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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

#181

Post by [deleted] »

lamontcg wrote: post #168
mtrn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not own a car, I do not fly, I buy clothes used or new just once a year. My newest smartphone I bought five years ago (and I just bought a new battery for $10, so I can use it for five more years). My utility company stats says my energy consumption is overall very low. I eat meat once a month. I try to own as few things as possible. I try to write and deploy code in energy efficient languages (Go, Rust, C, ...)…

You're perpetuating the idea though that we need to live like Ascetics in order to solve climate change. It'd be thousands of times better to get one coal fired plant turned off in place of renewables.

[deleted]

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#182

Post by mtrn »

lamontcg wrote: post #168
mtrn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not own a car, I do not fly, I buy clothes used or new just once a year. My newest smartphone I bought five years ago (and I just bought a new battery for $10, so I can use it for five more years). My utility company stats says my energy consumption is overall very low. I eat meat once a month. I try to own as few things as possible. I try to write and deploy code in energy efficient languages (Go, Rust, C, ...)…

You're perpetuating the idea though that we need to live like Ascetics in order to solve climate change. It'd be thousands of times better to get one coal fired plant turned off in place of renewables.

Yes and no. I feel that not doing certain things is a very simple thing to "do" things - and I appreciate simplicity.

For example, I would probably prefer getting rid of half of the cars and trying to find ways so that people do not need to move that much, if they do not want to (for example making all possibly remote remote work actually remote) - as opposed to making all cars electric.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#183

Post by kyteland »

starlust2 wrote: post #34
savant_penguin wrote: post #2

"What if the 'safe' carbon budget is zero. We can't sugar-coat the potential realities of this." Compared to what? Living without electricity? Paying 10x for energy? The lack of a real comparison with the real life consequences of a zero carbon budget seems a bit too convenient

Compared to the expense of failed crops? Mass migration of all humans to the northern most reaches of Canada? I really don't think you get it. If temperatures rise enough, most of Central and North America won't be uninhabitable. The parts that aren't underwater will be too hot and parched. We won't be able to grow crops or desalinate enough water when the clouds and rain disappear (yes that will happen). The 3 days…

Climate change doesn't necessarily mean everything will get hotter and scorched and we all have to move to northern Canada. It means things will be different than they were historically in ways we don't necessarily understand that well. There's plenty of evidence that past warming periods caused the Sahara to green by shifting the African monsoon patterns farther north on the continent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period

Current climate change seems to be messing with the jet stream in North America in ways that diverge from historical data. Then you get things like your yard scorching in Portland this summer and my hedges freezing and dying in Austin this winter. We've built a huge amount of infrastructure on assumptions about local weather patterns that may now be invalid.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#184

Post by zbrozek »

jbay808 wrote: post #60
zbrozek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could imagine something a bit better controlled could be ok. Large areas of solar panels, engineered to reflect as much as they can't use, would be a good double benefit. Excess electricity could be opportunistically used for GHG capture or the panels could maybe flip over and become mirrors. An orbital umbrella that we could modulate such that we can deal with unanticipated consequences could also be ok. I'm sure…

Solar panels are mostly black. Do they reflect more sunlight back into space than what was under them?

Usually not, and certainly not as currently designed. Hence the notion of flipping to a mirrored side in case of excess electricity, or having some fancy coating stack that manages to reflect everything which is not absorbed by the cell.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#185

Post by gremlinsinc »

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…

So much this.... but I still can't stop doom scrolling...it's at the just grab popcorn phase...

There's no point anymore to conservation from a consumer perspective, really.

In utah - consumer water use is like 2% of ALL water use, they run multitudes of ads saying conserve water...but do they regulate the 98%'ers in big industry, mining, retail, etc? No. Not at all. It's exhausting to watch them do nothing and complain about our 'scraps' of water they give us...

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#186

Post by lamontcg »

anonAndOn wrote: post #176
lamontcg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it worked that way, its a poor filter since the IFR is only 1% and it mostly kills people that are very old anyway. Plus ideologies aren't genetic. And even with genetics the whole "evolutionary filter" concept fails due to reversion to the mean. Plus it is a fundamentally right wing political concept. "Evolutionary filters" are about as scientific as the antivax movement.

It doesn't need to be perfect nor does it need to kill to be effective. You can negatively impact the fertility rate just by diminishing the quality of life.

Again, that is about as scientific as the antivaxxers.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#187

Post by myWindoonn »

rglover wrote: post #76

Fearmongering and gaslighting. https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1410961875899146249 Edit. Please read this and factor it into your understanding: https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Christy%20Testimony_... Edit 2. For the people downvoting me (certainly without considering what I've presented) and others, consider the phrasing here... "killer" heat, "scares" me. It's intentionally emotionally manipulative.

A downvote is too polite. The Pacific Northwest heatwave literally killed dozens of people (https://www.oregonlive.com/data/2021/07/oregons-heat-wave-de...). Pick a less stupid hill to die on; preferably one with trees and shade, and remember to drink water.

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#188

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #175
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”…

Finally found the article. I'd kept searching in The Atlantic, when it was actually from The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-isnt-the-media-c...

^ Never mind, that's still not it. (Sorry.)

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#189

Post by anonAndOn »

lamontcg wrote: post #186
anonAndOn wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need to be perfect nor does it need to kill to be effective. You can negatively impact the fertility rate just by diminishing the quality of life.

Again, that is about as scientific as the antivaxxers.

On the contrary, we have a great public health experiment underway that will be dissected for years to come. Hospitalization rates, medical bankruptcies, prevalence of long COVID, birth rates, excess deaths, etc. For science!

Re: Why North America's killer heat scares me

#190

Post by firestarter223 »

timeon wrote: post #178
firestarter223 wrote: post #81

If you point out recent coldness records, you will be lectured about the difference between weather and climate. I think the real issue may be the human delusion that things staying the same is normal (perhaps because of the short life span of humans), and more recently in scientific terms, that averages are normal. About this article I find it odd that it cites Thatcher, of all people. Surely the information she use…

Well obviously things generally are not static. However I'm afraid you have forget to include scale there.

In what sense? Because global warming happens faster than expected? Maybe - but such local heat events are not a good way to determine that.
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