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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

#351

Post by nemo44x »

spenczar5 wrote: post #145
ericmay wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. Yes and no. I agree that if your approach is to ask people to do this, you aren't going to win the argument. But instead you can reframe the argument. Does that $70,000 truck that you have to make payments on while you do back-breaking or soul-crushing work to afford it really make you happy? Do you really get use out of t…

> are people scamming you with clever marketing? … Are you honest with yourself? This is still an adversarial tone which is more likely to create resistance. It comes across as insulting their intelligence. Convincing people to change is really hard!

> Convincing people to change is really hard!

It’s hard when you’re trying to trick them. But show someone a genuinely better product and you don’t need to convince them of anything.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#352

Post by Aerroon »

rollcat wrote: post #123
IKantRead wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

>What about we try to optimize for quality of life instead of quantity of made-up number?

That's still economic growth. I don't know about you, but I would like there to be treatments for medical issues that aren't curable yet. I would also like to get improvements in life in general like better insulation, better water etc. The sum of all of that improvements is economic growth though.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#353

Post by holbrad »

yongjik wrote: post #336
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…

> population that drifts into panic and depression vs > feeling skeptical for legitimate reasons I think it's just your bias showing. This is 2023, people who are "skeptical" of the climate change aren't there for legitimate reasons. And frankly I'm less and less convinced that we need to engage these people.

I think might be your bias showing...

IMO there's an awful lot of necessary debate around climate policy. Skeptical can mean anything from thinking:

1) Battery storage for intermittent renewables is unsolved and therefore nuclear is a better solution (I think this is actually correct, if we could emulate France's historic budgets, timelines and safety)

2) The earth isn't warming at all and it's a Chinese conspiracy.

There's a lot of room between those two points, even thing's as basic as what's our current level of warming are harder to pin down than you would expect.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#354

Post by candiodari »

flagrant_taco wrote: post #306
nsxwolf wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone leaves out a large cohort - people that believe it, but don't want the solutions you're selling. We typically put forth constructive solutions like nuclear, which get shouted down / laughed out of the room instantly.

An easier first step before nuclear is reducing our power requirements. This one gets laughed out of the room both because we don't think purple will accept it and because there's a direct correlation between GDP growth and energy consumption, we don't care enough about energy use to give up GDP.

This will achieve the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

If you make something less critical, cheaper, it will be used for more and more ridiculous things.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#355

Post by candiodari »

gjulianm wrote: post #342
nsxwolf wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone leaves out a large cohort - people that believe it, but don't want the solutions you're selling. We typically put forth constructive solutions like nuclear, which get shouted down / laughed out of the room instantly.

Not really, I don't distinguish between the different ways to solve it. I wish that was the discussion, but I feel like any solution that has any costs of any kind is just ignored because a lot of people don't feel like this is serious enough to do anything serious about it, doesn't matter whether it's reducing consumption, massive switch to nuclear, or whatever.

Most green parties, and greenpeace in particular grew up around opposing nuclear power as unnatural. I think that's where it comes from.

https://www.greenpeace.org/international/tag/nuclear/

So naturally, people assume anyone fighting against global warming is against nuclear. As far as I can tell, it's also true.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#356

Post by paulmd »

gspencley wrote: post #346
paulmd wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Such as things like human rights, standards of living, morality and the role+purpose and limitations of government. Unfortunately, the dustbins of history are full of civilizations that took disruptive events carefully and with grave dignity and solemnity and respected the rights of powerful stake-holders within their society. That the people who make such arguments generally live in the places best positioned to w…

You should run for politics. The level of strawmanning and platitudes that your reply just levied is something typically only seen from politicians.

It's pretty objectively crass to ask people to die so that you can continue your consumption unabated. Just as it was with COVID.

Pretty much anyone who opens up with "the proper role of government" is guaranteed to using some self-insert version of the founding fathers as a debate-terminating cliche, and it's usually followed by some incredibly crass take like "you're going to have to die so that GDP and consumption can continue growing". Like, it's all just numbers, and it turns out the numbers are a lot more important than the lives of the affected individuals.

Does "I will never mask up, I don't care if a million front-line workers die, reopen the economy and let's get GDP back on track" make you a bad person? Well, it doesn't make you a good one. At best it makes you the edgy kid in your college debate club, but people tend not to like that "abstract, formal" argumentation when it's their lives you're debating.

It's not polite to say it here, of course. But treating a practical issue with real-world consequences as a boring dry debate club to score points over is kind of a shitty approach in general. And nobody else is obligated to play along with that and treat every possible position you might take as having inherent and equal merit, which is really the point of the tone-policing thing.

Taking a position that we should just let climate change happen (TFA announcing yet another "hottest month on record" and "hottest year on record", let's remember) because otherwise it would make your imaginary version of the founding fathers sad is not a position that deserves a whole lot of rhetorical merit or gravity. Of course it is "the role of government" to take action to mitigate dangers to its citizens - whether that's indian attack, or a socialized healthcare system for merchant sailors, or controlling an outbreak of smallpox, or climate change. And it's objectively silly to get hung up on what some 16th-century document thinks about it.

The debate-club stuff and the faux-neutrality doesn't really matter, and actually probably is offensive to the people whose lives you are debating. And again, that's an observation you are not really allowed to make here, that maybe this faux-debate-club schtick and enforced politeness around deadly issues isn't really healthy or right.

(I don't think anything I've said here is any more offensive than a PG essay - go read "haters", that's not an essay you could write on HN today, it's dismissive of people's opinions! it doesn't treat them as having inherent merit and deserving equal respect just because someone farted them out! but I expect to be tutted before too long anyway.)

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#357

Post by candiodari »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #288
nsxwolf wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone leaves out a large cohort - people that believe it, but don't want the solutions you're selling. We typically put forth constructive solutions like nuclear, which get shouted down / laughed out of the room instantly.

Unfortunately it's hard to tell the difference between people suggesting expensive and slow solutions because they're ill informed about the alternatives and the people suggesting expensive and slow solutions because they don't want to solve the problem. And practically there's little difference, especially if the former are getting their information from the latter.

I think people are fine about solving the problem, positive even (right wingers love solar panels, after all). They're just not fine about being forced to sacrifice to solve the problem.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#358

Post by nemo44x »

xorcist wrote: post #275
Roark66 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I may have posted this several times before, but China is not the problem. We know how to deal with that: international trade agreements. The problem is that it requires the US to be on board with it. Each one alone couldn't, but the EU and US together would have the economic force required to solve this problem, if they acted with decisiveness.

What does the USA get out of it? The USA is the #1 producer of oil and the commodity is traded in her currency globally. This makes the USA energy independent and keeps demand for dollars extremely high.

The EU on the other hand has virtually no ability to produce oil and gas and is dependent on outside suppliers. So of course they have a lot of incentive to move off of it and that’s much easier if everyone else does too.

American hegemony is at stake if oil demand is dramatically reduced quickly. Where as the EU stands to gain influence. So again, why would the USA weaken herself to the benefit of the EU?

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#359

Post by generalizations »

mrguyorama wrote: post #292
generalizations wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So because the fix is mildly inconvenient, better to just do nothing, keep making the problem worse, keep letting people die, and just hope that magic fixes everything? Tech can't undo the physics of the greenhouse effect. You want a cooler earth, you have to reduce the radiation we receive or increase the radiation that leaves through the atmosphere. For hundreds of years we have been participating in a geoengineeri…

> mildly inconvenient

Wildly disruptive.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#360

Post by avgcorrection »

zosima wrote: post #331
avgcorrection wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person that you replied to already wrote that “It’s not an observation about communism-vs-capitalism”.

Yes, of course. Abolishing property rights is not communism this time around.

Have fun living on your property when it's underwater.
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