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A graph that should be front-page news

lyrebirddreaming.com

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Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#331

With a headline like that the graph should be at the beginning. Usually you'd put it up front and then talk about the graph, not put it at the bottom and talk about how people aren't talking about it. Anyway, I scrolled down to the graph and skipped the text. We are currently 4 std deviations above the mean with respect to El Niño temperature. But there's also a historical line -4 std deviations from the mean. Was th…

I didn't find the source URL unreadable. It's here: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4 The lowest ones were 1988 and 1989.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#332
Yeah NZ national news has been going on about this for a couple of weeks. They're trying to scare everyone by saying what an extreme El Nino we're in for this summer with such devastating consequences as (let's see here) warm dry summer days.

It's going to be a good summer, I can't wait.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point is that if humans would change, the Earth would change quickly. The way the first comment was worded made it sound like the Earth would need that time and not that humans will drag it out that long. That's a given. The Earth will snap back fairly quickly if the pesky humans would just get their shit together.

There are some positive feedbacks that once triggered could not be reverted for millenia. For example a potential stop of the AMOC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#334

People quibbling about whether TFA was written by an AI and why the chart is at the end of the article and what a standard deviation. Meanwhile the planet is simmering.

When the substance of an article is accurate, the best people can do is argue over the presentation.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#335
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>right, because clearly hn comments is exactly the place where one would present in legalese their case against possibly a global cartel or at least a conspiracy between politicians and corporations to shift the blame for their externalities onto consumers, reaping the immense profits and directly and indirectly causing millions if not tens of millions of deaths. So let me get this straight, you don't know what exact…

> you don't know what exact crime has been committed we can start with: Conspiracy to defraud is an agreement between two or more people to act dishonestly to deprive someone of property, cause them financial loss, or expose them to economic risk . It is a criminal offense, and the conspirators can be prosecuted even if the actual fraud is never executed or no loss occurs. but i'm also ok with creating a separate cri…

>Conspiracy to defraud is an agreement between two or more people to act dishonestly to deprive someone of property, cause them financial loss, or expose them to economic risk. It is a criminal offense, and the conspirators can be prosecuted even if the actual fraud is never executed or no loss occurs.

But "you should use paper straws to help the environment" isn't fraud, because it does help the environment in some sense. You might argue there's higher priority or more effective measures, but that doesn't make it fraud. It's not fraud in the same way that ads for sports cars isn't fraud, even though they're terrible value for money.

>obviously executed when found guilty (i could be convinced that other forms of punishment are sufficient). why are you inventing things to get outraged about?

You can't be executed for fraud, so proposing it as the first option makes it sound like you already have a conclusion in mind. I'd be similarly outraged at someone who suggests we should round up homeless people for a suitable crime, then "execute" them.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#336
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't know what exact crime has been committed we can start with: Conspiracy to defraud is an agreement between two or more people to act dishonestly to deprive someone of property, cause them financial loss, or expose them to economic risk . It is a criminal offense, and the conspirators can be prosecuted even if the actual fraud is never executed or no loss occurs. but i'm also ok with creating a separate cri…

>Conspiracy to defraud is an agreement between two or more people to act dishonestly to deprive someone of property, cause them financial loss, or expose them to economic risk. It is a criminal offense, and the conspirators can be prosecuted even if the actual fraud is never executed or no loss occurs. But "you should use paper straws to help the environment" isn't fraud, because it does help the environment in some…

> isn't fraud .. can't be executed for fraud

it'll be special kind of fraud, fraud against the planet, execution is ok for that one

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#337

Earlier 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…

So, because he's a nutter the graph shouldn't be front page news is the argument then? That'll teach him. He will learn the regret the day he dared say "hey, this graph means we're all gonna die if we don't do something! Look at it!" because we outsmarted him by refusing to look.

You seem to be projecting onto me far more than my words literally state. I neither stated nor insinuated anything of the sort.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#338
post #245

the 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…

> that could be: 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. theres a lot of options. all of them will lead to some inflation and public debt but there are easy ways to offload that to the rich.

The problem is that most of these (and potentially all of these) ideas sound good, but achieve very little. Some (e.g. right to repair, sadly) will achieve almost nothing at all. This would be a scatter-gun approach at best; at worst, it creates the impression of doing something while actually doing very little.

I don't know what the best solution is. Arguably a genuine carbon tax (one that taxes large producers for the previously-externalised costs of greenhouse gas production, while providing tax cuts to the general population) is the single most effect means of enacting real change. However, Australia demonstrated that even a scheme that results in real, substantial income tax cuts while generating measurable, real reductions in emissions is vulnerable to a scare campaign by a committed, ultra-right attack dog politician.

I strongly suspect that our only potential way out of this now is via geoengineering, and that's fraught with dangers. I am also worried that a lack of government interest in climate change will eventually induce a highly wealthy individual to undertake geoengineering privately, without oversight, scientific input or regulation. But I cannot see the world stopping this any other way, other than by reversing the effects of climate change via nuclear winter.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#339
The now retired meteorologist at Iowa State, Elwin Taylor had been predicting for decades a dust-bowl level event to happen in 2025 as a result of an 89-ish year cycle. It didn't happen last year but this is a pretty clear signal for this year.

It takes the form of a super El Nino the likes of what is happening right now.

https://www.agriculture.com/weather/news/dust-bowl-coming-in...

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#340

With a headline like that the graph should be at the beginning. Usually you'd put it up front and then talk about the graph, not put it at the bottom and talk about how people aren't talking about it. Anyway, I scrolled down to the graph and skipped the text. We are currently 4 std deviations above the mean with respect to El Niño temperature. But there's also a historical line -4 std deviations from the mean. Was th…

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