401–410 of 456 posts
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Warming of 1.5C is an average over the entire planet and a warming Pacific Ocean can drive this average beyond the threshold. Also nowadays an El Nina more or less pauses the warming.
Is an El Nino actually a warmer Pacific ocean, heating the global average? I assumed it was changes in currents that were already there and the heat was already in the water somewhere.
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).
> Note: Before anyone complains, I’ve deliberately conflated energy and power above, because the difference doesn’t really matter for my main point. Power is work per unit of time, and is measured in watts; Energy is better expressed in joules, calories, or kilowatt hours (kWh). To be technically correct, I should say that the earth is getting about 300 terawatt hours of energy per hour due to anthropogenic climate change, and humans use about 16 terawatt hours of energy per hour. The ratio is still approximately 18.
Out of interest, you can also convert it to calories. 1kWh is about 0.8 million calories. So, we’re force-feeding the earth about 2 x 1017 (200,000,000,000,000,000) calories every hour. Yikes.
https://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2012/01/how-much-extra-ener...
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…
When we do hit whatever +1.5C or +2C, Q will be 0. The amount of energy input to the earth system isn't changing - that's defined by the temperature of the sun, it's the output that is decreasing. What your energy look describes is dT/dt, how quickly we will reach the new equilibrium. At the new equilibrium, the temperature is likely still to be the best descriptor of the new normal - we describe most processes and s…
The rate is important, but so is the final result. A system whose new equilibrium is +10C is as useless to humanity and life and earth whether we reach it in 25 years or 200.
I agree with you that ∆T is more useful for thinking about actual effects (e.g as you noted glacial melt), but my interest in thinking about it in energy terms is (a) I think it highlights the cause more strongly (YMMV) (b) it better accomodates the possibility of the extra energy in the system having effects not so obviously correlated with ∆T
Let’s say if there is a magical wand that can will any policy the user wants to happen — so the magic can’t remove carbon, but it allows the bearer to pursue any mean within humanity technological abilities — what are the actual actions that could be taken to fight climate change? My impression is that even the big polluter like China (as an example) is already on full speed to build more nuclear plant or solar power…
Simply taxing CO2 emissions and maybe reinvesting some profits (into electrification and renewables) should do just fine. The problem is people have to pay for these changes. This means potentially: - General increase in prices/decrease in disposable income - Danger for competitiveness of domestic industries - Uncertain second-order effects/additional risk Just consider electric vehicles-- pushing for no new combusti…
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> 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…
That one thing I was focused on, but there were others that a are other that appear to be missed, for instance take your...
> farmers in some communities such as central Africa, rural Asia, indigenous populations, who don't import their food from around the world
What will be their actual experience? The estimates seem to assume they'll just keep doing the exact same thing they are now, but that's easy to model but unrealistic. It's extremely likely they'll change their crops or techniques to improve yields in the new environment, and I think results derived from model that doesn't account for that are not useful to a layman.
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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.
I was thinking of WWII in my 1940s example, which I thought might have been obvious, but that's besides the point. (Bear attacks are a silly example to illustrate the principle involved)
If you're misattributing excess societal deaths to a wrong cause such as bears when the cause is anything else, there's a much bigger cost than just delaying your ability to understand and fix a real problem.
1) While you have the real cause of deaths wrong, people are dying of something else that is perhaps preventable. There's a real opportunity cost.
2) Say you work up a real social panic about something incorrect (such as bear attacks) and start reconfiguring society to focus solely on preventing bear attacks. Any policies here can cause dramatic harm to the economy. Not only does a bad economy directly and indirectly kill lots of people, but it weakens your ability to fix other more important problems. Your well-intentioned, but misguided attempt to save people from bears can kill far more people than it saves.
3) How would you know if your attempt to prevent bear attacks causes more harm than it prevents? All of a sudden, there's going to be a big industry of people making lots of cash in providing bear attack prevention methods. They're going to virulently attack anybody who starts voicing any opinions that are contrary to the general proclamation that bear attacks are the existential threat to society. Any opposition to the bear-attack-prevention-industrial-complex is going to be subject to intense derision and you're never going to be able to properly direct social energy to other, perhaps bigger problems, under this condition.
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We have been getting warnings like this for years and for years things have been getting visibly worse. I don't know how you "have to force myself quite hard to take this seriously" when the environment around us has been degrading faster than scientist have been claiming for years. Maybe you're confused by how events related to climate catastrophe unfold? It's not like a nuclear bomb where one day everything is fine…
I don’t feel unconvinced - which is a good thing, because if I did, the suggestion that it would be because I’m some psychological stage of grief would probably feel patronizing or dismissive. “the environment around us has been degrading faster than scientist have been claiming for years.” But not faster than science reporting has been claiming, since they have pretty reliably been claiming apocalypse in 5-10 years…
Every article since they has made use of increasingly unrealistic solutions to create the illusions that there is more time.
And again, the "apocalypse" is not a single day's event in the case of climate change. Given that fossil fuel usage continues to climb as well as CO2 (and now methane) emissions it's clear we have chosen the worst case path. The only limiting factor is how much hydrocarbons we can suck out of the ground.
We have committed to destruction of our ecosystem and transformation of the biosphere in ways not seen in millions of years on this planet.
You don't need to read the news, you can just look at outside and watch it continue to happen at an escalating rate for the rest of your life.
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But the models aren’t wrong. They’re surprisingly accurate. Some media reporting has been alarmist, choosing absolute worst cases and stating them as fact. But in general, the changes we’ve seen so far are in line with predictions and there’s no reason to be more skeptical than normal of this science. (As a side note, the resource extraction required to run a petrol engine is also not very green and often connected t…
No they are not "surprisingly accurate". I have actually made more money in direct bets AGAINST climate models. From 1970 to present. Indeed, the challenge I make to climate doomsayers is simple: make one prediction in the 5 year out timeframe and stick to it. I'll simply take the opposite. So far, I have won... every time. Let me have a look at my trading accounts: cenovus up, pembina up, taiwan semi up, everything…
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-mo...
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> 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.
Example: the idea that global warming doesn't cause warming is new. 20 years ago climatologists were telling British people with absolute confidence that by now there'd be no more snow. In the 1960s they were telling people there was a new ice age on the way. Both predictions were dead wrong and have now been white-washed out of existence.
Why is it only conservatives who require that if people claim their understanding of the climate is good enough to predict it decades into the future, they actually be able to do that? Why is it only conservatives who recognize that academia's reputation should suffer if they constantly make aggressive predictions, get it wrong and then pretend it never happened?