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Oceans hit highest temperature on record

bbc.com

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Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#121

Post by giarc »

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…

I fell in the same trap "So it'll be 25C in summer instead of 23C!". Sometimes it's small things that make you realize how small changes make big impacts. For example, I was watching a documentary about caribou in Northern Canada. A whole herd starved and died because of a slight warming during winter. Normally they dig through the snow to find food in the winter. But a slight warming meant the snow fell as freezing rain and left a thick layer of ice on top of the snow. The caribou couldn't dig through it and therefore couldn't eat and they died. A tiny change in temperature wiped out a huge colony.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#122

Post by cogman10 »

tehnoslow wrote: post #99

Worrying news, but honestly not surprising anymore. What's interesting is that El Niño hasn't even peaked yet, if it gets as strong as they're predicting 2027 is gonna be even hotter. Also kinda depressing to realize that no matter how much one person does, it won't make a dent globally. And what really stings is that even when decisions get made they're either too late or half-assed. Guess all we can do is hope we d…

My understanding is that 2027 is when all the energy stored in the ocean will ultimately be released in the form of massive storms. IDK if it'll be hotter or not, but it's predicted to be pretty insane, particularly throughout the southern US.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#123

Post by jgord »

karol wrote: post #25

OMG, that's like 200 years of 4.5bn?

to be fair.. almost all of human civilization happened over the last ~10k years, the Holocene, during which the climate was unusually stable.

Its reasonable to question whether our agriculture at scale is adaptable to such sudden climate change.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#124

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

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...

Wow, even with that being electricity rather than energy, that's orders of magnitude more than I would have guessed. That's a tremendous amount of electricity.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#125

Post by jgord »

Recent studies estimate climate warming is happening faster than it was, ballpark +0.3C per decade.

As we are at or nearing +1.5C now, with global emissions at an all time high [ perhaps peaking soon ] theres a good chance we are headed toward +2.6C by ~2060.

Keep in mind the CO2 stays up there for a long time, centuries, so when we get to net-zero its max-CO2 and therefore max-heat.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#127

Post by abdullahkhalids »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #4
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…

“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.” You cannot outrun agriculture and crop failures, infrastructure failures, insurance costs accelerating to properly price the risk, wild fires, etc. US cattle herds are at record lows from climate related input costs. Romanian, Hungarian, and Bulgaria…

Almost no one has the capability to intuitively understand cascading failure modes in complex systems. Especially, those with non-linear or flip-flop behaviour. It takes a lot of education to understand very particular types of complex systems, and then more effort to generalize those lessons to other types of systems.

For example, a science model might predict only a 5% drop in global food production. That is easy to ignore because we waste so much food. But that 5% might be enough to trigger countries to impose food export bans, and some dominoes falling later, there are localized famines in particular places with 50% loss of food supply. That then triggers wars. It's impossible to predict if and when such types of event chains will happen. The only way out is to be very conservative, and aggressively defend against failure.

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#128

Post by jdiff »

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...

> ~3x the energy of running an LED light for 5 minutes.

Why would this not be the energy of running an LED light for 15 minutes?

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#129

Post by jimbokun »

burningChrome wrote: post #60
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).

The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite. They're funding the modernization of existing plants in order to take older plants offline: June 2026: New coal-fired plants in Anchorage, Alaska, and Mt. Storm, West Virginia, would total 2.85 GW. They would be the first new U.S. coal plants to come online since 2013. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-announces-850m-moderniz... Meanwhile in Ch…

Could China and India get more electricity by investing the same amount in new solar production instead of coal?

Re: Oceans hit highest temperature on record

#130

Post by noosphr »

pstuart wrote: post #13
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).

This has been aided by the fact that energy has been heavily politicized. Fossil fuels are 'murican and renewables are woke. It's horrifying.

It's funny that environmentalists would rather see the world burn than solve all emissions problems with nuclear.

Climate change is Schroedingers extinction event. It's only bad when you can solve it with solar panels and wind. It's nothing to worry about when you can solve it with fission and eventually fusion.

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