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Global warming has accelerated significantly

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Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#741

Post by tialaramex »

tarr11 wrote: post #162
eykanal wrote: post #3

For those (like me) who don't know the authors, apparently they are well-published authors in the field of climate science whose work is very highly cited: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=gra... Not a perfect measure of whether this is a reputable article but at least readers should know this isn't from some randos in a basement somewhere.

It says this in bold red at the top - "This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal." I am not a climate scientist - how should I think about this statement? Normally I am looking for some statement that shows a document has been vetted.

For one thing, some of the places which would publish this kind of thing will authorize authors to provide anybody and everybody pre-prints but not the final copy they published.

In principle you could go (pay to†) read the actual final published copy, maybe it's different, but almost always it's basically the same, the text is enough to qualify.

If you go to https://eel.is/c++draft/ you'll find the "Draft" C++ standard, and it has this text:

Note: this is an early draft. It's known to be incomplet and incorrekt, and it has lots of bad formatting.

Nevertheless, the people who wrote your C++ compiler used that "draft" document, because it isn't reasonable to wait a few years for ISO to publish the "real" document which is identical other than lacking that scary text and having a bunch of verbiage about how ISO owns this document and it mustn't be republished.

And you might be thinking "OK, I'm sure those GNU hippies don't pay for a real published copy, but surely the Microsoft Corporation buys their engineers a real one". Nope. Waste of money.

† If you have a relationship with a research institution it might have this or be willing to help you order it from somewhere else at no personal cost.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#742

Post by jfengel »

tarr11 wrote: post #162
eykanal wrote: post #3

For those (like me) who don't know the authors, apparently they are well-published authors in the field of climate science whose work is very highly cited: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=gra... Not a perfect measure of whether this is a reputable article but at least readers should know this isn't from some randos in a basement somewhere.

It says this in bold red at the top - "This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal." I am not a climate scientist - how should I think about this statement? Normally I am looking for some statement that shows a document has been vetted.

I'd say that for a non-scientist, you should treat it as a non-event -- a paper that hasn't happened yet.

The climate is not something for which you need daily, weekly, or even monthly updates. Rather, this paper is just one more on top of a gigantic pile of evidence that that climate change is serious, something that we can and should do something about.

If the paper passes muster, you'll hear about it then, though all it'll do is very slightly increase your confidence in something that is already very well confirmed. Or, the paper may not pass review, in which case it doesn't mean anything at all, and you fall back on the existing mountain of evidence.

If the paper had reached the opposite conclusion, that might merit more investigation by you now, since that would potentially be a significant update to your beliefs. And more importantly, it would certainly be presented as if it were a fait accompli, even before peer review.

Instead, you can simply say, "I don't know what this paper means, but I already have a very well-founded understanding of climate change and its significance."

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#743

Post by netsharc »

baq wrote: post #397
sulam wrote: post #295

FWIW my personal assessment is that this acceleration is both real and largely out of our control. Models in the past did not attempt to account for non-anthropogenic carbon emissions, but as we experience further warming, most especially in the Arctic, feedback loops and tipping points mean that this (carbon emissions caused by “natural” processes) are becoming more evident. This is especially sensitive because a la…

> major dieoffs in warm latitudes, even for humans, due to exceeding wet bulb limits my extremely pessimistic position is nothing will happen systemically even after the first few such events, and they'll take tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives. I hope writing this out jinxes it.

The ingredients for the Syrian conflict came about because of climate change (dried up farms - farmers moving to cities to find jobs - social tension). The last 10+ years has shown that the relatively well-off Europeans would rather watch the Syrians drown rather than "pollute" their luxury enclaves...

We'd rather kill everyone else rather than give up our luxuries...

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#744

Post by fellowniusmonk »

stainablesteel wrote: post #493
tsoukase wrote: post #164

This ship has sailed, warming is irreversible. Developing nations mainly in Asia (China, India etc) are, well, developing and burn like there is no tomorrow. But they are not to blame. It is their turn to live nicely, like the US and Europe did for decades. Nobody can remove this right from them.

this strangely self-hating and suicidal message has been spread for decades now, this falls along the same kinds of thinking as blood grudges and blood wars. we don't need to adopt this form of thinking at all, no one is owed anything.

yeah, the audacity is insane China's been manufacturing and deploying more solar than anyone and solar+battery is a clear path forward.

The people making these arguments are mendacious and misanthropic to the point of deep irrationality, so many people have been trained to do nothing, try nothing, and assume the worst, I don't know who trained these people to embody epistemological learned helplessness but it boggles the mind.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#745

Post by casey2 »

nielsbot wrote: post #720
boxedemp wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nothing can be done about it. If you leave it up to the market it will spiral away forever since the cost of dealing with the problem always increases both due to the size of the problem growing and the cost to insure solutions compounding.

The "obstructionist" greens understand that the system is flawed and needs a structural change. We don't live in capitalist fairyland, there are baseline energy costs that can't be inflated away and our ability to work on the problem degrades after every disaster.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#746

Post by rvz »

tencentshill wrote: post #487
qgin wrote: 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.

Wasn't crypto a significant percentage as well? And that was before the AI buildout started.

Not even close. Crypto has always been able to cut their own emissions before needing lots of compute.

AI on the other hand cannot, and still needs thousands of wasteful data centers.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#747

Post by zahlman »

sulam wrote: post #295

FWIW my personal assessment is that this acceleration is both real and largely out of our control. Models in the past did not attempt to account for non-anthropogenic carbon emissions, but as we experience further warming, most especially in the Arctic, feedback loops and tipping points mean that this (carbon emissions caused by “natural” processes) are becoming more evident. This is especially sensitive because a la…

> Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode.

Current rates of sea level rise are still in single digit millimetres per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise), so that would take millennia. If there's even enough ice in the caps to get that far. Pre-historically, vast ice sheets covered broad swaths of regions now considered "temperate" (per the famous XKCD, "Boston [was] buried under almost a mile of ice"); what remains is a tiny portion and it's simply hard to imagine that it could fill the seas to such an extent.

If you have detailed calculations, please feel free to cite them. But my back-of-the-envelope reasoning: NOAA gives an average sea depth (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceandepth.html) of 3,682 meters. You propose that this could increase by nearly 2%. But the density of water only exceeds that of ice by about 9% (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice); the thickness of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet is only about half that average sea depth; and it covers only about 4% of the water-covered area of the planet (14 million km^2 vs. 361 million km^2, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth) which is not even all oceanic.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#748

Post by zahlman »

estimator7292 wrote: post #490
baq wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> major dieoffs in warm latitudes, even for humans, due to exceeding wet bulb limits my extremely pessimistic position is nothing will happen systemically even after the first few such events, and they'll take tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives. I hope writing this out jinxes it.

We are already far past the point of mere thousands of lives. Entire cities have been wiped off the map by floods. It will take millions, if not close to a billion lives before we get serious

> Entire cities have been wiped off the map by floods.

Could you name some?

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#749

Post by tzs »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #229
queenkjuul wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China produces a lot less carbon per capita than we do

Global warming doesn't care about 'per capita'. Edit: Individuals do not build coal power plants, utilities (and therefore, governments) do. India and China are continuing to build fossil fuel power generation. Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother. The…

> Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother.

That is why per capita is the correct measure.

The atmosphere is very good at mixing CO2 so a given amount of emissions anywhere has the same impact anywhere as the same amount of emissions from anywhere else.

Whatever we decide the limit on atmospheric CO2 needs to be to address warming needs to be converted into a quota for each country, since enforcement has to be done at the country level.

We can't just take the total and divide it by the number of countries. That would mean that Vatican City would have the same quota as the US. Regionally it would mean that the EU would have 27 times the quota of the US.

The only sensible initial allocation is to divide the total allowed by the world population, and assign each individuals share to whatever country has the power to regulate them.

Re: Global warming has accelerated significantly

#750

Post by zahlman »

moffkalast wrote: post #651
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #437

The paper doesn't seem to account for the reduction in sulfur emissions from ships, which was widely reported to be the cause for some of the recent warming?

The worst thing you can do when you're actively geoengineering is to abruptly stop doing it. So naturally we found a way we were already doing it and cut it immediately to make sure we fuck ourselves as much as possible :) I'm almost convinced it's intentional at this point, the rich are busy building their offbrand vault tec bunkers and starting random wars for no real reason. Longtermism nonsense over the today.

Airborne sulfur comes with its own negative environmental consequences, though.
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