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There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

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Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the US even more rapidly going green? https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?hideControls=false&... China's emissions were 10 billion tons CO2 in 2017 and have increased every single year to 12.29 billion tons CO2 in 2024. Meanwhile, US decreased from 5.22 to 4.9 in the same time

1/4 the population. Per capita we are 65% worse not considering how much of China's pollution is on our behalf

Yeah, and don't even get me started on historic emissions.

China has only produced significant CO2/capita in the last decade. The US and Europe are responsible for the accumulated GHG that have gotten us into the current mess. We blew nearly the entire CO2 "budget" for keeping us under 2C of warming, just by ourselves, so it's kinda odd to be pointing fingers at the foreigners who are just now halfway catching up to what we're emitting now.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#92

Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion. Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded: "The longer we put off doing something, the harder a…

I'm a different kind of crotchety. I think it's real and potentially catastrophic. But I see very little chance of (sufficient) coordinated action to mitigate it. I.e., I think there's too much temptation for individual countries to pursue a competitive economic or military advantage by letting everyone but themselves make sacrifices. I hope I'm wrong.

Luckily the effect is much larger in the opposite direction: weaning oneself off of foreign oil is a huge advantage both economically and militarily.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#93

Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion. Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded: "The longer we put off doing something, the harder a…

> Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now

My family is fundamentalist protestant, very midwestern, and I think about half of them believe that the earth is warming. Not trying to "win", just trying to say that a lot of this depends on the crowd you interact with. I don't know the percentage, but certainly there are still way too many people that don't even believe it. The very tired response is "well i wish it would warm up here slaps knee". Using the phrase 'Climate Change' at least reduces that objection.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#94
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing? China is solving the problem on their own. They already make substantially less carbon per person that most of the west. If we want to be like China it's a simple proposition: be OK with Manhattan project level investments in power transmission from places that have lots of renewables to places that need renewables.

Climate is determined by total CO2 output, not per capita. That’s a real problem, because China, and all the poor countries in Asia and Africa aren’t going to stop increasing their CO2 output per capita until they reach western standards of living.

Sounds like we should pioneer better low-emissions tech, then, and pass it along to them. We've got more expendable income and a better tech base from which to do that.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#95

Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion. Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded: "The longer we put off doing something, the harder a…

> Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now My family is fundamentalist protestant, very midwestern, and I think about half of them believe that the earth is warming. Not trying to "win", just trying to say that a lot of this depends on the crowd you interact with. I don't know the percentage, but certainly there are still way too many people that don't e…

"Climate Change" implies that some sort of "constant climate" is even attainable, irrespective of desirable.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#96
post #49

Reposting a previous comment... What is generally not understood is that our current icehouse phase is rare. 'A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history. 'Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously... Earth's current icehouse state is known as the…

Previous climate changes happened over tens of thousands of years. This one is happening in decades.

It's the speed, not the magnitude that matters. Change faster than evolution and migration will destroy ecosystems.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does NASA even have to do this? Build some cool rockets and get us to mars.

Living on Mars long-term is a practical impossibility. Certainly much, much harder than living on even a climate-changed Earth.

Humans have done a lot of things we once thought were impossible.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> My impression is that almost no one denies the warming itself, just the link to greenhouse gasses. I fall in that category. My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor. I saw the blue skys after 9/11. I read the NASA guys that said daily temperature range increased measurably. I saw the blue skys again during Covid19. I'm also of the opinion that anyone looking at historical…

> My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor. Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle? (just normal evaporation from lakes/rivers/oceans/plants) Even as back-of-napkin math, this should be a pretty easy sanity check. I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude here, but I also d…

>> Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle?

I've SEEN the effects with my own eyes. You can also see contrails seeding cloud formation on some days. Then there's the fact that these extra clouds are formed and dissipate on a 24 hour cycle, so part of the day they let in sunlight and part of the night they trap heat. These effects are significant and there is little research on the bigger picture effects of this (that I've seen).

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#99

Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion. Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded: "The longer we put off doing something, the harder a…

Yes, parts of my extended family who were anti-climate change and proud went from "Global warming is a hoax", to "So what if global warming is happening" over the past 10 years.

Re: There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)

#100

Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion. Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded: "The longer we put off doing something, the harder a…

> many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything

This is the part that seems to vary widely based on which warming alarmist you're talking to. Many of them are not saying there are things we could do that "don't even really cost us anything" that would deal with the problem--they're saying we need to devote a significant fraction of global GDP to CO2 mitigation.

Things that "don't really cost us anything" are probably happening already anyway, because, well, they don't really cost us anything.

Building a lot more nuclear power plants is the key thing that doesn't really seem to be happening right now, that would be an obvious way to eliminate a lot of CO2 emissions. But of course that does really cost us something. But it's probably the most cost effective thing we could do on a large scale.

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