
Why Half a Degree of Global Warming Is a Big Deal - murph37
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-report-half-degree.html
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hakcermani
IMHO its high time for a Global Warming temp scale (Dear Al Gore, I said it
first !) People don't get it when the degree shift needed is so tiny for such
catastrophic effects. We need to magnify it by 100 or maybe even a 1000! So 2
degrees temp change is like GW200. Maybe the message will hit home better ?

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drewrv
A metric I've thought about is, how much extra energy is circulating in earths
systems per degree of temp change? 2 degrees does not sound like a lot but
when you think of how vast the earth is that's a lot of extra energy in the
oceans and atmosphere. It would be an interesting metric to track.

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lozenge
One website tracked Hiroshima bombs worth of heat (4 per second). It was
perhaps tasteless.

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calebh
News agencies need to stop reporting global warming temperatures in Celsius
for US audiences. A single Fahrenheit degree is 5/9 of a Celsius degree! US
audiences do not have an intuition about Celsius, so giving changes in that
unit of measurement is worthless.

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singularity2001
they should use Kelvin, it's neutral

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QML
But Celsius and Kelvin have the same unit of measure; they’re only offsetted
by 273 degrees.

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singularity2001
yes I tried to sneak in °C via °K :)

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douglaswlance
Ok. The Earth is warming and all this bad stuff will happen. Why is government
the solution? The USA withdrew from the Paris Accord and also had the biggest
diminishment of greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 of all Accord members. We did
so by market forces which push for efficiency.

The way to solve global warming is to support market forces pushing for
efficiency, not government force that supports inefficiency.

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saudioger
Individuals don't care about efficiency, they care about price. This is
partially why the government had to step in to create labor laws. Unless
they're directly impacted by it right now, the average consumer does not care.
The American meat industry is downright terrible in some cases, and people are
buying more meat than ever.

If you halved the price of the iPhone by introducing slave labor in some
faraway land, you would still sell a boatload of iPhones.

This is one of the ways that I believe government should intervene because
individuals are very bad at deciding based on long-term impacts.

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douglaswlance
Individuals do care about efficiency, because they care about paying less in
their electric bill.

How did the USA lower emissions the _most_ in 2017 while also withdrawing from
the Paris Climate Accord? Because efficiency is increasing across the board
and people are buying more efficient devices.

If you produced lab-grown meat that was undistinguishable and utilized energy
more efficiently, then it would be less expensive and people would buy it.

~~~
saudioger
Individuals only care about efficiency if it impacts price.

There are numerous examples of people paying more for things in the long term
because they're less expensive immediately. Entire industries are built on
this. Again, humans aren't particularly good at forecasting long-term
decisions.

Additionally, The VAST majority of emission decrease in the past 10 years in
the US has been due to moving from coal to shale gas, not because of
individual purchasing decisions. It's iterative movement that was caused by a
combination of market forces and government regulations, not one or the other
on its own (and the current administration is actually reversing many
regulations that promoted shale gas over coal).

Renewables still don't even touch the impacts of moving from coal to shale
gas.

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at-fates-hands
Dire consequences of Global Warming have been forecast since the first earth
day in 1970:

 _" Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the
history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food
shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation
into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic,
think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade
of the 1980s."_

 _— Paul Ehrlich_

 _" The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present
trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global
mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is
about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age."_

 _— Kenneth Watt_

The fact is, we've had 70+ temperature swings in the last 4,500 years,
including 2 since 1970. It's odd we talk about catastrophic things happening
when the earth warms, but what about the dire consequences when it starts to
cool again?

A Swelling Volume Of Scientific Papers Now Forecasting Global Cooling In The
Coming Decades:

[http://notrickszone.com/2017/04/10/a-swelling-volume-of-
scie...](http://notrickszone.com/2017/04/10/a-swelling-volume-of-scientific-
papers-now-forecasting-global-cooling-in-the-coming-decades/)

~~~
good_gnu
What you see here is a common argumentative tactic by climate change deniers:
"Scientists have been hysterical about global cooling in the past and that has
not happened. Therefore claims about climate change in general are not to be
believed."

I refer you to the wikipedia article on global cooling for reference.
Especially take into consideration the line chart at the very top.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling)

With regards to the Paul Ehrlich quote I would add that he is not actually
talking about climate change at all but overpopulation.

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at-fates-hands
> "Scientists have been hysterical about global cooling in the past and that
> has not happened. Therefore claims about climate change in general are not
> to be believed."

a. Not a climate denier

b. I never said anything like you are referring to. I never inferred that
since its cooling, climate change shouldn't be believed.

c. What I AM saying is the earth's temperature has swung in both directions in
a fairly cyclical manner for thousands of years before heavy industry. The
earth's temperature warmed when there weren't ANY humans on the planet.

Even going back some 1.2 milion years, scientists still are not sure what
caused the change:

 _" The Mid Pleistocene Transition is a most important and enigmatic time
interval in the more recent climate history of our planet," says Fischer.
Earth's climate naturally varies between times of warming and periods of
extreme cooling (ice ages) over thousands of years. Before the transition, the
period of variation was about 41 thousand years while afterwards it became 100
thousand years. "The reason for this change is not known."_

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105081228.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105081228.htm)

I would also add the Clean Air Act has done a ton to improve the US and the
amount of pollution they contribute.

[https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/progress-
cleaning...](https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/progress-cleaning-air-
and-improving-peoples-health#pollution)

We as a country can do a lot, but what about other developing countries? What
are they doing to help reduce pollution and greehouse gases? If we're doing
all we can, and other countries aren't following suit, then our gains become
minimal and the march towards this catastrophe will continue, unabated.

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wlll
It's pretty easy to find scientific papers that make the claim that solar
variation is likely to make a small difference compared to human cause climate
change.

> Any reduction in global mean near-surface temperature due to a future
> decline in solar activity is likely to be a small fraction of projected
> anthropogenic warming. - [Ineson, S.et al. Regional climate impacts of a
> possible future grand solar minimum -
> [https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8535](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8535)]

> We as a country can do a lot, but what about other developing countries?

It's a difficuly question, lead by example? Change anyway, because the more
time we have to develop countermeasures the smaller the magnitude of the
problem will peak at? I don't know, but waiting for all countries to fall into
line isn't going to work.

