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World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

cnbc.com

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Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#141

Post by paulsutter »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #69
paulsutter wrote: post #49

Like most media coverage, the article omits the primary cause of the recent acceleration in warming - desulphurization of ship fuel “ the IMO2020 fuel change cut cloud tracks in key shipping lanes by half...this has a substantial effect on warming, concentrated in areas with heavy shipping activity like the North Atlantic. The reduction in reflective cloud cover over this region, plus an unrelated reduction in reflec…

Does this change anything? It is the warming that is harmful, not the cause of it.

Yes, this change is reversible

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/06/06/we-should-not-...

“How do we keep the world cool for the next few decades while we upgrade our industry to a post-carbon world and scale up CO2 removal? It does us no good to be stable at 350 ppm by 2060 if we’ve already lost Greenland, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and 7 m + 4 m of coastline respectively”

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#142

Post by moffkalast »

thelastgallon wrote: post #118
moffkalast wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A race of machines doesn't need to eat food, drink water, breathe clean air, and doesn't die from wet bulb temperatures. I bet it's a lot easier to build nuclear reactors when radiation poisoning doesn't matter. The perfect candidate for carrying our cultural torch forward.

> doesn't die from wet bulb temperatures AI, which is data-centers have been first-class citizens on this planet. All DCs have air conditioning, which most humans don't have. Without AC, these race of machines will fail often. Also, this race of machines is refreshed every 3 years.

Just gonna leave this here: https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...

There are much more efficient ways of doing datacenters than we're doing right now.

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#143

Post by jowea »

wongarsu wrote: post #132
jowea wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't we need millions of people for a viable industrial Martian civilization? Honest question don't know. Also, we haven't even been to Mars, unless SpaceX has some single-state to orbit spaceplane plus some fancy interplanetary engines in the works I'm not that optimistic. And who is going to finance this? Honestly building a Fallout vault to wait the worst out seems easier.

The current idea of how to get there depends on launching Starships to earth orbit, refueling them completely using a bunch more Starships, and then going to Mars. In terms of energy required it should work out, but I have no clue how he is planning to pay for it beyond a small NASA colony. On the other hand Mars hasn't been stripped of easily accessible resources in the same way Earth has been over the last couple t…

I don't know anything about Martian geology but wouldn't you need a large amount of travel around the planet to acquire everything an industrial civilization needs like resources for solar or nuclear power because it's lacking the easily accessible fossil fuels Earth had. And is it cost effective to mine on Mars and export? I thought using asteroids for that was easier.

And honestly, I don't think Musk is planning to do it, my opinion it's 60% marketing strategy 20% wishing for government funding for a small science mission 20% wishing the Mars colony happens somehow.

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#144

Post by jowea »

bloopernova wrote: post #133
jowea wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm optimistic (for a certain value of optimistic) but I feel we would do mass geoengineering and/or start serious international emission control, enforced by war if necessary, before we get to that.

My very pessimistic view is that things will get very bad first. Which means that humanity will have to deal with mass refugee movements, wars, natural disasters from climate change, and trying to mitigate the effects. One of those by itself would be difficult to deal with, but all at once would be impossible. In my opinion.

My optimist is that it when it gets real bad governments will do something before it gets catastrophic. Who knows, not a climate scientist, maybe it will be too late.

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#145

Post by therealdrag0 »

jowea wrote: post #112
chefkoch wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess at some point we will start geoengineering which will either work or kill a lot of people.

Is there a point to starting geoengineering after the situation is already disastrous? Because that's the only case I see it happening. The big advantage is that it could be done unilaterally.

Why wouldn’t there be a point?

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#146

Post by smeej »

jowea wrote: post #130
smeej wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want this to sound dismissive, but aren't we all "doomed" in the end anyway? How long does anything we do have an impact anyway? A generation? Two? Five? How many individual people have had an impact on the world five or more generations after they've died, as a percentage of the total population? Were all those other people's lives meaningless? I think you're grappling with a fundamental aspect of being mort…

Not the previous poster but it could feel meaningless if you really sincerely think civilization is doomed. At least with optimism for the future you can feel like you mattered to the people close to you, or you were a good cog in a great machine, or you lived a happy life and so will your successors. Even with daily life, if you think your own life is going to worsen in the future no matter what you do, won't that d…

But your own life is going to worsen in the future. To whatever extent you continue to have a future (stay alive), your mind and body will deteriorate. Your relationships will slowly end as the other people die. If you're lucky, you'll build some new ones, but that doesn't reduce the grief of the lost ones.

You might be able to make it happen very slightly slower by making lifestyle changes of varying degrees. But you can make lifestyle changes that will have similar impact on your experience of a warmer world too, if your own life is your concern.

So if you're concerned about everybody's experience, your influence is negligible no matter what. And if you're concerned about your own experience, your influence is slight but diminishing no matter what.

This is still a mortality issue, not a climate change issue.

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#147

Post by smeej »

jowea wrote: post #129
Fornax96 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest part for me to accept is that there are so many people who just don't care. Not about the disasters, the climate refugees, the death toll, the extinction of thousands of species, respiratory diseases, etc. How can people just accept all that as a fact of life when it's all man-made horrors?

I don't think we humans were made to think like that. Almost everyone mostly wants to live their lives and has just enough mental energy to care about problems in front of them.

To add to that, for the huge numbers of people who wouldn't be able to ride out a $1,000 emergency without going into debt, who feel like they're not even the primary causal agents in their own lives, the prospect of being able to have any sort of impact on the whole planet is absurd, even if they do have the bandwidth to think about it. They don't have an experience of, "When I decide something should be different, I have the ability to do anything that could actually bring that difference about."

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#148

Post by lm28469 »

boxed wrote: post #138
lm28469 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to read about the rebound effect. If your toaster is 10% more efficient but you have twice as many toasters in the world you're still fucked, this is what we're doing right now. This new faith in technology as the great redeemer is closer to religion than science. At best it's wishful thinking at worst it's delusional

Yea, except if the toasters get a million times more efficient people won't in fact run ten toasters per person around the clock to make the rebound effect possible. This is the type of gains LEDs have made. I've seen left leaning people make claims like LEDs just mean people have their lights on more so the total consumption goes up. But that's absolutely not true, because LEDs are so much more important that if eve…

> If the tech is good enough it can't be overcome by the rebound effect.

Yeah: ifs, whens, maybes and "trust me bro"s

On one side you have wishful thinking and on the other-side you have 200 years of technological progress that brought literally everything besides an energy or pollution reduction

The entire history of technological progress is a rebound effect, if it wasn't we wouldn't be talking about it here and now.. so yes you're free to believe that in some hypothetical future the trend will automagically invert itself, but it isn't backed by anything at all.

> people won't in fact run ten toasters per person around the clock to make the rebound effect possible.

Asia + Africa's population will double by 2050, and they pollute way less than the average westerner by capita. Do you think they won't want their part of the cake ?

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#149

Post by chefkoch »

jowea wrote: post #112
chefkoch wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess at some point we will start geoengineering which will either work or kill a lot of people.

Is there a point to starting geoengineering after the situation is already disastrous? Because that's the only case I see it happening. The big advantage is that it could be done unilaterally.

I think it being done unilateral is an even bigger risk.

If China thinks x hast the best outcome for them but it is a desaster for Chile?

Tough luck for them.

Re: World surpasses key warming threshold across an entire year

#150

Post by jowea »

chefkoch wrote: post #149
jowea wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a point to starting geoengineering after the situation is already disastrous? Because that's the only case I see it happening. The big advantage is that it could be done unilaterally.

I think it being done unilateral is an even bigger risk. If China thinks x hast the best outcome for them but it is a desaster for Chile? Tough luck for them.

Yes it's risky but I feel it might work better with the world of states we have today.
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