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Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

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Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#541

Post by phreeza »

Timon3 wrote: post #540
phreeza wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point is that it is hard/impossible to predict, and I am even hesitant to list some ideas because they sound like climate denier conspiracy theories. But just as a hypothetical example, there may be effects from aerosols ejected along with CO2 when burning fossil fuels, which act on shorter time scales in the opposite direction, which could lead to overshoot.

> The whole point is that it is hard/impossible to predict But it certainly seems much easier to predict compared to the results of further CO2 in the atmosphere. We've lived through the transition period from lower CO2 to current CO2, so it's reasonable to assume we'll see the same effects in reverse. We haven't lived through the period of current CO2 to higher CO2. > and I am even hesitant to list some ideas becaus…

> Sure, it's possible, but it seems much more likely that continued increases in CO2 will have worse unpredictable effects.

I completely agree.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#542

Post by concordDance »

danbolt wrote: post #404
concordDance wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese emit more per capita than the Europeans.

I think the world would benefit if western nations had a carbon levy on imports as well as a carbon tax on domestically-produced goods. Or, with the added costs, market forces would encourage people to find more efficient lifestyles. If someone wanted a more environmentally-taxing lifestyle, they could play the fair cost.

The calculations are infeasible expensive for most goods, you'd almost shut down trade.

Either that or its a flat rate per good which just becomes yet another import tax.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#543

Post by ilyt »

rtpg wrote: post #496
ilyt wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just do that simple thing, it will fix the problem" rarely works all that well for the complex system unless "this thing" is "stop doing something that makes it worse". Like that one time China decided sparrows are a problem then discovered what they exactly eat aside from grain...

I know these kinds of stories, and people like to say them. But they don’t distinguish from “spray water into the air to fix global warming” and “put iodine into table salt to fix an entire populations iodine deficiency”. Sometimes the simple solution works! The reality is that even simple solutions involve a lot of work at a large scale.

Sometimes they work, sure but for systems that complex it's far too easy to do much worse than better.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#544

Post by jfengel »

achenet wrote: post #532
irrational wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I have relatives that are medical doctors, physic professors, have doctorates in statistics, are engineers (real engineers and not software engineers), etc. and yet, because of the lies of conservative politics, are convinced that at best there is climate change, but it is from natural fluctuations and not human caused, and at worst that it is a hoax. Either way, there is nothing we can or should do.

I don't get how you can ignore that things have gotten hotter . Like maybe not believing a climate change model that says that by 2050 half of California will be underwater due to rising sea levels, I understand - it's a prediction about the future, likely to be wrong the way predictions about the future of the market are often wrong. But like... we've been recording temperatures for over 100 years now, and it keeps…

"Heat islands" "Fake data" "There was snow last winter" "It's not hot here" "They recalibrated the thermometers" "It's actually cooling since [last record peak]"

There's just a whole host of excuses to gallop through. Knock down one, they'll grab another. Debunk that, and they'll move on to the next one... or return to a previous one.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#545

Post by ryan93 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #507
ryan93 wrote: post #114

For a fraction of the US federal debt we could have gone full nuclear.

We have a very hard time building nuclear power stations. This claim, which seems to absolve energy consumption, is easy to say but very hard to do in practice.

1st world inhabitants will NEVER stop consuming energy until they literally cant get it.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#546

Post by polotics »

giardini wrote: post #81
polotics wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you skeptic of? There is so much misleading denialism of what is now ao blindingly obvious to any casual reasonable observer, that I propose you apply you skepticism with a bit a cui bono.

polotics says "...what is now ao(sic) blindingly obvious to any casual reasonable observer ..." Hmmm, "any casual reasonable observer" - that would be a scientist perhaps, and "casual reasonable observation" would be "science"?

Hello Giardini. Oh wow I typed "ao" instead of "so"... the earth is saved! "casual reasonable observer" being science indeed, check out the IPCC report, it's a super hot read I heard. Or you can publish your own and send it for peer review. I think you have no valid argument to put forward to explain how you are being a sceptic, but hey if you think you do, and if you think you are actually a sceptic, then please carry on I'm all ears.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#547

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Timon3 wrote: post #539
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the mechanism of starvation. You can't produce (and distribute) the amount of food that we need without the use of fossil fuels. Up-thread, you said "and replaced it with renewables", but we can't do that right now. Bluntly, if we hard-stop the use of fossil fuels today, a large chunk of the human population are going to die.

Yes, if you change the parameters of my hypothetical, the results change. What's your point?

I thought I was adequately clear. If you need me to make my point more clear, here you go:

> > > It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now.

For what most people mean by "right now", something bad happens - many, many people die. You chose that phrase; I didn't. So within the normal meaning of the phrase, you are very wrong.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#548

Post by Timon3 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #547
Timon3 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you change the parameters of my hypothetical, the results change. What's your point?

I thought I was adequately clear. If you need me to make my point more clear, here you go: > > > It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now. For what most people mean by "right now", something bad happens - many, many people die. You chose that phrase; I didn't. So within the normal meaning of the phrase, you are very wrong.

And I thought I was adequately clear when I initially specified:

> Nothing bad will happen if we suddenly stopped all fossil fuel consumption and replaced it with renewable energy.

Do you really need me to repeat this for every subsequent reference to the hypothetical? You yourself acknowledged it in your first comment, so you obviously understood it.

But if you need me to, fine, replace the sentence you quoted with:

> It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now and replaced it with renewable energy.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#549

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Timon3 wrote: post #548
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I was adequately clear. If you need me to make my point more clear, here you go: > > > It seems reasonable to me to assume that nothing bad would happen if we stopped fossil fuel consumption right now. For what most people mean by "right now", something bad happens - many, many people die. You chose that phrase; I didn't. So within the normal meaning of the phrase, you are very wrong.

And I thought I was adequately clear when I initially specified: > Nothing bad will happen if we suddenly stopped all fossil fuel consumption and replaced it with renewable energy. Do you really need me to repeat this for every subsequent reference to the hypothetical? You yourself acknowledged it in your first comment, so you obviously understood it. But if you need me to, fine, replace the sentence you quoted with:…

Right. (I was actually coming back to edit my post to acknowledge that you said that.) But...

We can't actually do that right now.

When can we? 10 years? With all the combines, and all the tractors, and all the semis having to be electric? Can we even do it then? We maybe can in 20...

If it's 20 years from now before we can do it, that's not "right now".

The problem with the way you said it is that it makes it sound like we could do it now (for reasonably normal values of "now"). We can't.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#550

Post by mempko »

crazygringo wrote: post #476
amrocha wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government is literally doing that by funding research. The government can fund literally anything it wants to. Private investment is literally never necessary.

What you're describing is a command economy of the type the Soviet Union had -- no private investment. The whole history the twentieth century is the evidence that such a system doesn't work. And it especially doesn't work as technology has become increasingly complex. Markets are vastly better-informed investors than governments can ever be. Which is why it's generally vastly better for governments to skew incentive…

The rise of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) to become the largest sector in the US economy (22+%) coincides with an increase in proportion of private R&D expenditure compared to government expenditure. In 2010 businesses spend $248 billion on R&D while the government spent $126 billion. In 2021 that number was $587 billion compared to $153 billion. In other words, the share of Business R&D went from 66% of R&D spend to about 80%.

The reason this is not a good trend is that the KIND of R&D businesses do vs government are very different. Government invests in basic research and invention while business invests in innovation.

Less money is going into science and more into squeezing money out of people via innovation. I would argue this is because the sector that makes all the important decisions is now the FIRE sector, which only thinks about the next quarter.

source: https://ncses.nsf.gov/data-collections/national-patterns/202...

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