531–540 of 591 posts
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I'm in eastern Canada, with the exception of August, it was unseasonably hot in Ontario and Nova Scotia.
Interesting, guess it's just a southern Quebec thing then. August is particularly...cold.
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This is the part of the problem it’s almost impossible to get people to accept and understand. The wilful ignorance, even among some of my own relatives, is legitimately terrifying. I tried to explain the concept of a tipping point and got chastised for buying into fake news. For a while I thought maybe a lot of people just think it’s exaggerated or something. Nope. They fully think the entire concept is a work of fi…
Yes, I have relatives that are medical doctors, physic professors, have doctorates in statistics, are engineers (real engineers and not software engineers), etc. and yet, because of the lies of conservative politics, are convinced that at best there is climate change, but it is from natural fluctuations and not human caused, and at worst that it is a hoax. Either way, there is nothing we can or should do.
Like maybe not believing a climate change model that says that by 2050 half of California will be underwater due to rising sea levels, I understand - it's a prediction about the future, likely to be wrong the way predictions about the future of the market are often wrong.
But like... we've been recording temperatures for over 100 years now, and it keeps going up. How can you argue with that.
It's like keeping a record of your child's height but refusing to admit that they're growing.
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.
> 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…
The perception of past weather patterns truly is unreliable, but I don't care if I can discern between temperature averages; the more common occurrence of extremes is what matters. I don't know how anyone can look at the reports of fires everywhere and not be certain this wasn't happening at this rate even few years ago.
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> 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".
But let's be fair - "reducing fossil fuel consumption" and "artificial weather manipulation" are on completely different levels in regards to dangers. Nothing bad will happen if we suddenly stopped all fossil fuel consumption and replaced it with renewable energy. We don't know what kind of bad things can happen with artificial weather manipulation, because we haven't really done that before, and you can't really tes…
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But let's be fair - "reducing fossil fuel consumption" and "artificial weather manipulation" are on completely different levels in regards to dangers. Nothing bad will happen if we suddenly stopped all fossil fuel consumption and replaced it with renewable energy. We don't know what kind of bad things can happen with artificial weather manipulation, because we haven't really done that before, and you can't really tes…
I think it's not really clear that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now. It would be pretty massive perturbation on a complex system. I think we should still do it because the alternatives are even worse, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking there are risk free paths out of the pickle we are in.
By what mechanism would you expect something bad to suddenly happen?
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I think it's not really clear that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now. It would be pretty massive perturbation on a complex system. I think we should still do it because the alternatives are even worse, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking there are risk free paths out of the pickle we are in.
It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now. The ecosystems on our planet have only had fossil fuel emissions added for around 200 years, and in that time these emissions have had a very negative effect on the whole system. If we stop adding these we return to the normal which has been ongoing for millions of years. It's not a perturbation, it's st…
Up-thread, you said "and replaced it with renewables", but we can't do that right now.
Bluntly, if we hard-stop the use of fossil fuels today, a large chunk of the human population are going to die.
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I think it's not really clear that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now. It would be pretty massive perturbation on a complex system. I think we should still do it because the alternatives are even worse, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking there are risk free paths out of the pickle we are in.
It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now. The ecosystems on our planet have only had fossil fuel emissions added for around 200 years, and in that time these emissions have had a very negative effect on the whole system. If we stop adding these we return to the normal which has been ongoing for millions of years. It's not a perturbation, it's st…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now. The ecosystems on our planet have only had fossil fuel emissions added for around 200 years, and in that time these emissions have had a very negative effect on the whole system. If we stop adding these we return to the normal which has been ongoing for millions of years. It's not a perturbation, it's st…
By the mechanism of starvation. You can't produce (and distribute) the amount of food that we need without the use of fossil fuels. Up-thread, you said "and replaced it with renewables", but we can't do that right now. Bluntly, if we hard-stop the use of fossil fuels today, a large chunk of the human population are going to die.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now. The ecosystems on our planet have only had fossil fuel emissions added for around 200 years, and in that time these emissions have had a very negative effect on the whole system. If we stop adding these we return to the normal which has been ongoing for millions of years. It's not a perturbation, it's st…
The whole point is that it is hard/impossible to predict, and I am even hesitant to list some ideas because they sound like climate denier conspiracy theories. But just as a hypothetical example, there may be effects from aerosols ejected along with CO2 when burning fossil fuels, which act on shorter time scales in the opposite direction, which could lead to overshoot.
But it certainly seems much easier to predict compared to the results of further CO2 in the atmosphere. We've lived through the transition period from lower CO2 to current CO2, so it's reasonable to assume we'll see the same effects in reverse. We haven't lived through the period of current CO2 to higher CO2.
> and I am even hesitant to list some ideas because they sound like climate denier conspiracy theories
Understandable, no worries!
> But just as a hypothetical example, there may be effects from aerosols ejected along with CO2 when burning fossil fuels, which act on shorter time scales in the opposite direction, which could lead to overshoot.
Sure, it's possible, but it seems much more likely that continued increases in CO2 will have worse unpredictable effects.