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A 3°C world has no safe place

economist.com

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Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#231

Post by wyager »

revscat wrote: post #36
wyager wrote: post #22

This article smells more like religious eschatology than rational economic discussion about the costs and benefits of climate change. This sort of sensationalist and opinionated reporting hardly advances the credibility of its cause.

"It's not what you're saying, it's how you're saying it that I have a problem with." This doesn't change the underlying reality, and I have a strong suspicion there is no means of discussing this issue that would meet with your approval, or your recognition that this is a crisis requiring significant action.

Your suspicion is unfounded. There are plenty of people who discuss the issue on rational terms. However, their writing is less entertainingly alarmist, so it doesn’t get as much traction. Same as any political-economic issue.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#232

Post by pyuser583 »

visiblink wrote: post #199
goatlover wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear could have already replaced coal by now. Renewables need a lot of battery storage and transmission to scale up to not relying on coal any longer, since a majority of it is relying on the sun and wind.

Nuclear is such a horrible replacement. Let's let future generations deal with the waste from the power that sustained our lifestyle. I hate it. I'd rather live with less.

Nuclear waste is very easy to deal with. It’s physically small, and easy to transport.

It has a long half life, but a deep shaft filled with cement in a remote area does the trick.

There’s no kicking the can down the road.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#233

Post by NumberWangMan »

scoofy wrote: post #122
daxfohl wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of concrete and steel in the urban lifestyle, which according to Gates are the biggest contributors to global warming. Not saying urban lifestyle is the worst, but there's a good chance it's just not enough. My guess is no matter what we do we're over the limit, a reduction in one thing leads to an increase in another, and probably population reduction is the only solution.

You don't need skyscapers. You need the density levels of Paris. Six-story walkups. The concrete can be put into 5/2 urban buildings, or it can be put in to driveways, pools, and sidewalks no one will ever use. Pretending that urbanism is somehow remotely equivalent is naive at best.

Exactly -- most "urban" areas in the USA are actually sprawling car-dependent suburbs that use far more resources of all kinds per capita than a true urban area.

What's more, is that we've forgotten that you don't need to build suburbs around cars. You can have pleasant suburbs with offices, shops, schools, and other non-residential buildings mixed into the neighborhood. Where people actually walk and cycle because the streets feel like they were made for it.

There's a massive gap between the population density of 60000 people per square mile you might find in an urban center, and the approximately 1,500 people per square mile you get in a typical suburb.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#234

Post by moistly »

ardit33 wrote: post #3

Canada and northern part of the US will be fine (north of the mason dixon line). Places like Albany, NY, or Minesota, or most of Canada, appart from the occasional crazy swings, are going to be more lovely places to live, with slightly milder winters. The southern part is toast, both from water level rises, and lack of fresh water. In this country, the ones that are going to be the most affected by global warming, se…

Dude, it’s been about three months since my part of Canada received rain. We have been above 30°C for over a month. For a week, we were hitting 45°C and it looks like it’ll happen again next month. We are in drought conditions and there are ungodly huge wildfires all around us. We’ve got crop failures. We are NOT fine. Good gods, no, we are not fine at all.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#235

Post by blooalien »

scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

It's as if a significant portion of humanity has committed themselves to slow mass suicide, and decided they wanna take everyone else with 'em. Totally 110% agree with your description of it as "surreal". I keep waiting to wake from the nightmare, but it's all turning out to be real.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#236

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

pyuser583 wrote: post #232
visiblink wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is such a horrible replacement. Let's let future generations deal with the waste from the power that sustained our lifestyle. I hate it. I'd rather live with less.

Nuclear waste is very easy to deal with. It’s physically small, and easy to transport. It has a long half life, but a deep shaft filled with cement in a remote area does the trick. There’s no kicking the can down the road.

Oddly, it seems that finding that deep shaft that is known to be geologically stable for at least a couple of half lives is fairly difficult, to say nothing of the issue of transporting the material from the reactor to said shaft.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#237

Post by willis936 »

The symptom of global warming is not the sole long term concern of climate change. We already have the tools to reverse global warming. I wager that a poor country with most of its GDP within 5 feet of 2021 sea level will unilaterally decide to stop global warming in the next 50 years. Maybe it's not a logical move, maybe it's already too late to save their cities, maybe it won't stop millions from dying of heat or famine, but it will be the politically savvy move of the leaders of desperate people. The decision won't be made by a bunch of rich people sitting around a nice clean table in an air conditioned room in the US or EU. The political backlash of not asking permission weighs far less than not doing it.

What does this pandora's box prospect really mean for the future? If not handled carefully then we may face even more serious ecological collapse (a la Snowpiercer). I don't think that's very likely. I think we'll see a more tempered implementation that will take a while to cool the planet. That meets the political demands of the desperate people while trying to appease the angry neighbors. The ice caps will still melt, the sea level will still rise 10 feet, and we'll still likely face ecological collapse from half a dozen different directions.

Which directions we care about most will start to matter. Should we not even bother talking about them today since us, as rich air conditioned folks wouldn't even consider the option of reflective particles in the atmosphere? Or should we face the real possibility and begin planning contingencies for it?

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#238

Post by qqtt »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #108
scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

> It’s surreal. I would say it’s human nature. We, humans, learn by making mistakes. There may be small differences among countries in the way we address, let’s say, climate change (e.g., Amsterdam is full of people riding bikes while Madrid is not), but at the end we all behave the same, whether in NY, Athens, or Santiago: we, as a world-wide society, only care about our immediate future, about our needs right now.…

Climate change as a crisis is perfectly threading the needle between human apathy, inability to invest in long term changes, and happening too slowly to provoke a reactionary response.

We build social infrastructure that is incredibly resistant to change by design to protect ourselves and provide stability - but climate change is demanding massive changes which we are ill equipped to deal with politically.

Traditionally we solve these moments in history with revolution to demand change - but climate change is happening too slowly for complacent human mindsets to react that way at a scale that it requires as a crisis.

It is quite horrifying watching it play out in slow motion. This will not end well.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#239

Post by belorn »

lacker wrote: post #126
scoofy wrote: post #49

American here. I took a bunch of earth science classes in college in 1999. I realized then, I would just plan ahead and aim for an urbanist lifestyle, because our country would have to change. I focused on transit alternatives as my primary advocacy, because it was the most obvious low-hanging fruit and paired with the public health. I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished…

To me, it is just the nature of large groups of human beings that sometimes there is an impending disaster, but people do not agree on what to do about it, and humanity stumbles into disaster. Look at Europe before WW1 or WW2, how many people predicted an imminent disastrous war, and how little agreement there was on how to fix it. Climate change is probably not as bad as impending WW3, but it shouldn't be surprising…

I have seen in every movement that while people share the goal, they do not share the strategy. The strategy often involve trade offs and cultural values that is separated from the common goal, and the stronger people feel about the goal the more convinced they are about their own chosen strategy. The most bitter fights tend to be between people who strongly share the same goals.

Preparing for a hotter world is nice, but what I am hoping is that nations (and the green movement) will realize that all strategies need to be deployed and it doesn't matter if one strategy feels like it is being counter productive to the values of an other. Some people can focus on replacing meat with vegetarian options, other on ecological meat, some on reducing factory farming in favor of local small scale production, and some on low carbon meat like shell fish. Let some build nuclear power plants, other renewable energy and battery. Focus on building bike infrastructure, rail system and electrify all parts of the transport system.

Re: A 3°C world has no safe place

#240

Post by cloverich »

titzer wrote: post #29

Keep in mind that it's 3C average , over the entire globe, over a year. The locale, variance, seasonality all matter. Like, suppose that you are "lucky" in that your region gets only the average of 3C, so your year is 3C warmer on average, but that only happens during 3 months of the year, so you get 12C hotter in summer--basically, el fuego--or you get 12C in winter--basically, no more winter. A warmer winter can be…

learning that the ice age had an average temp difference of 5-6c from the gates book was what really made it sink in for me.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2617-x

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