Live data from Hacker News

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

public.wmo.int

391–400 of 591 posts

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

#391
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It's absolutely not given that removing beef from our diet would make things much better. It is - the food input & land requirements are less efficient - and it’s absurd to say that eating pork or chicken instead is so miserable that people won’t abide it.

> It is - the food input & land requirements are less efficient

you are assuming that everything else will stay the same, which is a very common bias.

> say that eating pork or chicken instead is so miserable that people won’t abide it.

there are literally billions of people that do not eat various specific foods and beverages in conformity with various religious, cultural, legal or other societal prohibitions.

Try to convince your neighbor to eat dog instead of beef.

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

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think people have to die? Keep the strictly necessary things, get rid of the superfluous. Doesn't seem too difficult to me.

Good luck figuring out which is which from the legislative armchair. I recommend the book Seeing Like A State.

Ok, but you still have to try because we all agree the alternative is worse right?

I didn't mean to say that it's easy, just that it's simple. Simple things can still be hard to accomplish.

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

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think people have to die? Keep the strictly necessary things, get rid of the superfluous. Doesn't seem too difficult to me.

Strong “dropbox could be done in a weekend with rsync” vibes. Also “If You Can Keep Your Head When Everybody Round You Is Losing His, Then It Is Very Probable That You Don’t Understand the Situation”

I guess I meant that what needs to be done is simple, but it can be hard to do.

Dropbox wasn't built in a weekend, but it was built.

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

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations. The idea that the simplistic socio-economic models/pathways are in any way right or predictive was just a fantasy.

> The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations. This is very wishful thinking. It's like a doc telling you your body is collapsing due to lung cancer, you need to stop smoking, and you answering "the future is fundemantally uncertain, I'm sure something will come along and figure out this cancer for me…

But we aren't even close to lung collapse level predictions.

AFAIK worst case predictions for climate change death aren't above a billion life years.

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

#395
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Crashing the economy" is literally the worst thing you could do to fix climate change. Even in a stagnant economy, people are still commuting to and from work in their gas-guzzling cars, and heating their homes in the winter. CO2 emissions aren't going to change a ton. But what a stagnant economy does is prevent any kind of investment in renewable energy and electrification, because there's no excess money to use fo…

You don't need private investment to do electrification and renewable energy. That can be done by the government. Which doesn't have funding problems, ever.

Where do you think the government gets its funding from? And no, you can't just print your way out of this.

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

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you think will happen if the temperatures keep rising, the oceans keep rising, and currently livable areas of land that hold billions of people become inhabitable? It’s really not so bad. Not compared to killing millions of people today by increasing the price of energy. Estimates are of a rise of [2-4 degrees centigrade by 2100.]( https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/climatechange/science#:~:text=Glob... .) This will…

>This will likely result in an [increase]( https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014 ....) of arable land. This is my point. We already have major immigration/refugee issues all over the world. Even if we are 100% certain climate change will result in more farm land for humanity, the issue is where are the people now and where will that farm land be then? Do you think Russia (or any other country)…

Famine in Africa is an existential risk with or without global warming. Currently 822 million people are estimated to be malnourished. As per the citations above, global warming will provide only a slightly elevated risk of famine relative to present day.

Overpopulation in Africa is a problem to be solved either way. Ameliorating global warming won’t make any meaningful improvement to that.

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

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of me feels sad, part of me feels dread, and part of me says, "well, we're just reaping what we have been (and still are) sowing, and we collectively deserve all that is coming." All the suffering sucks though.

Only some are more culpable than others. The climate crisis represents the single biggest failure of humanity. How stupid do our leaders need to be to know about an extinction level event (or at least one that threatens the breakdown of civilisation) with > 50 years notice and take no substantive action? They should be charged for crimes against humanity.

The blame doesn’t lie just with leaders though. It comes all the way from the bottom. Everyone wants their standard of life to improve, they want conveniences, luxuries, socioeconomic status… and they vote for policies that’ll give them those things. It’s a collective problem at a global scale.

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

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? (AFAIK it does, and it'd be very unexpected for it not to. The rest of the comment is unclear to me. I may be reading it as a strawman instead of a steelman -- would a reply like: 'just because our derivative is negative doesn't mean on a per-capita basis we're less' be accurate? I'm sure I missed something)

Source for what? That emissions are declining in the US? You can find some details here https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... I am surprised you didn't know this already. Here is China https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KT?location... It doesn't take into account trends that already exist. In the next decade small reductions to emissions in US transportation per year will be me…

> Source for what?

"This doesn't take into account that countries like the US have already cut emissions and emissions have been declining for years."

> You can find some details here https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... I am surprised you didn't know this already.

This being US / 1st world emissions are decreasing? Thank you for looking that up etc., I appreciate it -- I did know that, and seriously, thank you for taking the time to source it: I'm only saying I knew so you can rest assured at least one other person is up on data. These are strange times and it's hard to get a read on if facts are common knowledge or not, and our estimate of that can cause intense feelings.

Putting my comment more simply and extending it so it doesn't feel like I'm passive-aggressively quoting my comment back at you:

I'm curious why we think the per-capita emissions data "isn't accounting for it decreasing"

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

#399
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese emit more per capita than the Europeans.

Yes, if you count the emissions for the stuff manufactured in China for (not only) european customers. If you look at consumption-based emissions[0], China is at 7 t per capita, which is 8 t less than the US, 2 t less than Germany and about par with Denmark, Slovakia, and England. 0: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

This is per capita data again, which makes the argument circular. In absolute terms, China emits more than twice as much CO2 as the next producer, and only a small fraction of that is exported.

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

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the right metaphor to demonstrate the argument being made is you are coupled to the other car and it doesn't matter if you turn off your engine, you're both hitting the wall anyway if the other car doesn't decide to stop too.

So you better turn off the engine and then hope the other drivers turns theirs off too. In what world is doing nothing the right choice?

I don't know if hope is enough. I don't think people are willing to be miserable for hope- especially when there is no reasonable expectation that others would stop.
Post reply on HN