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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

#481
post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what the "conspiracy" would be, but yeah, the sulfur reductions in ship emissions is definitely a factor. Someone needs to figure out large scale injection of SO2 to the stratosphere. Don't wait for permission, just do it!

This is literally just taken from a fiction book. It's a good book, I enjoyed it. But,it's just a story. Geo engineering should probably be done pretty carefully

The "just do it!" part is inspired by Stephenson, sure. I didn't realize before that that it's the kind of problem that you can actually just do, since there isn't a locked door to the stratosphere :)

But the idea itself is much older, and AFAICT very safe. The only thing missing is a practical way to get millions of tonnes of SO2 to the stratosphere aside from burning dirty oil on the ground.

These guys are supposedly working on it: https://makesunsets.com/

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

#482
post #343

I'm wondering, what's the projected circuit breaker that causes the system to collapse and people to change something if we don't do anything before? Crop yields falling? Starvation? Extreme events? Mass migration?

Could be starvation. Even though we're capable of producing more than enough food for everyone, the combination of sub-optimal eating habits, sub-optimal farming techniques, and comically inefficient/unfair distribution means that we don't. Between those factors and increasing population, even a small decrease in crop yields could cause unprecedented levels of famine.

Could be war. War over food, war over water, war over water for growing food, war over living space as coasts get flooded or obliterated by storms, etc.

Could be disease. There's plenty of evidence that climate change is causing diseases to spread (along with their animal hosts) where they hadn't before. If anyone thinks COVID was the last or worst pandemic we'll have to endure this century, they're fooling themselves. The true worst might not cause civilization to collapse entirely, but it sure will increase a lot of the tension already present.

Most likely, it will be a combination of all of these. The four horsemen are all enjoying the race.

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

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What if you are disabled and have no train connectivity? Ok, then you can have a car. Everyone else still can't. >What about workers who need to travel by car to build trains? What about support workers who help those workers? And so on? Company provided shuttle buses. See what happens if we stop virtue signaling and think for a few more seconds?

> , then you can have a car See how silly that sounds? These are just two things I thought of quickly. You will end up with ten thousand rules and caveats if we think a bit more. Why wasn't this included in the original comment? If you propose rules, make them at least 50% complete! > Company provided shuttle buses. TIL buses are equal to trains and cycles. Also shuttles will pollute more if they are sparsely occupie…

Mate, nobody's writing comprehensive laws in the hacker news comment section. Stop engaging in bad faith.

The rest of your comment is also wrong, and I'm sure you know why if you stop to think about it for 30 seconds.

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

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government is literally doing that by funding research. The government can fund literally anything it wants to. Private investment is literally never necessary.

What you're describing is a command economy of the type the Soviet Union had -- no private investment. The whole history the twentieth century is the evidence that such a system doesn't work. And it especially doesn't work as technology has become increasingly complex. Markets are vastly better-informed investors than governments can ever be. Which is why it's generally vastly better for governments to skew incentive…

No, that's not what I'm describing. Stop putting your ideological spin on my words.

The government doesn't need the private sector, it allows the private sector to exist where it's deemed beneficial.

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

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that the tropics only contain a third of the land mass it makes sense for humanity to not fight this warming.

Its possible to think that, but at the aame time the cost of adjustment would be trememndous. I would think food costs would skyrocket before canada and siberia are pumping out grain in massive quantity. Adjustment at that scale can also carry other risk such as disease and civil war. Or nothing at all may happen It really does depend on the rate of change.

It's going to happen slowly enough. Right now we enjoy a few extra days growing season.

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

#487
One solution is easy, it is to reduce deforestation. These can grow faster with more CO2 and store them in their wood. But humanity's real problem is not carbon dioxide and methane. The worst are the industrial chemicals and toxic agents that are impregnated in our bodies and brains.

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

#488

> 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…

The more you think about it the more it becomes plainly obvious how unfathomably screwed we genuinely are.

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

#489
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. Climate change is a diplomacy issue, nothing the west is going to do in the next 50 years will make a difference with what’s going on in china and elsewhere. So either you are a realist about this problem, and you admit that either it’s war with many countries to solve this issue, or it won’t be solved (because they won’t stop economic growth for carbon emissions). Possible alternatives are technology. But…

USA emits almost 8 times more C02 when compared to India per capita. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita In that sense India would need to be 10B+ people to poluate as much as US / west does.

Again these studies don't take into account things like burning, air pollution, waterways pollution, nor trees per capita in India vs North America.

If you've got enough trees per person to offset their carbon use, then it doesn't matter how much co2 they emit.

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

#490
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is only true if you literally crash the economy and do nothing else. What we can do is instead shift priorities, like food and housing security, while reducing the economy by not doing useless, pointless things. Do we really need all these things we buy at the store now?

We cannot build windmills, solar farms, and nuclear energy plants overnight. We cannot stand up new buildings and create local food supply chains overnight. I was responding to the proposal to cut oil production by 50%-75%, which would be great, but must be done gradually so that our current economic systems have time to respond, i.e. not crash.

Maybe we can announce a ban on pork, beef, plastics, TVs, consumption, etc but it should not be done overnight for the same reasons.

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