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A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

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Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#201

Post by blindriver »

hliyan wrote: post #32

I recently finished rewatching The Three Body Problem in which (spoilers follow) the world panics and goes into overdrive because an alien invasion is due in... 400 years. If the current climate trends continue, vast areas of the Earth may not be suitable for habitation within half that time, and we still can't seem to convince some people this is real. Granted I was a climate change skeptic myself until about 10 yea…

My source of climate skepticisms is based on the following:

1) We know that the Earth was much warmer in the past, including the Medieval Warming Period. We know that the Alps were warm enough so that the Iceman could pass through them without protection from the cold, and yet he was found encased in ice.

2) We know that the Earth is cooler now than in the past. And it's also hotter than it was in the past.

3) We know that previous historical temperatures had nothing to do with human-produced CO2.

Until someone can reconcile these facts, and they can say distinctively that the rise in temperature we see right now isn't the same reason as before, I'm going to believe that temperature will moderate and cool, just like it did in the past.

I live in California, where we were experienced a ~10 year drought. These same scientists claimed this was the "new normal" and everyone was in a panic. Then we had 2 years of rain and everything was back to normal for the last 4 years. In fact, it's better than normal. We are almost in summer, and there isn't a single area of California that is in drought conditions.

More importantly, no one is mentioning the "new normal" anymore. No one declared "we were wrong, sorry!" instead everyone is acting as if it never happened or that it's going to go back to drought conditions. The reaction is not scientific. It appears that climate science is driven by science fiction and ideology rather than actual science. And I'm quite sure there will be many people who comment "Just you wait and see!" but that's driven by ideology and not science. I prefer to follow actual science, and science to me suggests that climate will always continue to oscillate, on geological timeframes.

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#202

Post by bayesianbot »

sph wrote: post #190
zzgo wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if you do not want to accept climate change is a thing, you can accept the current state of the world is affecting people Or you could choose option three: do neither and go on Twitter to do some political point scoring: "The Democrat Party is going to use this three day Indian heatwave (they have one every summer) and their climate hoax to open our borders back up to illegal immigration! We must stop them! Vo…

And the Twitter campaign will find even more suckers to convince, and they will vote yet another Trump if not worse. The Internet was a mistake because it expected every person to become a paradigm of rationality, yet we are at the end of the day stupid hairless monkeys that can be easily swayed for the promise of a banana.

The mistake was not spending the first years of school teaching people to care about what is true, and also the tools for critical thinking to figure out what is real and how sure we are about it.

I thought that already when I was a kid and saw that people do not care at all if their beliefs are correct, and because of that don't care about learning any critical thinking skills, but I wasn't convinced and thought maybe adults just know something I don't, but today it is clear the same problem is even worse and the most important factor to why we are so screwed up as a species

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#203

Post by leptons »

jdw64 wrote: post #51

The sad thing about humans is that under capitalism, capital consumes public goods like nature. Then, when those public goods degrade and harm the human species, the capital class that actively consumed those public goods refuses to help restore them and instead cries that it's all a lie

Even if we didn't have capitalism, people would still need energy, for everything. It's unfortunate that fossil fuels were the easiest thing to use to generate energy over the last couple of centuries, and that it continues today. Maybe capitalism makes it easy for fossil fuels to remain entrenched, but I doubt any other kind of system would make fossil fuels less pervasive if it were the dominant energy source for over a century.

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#204

Post by TacticalCoder »

hliyan wrote: post #32

I recently finished rewatching The Three Body Problem in which (spoilers follow) the world panics and goes into overdrive because an alien invasion is due in... 400 years. If the current climate trends continue, vast areas of the Earth may not be suitable for habitation within half that time, and we still can't seem to convince some people this is real. Granted I was a climate change skeptic myself until about 10 yea…

> ... we know the following very accurately

We also know very accurately that we're between two ice ages. Shall we manage to both not cook ourselves in the next few hundred years and master climate before the next ice age comes.

For only about 12 000 years ago you did not want to be anywhere in the northern hemisphere when, in a few decades, it cooled dramatically (may I add: not due to human activity):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

Shall we be able to delay the next ice age? Should we just focus on the next 200 years or should be begin to think what we'll be able to do to prevent us from freezing to death in 10 000 years?

Also... We've got those AIs now (if I read HN correctly on a daily basis): how comes climate is not all solved already due to all the perfect apps and models AI generates for us?

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#205

Post by camgunz »

jeffbee wrote: post #13
camgunz wrote: post #4

I really think people are sleeping on the AMOC. The first season there isn't European wine/cheese/olives because of climate change is the first season European farmers probably literally declare war on their governments, to say nothing of the fact that almost no European homes can handle this level of cold. And for some perspective, this is only one of many other huge changes that huge populations will react violentl…

I am interested in your implication that European farmers would have someone other than themselves to blame for this outcome. As a whole they are at least as backwards as American farmers. They are largely deniers of climate change either as a thing altogether or as something attributable to man, or are prone to believing it helps them with longer growing seasons, and their main political activity is protesting any c…

There's no referees in politics, and no rule that anyone's positions have to be consistent. You can complain about it the entire time farmer after farmer leaves shit pile after shit pile in the highways.

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#206

Post by dahinds »

supertroop wrote: post #69
mistrial9 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The failure of the environment movements over the last 60 years are proof superficial and incorrect

Explain your reasoning or stop wasting bits.

For the past ~60 years... with maybe just a bit of slack on the start of that, it would include tremendously impactful things like: - the clean air act and clean water act - endangered species act and restrictions on international trade for protected animals and plants - creation of the EPA, and reductions and regulation of pesticides and herbicides - the emergence of the organic food industry - the Montreal protocol and global reduction in CFC production - contribution to the development of clean energy technology -- you could argue that now the boom in clean energy is just economics in action but that comes after decades of basic science and technical innovation motivated by environmental concerns.

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#207

Post by krupan »

Eh, let's just build more natural gas powered data centers. Maybe an LLM will tell us how to solve problems like this

I'm joking, but apparently there are influential people who really believe it's a good idea (see: governor or Utah and his statements on AI data centers recently)

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#208

Post by intended »

yongjik wrote: post #189
tialaramex wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blaming the consumer is a time-honoured way to ensure nothing is done. The consumer can't pick options which don't exist, so the producer says oh well, you can either burn coal or you can go without light - there's no mention that the producer doesn't have to burn coal to make electricity, just straight to blaming you for wanting light.

It's a two-sided sword. When you are the consumer, blame the producer. When you are the producer, blame the consumer. In this way everybody can blame someone else and ensure that nothing is done. For example, more people buying EVs can meaningfully reduce CO2 consumption, but you can easily find millions of people ideologically opposed to that. Or just look at how reliably people reject any policy that vaguely looks…

When you are informed, you hold to account the person responsible.

The entire issue of incentives to consume being a reason to blame consumers, is obviated when there are entire industries that have spent significant amounts of money and capital to ensure that voters cannot come to a consensus.

The science on global warming was clear eons ago. The true revolution has been in scientists learning how weak facts are when going up against media machines.

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#210

Post by tovej »

vladms wrote: post #183
Loquebantur wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of average individuals being the relevant actors in global carbon emissions is pure misdirection. They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs. The AMOC shutdown isn't merely "possible" and due "this century" either. The math of the dynamics of complex systems shows the current behavior to be signs of a phas…

> They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs. You two might agree if we consider that when you say "rich" you might describe the average individual on this website (if we consider all people alive). I do believe that 90% of the people would not want to actually destroy the planet the way it seems to be happening, b…

It's an even smaller percentage of people that are most responsible. Any multimillionaire is already someone who could have an impact, but mostly it's the 100 million club and up that are causing the most damage. And bug LLCs in general, since those are essentially optimising for profit only.
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