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Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

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Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#171
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you done the cost:benefit analysis? Curious what makes you so confident that "crashing the economy" (you're aware of all the excess death and despair this would cause?) is the best move here.

I mean it's pretty obvious that our current situation is already causing death and despair (droughts, wildfires, hurricanes) and this will only increase on our current trajectory.

I am not sure crashing the economy is a viable solution.

I say this because what I learned so far is that is people will start being cold and hungry then they will focus on immediate needs and that will make sure that no money will be spent on solving climate change. This is a natural instinct: you cannot think about the future if your current situation is suffering.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#172
post #138

> It was the hottest August on record – by a large margin – and the second hottest ever month after July 2023, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service ERA 5 dataset. August as a whole is estimated to have been around 1.5°C warmer than the preindustrial average for 1850-1900, according to the C3S monthly climate bulletin. Thinking about getting to 1.5 C averaged over the planet is surreal and we are still 3…

Even if a miracle happens and we get to net zero, warming will continue for decades due to climate lag and feedbacks.

I think there are solutions, question is when these will be implemented. I'm referring to planting more trees to cool down cities so that avg temp will decrease, routing rivers/water through city to increase even more the cooling effect (like city of Bishkek)

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it's not that big of a problem. it actually is and it's really big. Not to say that we shouldn't reduce our consumerism, but not by lowering our living standards. It would immediately harm if not kill the weakest/poorer segments of every Country's population.

I'm fairly sure that living standards will be lowered by floods, fires and other climate catastrophes. Not doing enough to stop CO2 production will result in a lot of lowered living standards, including making some areas of the world uninhabitable without air conditioning etc.

> I'm fairly sure that living standards will be lowered by floods

No, it won't as badly.

Doomerism is not a valid rational point of view.

Most of all, floods would happen anyway, so you'll have floods + lower standards of living, including much worse emergency services.

we are not at the brink of extinction and people lived and prospered in almost unhabitable lands long before we had the technology to regulate the temperature.

like for example Northern United Kingdom.

But are also living today in the middle of deserts, with no AC.

Of course we should cut on emissions werever it is possible, worst offenders being fossil fuels.

Edit: on a side note the reason why your proposal will never work is because cutting on emissions is actually easy. For example let's stop keeping pets at home. Pets that usually eat a lot of red meat. It is feasible, won't lower living standards and won't cost much to society. Now convince people that their cat eats more meat in a year than a Chinese average person and that's not sustainable.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#174
post #98

It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Same for red meat or cheap air travel. Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers. It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's no…

You realize that would cause countless death _today_ if you don’t replace the oil with something else? People will starve, become homeless, and maybe anarchy will reign. Not just in the developed world but globally.

I don't think the op said stop using oil for productive uses. I assume they'd be against any large electric car too. People in rich/not poor nations use too many resources and I'd say even the vast majority aren't actually for building homes or producing food or contributing to making those things efficient/safe/redundant.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#175
post #98

It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Same for red meat or cheap air travel. Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers. It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's no…

Look around. Everyone on earth wants to maintain a standard of living. Governments are toppled over this. And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions. And it’s the largest exhibit that is helping to drive the innovation needed to solve this problem, alongside incredible people from all parts of the globe. I wish we weren’t dealing with this. I wish there had been a…

I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions...

>And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions.

These largest economy's also contributed the most over their history, which seems reasonable grounds for contributing more and helping other economies come up to that standard of living w/o making the same contributions

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#176
post #23

I use Wren to take some personal responsibility, and I am looking for more ways to take action.

I suggest you give up all non-human powered transportation for starters and follow that with a reduction in you electrical footprint: no more batteries - use hand- or foot-crank generation instead. Once we haven't heard from you for an extended period we'll assume you were successful. Best of luck.

Switching to biking and paying for renewable electricity is quite practical in many parts of the world, so I think your “concern” that this isn’t doable while remaining on the internet isn’t productive.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because eating less meat, stop taking the plane, reducing our consumption level, replacing cars with bikes and trains and other stuff like that seems radical to you ?

No more air travel is very radical!

this is a big one. there is a surgery i'll need within 10 years that i can't access in north america. i could definitely give up flight for play, probably for work, not for health

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#178
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be sure, are you proposing killing people today so that they don't die tomorrow?

Because eating less meat, stop taking the plane, reducing our consumption level, replacing cars with bikes and trains and other stuff like that seems radical to you ?

> replacing cars with bikes and trains

1. What if you are disabled and have no train connectivity?

2. What about workers who need to travel by car to build trains? What about support workers who help those workers? And so on?

See what happens if we stop virtue signaling and think for a few more seconds?

Please stop with this zero-order thinking and spend a few seconds thinking of first-order and second-order effects when what you suggest can impact billions of lives.

E.g, Mao and his moronic campaign against birds

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0306422018800259

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#179
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That chart covers a very short duration. Here's a more complete chart of Earth's temperature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m... As you can see, we are indeed coming out of one of the coldest periods ever in Earth's history.

... and based on that chart are now hotter than any time in the last 100k years, heading into the last few million. A few 10s (of million) years at +25c are going to be the "new normal"? I'm trying to understand the point. The rate of change is quite dramatic, and the last time (Eemian) there was anything like this there were "rapid" 12c oscillations. Humans didn't exist. I suspect most current plant/animal species a…

Don't know about op's point, but seeing those kinds of graphs makes you really think twice about the hypothesis that stopping any kind of human activity will have any effect on a phenomenon that's been naturally occuring for hundreds of millions of years, on one order of magnitude greater than what we're observing (talking about degrees variation, not taking speed into account).

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#180

> It was the hottest August on record – by a large margin – and the second hottest ever month after July 2023, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service ERA 5 dataset. August as a whole is estimated to have been around 1.5°C warmer than the preindustrial average for 1850-1900, according to the C3S monthly climate bulletin. Thinking about getting to 1.5 C averaged over the planet is surreal and we are still 3…

On the other hand, looking at lived experience the story is quite tricky. From the perspective of an individual it is very hard to detect this level of climate change. I can't tell how much warmer any given month was compared to even 20 years ago. We're talking about 28 vs 28.5°C average for a month. (and July and August made news because of pronounced anomalies, other months were probably even murkier stories due to…

You are right, the changes are small and usually hard to see directly.

But we also have to remember that warming is not uniform across the planet, where I live the Berkeley Earth site [1] shows an average 2.5 C warming since the 1850s.

It is especially visible if your regular winter temperatures go below 0 C, but not much. Even 1-2 C warming may be seen as a much smaller snow coverage than before.

[1] https://berkeleyearth.org

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