281–290 of 456 posts
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This is not one of those problems that goes away by pointing a finger.
If one set of countries is lowering what they are doing, and another set of countries is increasing what they are doing, is that exactly equal in your eyes?
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Population declines on the other hand are expected because birth rates have been dropping for hundreds of years. This is a good thing you can’t support infinite growth on a finite planet. Suggesting global warming is the cause completely ignores these long term trends. Peoples quality of life globally has been consistently improving and that’s unlikely to change with global warming. China had one of the worlds larges…
Not sure where you take your optimism from but the network effects global warming is causing are not to underestimate. There's been plenty of research that we're talking about several threats to modern civilization at once where each of them alone could already be disastrous. And chances are high that there will emerge additional effects along the road we don't even know about. The argument of "look back, it always g…
Look at say Ukraine it was literally invaded with a war going on last year plus mass migration etc, but it also exported crops last year and are likely to do the same in 2023. Yes they are down significantly from 2021, but it’s not even close to zero.
It’s easy to get into this mindset that everything must work perfectly or the world falls apart but people adapt fairly quickly and in the end global warming is slow. It’s a death of a thousand cuts, but each of them gives a great deal of time to react. Cities aren’t going to flood on day X of year Y, it’s going to take decades of slightly worse storm surges etc. Crops wouldn’t suddenly fail because this year is 0.02C warmer than last the yield will mostly just slowly decline until alternative crops and methods are used etc etc.
Yes, local crop yields vary significantly year to year based on weather but that’s been the case since agriculture was a thing. The difference is we have much better transportation infrastructure and more ability to make substitutions.
The comparisons between the AR5 and AR6 are alarming. Now, under no emission scenarios other than low and very low which we are not tracking close to, we reach +2C at or just before 2050. Many reading this thread will see 3 degrees by the time they plan to retire. This comes with drought, undernourishment, and mass migration: https://sciencenorway.no/climate-climate-change/deadly-heat-...
> Many reading this thread will see 3 degrees by the time they plan to retire. This comes with drought, undernourishment, and mass migration I wonder what it'll feel like looking back at that point. There isn't anything that I alone can do right now to prevent this from happening, it has to be a collective action but still, we've been warned for decades, over and over, we knew what would happen. Will we regret not ha…
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Just wait until our upcoming reality hits the conspiracy theorists and religious fanatics. Climate change is going to herald in Dark Ages 2.0. I suppose the upside to that is eventually there will be an Enlightenment 2.0 also, and hopefully we'll get there faster than it took the first time. BTW, Dark Ages 1.0 wasn't even the first time humanity has been through a dark age... ...honestly, it pays to study history to…
We’ve arguably had 2 dark ages in western history though they were both localized. Meanwhile people constantly predict imminent disaster. If there’s anything to learn from history it’s that things might suck but they will probably be relatively ok. Hell the Black Death didn’t doom western civilization and it got really bad. PS: 500-1500 actually saw a great deal of innovation and improvements to the average persons q…
In relative terms, lower estimates of the fatalities between 1347-1351 are 30% of the population of Europe. So on a global level we would be looking at more than 2 billion dead in 4 years to get a sense of what that must have been like. 100 million dead in the US alone. That's staggering to think about, and it's no wonder that the pandemic left such an indelible mark on Europe.
Are 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 t…
It's not just cynics, that's just how it is. Emissions are still growing. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Frqp9M_X0AsvyMW?format=jpg&name=...
Just 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…
I wish warnings came with clear outlines of mass extinctions, of changes in resources, and most importantly, of cost to property owners in impacted areas. That last one could finally cause some action because the current economy largely ignored anything else.
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The thing that blew my mind was that they always report this in degrees Celsius. I'm in America, even despite an engineering degree, I think in Fahrenheit. 1.5C sounds like a small number, until you remember that Fahrenheit is ~2x 1C. So 1.5 degrees C is ~3 degrees F. Which, to me, just emotionally feels like a bigger number despite being the same empiraclly. Similarly, it means when the IPCC is saying there might be…
The US is basically the only country in the world that uses the Fahrenheit scale.
I see multiple people in this thread are talking about 3 degrees which is unrealistic. While 1.5 seems unlikely at this point 2 degrees is within reach and IMO the most likely outcome. I would even say anything above 2.5 is unrealistic. This chart[1] can be useful, compare it to last predictions and you'll see the reason of my optimism. Also note in the beginning of 2010s solar was very expensive, right now it's (alm…
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Please read some of these reports before you say stuff like this. Of course they factor this in, of course it isn't true that you need fossil fuels to make fertilizer, of course the IPCC does not advocate eliminating fertilizer use. Producing ammonia is one of the primary uses for hydrogen discussed in the reports. There are many companies doing this as we speak (Yara, CF Industries, BP). If it turns out to be too di…
I agree with you. But I caution -- shipping lng is not something that Canada does or will do. Canada's stated goal is to TRY to ship hydrogen. Dangerous as that is. Yes, fertilizer production becomes "one of the last sectors to use fossil fuels". I see no other path. Of course, THAT has to be transported. As does the food produced... That entire chain relies on fossil fuels. A simple bet -- I invest in NatGas and pip…
I will say that "it isn't a problem here" is nonsensical. Canada isn't on its own planet. It is a problem on Earth, and you are on Earth.
Are 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 t…
This IPCC report is an annual report and you can directly compare year to year. So far it seems like the report gets worse every year. The pessimistic take is that every single advancement in environmental policy has been used to cover increased fossil fuel usage somewhere else. Almost every "carbon credit" trading program has been to pat people on the back for doing "their part" while actually doing very little and…
You're not literally arguing that LED light bulbs and EV cars somehow enabled cryptocurrency mining operations, are you?
What I'm asking is: for the set of actions we have taken due to environmental policy that have led to reduced emissions, what is the effect of those policies compared to if we hadn't enacted those policies? For instance, if LED light bulbs and EV cars are a result of those policies, then where would be if we hadn't done that, and still had cryptocurrency mining operations?
In other words, how much have we bent the curve? Not compared to previous estimates, but compared to what reality would have been if-not-for?
Because, unless the argument is that these policies have actually had more perverse outcomes than beneficial outcomes, it's literally impossible that we haven't bent the curve. I'd like to see more reporting on how much we have bent the curve, because I think it would supply positive motivation.