151–160 of 247 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The prophecies always were about water stress and food security. How that plays out, I don't know. If it's anything like the recent energy spikes it means burdening future generations of wealthy countries with subsidised amenities while others go without.
When food and water become scare, conflicts arise.
What strikes me is the relative sharp change. CO2 has been rising since, what 250 years ? However real effects of global warming seems to be felt since, like 10 years old ?
Keep in mind total emissions grew much much faster in our lifetime (let’s say 1980-2026) than in the prior 200 years, which was before most of the recent huge growth in Chinese and Indian emissions. Also the ocean and arctic were absorbing the majority of the heat. The arctics been going through these heat waves for 10 years, its white albedo decreasing and potentially permafrost melting making more effective emissio…
Nah we need to stop burning fossil fuels dude.
to me, these heatwaves feel like the start of the end of human existence
Nah. It's really as simple as this: Southern climates are moving north. (In the northern hemisphere.) If you want a vision of the future, consider a New England that looks more like the Southeast. There will be winners and losers. As climate zones move toward the poles, weather patterns and agricultural viability will shift with them. This will eventually turn current breadbaskets into deserts while warming up northe…
Why such short term graphs? One of them only goes back 1991, and the longest term only goes back to 1946.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People one or two generations before you felt that about the cold war.
The conditions leading to the Cold War were reversible, this crisis is becoming very much less so. Despite what the carbon capture techno optimists say.
In order to just offset our current emissions, we would need around a million carbon capture facilities equivalent to the largest one we currently have. For comparison, the number of power plants in the entire world is a few tens of thousands. So we'd need maybe like 50 times as many capture plants as we currently have power plants.
Like it's not even in the neighbourhood of realistic, it's just completely infeasible and I am sure engineers know that. You basically need to suck the whole atmosphere through facilities, and there's a lot of atmosphere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think thats the wrong level of abstraction. The cold war ended, but clima change will not end.
Of course it will. There is a finite amount of fossil fuels and it'll become uneconomical to use before those are fully exhausted. Give it some more years (say, a few hundred) after the last car fleet and power plant switched away and the climate will have triggered any tipping points it's going to tip. Then the animals that haven't adapted will soon have finished going extinct, the ocean finished warming up with its…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think thats the wrong level of abstraction. The cold war ended, but clima change will not end.
Of course it will. There is a finite amount of fossil fuels and it'll become uneconomical to use before those are fully exhausted. Give it some more years (say, a few hundred) after the last car fleet and power plant switched away and the climate will have triggered any tipping points it's going to tip. Then the animals that haven't adapted will soon have finished going extinct, the ocean finished warming up with its…
And yet many Europeans will still argue that ACs are evil and they shouldn't have them despite an estimated 175k heat related deaths per year. Although maybe this heat wave will change some minds.
Lived in Europe all my life, never seen this, in the past 40 years. I think it’s more an American fantasy than anything else. Historically, aircon in Northern Europe was pointless except for large office blocks, so was rarely installed. It’s been common in much of Southern Europe for a while.
I think it’s still a _fairly_ hard sell in much of Northern Europe; you might be talking about a few days a year when it’s actually required, which will discourage people from putting it in. Thought about it myself when I was WFH during covid, but in Ireland in particular it really is just a few days a year, at worst.
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/seaice_daily/
edit: The charts shown in the article, show the institutional insanity, by greying out Ireland, speaking of "europe", but showing only data for England.