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September was the most anomalously hot month ever

scientificamerican.com

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Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#121

Post by generalizations »

hughw wrote: post #116
nemo44x wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. The winning argument is to show how you can consume more energy for less money by using sustainable technology. Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win. In essence I believe the only politically viable way to reduce carbon is to engineer and tech our way to systems that…

You're probably right but I fear the end of that road is a completely "re-terraformed" Earth we create to adapt to support our industrial society.

So we take the notion of national parks to the extreme, and carve out parts of the planet dedicated to preservation, and dedicate other parts to supporting humans and their needs, and we learn the science we need to artificially protect against ecological collapse. Maybe the solution to our expanding technology is technological.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#122

Post by itsoktocry »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #9
yakattak wrote: post #4

Can someone help me understand why when there’s a record cold month, there’s a convo like this > non-believer: “see global warming doesn’t exist” > believer: “you can’t measure this on a monthly scale, it’s too slow of a process” But often when the case is reversed, it’s used as evidence of global warming? I know global warming is real and I am a firm believer in it but this duality seems to cause a lot of issues whe…

Put "Ever" back into "Month Ever". "Ever" is what's being analyzed and September is the outcome of that analysis.

>"Ever" is what's being analyzed and September is the outcome of that analysis.

Isn't this analysis going back to 1991? How is that "ever"?

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#123

Post by rollcat »

IKantRead wrote: post #53
zemvpferreira wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do need to urgently discuss the role of the first world towards massive third world calamities. I'm a global warming believer, but I'm starting to question whether the planet warming won't actually be posivite for a lot of first world economies. More solar power, less money spent on heating, less dependent on foreign resources etc etc etc. Meanwhile, poor countries will take the brunt of the disasters due to geogr…

> I'm starting to question whether the planet warming won't actually be posivite for a lot of first world economies Well this is a fun new twist on climate denial. I have a hard time understanding how you can believe this when we've already seen incredible and costly damage in the US caused by climate change in just the last few years. Insurers are pulling out of Florida because they can't afford the increased risk a…

> less dependent on foreign resources is another way of say "reduced global trade" which has been and continues to be a major part of our economy.

TBF I'm growing more and more apathetic to this whole "economy" thing. Unbounded growth is what led us to the present problem in the first place. What about we try to optimize for quality of life instead of quantity of made-up number?

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#124

Post by robjan »

jgilias wrote: post #6

So… Why is there a climate scientist working for a payments processor?

I'm not sure about Stripe in particular but many financial institutions are tracking the top 10 global risks published by the World Economic Forum. The number one 10 year risk is "Failure to mitigate climate change". In total 6 of the top 10 are directly related to climate change and 3 are indirectly related e.g "Large scale involuntary migration" and "Erosion of social cohesion"

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#125

Post by throwaway5752 »

hotpotamus wrote: post #58
nologic01 wrote: post #50

> Two main factors are at play in driving temperatures to such extremes: their inexorable increase from burning fossil fuels and an El Niño event that is shaping up to be a strong one. It would be quite educational to attribute in more detail the impact of these two factors. The degree of "El Nino" influence is presumably known, and if its strength is not related with global warming in complicated and unknown ways it…

Perhaps those drifting into panic and depression are doing so because we are now clearly seeing undeniable effects and yet denial persists while CO2 emissions creep up seemingly inexorably?

Agreed. Panic is the rational reaction [edited from "response"] to a near term extinction level threat that not enough people are taking seriously.

People advocating half measures or not panicking are incredibly irrational. It's a human cognitive bias to try to arrive at intermediate outcomes between extremes (regardless of truth). Extremeness aversion.

edit: for instance, IPCC/NCA5 author Zeke Hausfather said, "This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist – absolutely gobsmackingly bananas" (https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1709217151452954998)

Everyone should be rioting in the streets. If you are not scared for the lives of your children then you simply don't realize the severity of this problem.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#127

Post by jonhohle »

m_fayer wrote: post #90
ramraj07 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t believe it’s possible to avoid anything anymore, Merely the scale will be determined at best. It’s not just going to be 800 million refugees. I suspect it’s going to be actual deaths in that range. And with no real intervention as is the case now, likely in the billions. Given how the whole world handled the pandemic I have no confidence it’ll unfurl any other way. A sobering thought that keeps me awake for a…

I think some time in the next decade there will be a “perfect storm” heat wave combined with a power failure, and millions will die in days. This will jerk the Overton window and popular sentiment in an unpredictable direction, and no one knows what the world will look like on the other side of that.

Where in the world would this event take place? In the hottest parts of the US the temperature gets to 46ºC regularly during the summer and people have lived there for hundreds of years. Do people die of heat stoke? Sure, at a rate of hundreds per year. Elsewhere in the world there are places where people love in the same heat with less means of cooking and less access to water.

Millions of people may have to adapt. Fortunately, people are good at that.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#128

Post by jgreen10 »

karaterobot wrote: post #82

I think these sorts of headlines are intended to raise awareness of climate change, but I conjecture the effect they have for some (or many, or even most) people is to make them throw up their hands and say "well, what can I do about it?". I know that, after seeing so many of them, they've stopped shocking me. They just make me feel a little sad. I suspect in the future I'll be numb to them, and they'll have lost any…

Decades of optimism along the lines of "something bad is coming, but we can still fix it" did way too little.

Perhaps now that it's actually bad something might happen.

At this point, geo engineering is probably the safer option compared to letting the planet spiral into an uninhabitable waste land. Of course, it should be combined with cheap and abundant renewable/nuclear energy.

Now that things are bad, there might actually be popular support for this, though we may still have to wait for the current political class to retire.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#129

Post by cm2012 »

DanHulton wrote: post #109
cm2012 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bet you a thousand dollars there will be not even 10 million deaths over current level directly linked to climate change, like drought, heat stroke, etc.

You are delusional. That could happen in a single event, let alone "ever" as your comment is implying.

In fact, I would go even further and predict that all cause mortality will be under baseline for countries most affected by climate change in the next 10 years vs 10 years prior, and life expectancy will go up. I absolutely believe that climate change is happening, I think tech and other improvements will outpace the damage it does. I'm very serious about betting on this.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#130

Post by irthomasthomas »

IKantRead wrote: post #53
zemvpferreira wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do need to urgently discuss the role of the first world towards massive third world calamities. I'm a global warming believer, but I'm starting to question whether the planet warming won't actually be posivite for a lot of first world economies. More solar power, less money spent on heating, less dependent on foreign resources etc etc etc. Meanwhile, poor countries will take the brunt of the disasters due to geogr…

> I'm starting to question whether the planet warming won't actually be posivite for a lot of first world economies Well this is a fun new twist on climate denial. I have a hard time understanding how you can believe this when we've already seen incredible and costly damage in the US caused by climate change in just the last few years. Insurers are pulling out of Florida because they can't afford the increased risk a…

Even George Rombio agreed climate change is positive for northern climates. The desserts are retreating and the earth re-greening. The climate winners enjoy longer growing seasons and more arable land. If see levels rise, we can build sea walls and levies. But if you choose to rebuild after disasters, instead of relocating, which used to be the norm, then each time you rebuild you increase your risk from severe weather events. Naturally insurers take a dimm view of that. It is U.S. policy causing your biggest problems.
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