Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 456 posts

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

#331

Post by myrmidon »

Ekaros wrote: post #273
myrmidon wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a democracy, this means that people in aggregate need to care more about climate change consequences in the future than wealth/disposable income right now. That is simply a hard sell, always has been, and most of us are to blame for the consequences...

Specially hard to sell when those in power don't seem to treat is as existential crisis that will kill them. I do not see them following their own messaging to utmost care.

I think its dishonest to shift all blame on "people in power" when living in a democracy.

It seems pretty clear to me that specifically US policy would have been MUCH more climate focussed if people had voted like 60% Al-Gore in 2000 (who ran 100% on that platform). But that option was basically on the table, people went like "meh, might as well take generic republican junior instead" and then got distracted by counter-jihad for the decade after.

Now most of the damage is already done, and the same things that would've really helped in 2000 are much less useful now because they're late.

And its not like Europeans did much better in the meantime, but they at least have the excuse that their baseline emissions are about half US level already (per capita) and governance is more fractured (by design), too...

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

#332

Post by timr »

mbgerring wrote: post #227
timr wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be really clear: it's not going to "directly" kill many people at all in the next ten years. People will die from things like storms and floods and heat waves and droughts. Maybe more people will die from causes that someone, somewhere attributes to climate, but these are all indirect. The real, immediate threat of climate is that we'll have to spend huge amounts of money mitigating these things.

The “real, immediate threat of climate” is trillions of dollars changing hands? A massive TAM, with tons of otherwise intelligent people distracted by chatbots and crypto? Sorry… this is supposed to be a threat? What are you threatening me with, a good time?

I mean, yes? I'd personally rather see money spent on housing and feeding and educating people than building new seawalls. Particularly in places like Bangladesh, which are both poor and low-lying.

The collective delusion of the climate conversation is that first-world countries are going to be the ones who suffer, but that isn't what the risk looks like at all. For example, New York City will be OK, even though mass media loves to show apocalyptic visions of the climate future set in lower Manhattan.

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

#333

Post by generativenoise »

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.

That is miles off from "We're all doomed in five years". Still entirely possible though seems improbable that the last 5 years has baked in enough change to doom "humanity". Can't really tell until the system has reached equilibrium, so you really have to wait several decades to properly be able to evaluate the claim.

You don't die from jumping off a building you die from hitting the ground.

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

#334

Post by imtringued »

klabb3 wrote: post #317
WorldMaker wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given many fossil fuel deposits took millions of years to settle/decompose/compress, I don't think you get a proper X multiplier without an exponent greater than 6.

Yeah the time is interesting but it doesn’t directly imply anything about the flow. I’m curious about that. Ie how much new oil/gas etc is being produced by nature each year. Found this[1] now, which gives a ballpark of 20-80k barrels/y which can vary quite a bit depending on the guesstimates of undiscovered reserves. Since we produce 80-100M barrels/y, we’re drinking from the basin about 1000x the rate that it reple…

>80-100M barrels/y,

Per day...

>we’re drinking from the basin about 1000x the rate that it replenishes

Try half a million times faster.

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

#335

Post by matthewdgreen »

creato wrote: post #263
guerrilla wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people in capitals not understand or believe this? What do rich people (some of whom control large parts of the media) plan to do exactly? Die? Bunker? I mean seriously.

What are the options, really? Option A is business as usual. Option B is a massive cut in energy consumption. Option A implies at some point in the future, massive social unrest due to mass migration. Option B implies massive social unrest today due to a large decline in standard of living. And no, it won’t be the “people in capitals” suffering here. Option C is option A plus some geoengineering that will likely be u…

Many Western nations have substantially reduced their emissions already. This did not result in catastrophic reductions in living standards. And these reductions happened before the current exponential cost improvements in renewables really began to cross the “knee”. At the same time there are fossil fuel interests and politicians who are trying to slow down renewables and promote more fossil drilling, even when it’s not economic. (And China is burning massive amounts of coal for reasons that make less economic sense every month.) This stuff is “set the controls for the heart of the sun” levels of suicidal. We won’t survive it.

As for geoengineering, good luck. While I also think this may be necessary, a precondition for spraying stuff into the sky is convincing people that this kind of intervention is necessary. Good luck doing that while enormous financial interests are trying to convince the world that it’s safe to keep digging up and burning fossil fuel deposits. They may not object to geoengineering itself, but they can’t afford to permit the kind of consensus it would require to get geonengineering done, so they will throw resources at fighting that consensus until it’s too late.

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

#336

Post by imtringued »

alfor wrote: post #316
brnt wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im sure the IPCC authors didn't forget their climate science 101 material. Moreover, we can tackle multiple problems concurrently, no need to make it appear we can only ever do one thing. And as it so happens, climate change tends to correlate extremely well with war and famine. It certainly appears a climate solution is going to help many other big problems along as well.

[flagged]

IPCC is absurdly conservative. If you have an issue with their numbers then you‘ve fallen for pseudo science.

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

#337

Post by jimmar »

generativenoise wrote: post #333
jimmar wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is miles off from "We're all doomed in five years". Still entirely possible though seems improbable that the last 5 years has baked in enough change to doom "humanity". Can't really tell until the system has reached equilibrium, so you really have to wait several decades to properly be able to evaluate the claim. You don't die from jumping off a building you die from hitting the ground.

I think we agree that you're doomed once you jump off the building, right? It might take a while to fall, but your future is set in stone...or concrete. There are people who argue that from a climate perspective, we are doomed. So what's the choice now? Be less doomed if we cut emissions? Be extra doomed if we don't? Are there meaningful levels of doomed?

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

#338

Post by DoctorOW »

prottog wrote: post #144
DoctorOW wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change is already impoverishing people.

Not as many as cheap energy from fossil fuels are lifting the global poor out of poverty.

Fossil field are expensive relative to most renewable sources as well as nuclear. This was before the recent price manipulation by oil companies, which have grown price disparity.

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

#340

Post by myrmidon »

af3d wrote: post #256
myrmidon wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to understand your PoV: Are you not concerned because you think current mainstream-science overestimates the consequences [1]? Or do you just believe that climate change will have little effect on you, personally? [1]: Flooding, biodiversity loss, food production yield, increase in regions and days/year with human-lethal outside temperatures (see relevant graphs in "summary for policymakers" around pg 16…

Climate activists have been declaring impending doom for years. So much so that it has become an entire industry. NOAA has even altered historical data (eg. https://climatecenter.fsu.edu/does-noaa-adjust-historical-cl... ) to support their ridiculous claims. And when the rise of temperatures didn't meet "expectations" they just moved the goal post. Used to Wikipedia actually had an article for "Global Warming". Where…

> Climate activists have been declaring impending doom for years.

What are those "declarations of doom" specifically? What are you actually talking about?

From my point of view, climate development went pretty much as predicted >40 years ago-- there is absolutely ZERO reason to assume that the greenhouse effect is somehow a collective hallucination or much weaker than we think.

Consider e.g. Hansen et al in Science (1981): https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1981/1981_Hansen_ha04600x.pd...

And compare e.g. with https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/global-left-...

If you look at their predictions, made >40 years ago, then these match the actual development pretty well, and these first papers also said basically the very same stuff that climate scientist are saying right now (but with less detail).

So again, what are these goalposts that have been moved?

> Bottom line, do the activities of humans have some effect on the environment? Yes, of course, but it's minuscule compared with the impact that natural forces have on it (volcanoes, solar activity, etc).

So your point is that both greenhouse effect and human CO2 emissions happen as described, but ALL of mainstream science is completely wrong about the effect size? What gives you ANY confidence in this?

IF your theory is "climate change is a collective hallucination, all data supporting it is fudged" then this would give some easily falsifiable predictions:

- There should be no change in longer term median temperatures: This is simply not the case-- the trend is in most places ALREADY obvious enough that you can see it by simply taking an arbitrary city and looking at the annual mean temperature.

- All currently observable effects from temperature change should have occured similarly in the recent past (sea level/glaciers). This is even more obviously not the case (see e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-03805-8 for a random source on this)

Your link is pretty much complaining that adjustments to historical temperature data are somewhat intransparent and hard to reproduce-- but that does not even come close to support the theory of "climate change not real".

> Used to Wikipedia actually had an article for "Global Warming". Where did it go? Ah yes, now moved to "Climate Change".

How does this support your argument?

Post reply on HN