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Oceans hit highest temperature on record

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Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#101

Post by schubidubiduba »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #57
bix6 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just economics. That doesn’t excuse what the current admin has done in terms of prioritization.

That "just" is really doing a lot of heavy lifting. Economics is what makes this country work. If converting to renewables makes more money, that's what will happen and the people making the money will find a way to justify it politically.

Economics only make the country work when societal costs are not externalised by those that cause them. Which they have been, always, by fossil fuel companies.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#102

Post by Windchaser »

yodsanklai wrote: post #83
lbriner wrote: post #2

When I was younger, I remember thinking, "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Then when I grew older I realised that in Climate science a few degrees is the difference between survival and annihilation. A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world. I am glad that I live far away from the effects but it is sad to think of people losing all kinds of things f…

> A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world. Ice age was only 6 degrees less than now, half of Europe was under ice

And when the Earth was 3C cooler, NYC was nearly under an ice sheet.

The current estimate is that we're heading for +3C warmer, which is gonna have some big impacts.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#103

Post by threetonesun »

yboris wrote: post #8

My favorite source of graphs about this ongoing catastrophe: https://x.com/EliotJacobson - retired professor of mathematics and computer science Example: https://x.com/EliotJacobson/status/2091911667903041543

Posting them on x.com and his Substack is all AI generated hero images so one wonders if he's more interested in the line going up for engagement purposes.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#104

Post by gmuslera »

WithinReason wrote: post #87
gmuslera wrote: post #5

"highest temperature on record"... so far. There are still ~4 months till peak El Niño, and then some months to spread effects.

> ... so far That's what "on record" means

Is not the same a record that may be broken in the next 100 years than one that will be broken most days till end of year. One is an event, the other is a running process with no clear end, besides that won’t be the current point.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#105

Post by majormajor »

Yizahi wrote: post #92
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is literally going to kill millions. You could be right, but I think the more likely outcome is a 'Ministry for the Future' scenario where India or China just decide to unilaterally implement geoengineering and dare the rest of the world to stop them.

There is a tiny problem with that hypothesis - there are I think at most 3 potentially viable climate reversal options - DAC, sun shield and aerosol injection in the atmosphere. All 3 options are likely cost through the nose and will require sums and efforts on a global scale. Any single country attempting them on its own, would require to set aside double digit amounts of its GDP for decades, effectively crippling i…

Game of chicken. Wait as long as you can because as it starts to get worse for everyone, maybe more and more countries will join in on the efforts.

I don't know if any country has the industrial base to do it yourself, as you say, but if any does, it's almost certainly China just due to manufacturing output and expertise alone. They're, what, 30-35% of the world's output? Set aside 30% of that and they can still feed a lot of exports to other countries - more than anyone else - to bring in money. And nobody else has anything close to the leading-edge hands-on know-how to build all the stuff that would be required. As you mention, there's a lot nobody has yet. So the country best at building cutting-edge hardware is gonna have the head start.

If you're a western pessimist, that whole mega-project could easily unlock even more manufacturing, materials science, etc, progress that could be applied to the rest of their output too, furthering the gap between them and everyone else. (But I guess if they did single-handedly save however many billion people from displacement, and the majority of developed countries from massive crisis/invasion/etc, that's probably the least of our worries!)

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#106

Post by forinti »

nehal3m wrote: post #26
ang_cire wrote: post #9

As someone who works in risk management, I think I have a hard time understanding how anyone can be so blase about climate change. Like, it truly takes a level of willful ignorance to have something so dire happening, and just choosing to either ignore it, or ignore the evidence for it. Like, even if you think the science isn't that accurate, the impacts , the massive potential harms, should outweigh the choice to ju…

I do care. I see a species ending disaster hanging over the future. I recycle, I have solar panels, a heat pump, an EV (that I leave on my driveway whenever my bicycle will do the job). But the planet is being ruined by greed on an unfathomable scale and aside from doing what I can and voting for parties that see the problem, I feel like there’s not a god damn thing I can do about it.

The UN sustainability index once listed Cuba as the only sustainable economy. Another year it was Ecuador. Cuba might be eligible again because of the embargo. My point is that you can't convince folks in rich countries to be truly sustainable and you can't convince the rest to not aim for a higher standard of living. Putin said something like that and he was right.

And we keep coming up with ideas to make it worse: blockchain and now AI.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#107

Post by Dumblydorr »

floro wrote: post #100

The biggest lie we're being told in the west is that we have a hand in climate change. China produces 60% of global Co2. When you look at the graph, Europe isn't even visible. If we truly cared about climate change we would stop buying from China. But we all know this won't ever happen because we don't really care enough. It's just virtue signaling. Buy an AC you're not saving the planet by sweating your ass off.

Per capita emissions are way higher in the USA. It’d make a much bigger dent if Americans changed their ways than citizens of developing nations.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#108

Post by [deleted] »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #57
bix6 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just economics. That doesn’t excuse what the current admin has done in terms of prioritization.

That "just" is really doing a lot of heavy lifting. Economics is what makes this country work. If converting to renewables makes more money, that's what will happen and the people making the money will find a way to justify it politically.

[deleted]

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#109

Post by drdrey »

ch4s3 wrote: post #55
cdrnsf wrote: post #7

Meanwhile governments are electing to either do nothing or actively make the problem worse (particularly in the case of the US — expanding fossil fuel extraction, pushing data center build out and attacking renewables like wind).

Data centers use no more than 1.5% of electricity globally[1], and a long LLM query uses only a little more than 5 minutes of general laptop use ~3x the energy of running an LED light for 5 minutes. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...

1.5% of electricity, not energy

that would be 0.3% of global energy use

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#110

Post by Zambyte »

the_real_cher wrote: post #48
Varelion wrote: post #19

Thank God we have a new technology that is aggressively using water, power, and making the world increasingly hotter.

I know. Banning internal combustion engines is a good first step.

Seriously. People fuss over LLM energy consumption, but I did the math on my rig, and if I were to use my machine at full tilt for all of my waking hours, I would use roughly 1/10th the amount of energy the average American uses driving.

By the way, I highly recommend the Priority 600 :-)

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