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Global warming has accelerated significantly

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Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#601
post #417
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt. Ironic OECD countries actually REDUCED their emissions based on a peak in 2007 and continue to do so. Not reduced as a percentage of GDP or adjusted for population growth, but reduced in absolute levels. It's all China, but I guess it's cool to blame things on developed countries. There are literally 100k deaths in Europe that can be prevented…

China is some years behind our industrial development then undevelopment, and is building an entire USA of solar panels every year or whatever - can we expect them to quickly reduce emissions soon?

> can we expect [China] to quickly reduce emissions soon?

They did, last year.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#602

As an observation, global warming has completely disappeared as social concern in the last few years. Great that someone is still publishing research, but it seems like being a climate scientist has gone from hottest field to nobody cares.

I think a lot of people have lost faith in the ability of the world to come all together and make the necessary sacrifices to make a difference. Especially when some parts of the world are in competition with each other and not making these sacrifices allows them an edge. Also another group of people have realized they are not willing to forgo all their petty and unnecessary comforts nor are they willing to pay any p…

Its not that.

Basically, on the average, people don't have ability to think rationally into the future. Most people think only 1 level of cause and effect.

Right now, for the vast majority of people, global warming isn't a problem when your house has AC, your car has AC, your workplace has AC. When you are forced to do things that you see no direct effect of, it makes it seem less important, and its a self reinforcing cycle where you see other people not doing it and you wonder why you have to make your life harder.

People will start caring only when their direct lives are affected. So unfortunately, the only way to fix global warming is to let it get bad enough to where there is enough death and destruction for people to start paying attention.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#603
post #172
post #147

Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt. And I don't think it's going to hurt enough in 10 or 20 years. The pain will come slowly, people won't see it. It's like going back to the middle age so slowly, that the population don't realize or feel it. And honestly, wars and trump are making climate concerns so difficult to think about.

I've been mentally tabulating a list of reasons rich (and/or older) people should care about climate change, even if you're only looking out for your own interests: - Your children and younger family members will have to deal with this - Climate change is causing increasingly worse turbulence for airplanes - It will disproportionately affect your favorite vacation spots - Probably something about stock markets and pe…

> - Climate change is causing increasingly worse turbulence for airplanes

Cutting out air travel is the single most accessible and impactful thing an individual can do with respect to climate change. You can stop turbulence from getting worse, but since you won't be flying in the first place...

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going for a record in bad takes? Your account is a month old and yet I recognize it on sight for the bs takes. Try a bit harder please.

My point is until it's peer reviewed it offers no value. Do you know how many papers are published that don't pass peer review?

> My point is until it's peer reviewed it offers no value.

That's just your opinion.

It clearly has some value, whether or not it will have even more remains to be seen.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> direct air capture is the primary escape hatch We MUST MUST MUST stop burning things. Stop it. - We are still mining and burning coal. This is incomprehensible. US, AU, etc Eg: https://www.nacoal.com/our-operations - We are still subsidizing oil to around $1T/year, not counting oil wars. Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables. It would be cheaper than the oil subsidy…

This is why it's clear we will never do anything to slow the progression of climate change. By far the most effective an immediate solution to limiting the damage of climate change is to simply to keep fossil fuels in the ground . People talk about the economic pain of doing this, but that economic pain is nothing compared to the impact of unmitigated climate change. Even though this would be painful, it is also by f…

The economic pain is current. The impact of unmitigated climate change will happen in the future. Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians makes this sort of planning ahead difficult.

It seems like the whole economic system runs on a quarterly time scale - just look at all the times negligent maintenance to improve profits in the short term have caused disasters in the long term.

Not sure what the solution is though, so I won't complain too much.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What have you done? Why is it someone else’s problem?

It's a collective problem that we all have to solve together. I'm doing my part. What have YOU done?

I don't know how much surface area you consume, but the single biggest cause of energy use is spread out living in detached single family homes in the USA and other developed countries.

All the recycling, solar panels, electric cars, whatever don't come close to making up for the fact that each family of 4 living on a 0.1+ acre lot with all the various setbacks and whatnot, commuting many miles to work and school and grocery stores and the gym, moving all that mass of people, students, workers, food, water, sewage, trash, gas, etc is orders more consumption than if people were living in dense arrangements such as apartments in 4 and 5 story buildings.

Energy = Force * distance

From what I can tell, none of it means anything as long as detached single family homes are still the expected lifestyle, at current populations. Might as well consume as much as we can while we ride into the sunset, or cull the population quickly.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#607
post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't do the AC thing, it is a stupid trope under blogfluencers. There are no restrictions (besides positioning the outer unit in such a way that you cause your neighbors to lose sleep). As the summers get more extreme in Europe, more residents decide getting one is starting to pay off, so you see more AC's, but many people think they are doing fine without.

I can easily google restrictions and share them, and I have in other comments but let me throw it back at you. Why do 90% of Americans have AC while only 20% of Europeans do? Why does US have ~4 heat related deaths per million while Europe has ~235 per million? Do you think it's just stupidity (Europeans don't know the relationship between heat and AC)? Or poverty? Any other explanation? https://news.un.org/en/story/…

> Why do 90% of Americans have AC while only 20% of Europeans do?

Because Rome is further north than New York and Paris is just south of Ottawa/Montreal.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#608
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All data centers in aggregate (AI and all other uses) use about 1.5% of electricity production, which itself is about 20% of total energy use. So when people are focusing on AI above all other energy uses, it doesn't really paint an accurate picture of what's going on.

You can split up every single industries/topics/&c. into "yeah but it only use 1.5% of energy", "yeah but it only produces 1.5% of the co2" Guess what happens when you add them up...

>Guess what happens when you add them up...

I'll guess, they add up to 100%?

I don't see what's the insight here.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> direct air capture is the primary escape hatch We MUST MUST MUST stop burning things. Stop it. - We are still mining and burning coal. This is incomprehensible. US, AU, etc Eg: https://www.nacoal.com/our-operations - We are still subsidizing oil to around $1T/year, not counting oil wars. Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables. It would be cheaper than the oil subsidy…

> We MUST MUST stop burning things. Yes, we must. It is so rare to see someone saying this in public. Thank you for this simple clarity. Stop burning everything! Fossil fuel, wood, plastic, garbage, paper. Stop making methane. We only need solar energy at 1 dollarcent or eurocent (it will get much cheaper still!!) and a little batteries for the convenience of using electricity when the sun does not shine. In the nort…

> Stop burning everything! Fossil fuel, wood, plastic, garbage.

I don't understand the wood argument. Isn't it widely accepted we need to do burns to manage forests? Wood is a short-term cycle of carbon. It releases when it burns but frees up space to capture it right after. When people live on rural plots and trees fall, should they burn for heat (and lessen needing other energy sources) or let it decompose and cause the same thing? It's not the same as extracting deeply embedded carbon sources that won't make it to the atmosphere if untouched (fossil fuels)

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The obsession with demonizing AI/data centre loads seems to be a deliberate distraction from the much, much larger carbon loads of the economy at large relative to which IT power consumption is a tiny proportion.

Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions, and AI is probably .1% to .5%, but sure, stop using LLMs. That will solve the problem.

> Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions

The majority of which is methane, which only has a 7-12 year life. Which means — unless for some reason you started eating way more animals than you did yesterday — that your emissions today simply replace your emissions from 12 years ago. In other words, it is a stable system, unlike carbon, which basically sticks around forever.

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