Dismaying to see the reactions to this range from denial to complacency to wishful thinking.
Climate forcing has such momentum that it takes two decades for the full impact of emissions to be felt and many more for cascading impacts. The fires we're seeing? The droughts? The floods? That's from emissions from the early 2000s, before China and India embarked on rapid industrialization and growth of energy use, especially coal.
This isn't the apocalypse either. It's just something of a scale we've never faced in human records, like what the Mayans faced at the end of their civilization but global.
Do you have a rabbit hole entry point for the downfall of the Mayan civilization, specifically the climate factors? It's a civilization and series of events I know little about but is fascinating.
The end of the Classic period? Sure. The 200 year drought did not help by reducing agricultural capacity and the political upheaval tanked any ability to adapt of much of the cities.
But it was the resulting warfare from all that that really fucked then up.
But post-classical Mayan civilization was still healthy and large in scale. Just not the same kind of thing.
It would be a mistake to say their civilization ended then. It simply changed.
The Spanish killed it though. Killed it so systematically it became myth for centuries
Hm, I don't see the similarity then. The Spanish were deliberate and malicious. Climate change is a consequence of our own actions, although the accounting needs work.
How many predictions of "catastrophic climate change" have actually come true in the past few decades? Some of us have lived long enough to realise the truth.
MANY. This is the most annoying case of confirmation bias.
Climatologists make predictions in terms of probabilities. “If emissions go up X amount then we will see Y increase in likelihood of impact Z”. They can’t predict a specific future. Our climate is a single instantiation of many possible climates, and climate prediction is a matter of characterizing the possibilities.
The vast majority of predictions from actual climatologists has/is occurring. From increasing mean temperatures, to increasing hurricane intensity and frequency, to marine life impacts (eg Maine lobsters are migrating so far north they won’t be Maine lobsters soon), to decreasing sea ice, to innumerable ecological impacts. ALL of that was predicted. Accurate temperature predictions go back 150 years.
They can’t predict “sea ice will diminish to exactly this amount by year 2023,” they make probabilistic statements about how mean sea ice will decline per decade. They can’t say “in year 2040 all the lobsters will be gone,” they say the mean lobster population will migrate north to cooler water.
I assume you heard a few reporters make specific claims about a hurricane hitting your town or something, but they missed the point. Maybe you watched too many fictional movies. That line of reasoning is utter propaganda that you’re spreading. It’s antiscientific, unsubstantiated lies.
No one under the age of 40 has seen a record low month. The number if record highs continue to increase, year over year. The number of record lows continues to decrease, year over year. Average humidity increases year over year as the oceans warm.
And the oceans are warming as well.
The climate models Exxon ran in the 1980s predicting widespread warming were frighteningly accurate.
The only way you can rationally argue with the numbers is to provide measurements which indicate the opposite. But you can’t, so you question the motives of those who chose wisdom over polemics.
Up here in the Canada we see record lows too. But we also see record highs. The instability of the jet stream makes both our extremes more so, and we get hit with the bad conditions on both ends.
Yes, some of us have lived long enough to realize the truth; The truth is that those scientists decades ago who warned us all about exactly the things we see in the news daily these days were right then, and still right today. We should have taken action then instead of wasting decades allowing the problem to get so far out of control.
Not many. We’ve consistently overshoot worst case predictions.
Many of the heat waves, hurricanes and first fires we’ve seen weren’t predicted to occur until 2030s.
People in North America and Europe of course enjoy the best climate and see the effects the slowest from climate change.
One way to accurately judge climate change is to count the number and frequency of extreme events. How many 100 year weather events have you seen? How many 500 or 1000 year weather events have you seen? How many once in human history, like the drought in China have you lived through?
The fact that North America and Europe enjoy the best climate is predicated on the Gulf Stream and the Jet Stream. Given that climate change may destabilize both, both Europe and North America may experience the effects from climate change very quickly.
The thing that is most difficult for people to understand is that this drastically increases risks in the long tails of climate events and you only need two or three of those to significantly destabilize human society.
We have an ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine where one of the largest grain exporters is blockaded. This year's record-hot summer in Argentina halved crop yields. If you were to combine just one or two more events like these in a year you have a substantial price increase in staple foods, which is known to trigger massive geopolitical events with impacts that last years.
Systems are resilient until enough of the foundation is chipped away, then they collapse suddenly. We are really toying with our destinies in a way few people are truly aware of.
If humanity was smart, one month every year would be a quiet month with travel banned, and one year every twelve years would be a quiet year. But humanity as a whole is still dumb as rock, it can't stop its own urges even for a moment.
Nothing stops you from spending a day to watch some decent documentary that shows what was before and after. Tabloids, with cheap screaming titles, don't give a shit about climate, they just monetize on hype, but the hype is based on reality in this case.
If you can state that with such confidence, can you also elaborate as to what they’re caused by and how their severity is unrelated to elevated temperatures?
There was that subreddit, r/hermancainaward, where you could spend all day reading tales of people who weren't afraid of Covid, until they were. Then they died.
I guess we're in agreement. It's terrifying because we're not making reasonable decisions to mitigate the risks.
I'm a rock climber and I've gotten into enough tricky situations on the cliffs. So long as you can take action the fear is manageable. It's when there is seemingly no viable action to take that the bad fear sets in.
Thing is, the risks I take personally as a climber aren't as big as the risk were taking collectively as a civilization by not acting on climate change, even though the risks I take go well beyond what most people would accept if they understand what they were in for.
We are most certainly not in agreement. You implied that one had to live in fear of covid in order to make rational choices about it.
I mean it's okay that you were, you don't have to do the macho act to save face or anything. It's a very common response even irrational fear (and is unfortunately exploited). I was not saying that's the "wrong" way to feel or live, just that it saddens me to think of people feeling like that.
If you were 70+ then COVID was far more likely to kill your than driving. But most of us weren’t 70+ and couldn’t really empathize with those that were.
You got that right. I inform myself, I empathize with people, and I don't live in fear of things largely out of my control. Millions of people including my loved ones and likely I will die of a heart attack or cancer. Millions of elderly including my loved ones are at risk of flu and other common illnesses, falls, etc. Countless young (and old) people will die of auto wrecks and violence. The sun will strip the atmosphere off the earth in a few billion years. I simply don't live my life terrified about all these things. Just because you do doesn't mean you also have to get angry at people who don't, or try and fail to shame them -- not to scare you more but it's bad for your blood pressure and stress levels.
There is a crucial difference though: you can't do anything about atmosphere being stripped but you definitely can reduce risks of getting the disease or dying once sick. And the most terrifying part for me was that maybe I could have done something to help other people but didn't
That's not a crucial difference for me when you include all my other examples. There are things you might or could have done, but it's not reasonable to think you can make perfect decisions. Life is full of ifs and buts. There might be some path in life I could take from here that would lead to malaria being eradicated. I simply don't feel the need to live in fear of any of it. Covid, malaria, driving, McDonalds, climate change. Strike 2 for attempted shaming though.
Well none of it is going to affect you personally so it makes sense. Grandma and grandpa were going to die sometime, and who cares if the grandchildren are going to have a hard existence because the world they will grow up in is much more harsher than ours? We probably won’t see substantial consequences of our actions in our lifetime, so why not YOLO? Only if there is really a God would we see any kind of punishment for this attitude.
But still, if you had some empathy for those who are older or much younger (not even born yet), their would be a lot of guilt in this thinking, the shame would be deserved.
Such a bitter angry hateful sad way to go about your life. Wishing for god to punish people for not being a mopey sad sack like you are. Lot of projecting in your comment I'm afraid, none of it applies to me despite your seething armchair psychology.
I was sincere in my comment. I don't wish punishment for anything, and I'm pretty much an atheist when it comes to God (so eternal punishment isn't waiting for anyone who doesn't "do the right thing"). I'm not projecting at all, and since you are a throwaway account, I'm pretty sure you aren't here to do much more than troll anyways. It just is what it is: some people care about the future, others just care about YOLO, just lots of self gratification I guess.
You might want to consider whether to have children though, they change the way you think about the future.
I was sincere too. Hope you manage to cheer up and stop being so scared and hateful one day and wishing for god to smite people for not being the same way you are.
It's just the bunny slopes or foothills of extremist signalling, having to demonstrate that you're the sort of person who doesn't get upset at the things that cause other people grief and despair (which of course you take every opportunity to exaggerate) with the presumable but unspoken conclusion that you're the AntiSnowflake gifted with exceptional reserves of mental fortitude or maturity. Like bullshiting, these positions don't care whether the arguments they are contradicting are right or wrong, they only care that it in opposing them they can project an image of cool unconcern.
This is what being an internet tough guy has sunk to in the age of twitter.
Not living in terror and despair of things that are largely outside my control = extremist? Maybe it is you who is the extremist.
Living in fear, anger, a strange frothing hatred for people who are different. If anybody would appreciate why someone would not want to live their life that way, I'd think it would be you.
I'll answer this in good faith. I can't help but be skeptical yet practice a version of "pascals wager" but apply it to climate change. I drive an electric vehicle, power my house with solar, reduce air travel, etc. I have 2 major issues: The first is that the environmental damage we are currently doing-- destruction of our oceans, polluting our air and water, etc. will destroy our planet in a few generations any ways, climate change not required. Second is that I am skeptical of our governments response. I don't believe they genuinely care about solving it other than making money off it. Does it really matter if I am skeptical? I am doing what little a normal citizen is expected to do to fight it.
Air/ocean pollution and environmental damage !== climate change.
Climate change is specifically about greenhouse emissions trapping the suns heat causing long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns.
> It’s apathy
I am following the prescribed "action plan" for the average citizen. What would you have me do? Not everyone can be a political activist.
My point was that even in a hypothetical scenario where climate change is false (no rise in global temperatures or change in weather patterns), the damage we are doing to the earth is still enough to destroy it.
That is not why we would need such a thing. It's not necessary or sufficient to prevent terrified people living in perpetual fear of things politicians and experts tell them to be afraid of.
Rational and level headed efforts to tackle problems like climate change would be welcome. A great first step would be to vote out all politicians who use it for political games by riling up panic and then actually doing very little about it.
If you look specifically at Northern and Southern hemisphere temperatures it seems that the SH and more specifically Antarctica are where the spike is occurring.
The frustrating thing for me about climate change data is that anecdotally it doesn't correspond with my personal experiences over the past decade. This is particularly surprising given that I've lived in 3 different continents over multiple seasons and visited several others. With the exception of 1 particularly hot European summer (I think it was 2019), it has mostly been cooler than normal everywhere I've lived both in the southern and northern hemisphere. This winter in Australia has been one of the coldest I can remember and last summer was pleasantly cool... I was in central Queensland at the time which usually has quite hot summers. Before that, I was in Europe for half a decade and most of the people I know said the temperatures were normal or cold except for that one summer I mentioned.
Whenever I read articles about temperatures, the heat wave is always happening in some foreign country that I didn't visit.
That's to be expected, the global variation over the last 2 decades has been about .2-.3 celsius. That's very difficult to notice, and basically completely swamped by local variations (what is called weather, not climate).
The thing is climate change is an almost perfect example of the boiling frog parable. It occurs over several decades, just enough to cause skepticism or feelings of "it's not changing so quickly".
This rate however is probably almost without precedents geologically, save for extreme events like giant eruptions or something. It's hard for life to adapt this quickly, on top of the many other habitat pressures we've introduced. Also, there will be significant consequences for humans (which could be catastrophic and hard to predict if we don't limit warming to say 2C).
What frustrates me is that there's still significant resistance to not destroying our own home...
> It occurs over several decades, just enough to cause skepticism or feelings of "it's not changing so quickly".
It's also important to realize that this isn't all "natural" skepticism and there's plenty of money being thrown around to spread FUD about the causes, severity, and consequences of climate change.
Except it isn't blind and it isn't belief? A hypothesis that has been amply supported by decades of evidence of many forms is hardly a subject for "blind belief".
Consider the economics. There are HUGE companies with a history of influencing legislature, lobbying an lying to everyone, whose existence depends on us to continue not caring about climate change. People like us can hardly imagine the amount of money they are throwing at us in the form of marketing, lobbying, astroturfing, etc. They are literally making money off us not taking action.
Otoh, I cannot think of a single billion dollar company that got where it is by being climate friendly.
Media companies get views by being sensationalistic and spreading paranoia. Governments love that too, since it means another excuse they can use to enact more authoritarian policies. The Internet has taken that to the next level.
I'm not a fan of Greenpeace and I haven't checked their number here .. but it passes the "it'd be at least that much" test for order of magnitude:
Koch Family Foundations have spent $145,555,197 directly financing 90 groups that have attacked climate change science and policy solutions, from 1997-2018.
My main quibble is that as I've been around geophysical energy and mineral exploration since the 1980s I'd argue that Koch and Co. started funding anti-climate change think tanks and policy groups a lot earlier than 1997.
They've been prepackaging all manner of FUD talking points and passing them out to media groups for almost 50 years.
They torpedoed any chance of decent widespread public transport in the US, simply to keep the demand for individual freedom loving liberty driven gas guzzling high and profits flowing.
It's remarkable how easily led by the nose central north americans have been.
Based on the posts by denialists here repeating literally 30 year old paid for talking points—that we’ve had exposed in court filings—as of they were new or profound…?
> Also, there will be significant consequences for humans (which could be catastrophic and hard to predict if we don't limit warming to say 2C)
I have trouble visualizing what form the catastrophe would take. The worst I can imagine is global famine, is that what we are talking about here? Or rather local famine, acting as catalysts to civil unrest, wars etc?
Basically, I think the climate debate gets fuzzy here. Granted, just like you say, it gets hard to predict, but given that, what makes certain temperatures a threshold for disaster?
If oceans get too hot, fisheries will collapse and wreck coastal communities. Sea level rise will make storm surges worse and make "once in a lifetime" events more common.
This instability will drive a migration of people inland, essentially as ecological refugees.
Given that it's such a small change... Surely this is not a problem for our generation. It definitely does not appear to be a problem that's worth destroying financial opportunities on a massive scale and enabling totalitarian governments in the current era.
The way I see climate change activism is that elites want to fix the climate at the expense of the lower classes of society... In a time when wealth inequality is at an all time high and without the consent of the lower classes. This is incorrect.
First, we have to fix inequality problem so that the pain of the transition will fall more or less evenly on everyone's shoulders... Then once this is the case, everyone should have more time to think about climate problems and we can expect broad support.
Of course, 'we' will all be long dead by then. I feel totally fine and morally justified in leaving this problem to a future generation. Most people in my generation have way too many concrete personal problems concerning their own survival in a week's time to worry about abstract problems such as the survival of the human race in a few hundred years.
...Not to mention that in a few generations' time, if we focus on maximizing access to opportunities, through the resulting innovation, we will probably end up with extremely efficient renewable energy which will be able to fight climate change far more effectively with no sacrifices necessary.
It seems literally like a no-brainer to me to just let the free market do what it does best in terms of innovation. Shut down government money printers and dismantle policies that are harmful to the free market and which centralize opportunities and create tech monopolies to control the masses. That's not the way. It needs to be done honestly.
What's the point of even allowing the human race to survive if it turns the global economy into a squid game and only the most dishonest, manipulative people will remain?
It's interesting you chose the boiling frog parable because it's a fallacy. Skeptics contend that climate change will not precipitate an abrupt catastrophe; rather, humanity will simply adapt to it.
To illustrate, the Earth's temperature has already risen by approximately 1 degree since the inception of industrialization, yet our lives have arguably improved significantly during this period. Would we willingly forsake the past century of human progress to revert the global temperature back by that single degree? This seems improbable, and yet it is a viewpoint advocated by certain climate change alarmists who propose concepts like degrowth.
I've seen people claim that slowing down or stopping economic (or even reversing, but I admit this position is rarer) progress was an acceptable tradeoff to counter global warming. Almost all solutions proposed by climate alarmists follow this pattern, albeit to varying degrees.
The analogy was that 100 years from now, people would see our current era as we see the industrial age. That is, unless we stop progressing.
Formulated differently, if degrowth had been followed in the industrial age, we would still be living in the industrial age (but the Earth would be a degree cooler).
Well, the capabilities (or lack thereof) of the person(s) doing the categorizing is rather important as well.
For example, I am a conspiracy theorist, and the number of nasty things that have been said about "me" by literally delusional Normies over the years gets a little annoying after a while. It would be a real shame if these chickens were to come home to roost at a particularly inconvenient time.
Anyways, I wish you and your Rational crew best of luck with your climate problems!
Mostly it’s obvious you’re just tired of being consistently called out on your nonsense. It hurts your unearned feelings on superiority. A trait conspiracy theorists have been repeatedly shown to have I might add.
Like I said: you’ve made it an emotional core of your identity.
> Which notable people think we should go back to a pre-industrial age?
It's being suggested quite clearly in some of the most unexpected places. One of the most curious things about the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, is that a great deal of the funding for some of its largest exhibits comes from one of the Koch brothers. Specifically there is the floor sized exhibit on human evolution which repeatedly emphasizes a subtext of adaptation, adaptation, adaptation as the driving force behind development of modern humans. The proponents don't care if this adaptation can also take the form of a misery-soaked return to pre-industrial society in 500 years, they won't be around to deal with it.
But they know that it's an asymmetrically structured argument that is difficult to counter using the language of progressive politics, in which adaptation is also emphasized but of course in different contexts.
> Would we willingly forsake the past century of human progress to revert the global temperature back by that single degree?
Eh. I see what you are saying but have we felt the full effect? Do any of us have a perception of what was lost that would let us even make such a determination?
It's not alarmism to say we should take action to prevent out extinction. By your logic, people who call emergency services when a building is on fire are "alarmists".
There has literally NEVER been a problem anywhere near as large as climate change, including World War 2. If being concerned about literally the largest problem to have ever existed is 'alarmism', then your position is simply that it's impossible for anything bad to ever happen.
> By your logic, people who call emergency services when a building is on fire are "alarmists".
By my logic, people who call emergency services when the room temperature rises 1 degree are "alarmists". The building is not on fire. We are not headed towards extinction, not even close. How do you explain that the world has gotten significantly better over the last century despite warming over one degree?
My position is that this "extinction" fear you speak of makes absolutely no sense. And any attempt to prevent warming through economically harmful policies will likely have a greater negative impact on humanity.
Sure, but I'd rather live in paradise than burn my house. In that sense nothing's a big deal, but it is for me. I believe we all deserve good lives.
The best adaptation to burning your house is the rational thought "Perhaps I should not burn my house". :)
It dreads me to think we so much lost contact with living well that many don't care anymore. I think the first step in the journey would be to stop the destructive culture of desperate consumerism, greed, consumption, overwork and ill-being. Maybe that's something we should be prioritizing alongside climate change, as a species. Living well in our homes, and as a community.
Living well requires energy and lots of it. There are billions of people who aspire to use far more energy than they are currently using, in order to live better. Who are we to say that they can't use as much energy as we do/did? (I know you're not saying that directly, but it's hard to imagine how half the population could bring themself up to even the median energy consumption without dramatic increases in climate changing forces.)
I think this is a false conundrum. We should use as much energy as we sustainably can, without destroying ourselves, if that improves our well being. But not more. And we should also make sure that all humans have good conditions. I think the essence of what makes a good life is surprisingly inexpensive in terms of resources. I believe that planning well, we can achieve a good compromise for everyone involved, with a larger focus on those more in need.
Moreover, energy consumption isn't so significant as emissions per Watt. Our capacity for solar energy could sustain even energy growth without significant emissions. We already have the technology to make the transition.
To reiterate, whatever we do, sitting back and watching the world burn (in an almost literal sense) is not a reasonable option!
Even solar panels aren't emissions-free. They take 1-3 years to payback the emissions used to create them, which is a great trade (a decrease full-lifecycle emissions as compared to do) for people who would already be consuming the power they'd create, but is still an increase in full-lifecycle emissions when created to supply power to someone who wouldn't otherwise have access to that power. Anyone who is without stable electricity today should gain access to it, by all means, but that is a net increase in emissions as compared to today.
Stable supplies of food (and fertilizer and machinery to grow and process it), clean water, refrigeration, transport, (somewhat ironically) HVAC, lighting, and some amount of outputs of manufacturing are desired by all.
I'm sure there are some emissions we still don't know how to avoid relating to solar manufacturing, but typically we look at energy return on energy invested (EROI). As the supply chain becomes less carbon intensive, less the energy to produce panels themselves produces emissions. The most carbon intensive countries are countries like US and China -- I'm sure just the emissions they cut back could compensate a lot of energy growth for developing countries. This is only a temporary spike. And being the large industrial producers, as they transition the emissions per Watt will go down significantly.
Again, it's not clear what your proposal is. Ignoring the problem is a bad idea. Doing the best we can to rapidly (of course, not so rapidly we couldn't handle it) transition to renewable energy is what we should be doing. Doing it now is the best time to be doing it. And are doing it! Just some countries are lagging behind somewhat, including the US and China. A big part of the problem is not recognizing the scale and importance of what we're facing. With reason and compassion in our hearts, we shall find the best solution for all :)
Cosmically, I don't think we matter, and that person is right. Even if we don't destroy ourselves in this century, the Earth will eventually be roasted to a crisp by the Sun expanding. Not that it makes me feel any better, just trying to consider what that perspective is.
I live in Australia. Since 2019 I’ve seen outrageous nationwide bushfires, intense rain and flooding in the central coast which forced us to evacuate for a week, followed of course by 2 years of a pandemic and then an entire year of rain so heavy in the northern rivers that it catastrophically flooded the entire area and cut off our plateau town from food and fuel deliveries for about a week.
Prior that I had never been evacuated or cut off from anything because of weather events, so I guess that’s why scientists are keen to distinguish between anecdotal evidence and statistical, empirical or experimental evidence.
What do you think is the connection between Australian bushfires and climate change?
Did Australia not drastically cut back and stop the amount of back burning that Australia used to traditionally do in order to prevent larger bushfires? You only have to ask anyone who has lived for a while in an at risk area to discover first hand that these activities had been curtailed and stopped for quite a few years.
> Did Australia not drastically cut back and stop the amount of back burning that Australia used to traditionally do in order to prevent larger bushfires?
No, that didn't happen.
“Hazard reduction work has increased because of increased funding to the RFS and to national parks. There has been more carried out in recent years than in previous decades.”
> You only have to ask anyone who has lived for a while in an at risk area to discover first hand that these activities had been curtailed and stopped for quite a few years.
Farmers get all their information from Sky News and Facebook. I've lived in at risk areas for over 15 years, and I can't tell you first hand that the activities have been curtailed and stopped. Very few people would be able to tell you that first hand. A lot of people will tell you bullshit conspiracy theories they've read on Facebook though.
Think of it as more and more energy being kept within a closed space.
That closed space is the thin layer of land + ocean + lower atmosphere, it's spinning and it's quite large in comparison to single human.
Now think of a closed room with energy being pumped into that room, to (among other things) a fridge on the floor with door open.
The energy increase makes the heat exchange coils on the back of the fridge hotter and the space inside the fridge colder.
Overall the average energy within the room in increasing.
This is a poor but in some ways accurate picture of the earth .. or at least one climatic cell - the earth has a number of these in the North and South hemispheres and they interact and spill energy from one to the other.
Energy can express itself in many ways by cascade transfers - to wind and storms, to melting ice (at zero degrees) to create water (also at zero degrees).
In Australia that energy has driven the decadal scale La Niña and El Niño oscillation that, so far, has worked out fairly well for Australia ... (a very catastrophic fire season a few years back aside).
Elsewhere on the globe, not so much for others.
But wait, there's more, especially in the longer term if steps aren't taken.
In the near term, you can expect Australia to see a hot, dry El Niño:
I'll point out a few things that maybe you have noticed but not correlated because they're not obviously "headline grabbing" (in a personal sense).
I'm in Australia too (Melbourne), and have travelled to Europe several times in the last 25 years. Have you noticed that the "overnight low" temperatures and aren't as low as they used to be? If you're an avid gardener or a farmer (or know one), have you noticed plants flowering/blooming earlier/later? If you're a bird watcher, have you noticed changes in migration timing?
I'd also point out that unless you're nearer the polar regions (which have sustained higher temperatures over time), you may not personally notice changes. This also depends of course on how old you are. I was born in the 60's. Winters in Melbourne are decidedly different these days from those of my childhood.
Funny. Anecdotally, my experience has been completely different. Progressively hotter summers and harsher winters. I guess that’s why we rely on accurately measured data.
I am in Melbourne and it seems like we have had the most mild summer and winter. Last winter however was incredibly cold and you can already see that this coming summer is going to be a bad one!
It is very dry and all the signs are point towards a big El nino + the Indian Ocean Di-pole being in full swing. Going to be a rough one in the south at least.
Relying on other people anecdotally and probably unprompted to judge relative weather is a pretty bad methodology. Why would you rely on that in Europe? Historical local data is easily accessible, especially in the last twenty years.
But yes, to make it average to a slightly higher temperature, but have some places have much hotter temperatures, some places have to cool off.
At this point is anyone really denying drastic climate change? I think people are just divided into pessimists who don’t think anything can be done, so YOLO, and optimists who think we can fix things via lifestyle changes that the first group might find austere.
> At this point is anyone really denying drastic climate change?
Anybody who listens and trusts media will most likely think we are living in a drastic climate change. Because media sells fear making people consume more media.
Ever wondered why you constantly see bad news on media and not good news?
People living in constant panic since five years. And panic is never a good advisor when thinking about complex issues. Think about this.
Anyone who understands graphs should be concerned. It isn’t a case of “the media are scaring us” rather than “we have a serious problem with weather that isn’t going to get better on its own.”
> If you don’t believe the media, at least take a look at this xkcd comic, it puts the problem into perspective very clearly
Yeah, why discuss complex topics when there are comics instead.
The problem is not weather - but Ideocracy getting reality much more faster than anyone predicted.
Fun fact - by replying in that way you exactly prooved my point. Thank you.
P.S.: "looking at graphs" is exactly media. But you don't think about relevance and probability. At least from the past three years you should have learned that scientific models are not religious truth but are an opinion of the modellers.
My mental picture for the next 20 years is that climate change will get catastrophically bad but advanced AI will solve everything with autonomous global carbon sequestration chemical factories.
Or the more likely scenario happens, we can’t progress tech fast enough to undo the damage we’ve caused and this becomes the greatest disaster of all time for humanity.
I keep using an example I read from a blog about how to think about this, (pls don’t shoot me here, I’m just the messenger):
1. Avg case is we cross 2.7 degree Celsius hotter by 2100. Worst possibly 5 degree Celsius hotter according to ICPC.
Let’s assume this is a given truth, so what are the negative effects of being 5 degree hotter. If you’re in America, 5 degrees hotter will make USA more like … Spain or Argentina?. So the worst case on average is cooler than current day India. Why all this apocalyptic messaging? (This is before even contesting the models, Science etc)
Edit 1: A lot of people talking about ice age, burning age, rivers stop flowing etc. please think more clearly, Is India uninhabitable? (Has it lost its rivers etc). People talking about places becoming uninhabitable, again please think clearly, Qatar is one of the hottest places in the world, 5 degrees hotter does it make Qatar closer to Sahara desert or is there quite a way to go (almost 15 degrees more to go?) . Most places in the world will remain cooler than present day Qatar after the warming! (Assuming the worst case warming)
Edit 2: I’m more sympathetic to the arguments about crops and animals dying but this is not apocalyptic to humans. Bad for nature sure, we should try to protect them but humans will be fine, we will manage to grow the crops and animals we need, worst case in different locations than now and I’m not even sure of that (technology?).
As the world warms, the jet stream gets wacky and wavey. Regional temperature variations are be orders of magnitude higher than the global average change. Changing climate also means different new pests, funguses, bacteria, etc.
Resulting droughts, floods, and famine are typically seen as bad things. These factors will contribute towards conflicts and wars.
There will also be mass emigration from areas that become unliveable, on the order of hundreds of millions to billions, primarily towards "first world" nations. No matter how that plays out, it's bad.
A disintegrating world order does not bode well for the global economic system on which current Western quality of life is built.
Plus, some people care about nature beyond factory farms and concrete urban sprawl. That nature is most definitively getting fucked as life just can't adapt so rapidly.
Well, in part, the problem is that everything that grows in North America is not ready to grow in India. So tons of plants and animals will die when their ecosystems disappear. Ponds will evaporate , rivers will move or stop running. It’s a bad time.
Hey man, I can't be the person to fully educate you on this but 2.7 degrees of average increase does not translate to a slightly warmer summer day. The language used makes it very misleadingly sound like no big deal, but it is a BIG deal. Without trying to be cliche, there is an XKCD for this and here it is: https://xkcd.com/1732/
A short way to get the point across is that when the earth's average temperature was 4°C lower than it was in 1990, that was an ice age. "Boston is buried under almost a mile of ice".
Imagine such a dramatic climate change in the other direction, 5°C hotter than 1990.
Climate forcing has such momentum that it takes two decades for the full impact of emissions to be felt and many more for cascading impacts. The fires we're seeing? The droughts? The floods? That's from emissions from the early 2000s, before China and India embarked on rapid industrialization and growth of energy use, especially coal.
This isn't the apocalypse either. It's just something of a scale we've never faced in human records, like what the Mayans faced at the end of their civilization but global.