It reemphasizes the climate sceptists standpoints. They (most) are not denying there is a problem, but claiming there is widespread misinformation and propaganda around this topic and a strong exaggeration of the scale of the problem.
We have a kernel of truth around climate change. Let us cherish the kernel, instead of watering it down by popular media and scientists trying to jump the bandwagon by making vaguely substantiated claims.
The indisputable observable facts are:
1) The polar jet stream is slowing down.
2) This creates meandering air currents which produced the current heatwave in Europe and the so called polar vortexes in the US.
keyword: may. This statement tells us nothing new. Everyone already knows that local changes in climate have global effects. That's why we have global climate models.
(cue: extreme forest fires, partly caused by mismanagement of forests)
"Temperatures are rising in the world, but the warming is strongest in the arctic."
Nothing new.
"Here the warming is twice as fast as the global average."
Interesting: we know that the polar jet has been slowing since the 60's, but the warming of the arctic seems to be equal to global warming in the first part of this graph. Also, very shoddy time-series analysis, imho.
"And that's causing the ice to vanish."
"...international group of researchers who've come North to see how it has been rapidly changing."
So here I really wonder. Why would you do that? We've got great sensor networks and satellite measurements.
"Without the ice, more water evaporates, contributing to more greenhouse gasses."
True, but locally. Increased cloud cover also has a net negative effect. It really depends on a complex interplay and requires a sophisticated simulation.
"Some scientists think this is supercharging extreme weather across the world."
This seems highly hypothetical. Why not make a factual claim, such as: "Scientists have proven this actively contributes to the number of extreme weather events."
"Call atmospheric scientist... who explains how the polar jet stream effected the US this past winter."
"There was a huge northward swing in the jet stream over the west coast, bringing lots of warm air over Alaska."
So, this is true, but the jet streams are not constant, and have never been. Connecting it with a slowing down of that stream is intentionally left to the viewer.
... news report ...
"Took a southward drive over the rockies and dipped way down into Florida."
... another news report, claiming that such events have happened in the past??? Wouldn't that debunk this line of thinking? ...
"At times 20 degrees above average, and warmer than NY city."
These local fluxes of temperature are normal in this region.
... more claims of the jet stream, causing problems. No scientific claims, however, just news reporting. ...
"Tokyo had its coldest day in 48 years." So what happened about 48 years ago?
"Some prominent climate researchers are skeptical."
Good for them. We'd better be.
"Scientists can't definitively say whether any one weather event was caused by the warming Arctic, conditions elsewhere, or by random chance."
So, this is one of two scientific claims. At this point I am wondering why I just watched 4 minutes of melting ice bergs.
"But Francis and others think the warming Arctic is loading the dice for extreme weather."
Think? What does that mean? They don't agree with the other scientists? Have they found proof?
"FRANCIS: We can confidently say that some amount of the increase in extreme weather that we're seeing, is because of climate change."
So... eh, what about the jet stream? The arctic? I agree with this statement, because... it is obviously true! When global temperatures rise, we obviously get more droughts and more extreme temperatures.
KINTICH: "One thing is for sure, extreme weather in North America is occurring more often."
And the relationship to the Arctic? The jet stream? Tell me more!
"Climate scientists have given this phenomenon a new name: cold arctic, warm continents."
But, this has always been the case! This does not automatically prove the opposite.
... summary ...
So my conclusion: nothing new has been said! The only true statement is that we cannot conclude anything yet.
Now, multiply these kind of videos by hundreds, and you might start to understand why certain people are getting tired. Stick to the facts! The facts are scary enough as they stand.
For many countries this is also a domestic divide rather than the traditional nationalism soaked debate that most people or news orgs focus on.
Southern US stands to lose a lot more from the charts I've seen. Surprised it isn't raised a lot more by their representatives.
One top comment said "Over the next 40 years, (those 250 million tress) will absorb about as much carbon as the United States emits in a week."
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/c6lj7u/nonprofit_pl...
- Step one: _stop_ polluting (in like 1995).
- Step two: Work out ways to get the genie back into the bottle or co2 back into the ground.
It seems like we forgot to enact step 1 and now step 2 will pretty much be pointless because we are still spewing out co2 faster than ever.
If we're too survive we need to do both steps as of yesterday, unfortunately I don't think there are very efficient says to sequester enough carbon yet, so I think we might be in some trouble.
Huge supporter of climate change action, but scientifically is there any basis for the idea that current models point to human extinction? (Don't answer if you don't have a hard source, but I'd like what the projected point is for that)
I suspect for most of us, and our descendants, it's pretty academic if the future holds extinction, some Mad Max future where the few survivors have the capability of the 19th century, middle ages, or somehow bomb^W emit ourselves back to the bronze age. All will see them surrounded by tons of surviving things (and packaging) they can see but can't understand, make, repair or refill.
> This image should terrify you. It should be on billboards.
> As you can see, in either scenario, global emissions must peak and begin declining immediately. For a medium chance to avoid 1.5 degrees, the world has to zero out net carbon emissions by 2050 or so — for a good chance of avoiding 2 degrees, by around 2065.
> After that, emissions have to go negative. Humanity has to start burying a lot more carbon than it throws up into the atmosphere. There are several ways to sequester greenhouse gases, from reforestation to soil enrichment to cow backpacks, but the backbone of the envisioned negative emissions is BECCS, or bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration.
> BECCS — raising, harvesting, and burning biomass for energy, while capturing and burying the carbon emissions — is unproven at scale. Thus far, most demonstration plants of any size attaching CCS to fossil fuel facilities have been over-budget disasters. What if we can’t rely on it? What if it never pans out?
...
> Check out that middle graphic. If we really want to avoid 1.5 degrees, and we can’t rely on large-scale carbon sequestration, then the global community has to zero out its carbon emissions by 2026.
To state the obvious, we will not reach 0 CO2 emissions in the next 7 years. Everyone better strap in, because it only gets worse from here.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/carbon-engineering-co2-captu...
After 5 in 15 years, and on course for a sixth, the benchmark looks way off. At what point should it simply become a 1:3 year summer, or just "summer"?
How deniers can experience it and keep acting like nothing's happening beats me.
I look around my workplace, nobody seems to be compelled to change their lifestyle. Nobody seems to mind using a disposable cup every day, buying latest gadgets they don't need, talking about traveling to new places, etc.
I bought people on my team reusable coffee mugs to reduce the amount of disposable waste, but inevitably they get too lazy to clean it and they are back on disposable cups.
We need political action and economic incentives. Individuals changing their lifestyle isn’t going to accomplish anything.
So using reusable cups may not on its own solve global heating... But neither will any single election, tax or international agreement.
Instead of telling each other “what you’re doing is not solving everything therefore it’s useless”, we should be saying “what you’re doing is a good first step, and here are other ideas for doing more”.
I agree that a single individuals actions will have minimal impact, but isn't it the individual that makes up the whole?
"Individuals changing their lifestyle isn’t going to accomplish anything."
Why do you say that?
Does any evidence exist that individuals making changes doesn't do anything?
For example, my partner and I no longer own cars, that's hopefully two whole cars off the road for practically a lifetime. Does this have zero impact ?
Also think of it this way, imagine if all of the people in the world right now who couldn't afford to fly, own cars and consume as much as you, could afford to do so and proceeded to do so without thinking about the consequences, it would be 2050 pretty quickly.
I agree legislation and emissions trading schemes etc are important but i don't see it happening fast enough just yet. So why not take some ownership of your own and do your best in the meantime ?
Published CO_2 emissions would include an estimation of the total CO_2 emissions estimates of the complete production flow of each product you buy, the distance you travel for work and all other energy consumption.
Would that incentivize people?
(for the purpose of this argument, assume we can actually make such an estimate)
I'm with though, people are too selfish and too short sighted to be mildly inconvenienced to spit on the fire and some government action needs to happen, I guess all we can do is be vocal about it and hope people cause science friendly politicians come election time
Have people really got that lazy? Or is their work really that important?
In all fairness though, in America the power is only 110v not 240. So boiling a kettle is not going to happen. Plus the Boston Tea Party thing means y'all don't have a nice sharp cup of tea. So it is kind of not economically viable to just have a cup of tea, which for me, with no milk or sugar, comes in at less than 1p per cup + electricity. (58 tea bags cost 80 pence). Even then I often re-use the same tea bag, so totally different economic level.
I imagine my blood wouldn't be too useful if it was laced with caffeine, sugar, dairy products and/or artificial sweeteners on an hourly basis and that I might get too lazy to wash a cup. Maybe this is what happens.
There is a feedback loop that goes on with the wasteful lifestyle with people not able to regulate their body heat in winter or summer. So everything has to be air conditioned the whole time. In the USA this is a requirement but in England there was no such thing as air conditioning in the 1970's. You would open a window instead. Nowadays the windows have to be closed and the AC is on. Also in the 1970's you put lights on when it got dark. You didn't have the lights on mid day in mid summer, the glowy thing in the sky was considered sufficient.
Try turning off the lights in your workplace and see how people moan. Don't tell them that you are saving the environment, just say you had glare on your screen. See how they react.
I would like to see an office segregated into two zones much like how places used to be segregated into smoking and non-smoking areas. In one zone there would be the planet trashers. Then in the other the people who can do actual work without having to be overly nannied.
The 'eco' work zone would have no AC in places like England, instead there would be a breeze, some silence (instead of fans), nobody moaning about the weather but enjoying it and some sensible hours worked, so nobody sauntering in at 10 to moan all day, more of a decent lunch time, French style.
Meanwhile, in the other zone would be the people who are no longer able to regulate their body temperatures due to weight considerations. They would be paid slightly less as in their part of the building there would be the fizzy drinks machine to pay for, the disposable cups, the air conditioning, the excess lighting and the excess trash to landfill.
If this were in place then I am sure productivity would increase.
(Max time on top chart goes back to 1919)
Each year's high and low in the same line so there's no chance of noticing a trend or moving average, without plotting one.
Is it an obscure idiom (Native English speaker, so hard to tell)?
I had to read the article to finally made sense of it.
The article explain later what that means:
> Europe’s five hottest summers in the past 500 years have all occurred in the last 15 years, not including this summer.
And that means window units are not an option.
So if you don't have A/C, it's certainly not because you physically can't. I personally get by with a fan.
Though I definitely have culture shock when I return to Texas and remember people will have their A/C on 24/7 at 69F.
Wonder what sort of change that will bring to countries or regions in the world.
It's not really about the population it's about usage and greed.
edit: sorry, wrong calculation:
2 Steaks a week produce about 300Kg Co2 per year, which is the same as 7 People living DR Kongo produce
Who would pitch in to help me build a giant Mr Burns sun blocker in space?
If everyone on this site simply 1) exercised their right to vote fully, 2) invested enough research time to make sure their vote helps fight global heating, in even a tiny way, and 3) made one change per month, no matter how small, in their individual routine in a way that diminishes their contribution to global heating...
... That would contribute more to saving the world than all our “world-saving” startups combined.
But that would require admitting that we’re not as special as we think we are, which is hard.
Compared to a visionary engineering team raising let’s say $100 million to push forward new methods of sequestration?
YC has specifically called for startups in this field. Startups like SKH are pushing to get sequestration under $100 per tonne — compared to US per capita average of 20 tones, of which 8.5 tones is considered “innate” just for living in the US...
So while the absolute maximum personal impact an individual can have is around 10 tones, cost effective sequestration is the path forward to pricing and taxing carbon.
Once we have a reasonable sequestration cost, we can charge everyone and everything for their own emissions and use that money to actually negate it.
At current rates it would be ~$3,000 per capita which is still politically untenable. But at $300 per capital it becomes trivial. Somewhere in the middle in there it becomes economically and politically possible to actually eliminate the entire carbon emissions of the US, without even having to ask anyone to change their footprint.
So the question is what’s more important to you? Moralistically preaching to everyone how they should be living their lives, or actually reaching zero net emissions?
For example, you don’t need to eliminate international travel in order to eliminate the carbon footprint of international travel.
Sure, we need to ramp up carbon capture capabilities, and we need to do it fast. That is a great challenge for the tech industry to tackle.
However.
Carbon capture is not a silver bullet. At best, it is a short-term fix which can buy us time to actually fix the root cause of global heating. To state the obvious: the root cause is unsustainable extraction and ignition of fossil fuels. Carbon capture does nothing to address that root cause! In fact, it may end up making things worse in the long run, if we insist on over-selling it as a silver bullet - like you're doing right now.
Did you know that when you build more freeways to alleviate traffic congestion, you actually make traffic worse? And did you know that after decades of scaling up "plastic capture" capabilities in the form of consumer recycling, we have basically nothing to show for it? There's no evidence that it has made a dent in the production of new plastic. In fact plastic production has accelerated: we've produced as much plastic globally in the last 13 years than in the 54 years before that.
Building more freeways, over-selling plastic recycling, and over-selling carbon capture are all examples of the same flawed reasoning. They are short-term patches to fundamentally unsustainable systems, and when we allow them to become substitutes to an actual solution, they actually make our problem worse down the line.
Which brings me to my criticism of the tech industry's priorities. Collectively, we are one of wealthiest and most influential groups of people on the planet. Our resources are immense, therefore our responsibility to allocate our resources wisely is also immense. And we are failing miserably in that responsibility, because although we are investing plenty of resources in short-term fixes like carbon capture, our investment in fixing the real structural problem (again: unsustainable extraction and ignition of fossil fuels) are basically ZERO.
The reason we're failing is simple: carbon capture can be solved with technology and venture capital. Those are things we understand, and conveniently they allow us to keep doing what we like to do while telling ourselves we are saving the world. On the other hand, solving the root cause of global heating requires dismantling the fossil fuel industrial complex. The biggest obstacle to doing that is political corruption, which no amount of technology or venture capital can solve. The way we fight corruption is by becoming better citizens. That requires things like: voting; researching issues and candidates thoroughly; protesting; calling our representatives; showing up at town hall meetings; informing our friends and family about important political issues; getting other people to vote; etc. Unfortunately, most techies do none of those things. Political apathy is the norm. Even worse, remember that the tech industry played a direct role in Brexit and Trump's election, both of which are catastrophic setbacks in the fight against global heating.
I am not "moralistically preaching" as you call it. I am simply describing a pragmatic strategy to solving global heating. Unfortunately it's neither fun not profitable to make the effort to be a better citizen, so techies just don't bother. This makes us collectively part of the problem rather than the solution, and I think that's a shame.
PS: for the sake of completeness, here are other catastrophic consequences of fossil fuel emissions which carbon capture won't solve:
- rampant plastic pollution (remember, plastic comes from oil)
- mercury poisoning of the entire oceanic food chain (did you know that most of the mercury accumulating in the ocean comes from the fumes of coal plants?)
- the rise of fascist regimes in the US and Europe, bankrolled in great part by the Koch brothers in the US and Putin's oligarchs in Russia - in both case that is oil money
- the rise of violent Salafist groups such as Al-Qaeda, ISIS and Boko Haram, bankrolled by Saudi Arabia - also oil money.
- countless oil spills;
I could go on.
