So what? After my vacation in Dubai I'm going to buy my next SUV with BitCoins.
IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’
181–190 of 456 posts
Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’
#182I do wish someone would just acknowledge we’ve been getting “final warnings” as well as predictions of catastrophe every few years for decades now. Just recognize that I have to force myself quite hard to take this seriously. I do trust the science! But I trusted the science in 2017 and in 2012 and in 2009 and in 2004 and in 2000 and so on. I am making myself trust the science this time, again, and selfishly I would just like that extra effort validated.
Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’
#183I'll up my cigarette intake from 1 a day to 2 to make up for this
Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... the changes in ... crop yields... How would they even predict/model that? Have they modeled all the different plausible crops and agricultural techniques, which regional environmental conditions they're most suited for, and the transitions between them based on regional climate change effects? It's one thing to model a natural system, but seems quite a bit more complicated to model a system where human technolo…
The problem is that about a quarter of the world population - 2 billion people - currently make their living through traditional small-scale farming. If it turns out that climate change rapidly expands the viable area for growing quinoa, that's great for Peru and Bolivia and the world food market, but it's not going to help a subsistence farmer in Vietnam who finds their rice fields no longer grow enough to live from…
> but it's not going to help a subsistence farmer in Vietnam who finds their rice fields no longer grow enough to live from.
But what if those farmers switch from rice to some other subsistence crop better adapted to the new conditions?
Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’
#185Just in case it saves one person the effort to research this themselves ... for some reason I find the measurement of climate change in units of temperature a bit problematic (though entirely rational). It tends to suggest the old bugbear of "global warming", which of course gets translated by deniers (& skeptics) into "well it's colder here so that's wrong".
I spent a while digging in to try to get some numbers on a different sense of what's happening. Global average temperature is changing because extra energy is being retained within the boundary of the planet's atmosphere [0]. So how much extra energy is being retained?
A best guess estimate from 2015 would appear to be that
> the earth is getting about 300 terawatt hours of energy per hour due to anthropogenic climate change, and humans use about 16 terawatt hours of energy per hour.
That is, the earth is gaining 18x more energy per hour than we use every hour, thanks to the changes in radiative forcing driven by climate change contributors.
[0] anyone familiar with complex physical systems will understand that when you add energy to such a system, the effects are often hard to predict. It is very likely that the temperature of the system will rise, but you may also see, for example, more movement as well (which is in some sense a related concept to "temperature" but not identical, and it adds uncertainty because it of the extra degrees of freedom).
Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’
#186I do wish someone would just acknowledge we’ve been getting “final warnings” as well as predictions of catastrophe every few years for decades now. Just recognize that I have to force myself quite hard to take this seriously. I do trust the science! But I trusted the science in 2017 and in 2012 and in 2009 and in 2004 and in 2000 and so on. I am making myself trust the science this time, again , and selfishly I would…
I'm with you on this. And I am absolutely the furthest possible thing from a climate skeptic. If anything, it's just a recognition that this kind of communication from official sources is clearly ineffective. The climate crisis is never ever going to be solved by spontaneous collective action or by appeals to collective action. People will continue to do whatever it is they have to do to get their daily or yearly basic needs met.
What we need are people in positions of power that care.
Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Drowning is hyperbole English is not my first language. How would you describe something previously on land becoming submerged by the ocean?
Flooding. Drowning is when a living organism is submerged, flooding is when buildings are submerged.
> Drowning is when a living organism is submerged...
...and dies from it, which is a pretty important aspect to the word. If the organism doesn't die, it's swimming or just submerged.
Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’
#188Are there any resources that show the improvement we've already made in those terms? I think that would be helpful. Like, there's got to be an estimate of what our rate was when growth was before we started introducing what we've already been doing. I know there are cynics who want to make the argument that we've done absolutely nothing and that we're still in the base scenario, but I think that doesn't give credit to the advancements we've made due to environmentally-influenced policy changes across the world.
Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’
#189Looking at the CO2 concentration per year chart: how long until we've got Spaceballs' "Perri Air" to avoid cognitive impairment? Anyone already experimenting with getting their indoor air closer to the (extrapolating a bit) ~250-280PPM of the pre-industrial atmosphere? This'd be a step farther than people who vent in outdoor air to keep indoor air from creeping even higher due to respiration and such.
Ventilation (or lack of it, due better sealing that prevents continuous ventilation through cracks) will have much more impact than background concentration.
Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
Very few things give me as much hope as reading this kinda of doom spam. To know the people pushing this are so detached from reality gives me a lot of confidence we'll be all right.