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Global warming has accelerated significantly

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Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#711

Post by JuniperMesos »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #650
WarmWash wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is that everyone has to sacrifice, but half the people think there is no problem and then other half thinks only corporations need to sacrifice (and are unwilling to sacrifice themselves).

No one thinks only corporations have to sacrifice; they do think that it's folly to ask individual members of society, who on average contribute the smallest overall proportion to global warming, to sacrifice while corporations continue to squander away our natural resources. And the pareto principle agrees.

Yeah but there's a lot of individual members of society, and nearly all of them benefit from supply chains that emit CO2 and would have to stop doing so in order to not emit the CO2.

If gasoline in the US cost $20/gallon this would reduce the amount of CO2 emissions because suddenly driving a gasoline-powered car is much more expensive for everyone. This would make a lot of ordinary Americans very upset.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#712

Post by alexk307 »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #523
PowerElectronix wrote: post #514

And yet the minimum extension of artic ice ever recorded was in 2014. I think there are more effects to account for when extrapolating measured temperatures, mostly made on the ground with cataclismic effects. After all, all the carbon being emitted nowadays was in the biosphere back in the days. Why couldn't it return back to it without the earth becoming inhabitable?

The argument isn’t that the whole earth becomes inhospitable. But that certain regions do, and the rest will have their climate differ drastically. If you live on the coast and the water level rises, your home is inhospitable, even if someone 100mi inland is fine. If you live in a region that usually was 90F in the summer and is now >110F regularly, that’s going to cause problem.

There isn't enough fossil fuels in the ground for us to burn to cause a 20F+ increase in annual summer temperatures globally...

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#713

Post by deepsun »

adrianN wrote: post #402
deepsun wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re carbon capture -- we can cut trees and dump them in "carbon storage" places like the bottom of some water bodies where due to lack of oxygen no rotting happens, like peats and e.g. Black Sea. And grow new trees in their place of course.

It’s difficult to scale this to the levels we would need to make a difference.

Yes, agree. But I'm not sure direct air capture is more scalable than trees. Yes trees need to be moved, but at least they grow by themselves.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#714

Post by Supermancho »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #699
breakpointalpha wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In principle, you are right. Cheaper than coal renewables are winning. Don't forget though, that fighter jets can't operate on batteries.

That’s a red herring. It’s not worth mentioning.

Except for the industries where it does matter. Trivializing the needs of complex and energy hungry supply chains, is bad faith. They are one of the many reasons fossil fuels are so widely used.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#715

Post by jillesvangurp »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #385
standeven wrote: post #303

The main driver of this is human-produced CO2, and there are meaningful ways to reduce usage. -Switch to an electric vehicle -Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps) -If your power grid isn’t clean, add rooftop or balcony solar -Encourage friends and family to do the same

Prices are a great incentive. In Germany, 1 kWh of electricity costs roughly 3x as much as 1 kWh of gas. That doesn't make heat pumps very attractive. Historically the differences were even worse. Relying on people individually making choices that are better for the environment at a disadvantage for themselves is not going to work.

The way a good heat pump works is that you can get about 3-5kwh of heat out of 1 kwh of electricity. So, they can save money over gas even though electricity is more expensive per kwh. And of course gas prices fluctuate quite a bit. Right now Germany is low on gas and gas prices are going through the roof because of the situation in the middle east.

Here in Germany this issue is lack of policy, financing, and a lot of people are renting. I actually pay about > 100/month for gas. I live in a 20 apartment building with a big furnace in the basement for the whole building. A heat pump would be cheaper to run but you'd have to do a big one for the whole building. This is actually a good thing. Big heat pumps can be quite efficient. It's probably cheaper than having to install 20 heatpumps for 20 apartments.

But buying and installing heat pumps costs money. Technically, it is actually an investment (i.e. it has an ROI). If you do this collectively as a building, you'd do it to lower your monthly bills. This is something that should be possible to finance out of those savings (at least partially). That's literally why private home owners install heat pumps and get their money back in 6-10 years typically. Faster if they also invest in solar. And get an EV that also powers from those panels.

But this where things break down in Germany. You need consensus. And financing. And there are home owners that can block things and it's their renters that pay the heating bill so the owners don't care. And so on. And if you are renting, you are not going to pay for this either. So, everybody just coughs up the money every month without even questioning it. My apartment doesn't even have a thermostat or a smart meter for electricity. Apparently that's normal in this country. Germany is just deeply bureaucratic and inefficient. For all the talk about environment, they can't be arsed to do what the rest of the world did decades ago: save some energy with smart meters.

Policy could help here. Mainly clearing up bureaucracy. And maybe some more subsidies/incentives (those already exist) or low interest financing. And a clear political goal to vastly reduce expensive gas imports. Even if the electricity for powering these heat pumps would come from gas powered electricity plants, it would still require a lot less gas. And of course Germany has lots of wind power. I think other countries in the EU are a bit further with their thinking than Germany on this front. On paper it having lots of apartment buildings like mine actually means it is fairly straight forward from a technical point of view to upgrade these buildings.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#716

Post by aziaziazi »

pjmlp wrote: post #499
epolanski wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which in turn are also relatively small compared to the damages of cattle and fishing. Seriously adapting our diets around being more sustainable. I'm not advocating for veganism or such, but at least to understand that eating a burger pollutes as much as driving a large vehicle for 50 miles and that maybe we can substitute that with poultry or eggs or cheese many times.

What about putting trees down for soya fields?

Speaking of deforestation:

> Globally, 77% of soya is produced for animal feed, 19.2% for direct human consumption and 3.8% for industry (biodiesel, lubricants, etc.).

https://www.deforestationimportee.ecologie.gouv.fr/en/affect...

Poultry protein efficiency is 21% and beef 3%

> We find that reallocating the agricultural land used for beef feed to poultry feed production can meet the caloric and protein demands of ≈120 and ≈140 million additional people consuming the mean American diet, respectively, roughly 40% of current US population.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...

Edit:

Note the soy usage vary around regions. The first link is from a French gov page, after the previous citation it gives the world repartition:

> In animal feed, the largest consumer of soybeans is chicken (37% of world production), followed by pork (20.2%), aquaculture products (5.6%), dairy products (1.4%) and beef (0.5%).

Which is quite different than the French reparation :

> flesh and egg poultry account for 44% of total [imported] soy, then diary/mixed cows (36%) then flesh cow (8%) and pigs (6%)

(fr) https://chaire-bea.vetagro-sup.fr/en-france-les-animaux-dele...

Soy protein are 97.9% as digestible as beef

> protein qualify can be scored in terms of its Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS). Soy achieves a PDCAAS of 0.92, comparable to beef at 0.94.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

The DIAAS is sensibly worse (soy 0.898 - beef 1.116) but still far from the beef protein efficiency cited above (3%)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Amino...

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#717

Post by NewJazz »

lokar wrote: post #680
breakpointalpha wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In principle, you are right. Cheaper than coal renewables are winning. Don't forget though, that fighter jets can't operate on batteries.

They don’t contribute enough to matter

And using more electrics powered transport in other sectors frees up fossil fuels for other sectors.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#718

Post by lunias »

oblio wrote: post #649
lunias wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like to get worked up about this topic haha. All I'm sayin' is, it might get a lot hotter. Or maybe it will get cooler? I think it's important to put things in context because it's not some monotonically increasing function even if there is a local trend. I'm pro doing what we can to correct our impact on the environment; I'm even pro going beyond and attempting to control for other non-human externalities. My…

Look at all the comments under your original comment. Their point is very valid. Geologic scales are extremely long and the planet does not care. Humans, on the other hand would physically not be able to survive in most climates going back 100 million years or more. Too little or too much oxygen. Temperatures too high or too low, etc. We cannot compare this event, which is much, much, much faster than any natural war…

I never said their (or your) points weren't valid. In fact, I think they are quite self-evident and well known. People are assuming in bad faith that I'm unaware of these facts or that I sought to mislead with my original comment.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#719

Post by logicchains »

jihadjihad wrote: post #510
notarobot123 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, those still unconvinced of the human influence on climate change seem to be the sort that would trust the basement randos more than they would reputable scientists

Because they are practicing the reverse scientific method. They hold a conclusion in their hand, like, man-made climate change is a hoax , and seek to find any threads of "evidence" that support their foregone conclusion.

The scientific method is making testable predictions. You can look back 10, 20, 30, 40 years at the predictions of sea level rise made by climate scientists, and the sea level today is nowhere near where they predicted it would rise to. If someone's continuously making incorrect predictions it's not reasonable to assume their predictions will suddenly become accurate, especially when there's no feedback loop to weed out people making bad predictions (unlike e.g. in finance where people whose models have little predictive power eventually go bankrupt). No climate scientist has lost their job for making incorrect predictions of sea level rise twenty years ago.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#720

Post by nielsbot »

boxedemp wrote: post #485
nancyminusone wrote: post #458

Don't kid yourself - we closed this one with "Won't Fix" a while ago. "But what about ?" No. Full stop. We're not going to do it, and we're not even going to apologize for it either. All we can do now is prepare, not that I've seen a lot on this front either.

We'll fix it if it become cost effective. It might, but probably won't because if the scale.

we're going to chose the most convenient path. if climate disaster becomes inconvenient, we'll attempt to do something about it.

it will be a disaster.

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