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September was the most anomalously hot month ever

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Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#431

Post by flagrant_taco »

zosima wrote: post #315
flagrant_taco wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debate over exact causes has always felt misguided to me. The planet is extremely complex, human impact on the planet is largely based on estimates and modeling, and at the end of the day an understanding of why it's getting hotter isn't itself a course correction. There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil f…

There is a lot of things that seems easy, but in fact are impossible. Sure, we could just stop using fossil fuels. But something like 50% of the global population would then be starving. The cure that so often is prescribed is worse than the disease. And people don't seem to realize.

There's a big gap between the amount of oilwwe use today and zero oil, we can reduce without stopping.

I think your point leads down the path of arguing that we have too many people on the planet though. If we can sustainably feed everyone without causing unknown amounts of damage to the environment, we will eventually hit a wall and run out of ways to dodge that fact.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#432

Post by ChatGTP »

yosito wrote: post #264
ChatGTP wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noticed the same thing myself today. Not long until winter and it feels like a mild summers day.

Winter? Winter might be cancelled this year.

It snowed the day after I made this comment and seems to have become quite cold without much on the forecast of it warming back up again...so ha!

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#433

Post by paulmd »

worksonmine wrote: post #374
paulmd wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm wondering why solar activity isn't accounted for in the models why do you work from the assumption that it's not? a trivial search turned up this article from 2011 which says that models already do include approximations of solar activity even at that time. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/grantham-i... obviously it is something that is constantly being improved, like everything else in the mod…

Much more constructive thank you. To be honest I haven't looked into it much in the last decade just going from the news and general discourse. I've noticed that we've been going into an active phase and it's mentioned a lot in other situations but never when it comes to the reasons behind climate change. Especially since it could make it worse I'd assume they'd push harder on it being more of a problem now. Feels li…

I appreciate your tolerance and generous reading, it's just a frustration of mine. There are invariably a lot of smart people looking at any problem that is receiving widespread funding etc, and it's dismissive to be like "but what about !?!?" and like yeah they probably know. Usually it's more instructive to invert this and try to figure out what the open questions or the hot new approaches (and why they do it better) in an area is.

And yes, lowest emissions is the guy with a mattress on the floor and xbox who doesn't go anywhere but nobody's ready for that talk yet.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#434

Post by uoaei »

generalizations wrote: post #359
mrguyorama wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So because the fix is mildly inconvenient, better to just do nothing, keep making the problem worse, keep letting people die, and just hope that magic fixes everything? Tech can't undo the physics of the greenhouse effect. You want a cooler earth, you have to reduce the radiation we receive or increase the radiation that leaves through the atmosphere. For hundreds of years we have been participating in a geoengineeri…

> mildly inconvenient Wildly disruptive.

There are billions of people living in just such a "disrupted" state today. Says more about your attachment to convenience than about what humans can handle.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#435

Post by wizofaus »

generalizations wrote: post #359
mrguyorama wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So because the fix is mildly inconvenient, better to just do nothing, keep making the problem worse, keep letting people die, and just hope that magic fixes everything? Tech can't undo the physics of the greenhouse effect. You want a cooler earth, you have to reduce the radiation we receive or increase the radiation that leaves through the atmosphere. For hundreds of years we have been participating in a geoengineeri…

> mildly inconvenient Wildly disruptive.

If your income directly depends on BAU, sure. But while there are those that would lose out initially to a rapid transition away from burning fossil fuels, including some that live at best a modest existence, I'm confident it'd be vastly cheaper to pay them to retrain etc. than to pay the costs of allowing the global temperature to keep climbing. Unfortunately there are also those whose personal fortunes are directly dependent on our addiction to fossil fuels, and they're not willing to risk jeopardising their wealth and status, so it's pretty much guaranteed we'll keep on burning them for a long while yet. At this stage the best we can hope for is that thousands of climate scientists have somehow got it wrong and we'll be fine in planet that's 3 or 4 degrees warmer.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#436

Post by Aerbil313 »

olifante wrote: post #424
Fricken wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read those numbers, and my anecdotal experience more or less corresponds to them. I know plenty of people who acknowledge climate change and think it is serious. They've all had their whole lives to make climate conscious lifestyle decisions, they could all stop eating meat tomorrow, but they ain't done squat. Not as individuals nor as a group. The few who have are weirdos who live at the margins.

Putting the burden on invididuals for averting the climate crisis is a form victim-blaming. It’s long been clear that only concerted collective action will be effective in producing real change. This is why so many free-market, minimal-state absolutists are so prone to putting their fingers in their ears and pretending climate change is not a problem, or if it is, that individuals as free agents are responsible for c…

Not acknowledging that the current predicament is caused by every single human being except maybe native tribes in remote islands is blindness. Saying that the vast majority (%99.9) of human beings is responsible and to be blamed for it is not victim-blaming, but not right either. The thing to blame is our beloved technology. Technology is the main force which shapes human society. We do things and don't do things because of our technology. It defines societies and the entire human civilization. The only choice there was was to oppose all technological progress, but that ship has sailed long ago, in 15th century or so. Back then, few people understood what technological progress will inevitably bring, no one had a time machine to see 21th and 22th centuries. We tout these people as religious backward luddites today, though the sentiment is changing.

The whole situation is as deterministic as two celestal bodies moving according to Newtonian physics. Technological progress was inevitable, and so was the resulting population bomb in the last century, and so is the nearing Collapse of the civilization in the coming decades, due to ecological overshoot. Read the Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#437

Post by lobocinza »

flagrant_taco wrote: post #430
lobocinza wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and those that dominate the narrative around climate change are the ones who sabotaged nuclear power in the first place. We don't understand the problem/solution space enough so the most sensible is to invest in climate research and monitoring.

To what end? What will more data do when it's inevitably going to be incomplete and largely based on modeling? We won't ever understand the problem space of the entire ecosystem well enough to make a complete solution. But there are easy things that can be done if we actually cared to, and we certainly don't need to keep piling on more things that almost certainly make things worse.

> But there are easy things that can be done.

Sure, like stopping subsidies to fossil fuel industry but I don't think cutting CO2 emissions is easy as you paint. How would we do that in a short notice? Through government? I'm extremely pessimistic towards "solutions" that require bigger government or new taxes as politicians almost always follow perverse incentives and don't care about long term consequences. My government subsidizes the coal industry using taxpayer money while making it hard for citizens to generate their own clean energy through laws and taxes. Government isn't the savior.

> We won't ever understand the problem space of the entire ecosystem well enough to make a complete solution.

More data and better models does nothing to prevent the planet from warming but help us plan mitigation strategies ahead and give us more confidence towards the efficacy/consequences of interventions. Right now we clearly understand that the planet is warming and that we are somewhat close to a cascading failure but what else? I don't like the prospects of downing living standards to the stone age so we may delay global warming. This isn't a solution and is a big sacrifice.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#438

Post by xorcist »

nemo44x wrote: post #358
xorcist wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may have posted this several times before, but China is not the problem. We know how to deal with that: international trade agreements. The problem is that it requires the US to be on board with it. Each one alone couldn't, but the EU and US together would have the economic force required to solve this problem, if they acted with decisiveness.

What does the USA get out of it? The USA is the #1 producer of oil and the commodity is traded in her currency globally. This makes the USA energy independent and keeps demand for dollars extremely high. The EU on the other hand has virtually no ability to produce oil and gas and is dependent on outside suppliers. So of course they have a lot of incentive to move off of it and that’s much easier if everyone else does…

There's no way to know if this question is sarcasm or not; but it's a good one. The EU is not uniform in this. Some countries face the same question, the UK and Norway comes to mind. Our history era is pretty much defined by oil, both directly and indirectly, but we don't know how long this era is.

Perhaps it would make economic sense to squeeze the market to the last drop? This is also why peak oil is an important concept. The price will certainly increase over the long term and this is a tempting opportunity.

However, this is also how empires fall. There will be technological change, and it will decrease our dependency on oil, not increase it. The economic impetus for this change is clear. Companies resisting change will be irrelevant in the future and the same is true for whole countries. Economies which isn't dominated by oil will be the first to change and master the next economic era. Countries like Russia are not likely to keep up with the technological change, they are much too invested in the old system.

So the answer is that given a long enough outlook, economies gain from this transformation. The US specifically also should have every incentive to keep trade with China under control, given that geopolitical situation. Aligning with the EU would be a strategical move against China, while keeping the European trade partners close. It's a move that would make both economic and political sense.

That's separate from the moral reasons. We know what carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere leads to. Over geological time scales it is abundantly clear. We may not want that for our children, but that's unfortunately too late to change now. Economic and political reasons are what remains.

Re: September was the most anomalously hot month ever

#439

Post by louwrentius »

MandieD wrote: post #107
louwrentius wrote: post #85

A constant 18C-20C degrees in September here in The Netherlands is absolutely insane. Heck, it's now 18C in the first week of October and at this rate I believe Oktober may not dip below 10C and also set a new record. And we go about our day as if nothing is happening. Yet the people peaceful protesting against fossil fuel subsidy blocking a street (A12) are the crazy people and should be violently removed from the r…

Not sure if I've told you before, but wanted to let you know that your solar-powered blog posts, in particular your DIY larger LiFePO4 battery, finally helped me understand some stuff about domestic solar that I'd previously failed to grasp.

Ok, thank you! Can you share what part/subject did I clarify in my article?
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