30 years ago I attended a university lecture in an economics class and the professor spoke about the economic consequences of global warming - some places will be better off and plenty of places will be worse off. There will be water shortages in some places, while heavy rainfall in others. He presented it as a given fact that the global warming is coming - and pretty much the whole audience was shocked. Finally someone asked if he really thinks that it is unavoidable. And his answer was yes, that is human nature. As long as fossil fuels are there and cheap to explore someone will use them.
Whenever you hear a politician say "carbon neutral by 2050", interrupt them. The real goal is to avoid getting too far over 1.5 degrees warming. We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system. The year 2050 is meaningless. Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
2050 is not meaningless. Its close enough to feel like its achievable but far enough away that you can put off immediate action and still feel there is time to get it done. Reminds of the lyrics of the spirit of the west song:
Berkeley Earth berkeleyearth.org › home › global temperature report for 2023
Global Temperature Report for 2023 - Berkeley Earth
February 29, 2024 - 2023 was the warmest year on Earth since direct observations began, and the first year to exceed 1.5 °C above our 1850-1900 average. ...
> We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system.
Then I'd be far more worried about nuclear war than minor temperature excursions. Aside from that "non recoverable" damage happens every day. What do you think mining is?
> Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
On average it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler last year than it was the previous where I live in northern CA.
I’m amused that the argument is that we are in a Mr Burns position where different kinds of pollution we were emitting was balancing out and somehow fighting pollution is the reason global warming is worse? While I’m sure it has some effect, the amount of co2 we pump out every year as a species is insane. The effect of ship pollution mitigating that is marginal at best
Some systems pulling the average up and some pulling down but the average of them is net up. I wonder though if it would have been better or worse for us if the net change ended up negative (dropping temps every year) instead. Probably worse, right?
Stratospheric aerosol injection is the leading geoengineering proposal for a reason. If you have well-supported reasons to be skeptical, you should share it, but just saying "idk doesn't sound right to me" isn't convincing.
Even if it were meaningful, is the proposal to fight global warming to keep dirty ships? That’s an insane strategy.
More realistically, there’s vested interests in existing ships and shipyards not being made obsolete so any minute effect is overhyped as “this is how we solve global warming”.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an acquaintance - he was convinced that anthropogenic global warming was impossible because a volcanic eruption emits so much CO2 and was completely unwilling to consider evidence that perhaps humans emitting annually 200x more than all volcanoes combined might have an effect.
The amount of aerosol you need to I next is enormous, it needs to be sprayed at an altitude higher than realistic means of injection are feasible, and it has to be done in a way that doesn’t produce so much CO2 that it defeats the point.
Can you imagine an extant tech that can come close to doing that at the required scale? I can’t.
Is there a real practical solution to this? It seems like all proposed solutions in last 40 years are a drop in the ocean, or just a money grab scams. Only thing that really worked for such global scale is the ozone layer repair. Global warming/climate change I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
Which was, stop using CFCs, and stop venting them into the atmosphere to "dispose" of them. We also stopped lighting rivers on fire for mostly the same reasons, stop dumping industrial waste in them.
> I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
Ocean shipping produces more pollution than most countries. There are only like 5 countries that produce more carbon than the worldwide shipping fleet. If they cared then "cheap crap from China" wouldn't exist.
It's a scam. They want to monopolize the economy and they're using your environmental consciousness as the wedge to push you against your own best interests.
There are a lot of money scams out there to be sure.
It's unlikely that something like carbon capture will ever significantly reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. It's just too energy intensive.
But there are a lot of practical solutions to significantly curb emissions that mostly just require regulations and taxes.
Things like building out rail transport. Heavily taxing air travel. Taxing all forms of carbon emission (fuel taxes would be pretty effective). Subsidizing non-co2 emissions, pushing for electrification when possible and power generation which uses non-CO2 emission. Stop wasteful pipedreams like "clean coal". Force data centers to be better citizens. For example, make them buy the battery/solar systems to offset their consumption. Make them participate in district heating schemes.
There's also some hope that even without intervention some of this will happen somewhat naturally. Solar and battery is already very cheap. Both are causing changes in the shipping and transit equations.
Plenty of solutions, but politicians will never make it happen.
We calculated that capping personal emissions (mostly doable via peer pressure should we get this moving as normal people) to some top 1 percent 25 metric carbon ton and going plant based would get us net-zero while additionally getting rid of the zillionaire problem and adding extra 50-100 gigaton rewilding effect to the table.
With no bigger than marginal effect on anyone's QOL.
But we're SOL as the propaganda machines of the zillionaires keep dividing normal people to fake dichotomies.
Yes, we got to adapt, we won't cool it down and "repair" what is broken.
However we can slow down the effects and try to stop the effects. So it's "only" 1.5° or whatever, not 3°, 5° or 10°. And if we raise average by 10° at least not by the years 2100, but 2200 to give time to adapt.
"Adapting" means resettling people, restructuring agriculture and food production, etc.
(All numbers are quite arbitrary picks, just as any goal one tried to set before)
Our politicians are already thinking about them, which is why they are cracking down on immigration and generating relentless propaganda demonizing refugees and asylum seekers.
Before areas become completely uninhabitable, we will see areas become increasingly stressed: heat waves, more extreme weather events, poorer crop yields, depleting aquifers.
Stress increases conflict risk. Fights for essential resources (land, water, food, shelter) will break out long before those essential resources are completely gone.
If we skip past the immense suffering and death part, we will probably end up on a planet where national borders have been redrawn by war and desperation, and a smaller population that lives in more northerly climes.
I heard about this[1] recently, essentially spurring a massive plankton bloom to capture carbon where it ends up on the sea floor and becomes future oil deposits in a few millenia.
The nice thing about it is that it doesn't require global cooperation.
Nobody has to "like" them. The centralized command and control structure is mostly in place to just force them down everyone's throats. Once we have centralized digital currency it will be a foregone conclusion
How will a centralized digital currency affect whether I decide to burn carbon fuels? If it gets obnoxious enough I can just use a different currency instead.
As with most difficult problems, this is a messy political problem, not a technical one. There is zero chance we avoid 1.5C gain. The best you can do is make life decisions for yourself to make your lifetime as comfortable for you as you can, assuming it will happen. I started doing that 5 years ago.
Technologically practical? Certainly. Kick renewables and electrification into high gear. Treat it like the emergency that it is.
Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.
Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.
I'm not sure what we should do, it's very hard to determine what minimizes harm and maximizes benefits at a global scale. It's certainly not as simple as extremists would like to believe. Certainly it would be much (MUCH) less risky to slow warming as much as possible and maintain constant or slowly reducing CO2 levels.
I think from the standpoint of predicting what will happen, my best guess is that people will use fossil fuels until it is economically not viable to do so. If you want hasten it at an individual level, buy solar panels and have your house disconnected from the grid until fees you pay no longer subsidize fossil fuels. Frown at people and refuse to give them positive social cues when they buy a car that isn't electric. Instead of "oh nice car" just say "it would be so cool if they had a plugin version!". Support electrification of things like heat and water heating so long as it can be powered by non-fossil sources.
In the long run I think solar power, effective battery technology, and the peaking of the global population combine to cause fossil fuel usage to reduce over the next 100 years or so until CO2 levels stabilize. Lots of large CO2 emitters are already leveling off - the output is too high to sustain but at least it's no longer increasing year over year - such as from cement production.
Honestly it's not much but that's what you can do, larger social movements and political action do not work when someone's decision is whether to spend $800 a month or $100 a month to heat their house. Anyone who says it does should buy a thermometer, but instead they will get a plane ticket to the next big city to run around in the street yelling at police (literally the only people paid to not care about your slogans) while nobody really notices.
If we are in overshoot scenario even reducing emissions may not be enough. There are warming gases currently trapped in permafrost, the natural carbon storage capacity is very dynamic, so global warming may target new (worse) equilibrium beyond what we think we can achieve in best case scenario.
Electric cars are the savior of the auto industry, not of the climate. It needs to become viable for most people to get around without cars at all. The intensity of their resource consumption, both for manufacture and for infrastructure, independent of their fuel source, cannot scale up for the world population.
Were you aware that the last time the planet was estimated to have co2 levels over 420ppm the global temperature was 10 degrees Celsius warmer overall? This is the global equilvant of being locked in a car in a sunlit parking lot.
A change in attitudes is not enough. Structural change is needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, the population is unable to achieve results.
The population is achieving results. Most of these results are occurring in China, which has begun an unimaginably huge deployment of renewables and nuclear. Europe is also making progress. The rest of Asia will go next, and then (as it develops industrially) so will Africa. Even parts of North America will quickly electrify: for example, Canada just agreed to reduce tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6% from 100%.
Our ecological goals are to make biosphere damage scarce, but our economic practices aim to make scarce things plentiful. We need something to balance out the effects of scarcity-based economics.
In the very fun board game ‘Evolution : Climate’ you “breed” animals designed to survive the climate conditions on the board. One strategy is to switch to breeding ‘carnivores’ that then can feast on the creations of other players. They downside tho is that once other players evolve their animals to have carnivore protections (fight back, scales, protective shells etc) the carnivores start to quickly starve and that player must quickly change out of this eat everything strategy back to a more sustainable strategy.
In a similar way I think what works is to push back against growth only and growth at all costs approaches and back practises and models and communities that are working in other ways.
The trouble is, when I receive my paycheck, it just comes as "dollars". I don't know whether my employer got them by providing services to communities which are working in other ways, or whether they come from more nefarious behavior--and I have no way to refuse one sort but accept the other.
The kind of community action you're describing happens, but we need to find ways to help it scale.
I can't think of a single time in history that humanity responded to a threat in a fully coordinated manner. Maybe this is the first time, but the incentive stack from the individual voter all the way up to geopolitical grand strategy argues against it.
Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.
We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.
nevermind satellites, just diff the temp records from say, 1950-2000 and the ones reporting that data today and there's a lot of jank. urbanization around the thermometers also makes it appear as though global temperatures are rising, but all the data really says is that cities are heat islands.
first order: verify satellite data. Secondly, move all sensors to locations where they are unaffected by heat islanding and other man-made influences.
yes, if a city gets hotter in temperature because it grows, that obviously is a concern, but it doesn't affect people in the countryside, or on the other side of the planet, etc. (1/1000th as much if anything, i'll hedge).
the second thing will never happen. I am sure someone will reply why it's literally impossible and stupid to put thermometers someplace where the weather is natural. Because if we did move all of the sensors, suddenly there wouldn't appear to be any 1.5C change or anything, and there's thousands of egos at stake, here.
If you initially make factually wrong comment then you should at least apologize and say that you are sorry for being wrong, not keep pushing your agenda further.
Your behaviour is both incorrect (you were shown at the specific place) and intentional (you have ignored that). So, I have downvoted all your posts in this topic because I have observed the efficiency of the correct words to your ignorance. Usually I am glad to argue about the climate topic, but sometimes downvotes work better.
Ironically enough, as climate change becomes worse, we here in Europe might ironically end up with a way colder climate due to the melting ice caps especially in the Arctic disrupting the Gulf Stream among other things.
Also, this kind of "how can climate change be real since it's winter, snowy, and cold" is a climate change denier take. I'd refrain from it if I were you.
It's probably the fact that you created two accounts in 30 mins to astroturf/troll a thread about climate change which is an actual, measurable phenomenon.
What would you explain? Alarmism needs exaggerated alarm, which isn't found in the earlier comment. One could project their own worries about a warming globe onto the comment, perhaps, but that alarm would stem from within oneself, not the comment. Another might see a warming globe as the best thing that could ever happen and there is nothing in said comment that would dismiss that.
It wasn’t auto censored. And you didn’t explain anything, you made a silly and provably false statement and were understandably downvoted almost immediately. Just like if you were to claim the moon landing was faked.
The presence of hyperactive censors has no bearing on the truth of whatever claim they're censoring. People like to steer whether or not they know where they're going.
Your flagged comment goes beyond claiming alarmism (i.e. exaggeration) on the part of others. It's conspiratorial in tone and uses an unnecessary insult.
You are free to say whatever you want. Society is free to dismiss your factually incorrect statements. That isn’t censorship, nobody is required to listen to your nonsense or give you a platform to spout it.
Ok, so why not just be specific? “On record” usually means since we started recording history , at least 5k years ago.
And have you looked into the records? satellite surface temps and high resolution recording have not been around for very long. 1880 methods were very crude and narrowly scoped.
and scientists edit the historical temperatures because of, and i hope you can see my eyeroll here "anomalous readings" - but they're overwhelmingly erroneous in only one direction. that's strange.
That’s not the raw data. The original recordings were made by merchants on parchment. They measured the volume of water in a wooden box, to set the buoyancy for their loads
Hah. Shall I present it to you on a silver platter then?
If you read the NASA page, they explicitly cite GHCNd, a raw surface temperature and precipitation dataset that goes back quite far. There's many other similar datasets you can find if you're willing to look.
Check out the readme for the csv format description, and /by-year for the raw rows:
There are tons of raw data available freely and publicly. In my estimation, there is no comparable scientific discipline with a better curated data environment.
What exact raw data would you want? I am sure ChatGPT can throw together some python that will download the relevant data.
you're right this is much to complicated and important for anyone to understand. just take our word for it that we have to make things more expensive, raise taxes, and restrict freedoms to fix it.
30 years later it looks like he was right.
It's a ways outside of town
But the distance has its uses
Close enough to make the effort
Far enough to make excuses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZXgl5KxUQY
“Close enough to feel achievable” is a bug, not a feature.
This.
Then nothing.
My guess is we passed the tipping point. It's inevitable by now.
February 29, 2024 - 2023 was the warmest year on Earth since direct observations began, and the first year to exceed 1.5 °C above our 1850-1900 average. ...
Then I'd be far more worried about nuclear war than minor temperature excursions. Aside from that "non recoverable" damage happens every day. What do you think mining is?
> Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
On average it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler last year than it was the previous where I live in northern CA.
More realistically, there’s vested interests in existing ships and shipyards not being made obsolete so any minute effect is overhyped as “this is how we solve global warming”.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an acquaintance - he was convinced that anthropogenic global warming was impossible because a volcanic eruption emits so much CO2 and was completely unwilling to consider evidence that perhaps humans emitting annually 200x more than all volcanoes combined might have an effect.
Can you imagine an extant tech that can come close to doing that at the required scale? I can’t.
Which was, stop using CFCs, and stop venting them into the atmosphere to "dispose" of them. We also stopped lighting rivers on fire for mostly the same reasons, stop dumping industrial waste in them.
> I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
Ocean shipping produces more pollution than most countries. There are only like 5 countries that produce more carbon than the worldwide shipping fleet. If they cared then "cheap crap from China" wouldn't exist.
It's a scam. They want to monopolize the economy and they're using your environmental consciousness as the wedge to push you against your own best interests.
It's unlikely that something like carbon capture will ever significantly reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. It's just too energy intensive.
But there are a lot of practical solutions to significantly curb emissions that mostly just require regulations and taxes.
Things like building out rail transport. Heavily taxing air travel. Taxing all forms of carbon emission (fuel taxes would be pretty effective). Subsidizing non-co2 emissions, pushing for electrification when possible and power generation which uses non-CO2 emission. Stop wasteful pipedreams like "clean coal". Force data centers to be better citizens. For example, make them buy the battery/solar systems to offset their consumption. Make them participate in district heating schemes.
There's also some hope that even without intervention some of this will happen somewhat naturally. Solar and battery is already very cheap. Both are causing changes in the shipping and transit equations.
Plenty of solutions, but politicians will never make it happen.
We calculated that capping personal emissions (mostly doable via peer pressure should we get this moving as normal people) to some top 1 percent 25 metric carbon ton and going plant based would get us net-zero while additionally getting rid of the zillionaire problem and adding extra 50-100 gigaton rewilding effect to the table.
With no bigger than marginal effect on anyone's QOL.
But we're SOL as the propaganda machines of the zillionaires keep dividing normal people to fake dichotomies.
However we can slow down the effects and try to stop the effects. So it's "only" 1.5° or whatever, not 3°, 5° or 10°. And if we raise average by 10° at least not by the years 2100, but 2200 to give time to adapt.
"Adapting" means resettling people, restructuring agriculture and food production, etc.
(All numbers are quite arbitrary picks, just as any goal one tried to set before)
Stress increases conflict risk. Fights for essential resources (land, water, food, shelter) will break out long before those essential resources are completely gone.
If we skip past the immense suffering and death part, we will probably end up on a planet where national borders have been redrawn by war and desperation, and a smaller population that lives in more northerly climes.
I'm sad all ocean megafauna are going to be extinct.
The nice thing about it is that it doesn't require global cooperation.
[1]https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/the-no-bullshit-way-to-...
Edit: I should probably link where I heard about it to give credit to someone who deserves it
https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/p/the-climat...
Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.
Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.
I think from the standpoint of predicting what will happen, my best guess is that people will use fossil fuels until it is economically not viable to do so. If you want hasten it at an individual level, buy solar panels and have your house disconnected from the grid until fees you pay no longer subsidize fossil fuels. Frown at people and refuse to give them positive social cues when they buy a car that isn't electric. Instead of "oh nice car" just say "it would be so cool if they had a plugin version!". Support electrification of things like heat and water heating so long as it can be powered by non-fossil sources.
In the long run I think solar power, effective battery technology, and the peaking of the global population combine to cause fossil fuel usage to reduce over the next 100 years or so until CO2 levels stabilize. Lots of large CO2 emitters are already leveling off - the output is too high to sustain but at least it's no longer increasing year over year - such as from cement production.
Honestly it's not much but that's what you can do, larger social movements and political action do not work when someone's decision is whether to spend $800 a month or $100 a month to heat their house. Anyone who says it does should buy a thermometer, but instead they will get a plane ticket to the next big city to run around in the street yelling at police (literally the only people paid to not care about your slogans) while nobody really notices.
Our ecological goals are to make biosphere damage scarce, but our economic practices aim to make scarce things plentiful. We need something to balance out the effects of scarcity-based economics.
In a similar way I think what works is to push back against growth only and growth at all costs approaches and back practises and models and communities that are working in other ways.
The kind of community action you're describing happens, but we need to find ways to help it scale.
Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.
We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/glob...
first order: verify satellite data. Secondly, move all sensors to locations where they are unaffected by heat islanding and other man-made influences.
yes, if a city gets hotter in temperature because it grows, that obviously is a concern, but it doesn't affect people in the countryside, or on the other side of the planet, etc. (1/1000th as much if anything, i'll hedge).
the second thing will never happen. I am sure someone will reply why it's literally impossible and stupid to put thermometers someplace where the weather is natural. Because if we did move all of the sensors, suddenly there wouldn't appear to be any 1.5C change or anything, and there's thousands of egos at stake, here.
Also, this kind of "how can climate change be real since it's winter, snowy, and cold" is a climate change denier take. I'd refrain from it if I were you.
Yes, really.
The warmest recent years (e.g., 2022, 2023, 2024) rank among the highest average temperatures on record for Germany.
The rate of warming in recent decades is stronger than the global average, with Germany seeing about 0.38 °C per decade (1971–2022).
.... and other similar statistics. Look up.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folgen_der_globalen_Erwärmung_...
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hasanabi
Edit: this one too? https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=doktor2un
You scream with your brand new account that only talks in conspiratorial tones about how climate change isn't dangerous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46660300
The Economist used to be a good publication until McElthwaite left for Bloomberg about 10-12 years ago.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/glob...
And have you looked into the records? satellite surface temps and high resolution recording have not been around for very long. 1880 methods were very crude and narrowly scoped.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/graph_data/Global_...
If you read the NASA page, they explicitly cite GHCNd, a raw surface temperature and precipitation dataset that goes back quite far. There's many other similar datasets you can find if you're willing to look.
Check out the readme for the csv format description, and /by-year for the raw rows:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/
are you sure you linked what you think you linked?
What exact raw data would you want? I am sure ChatGPT can throw together some python that will download the relevant data.
Would you like more, or do you plan on analyzing the first few petabytes first?