
IPCC: Climate scientists consider ‘life changing’ report - Kemet
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45653099
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Sol-
I guess governments will just skip the prevention step when they realize their
own inaction made that impossible and just try to find ways to adapt to the
inevitable changes instead. There's pretty much no way, purely for
political/human reasons, that keeping the temperatures below 2 or even 3
degrees seems feasible at that point, so humanity will just have to deal with
it and adapt over the next century. Shame about the planet and the natural
ecosystem, though.

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ced
Right. We'll claim it's too late to "prevent global warming", keep our
lifestyle exactly the same because it's "radical" to suggest otherwise, and
shoot for +5 degrees in 50 years instead of stabilizing at +2/+3.

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Daishiman
The only reason it's controversial is because all prior reports have been
retouched by lobbyist and politicians who wanted to play down the effort.

Hope for the best and prepare for the worst, but worst increasingly looks like
an extinction-level oceanic anoxia event.

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CalRobert
It always seems odd to me that people still plan their lives as though the
world fifty years from now will be basically the same as now. I hope they're
right, to be honest. But we're talking 3+c warming (5.4F) and that could be
horrific. I guess it's nice if you want a winery in Norway but that's small
comfort.

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lazyjones
I don‘t like alarmism. Most of it is simply proven wrong in the long term.
People are good at adapting most of the time. For example, I got myself air
conditioning in a country famous for skiing. People in poor countries will
probably suffer much more, but they need to tackle their population growth
issues anyway. In essence, there are life-changing problems affecting us every
day (who would have thought 50 years ago that we‘d need barriers againt car
attacks at all major public events?), don‘t obsess over one thing like some
sort of religious freak („the end is nigh...“).

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dm319
I think alarmism is a retrospective assessment. We can probably say a lot of
our reporting on current Western terrorism is alarmist - numbers wise, it
didn't compare to road deaths or regular shootings.

But global warming will be/is unprecedented and will affect the whole world.
Immediate action is unlikely to reverse this process either.

Your comment about population growth issues is disgusting.

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lazyjones
> _We can probably say a lot of our reporting on current Western terrorism is
> alarmist - numbers wise, it didn 't compare to road deaths or regular
> shootings_

Because we have adapted. But how many are affected by the terror it involves?
Terrorism = terrorizing people, not just murdering them.

> _But global warming will be /is unprecedented_

Erm, no.

[https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-
hotte...](https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-
earths-ever-been)

~~~
rotw
> Erm, no.

Why do you bother commenting on this if you just flat-out refuse to accept
scientific evidence _in the original post?_

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lancewiggs
Nothing is more important than getting our reaction to climate change right.
It’s so frustrating that so few genuinely helpful companies are emerging out
of our ecosystem.

We can and must do better. And quickly.

~~~
Simon_says
Even in the worst case scenario, global warming will not annihilate the human
species. AI, nanotechnology, weaponized bioweapons, nuclear war, asteroid
impacts, or alien contact could all potentially wipe out humanity.

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fabricexpert
Probably unlikely that those will wipe out humanity, at least we don't have
any concrete evidence or examples of them (e.g. we have't built an AI that can
do much yet, we don't have nanotech that will self replicate and kill us all,
aliens have yet to show up etc.). Bioweapons seems unlikely to end humanity as
someone will win the war, and personally I think MAD prevents widespread use.

The only thing in your list that does make sense is an asteroid impact, which
we don't have much say over.

With climate change we know a) it's happening, b) it's going to affect us in
some pretty major ways and c) we can do something about it.

None of those hold true for your points.

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Simon_says
> Bioweapons seems unlikely to end humanity ...

I was more thinking an infectious agent that's modified to be particularly
deadly.

I believe that the second law of thermodynamics implies with high probability
that humanity will not last forever, so I don't think it's that unlikely that
_something_ will wipe us out.

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tumetab1
Weird quotes from the article:

> In this case, there are 86 lead authors from 39 countries, of which 39% are
> female.

> These researchers, who are unpaid, have reviewed the available scientific
> literature on the feasibility, impacts and costs of staying under 1.5C.

> "If one can imagine the governments holding the hands of the scientists,
> this means you don't know how science works!"

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antientropic
What is weird about them?

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glenra
The entire article reads like a blog post. It obviously wasn't written by a
news writer or edited by a news editor - there are grammar issues and tonal
issues and sourcing issues.

Does the BBC now have something like the Fortune "Contributor's Network" \- a
group of random bloggers who get to write under their domain _as if_ they were
BBC writers, weakening the brand but bringing in more click revenue? That'd be
my guess as to what's happening here.

Regarding just the first sentence example:

> _In this case, there are 86 lead authors from 39 countries, of which 39% are
> female_.

The sentence structure suggests it's the _countries_ rather than the _authors_
who are female. The clause is misplaced and "of which" applies to things not
people ("of whom" would have been better). Basically the writer wanted to cram
in a bit of extra information, couldn't figure out where or how to do so
gracefully and grammatically, yet stuck it in anyway.

~~~
growlist
Blame falling standards in UK education, and the fact that bright kids don't
go into the media any more. A 2:2 in media studies from an ex-poly and this is
what you get.

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Nursie
I still frequently encounter people who consider the whole thing either a
conspiracy or an outright lie, a way to bring America down, or some sort of
left-wing class war in the UK, or all sorts of other bizarre things.

I even encountered one commenter recently who claimed that we fundamentally
misunderstand the action of gasses in a a gravity field, and he was going to
single-handedly prove it all wrong (and invent a source of free energy at the
same time).

With this, and the long-term nature of the problem meaning that the can can
always be kicked just a little further down the road, I'm not surprised that
little gets achieved.

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jeletonskelly
Can we make significant progress in carbon capture technologies within the
next 20 years that would not require such dramatic changes to society?

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avmich
According to Wikipedia, Earth atmosphere weights about 5e18 kg. A m^3 of air
is alightly above 1,2 kg under normal conditions.

Suppose that on average each person from the most resourceful 1 billion people
on Earth installs a device for air cleaning. The machine sucks air in, removes
CO2 and releases the clean air. The device works using renewable energy, so by
itself it doesn't contribute additional CO2 to the atmosphere. Suppose we want
to remove 10% of CO2 from air, or in other words we want to pass 10% of Earth
atmosphere through such cleaning devices. The year has about 365 * 24 * 3600
seconds, so to have those 10% in 10 years each device has to process 5e18 /
1e9 / 365 / 24 / 3600 / 10 / 10 = 1.6 m^3 of air per second.

This is not a small number, yet it's not immediately obvious why this isn't
possible. For example, energy requirements can be small, because the device
effectively doesn't change the bulk of the air. 10 years isn't that much
comparing with the speed of raising air temperature. Cost of such a device
could be perhaps smaller than a modest car. We still have option to deploy
more devices, to separately clean ocean water etc. This is largely technical
and not political solution.

What's wrong with this approach?

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4dahalibut
1\. Cost to produce devices 2\. Assumes perfect processing rate 3\. That seems
like quite a lot of air. For reference, a 52 in ceiling fan does 2.8 , and
you're talking about pushing air through some type of filter probably

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chinamarriage
A key factor contributing to climate change is the number of people weighted
by energy consumption.

Should governments in rich countries encourage people to have fewer kids or
otherwise constrain their life choices in various other ways? This goes
against liberal values. What do most progressives think?

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garmaine
That's not a causal relationship.

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XorNot
Also most western countries are in negative population growth sans
immigration.

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growlist
I think I can live with the drastic changes. Can the elite?

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claydavisss
Yet I doubt even these scientists have engaged in radically rewriting their
lifestyles to reduce climate impact. If they had, they would have video
conferenced instead of flying to Korea.

Basically no one in the West other than the very poor live a low impact life.

In the US in particular, we are really only very good at telling others how
they should change. Case in point was the "March For Science" that took place
a while back...in San Jose the parking for the event was full of giant
SUVs...yet they all seemed so angry.

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2sk21
Carbon pricing is probably the only way to effect a change in behavior.

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claydavisss
Doubt it, most in the West can afford moderate price spikes, and anything more
profound will be viewed as job-killing. Indeed this was the exact response
from Jerry Brown when asked about more impactful carbon taxation...he
specifically stated that he refused to put "10 million people out of work".

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tobyhinloopen
I guess I'll be investing in building houses on Antarctica or something. Oh
wait, it will still be dark there the majority of the winter... hmm...

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tqkxzugoaupvwqr
Too shortsighted. You also need to invest in housing in the Arctic region, as
well as in shuttling between the Arctic region and Antarctica. The inhabitants
will likely want to move to their summer home every half year.

