> “We think they are caused by a dramatic collapse of the North American ice sheet. This sets into motion a chain reaction that involves changes to the tropical monsoons, the Southern hemisphere westerly winds and these large burps of CO2 coming out of the oceans.” Right. CO2 lags temperature increase, it does not drive temperature increase. Unless 'ice sheet collapse' is driven by something other than an increase in…
Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years
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Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years
#242Can we soon start talking about the largest elephant in the room - China and their global junk manufacturing industry - seeing how China commits approximately the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere as the United States, India, the EU and Russia combined? Global top polluters: China, more than 14 million tons of CO2 United States, 6 million tons of CO2 India, 3.5 million tons of CO2 European Union, 3.4 million ton…
Pointing the finger at China is ridiculous. China has more than 4 times the population of the US so it would be reasonable to expect that they actually emit more than 4x the CO2 of the US. Your numbers show that they actually emit 'only' just more than twice the US, and bearing in mind that they are indeed the world's factory. So your numbers show that the US (and Russia) are doing badly and that the EU is doing rela…
China's per capita emissions have more than quadrupled over the same period, and are showing no signs of slowing down. At this rate it'll soon eclipse the US's per capita rate.
You mentioned India, which is a much better example of a low per capita rate.
Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be realistic, you are more likely to die from cardiovascular issues or car crashes.
A simultaneous failure of multiple breadbasket regions (something made much more likely by climate change) would case mass global death. To be fair, first-worlders wouldn't be as affected, though. It's not good to assume all hope is lost, but it is also dangerous to bury your head in the sand.
Even if food production falls globally by 25% or so, any famines will be due to distribution, not lack of global food production.
If we really screw up, we may have famines similar to what was relatively common up to about 1980.
And why did we stop having them?
Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of the movies and stories you mentioned were about the "rise of AGI". The closest you can get might be The Matrix via Animatrix? You can go look up what the authors meant by their pieces, there's plenty of analysis of each of those stories. In addition I would love a citation on "the rise of AGI" being a fear in sci-fi for a long time, I've enjoyed quite a bit of science fiction literature and I can only think o…
Neuromancer. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Erewhon.
Ellison's analysis of his own work is pretty well known and while not specifically about AGI is definitely about technology misuse, so you win there.
Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years
#245With each new IPCC report the chances of us keeping global warming below 1.5 C become more and more remote as emissions are locked in. But at the same time the really bad scenarios where we go well over 4 C also become more remote. Every half degree is worse than the last and each is worth righting for but it does look like our civilization will make it through this intact, even if not all people individually.
Has anybody ever seriously believed that we wouldn't make it through? This just seems like an alarmist take to me.
Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years
#246Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah yes, a "source" from Charles Koch's Cato Institute. Do you really expect to be taken seriously with this "rebuttal" ?
Here's another source using data from the "EM-DAT International Disaster Database"[0]. Excerpt from the article[1]: > As we see, over the course of the 20th century there was a significant decline in global deaths from natural disasters. In the early 1900s, the annual average was often in the range of 400,000 to 500,000 deaths. In the second half of the century and into the early 2000s, we have seen a significant dec…
It's further skewed by the use of decadal averages, which hid the fact that the greatest peaks included deaths that were either the direct result of--or greatly worsened by, conflict and/or a handful of specific policy decisions--food production failures during and conflicts such as the Zhili-Anhui War in 1920-21[1], floods that occurred during the Chinese civil war which dramatically worsened responses and recovery, the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-33 and the Soviet famine of 1930-33 more broadly, the 1938 Yellow River Flood[2] following the intentional destruction of dikes in an attempt to slow the Japanese Army's advance, World War 2 more broadly in the 40s where you had both the food production interruptions of war on a massive scale and explicit acts of mass starvation, the Great Chinese Famine in 1959-61 which is considered to be one of the largest man-made disaster in history,[3] etc.
The graph falsely suggests that we've we've somehow stumbled upon a viable adaptation strategy that makes climate change nothing to worry about. Since 1900, we've seen massive medical advancements, improved early warning systems for at least some types of disasters, transportation networks and technology that helps move people away from disaster zones both before some disasters and in their aftermath, the ability to rapidly move large amounts of food to disaster areas, and more.
Those are all great achievements, but the largest factor in the decline your chart suggests (albeit through data misrepresentation) is the fact that we don't have massive conflicts on the scale we saw in the first half of the 20th century, genocidal dictators looking to quickly wipe out millions of people through starvation, or political ideology driving inane agricultural policies that killed tens of millions of people because the autocratic dictators of some of the most populous nations on Earth read some pseudoscientific drivel (Lysenko and others managed to inspire not only the Soviet Famine in the 30s but also the Great Chinese Famine in the late 50s) and decided it sounded pretty ideologically reliable. We still have conflict and famine, but nothing on the same scale.
Trying to take that and spin it as climate adaptation is, well, absurd. Even by climate skeptic standards, that argument's a real stinker.
0. https://twitter.com/TheDisproof/status/1633492932484374530
1. https://disasterhistory.org/north-china-famine-1920-21
Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really think that China would not have industrialised if not for Western companies? Nothing about China's history shows that that's remotely true. In fact, outsourcing was only possible because of the various industrial plans that China had put in place in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, all of which prioritised building equivalent capacity to what existed in the West and the USSR. Moreover, China was destroying…
>China was destroying its environment in the 1950s already To be fair, every country was destroying the environment, even in the west, well after the 1950's as well.
Meanwhile, in the US you already had strong conservationist movements starting up, leading to the creation of the EPA by 1970.
While China finally adopted some environmental protections in 1979, it wasn't until the late 1980s/early 1990s that they could override industrial development in key situations
Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
#1 is very real #2 is warmongering #3 will be solved by human ingenuity I have a more positive outlook. :)
The idea that we are going to technology our way out of climate change is hilariously naive. That would require us to remove more co2 from the atmopshere each year than we add, which is just a laughable idea to achieve within the required time frame of the next 15 years or so.
Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years
#250Can we soon start talking about the largest elephant in the room - China and their global junk manufacturing industry - seeing how China commits approximately the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere as the United States, India, the EU and Russia combined? Global top polluters: China, more than 14 million tons of CO2 United States, 6 million tons of CO2 India, 3.5 million tons of CO2 European Union, 3.4 million ton…
These numbers say more about the US than China, if you control for population. And also, I keep seeing those numbers thrown around, but it's never clear if it's on the production side or the consumption side. If it's the production side CO2, then we have to remember that a huge fraction of carbon emitted by China is for the benefit of consumers in the western countries. Which makes you think, just wtf is the us doing…
But why would you control for population? So there are a vast number of Chinese who can't afford a large share of China's emissions, so what? What's your mindset here, that we have to determine the most guilty individual person and ignore governments? There may be lots of people in China but it's one government and it's emitting a lot, in absolute terms. Is Liechtenstein (population under 40,000) potentially a huge priority for us to consider in regard to tackling emissions? Their per capita figure could be enormous. You should not care even if it is, because in absolute terms it will be trivial.
To answer your question: transport.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector-s...
If you switch to China, this slice is taken over by manufacturing and construction.