Earlier quoted context omitted.
What analogy might work better, i.e., be less charged but as precise?
Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to s…
A graph that should be front-page news
281–290 of 469 posts
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#282the problem with this kind of article is half of them push a doom angle and the other half talk about carbon footprint. both of them have the same effect making people give up or do useless lifestyle changes that do nothing for the environment. we should be pushing for backend changes that are invisible but actually make things better. that means massive subsidies to build out clean power and electrify everything. po…
How is ulez unpopular? Its geographical, age or class axis. In some places: like the cities, its extremely popular and extremely unpopular in other places: just outside the cities, especially for people who can't afford electric vehicles. Just cos some people vandalise the cameras, don't make it inherently popular or not. Its just that a very few _really_ don't like it, to the extent they're willing to smash stuff up.
> give away solar panels and two way heat pumps to low-income families, tax the profits of oil and gas companies, enforce right to repair, remove tariffs on chinese car makers if they create jobs in europe, fund train networks to get tickets cheaper than flying, invest in renewable energy to make electricity cheap... there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.
The basic issue remains that if we don't punish people relative to their burning of carbon then we're never gonna deal with climate change. One human can undo the hard work of many in one casual or selfish act. By the sound of international debate on the subject we should probably be investing in geo-engineering instead if we care for outcomes.
For all the presumed benefits of a populist green movement, I doubt it would actually care enough about the root issue and easily yield to self-interest. Every electorate-level conversation about climate change always starts and ends with talking about someone _else's_ carbon usage, never our own. As a species we're simply not mature enough to note what habits we've deeply embedded in our culture that are inherently problematic, like supermarkets.
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#283Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#284Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have ways to determine the past climate without having access to direct measurements.
This isn't climate, it's weather. There are no proxies that record monthly water temperature. Only second order effects that are at best weakly correlated with water temperature.
Under what circumstances would 29 years be an insufficient mean to compare to the last few years? Precisely those circumstances in which the climate had changed.
> This isn't climate, it's weather.
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#286If it should be front-page news, shouldn't it also be at the top of the article, rather than right at the bottom?
They should also plot the lines on actual temperature, instead of std. dev. And expressing a number as some percentage more or less than another number is a great way to make it meaningless.
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#287Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author of that Climate Casino post has some... strong views. So you might want to bear this in mind when reading his analysis: "The human cancer is destructive to every living thing, as humans continue to eat the planet into oblivion. As someone who values “everything else,” I would be one of the first to rally behind the NTHE philosophy if it had any scientific basis at all. I want the human cancer gone from thi…
To be fair, the planet is gonna be fine in the long term. It's the human race that's in danger... so maybe a win-win from his perspective??
“Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.”
But I don't think it's all that interesting of an argument. When people say save/destroy the Earth, they mean humanity. Call that arrogance, but it's true.
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Optimistic of you to assume it’ll only be fifty years. Do you expect humans to adapt that quickly? The climate will be messed up for centuries at least
Where do you get the "centuries at least" bit? The hole in the ozone layer "repaired itself" much faster after humans made changes. There's no more acid rain in Los Angeles after humans made changes. These all happened within my lifetime. We also saw during covid lock downs how quickly things changed from the sudden slow down in human activity.
It's likely / probably unsolvable at this point as we're hitting tipping points for which there is no effective return such as permafrost melting and releasing more co2, causing more heating, melting more co2, etc and partial shutdowns of critical ocean currents. But yeah I know...MUH FREEDOM.
Re: A graph that should be front-page news
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you get the "centuries at least" bit? The hole in the ozone layer "repaired itself" much faster after humans made changes. There's no more acid rain in Los Angeles after humans made changes. These all happened within my lifetime. We also saw during covid lock downs how quickly things changed from the sudden slow down in human activity.
Changing refrigerants and propellants away from fluorine chemistry and installing desulfurization equipment on coal plants are both many orders of magnitude easier than reducing the amount of hydrocarbons we burn globally to the point where the temperature increasing is stopped or reversed. One of them requires the entire global population cooperate to burn fewer hydrocarbons. The examples you mentioned were handled…