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Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

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Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

#181

Post by lotsofpulp »

nozzlegear wrote: post #179
lotsofpulp wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? It’s still multiples more than other places.

So it's a good thing ya doink

In response to fHr's comment of

>If only China and US could get their shit together....

If people in the US are still consuming multiples more than people in other societies, then a decrease of 36% means the US still does not have their shit together. Presumably, zahlman's response of pointing out the 36% decrease was a refutation of fHr's claim for China and US to get their shit together.

Although, also funny is that the US's 36% decline is partly (significantly?) due to exporting CO2 emissions from manufacturing to China, but that applies to the rest of the world too.

Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

#182

Post by hliyan »

dgellow wrote: post #177
vrganj wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have come to the same conclusion, but let me ask you, how can you still be a capitalist having had that insight? Why would you support a system that you recognize makes it impossible to do the right thing even as we're dying from its consequences?

I honestly don’t know and feel very conflicted about my own ideology. I recognize how broken it is at scale, but also value the personal autonomy, entrepreneurship, nonconformity capitalism promotes. Though my version of capitalism isn’t the libertarian free market one, libertarianism will always evolve into oligarchy or something fascistic given enough time, it’s just baked into the incentives. My personal ideology…

Perhaps this will help: commerce, free market and capitalism are three different things. Commerce, or trade, has existed for millennia, even among tribes and villages. The free market emerges when there are multiple producers of a good or service, and there is no compulsion upon any producer (from either a third party or another producer) to buy or sell. Capitalism would be when one or more of these producers no longer need to engage in production themselves, but are able to use their surplus savings to employ other producers and then keep for themselves the difference between market price and production cost (including cost of labor). There is nothing inherently wrong with that latter mode of production, except that it never reaches a dynamic equilibrium. Since it's surplus savings that enable the acquisition and direction of other producers (i.e. their labor), and that process leads to additional surpluses, the accumulation of surplus becomes exponential. At some point, the surplus becomes sufficient to apply compulsion on other producers, thus effectively eroding the free market that led to that mode of production in the first place.

Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

#183

Post by nozzlegear »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #181
nozzlegear wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's a good thing ya doink

In response to fHr's comment of >If only China and US could get their shit together.... If people in the US are still consuming multiples more than people in other societies, then a decrease of 36% means the US still does not have their shit together. Presumably, zahlman's response of pointing out the 36% decrease was a refutation of fHr's claim for China and US to get their shit together. Although, also funny is tha…

If we had to choose between the US decreasing by 36%, and decreasing by 0%, I know which one I would choose if I cared about the climate (which I do).

Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

#184

Post by vrganj »

dgellow wrote: post #177
vrganj wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have come to the same conclusion, but let me ask you, how can you still be a capitalist having had that insight? Why would you support a system that you recognize makes it impossible to do the right thing even as we're dying from its consequences?

I honestly don’t know and feel very conflicted about my own ideology. I recognize how broken it is at scale, but also value the personal autonomy, entrepreneurship, nonconformity capitalism promotes. Though my version of capitalism isn’t the libertarian free market one, libertarianism will always evolve into oligarchy or something fascistic given enough time, it’s just baked into the incentives. My personal ideology…

I really appreciate the self-reflective answer and I fully understand the conflict.

You seem like a thoughtful dude, kudos.

I fully agree with your assessment about capitalism devolving into either fascism or some sort of feudalism.

I, too, have been struggling with what a more just system could look like.

Personally, some aspects of Yugoslav worker self-management appeal to me.

Basic idea is: Companies compete on a market, but theres no stock market. Companies Combined with state grants and regulations to direct the overall direction of the economy, I feel like it solves for a lot of issues of shareholder capitalism without swapping them for a whole separate set of Commissariat problems.

Of course, the state itself wasn't democratic in Yugoslavia and it suffered from ethnic tensions that ultimately tore it apart. But we don't need to copy their setup wholesale.

Wonder how you'd feel about something like that?

Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

#185

Post by cineticdaffodil »

benj111 wrote: post #166
roenxi wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the plan isn't to stockpile food communally through a big corporation making a tidy profit for being well prepared in a disaster, and it isn't to stockpile it personally... what is the plan? There won't be any food. There are very limited options here. Those two are, by far, the two best ones for reliably being able to access food. Someone has to build up a reserve. Literally, you should to be able to point someon…

An African subsistence farmer makes what? A dollar a day. The average American makes $60k+ annually. So who is going to be able to afford that bag of flour? Further the African subsistence farmer has lost their harvest, so they don't even have that dollar. The rich will always be able to outspend the poor. Making things uniformly more expensive doesnt change that. The west will continue to have an obesity epidemic wh…

[dead]

Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

#186

Post by dubcanada »

murkt wrote: post #113
mh- wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Waco right now and the car said it was 107 today. If one more person says "but it's a dry heat"...

It is dry heat, if you look at it from certain point of view. I once experienced smth like 27-28°C with fog, 100% humidity. Was almost as bad as 40°C with low humidity. And if it would be 42°C/107°F with fog and 100% humidity, lots of people would be dead already. But it’s more like saying “at least this building is not on fire right now”. Or 1km wide meteor is not crashing down. It is not, and anything near 40°C is…

42C and 100% would be a humidex of 81~ that would be every animal at that location instantly dying.

Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

#187

Post by bluerooibos »

bamboozled wrote: post #10

All we needed to do was stop burning fossil fuels we really are fucking dense.

One positive is that solar (and probably other renewables too) prices are plummeting and are now the cheapest way to generate power - so in economic terms, I hope this trend continues and accelerates even more to the point where even fossil fuel addicts can't resist putting a solar panel on their roof.

In the UK and other European countries, I see every month we're breaking records on the percentage of power generated from renewables.

Check out https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live - it shows the UK is currently generating 30%+ of it's power from solar, which is incredible.

Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

#188

Post by timr »

lukeify wrote: post #12
Noaidi wrote: post #6

People really don’t appreciate yet. How really bad this situation is and will be. They’re talking about 1.76°C higher temperatures next year because of this El Niño. Those are climate change temperatures that are not supposed to be around until 2035. So it’ll give us a sneak peek into our future. But the biggest effect and this is noted by many insurance companies now is going to be in places like India. But this is…

It was inevitable we'd get to the point where climate change began substantially disrupting ecology and human livelihoods. Looks like we're ahead of schedule. People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.

> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen. Yeah, people have been "predicting" it, but the fact is that this is currently mostly hyperbole, driven by bad reporting and activist exaggeration.

What is happening, right now, is that winters are mostly getting warmer. Summers are getting hotter in certain places, but not at nearly the rate that cold days are decreasing -- and the evidence is weaker on a global scale. From the IPCC 6AR report, figure 11-9 shows it clearly:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...

Figure 11-2 shows it another way:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...

Even the IPCC report only gets to the "virtually certain" evidence level by combining the two claims:

> The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (including heatwaves) have increased, and those of cold extremes have decreased on the global scale since 1950 (virtually certain).

That's because, when you actually look at the data, it is abundantly clear that the increase in hot extremes are far less common than the decrease in cold extremes. Of course, when you take the ratio of the two, this looks worse, because the denominator is getting smaller.

Chapter 11 is worth reading. You will be shocked how many of the widely reported memes about extreme weather and climate are just not supported by good data:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/

I recommend in particular going through the figures, and looking at how many of them are model predictions (nearly all), versus plots of historical data. Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?

Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

#189

Post by ericmay »

mapt wrote: post #172
ben_w wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many farmers are subsidised specifically so that food is over-produced in most years, specifically to ensure than in bad years people don't go hungry. Corporations may indeed be taking advantage of this, demanding prices so low that the farmers don't get the benefit of those subsidies. However: > buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later Is the point of a futures market. Futures let people trade a thing before the…

In the US, we have a massive grainfed meat livestock sector that in an emergency could basically all be slaughtered in favor of feeding the grain to people. But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable.

Distribution is hard too. It’s not as simple as “we have food and we are mean”. Look at how Hamas for example was seizing food supplies meant for starving Palestinians. Who is going to deliver food aid to, idk, Sudan and ensure only the hungry get it? What guns and soldiers will protect it? Who is going to pay for it?

Other countries have a lot of money and excess food too - EU, China, Brazil. I would look forward to hearing their proposals to solve hunger and to shake the hands of each volunteer and soldier and pilot/ship captain going to help feed people.

Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

#190

Post by gilrain »

hackernud3s wrote: post #117
gilrain wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t get to be unattached to the lives of others ; only your own. What ugly thinking to cloth in Buddhism!

Attachment being the cause of suffering really is core to Buddhism. It's not for everybody though.

Then why didn’t the Buddha kill more people, thus removing the cause of their suffering?

Because you can’t remove someone’s attachment to themselves… terminating them isn’t the same thing. What you must terminate can be found only in yourself, nowhere else. And it isn’t your life that you must terminate, but your self.

Get off HN if you care about spirituality.

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