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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’

#391

Post by mulmen »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #318
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.

Awareness is not the same thing as familiarity. If you give temperatures in Fahrenheit, most people outside the US (and Canada) are going to need to convert that to Celsius.

Yes, most people will. But that’s more than just America being familiar with Fahrenheit and allows for a disproportionately larger population of Fahrenheit-literate people in the commonwealth.

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

#392

Post by evandijk70 »

nayuki wrote: post #370
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…

"16 terawatt-hours of energy per hour" is simply "16 terawatts of power (continuously)". I want to see writers move away from the unit kWh and instead use joules, which is way less confusing and harder to misuse. Also we as a society need to respect the distinct concepts of energy (J) versus power (J/s = W).

Is that a problem of units or education?

Children sometimes confuse the units of speed and distance, but not when they get older.

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

#393

Post by eolas »

imrane wrote: post #369
creato wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: less people by any means necessary.

This sounds slightly eco-facist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism

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

#394

Post by alfor »

junon wrote: post #350
alfor wrote: post #310

My comment was removed because it doesn’t support the current orthodoxy. (and could make people feel bad about their new climate religion) I would be great if the censure applied here would put the comments censored on another page with a link to it. That way people interested could see what is removed and why. Instead of being it silent and hidden. More and more I feel that HN has become an echo chamber where only o…

Enable "showdead" in your settings.

Thanks

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

#395

Post by sazz »

myrmidon wrote: post #347
sazz wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China, USA, India, Russia - those are countries producing most of the CO2. Take those four countries and you have roughly half of the emissions. Do you really think China will change anything economical at all when Germany or Great Britian cripled themselves to death? Do you think Russia highest priority is the reduction of CO2?

China is currently at around European level in CO2/capita (~8tons CO2/capita/year). US is SIGNIFICANTLY worse by about a factor of two (~15tons CO2/capita/year). "The west" has currently pretty much ZERO moral standing when pushing for more drastic anti-CO2 policies in China and especially developing nations like India or Africa. This is not taking "exported" emissions into account and considering cumulative emission…

You cannot solve a puzzle by picking out one piece. You solve a puzzle by looking at all the pieces and not stylising yourself as the moral hero and assuming that everyone else will follow. That is short-sighted thinking.

A per capita figure may play a role in politics in negotiations, but it is not relevant for solving the problem.

It is like accusing a Norwegian living in a fjord of wasting water. For example, it is completely irrelevant how high the per capita consumption of an Icelander is. Or a Greenlander. Because it doesn't solve the problem.

Yes, the US has a higher consumption. But it's just 334 million inhabitants vs 1,440 million in China (which still puts America in the top five, but far behind China).

If you really want to solve the problem then you need to develop a practical solution for China.

But let me ask you a question: Let's imagine that everything is suddenly perfect in your country. The economy has suffered brutally because of all the changes, but you are now the world leader in CO2 per capita consumption. What do you think happens then?

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

#396

Post by mrpopo »

tablespoon wrote: post #171
mrpopo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it sounds like they are not accounting for things like changes between crops or changing which areas are cultivated, which could be pretty significant. > it seems like you would have account for more Canadian land becoming arable and agriculture spreading further north. It's a map. It's litterally showing the changes by areas. And the map does show areas with increased maize yield, such as Southern Africa, but t…

> It's a map. One that appears to not answer the question I posed, or answer it in the negative (as in, they're not modeling realistic agricultural adaptations). > It's litterally [sic] showing the changes by areas. Apparently only "in currently cultivated areas." It's hard to get worked up over the predictions of a model that basically assumes everyone continues to do the exact same stuff while everything else chang…

I think you are too much focused on global agricultural productivity, which will not be a life-or-death problem for anyone with access to the global market, such as you. Fear not, global warming will not leave you starving.

Global warming and crop yield change will affect, as I said before, farmers in some communities such as central Africa, rural Asia, indigenous populations, who don't import their food from around the world, don't have the means or don't want to do so.

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

#397

Post by alfor »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #275
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.

> climate change tends to correlate extremely well with war and famine and migration.

Does it? We have fewer and fewer death because of climate (most death of climate is because of cold) We have a proxy war in Ukraine that has nothing to do with climate We have a famine in Sri Lanka that was caused by the green movement

The narrative of climate is the cause of all problems isn’t reasonable anymore.

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

#398

Post by polotics »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #34
polotics wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IPCC sadly had to accommodate economists, and they went one to do what economists do. However they got cordoned off in a separate section. Of course economic growth of Pakistan has been severely impacted by the floods they recently got, but hey what's evidence and anyway, it's all just a far away 'stan, right? The hard science sections tell it like it is, then the growth of GDP can be gamed in oh so many ways, ma…

The IPCC are the people who wrote the source report in the first place! If you don't trust their analysis of climate change, I'm not sure what we're doing here - do you have some other source you think is more reliable?

As I wrote: the IPCC is split up in sections, and one of them is economists doing their thang

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

#399

Post by antisthenes »

fwlr wrote: post #360
yamtaddle wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll keep getting "final warnings" as we pass "realistic hope of keeping warming under X" and "a sliver of hope for keeping warming under X if a literal miracle occurs" thresholds for different warming levels. The next major report like this will probably have a best-case scenario of more like 2.0C. We're at "a sliver of hope if a literal miracle occurs" for 1.5C (realistic hope of keeping it that low was probably g…

All I can take from this comment is there are several likelihood thresholds and an array of future Celsius values which can be combined to generate arbitrarily many “final warnings”. Sigh.

We're terribly sorry the reality is a bit more complex and doesn't conform to your mental model of an "if then" statement.

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

#400

Post by polotics »

luckylion wrote: post #17
polotics wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IPCC sadly had to accommodate economists, and they went one to do what economists do. However they got cordoned off in a separate section. Of course economic growth of Pakistan has been severely impacted by the floods they recently got, but hey what's evidence and anyway, it's all just a far away 'stan, right? The hard science sections tell it like it is, then the growth of GDP can be gamed in oh so many ways, ma…

Should we just tell Pakistan to suck it and not develop? Should we just shut down all economic activity that isn't related to sequestering co2? It seems obvious that there's a tension between economic activity (aka living in a somewhat developed country) and resource usage.

Is not, at all, what I wrote: of course Pakistan is in much need and well deserving of development, and again, I did not write it should not develop. It also has not put any significant portion of the CO2 that's now stuck in our aor, so the major hurdle to its development put up by climate change are doubly unfair. In terms of fairness the US and Europe should have stopped producing any more CO2 last century, China and India should be stopping about now...
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