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

theguardian.com

371–380 of 456 posts

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

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the whole point: it doesn't matter why they died. If you're doing things well, excess deaths are low. If you're doing things badly, excess deaths are high. Could be a multiplicity of reasons that connect "bad" and "excess deaths", and the specifics won't matter if you're looking for a summary of "normal human life, good living standards, capacity to adapt".

Of course it matters why people die. If I was an analyst in the early 1940s analyzing why there was an excess of human deaths and wrongly attributed it to an increase in bear attacks, wouldn't that be really dumb? If you're trying to solve a specific problem, isn't getting the cause of death wrong a really big deal?

Well, if bear attacks really did contribute to a statistically significant increase in excess deaths, that would indicate that you're doing something wrong.

Misattributing it to bears when it was really lead in gasoline or plastics in the air or whatever really caused it just delays your ability to help fix it, but that's a different question.

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

#372
post #368
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they use both. Celsius primarily, but still both. Ask them how hot their oven is, or the temperature of the pool.

Canadians don't know what 15f is going to look like though 275, 375, 400, 425, and hot are arbitrary settings to me, not particular temperatures. They're comparable only in that they're ordered. This is not an understanding of the scale, beyond knowing that it's talking about temperature. I definitely could not tell you how 100f relates to a standard room temperature of 18C

Sure. I was just pushing back on the “America doesn’t metric system, lol” cliche.

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

#373
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predictions so far have been terrible compared to what actually happened.

Yes, turns out the predictions were too conservative.

lol if that is true then why even bother? We are doomed.

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

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anyone familiar with complex physical systems will understand that when you add energy to such a system, the effects are often hard to predict This is something that is very underappreciated. It's entirely possible that the climate becomes chaotic (in a mathematical sense) and there are sudden, drastic changes that cause economic and social devastation. It seems inevitable that people will be complacent until it's…

It seems inevitable that [conservatives] will be complacent until it's too late. Let's not white-wash the problem.

The problem looks pretty “white” to me already.

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

#375

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…

[dead]

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

#376
post #263

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…

Option D is hoping the mass social unrest will cause enough (of the right) people to die off or actively steering towards that. A final solution one might say.

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

#377
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.

As a Canadian I never use Fahrenheit. The only people I know who do are at least 70. Edit: For weather.

As a Brit, I concur.

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

#378
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I always find so hard to believe is that, knowing how well we can predict weather and other complicated systems, climate change science somehow is able to make 1/10 centigrade precision predictions on time horizons of decades and centuries.

Can we predict weather that well? The 10 day forecasts my phone gives are mostly ok, not great, and often change at the last minute.

That was my point.

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

#379
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I always find so hard to believe is that, knowing how well we can predict weather and other complicated systems, climate change science somehow is able to make 1/10 centigrade precision predictions on time horizons of decades and centuries.

Why would you be confused about this? Temperature of a function of energy. We're talking about a global average temperature. Energy is being captured and retained. That raises the global average temperature. The specifics don't matter. Predicting the weather on the other hand is very complicated because you're asking what specifically will happen in a specific place. The variables going into that are many and even if…

This is reductionist, the specifics of what goes on at the surface do matter, that is the whole point of the climate change debate. How much chemical energy can we dig up and how do the byproducts affect the radiative ability of the planet (ie green house gases).
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