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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)

#171

Post by larkost »

alt227 wrote: post #125
mithr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your analogy doesnt work, becaue the earth has been warmer than it is now several times in the past. so the increased temperature is within the range of normal temperatures. The problem is not that the earth is warming, it is that it is warming at an artificially increased rate.

The rate of warming is a problem (i.e.: it determines what generations of humans are going to see this), but the major problem is the warming itself, or rather the change.

We (humanity) have gotten comfortable with the way things are, and a change in that is going to mean that things are going to change for us, and we don't like change. Most of our biggest cities are all close to the coast and will be subject to massive flooding in the next 100 years (if not sooner). Much of those same large population centers are also fairly close to being too hot for general survival (without aggressive AC). Our agriculture is all setup for the temperatures we have now, and the rain patterns we are used to. So we are going to have to change both where we live, and how we grow our food (location and probably strains as well).

Global warming is (almost) definitely not going to destroy all life on earth, but many of the forecasts are in extinction-level for most of the large animals. So life in general will continue, and probably humanity (since we are so good at making environment for ourselves), but the (eventual) changes are going to make the world very different, in ways that we are not going to like.

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

#172

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

nradov wrote: post #136
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another reframing that may be useful is energy security/redundancy. If you have a cheap source of solar panels and batteries, the only downside to installing them all over the country is up-front cost (which pays itself off quickly). The upside you gain is a substantially more robust, less centralized power grid that can continue to operate if something happens to impede your supply of fossil fuels or part of the gri…

Where is this mythical cheap source of batteries? I mean you can go on Alibaba and order cheap 18650 cells in limited quantities but there's an enormous difference between doing that and having enough reliable battery power to keep a nationwide grid supplying a modern industrial economy through several days of bad weather.

The Alibaba rate is still ~20% margin (not including shipping costs which decrease as order size increases) over the wholesale rate. As a consumer you don't have the ability to buy batteries wholesale (similar to how you can't go purchase a combined cycle natural gas plant on Amazon)

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

#173

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #88
legitster wrote: post #45

Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion. Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded: "The longer we put off doing something, the harder a…

> many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything I hear that often, but it's never followed by details about any of the actual changes that are being talked about. The ones I actually hear (especially politicians) advocate for are catastrophically expensive and dubious in their effectiveness. Banning coal or gas-powered cards might (might) be a good idea in the long run, but it definitely…

banning coal is quite cheap even ignoring the emissions and pollution side effects. England has already shut down their last coal plant and without 6 years of Trump, the US likely would have or would be planning to within the next couple years. Coal is expensive, not flexible, and horribly polluting even compared to natural gas.

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

#174

Post by metalman »

Many small aircraft wings are held on with 4 small bolts, one one each spar, and one on each end of the strut, so as you might imagine that with the failure mode involved, they are damn good bolts, and they are, but unfortunately people look at our atmosphere are shrug, and refuse to consider the failure mode, especialy as we have only one atmosphere, which we benifit from in so many ways, like right now it is holding up hundreds of cessena's and everybody is breathing it, but it's like going along in a cessena, while watching the wing bolt stretch, bit by bit, it's only a little cracked. Which to my knowledge has never happened, no one has ever pulled the wings off a 150, simply because good as those bolts are, they get checked, and fussed over, and changed long long before anything gets troublesome, because simply, some things are unthinkable and there are no debates or opinions, something held to be self evident.

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

#175

Post by nradov »

gzread wrote: post #157
nradov wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it though? For developing countries, having a large supply of fossil fuels has always been a huge accelerator for industrialization and overall economic growth even if that fuel has to be imported. There really is no substitute, especially when you consider that it's not used only for transportation and power generation but also for manufacturing as an industrial heat source and chemical feed stock.

Solar energy is cheaper than oil right now. On average. Too bad it's highly variable but if you can cope with extreme variability you can get extremely cheap energy.

Pretty tough to cope with variability if you want to build a modern industrial economy. I mean even with cheap labor it kind of kills your cost structure when capital intensive facilities have to shut down due to electricity shortage. Plus there are plenty of industrial processes that require fossil fuels as inputs separate from just electricity.

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

#176

Post by ModernMech »

zzrrt wrote: post #142
legitster wrote: post #45

Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion. Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded: "The longer we put off doing something, the harder a…

> Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. POTUS tweeted "WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???" a few weeks ago when a record cold wave came in. I suppose you were talking about people you personally know, but it seems like there's a good chance many who voted for him would say it too. Anyway, I guess there is a growing collective admission that the c…

> Anyway, I guess there is a growing collective admission that the climate is changing even if the crotchety ones will still quip about it not being warmer at some given time and place. It's unfortunate that "global warming" caught on instead of "climate change."

Rather than a collective admission, I feel what's happening is the crotchety people are dying off, leaving us millennials and GenZ to clean up the mess. Thinks won't change until a critical mass of them are dead and gone.

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

#177

Post by irthomasthomas »

legitster wrote: post #45

Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion. Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded: "The longer we put off doing something, the harder a…

The earth did have warm periods before. it appears to be part of an mini-interglacial period which happens every few hundred years. We had the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman WP and Bronze age warm period. There is a vast body pf evidence in particular for the MWP showing that life on earth got better as the deserts retreated.

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

#179

Post by circuit10 »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #177
legitster wrote: post #45

Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion. Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded: "The longer we put off doing something, the harder a…

The earth did have warm periods before. it appears to be part of an mini-interglacial period which happens every few hundred years. We had the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman WP and Bronze age warm period. There is a vast body pf evidence in particular for the MWP showing that life on earth got better as the deserts retreated.

This is a nice graph that makes the problem pretty obvious: https://xkcd.com/1732/

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

#180

Post by conartist6 »

aeternum wrote: post #73
legitster wrote: post #45

Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion. Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded: "The longer we put off doing something, the harder a…

The problem with Pascal's wager logic is you have to change your behavior based on all kinds of crazy low-probability events. You must worship every god, be an AI-doomer, a climate-doomer, a nuclear-doomer. Pascal's wager is generally agreed to be logically unsound, so it's somewhat insane that we've revived it in all these modern contexts. If you believe in it, at least be consistent and sacrifice a goat to Zeus eve…

There has to be infinite torment in play for the wager to apply too! Thus by conclusion you should only give vengeful gods the benefit of the doubt
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