Live data from Hacker News

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

public.wmo.int

341–350 of 591 posts

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

#341
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does a green transformation have to "tank" the economy? Can't we have green economic revival ? Would it not create more jobs to transition faster ?

More jobs = more consumption = more resources. Their idea is for people to consume far less, therefore own less. If people own and consume less there's less incomes. Don't own a house, only rent a small apartment in a dense urban setting. Don't own the means to your own transportation, only get by with walking and transit. Price meats so high most people can't afford them regularly.

Two out of the three things you mention are so 'undesirable' that the few dense walkable urban areas in the US are more expensive than living in the suburbs. There's a reason why left-wingers use the word "gentrification" a whole lot. In many cases suburban home and car ownership is actually cheaper than the traditional urban lifestyle, for various reasons including but not limited to:

1. Supply being limited because America outlawed dense urban construction decades ago. Dense cities cannot legally expand to meet demand and building up gets more expensive and unrealistic after a certain number of floors.

2. People in suburbs being further away from lucrative jobs - i.e. proximity to one's work is priced into the cost of the home.

3. Various government subsidies and tax credits that distort the market to produce more resource-intensive suburban housing.

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s extremely depressing that you can’t have more than a couple paragraphs’ discussion without extremism kicking in. No, thinking people shouldn’t drive a 2-ton vehicle for 40km to buy 200g of Wagyu every other day is not the same as planning mass murder. Your comment is inflammatory and delusional.

>people shouldn’t drive a 2-ton vehicle for 40km to buy 200g of Wagyu every other day Your example describes a fantasy. The vast majority of people do not travel anywhere close to 40km to buy groceries. Even in a car-centric country like America, the average driver travels just 4km. If someone has to travel 40km or more to get to a grocery store, it's because they live rural. People who travel that far for groceries…

Dude, work on your reading comprehension. Hyperbole is a literary device.

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

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in the UK, if I had to travel 'just 4km' then I wouldn't take a car. In any case it's the other 50% of journeys that are 4km+ (20% of journeys are 10+ miles) that are the problem: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-marc... The USA is a young country, built from the ground up around the automobile. Undoing that both physically and psychologically is just not possible in my opinion.

The UK is smaller than Oregon. It's really not an ideal comparison.

Doesn't matter how big it is, nobody lives in "Oregon" the same way nobody lives in "The UK".

People live in communities, cities, towns. You can build a human scale town in Oregon just as well as you can in the UK.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But it's you reduce the economy, think of what it will do to the poor!" it's incredible how ritch people will happily push the poor in front of them when it's beneficial. The fact is "emmisions per capita" is heavily correlated with "gdp per capita": https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-vs-gdp The "educated people in western countries [who] are incredibly eco-conscious" emit way more co2 than "85% of the…

What does “per capita” emissions have to do with the physics of climate change?

It's related to the comment I was replying to:

> Meanwhile, educated people in western countries are incredibly eco-conscious, have excellent modern waste management, have amazing huge national parks and conservation areas, clean waterways or have nets to prevent plastics entering the oceans.. are 'banning' gasoline cars by 2030.. and the air quality! Amazing.

The commenter appears to say that people in western countries are already doing a good job on climate. Even though those people emit way more than people from other countries.

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

#346
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…

China releases more CO2 than the US, EU, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand combined.

The West has become really good at reducing emissions and environmental impact. Yes, a fair portion of that reduction is consuming CO2 intensive products made in China rather than locally, but even taking that into account the developed world is probably still less CO2 producing than the developing world.

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

#347

> 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…

I might be fooling myself but I think I can intuit the changes in extreme temperature events (not the averages though, as you say)

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

#348
post #258
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…

I'm going to guess you've never spent much time outside the bubble of the first world. After living extensively overseas in Latin America & South-east Asia and seeing how its part of everyday life for most people in the rest of the world to openly burn trash, plastics, car tyres.. litter everywhere, cutting the cat converters off their trucks, dumping construction waste straight into rivers.. it's been eye opening. N…

[dead]

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

#349

> 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…

This is a fair point. Out of curiosity, I went back and looked at the temperatures in my area the year I was born. Our highest temperature of the year was 96F ... on September 24! Let me tell you, if we hit 96F two weeks from now, it'll be front page news and evidence of climate catastrophe.

I think everyone has now fallen into the trap of mixing up weather with climate. We used to deride the deniers who said a cold snap meant global warming was fake, by pointing out that climate and weather are two different things. But more recently we point to every heat wave as evidence of climate change, every cold snap as well -- because 'more energy means more extremes!' Which may be entirely true, but it's hard to deny it looks like trying to have your cake and eat it too.

FWIW, back in 1974, the coldest day of that year was 12F. That would also be considered quite cold today. So that year hit some temperatures in both directions that would be noteworthy today, almost 50 years later.

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

#350
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to guess you've never spent much time outside the bubble of the first world. After living extensively overseas in Latin America & South-east Asia and seeing how its part of everyday life for most people in the rest of the world to openly burn trash, plastics, car tyres.. litter everywhere, cutting the cat converters off their trucks, dumping construction waste straight into rivers.. it's been eye opening. N…

You can wax poetic all you want about anecdotal values differences between the first and third worlds, but speaking in terms of actual practical impact: what you are saying is simply not true. Greenhouse gas emissions scale super-linearly with income: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitte... There are dozens and dozens of studies all reaching this same conclusion, if the International Energy Ag…

This doesn't take into account that countries like the US have already cut emissions and emissions have been declining for years. Meanwhile, China has much greater total emissions than the US does and emissions in China are increasing per year continuously as they are in India. Total global emissions are what matters for the climate. Although reducing waste and being more efficient are always helpful, fixating on lifestyles of people like US citizens is not particularly useful.
Post reply on HN