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There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

science.nasa.gov

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Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#101

Post by chucksta »

Scarblac wrote: post #71
reducesuffering wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should should per-capita be most important? If country A keeps their population stable and emissions under control, but country B of the same starting population, keeps doubling their population and doubling their emissions, why should country A have an increasingly declined allowance of emissions when they were more responsible in keeping their total emissions down (by not having as many people)?

Because per capita is the only thing that makes sense. If China were to split into 10 countries each emitting 10% of what they do now it'd be the exact same emissions, but according to you it would be much better. Similarly if the EU would become one country, that country would be high up on the list, much higher than member countries now! Oh no! Looking at per capita emissions is much more fair. Anyway, China's emis…

It can't realistically be solved at a per capita level though

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#102

Post by phkahler »

16bytes wrote: post #39
phkahler wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> My impression is that almost no one denies the warming itself, just the link to greenhouse gasses. I fall in that category. My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor. I saw the blue skys after 9/11. I read the NASA guys that said daily temperature range increased measurably. I saw the blue skys again during Covid19. I'm also of the opinion that anyone looking at historical…

Not to be contrarian, but if you cared, you could easily rule out your suspicions. It's not even worth it to say why or how, since not even doing rudimentary research means that you aren't interested in developing a well-informed opinion.

>> Not to be contrarian, but if you cared, you could easily rule out your suspicions.

That's just false. You might try to rule it out yourself to see. My comments here and the responses demonstrate that it's a waste of time to argue against people in the purity cycle of global warming. My position is one of moderation not denial - and I'm downvoted, told I don't care, and I haven't done even the minimum of research. Pffft. HN is not what it used to be.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#103

Post by maxglute »

declan_roberts wrote: post #16

So what are we going to do about China?

Emulate them?

PRC solar power production last year conservatively will diplace ~45 billion barrels of oil, or 10%-20% more than total global consumption per year. It's just retarded eco accounting that attributes emissions to renewable manufacturers while fossil exporters don't get any penalties for extracting emissions.

Every year of PRC solar prevents doubling of oil, basically they're like the only significant country whose net contribution is negative for how much carbon sinks they manufacture. So the answer for US+co is obviously stop exporting oil and lng, and start exporting renewables.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#104

Post by renjimen »

rayiner wrote: post #65
renjimen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not per capita. The US is still the worst large country. If you account for offshoring manufacturing then the US looks even worse. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions

The climate doesn’t care about per capita obviously.

Climate doesn't care about political borders either.

But per capita is more informative when thinking about policy for curbing emissions, which is how we actually change our effect on the climate.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#105

Post by Windchaser »

0ckpuppet wrote: post #35

we don't need evidence Earth is warming, because it's happened before humanity, and it will happen after we're gone. We need evidence that we're poisoning ourselves and the planet. Global warming's only accomplishment is giving the poisoners a pass when it was debunked. Private jets and climate change, choose one.

I know you're getting dogpiled, but global warming has been validated, not debunked.

The science behind it really got going in the 1890s, with Arrhenius' paper predicting climate sensitivity to CO2. That was bounced back and forth with rebuttals and counter-rebuttals until about 1950. Major debate points were how much role water vapor played, how this varied with temperature/altitude/pressure. (You can trace each part of the argument if you're so inclined; there's lots of neat science in there. The concept of "pressure broadening" was my favorite; it explores how spectral bands change with pressure).

Around 1950, the science started settling out. Spectrometers had improved, we had clearer view that CO2 and H2O don't fully overlap in their spectra bands through the atmosphere, and we had the computing to do better calculations. By the 1970s, we were getting ice core data showing that the world had gone through huge temperature swings, and how this changed with CO2. Enough data had accumulated that a consensus was forming. In the 1980s, scientists were now concerned enough to form a large body to inform policymakers on this issue (IPCC; 1988). And in the 40 years since then, we've mostly sat on our hands, even as the science just gets clearer and clearer.

I share all this long history to explain that the science went through nearly a century of rigorous debate even before politicians got involved. This a scientific issue, not a political one. And I'm glossing over 99.9999% of the detail here. There was an extensive literature debate between the scientists, hashing out any point you can think of. You just have to go to your local uni library and start reading.

TL;DR: saying that global warming is debunked is about as incorrect as saying that the Earth is flat. We have extensive evidence showing otherwise.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#106

Post by mithr »

smitty1e wrote: post #95
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now My family is fundamentalist protestant, very midwestern, and I think about half of them believe that the earth is warming. Not trying to "win", just trying to say that a lot of this depends on the crowd you interact with. I don't know the percentage, but certainly there are still way too many people that don't e…

"Climate Change" implies that some sort of "constant climate" is even attainable, irrespective of desirable.

It doesn't; that's kind of a first-glance reading of the phrase without really thinking about it.

Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#107

Post by toast0 »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #48
degobah wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But POTUS 5 months ago: "If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now they just call it climate change because that way they can't miss. Climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there's climate change. It's t…

> "that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success." This is a weird statement coming from Trump. I wouldn't think his base would care for improving the lives and economies of other countries, specially undeveloped countries.

I mean, he's saying everyone else who tried to do something about climate change had bad results, so let's do nothing and we'll be better off.

Doesn't seem weird to say that if you want to do nothing.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#108

Post by Scarblac »

chucksta wrote: post #101
Scarblac wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because per capita is the only thing that makes sense. If China were to split into 10 countries each emitting 10% of what they do now it'd be the exact same emissions, but according to you it would be much better. Similarly if the EU would become one country, that country would be high up on the list, much higher than member countries now! Oh no! Looking at per capita emissions is much more fair. Anyway, China's emis…

It can't realistically be solved at a per capita level though

Maybe we should start trying before we conclude that.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#109

Post by renjimen »

chucksta wrote: post #101
Scarblac wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because per capita is the only thing that makes sense. If China were to split into 10 countries each emitting 10% of what they do now it'd be the exact same emissions, but according to you it would be much better. Similarly if the EU would become one country, that country would be high up on the list, much higher than member countries now! Oh no! Looking at per capita emissions is much more fair. Anyway, China's emis…

It can't realistically be solved at a per capita level though

Individuals can of course make choices to reduce their emissions, Americans more than most since they're starting higher. Buy less new stuff, eat less meat, fly less, etc.

But policy is where real change needs to be made, and the effects of policy still scale with population in most cases.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#110

Post by kibibu »

phkahler wrote: post #98
Windchaser wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor. Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle? (just normal evaporation from lakes/rivers/oceans/plants) Even as back-of-napkin math, this should be a pretty easy sanity check. I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude here, but I also d…

>> Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle? I've SEEN the effects with my own eyes. You can also see contrails seeding cloud formation on some days. Then there's the fact that these extra clouds are formed and dissipate on a 24 hour cycle, so part of the day they let in sunlight and part of the night they trap heat. These…

Clouds reflect radiant heat back into space. Contrary to your claim, "global dimming" was a very active research space for a long time, and in fact the water vapour and other airborne pollutants likely masked the impact of global warming.
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