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

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491–500 of 591 posts

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

#491
post #9

The conspiracy-minded part of me really wants to link this year to the sulfur reductions in ship emissions kicking in this year. The fact that there's basically only one person really trumpeting this in a way kind of indistinguishable from things I know are false is hard though. Hank Green pointing out that we could just spray water into the air to get the same effect (and avoid the whole "sulfur" thing in general) g…

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!

I mean… “breathing in sulfur is bad for people’s health” is a documented issue right? Like the sulfur _is pollution_. That’s why we cared to get rid of it!

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

#492

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.

I recently learnt that chopping trees is not particularly a bad thing. The CO2 is already stored inside the tree. The most important thing is to ensure new trees will be growing.

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

#493

And tech carries out churning out artificial intelligence systems that consumes way more energy than genuine human intelligence while being worse off at the same tasks most of the time

I'd like to see that energy calculation. AI could write a whole book in hours or a beautiful image in seconds consuming a few hundred watts of the TPU.

It would take a human weeks/months to write a book and days/week to paint a beautiful images. Also consuming at least ~100 watts idle.

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

#495

> red meat I've been vegan for decades, and I would love to see humanity move on from meat, but the idea is so incredibly offensive to people that I find it far easier to imagine the the Amazon razed and replaced with cattle feeding lots before that will happen.

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

#496
post #25
post #9

The conspiracy-minded part of me really wants to link this year to the sulfur reductions in ship emissions kicking in this year. The fact that there's basically only one person really trumpeting this in a way kind of indistinguishable from things I know are false is hard though. Hank Green pointing out that we could just spray water into the air to get the same effect (and avoid the whole "sulfur" thing in general) g…

"Just do that simple thing, it will fix the problem" rarely works all that well for the complex system unless "this thing" is "stop doing something that makes it worse". Like that one time China decided sparrows are a problem then discovered what they exactly eat aside from grain...

I know these kinds of stories, and people like to say them. But they don’t distinguish from “spray water into the air to fix global warming” and “put iodine into table salt to fix an entire populations iodine deficiency”. Sometimes the simple solution works! The reality is that even simple solutions involve a lot of work at a large scale.

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

#497
post #90

My prediction is that geo-engineering will be done when a certain death/disturbance threshold will have been reached (too many climate refugees for example and western world can't achieve a closed border, or too many weather disasters that hit the western world and populations are convinced it is because of global warming). However I don't think we will reach it in the next 5-10 years, but maybe after that period. Al…

> My prediction is that geo-engineering will be done when a certain death/disturbance threshold will have been reached

People seem to be accepting "the new normal" very fast. I'm not sure geo-engineering will be popular, since the status quo bias that's currently preventing us from reducing fossil fuels, will also stop any "artificial weather manipulation".

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

#499

And tech carries out churning out artificial intelligence systems that consumes way more energy than genuine human intelligence while being worse off at the same tasks most of the time

I'd like to see that energy calculation. AI could write a whole book in hours or a beautiful image in seconds consuming a few hundred watts of the TPU. It would take a human weeks/months to write a book and days/week to paint a beautiful images. Also consuming at least ~100 watts idle.

also ai agent scientists in a simulated lab could solve big problems like climate change. AI might be the only thing that can save us, if it don't kill us.

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

#500

> 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…

> From the perspective of an individual it is very hard to detect this level of climate change.

That used to be a common claim, but it's past its expiration date. Extreme weather events are happening all over.

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