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

public.wmo.int

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

#521

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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.

Climate change is not a technological problem at this point. We know how to solve it, we just don't do it.

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

#522
post #200

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Depends where you live. I live in Vancouver, BC, and the effects here are very, very significant. It used to be that wildfire smoke in the city was super rare, but for the past ~10 years there’s been massive amounts of smoke in the city almost every summer. Weeks each summer where the air is filled with smoke, your throat itches non-stop, and it’s not healthy to be outside for extended periods. Virtually everyone agr…

Global warming is a potential factor, but decades of poor logging practises are also to blame ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259006171... ).

Yeah agreed, I worded that poorly, there’s always multiple causes. Both logging and fire suppression are significant causes too.

It is worth noting, though:

- That paper cuts off at 2017. Things have gotten even worse recently: the previous high (on record) for hectares burned by wildfires in Canada was 7.1 million, this year we’re already at 16.5 million, and still growing quickly: https://natural-resources.canada.ca/simply-science/canadas-r...

- Climate change is seen as a major cause of the exceptionally hot, dry, wildfire inducing weather we’ve been seeing, e.g.: https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/climate-change-more-...

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

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I genuinely don't understand how your comment is a response to mine. Where are we going to move the billions of people living in coastal South East Asia when oceans rise and their land becomes un-farmable due to climate change?

Rising oceans aren’t going to make coastal areas in Asia uninhabitable for any appreciable proportion of people for centuries. Asia has huge tracts of unused land. Over the centuries, people will migrate.

I tried to explain to you that overpopulation has almost nothing to do with global warming, and conflating the two diminishes our ability to solve each.

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

#524

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> 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…

You scenario seems to only correlate increasing price with lower consumption. I think there should also be viable paths where increased prices for some energy forms translates to increased demand for cleaner forms instead A carbon tax matched by a matching carbon dividend could transfer funds to poor people. A fuel consumption tax can be matched by a matching tax cut on miles driven. Transferring demand from fossil f…

The goal is to make energy cheaper. I would much prefer it to be clean energy, but this is secondary. If we could devise a way to make clean energy cheaper than untaxed fossil fuels, I’m all in. It just hasn’t worked that way so far, and activists are almost entirely focused on making fossil fuels more expensive, rather than clean energy cheaper.

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

#525

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Once oil is used only marginally for fuel and heating, the demand will be a lot less (minus 80% or thereabouts) and going after difficult to extract sources might indeed not be economical but also not needed to satisfy demand (unless this happens very very late). During the transition there could be cost spikes at demand levels that are awkward to fill without expensive resources, though.

Motor véhicule is 50% and aviation 5%, idk about heating. So we assume that we replace all explosion engine by EV. Correct?

Mostly replace, yes, there is also electricity generation via oil to be replaced.

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

#526
post #520

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Yes yes the solution here is to physically move hundreds or thousands of years of capital investment, especially forms of capital investment that cannot be moved and are just abandoned/destroyed. That way we can emit a bunch more to rebuild that already-built infrastructure in a different locale!

There's a lot of time though. It's more a matter of the kids or grandkids moving somewhere colder rather than anything sudden. And the biggest problem with building a new house up north is getting planning permission. The actual construction can be relatively trivial.

It's somewhat ironic all the billionaires are about space and mars and shit - like, ok, super in-hospitable, go for it. While we should be building our space fortresses and geo domes on earth to keep the elements out, and survive on some kind of lab food.

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

#527
post #441

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To be honest, we could use a hard reset like that every once in a while.

Maybe the new cities could be built to be walkable.

the little domed areas we will call cities will be walkable. so there's that!

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

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

uh, ok? It's the trends we're talking about. not one year or one day of data.

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

#529
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…

some crazy person or country will bring the reckoning closer (or render it moot) by leveraging the unrest and fear, by blowing things up.

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

#530

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.

sure, but AI will also produce a lot of useless outputs too.
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