I spent a while digging in to try to get some numbers on a different sense of what's happening. Global average temperature is changing because extra energy is being retained within the boundary of the planet's atmosphere [0]. So how much extra energy is being retained?
A best guess estimate from 2015 would appear to be that
> the earth is getting about 300 terawatt hours of energy per hour due to anthropogenic climate change, and humans use about 16 terawatt hours of energy per hour.
That is, the earth is gaining 18x more energy per hour than we use every hour, thanks to the changes in radiative forcing driven by climate change contributors.
[0] anyone familiar with complex physical systems will understand that when you add energy to such a system, the effects are often hard to predict. It is very likely that the temperature of the system will rise, but you may also see, for example, more movement as well (which is in some sense a related concept to "temperature" but not identical, and it adds uncertainty because it of the extra degrees of freedom).
This is something that is very underappreciated. It's entirely possible that the climate becomes chaotic (in a mathematical sense) and there are sudden, drastic changes that cause economic and social devastation.
It seems inevitable that people will be complacent until it's too late.
Of course, it's easier for this energy to dissipate as heat and kill us all.
Ya think ? :)
(no insult intended)
Let's not white-wash the problem.
Now turn up the temperature in your house until it starts moving. You can put it in the oven and crank up the heat if you want
I'm in America, even despite an engineering degree, I think in Fahrenheit.
1.5C sounds like a small number, until you remember that Fahrenheit is ~2x 1C.
So 1.5 degrees C is ~3 degrees F. Which, to me, just emotionally feels like a bigger number despite being the same empiraclly.
Similarly, it means when the IPCC is saying there might be a 7C change in 100 years, they mean a 15F change. 15F is emotionally terrifying to me. Its the difference between 85 degrees and 100. 7C is an abstract concept to me.
That last one could finally cause some action because the current economy largely ignored anything else.
> Note: Before anyone complains, I’ve deliberately conflated energy and power above, because the difference doesn’t really matter for my main point. Power is work per unit of time, and is measured in watts; Energy is better expressed in joules, calories, or kilowatt hours (kWh). To be technically correct, I should say that the earth is getting about 300 terawatt hours of energy per hour due to anthropogenic climate change, and humans use about 16 terawatt hours of energy per hour. The ratio is still approximately 18.
Out of interest, you can also convert it to calories. 1kWh is about 0.8 million calories. So, we’re force-feeding the earth about 2 x 1017 (200,000,000,000,000,000) calories every hour. Yikes.
https://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2012/01/how-much-extra-ener...
Children sometimes confuse the units of speed and distance, but not when they get older.
Does this imply in preindustrial times the net energy was 0, or is this total energy and there’s some number not mentioned of loss?
What your energy look describes is dT/dt, how quickly we will reach the new equilibrium.
At the new equilibrium, the temperature is likely still to be the best descriptor of the new normal - we describe most processes and states in terms of temperatures they happen at, because it's and intensive property rather than an extensive one. You don't have to temper this 300 TW number by the mass or surface area of the earth to get a sense of what's happening when you use temperature
What's the energy number at which a glacier will melt? What's the temperature?
∆T is one of the most important numbers in thermodynamics for good reason
The rate is important, but so is the final result. A system whose new equilibrium is +10C is as useless to humanity and life and earth whether we reach it in 25 years or 200.
I agree with you that ∆T is more useful for thinking about actual effects (e.g as you noted glacial melt), but my interest in thinking about it in energy terms is (a) I think it highlights the cause more strongly (YMMV) (b) it better accomodates the possibility of the extra energy in the system having effects not so obviously correlated with ∆T
> Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth regenerates during the entire year.
As we look back in ice cores, there is variation, but not constant oscillations witch confirm a self stabilizing system.
A few negative feedback we don’t often hear:
increase of co2 have a huge effect on plant grow especially in hash deserted conditions.
Increase in temperature increase humidity: clouds that have a huge effect on reflecting radiation (much greater than co2) increase precipitation, increase plant growth in deserts.
Not to say that we should continue this experiment, but maybe not panic either and see this as the only problem: war, famine, poverty are much more important and real immediate problems instead of projected possible problems.
Water vapor amplifies the effect of other greenhouse gases.
https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3143/steamy-relati...
Moreover, we can tackle multiple problems concurrently, no need to make it appear we can only ever do one thing. And as it so happens, climate change tends to correlate extremely well with war and famine. It certainly appears a climate solution is going to help many other big problems along as well.
My understanding is that clouds are inside that part of the atmosphere in which radiative forcing has decreased. This means that while they may reflect radiation so that it does not reach the ground, they do not stop (all) the energy from being trapped within the atmosphere.
> war, famine, poverty
All actual problems that will result from significant climate change, not distinct from climate change (even though they may exist for other reasons too).
Which might sound good for crops but of itself can destabilise ecosystems, African savannahs are already becoming scrubbier with brush and shrubs due to more CO2 enrichment for at least ~1 million and possibly several million years. That will definitely have implications for populations of animals adapted for grassland
I wonder what it'll feel like looking back at that point. There isn't anything that I alone can do right now to prevent this from happening, it has to be a collective action but still, we've been warned for decades, over and over, we knew what would happen. Will we regret not having mobilized more, joined every protest out there, not having written our representatives more than we did, not having made more sustainable choices than we did? I know the effect of personal choices and actions is marginal but still, I'm sure we'll feel lots and lots of regret.
Can YOU Fix Climate Change? https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc
and
We WILL Fix Climate Change! https://youtu.be/LxgMdjyw8uw
Make sure that you watch the second one if you watch the first one.
It will feel like nothing, because everyone will have conveniently forgotten about these sorts of reports and predictions when the world stubbornly refuses to end. Just like everyone conveniently forgot that in the 50s and 60s scientists were writing to the US President to tell him that the consensus of scientists was that the world was entering a new ice age, and that he should prepare agriculture and industry for the transition.
You wait and see.
> Using bogus ‘net-zero’ pledges to cover up massive fossil fuel expansion is reprehensible.
Understanding a problem, and being able to hold on to power while making the hard decisions is a classic unsolved problem in politics.
But it's infinitely harder with very few (two!?!) high centralized litmus-tested groupthink political parties, incentivized to lock up power unilaterally, and marginalize the power of other parties, not skills conducive to governing.
And also infinitely harder with unlimited spending by corporations (who are not citizens, and don't share the interests of citizens), where tiny groups of executives get to leverage all their companies resources toward tilting the political field in their favor, in order to get massive bonuses for feeding insatiable shareholder demand. But without reflecting any of the decency that shareholders might actually have.
It's the moloch beast. The whole system is the problem, but it's near impossible to improve the system's design because it will fight that at every step.
It mindlessly cares about its own survival. Which is how it came to be.
Even if every single person in the system actually wants to do the hard things that will keep the planet in good shape.
Option A implies at some point in the future, massive social unrest due to mass migration.
Option B implies massive social unrest today due to a large decline in standard of living. And no, it won’t be the “people in capitals” suffering here.
Option C is option A plus some geoengineering that will likely be undertaken when the situation is desperate enough.
Luckily that aligns with the singularity timeline. AGI will have a very good carrot for us to agree on its terms.
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 of many moving parts. Thinking that "we will reach an equilibrium eventually" is probably a naïve take. The next natural equilibrium probably includes a decimated world population.
Positive action is necessary now. If you don't know what action to do, go to [1] and start there.
> 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.
This take is seriously dangerous.
"1.5C is not so bad, chill people"
When the fact is - we don't know the impact - if we go beyond 1.5.
What we do know (because it's already very much measurable) is that much of the worlds glaciers will melt, causing drought.
What we do know is that eventually the sea levels will rise and drown many extremely valuable coastal areas.
Imagine you live in a valley where elderly people die of heat stroke every summer: 100 three years ago, 500 the summer after, 2,000 last summer. Your parents are 70 and 71 and barely made it. You immigrate, with your children, right? To where? The big city with worse heat management?
Repeat with peasants who can’t grow crops without expensive feedstock, or pig farmers whose water supply is dry. Where will they go?
People will want to flock to places that are currently openly considering tall walls and machine guns to prevent immigration — and that’s when thousands are coming at a time.
You think that having several millions every year will not make that situation a lot more tense?
We're going to blow right past 1.5C, 2C, 2.5C...
I'd rather we not find out.
Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
(1) I live in a democracy with ranked choice voting, and I always vote green #1, but the greens are in minority and the main parties are more interested in playing to the masses. sometimes they're in coalition but they don't achieve much.
(2) I'm a relatively well paid person in a relatively wealthy country. I own my own home, and I have rooftop solar installed. But I can't afford an EV that will fit my family, or a heat-pump, so I still have to burn oil or wood to heat the house in winter and burn diesel to bring the kids to school. I die inside a little every time I have to go to a filling station. We live in a rural area with no public transport, so that's not an option either.
(3) I talk people into getting solar panels and switching to EVs, lowering electricity usage, buying second hand, reusing, recycling, every green action thing I can do. I urge people to vote green. Sometimes I feel like I have a little effect here, but I could be fooling myself.
It's disheartening that an environmentally conscious person like myself, with a good steady income and no big debt, still has to burn fossil fuels on a daily basis to keep warm and move around. I feel like I'm part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Takes 3 hours of your time to find out.
How would they even predict/model that? Have they modeled all the different plausible crops and agricultural techniques, which regional environmental conditions they're most suited for, and the transitions between them based on regional climate change effects?
It's one thing to model a natural system, but seems quite a bit more complicated to model a system where human technology and decision-making is extremely significant.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/
> Have they modeled all the different plausible crops and agricultural techniques, which regional environmental conditions they're most suited for, and the transitions between them based on regional climate change effects?
Seems so.
> It's one thing to model a natural system, but seems quite a bit more complicated to model a system where human technology and decision-making is extremely significant.
"Extremely" is a big word. Agricultural yields depend on the weather. A population of 9-10 billion will not be sustained by vertical farms maintained in a synthetic climate.
"Average annual global temperature in a given year" and "temperature in my city tomorrow" are fundamentally very different types of predictions.
Often it is easier to accurately forecast gross dynamics on a long time frame than it is to forecast precise dynamics the exact same process over a short time frame.
You don't even need to understand the math or physics to see why this is intuitively true.
Consider e.g. predicting minutiae about the behavior of a fetus over the next week ("how many fist clenches", "how many kicks") vs. predicting which week the baby will be born -- the latter is substantially easier than the former despite the longer time frame.
Or, more to the point, consider forecasting the position of a particular cloud of molecules in a pot of water being bought to boil vs forecasting the temperature of the water in the pot in 5 minutes. The latter is hilariously trivial -- a small child can be taught how to do this with excellent accuracy. The former is some horrendously difficult phd level fluid mechanics and even then hard/impossible.
In some sense, an educated intuition is exactly the opposite of yours -- it'd be surprising if we were this good at extremely fine-grained weather prediction but couldn't guess the annualized average temperature of the entire system in 50 years. The latter is a much simpler statistic because the timescales and physical scales take a lot of the difficult stochasticity out of the forecasting problem.
Can you predict the average height of all the residents of your city? A demographer can given an answer that is a lot more accurate.
And predictions about life expectancy become easier in aggregate, too.
Source: am data scientist.
Also note in the beginning of 2010s solar was very expensive, right now it's (almost) the cheapest source of energy[2] and the technological problem at this point is battery.
That begin said our problem for switching to renewables isn't only technological, there are political reasons (e.g. China and coal [3]) and also despite solar being cheap for a certain period of time running old infrastructure (e.g. natural gas power plant) still makes economic sense, at least in the short term. but I expect that predictions like [1] become more optimistic in this decade.
As a final note in the past economic growth = more pollution which is simply not the case any more for most of the countries.
[1]: https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/ [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth [3]: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/china-must-stop-its-coal-i...
If you guys are planning to see the natural world in retirement, don't wait. Better to see it as it is now than what it will become.
That said, it's still going to be worse than we all want it to be. Like many things, the truth lies in the middle and all we can do is push hard on the margins.
What exactly are you saying here? That in 30 years, the entire planet will be an arid desert?
If you look at sites like Our World in Data then nearly all metrics of human progress have dramatically improved over the past century, while temperatures increased 1°C.
So it isn't clear that another degree increase will lead to catastrophe. The numbers are round and arbitrary. Our increased wealth and technology has improved lives far, far more than the increased temperature has diminished them, and I don't see why that trend won't continue.
What we need are people in positions of power that care.
That is simply a hard sell, always has been, and most of us are to blame for the consequences...
Okay then - so how do we get those people to materialize?
Absent "appeals to collective action" which you've already determined is never going to work.
- the slow-boiling frog
I don't know how you "have to force myself quite hard to take this seriously" when the environment around us has been degrading faster than scientist have been claiming for years.
Maybe you're confused by how events related to climate catastrophe unfold? It's not like a nuclear bomb where one day everything is fine, then the next every thing is gone. That case is different in two major ways: the break down is instantaneous and a new normal is almost immediately established.
The final warning for climate is about a process that once started can no longer be stopped.
You don't have to "trust the science", you can literally watch it happen as the arctic heads rapidly towards a blue ocean event (see "arctic death spiral"), crop failures have been increasing, California has suffered extreme years of drought followed by this current season of incredible floods, lake mead reaches a lower level than it has since it was filled, Texas is subjected to extreme weather (in both directions) causing year after year failure of the power grid.
These things will continue to happen, will happen more frequently and at greater magnitude for the rest of your life.
If you feel unconvinced it's because you're in a state of denial (which in part of grieving so not terribly surprising or uncommon).
“the environment around us has been degrading faster than scientist have been claiming for years.”
But not faster than science reporting has been claiming, since they have pretty reliably been claiming apocalypse in 5-10 years for 60 years now.
IMO the situation is that mainstream science said categorically since before 1990 that CO2 emissions lead to unpleasant outcomes, and gives periodic updates on how the world in aggregate is mostly doing worse then planned in emissions and adds some detail to the predicted resulting consequences.
What would you expect from science and science reporting instead?
The West is living in lala land with some of the proposed policy measures.
A popular one is implenting a carbon tax at the border which forces buyer and seller to internalize societal cost.
But this would result in redefined trading blocs, particularly with united developing nations. The other bloc (paying the border carbon tax) will enter a post-growth period due to slow and expensive trade
There's no hidden trick, all of that is completely obvious. Yet, government action could increase the rate of change several times.
Nobody is in full speed, everywhere things are mostly left to the market, and the market created a huge lot of completely artificial bottlenecks. It also is unable to do research and any kind of long-term investments, even when it's clear those are profitable; and it's always completely unwilling to do infrastructure investment.
with that caveat out of the way, here are some examples from other people you can mull around as you ponder the scope and scale.
#1 the IPCC themselves. As part of AR6 one of its reports is on mitigation options: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-g...
#2 - Bernie, if elected, wanted to start a 'green new deal' jobs program that would re-direct most of the military budget as well as greatly increase federal spending such that somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5T/year would be spent on the transition. The hope was that in de-escalating our global military presence he could also entice china into a grand bargain that involved them putting more of their military budget into it as well. Again regardless of your opinion on the realisticness of it, its worth recognizing as one of the only people and plans that got the scope and scale correct.
#3 - https://drawdown.org/ Drawdown isn't a policy so much as a menu of options that have been explored, studied, modeled, quantified and ranked.
The problem is people have to pay for these changes. This means potentially:
- General increase in prices/decrease in disposable income
- Danger for competitiveness of domestic industries
- Uncertain second-order effects/additional risk
Just consider electric vehicles-- pushing for no new combustion-car sales starting in 2025 would be political suicide in a lot of democractic nations, simply because people actually value future wellbeing on a planetary scale less than what's in their own pockets right now.
There is absolutely no need to go nuclear for electrical power at this point IMO-- it's not cost competitive, not sustainable and extremely unpopular, too.
Just like collective farms made Russia and China agricultural power houses.
This problem is not a matter of technology, it's yet another problem of society and people.
Carbon capture is completely unplausible. Annual US CO2/capita is ~15tons, we simply can't realistically plant enough trees.
Currently there is no way to do anything that would have sufficient effect to compensate current pollution-- we HAVE to reduce it at the source.
But I completely agree that it is mostly just the will that is lacking.
I'm curious, though, and I admit I haven't read the report, but what is it about 1.5 degrees that the scientific community sees as so critical. Is that the temp after which positive feedback loops take over and it becomes a "runaway train", so to speak (e.g. less ice results in less albedo and more warming, which causes less ice). I just want to understand why that number was chosen to represent such a critical point.
And since it's obvious we are not going to make that limit, what are the additional consequences of hitting 2 or 3 degrees of warming?
Edit: To the downvoters, please take a look at https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions. Global CO2 emissions have simply skyrocketed since 1950. The only year they didn't go up was 2020 - remember that year we had a pandemic that shut down much of the world for months and months on end. And still, despite all the stoppage of activity, there was just a small blip down in CO2 emissions. I don't understand how any sane person can look at this graph and believe that 1.5 is attainable. Remember, we don't just have to flatten this graph, we need to bring it all the way back down to 0. I do think alternative energy technology will eventually get us there, but certainly not in 15 years, all across the world.
[0] https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement
In that case, I think still harping on the 1.5 degree number is a communications mistake. It is obviously impossible at this point (see the edit in my original comment), and so I think focusing it risks encouraging a "well, this is obviously too late, might as well enjoy our bread and circuses while they last" attitude. I think it would be much better if scientists said "Remember when we warned you about that 1.5 degree limit? Well, y'all f'd that up, so now a lot of these dire predictions are going to come true. Oh, and here is a whole host of even more dire predictions that will occur for every .1 degree you miss the limit, so you better try to limit carbon emissions as much as you can to prevent things from becoming more screwed than they are already guaranteed to be."
I just think that any messaging that talks about things eventually being "too late" is bad from a public motivation standpoint.
If we warm faster, feedback loops will have more effect earlier, tipping points may be reached in shorter time, biodiversity will drop a lot, and our ability to react and do something about it will be compromised because we will have more urgent things to do like i.e. figuring out new food sources in scale after agriculture becomes unreliable enough.
It is not if we will hit a mark, but how fast we will leave it behind. There is no possible adaptation to fast enough change, for us and the world we depend on.
My question is what, specifically, the 1.5 degree budget signifies, and why it seems like there will be such a discontinuous amount of harmful effects if we blow past it. What is the significance of 1.5 vs 1 or 3?
Also, I'm not some sort of "climate skeptic" - I totally understand there will be severe negative consequences for continuing to pump carbon into the atmosphere. I'm just genuinely curious on why scientists landed on the 1.5 number.
The assumptions for how 1.5C is "possible" amount to futurism.
The goalposts keep moving too - once it was a 66% chance of staying under 2C, now it's common to talk about exceeding 2C and lowering the temperature later, which is about as plausible as running a car into reverse while the gas pedal is down.
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?
"The Synthesis Report will be the last of the AR6 products and is scheduled to be released in March 2023 to inform the 2023 Global Stocktake under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change."
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 hear from climate denialists (I hate that phase btw) is that past climate models have been highly inaccurate and many claims and concerns have in time been proven overstated. This is somewhat true.
But here we are once again looking down on the masses and effectively saying, "you plebs just don't get it, this is your final warning before you all die".
I think I'd rather the data was presented with less emotion and I think that would be more convincing personally, but at the same time I suspect we're probably going to have to see some dire consequences of climate change before any serious action is taken.
That's such a trite reply. First, we can take it literal. Yes, models have been inaccurate, and this one will be too. The trend is unmistakably there, though. You can check the bloody weather outside to see for yourself. Do you want to bet your life that the estimate is too high this time?
Second, we can take it less literal. They simply mean they don't want to move. They don't take it seriously. They don't care. Nothing in the world short of an immediate disaster in their direct environment is going to change their "opinion". And even then some will claim it's a freak accident.
Don't take these arguments as if they have the same weight. Do you want to bet your life and the lives of the ones you and we love?
I tend to operate with two mental modals because I believe a lot of these divides can be explained by differing educational levels and intellectual abilities.
I think you need to put yourself in the headspace of a 90 IQ dude who has been told his entire adult life that the world is going to end because of climate change. To him the fact that there was snow the other day and the world hasn't yet come to an end is actually a convincing argument that the Earth isn't getting so hot that he needs to be concerned.
Similarly, while this hypothetical person might not be intelligent enough to understand that scientific models are always going to have some level of inaccuracy and there is always some amount of noise in the data, they are intelligent enough to recognise that in the past false claims have been made – and often these claims have been made in a condescending manner.
We've seen similar divides and misunderstandings with Trump, Brexit and the pandemic. We need to find better ways to communicate across social divides – that's what I was appealing to. We have to do a better job at presenting data in a way that's accessible to every while also not being so condescending and overly opinionated that it's off putting to those who remain unconvinced.
Or put another way, a climate denialist isn't going to be convinced by you telling them they're an idiot for not understanding how to analyse the data correctly (even if you're correct). You instead have to recognise the merits of their perspective and try to explain the data in a way that will allow them (hopefully) to come to the correct conclusions.
But like I say, I don't know if this is even possible with climate change. A lot of people I'm referring to here think with their eyes and if they can't see the truth in their own life experiences, and with their own eyes, then they're sceptical of it. Climate change for lots of reasons is unfortunately one of those things that's really difficult to explain to someone who sees snow as evidence of that the Earth isn't getting hotter, but these are the people we ultimately need to convince.
> Do you want to bet your life and the lives of the ones you and we love?
No. That's why I'm saying please stop with the alarmism. It doesn't convince anyone and just causes unhelpful ideological divides.
Propagandists love to exploit this by saying things like “there’s still time - just look at all the snow”.
So 1.5 degrees should be an important target if good models are important. But, it turns out, certainty isn’t what we’re after.
Another challenge is the report itself is pretty dry and emotionless (for example, every line of the PDF is numbered).
Here's a link to the new Synthesis report referenced in the article: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/
Here's the "summary for policymakers": https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf
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.
Is it your position that there have been no serious consequences of climate change to date? That's not factual.
"Intellectually, progress could be okay. But you're doing it wrong."
Temperature is not the only factor the models consider when simulating future crop yields. Higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have a positive effect on photosynthesis and water retention, increasing crop yields, though often at a cost to nutrition.
Increases in temperature and carbon dioxide (CO2) can increase some crop yields in some places. But to realize these benefits, nutrient levels, soil moisture, water availability, and other conditions must also be met.
https://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-affecting-crop...
https://climatechange.chicago.gov/climate-impacts/climate-im...
Here (W.Australia) we're busy trialing many wheat (and other) varieties for future use but its better to deal with AGW by reducing C02 (and methane and water vapor) in the atmosphere than by soft selling adaption.
Over threshold things are predicted to tip and get uncontrollably worse.
"Final Warning" "act now or it's too late" sounds like a late-night infomercial selling me something.
If I were running the report I'd try to write it in a manner that is scientific and thus emotionally indifferent to every outcome. Science doesn't care whether any special dies or not (humans or not). If you can't look at climate science with an indifference to the death of the species, you probably can't run statistics neutrally, which gives a lot of room for doubt (fair or not).
We’re seeing crop failure after crop failure. Whole ecosystems are collapsing. Tornados and floods are happening in places they had never happened in.
Europe and the US are going to be impacted way later than everyone else other than the immigration wave they’re going to have to deal with.
It’s a sick joke that the countries with the ability to do something about this are also going to be the last ones severely impacted.
I strongly suspect we’re going to cross the 2C threshold in our lifetimes.
The willpower to change things isn’t there, and the effects are too far removed from our decisions. Even the floods and droughts are easy to ignore, telling yourself “it’s not happening here, just some random far away place”.
But I also think that we’ll slowly start reducing our emissions anyway, as electric cars and green energy keep spreading. So we will eventually reach an equilibrium. I just don’t think that that’ll be before the 2C threshold.
Probably, the climate is a complex system and we've never had a ringside view of CO2 levels rising this rapidly so there's really a large degree of both upside and downside uncertainty in all of this. Probably hitting 2C just means a few refugee crises and no disasters that'll effect most of humanity but we can't be sure.
less than two years after it was formed the PPM went past 360, then not long after went past 400 PPM iir.. how can those people feel emotionally after that?
As far as I can tell, it was already past their "safe" target when formed, they were just setting a target to aim for in the long term.
For example this paper suggests that in the UK a reduction of 52% by 2050 compared with 2020 levels is possible.
Everyone knows that and most don't like it but their addiction is too great to make the necessary lifestyle changes to quit.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said: “This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”
But considering that our global emissions are huge and population keeps growing I'd be very surprised if we didn't reach 2ºC in a couple of decades. Even with the efforts of some countries in reducing emissions, our per capita global emissions have been hovering between 4-5t since the 70s and we're probably going the break past 5t in the next years.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
The only way out of this are very strong negative emissions. That is, reducing emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Well like no one knew that :) But the official report I am sure details all the background to prove that statement. It is too bad the people that can do something will not only ignore the report but probably will double down.
Early forecasts suggest El Niño will return later in 2023, exacerbating extreme weather around the globe and making it “very likely” the world will exceed 1.5C of warming. The hottest year in recorded history, 2016, was driven by a major El Niño.
1.5°C is basically already locked in.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/16/return-o...
Also nowadays an El Nina more or less pauses the warming.
So far it seems like the report gets worse every year.
The pessimistic take is that every single advancement in environmental policy has been used to cover increased fossil fuel usage somewhere else. Almost every "carbon credit" trading program has been to pat people on the back for doing "their part" while actually doing very little and masking existing fossil fuel consumption with sleight of hand accounting tricks. Almost every bit of annual power savings by collective action switching to things such as LED light bulbs and EV cars has been (too easily) entirely offset by the vastly increased energy consumption of things like cryptocurrency mining operations and AI computation farms and still far too cheap oil prices. (The world was on track for net coal-fired power plant shutdown and Bitcoin alone is responsible single handedly for restarting up enough coal-fired power plants in the 2020s to offset that expected net gain.)
This report card says we aren't doing anywhere near enough. We aren't meeting our collective promises (we are likely to miss the Paris Agreement best case target and are hoping we still have a path to stick to the Paris Agreement's worst case). Maybe we still aren't yet "doomed", but there's not really a lot of credit to go around for anyone collectively doing the right thing. (Individual action was always something of a red herring given how dwarfed individuals are by large corporations and industries. It's probably not worth handing out gold stars for individuals doing their part, either.)
You're not literally arguing that LED light bulbs and EV cars somehow enabled cryptocurrency mining operations, are you?
What I'm asking is: for the set of actions we have taken due to environmental policy that have led to reduced emissions, what is the effect of those policies compared to if we hadn't enacted those policies? For instance, if LED light bulbs and EV cars are a result of those policies, then where would be if we hadn't done that, and still had cryptocurrency mining operations?
In other words, how much have we bent the curve? Not compared to previous estimates, but compared to what reality would have been if-not-for?
Because, unless the argument is that these policies have actually had more perverse outcomes than beneficial outcomes, it's literally impossible that we haven't bent the curve. I'd like to see more reporting on how much we have bent the curve, because I think it would supply positive motivation.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/03/15/climate-crisis-what-c...
Given how each word is carefully weighted in their report, this sounds a bit scary to me.
It's really getting harder to stay sane and calm.
If we all end up being replaced by AI, I can't see the devastating economic effects being good for the move to renewables.
The reason is that there is a good chance we will blow past 1.5, and this will be brought up as evidence that they are just "crying wolf".
My guess is that the "final warning" phrasing is more news media and not actual scientists. If so, the news media is doing a great disservice to humanity.
I would be great if the censure applied here would put the comments censored on another page with a link to it.
That way people interested could see what is removed and why. Instead of being it silent and hidden.
More and more I feel that HN has become an echo chamber where only one direction is allowed.
TLDR: make censure explicit and visible instead of hidden.
"Scientists have issued a "final warning" on the climate crisis as rising greenhouse gas emissions bring the world to the brink of irreversible damage that can only be averted by swift and drastic action."
OMG.
I just stopped reading after the first paragraph. Welcome to the attention economy where only the biggest fairground screamer gets a hearing. Except that fairground screamers are definitely not part of the achievements of "age of enlightenment".
I remember a few years ago - when it was about the populism of extreme right-wing parties - how the propaganda was described: First a problem is described as a catastrophe, and then the only way to solve it is presented. Any parallels?
Nothing - but absolutely nothing - makes sense in this paragraph. Where is the critical thinking that "science" always prides itself?
It starts with the fact that scientists have issued a final warning on the climate crisis. Sounds somehow like parents who are at their wits' end with their educational measures and don't know what to do next. And what does "final warning" actually mean? Will we be spared that from next year on? Or will there be the "really last warning", the "last last warning" or the "last last warning 2"?
I am sure they will continue with their "warnings" next year. What else are they supposed to do?
So then the world comes to the brink of irrevocable damage? What is that supposed to be? Irreversible damage like the last eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, the irreversible damage of the Hiroshima bombs, the irreversible damage of the last world war?
The world is continuously changing. Things are destroyed and things are rebuilt. We dig up the earth everywhere we greed for mineral resources. For the next iPhone of the very scientists who warn against it. We changed the surface of the Earth a dozen times but now it's irreversible. Fun fact: If nature gets the chance in 1.000 years nothing will be there anymore because nature irreversible changed everything again. Is this a catastrophe as well?
But it's not even "damage", it's just the "brink of possible damage". So we are heading for a situation that might produce damage - and that we can only prevent by taking drastic measures.
But who tells us that precisely these drastic measures will not also lead to damage?
Yes, the climate is changing. The glaciers are melting and suddenly old Roman roads appear that led over the mountains. Yes, it was warmer 2,000 years ago, too. But probably someone forgot to announce to the people back then that they were living on the brink of a catastrophe or something.
Before anybody asks: Yes, lets clean the oceans. Lets plant trees. Lets adapt to the climate change. Lets invest in robust energy sources which are not dependent on wind or sun for which we have to cut down forests and destroy seas. But don't be that arrogant to think that using a master plan we can control a complex, non-deterministic, loopback-based system on the edge of chaos.
This never happened. And this never will. And those systems are always "irreversible" because that's the nature of it.
The initial predictions at the time were for the situation then, but if the situation changes, the predictions won't become wrong, just outdated.
Not that far off from, "We're all doomed in five years," because we definitely did not stop using fossil fuels, and in my opinion, wiping out all of humanity would count as doom.
I hope they all walked up there after taking their sail boats across the ocean.
