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IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

theguardian.com

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Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#291

Post by rad_gruchalski »

jimmar wrote: post #255
robertoandred wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's of course not what her tweet said. Did you intentionally misread it or just get it through an incorrect grapevine?

Her tweet was, "A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years." Not that far off from, "We're all doomed in five years," because we definitely did not stop using fossil fuels, and in my opinion, wiping out all of humanity would count as doom.

It kind of depends what does the “over the next five years” refers to. I would assume she meant “if we don’t stop using fossil fuels within the next five years, the humanity will get wiped out in some unspecified time”.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#292

Post by mulmen »

ep103 wrote: post #248
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #185

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…

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…

UK tabloids apparently choose to use Fahrenheit to sensationalize heat waves.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#293

Post by kuhewa »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #185

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…

90% absorbed by the ocean thanks to a high specific heat it's an even more modest number in degrees

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#294

Post by andrew_gs »

mulmen wrote: post #287
saulpw wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is basically the only country in the world that uses the Fahrenheit scale.

This is false. Fahrenheit is commonly used in Canada to this day. Awareness of the scale still exists in the UK as well. Any commonwealth country is likely to have awareness because metrication happened so late in those countries.

That's certainly not true for Australia and New Zealand, numbers in Fahrenheit are basically meaningless for me.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#295

Post by mulmen »

andrew_gs wrote: post #294
mulmen wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. Fahrenheit is commonly used in Canada to this day. Awareness of the scale still exists in the UK as well. Any commonwealth country is likely to have awareness because metrication happened so late in those countries.

That's certainly not true for Australia and New Zealand, numbers in Fahrenheit are basically meaningless for me.

Australia and NZ had much more successful conversions to the metric system than Canada but there are people alive today who would have used the Fahrenheit scale early in their lives. Contrast this with non commonwealth countries who converted to the metric system 100 years earlier than the commonwealth.

UK Metrication: 1978 (partial)

Canadian Metrication: 1976 (partial)

Australian Metrication: 1988

NZ Metrication: 1976

French Metrication: 1858

German Metrication: 1872

Mexican Metrication: 1857

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#296

Post by kuhewa »

alfor wrote: post #260
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #185

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…

Complex systems usually tend to equilibrium otherwise they would be in constant oscillation (positive feedback theory). As we look back in ice cores, there is variation, but not constant oscillations witch confirm a self stabilizing system. A few negative feedback we don’t often hear: increase of co2 have a huge effect on plant grow especially in hash deserted conditions. Increase in temperature increase humidity: cl…

> increase of co2 have a huge effect on plant grow especially in hash deserted conditions.

Which might sound good for crops but of itself can destabilise ecosystems, African savannahs are already becoming scrubbier with brush and shrubs due to more CO2 enrichment for at least ~1 million and possibly several million years. That will definitely have implications for populations of animals adapted for grassland

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#298

Post by saulpw »

mulmen wrote: post #287
saulpw wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is basically the only country in the world that uses the Fahrenheit scale.

This is false. Fahrenheit is commonly used in Canada to this day. Awareness of the scale still exists in the UK as well. Any commonwealth country is likely to have awareness because metrication happened so late in those countries.

My friends in Canada talk in degrees Celsius by default. They have a basic understanding of Fahrenheit (more than Americans do of Celsius), but it's not their native temperature scale.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#299

Post by coderenegade »

taylodl wrote: post #114
geysersam wrote: post #51

Earlier 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…

>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.

There are two very different points being conflated here. What's the time scale for the reduction in population? 10% of the world's population disappearing today is very different from a gradual reduction over the course of decades. 10% of the world's population disappearing over 100 years is almost certainly a good thing at our current population level, when every indication is that sustainability just isn't possible with 8 billion people. At the very least, it'll force us to challenge existing economic models that are all predicated on endless growth.

And I don't see anyone saying that things will be easy. In fact, I think most acknowledge that the opposite is very much true. But a) on an individual level, there's not much you can do when income, consumption, and emissions are all Pareto distributed -- I can no more instigate a bank run on my own than I could affect carbon emissions -- and, b) the species has survived worse population declines than this before, on numerous occasions. The black plague in Europe and the Mongols tearing through Central Asia both come to mind. Tomorrow has never been guaranteed, for anyone.

As an average person who does his best to live sustainably, there's only so much I have the time and energy for. I live semi-rurally within an hour of a major population center and on the edge of a state park, so believe me, I get it. But if it gets bad enough, at some point it really is out of my control. There's only so much I can care when I have bills to pay and a life to live. I'd imagine most people are in a similar position.

Re: IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’

#300

Post by WorldMaker »

tunesmith wrote: post #290
WorldMaker wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is why it's so hard to ask my question, because I feel like this mentality is so oppressive. 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 poli…

> You're not literally arguing that LED light bulbs and EV cars somehow enabled cryptocurrency mining operations, are you?

I somewhat am. It's far more correlation than direct causation, but the added energy equivalent of an entire second world country such as Iceland doesn't just spring out of nowhere, especially when considering nearly zero-sum fossil fuel utilization. Assuming that fossil fuel mining/drilling/refining didn't massively increase over the same years (and statistically it hasn't, it mostly appears "constant"), much of the energy that things like cryptocurrency mining have used have by simple matter of fact come in part from efficiencies gained elsewhere in the overall energy ecosystem.

It's not entirely a zero sum game of course, because there has been an increase in renewable energy sources (hydro, solar, and wind especially), but it certainly awfully looks like it is still close enough to zero-sum or possibly even (pessimistically) negatively weighted sum, with regards to carbon output, when even given huge increases in renewable energy mixes across the world we didn't see net decreases in things like coal-fired power plants at the scale we should have. We keep collectively finding ways to use roughly all of the available fossil fuel energy extracted each year, despite focuses on renewables and despite efforts at using less energy overall in average households.

Is that a perverse outcome of well-intentioned policies? I'm not entirely sure. Cynically, it certainly feels like it.

Positive motivation would be great to have, you are correct. I don't think we have enough of it in current policies. (We needed carbon caps, not [just] credits/offsets. We needed carbon taxes to internalize to markets externalities they don't actually care to watch. We didn't get those things. We still seem unlikely to get those things.)

The best positive motivation I'm aware of that we're finally seeing "just in time" some of the effects of a greatly healed Ozone layer, which proves the concerns about Ozone depleting chemicals in 80s and 90s had the desired effect and the efforts to eradicate them were not hyperbolic and were definitely necessary (and that climate change would be much, much worse in most of the world had we not made those changes; though Australia and its strict sunscreen regimens can still tell us how much the remaining Ozone damage is a present threat in anthropogenic climate change).

I still sometimes worry that we needed (years ago) an attitude like that towards things like a possible ban on cryptocurrency energy usage if we actually wanted to bend the curve, but in the 2020s the fact that things like fighting for the Ozone succeeded "quietly" almost dastardly make it harder to fight for political will now because "people already did their part and sacrificed for 'nothing' and are exhausted".

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