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IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

theguardian.com

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Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#111

Post by numbers_guy »

aaomidi wrote: post #85
numbers_guy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the fuck do you even mean with "nothing happens", when the climate has been changing noticeably for the past decade already?

I know right? We’re seeing crop failure after crop failure. Whole ecosystems are collapsing. Tornados and floods are happening in places they had never happened in. Europe and the US are going to be impacted way later than everyone else other than the immigration wave they’re going to have to deal with. It’s a sick joke that the countries with the ability to do something about this are also going to be the last ones…

My father is 75, doesn't speak English and has no idea what "climate change" is scientifically. However, as a farmer he has been noticing the change in climate for the past 15 years at least. I am not a farmer, and don't have his experience, but I am aware enough or my surroundings to notice that the climate of my childhood was different. We used to get rain in the summer. We used to get snow in the winter. It's currently winter, one of the driest I can remember. No rain and no snow.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#112

Post by [deleted] »

Retric wrote: post #95
vkou wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coal is only going out of style because we are building out new natgas plants. The greatest trick that has been pulled on us this century is somehow billing gas as a 'green' source of energy. Electric cars are an expensive distraction from the problem. The sustainable future of transportation is the electric train, the electric trolley, the electric scooter, and the electric bicycle. Personal automobiles, electric or…

Every hour in operation 2GW of natural gas emit the same CO2 as 1GW of coal. In terms of how quickly we hit 2.5C of global warming that makes a big difference on its own. However, large steam turbines simply take a lot of energy to warm up to operating temperature. This means simply turning coal power plants on and off releases lots of CO2. This makes a huge difference as we add wind and solar because you can turn na…

[deleted]

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#113

Post by timr »

Retric wrote: post #95
vkou wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coal is only going out of style because we are building out new natgas plants. The greatest trick that has been pulled on us this century is somehow billing gas as a 'green' source of energy. Electric cars are an expensive distraction from the problem. The sustainable future of transportation is the electric train, the electric trolley, the electric scooter, and the electric bicycle. Personal automobiles, electric or…

Every hour in operation 2GW of natural gas emit the same CO2 as 1GW of coal. In terms of how quickly we hit 2.5C of global warming that makes a big difference on its own. However, large steam turbines simply take a lot of energy to warm up to operating temperature. This means simply turning coal power plants on and off releases lots of CO2. This makes a huge difference as we add wind and solar because you can turn na…

> However, large steam turbines simply take a lot of energy to warm up to operating temperature.

Boilers, not turbines. The boilers at a coal plant are gigantic -- 5+ story hunks of metal the size of city buildings. They don't turn on/off on demand. The whole system is complex, of course, but the boilers are giant boxes of fireball that flash-vaporize water using pulverized coal at ~500C and 200+ bar of pressure [1].

My father was a control systems engineer for coal plants (and later, gas) for a major utility. When I was a child, he'd be away for weeks at a time when plants were spun up or down for maintenance.

One of the more memorable events in my life was when I was allowed to take a tour of a big coal plant when it was down for maintenance. Those boilers were terrifying, even when "off". The gates of hell.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/pulverized-...

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#114

Post by taylodl »

geysersam wrote: post #51
Retric wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overstating impact is detrimental to the cause. > decimated 1.5C will be bad, but it won’t directly kill 800+ million people in a short timeframe. People simply don’t respond to harm spread across 100 years the way they react to harm concentrated into a few large events.

So is understating the impact. This take is seriously dangerous. "1.5C is not so bad, chill people" When the fact is - we don't know the impact - if we go beyond 1.5. What we do know (because it's already very much measurable) is that much of the worlds glaciers will melt, causing drought. What we do know is that eventually the sea levels will rise and drown many extremely valuable coastal areas.

we don't know the impact

To your point, we know quite a bit, and it's pretty bad.

Will 10% of the world's population perish? Most likely. There's already a population die-off in progress in many areas of the world as the birth rate continues to decline. People don't have to drop dead for the population to die off, they can simply not be born in sufficient numbers to replace the existing population.

As for those who are alive - adversity leads to war. What we should be thinking about is how much disruption is required to foster chaos - especially in a political environment that has become so divisive.

All in all it's easy to imagine a population decline of 10% over 100 years. Chillingly, it's also easy to imagine a lot higher percentage. Over the next 100 years people are going to rediscover that we are, in fact, animals. Animals who will react violently should our existence be threatened. Hopefully we'll also rediscover that we're social animals and that the key to our survival will be working together.

The old saying is it's darkest before the light. I'm afraid of how dark it's going to get. There's thousands of years' worth of junk in humanity's attic we have to sort out before we come through to the other side. People are fooling themselves if they think sorting through all this will be easy and that the price won't be paid in lives lost.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#115

Post by Symmetry »

johnnymorgan wrote: post #69
thwayunion wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If climate models were predicting the temperature of your city on March 21, 2120 then your intuition here would be wise. But that is not at all what these models are predicting. They are predicting global average annual temperatures and other gross, planet-scale statistics. "Average annual global temperature in a given year" and "temperature in my city tomorrow" are fundamentally very different types of predictions.…

The point he is making is the disconnect between models and reality. Also when are people held accountable for their models being wrong and the output that comes from that. Climate models has a terrible track record and have failed to materialize over and over again. We have environmental crises all over the place which we should be focused on. The two are not the same thing and climate activism seems to not care abo…

On a year by year level they've been pretty bad but on a decade by decade basis they've been pretty much spot on. Why wasn't there any increase in the average temperature between 2004 and 2014? Nobody know, but in 2015 global temperature spiked all the way up to where predicted and stayed there. There's been this weird stepwise pattern to the warming but the general trend is in line with predictions.

The general relationship between increased CO2 and warming has been known since the 19th century, though they were off by a factor of two on the slope back then. Modern climate models have a lot of moving and it's not clear they're actually better than the "Assume a spherical^H^H^H^H homogeneous atmosphere" models but the basic physics and general trend line are hard to ignore.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#116

Post by tomatotomato37 »

Retric wrote: post #22
witheld wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to make a bet with you, and I'd be willing to, but I really don't think I'll get to collect.

Would you actually be willing to bet that world population drops by 800+ million people within 10 years of 1.5C?

Depends, can we filter out any deaths caused by the current major landwar between the breadbasket of europe & the "Order #227" gas station?

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#117

Post by mrmanner »

kypro wrote: post #59

Assume we hit 1.5C and "nothing happens" does this help the cause? While I'm very concerned about how unchecked climate change could impact future crop yields I also worry that having a hard line like this probably won't help convince anyone, and could counter intuitively act as a "I told you so" for climate denialists when the world doesn't fall apart as soon as we hit 1.5C. A lot of the more convincing arguments I…

The problem here is that we just aren’t cut out to understand delayed consequences. The society we build today decided co2 levels tens of years into the future, affecting temperature for yet more years into the future, affecting society for very long time. One effect of this is that consequences may be locked in long before we see them.

Propagandists love to exploit this by saying things like “there’s still time - just look at all the snow”.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#118

Post by bertil »

toxik wrote: post #24
Rygian wrote: post #8

For anyone interested in what 1.5C represents, I can't recommend enough the Climate Fresk [1] exercise. It's not just the droughts and floods, the heatwaves, the changes in birds, insects, crop yields, … Include permafrost melting and releasing greenhouse gasses, civil unrest in populated areas that won't be livable anymore, unstable food production, and quite a few other causes and consequences. It's a feedback loop…

What I always find so hard to believe is that, knowing how well we can predict weather and other complicated systems, climate change science somehow is able to make 1/10 centigrade precision predictions on time horizons of decades and centuries.

Can you predict the height of the next person that will turn a corner? You likely won’t any less than three inches off.

Can you predict the average height of all the residents of your city? A demographer can given an answer that is a lot more accurate.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#119

Post by pier25 »

The currently measured temps are nowhere near reality. We're already way past 1.5ºC if we consider aerosols cooling, climate lag, and feedbacks. We've already eaten and really just waiting for the bill. Even if a miracle happened today and we reached zero emissions it wouldn't change that.

But considering that our global emissions are huge and population keeps growing I'd be very surprised if we didn't reach 2ºC in a couple of decades. Even with the efforts of some countries in reducing emissions, our per capita global emissions have been hovering between 4-5t since the 70s and we're probably going the break past 5t in the next years.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

The only way out of this are very strong negative emissions. That is, reducing emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#120

Post by tito »

alfor wrote: post #98
Rygian wrote: post #8

For anyone interested in what 1.5C represents, I can't recommend enough the Climate Fresk [1] exercise. It's not just the droughts and floods, the heatwaves, the changes in birds, insects, crop yields, … Include permafrost melting and releasing greenhouse gasses, civil unrest in populated areas that won't be livable anymore, unstable food production, and quite a few other causes and consequences. It's a feedback loop…

[flagged]

Haha love it. Reminds me of something out of Game of Thrones.

For anyone reading this poem who has a strong negative reaction:

Consider it a sign that perhaps there's something more you could be doing in your own life. Take a job in climate (https://workonclimate.org/ https://climatebase.org/). Start a startup working on climate solutions.

"Climate deniers" aren't really a problem.

Complacency is bullshit though.

Consider that future generations may look back and judge your excuse of "but alfor on HN wrote a poem that made fun of a climate person" quite harshly.

It's go time :)

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