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A graph that should be front-page news

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Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#351

Post by mmooss »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #343
Ntrails wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is ulez unpopular? As a rule most people with a ~10 year old car which runs fine at low cost are going to be frustrated at an extra tax on their vehicle. (It is not like the manufacture of a new electric car is green.) Ordinary People always were going to have to suffer to migrate off fossil fuels. Expecting them to like it is somewhat hopeful!

sure, but air quality is noticeably better in cities, so I can't let it stand that its just inherently unpopular. Some people like the benefits and enjoy them, those who don't like the downsides express that loudly. It's not just a talking point (see ded comment below), every time we try to publicly survey to implement traffic calming ideas in our city (UK) its a stalemate between in towners and out of towners. Usual…

[dead]

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#352

Post by inigyou »

qsera wrote: post #206
RetroTechie wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No this is 'calibrated' against other research like fossils (indicating which species were living where & when) & probably more. It's called science for a reason... (not back-of-a-napkin stuff)

But those are unreliable as well... See, since it seems that you are convinced yourselves, can you tell me how accurately the past temperature can be assessed by using this method? I mean +/- how many degrees?

Can you tell me any answer you'd accept?

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#353

Post by Symbiote »

Ntrails wrote: post #324
Quarrelsome wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to scrap unpopular things like ulez 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 ex…

> How is ulez unpopular? As a rule most people with a ~10 year old car which runs fine at low cost are going to be frustrated at an extra tax on their vehicle. (It is not like the manufacture of a new electric car is green.) Ordinary People always were going to have to suffer to migrate off fossil fuels. Expecting them to like it is somewhat hopeful!

The ULEZ in London was first discussed in 2014, so the writing was on the wall for diesel cars since then.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#354

Post by krupan »

quickthrowman wrote: post #275
pdonis wrote: post #264

"Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed." Way, way, way, way overstated. The graph shows a comparison to an average over a few decades. Human civilization is thousands of years old. Does anyone have a graph of what all the El Ninos since the last Ice Age ended have looked like? Of course not. Nobody has that kind of temperature data.

There is not a graph of prehistoric ocean surface temperatures (doesn’t seem possible to obtain this data other than collecting it as it happens as far as I can tell) but there is global historical temperature data. Here is an XKCD comic, scroll to the bottom and pay attention to the rate of change since 1850 vs the prior 20,000 years: https://xkcd.com/1732/ This Wikipedia article has a graph of the last 2000 years:…

How does the global temperature relate to El Nino temperature? Do we know without having El Nino data?

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#355

Post by QuantumGood »

cuu508 wrote: post #227
QuantumGood wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most powerful humans, and human systems, often score very low on stewardship and empathy. While "cancer" triggers as opinionated, using a less-charged analogy I think should probably make a similar point.

What analogy might work better, i.e., be less charged but as precise?

TLDR; hard to resolve that question with dialog.

Complexity resists reduction, yet fundamentals that affect change over time exist.

That said, growth seeks to shed restrictions upon it, but unrestricted growth has many suboptimal effects on the area it grows in.

If you propose a system growth effect thesis (established example: the iron law of oligarchy), it's not possible to show its influence both accurately, and in such a way that agrees with most observers. It may not even be useful; it might exist as a concept better in a group relation with other concepts, and focusing on the group might be most useful.

And responses to actions to display a system's properties tend to be about those actions, not about the system.

Some of the most popular responses re: growth are "the area doesn't have a beneficial significance equal to the beneficial significance of the growth", but one is measured essentially to support propaganda, and other is barely measured and poorly understood.

Once you narrow the framing, people criticize the framing as the reality, not its usefulness as a paradidm for the reality of the issue. The map is not the territory; we cannot "describe" reality. We can create interfaces to that reality, we can measure, discuss, theorize about cause and effect, attempt to emulate or simulate to better understand, but responses tend to focus on the interface instead of the reality, and then devolve to epistimelogical "statements about statements" type activity.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#356

Post by azan_ »

uv-depression wrote: post #330
azan_ wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's an absurd argument, though. Yes, exactly! Talking about infinite growth or infinite existence is really stupid and that’s my point!

You're arguing against "degrowthers", favouring the current growth-based system. What you're arguing for is a system that requires the infinite growth you don't want to think about. So in essence you're saying "looking at the consequences of my beliefs is absurd", which is hardly a compelling argument.

If my system requires infinity growth then yours also does require infinite resources by the logic outlines above. If you agree that your system does not require infinite resources because we should be talking only at timescales that are relevant to humans, then my system also does not require infinite growth. You can’t have it both ways, either you are ok with infinite timeframe (and then degrowth will eventually run out of resources) or you are not (but then the growth requires to sustain current system is obviously finite).

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#357

Post by krupan »

exe34 wrote: post #113
lotsofpulp wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, could be negated if enough people who are projected to consume above a certain amount over the course of their lifetimes are killed.

In that case you can just throw in a couple of nukes. If you choose the location and the yield just right, you can also buy a few years of cooling.

You just reminded of the term Nuclear Winter. Is that still a thing?

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#358

Post by mmooss »

childintime wrote: post #280
imperio59 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word you're looking for is nuclear. Everywhere.

The word is solar. Instant reduction in CO2 emissions, won't be a decade late, and won't be obsolete by the time it's finally ready. Nuclear is a politician's vanity project. And politicians do have a knack for choosing the wrong thing at the wrong time, by ignoring the market. Just let the engineers make the call.

> Nuclear is a politician's vanity project. And politicians do have a knack for choosing the wrong thing at the wrong time, by ignoring the market.

Nuclear benefits the politicians' vested supporters, major corporations. Renewables are smaller and not vested interests.

> Just let the engineers make the call.

That dangerously assumes that engineers don't have their own biases and corruption. It's hard to fathom that perspective given what everyone can see happening in Silicon Valley for years.

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#359

Post by lejalv »

_alternator_ wrote: post #349
smallerize wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair, I had to click into the full size (I pinch zoomed on my phone). But now the fact that 1988/1989 are outliers raise a few more questions about the variance calculation. In particular, the title suggests that those weren't included in the variance calculation. A 3.5-sigma event is a 1-in-1000 chance. Yet we have 2 of them in our data set that goes back only 40ish years? Something is suspect. Maybe I'm not account…

Why are you assuming gaussianity?

Re: A graph that should be front-page news

#360

Post by engineer_22 »

Atreiden wrote: post #129
engineer_22 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst.…

What about it reads to you as low quality? The intention seems to be to convey alarm through description of catastrophe, which was effective for me.

Disclaimer: this is only an opinion.

The language is too strong for the context. Author uses religious imagery, prognosticates about an Armageddon scenario, and does so based on a relatively short time series.

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