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UN sounds alarm on missing climate pledges

reuters.com

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Re: UN sounds alarm on missing climate pledges

#21

Post by pfranz »

pvaldes wrote: post #15
mikestew wrote: post #2

The WMO report confirmed that last year's temporary dip in emissions "did not have any discernible impact on the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases and their growth rates." Concentrations of other gases methane and nitrous oxide also rose in 2020 and beat the last decade's average, it showed. Am I reading that right? A major pandemic shuts everything down for a period, a lot of us are still working from home, and…

Massive wildfires didn't helped.

But they also weren't a large contributor. In California over 3 months wildfires released more than 75 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That number is larger than any year in the past 20, but it's also never expected to be 0. The annual worldwide CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels is expected to total about 33 billion tons this year.

I'm not sure what the sum of all wildfires over the year were, but I can't imagine they'd make any sort of dent compared to just burning fossil fuels.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/climate/wildfire-emission...

Re: UN sounds alarm on missing climate pledges

#23

Post by [deleted] »

rsj_hn wrote: post #11
crubier wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some figures to keep in mind, since CO2 is absent from your calculations: Flying from SFO to LAX and back costs 0.2 Tons of CO2. That’s more than a month of your CO2 quota if we want to limit climate change to +1.5C. CO2 budget should be 2 Tons per year to reach that goal. Currently, emissions are 15 Tons per year per capita in the US.

> That’s more than a month of your CO2 quota if we want to limit climate change to +1.5C. Fortunately, I don't have a CO2 quota, nor are we going to meet any of these targets, nor is there popular support for imposing quotas. But if you prefer to drive to LA, that's perfectly fine with me.

[deleted]

Re: UN sounds alarm on missing climate pledges

#24

Post by rsj_hn »

dTal wrote: post #16
crubier wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won’t have a CO2 quota don’t worry, your little comfort will be fine. But easy oil will run out eventually anyway. Your children (if you have any) will live on an overheating planet, with mass climate migrations, and very high priced oil, even for things as basic as fertilizers.

I fear that waiting until oil is too expensive to use, is effectively waiting until all the oil has been dug up and put in the atmosphere. It's the non-answer. That way lies climate disaster. I am disturbed by the shoulder-shrugging attitude to mass environmental devastation.

I am disturbed by the hysteria and alarmism. People have been predicting "climate disaster" for 40 years now, along with population disaster, and many other disasters. I'm not onboard with this extremism, and neither is the majority of the population, and most important for you, neither is China, which is opening 120 new coal plants just this year. Yet for some reason I'm supposed to be terrified of flying from SFO to LAX and pretend that there is some sort of existential crisis.

But don't worry, this will allow you to keep warning of collapse, just around the corner, for the next forty years as well. And the forty after that.

Re: UN sounds alarm on missing climate pledges

#25

Post by dTal »

rsj_hn wrote: post #24
dTal wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fear that waiting until oil is too expensive to use, is effectively waiting until all the oil has been dug up and put in the atmosphere. It's the non-answer. That way lies climate disaster. I am disturbed by the shoulder-shrugging attitude to mass environmental devastation.

I am disturbed by the hysteria and alarmism. People have been predicting "climate disaster" for 40 years now, along with population disaster, and many other disasters. I'm not onboard with this extremism, and neither is the majority of the population, and most important for you, neither is China, which is opening 120 new coal plants just this year. Yet for some reason I'm supposed to be terrified of flying from SFO t…

>People have been predicting "climate disaster" for 40 years now

Indeed. Notably, 40 years ago an Exxon internal report predicted a 1 degree rise in global temperature due to fossil fuel use by 2020 - and here we are, 1 degree warmer. [0]

Do you appreciate how huge 1 degree is, in 40 years? The last time the Earth was this warm was 127,000 years ago. It's enough to wreck ecosystems, and has. And it's just getting started.

>pretend that there is some sort of existential crisis.

You're speaking as if the climate isn't visibly, dramatically changing; as if huge numbers of bottom-of-the-food-chain organisms like insects and phytoplankton are not declining precipitously; indeed, as if we were not in the middle of one of the largest mass extinctions in the history of the planet - on par with the times when it got hit by huge asteroids. The scientific consensus on the severity of what is happening is unanimous. Nobody knows exactly what will happen - it's too dramatic and unprecedented - but if you're not worried, you're simply in denial.

>I'm not onboard with this extremism, and neither is the majority of the population

Certainly not true in America: "A majority of Americans continue to say they see the effects of climate change in their own communities and believe that the federal government falls short in its efforts to reduce the impacts of climate change." [1]

[0] https://xkcd.com/2500/ [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of...

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