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Why North America's killer heat scares me

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#121

Post by iNane9000 »

Fauntleroy wrote: post #46
prox wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making money comes first in this world, and only then comes the realization if our kids or grandkids still have a habitable world. Guess up until now it’s an abstraction people couldn’t imagine. Despite years of warning. Recently been thinking we should reform old style political parties. Instead we get to directly vote for ideological topics which we can vote on, and politicians/parties who adhere to them. So instea…

You're not alone in that thought, but the first step is dismantling the party system. In the United States that would either require extreme campaign finance reform and the elimination of First-Past-The-Post voting systems. Or a violent revolution. Either way it's not looking likely...

The parties can be improved without dismantling. In fact, that’s exactly what must happen and indeed the fate of our democracy depends upon it happening.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#122

Post by pastage »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #40
throwaway284534 wrote: post #6

Respectfully, I’m getting fatigued from hearing about climate changes. Not because I don’t care, but because I feel powerless to do anything major about it. For all the recycling I’ve done, a single factory can undo in just a day. Being defeatist isn’t exactly productive, but hearing that calamities are happening on a daily basis doesn’t help much either. I really do think the only way this’ll get better is after som…

For me, it's knowing that extensive lifestyle changes and even major policy changes in the western world will hardly make a dent as nations with less means continue to grow and increase their carbon footprint. (Yes, I understand per-person consumption in Western countries is much higher) I can't blame the people in those countries for not being able to think or plan long term while trying to make it day by day. Human…

That's only a problem in long term, for now every bit to lower the consumption will help. Every trick you can find that makes good life less a burden for the planet will help minimizing that long term problem.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#123

Post by Retric »

pastage wrote: post #118
Retric wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not saying anything negative about your lifestyle and I make similar choices. But, the perception is you need to be that extreme when the reality is different. People really don’t need to suffer to make a difference, which is critical as most people aren’t willing to suffer if they can avoid it. For example rather than turning the heat down, buying a solar hot water heater let’s you save money, take long hot sho…

FWIW That is not extreme, it is also not suffering. What would an effective leverage be?

Making positive ROI investments in solar, wind, etc manufactures or projects. The transition is economically viable but capital constrained.

PS: I try to write and deploy code in energy efficient languages (Go, Rust, C, ...) [1].. That comes off as extreme to me, it’s going to take a lot before that’s saving more energy than a single lightbulb uses.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#124

Post by xwdv »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #85
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sympathize with and share your exhaustion, but I force myself to pay attention to these stories. They remind me why Climate Change is always my #1 priority when voting in elections, and when thinking about the world writ large. There was an editorial in The Atlantic a couple of years ago—which I now can’t seem to find—titled something like “We should be covering climate change like it’s the only story that matters”…

| Climate Change is always my #1 priority when voting in elections If every climate change candidate you favored for won in the US and Canada the impact on climate would be near zero. Why? Because China, Vietnam, India and Indonesia are now the majority contributors to emissions and they don't care about your agenda. Such are the unintended consequences of progressive agendas. We regulated 'dirty' businesses out of e…

I like to think in a worst case scenario we can always use military power to halt or destroy their industries if necessary to save the planet. The developing nations emitting the most pollution have no chance against the United States.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#125

Post by [deleted] »

Fauntleroy wrote: post #46
prox wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making money comes first in this world, and only then comes the realization if our kids or grandkids still have a habitable world. Guess up until now it’s an abstraction people couldn’t imagine. Despite years of warning. Recently been thinking we should reform old style political parties. Instead we get to directly vote for ideological topics which we can vote on, and politicians/parties who adhere to them. So instea…

You're not alone in that thought, but the first step is dismantling the party system. In the United States that would either require extreme campaign finance reform and the elimination of First-Past-The-Post voting systems. Or a violent revolution. Either way it's not looking likely...

[deleted]

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#126

Post by partiallypro »

generj wrote: post #117
partiallypro wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the US, Germany etc could all cut their carbon emissions drastically and it wouldn't even matter because China and India dwarf any small change by the West. Not only are you powerless, so are most countries, even the most powerful ones. What is tiresome is that the US, etc is supposed to do something drastic which would barely have any effect while China builds new coal plants constantly. They run over 50% of al…

Doesn’t the poor farmer in China deserve electricity though? US + EU got to use coal (and still do) for 150 years before we even started discussing eliminating its use. If the West isn’t going to let the world use coal or other carbon heavy solutions, they need to pay the cost differences. It isn’t fair to impose poverty on everyone else after reaping the benefits of carbon emissions. We will never get global buy-in…

You really think the US, etc should have to pay for the second largest economy (by a huge margin) in the world to go green? Your argument doesn't even really hold water. Coal etc was used because it had no real alternative at the time, now there is an alternative.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#127

Post by throwawaysea »

hooplah wrote: post #53
jjcon wrote: post #32

A few years ago we would make fun of people who questioned global warming when it snowed… now we claim it is in fact global warming when it’s hot out? Edit: Politicization of individual weather events makes way for bad science no matter how extreme. In general, individual extreme weather events are not evidence of climate change and it is my opinion that everyone sounds stupid when they politicize them. Instead we sh…

And everyone stopped trying to link events through any sort of rationale. Hurricane? Climate change. Wild fire? Not forest management. Climate change. 100 year freeze? It's only happened once in our lifetime, and once in the early 1900s, but climate change! Heat wave. Climate change. Basically just replace climate change with "God is angry" because science has nothing to do with it, otherwise you'd hear attempts to l…

Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington and chief scientist of the Northwest Modeling Consortium mentioned in his recent blog posts that the heat wave was a perfect storm of factors like compression from sinking air coming off the West slopes of the Cascades. He also said (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...):

> Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well.

He also said in the same article:

> Let me end with the golden rule of temperature extremes: the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming. Think about that.

Even the Associated Press has fallen to this tendency to attribute everything solely to climate change. They wrote an article (https://apnews.com/article/climate-climate-change-science-en...) about a new study that came with a sensationalist headline, even though the actual contents of the study (https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/wp-content/uploads/N...) show this was a rare event (1 in 1000 years) with only a few degrees of contribution to temperature from climate change.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#128

Post by gruez »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #104
gruez wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Go back to glass bottles for things. Give subsidies to companies that use glass for inventory loss and such. Bring back the milkman who refills your empty jugs. Shouldn't we tax the externalities of plastic and let the market decide whether it's worth it? In your example of using glass bottles: sure it gets rid of plastic, but what about the costs of glass? eg. increased weight or energy/water needed to clean them.…

Shouldn't we tax the externalities of plastic and let the market decide whether it's worth it? If that were enacted tomorrow, every business would just eat the cost and raise prices. but what about the costs of glass? eg. increased weight or energy/water needed to clean them. That's what federal subsidies are for. Make it worth it to use glass, or some other material other than plastic. Subsidies are how we got cheap…

I think you're missing the point. You want us to switch on the assumption that plastic is intrinsically bad and glass is intrinsically good, without going through the analysis to confirm whether it's actually the case. Sure, glass has benefits compared to plastic, but it also has costs. Should we switch to glass even if it's 2x more expensive (in dollar terms) than plastic? What about 3x? 5x? What about in terms of environmental terms (eg. energy use/water use)? If using glass produces 2x the greenhouse gasses overall, should we still use it? What about 3x? 5x?

A good point of comparison would be plastic bags vs paper bags vs cotton bags. I think most people "feel" that plastic bags are bad and should be replaced with the alternatives, but paper bags are equal to plastic bags when you only look at climate impact, but is 43x worse than LDPE bags when factoring in "all indicators". Should we still switch to paper bags in this case?

https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#129

Post by nradov »

dragontamer wrote: post #42
tdfx wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they want to believe that the virus will go away on its own Pandemics have never "ended". Their effects just slide to a level that people stop talking about it.

Smallpox. With a high enough vaccination rate, even a disease with R0 of 20 can go away (COVID19 has an R0 of 3 to 6, maybe 9 if we include Delta variant). We've literally eradicated a more difficult and deadly disease before. I'm not saying we need to eradicate COVID19, but its absolutely within our power.

Unlike smallpox, SARS-CoV-2 has animal reservoirs. So eradication is not a feasible goal. But widespread vaccination can minimize the long term death toll.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#130

Post by robotnikman »

xwdv wrote: post #124
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| Climate Change is always my #1 priority when voting in elections If every climate change candidate you favored for won in the US and Canada the impact on climate would be near zero. Why? Because China, Vietnam, India and Indonesia are now the majority contributors to emissions and they don't care about your agenda. Such are the unintended consequences of progressive agendas. We regulated 'dirty' businesses out of e…

I like to think in a worst case scenario we can always use military power to halt or destroy their industries if necessary to save the planet. The developing nations emitting the most pollution have no chance against the United States.

Unfortunately most of those countries have nukes
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