–210 of 266 posts

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#201

Ugh this sensationalized trash reduces the trust of the public in the science. The reality of weather should not be reduced down to politics, yet here we are. Living in idiocracy. We're in a strong el nino at the moment and it's not even the worst one in the last 50 years.

So what you're saying, is that even with a weaker el nino, we still have higher global average temps? And this is somehow "sensationalized?"

Depends on how you define an "average" and what temperature you're measuring.

The oceans are directly affected by global warming. The oceans are like a big thermal battery. The atmosphere and resulting weather are indirectly affected.

What determines the weather are the global jetstreams. Global warming causes more turbulence in them, but the heat being experienced is not literally from global warming. It could be just as hot or cold or moreso in the past, and it definitely has been.

You cannot go outside and feel global warming. That's a really dumb myth and my entire point. Every time it's hot it's an opportunity for the media to rally all the idiots together and wheel out the same tired propaganda and so many people believe it every time.

It's very important to realize that all those graphs that show increasing temperatures are talking about the ocean.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#202
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IEA figures shows that it expects global electricity generation to rise by 2,493TWh between 2022 and 2025. > The IEA expects the growth in renewable generation to cover the vast majority of this total, growing by 2,450TWh. This is equivalent to 98% of the overall increase in global demand.

Share some figures that are per dollar. Fusion has the potential to beat all of that.

Sure, with the first working protype in 2043, and global deployment of 10,000 working plants by 2063.

What's happening in the meantime?

TISM

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#203
post #148
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be aware that dismissing very-overtly-obvious climate claims out of hand makes you sound very dubious, right? Super "merchants-of-doubt"y. The only way to deliver this opinion in a non-suspect way would be something like: "I'm aware that all metrics show it's the hottest month on record, and everyone is experiencing that everywhere, but ". Like, it is obvious in the last fifty years. Your argument is "well m…

Far from everyone experiences this as a particularly hot summer. There has been some warm days around the Mediterranean, US and china, but talking to people in e.g. central and northern Europe and India it has been, probably cooler, than average.

Sorry, I was talking about the data.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only real solution is to make energy ubiquitous and plentiful. Renewables have been the boring, consensus answer to this for about a decade. There's some obscure academic discussions about the exact makeup of the last 15% of energy needs, but most of those options revolve around how to best reuse the massive amounts of nearly free electricity that a sensible overbuild of renewables will create at other times. I…

The radical insistence on renewables as the ONLY energy source, and the equally radical opposition to Nuclear is part of why we aren't improving fission and researching fusion more, which would get us out of the woods. No compromise is being pursued from the renewables side, while the nuclear side completely agree that renewables will be a major part of our grid.

The opposition to nuclear fission is no more radical than the "opposition" to Solar CSP, Tidal, Wave, Vertical Axis Wind, Hydrogen cars and heating etc.

We tried a few things and figured out what worked best. That sucks if you have a weird emotional attachment to one of those techs that didn't make the cut but that's life.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#205
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article you linked to clearly states in paragraph 1 that the paper in question was published after he won the Nobel Prize.

Yep, but the model I referred to (DICE) had been developed by him (and others) over many years - unsurprisingly, since it's what he won the prize for. More thorough critique: https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/The_app...

Quite likely his work over the decades is consistent and builds upon itself, but your initial declaration was rather misleading, he did not win a Nobel Prize for declaring that a 6C increase in temps will result in an 8.5% decline in GDP.

Anyway, they gave a Nobel to Al Gore who made some pretty wacky claims that have failed to materialize, so it's not like the Nobel Committee has a spotless track record.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#206
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The abstract question of whether a higher or lower temperature would result in more habitable land (assuming, say, a gradual change over a million years) is completely 100% irrelevant to the issue of climate change. A fast enough change will: - Make places where large numbers of people currently live uninhabitable due to temperature and sea levels - Kill off most plants and animals because the ones in a given place w…

There has been a 15000 thousand year trend, where a warming planet has resulted in more biodiversity on earth. Where is the evidence that the trend is ending?

The rate matters.

An airliner lands on a runway and smoothly decelerates from 150 MPH to zero over 10,000 feet. This is just fine.

An airliner does the same deceleration over 10 feet. Everyone on board dies in a huge fireball.

Even for neutral or beneficial changes, the rate matters.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By definition, if you have enough, it's not deprivation. And, at an individual level, deprivation isn't really something you can do to yourself (barring extreme circumstances, eating disorders, religious asceticism and suchlike). This does get more complicated when it's a societal level choice. You might feel subjectively energy-deprived at a very different point to me. At the same time though, a well-designed low-en…

> At the same time though, a well-designed low-energy regime isn't perceived by its citizens as despotic. There's very little call (nowadays) to smash Houston-style freeways through Europe's semi-pedestrianised neighbourhoods. Despotic it may not be, yet people vote with their feet. Way more Europeans leave their delightfully walkable cities to make a living in Houston than the other way around[0]. 650k Germans, 180k…

No shortage of Americans in the fairly walkable, and notably English-speaking, UK.

Paris, London and Berlin of 2023 are markedly different in so many ways to, say, 1983. Berlin was in two different countries back then, and if you tried to cross, you died. Much of London was still semi-derelict from WW2 and post-war economic changes.

Perhaps a history measured in millennia means a little more patience around change. Perhaps Europeans don't see the struggle for more wealth as the most important thing.

And looking at life expectancy trends in the developed world (as a very crude proxy for wellbeing).. perhaps they might be on to something.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>all of human development has been about spending more energy per capita at less cost What? No. That makes no sense. Human development includes a lot of things that have nothing to do with that ridiculous and narrow definition. >Those who take climate change seriously should have gone all in on nuclear, but somehow there was enough of an overlap between that group and anti-nuclear activists that it never happened. Th…

> Human development includes a lot of things that have nothing to do with that ridiculous and narrow definition. What other concept so concisely captures the difference between how our primitive ape ancestors lived, to how cavemen lived, to how the ancient cultures lived, to how we live now? Or how countries at different stages of development now are to each other? The Human Development Index correlates highly with p…

> Big Oil lobbied for their interests. I'm sure solar executives spend money on lobbying

One is bigger than the other.

> the public should also grow a backbone

:)

> zoning & public transport

Let's take inspiration in Europe or Japan, not in the USA.

You want more of public transport, not less. And you want it ideally (almost) free, omnipresent and reliable, to let more people use it.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/25/story-cities-...

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#209
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To ask these countries to reduce their energy requirements is to ask their citizens to live a lower standard of life. Hypocritical of those in the West to make that request. That's a weird take. The West has colonized the rest of the world, enslaved people, exported cheap product to decimate local industry (sometimes at gunpoint), extracted resources (frequently with indigenous people working like slaves), propped…

> but we draw a line at trying to avert a global climate disaster? USA isn't going to invade countries to hinder their development. Neither is China. Energy needs continue to increase.

But my point is that the US is hindering China's chip industry development just fine, without a single gunshot fired, and it's considered totally mundane.

There are a lot of ways developed countries can nudge developing ones toward better energy efficiency. Many of them (like, say, funding solar arrays or nuclear plants) would actually benefit these countries. Some of them (say, higher customs tax for products made with fossil fuel energy) may not, but they can be implemented incrementally and paired with other "carrots" like renewable energy projects.

Re: This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in 120k years

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even a perfect engine is not 100% efficient, if we don’t find a way to expel more energy or reduce the energy we use, we will only create more heat and will need even more energy to deal with it. It is also the case that a large part of the world is simply not built to withstand such temperatures, and using more energy to accommodate that means putting more heat into the atmosphere.

> we will only create more heat and will need even more energy to deal with it Yes, that's a thermodynamic certainty. But the moment Homo sapiens left the year-round pleasant high plains of East Africa, we were going to need energy; you can't blame the caveman for lighting a stick on fire to keep himself warm. > a large part of the world is simply not built to withstand such temperatures People live in some truly inh…

I don't think you appreciate what you are asking here.

Infrastructure in London was melting last summer, lots of our infrastructure will have to be rebuilt, which is severely inefficient, and will require even more energy.

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