71–80 of 456 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you also find it hard to believe that casino can say your chance of winning roulette is 1/37 (and you're gonna lose money), despite the fact every roll is random? Both are just law of large numbers.
Strange to compare the random results of a spinning wheel three feet wide in an air-conditioned room to a planetwide system, isn't it?
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…
There is no way except property seizure and capital reallocation at a large scale. This wont happen, so we're effectively doomed to suffer the slow violence of the inaction of our owners who themselves will never live to feel the harm they're aiding and abetting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Longer term projections on 2.5C look more hopeful. Globally electricity production has gotten significantly more green, though offset by increased demand. But, new coal power plants for example were down 66% globally in 2020 vs 2016 and existing infrastructure only lasts so long. Project things forward to 2040 and emissions should be noticeably below current levels even with increasing demand simple because of econom…
Coal is only going out of style because we are building out new natgas plants. The greatest trick that has been pulled on us this century is somehow billing gas as a 'green' source of energy. Electric cars are an expensive distraction from the problem. The sustainable future of transportation is the electric train, the electric trolley, the electric scooter, and the electric bicycle. Personal automobiles, electric or…
Spending enormous amounts of energy to move around 4,000+ lbs of metal, just to go to the restaurant down the street, is insane.
For anyone interested in what 1.5C represents, I can't recommend enough the Climate Fresk [1] exercise. It's not just the droughts and floods, the heatwaves, the changes in birds, insects, crop yields, … Include permafrost melting and releasing greenhouse gasses, civil unrest in populated areas that won't be livable anymore, unstable food production, and quite a few other causes and consequences. It's a feedback loop…
Overstating impact is detrimental to the cause. > decimated 1.5C will be bad, but it won’t directly kill 800+ million people in a short timeframe. People simply don’t respond to harm spread across 100 years the way they react to harm concentrated into a few large events.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/
1.5C is the (likely to be overshooted) goal. The IPCC report assesses that 2011-2020 is already 1.1C warmer than 1850-1900 (page 7), that the world has been warming by ~0.2C/decade (saw it somewhere), and that current policies (if implemented) will lead to a warming of +3.2C by 2100 (page 23). Page 16 shows various ways in which a +3.2C world will be hostile to humans. For instance most of south and south-east asia, and some of the most populated areas in Western Africa will experience temperatures and humidity levels that are dangerous for human survival >200 days a year. This is now all determined with rather high confidence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should they take down those signs? I would personally prefer for things like that to stay up with contextualization about how scientific understanding has changed and why the prediction was wrong.
The predictions were not wrong. Society changed, people reacted to Greta and others, and that changed the situation, and thus the predictions. The Pandemia and pausing industries on a global scale did their own share. And as sad as it is, the war in Ukraine was finally a massive boost for changes in Europe's energy-infrastructure. People previously thought it would take decades, what now is finished in some years. Th…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJdqJu-6ZPo
And we can debate semantics, but the prediction failed to accurately predict the future, as is the norm for climate catastrophists. It's all emotional appeal to whip up the masses to vote, same way gun and ammo prices spike whenever a democrat wins the Presidency. I would hope people who actually have the power to help solve the problem are looking at the issue more objectively.
Assume we hit 1.5C and "nothing happens" does this help the cause? While I'm very concerned about how unchecked climate change could impact future crop yields I also worry that having a hard line like this probably won't help convince anyone, and could counter intuitively act as a "I told you so" for climate denialists when the world doesn't fall apart as soon as we hit 1.5C. A lot of the more convincing arguments I…
The talking down to people, coupled with hyperbolic dialogue has just fatigued everyone on this file.
I think climate activism is total shit and ignores all the environmental damage that goes along with it.
Which is to say, if we don't change right now, then when the next report comes out, we will already have enough CO2 in the atmosphere to be at 1.5C -- even if we stopped burning fossil fuels absolutely and utterly.
I'm really not sure how much such a warning can accomplish, after decades of having been ignored in the past. I've been treating 1.5C as a fait accompli already.
The problem for me is less about the actual temperature, or even the disasters that will come of it, but what it does to American culture right now. The whole world has failed to solve the problem, but I think America was the lynchpin. We deny that the problem exists, making it much harder for the rest of the world to summon the will to spend money to do it.
But in America, that has cost us our relationship to science. Any HN discussion is sure to be filled with criticisms of the scientists, many of them insisting now that this is all some kind of leftist power trip. That has utterly destroyed not just our ability to use science for any national ends, but an implacable, violent hostility between political groups.
Climate change is only one part of that culture war, but it is a particularly strong example. The climate conspiracy theorists are simply wrong, just plain factually on the face of it. It's not a matter of values, or interpretation, or conflicting scientific models. There's a right and a wrong answer, and if even that turns to bitter hatred, how an we possibly resolve any genuine differences of opinion?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Longer term projections on 2.5C look more hopeful. Globally electricity production has gotten significantly more green, though offset by increased demand. But, new coal power plants for example were down 66% globally in 2020 vs 2016 and existing infrastructure only lasts so long. Project things forward to 2040 and emissions should be noticeably below current levels even with increasing demand simple because of econom…
Coal is only going out of style because we are building out new natgas plants. The greatest trick that has been pulled on us this century is somehow billing gas as a 'green' source of energy. Electric cars are an expensive distraction from the problem. The sustainable future of transportation is the electric train, the electric trolley, the electric scooter, and the electric bicycle. Personal automobiles, electric or…
Gas has significantly lower emissions than coal. Progress is progress.
Absolutism gets us nowhere, unless your goal is to drive humanity back to the stone age by "switching" to energy production systems that do not currently exist (with the exception of nuclear, which is the only currently practical solution for "green" base load that we stubbornly refuse to consider).
All of those electric transportation doo-dads add significant load to a system that can barely keep up as it is (in the US, anyway).
Just to emphasize the point, in NYC environmental extremists shut down Indian Point, thus converting about a quarter of NYC's power demands from clean energy (nuclear) to fossil fuel. Meanwhile, each of the past few summers the city has come close to rolling blackouts. Good job, folks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you also find it hard to believe that casino can say your chance of winning roulette is 1/37 (and you're gonna lose money), despite the fact every roll is random? Both are just law of large numbers.
Strange to compare the random results of a spinning wheel three feet wide in an air-conditioned room to a planetwide system, isn't it?