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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

#171

Post by secretsatan »

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…

> The other segment of the population that can be affected by a clear and well founded explanation of what is happening are those sitting on the fence about climate change or feeling skeptical for legitimate reasons.

I simply no longer believe these people really exist, that information has been around, it has been around for decades, and yet this argument comes up time and time again, I'm a reasonable person, persuade me. Nah.... it's been done time and time again.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#172

Post by Aerbil313 »

Fricken wrote: post #146
flagrant_taco wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is the path to inevitable collapse. If people will never be able to give up convenience or growth then we really are doomed, tech advantages only slow down that runaway train. I don't actually think it's a fundamental blocker though. People sacraficed quite a bit at home during WWII to support the war effort, we could make similar sacrifices now if we saw our impact on the planet as a similarly…

Young men have a genetic proclivity for getting their asses handed to them in war. It's surprisingly easy to order men to their deaths when they're convinced it's to protect their tribe from some other tribal threat. We've been doing it for longer than we've been human. Nothing in our evolutionary history has prepared us for climate change. We have more trivial things to worry about.

That's the thing. No one can actually comprehend such things like geopolicits, global/national economy, climate change etc. The world is too big for our brains to understand.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#173

Post by Fricken »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #172
Fricken wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Young men have a genetic proclivity for getting their asses handed to them in war. It's surprisingly easy to order men to their deaths when they're convinced it's to protect their tribe from some other tribal threat. We've been doing it for longer than we've been human. Nothing in our evolutionary history has prepared us for climate change. We have more trivial things to worry about.

That's the thing. No one can actually comprehend such things like geopolicits, global/national economy, climate change etc. The world is too big for our brains to understand.

Reason is slave to the passions. If it doesn't resonate at an emotional level we don't care. It doesn't matter if we understand. We also have to give a fuck, and clearly we don't.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#174

Post by qubex »

avgcorrection wrote: post #144
flagrant_taco wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debate over exact causes has always felt misguided to me. The planet is extremely complex, human impact on the planet is largely based on estimates and modeling, and at the end of the day an understanding of why it's getting hotter isn't itself a course correction. There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil f…

> We could easily cut our use of fossil fuels if we weren't trying to balance that with an arbitrary GDP growth target. We could stop incentivizing people and companies to consume disposable products. We could stop subsidizing massive industrial farms and instead focus on eating locally and growing some of your own food. Then it's the small task of changing the economic model of the entire developed (and less develop…

And just on cue there it is: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of Capitalism”, variously attributed to Frederic Jameson and Mark Fisher (amongst others).

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#175

Post by throwaway5752 »

sojournerc wrote: post #139
throwaway5752 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Panic is never rational - it's an emotion. Giving into it can cloud what action should be taken, or, often, cause actions that make the situation worse.

If you do not feel panic at the state of climate change, then you are in fact not processing information correctly, ie, not rational. It is not rational to drive a car off the rim of the Grand Canyon; it is rational to jump on the brakes immediately and not fall to ones death. It is rational to feel fear when in great danger.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#176

Post by TheBigSalad »

nicbou wrote: post #54

This is just so unbelievably sad. How should one react to their powerlessness as an individual in the face of this looming catastrophe?

Our power grid is naturally getting more energy efficient and the human population will hopefully start to decline soon.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#177

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

nemo44x wrote: post #108
flagrant_taco wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debate over exact causes has always felt misguided to me. The planet is extremely complex, human impact on the planet is largely based on estimates and modeling, and at the end of the day an understanding of why it's getting hotter isn't itself a course correction. There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil f…

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…

This whole "experience" thing is overrated. Tens of millions of people go to see Mona Lisa, what do they get out of it? Absolutely nothing IMO. Their travel created an awful amount of CO2. Had they sat at home and read about Renaissance art and history, they and the world would be much better off.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#178

Post by supertrope »

AuthorizedCust wrote: post #56
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…

While the refutations of this guy seem scientifically sound, they are tone deaf. He’s speaking to perceptions. There is a problem with how the issue is communicated in common parlance. How do we fix the communications?

It’s hard to keep up with the climate change denial propaganda noise machine without stooping to their level. In the end motivated reasoning means people will value cheap hydrocarbon energy over global benefits of less climate change. Just look at the French gilet jaunes protests.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#179

Post by Roark66 »

londons_explore wrote: post #136
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…

> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. Asking people to eat less might never win... But when there is a famine, people have no choice but to eat less. It's not that there is no food available in a famine - it's just that prices go sky high. Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 em…

>Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 emitted.".

And it would not change anything at planet scale, because on the other side of the world China is going to "pick up any slack" of CO2 generation we may not do.

It shouldn't stop us from trying to increase efficiency, but panic and insane ideas of the sort of "no one can emit a ton of CO2 without paying $1k" are not the way to improve things. The biggest fight in the world today is not for "the climate", but for the freedom to live in a non-autocratic country. We would have to win the second to have the slightest shot at cooperating well enough to have a shot at mitigating the first for those of us in places that will be hit the worst.

Do you think a communist-by-name party of China (or Russian mafia-state) gives a damn about the climate and how it affects people in places like subsaharan Africa, Bangladesh etc? Not in the slightest, but they'll gladly use every bit of it to promote panic and industry killing policies in places like the US, EU while pretending to "be green". If we win the fight not to be ruled by corrupt dictators we can have a shot of improving the lives of people who will suffer due to climate change.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#180

Post by epups »

I think we should start talking about geoengineering again. It seems clear that the pace of what we are doing will not be sufficient to avert a disaster at this point. I think there are enormous risks involved with, say, stratospheric aerosol release, but the status quo seems even worse at the moment.
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