> “We were actively told if we start to talk about solutions, if we start to talk about the policy implications of our work, we will have abandoned our supposed ‘scientific neutrality,’” Gill said. “And then people will not trust us anymore on the science.”
This is basically correct, and it is the thing that every climate activist does not seem to understand.
When you start treating your favored issue in moralistic terms, and insisting that it's an emergency that must be acted upon now, then you have entered into the realm of political economy. You're now making a statement that the issue you're advocating for is more important than other issues, and people take umbrage with that.
It may seem obvious at first glance that if we're careening towards 1.5C with myriad and unknown feedback loops that might lead to ecological disaster, we should stop emitting carbon, and pretty quickly. We only have six years.
Except to do that, we have to end almost all transportation, reduce electricity usage substantially, stop using all concrete, stop flying airplanes, stop eating beef, stop using petrochemical fertilizers, etc. It is not an exaggeration to say that billions of people would die within 12 months.
You might complain and say, my goodness, we've had fifty years to be reducing these things, of course we can switch to sustainable energy and materials. But we didn't. So now we have to decide what's most important, and if it's your position that the most important thing right now is to stop emitting carbon -- or even by half, within six years -- then your position is utterly insane and divorced from reality, because yes, many people will die as a direct result.
And if you associate yourself with the position that "we have to take immediate and drastic cuts that will cause huge numbers of people to quickly die," then people might get upset with you.
What would you expect astronomers to do if there's a building-sized asteroid headed for Earth in 40 years and the response so far has been to build a handful of bunkers and now there's 6 years left to build the complicated spaceship that needs to save the remaining millions living in the region where it's going to hit?
I understand the idiology of science existing in a abstract realm detached from reality and politics, but also, I can't fault them from feeling the heat under their feet. Climate change is not existential for us, but it's gonna suck and can be entirely prevented if you can only somehow get through to people
> And if you associate yourself with the position that "we have to take immediate and drastic cuts that will cause huge numbers of people to quickly die," then people might get upset with you.
People got upset with Nelson Mandela also, enough to lock him up for 27 years. I wonder if he'd say today he'd rather not have made people upset to help solve a big problem
People need to accept that this statement is just incorrect. We cannot stop it in the near future. Even if we had the means of producing non-CO2 energy in quantities enough to provide all our energy needs today (that is, net-zero CO2 today), what we've already added will still continue to add heat. We do not have the facilities to produce bio-jet fuel in industrial quantities at inexpensive prices. It's going to take years to convert the elect grid to wind and solar, and that's even when people want to do it because it's cheaper. We need some way to replace all the fossil fuel used in agriculture, somehow make concrete net-zero, efficiently create steel without CO2. Ain't happening any time soon, even everyone wanted it.
> ... if you can only somehow get through to people
Actually, a large number of people have actually decided. They want to ignore it. It's not the choice you want, and I don't think it's a responsible or wise choice, but if you want to actually solve the problem, you need to deal with that reality. Just saying "well, if we could only pass a law and force people..." is foolish (which is the next step after "getting through to people" doesn't work because they already made their choice).
If you want to solve the problem, make people want to do it of their own free will. For instance, make it cheaper to be net-zero CO2 than to burn it. Make it cheaper to take out CO2 from the atmosphere than to burn it. Make it so much cheaper to use less than people want to use less. Unfortunately, there are some hard problems from a chemistry standpoint here.
The main comment I have is this: even though 1.5 degrees is is unavoidable because there's not enough willpower as you say, the runaway effects are very uncertain (both when and how bad). You're technically correct that warming is unavoidable (indeed, some of it is already here), but I think you're overlooking that it still makes sense to make it clear to people that we can and should avoid worse. Current projections based on committed and implemented policies have us already avoiding a +5°C world, but if we stop caring, that's still on the table.
What people do, based on their opinion as informed by the information they get, matters.
> It's going to take years to convert the elect grid to wind and solar, and that's even when people want to do it because it's cheaper.
Exactly. We still have years (sufficient years to avoid much worse than 1.5 degrees), and we had more years before. It's starting to happen now because it's cheaper, not because it's the right thing to do for those alive 50+ years from now (estimate, idk the exact value). That's perhaps the most depressing part: we can't make people care about things that aren't exceedingly obvious and it causes a lot of suffering. Even now, with events starting to happen that would have been very unlikely without the already-here warming, we're nitpicking over what might be the cheapest path instead of making a comprehensive plan with all available options included in optimal proportions to minimise the total cost, and breaking ground such that we're at least going to be finished transitioning the electricity generation part of the equation in 20 years or so. Don't need to force anyone if you can offer them nice jobs building the infrastructure we need anyway.
> make people want to do it of their own free will. For instance, make it cheaper to be net-zero CO2 than to burn it.
Thermodynamics wants to have a word with you :( if it were that simple, that's what would have been done. Who wouldn't want cheaper energy? Don't even need climate change to want that.
Since that didn't happen before, I don't see why it suddenly would now if we only want it hard enough. We might get lucky with breakthroughs, but in the meantime, it makes sense to try and get through to people that maybe they should look at heat pumps for their next gas burner upgrade (for example, and as local climate permits of course)
> I don't see why it suddenly would now if we only want it hard enough.
It wouldn't. It hasn't happened so far or at least what's been happening has been painfully slow. We don't have the time to convince mom-n-pap who don't see why their SUV is a problem. We don't have time to convince your average gym bro who has suddenly adopted an all-beef diet to look swole. We don't have the time to convince big oil to stop investing in and opening new oil refineries.
What we do have the time for is organizing enough people who see where we are heading and voting and electing for representatives that support a green/fossil free agenda. Removing all the ridiculous farming subsidies on beef/animal agriculture, stopping with bailing banks and oil companies and holding them accountable with jail time and company-ending fines when they mess up seems to be a step in the right direction.
Creating enough criminal/punitive and economical/taxation incentives to FORCE everybody to get on board with a fossil-free world is the only clear path to mitigating what's already happening and accelerating in nature. Everything else is just waiting for the hammer to fall.
Huge numbers of people are going to die regardless at this point, we’re simply arguing the mechanisms by which the outcome is arrived at. We waited too long to make meaningful changes to positively impact carbon trajectory and planetary boundaries [1], everyone lived on proverbial credit (draining resources faster than sustainable), and everyone is unhappy the bill came due that sophisticated participants knew would come. Oh well (not glib, just a realist).
I am not worried if you don't believe. It doesn't matter if you do. Doesn't matter if I do for that matter. It only matters if people who have big levers do.
I remember when I found out millions die every year from air pollution, including in my own rich 'clean' country where there are no visible smog issues. I still can't believe this isn't common knowledge. It seems to be stuck because it's not new enough to make the news that people watch/read, abstract enough (like dying from smoking-induced diseases) that it's hard to find eyeball-drawing examples, and inactionable (as an individual) in similar ways to global warming so you'd just feel powerless anyway. But collectively we ought to know these things to make good policy decisions :/
It was also hard to believe at first because, if it were so bad, surely someone would have done something. Alas, it's just not sufficiently in the public's, and thus policymakers', perception.
> Particulate matter – often abbreviated as PM – is everything in the air that is not a gas. These are very small particles made up of sulfate, nitrates, ammonia, sodium chloride, black carbon, mineral dust and water that are suspended in the air that we breathe.
> Particles with a diameter of 10 micrometers (10 millionth of a metre) or less can enter deep inside a person’s lungs. But the most health-damaging particles are even smaller. Those with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less – abbreviated as PM2.5 – can penetrate the lung barrier and enter a person’s blood system. These are extremely fine particles: 2.5 micrometers is about one-thirtieth of the diameter of a human hair.1
> All studies of the mortality impacts of air pollution consider our exposure to particulate matter. Some studies also consider the impact of ground-level ozone. The death toll from ozone is much lower than that of PM, but it is still considerable: it’s responsible for hundreds of thousands of premature deaths every year. Other air pollutants are rarely considered in global studies.
That doesn't really answer my question but I was able to find some more info.
These claims appear to be based on studies in which PM2.5 levels have been correlated (by statistical models) with increased risks of heart disease as well as respiratory problems.
I haven't been able to find anything describing exact mechanisms.
But Pope et al [1] concluded that "a decrease in the concentration of PM2.5 of 10 μg per cubic meter is associated with an increase in life expectancy of 0.77 year."
For comparison, the EPA's clean air standard for PM2.5 is 12 μg per cubic meter.
> Except to do that, we have to end almost all transportation, reduce electricity usage substantially, stop using all concrete, stop flying airplanes, stop eating beef, stop using petrochemical fertilizers, etc. It is not an exaggeration to say that billions of people would die within 12 months.
I think there is a lot possible still. People would not die from smaller cars, less travelling, and smaller houses. Until the 1960s, people almost never took an airplane. Airlines sold the idea that 2 to 3 long distance vacations per year are necessary for mental health.
Smaller houses would be very helpful for several generations of would-be homeowners. Most people do not want a McMansion as a "starter house" nor can they afford it, but that's typically what's available.
> Except to do that, we have to end almost all transportation, reduce electricity usage substantially, stop using all concrete, stop flying airplanes, stop eating beef, stop using petrochemical fertilizers, etc. It is not an exaggeration to say that billions of people would die within 12 months.
Literally nobody is suggesting we do that.
That's one of the dumbest strawman arguments I've read recently.
We've basically done nothing so far, and we're all out of ideas.
We could instead do things like just reverse the tax cuts for SUVs and Trucks and apply taxes on top of them and phase out the "light truck" CAFE standards.
And fewer pedestrians might die from overweight vehicles.
The problem with climate change is that no one understands the staggering scale of what has to happen to address it.
> Literally nobody is suggesting we do that.
Okay, well what are we suggesting? Do we want to stay within the 1.5C warming target?
* If we banned all global commercial aviation tomorrow (~750Mt), we would save 4.5 Gt over 6 years, delaying our lock-in date by about 5 weeks.
* If we banned all global passenger vehicles tomorrow (~5Gt), about 30Gt over 6 years, we delay the date by ~9 months.
I'm sorry, but if no one is suggesting we do these things, why is so much ink spilled over the 1.5C warming carbon budget?
If you don't want to breach it, we _have_ to do these things, there is no other choice. You can't just tweak US CAFE standards a little bit. Even if you immediately ban every single car and truck on the road on the entire planet, you're nowhere even remotely close to where you need to be to prevent 1.5C warming.
If you ban all cars globally, all trucks, all global commercial aviation, if you immaculately create 50 billion carbon-free solar panels to provide free and green solar renewable energy for every single residential household on the planet, you've still only delayed things by a couple years.
Fertilizer is about 2.6Gt annually, 15.6Gt over six years. Are we going to keep that?
What are you suggesting we should do?
And this is exactly what the point of my comment is all about. Things like the linked article in this story are designed to allow people to moralize about climate change without affirmatively supporting a particular policy choice. It's just a club to beat people over the head with, without actually describing what the solution is.
It gives people the idea that we _could_ meet these targets if we wanted to, maybe with some minor changes, some cost that someone else could absorb.
But we can't. The only way we could meet the 1.5C warming target is with massive, drastic changes to the lives of all of us, changes so large that our lives would be unrecognizable, and indeed, enormous numbers would die.
Where to even start. I think I would start first by noting the huge problem with your choice to label a climate catastrophe as someone's "favorite" issue. To my mind this is a manner of playing games with words that's immediately self-disqualifying. I imagine that a climate scientist's favorite thing, their actual favorite thing, depending on the person, might be experiences with friends and family, their favorite books, their comfort at home.
A favorite "political issue" could have connotations of being some curious side hobby that absorbs a person's time, like a guilty pleasure for which they might make apologies for their interest, like being into trains in public transportation, or nerding out over Federal reserve policy.
If someone is a climate scientist, and reviews a bunch of models and research showing catastrophic consequences for the planet, and wants to communicate about that, labeling that as a "favorite view" is a representation that misses 99% of what's important about why a person is motivated to communicate about it, because nothing about it has to do with the selection of a personal interest or the satisfaction of becoming immersed in it. So it's not a description that passes a step zero sanity check.
Next is the notion that by communicating about this they have inappropriately crossed lines from science into politics. I think talking this way repeats something that I believe is a pretty fundamental confusion regarding the fact value distinction. And without getting into a long version of it, I think Hillary Putnam is a pretty excellent philosopher on the specific question, and on the ways that people use the fact value distinction to attempt to insulate policy from being informed by facts in ways that allow people to be more deeply harmed.
But no, the state of the Earth and the environment in the choices we make about it are all already intrinsically political, in the sense that there's something important at stake where we have to collectively weigh what choices we want to make, and this is not a case of a frivolous one that's a mere indulgence. There is no pre-existing state of nature that has become newly violated by climate scientists sounding the alarm. We can and do allow our best and newest information to inform policy. This is about as wrong as it gets.
>And if you associate yourself with the position that "we have to take immediate and drastic cuts that will cause huge numbers of people to quickly die,"
I pretty closely follow the state level organizations and my home state that work on environmental issues, and I've even volunteered with them from time to time. I could tell you as a pretty ironclad matter of fact that they don't advocate for anything like you're claiming. In my state they're advocating for things like incentives and rebates to install heat pumps and solar panels, as well as regulations that help utilities more effectively accommodate renewable energy. Stuff like that. As other commenters in this thread are noting this is a massive strawman.
> I could tell you as a pretty ironclad matter of fact that they don't advocate for anything like you're claiming. In my state they're advocating for things like incentives and rebates to install heat pumps and solar panels, as well as regulations that help utilities more effectively accommodate renewable energy. Stuff like that.
Sorry, but what are we talking about? You cannot make even a tiny dent in climate change with rebate programs for solar panels. Yes, it's going to help at the margins, but it's the kind of small-fry change that doesn't change anything in any meaningful way.
This thread is about preventing 1.5C warming. According to climate scientists, we have ~250Gt left in our carbon budget before we lock-in that 1.5C warming. There are all manner of media stories beating people over the head over this.
You can ban all cars, all trucks, all electricity, all global aviation, do it tomorrow, and you've only delayed things by a few years.
>You can ban all cars, all trucks, all electricity, all global aviation, do it tomorrow, and you've only delayed things by a few years.
It's already worse. It's not going to get better for hundreds of years. But IF we were seriously head in that direction IMMEDIATELY ... we can could stop the MUCH MUCH worse from arriving ... forever. We missed our chance to avert what we've got. It's not a case of ALL or NOTHING. We -can- make changes to avert some of the damage that's already arriving ... for ourselves and our descendents.
I think this response is wrong-headed on multiple counts. It is emotional rhetoric, pretending to be a reasoned argument.
> This is basically correct
Why is it correct? Says who?
> and it is the thing that every climate activist does not seem to understand.
I think it is you that does not understand how and why people are reacting.
> then you have entered into the realm of political economy.
False assertion.
"You like having an economy: in general, having money and trade. If you do not do these things, nobody will have money."
... is not a political statement. To say it is, is to say that a statement such as:
"Watch out, there's a car coming!"
... is a manifesto about transport issues.
> Except to do that, we have to end almost all transportation, reduce electricity usage substantially, stop using all concrete, stop flying airplanes, stop eating beef, stop using petrochemical fertilizers, etc.
That sounds largely correct.
But then:
> It is not an exaggeration to say that billions of people would die within 12 months.
Yes, it is. Stopping personal ICE vehicle transport, stopping non-essential flights, stopping all meat eating, stop using all petrochemicals...
That does not spell doom for billions.
Yours is the emotional exaggeration here.
> if it's your position that the most important thing right now is to stop emitting carbon [...] then your position is utterly insane
This is a standard, if very strange to me, right-wing political tactic: take what you are doing, accuse your opponents of doing it, then mock it.
It is, in a word, BS. It is crude appeal to emotion, and it is lying.
An honest response would be "we have left it too late and so now billions will die". But you are being nothing but dishonest, while role-playing some kind of square-jawed straight-talker or something.
It is too late. The only question now is how bad it will be and if the blows can be softened.
If you're too busy for more than 3min of reading, read this:
>> "Climate change will cause agricultural failure and subsequent collapse of hyperfragile modern civilization, likely within 10–15 years. By 2050 total human population will likely be under 2 billion. Humans, along with most other animals, will go extinct before the end of this century. These impacts are locked in and cannot be averted."
If you truly believe that then why are you wasting time on HN?
For those people who don't want to rely on "Scientists" in the Media: Some materials from the ground contain carbon. We dig it out, use it for some purpose, and the carbon is now in circulation. Each year we bring more carbon into circulation, there is no process for bringing the carbon out of circulation (in less than 10 million years). So for any negative effect that CO2 has: Its going to get much worse, and halting all carbon digging will stop it from getting worse, not reversing it.
Not sure this kind of rhetoric ever worked. As far back as I have followed the news - so perhaps for 35 years - it was about to be too late. We were at the brink of a catastrophe. Humankind had to do something now. Tomorrow, it would be too late.
Look, global warming exists, it's (at least partially) man-made, and that's really bad.
But it's one issue out of many man-made or man-fixable issues. Fighting poverty is another. Curing diseases like malaria is also important. Curbing starvation. Spreading democracy and the rule of law. Then there are women's rights. Education. Racism. Avoiding WWIII. I am sure I forgot many large issues. How do we prioritize? Do we have to prioritize or can we deal with all of them at once?
This a typical what about-ism. The fact that there are other problems in the world doesn't invalidate the global warming/climate crisis.
Interestingly, lot of those things are connected:
Global warming is making droughts and floods more likely, thereby directly increasing the chance of starvation by threatening global food supply
Global warming is making warmer some parts of Europe, making ideal habitats for mosquitoes where they were not thriving before. Just this year Paris had to fumigate (first time in history) against a new invasive type of mosquito, known to be a malaria spreader. Additionally, Zika virus, once confined to parts of Africa, is now present in Greece, Turkey and other Balkan countries.
Global warming is likely to create a large societal collapse. When societies collapse, education and women's rights get thrown out of the window, so does the rule of law. Conversely, educated people and women are shown to care and do more about climate change.
Based on that, I think it's easy enough to prioritize...
Good news! Climate change is already making malaria worse, decreasing food security, and will presumably begin destabilising governments in some regions as a result of disasters and migration if it has not already begun to do so. Prioritising efforts to stem the tide of climate change is prioritising those things!
> As far back as I have followed the news - so perhaps for 35 years - it was about to be too late. We were at the brink of a catastrophe. Humankind had to do something now. Tomorrow, it would be too late.
Climate Change has felt like the Truck Almost Hitting The Pole[1] meme for decades. We're always A Mere N Years Away From Disaster, and then after N years, we're again M Years Away From Disaster. This has been the message since I can remember.
Climate change is not a single disaster waiting to happen at t=x, but a gradual process. There’s plenty of evidence suggesting that extreme weather events like wildfires, floods, and storms have been increasing in number and severity in recent years [1]. Some people have already been directly impacted, most are indirectly sharing the burden of the societal costs.
Unfortunately, humans collectively are very shortsighted, and it’s hard to communicate issues with seemingly intangible or long-term consequences. So we continue to argue pointlessly while slowly boiling like the proverbial frog in a pot.
That's part of the question isn't it? 1.5C isn't the problem - it's 1.5 over 10 years. If it is (or if we make it) 1.5C over 100 years then the problem is easier to deal with. If it's over 200 years then the problem is much easier to deal with.
Put your self in a climate scientist's shoes. What would you do? Society clearly doesn't want to hear the news. "We have other fish to fry" (Like get even with other humans etc.)
You can raise the alarm and be accused about alarmism. You can say nothing, keep publishing in ivory tower journals and be guilty of gross-negligence of monumental proportions.
It shouldn't be like this. Science is like a pair of glasses through which we can see a bit further than our noses. Breaking them is an act of supreme idiocy.
There is simply no chance the key carbon producing 'developing' nations are going to curtail emissions. They simply cannot afford to do this given the economic and social stability costs associated with the migration. This, and parts of Europe (namely Germany) are now dependent on higher emission inputs as a result of Russia's Ukraine gambit.
The vast sums expended on climate change reversal are better now spent on climate change adaptation, though I fully expect this to be another trillion dollar boondoggle enriching NGOs, consultants, advocacy groups and corporations.
Sorry to be the bearer of the bad news and I accept the massive downvotes as my penance.
I think you are realistic. I ask you to be open to other ideas such as those I suggested elsewhere here about small items that can compound to make bigger effects. Sometimes some of the ideas need lots of money, others are more community-oriented.
I walked by a guy chatting near his 4x4 engine turned on, asked him if he could turn it down, [some not polite response], I explain it's because of pollution, [we don't care about pollution], I said we very much do. That tells how far we are from this concern with average people
Do we (as a society/species) though? If we cared about climate change we'd be doing something about climate change. And we're really not.
Everybody cares about somebody else making changes in their life to reduce pollution but how many people actually make meaningful change in their own lives?
And if you ask somebody to consider drastic change in their own life – driving as little as possible, never flying in airplanes, buying significantly less stuff in general, not having kids, not eating meat, living in apartments rather than single-family homes, etc. they'll just say the corporations are the problem and anything they do wouldn't matter at all.
I'm kind of at the point where I say we just all let our own metaphorical 4x4 engines run and see what happens. Most of us reading this will be long dead before anything heinous happens to us (or we're wealthy enough to be insulated enough from the effects to where we'll get by OK).
A lot of people argue what’s the point when the normal individual is so much less responsible than the billionaires, and the normal country is so much less than the largest
The trouble is that notably cutting personal carbon emissions comes at a fairly high individual cost, but has basically no effect unless a whole lot of other people do it, too. If they don’t, you’ve harmed yourself significantly for effectively no reason—no meaningful good was accomplished.
The greater direct effect at much lower real personal cost, for billionaires, plus the greater likelihood of their influencing others to follow suit, makes the calculus a bit different for them.
>The tragedy of the commons is a real sonofabitch.
The "tragedy of the commons" is a propaganda tool used to justify privatization of the commons. The commons were reasonably well-managed until a small number of people decided to extract maximum profit from them (and damn the consequences).
I remember a few years ago, there was some discussion about whether scientists ought to get more involved in climate activism and political advocacy. There was uncertainty: even though many thought climate change warranted more extreme regulatory (or other) action, many were also afraid to tarnish the supposed neutrality of science.
Well, fast forward a few years... the message got out. The public knows it's bad. No, it's a crisis. Or emergency, or whatever. It's the climate apocalypse. Okay.
It's numbing by this point. It's like we found ourselves on the ladder of climate grief and jumped up from denial, missed every other rung along the way, and fell straight down to burnout.
COVID provided temporary relief, Greta came and went, Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement tried, the IPCC lost more and more of its clout, the American conservative media downplayed all of it, China wouldn't do anything unless the US did... and sooo... here we are in 2023, scientists all yelling and screaming that the world's burning up and it's all going to hell, and by and large the public just shrugs and goes, "Yeah, we know. Waddya want me to do about it?"
What is there to do? Collectively, as a species, we decided we don't care about this enough, that we'd rather prolong the status quo than risk any drastic action. Sure, we'll ride our bikes more and buy carbon offsets when we fly, maybe eat one less steak a week, consider an electric car... it's nowhere near enough. Guess we'll just let the next generations deal with the consequences. Shrug.
In the last decade we've had several culture wars, a global pandemic, Ukraine, Hamas... each of these got more meaningful action and mindshare than the climate, even though none of them have as far-ranging impacts. I guess humans are just bad at dealing with long-term changes that start small and snowball into something terrible a few decades later.
I guess at this point the only realistic thing left to think about is how to respond to the changing conditions, from aglands going away to wildfires to climate migrants/refugees to border instabilities to raw resources for batteries. I think we've already moved on from the question of "how bad is it, really?" (oh yeah, guess it's pretty bad), past "what are we going to do?" (silence), and to "how can I compartmentalize this so I can carry on with my day".
The death cult of American evangelicals is pushing for a climate disaster for the same reason they are cheering on the Israeli beat-down on Hamas. They think it will bring about the second coming of Jesus. Seriously. these dudes get off on rapture fanfic which Jesus gives them power over everyone.
To your point that as a society we have decided to prolong the status quo, I suggest a different perspective. I know that I won't move into a city and give up driving. It takes way too many things that make life worth living. I expect that you and others have a different perspective. I can accept that. ut hte discussion should not stop at that apparent impasse. The discussion fails by presenting a limited palette of unpalatable options as the only solutions instead of looking at wider range of options.
I rarely hear about options that we can do locally that will help reduce the impact of carbon in the atmosphere. A common wish list item is not just bicycle friendly roadways but bicycle focused roadways. To do this you need to realize that everywhere there's a roadway, you need to make it bicycle friendly because people are not to give up where they live. I can get behind that for all year riding. There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.
EV problems are almost all engineering problems. EVs that are good for 50-100 mile range like my Chevy volt is a good local car. Citroen has a design that's cheap to build, uses standard electronic components could be built in and for local community. Batteries are getting cheaper, lighter, with more capacity. Longer range travel has a variety of options ranging from short haul electric air, long distance rail and better charging networks
Community virtual power plants. Batteries are getting cheap enough that you can drop in 4 kW of battery plus inverter for a few thousand dollars. Use those batteries to peak load shave which takes polluting plants off of the grid during high demand times. This is not something should be controlled by a public utility but by the local community. Vermont is doing this now to avoid the need to build more power plants. They even install solar panels at customers houses to add more power to the grid.
Provide tax disincentives for maintaining a lawn and irrigation system. Make it easy to rewild anything covered with turf-grass. This is one of those long-chain effects. Rewilding does a very good job storing carbon and moisture in the soil. It provides food and habitat for insects, further enables more plant growth in environments that are drought resistant or at least tolerant. Rinse and repeat.
Rewiding will also cut down the amount of pollutants created by two strokes lawn equipment. Some communities have started on this by mandating battery-powered lawn equipment only.
Convert nighttime lighting 2700 K temperature lighting. More efficient, less damaging to the nighttime ecology. Reduce lighting intensity after 10 o'clock at night and use more motion sensitive full-cut off lighting. This easily saves 50% or more of nighttime power which could be used to charge batteries for the next day for peak loads.
On airflight, mandate that air flights cannot create contrails. It's already known how to minimize them by changing altitude to avoid parts of the atmosphere which are prone to trigger contrails. You want to avoid contrails because clouds. Low altitude daytime clouds reflect heat upward. Reduce the number of clouds the ground gets hot. High-altitude clouds hold in heat like an insulating blanket. Minimize high-altitude clouds especially over the polar regions and a significant amount of heat radiates in the space.
Here's an interesting article on radiation cooling both in the atmosphere and on physical devices that can be used to supplement or replace air conditioning. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13729 this is a well covered topic if you're an atmospheric scientist.
There are several geo-engineering experiments that we should be checking about. There are some that are using calcium carbonate I believe to absorb CO2 the ocean. There is the ever popular iron fertilization which does work but it's very finicky apparently. Use them.
It seems like every month there's a new chemical process which is efficiently does direct air capture for CO2. Pick a few, techniques, build a few machines implementing these processes in cities and on a bake-off. See which one works the best and when you have it working, open a mutual fund to individual people can invest in and profit from direct air capture.
You might not think any of these items will have a big effect and you are right. We got to where we are by a thousand bad decisions but these ideas are like compound interest in that they build the previous day, week, month, year's effort. If we keep making more small wrong decisions, the death cult of climate change will be right. But we need a plan a model a way to sell small right decisions the individual people can do in their own land in their own life and their own cities. I have no illusions that will be easy or that everyone ago yeah let's march in the same direction but we need to introduce these small small ideas and plans on how to implement.
If we can show that these changes don't have a big negative effect on people's lives, then will be able to start going after the production side of the CO2 problem. Change works only when you give them something good first before you take away what they know no matter how bad it is.
One plan to keep thinking I gotta find a way to do it is to build 24 inch stoves that cheap-add landlord's use in crappy apartments to replace gas ovens. But instead of using the traditional resistive heating elements make them induction. Make the oven convection and if the house doesn't have enough current capacity, put a battery in the unit and use that to supplement the house current when cooking. The other thing is to leverage the New York State in window heat pump project to put heating in low-income housing in the hands of the tenants not dependent on the ancient gas boilers or even worse open air gas heaters found in many crappy old apartments.
Small stuff like this has a big impact not just on the environment from people's lives. I know I can't do it myself had talked up whenever possible to try and find other people willing to work with me on it.
It is discouraging that we are in a multi-situation failure scenario. There are some speckles of hope. There are people out there trying to reforest deserts to bring moisture back into the soil and make a self-sustaining environment. You see the videos on YouTube and a lot of the work makes sense. How real it is? I don't know. It's YouTube but reversing densification is one way to make things better around the world and it's relatively cheap. Some of the things I suggested could also be applied to troubled places to improve their environment.
I think the important thing is not to get discouraged by the magnitude of it but to pick something and make a change happen. Make something positive, constructive that other people can buy into.
Don't let the climate change death cult wear you down.
I had to think about how to respond to this, because on one level I totally hear ya that there are a million little wins to be had in a billion different ways. Novel engineering tweaks and behavioral hacks are everywhere, much of it low-hanging fruit with low barriers (induction stoves, LED lights, whatever), while others eventually become a no-brainer given enough time (why not an EV if you're mostly just urban commuting anyway).
But I don't think that's quite enough, mathematically. You nailed the heart of the issue:
> It takes way too many things that make life worth living. I expect that you and others have a different perspective. I can accept that.
> Change works only when you give them something good first before you take away what they know no matter how bad it is.
Fundamentally, people don't want to lose something they've had already. Many don't even want to be inconvenienced. They view any sort of minor intrusion on their lives as government overreach -- maybe partially by personality, but also due to the intense conservative propaganda advancing this "me vs them" viewpoint on purpose. It's faux Old West ruggedness mixed with weaponized individualism. We've stopped being able to even think about collective problems, much less solving them.
For what it's worth, I don't live in a city either, but in a pretty rural area where EVs aren't super practical, frequently fly (and don't care about the contrails), etc. So this isn't me soapboxing, just pointing out that my own climate scorecard is pretty terrible too.
Maybe given a few hundred years people will trend towards wisdom and more ecologically sound behavior. But we don't really have that kind of time. It's kinda like wartime drafts... you can build up a standing army of volunteers if you have the decades and resources to slowly accumulate them, but in the heat of the moment, sometimes you just need to round people up against their will.
Climate isn't quite THAT urgent, but if we wait for volunteers... well, we've already been doing that for three or four decades. The environmentalists have been doing it forever, and other people do it here or there... and mathematically it just doesn't add up to enough. That's how we got here in the first place.
It's not a "death cult" to want stronger reins on private liberties in order to secure a collective well-being. It's an ideology, but one that half of America does not want, and without them, the rest of the world doesn't stand much of a chance. Unless China singlehandedly decides to do something about it, which might make a big enough difference.
But not everything in the world can be solved by individual willpower alone. Sometimes it's individual will that's the problem to begin with. Our freedoms aren't infinite, and our choices have very real life-and-death consequences for others in the world.
We all have crappy environmental records. :-) Last year flew to Scandinavia, drove 4000 km through Estonia, Finland, and Sweden in a 300,000 km old diesel Volkswagen van. Yeah, that was a skidmark on a white couch.
The right kind of volunteers can make a difference. It's more like we have to form a life cult where people do the research, do the planning, take the action to make change happen. For example, have rewilding yards to show the demonstration to your city Council to show what you mean and give them a proposed code change that's not threatening but has a right mix of carrots and sticks. Just watch the ADU conflicts on zoning changes, that tells you a lot about what you have to do.
On lighting, a small group of 10 people over the course of a year did all the right things politically and got a small city here in Massachusetts to convert over to proper nighttime lighting. Now they're working at replicating that success in other communities by training people how to find the decision-makers, to volunteer for the right committees to understand how to communicate without offending or triggering reflexive action.
I think what we need to do is replicate the success of crazy Republicans at building occult and political force. I don't know how to do that, it may be distasteful but there's no denying their success.
I feel like many of the points you raise are in large part "failures to communicate". As a friend says I'm great at process, I'm great at design but I have no skills in the political and we need people who are good at the political and work with the people who are good at design.
"Escalating rhetoric comes as new study shows there’s just six years left to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius at current CO2 emissions rate."
I’m not denying climate change is real. But we’ve been hearing “just x years left until catastrophe” for decades now. It always results in higher taxes, fewer freedoms, and the crisis never abates. If you live in a constant state of emergency, eventually people become numb.
The catastrophe is upon us now. Just look in the number, frequency and scale of wildfires, tsunamis, floods, etc.
It's too late to put the genie in the bottle now, but if anything, the government of the world haven't been strict enough in the regulations, haven't taxed enough the top earners, haven't done enough to curb the giant corporations.
As for fewer freedoms, I am not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean by freedom the manner in which large corps exploit their own workers, other countries, and eventually throw the whole world under the bus in the singular pursuit of profit? Or the freedom of cowboy bank-boys destroying the life savings and retirement funds of millions and putting yet other millions out of housing, just so they can satisfy their own gambling habits? That kind freedom, if anything, has become much much more and has gone unchecked for far too long.
> If you live in a constant state of emergency, eventually people become numb.
We share a finite world and its finite resources with one another. The freedom of rich douches to buy a Lambo to compensate for the gaping void in their soul comes at the expense of others, and luckily, more and more people start realizing this.
Not everybody stays numb in the face of a never-ending crisis. Some people, like me, get progressively angrier at the state of things. You can see it by the tone of my writing, you can see it by the millions on the streets protesting the oil giants, old dudes sending young boys to fight their wars, old dudes racking massive profits with 310:1 the salary of their own workers. I hope new generations are even angrier than us, and fight for a lasting change, because if they don't, they might be the last ones.
How is tsunami frequency established to be influenced by anthropomorphic climate change? Also, over a hundred years ago wildfires and floods were more frequent than they are now and the historical deaths per capita from natural disasters was much higher.
What we are seeing recently in Maui, California, PNW, and elsewhere are primarily the consequences of an artificial blip of decades of over-protection of adjacent forests and waterways because of misguided environmental activism. When you refuse to allow forest culling or occasional fires and hinder development of dams and levees, later fires and natural movement of rivers becomes uncontrollable. While more land was developed and the population exploded, the resource management expansion was missing. Climate change may have an effect on these recent incidents, but thinking of it as the main cause is misleading.
>How is tsunami frequency established to be influenced by anthropomorphic climate change?
The connection between the frequency of tsunamis and global temperature is mediated through several mechanisms such as sea level rise, glacial melting, ocean acidification which affects seabed stability, and the destruction of natural barriers such as coral reef systems.
You are confusing two different things. Most of the models show that the worst of the worst impacts are a few decades down the road, at which point most commentators on this site will either be very old or dead. But there is active debate about how soon we need to act to prevent those bad things from happening. Some people seem to think we have time, and that a gradual reduction in emissions will be sufficient. But more recently, concerns about tipping points and feedback loops is pointing to a scenario where we may have little time left or may have even passed the point of no return, to prevent some worst case scenarios.
So yeah, saying that climate change will be really bad in 30-50 years, and also saying that we have less than 5-10 years to prevent it are not incompatible with each other. I hope that clarifies it for you.
Moreover, climate modeling is hard. While most scientists agree that climate change is caused by man made emissions, there is still a lot of debate as to how much time we have and how bad it will be. So if you are seeing contradictory headlines, that's because the science is a work in progress. If that bothers you, maybe just ignore the headlines for now and understand that we will never have 100% certainty about how long or how bad or when things will happen, but we do know the general direction of where things are headed and we do know that we need to act soon.
No I am not. "worst of the worst" was intentionally vague. We are dealing with probabilities. There is a small chance We could hit a tipping point tomorrow and things could spiral out of control. Or a dampening effect could emerge that we did not account for that could delay things for a while. It is hard to overstate just how uncertain things are. Predicting the future is hard. But drastic sea level rise is almost certainly a few decades away, most models predict it won't get really bad till the end of the century. And things like heat stress or hurricane frequency are all likely to increase, but it will be a few decades before they make certain areas uninhabitable.
And for the record, I don't think we are taking this issue seriously enough. Even if the most likely outcome is a slow "boiling the frog" type of scenario, if there is even a 1% chance that a series of tipping points could result in cataclysmic climate catastrophe (which I believe to be the case), then we should absolutely be prioritizing this issue.
And for decades the response has been to double down and increase production of GHG's and extraction of more oil. But at some point, someone does have to pay the bill for the mess and higher taxes are not good or evil but a tool. I doubt it means fewer freedoms as we already control the vehicles/uses of oil and this is just an extension of that, just like we don't let people use dynamite for stump removal anymore, common sense. The crisis has never been addressed.
The crisis doesn't abate because people haven't implemented any solution. The topic remains relevant because the future will still be worse if we don't implement sufficient changes, as compared to living with the changes from ~today onwards. That's my understanding anyway
I believe the government had one “Oh shit!” card where they could require dramatic changes for the good of the people and they used it on Covid. I cannot see the general populations accepting the changes needed for climate change.
(I’m cynical of peoples behaviours but do know climate change is real)
The "general population" didn't accept "dramatic changes" for COVID, either. Except in places like China where the government has far more power than democratic republics. And even in those places there was pushback.
The government has never had an "Oh shit!" card, except in scifi movies. It has always had to make a sales pitch for population buy-in. And it did a crap selling job during COVID because of polarized media companies and fractured government.
Literally billions have been, and are being, spent on electrification. Solar, wind etc have had a ridiculous amount of investment.
Yet the one technology that could actually solve this problem (nuclear energy) is off the table for some reason. We have unlimited clean energy at our fingertips. But instead of discussing it as a solution we’d rather resort to doom and gloom emergency language.
How does nuclear energy solve your problem when a huge faction of the US population says you can pry their ICE vehicles out of their cold, dead hands?
Also, when you do the full analysis, we only need a 10% bump in generation to accommodate every single US household have 2 EVs - and that's if they don't shift to charging at night and insist on charging during the day during peak load.
Add in the fact that the average US household can produce 50% of their power using solar power and you realize there's no need for any bump-out of generation at all.
Why promote nuclear with all of its attendant complications when you don't need to?
We've spent a lot on nuclear and it's still too expensive for all but the largest countries to afford. We've spent a lot on wind and solar and every country can afford them.
Solar and wind are great, we should continue to build that stuff. But also "have ever been" is the key part of your message. The cost of nuclear is based on technology from the 1960's. There have been no new reactor designs since then. New reactor designs could be built and operated at a fraction of the cost of old designs and would be many times safer as well.
Nuclear power is great, on paper, but in the real world humans have demonstrated over and over again that they cannot be trusted to a) Build it on time b) On budget c) Without corruption, skimping on materials, or taking shortcuts d) Regulate it properly e) Hold those involved accountable f) Design and implement a robust plan to store the resulting waste in a responsible manner
Just look at the medical isotope shortages that have occurred. As a species we can't even see the need to have redundant sources of life saving materials that can only be produced in specialized reactors. What if something happens to them unexpectedly or they need maintenance? Shrug... is the answer we get.
Despite billions in subsidies, nuclear reactors have not become much cheaper to operate in the last 40 years. They have become safer and more efficient, sure.
But not cheaper.
Compare what PV has been able to achieve with way less subsidies and it becomes clear that nuclear - from a cost perspective - is a dead end.
Fair enough, I'm just generally frustrated at the doom and gloom. I don't think putting everyone into a constant state of panic is the right approach at all, we need to be inspired to build and be creative, not fearful and depressed that the world is going to end.
Yeah, it's also not the feeling I'm seeking to convey. More just to convince that, "eh, wake up y'all, we have something important to do". If there's something concrete I can/should change in my wording, feel free to propose
You misunderstood. We've been X years away until we can't avoid a catastrophe that's going to happen decades later. That's our reality. The catastrophe itself was always decades away. And largely still is, but the downside effects of global warming are happening faster than the models predicted. At the rate things are going, the problems we thought we'd have in 2100 are going to be had in 2050-2060. That's not good.
Are we all going to die by 2030? No.
Are we going to have significant impacts by 2100? Absolutely.
Will warfare exacerbate the problem and kill off even more people? Certainly.
Will civilization collapse? Maybe, but probably not. Regional collapse is likely.
Things like "my freedom to burn piles of car tyres in my front yard" are or will definitely be threatened, but most would not see that as a bad thing...
Or "my freedom to have a stash of 20 luxury cars that I never use because I fly with a private jet everywhere. I also own 20 mansions in 10 different countries, and a zoo (just cause)"
This is probably not going to go well because good-faith discussions on this topic are pretty hard to have, but here goes.
Government regulations often represent losses of liberty when applied to individual citizens. The government has a monopoly on violence, they can forcibly make you do things, with guns.
e.g. California now forces people in buy and install solar panels on their house if they are building a new house. What do I do if I try to build my own house without solar panels? They cost tens of thousands of dollars so it is realistic that someone wouldn't be able to afford them. Well the government will not give me a certificate of occupancy. What happens if I just live in my house anyway without solar panels? The government will condemn my house and show up to demolish it eventually. What happens if I try to stop them from demolishing my house? They will arrest me and put me in jail, if I resist they will shoot me.
This is a loss of freedom: before I was allowed to build my own house without being forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a thing, and now I do not have that freedom.
This type of thing plays out in a million ways: cars, generators, gas stoves, etc.
Green versions of technologies are better, a first-principles understanding is that more efficient things are better and cheaper and should naturally succeed in a market. A good example is lawn care products: gas-powered mowers edgers, blowers, etc are being phased out naturally because their electric alternatives are better and cheaper. This same thing will play out with electrification of other things given enough investment and scaling-up. Which we are currently seeing already. Take cars: the % of electric car sales is going up on its own without the government needing to force people to buy them (though yes, government incentives are accelerating this). This is by dint of the technology just being better and more efficient, companies like Tesla investing in the technology has proven it to be better.
My example of the solar panels is only a small one, there are other things like the ULEZ cameras in London which literally restrict freedom of movement for people, which are even worse, but those types of things are not happening yet in the United States so I won't dwell on them here.
if the government increases taxes for a specific scenario/use-case, how is that not a restriction in freedoms and liberty? taxation is forced with punitive coercion.
Irrelevant if you agree with the purpose or not, this seems pretty straight forward.
Guy, some men wouldn't stop beating their wives, and that's why there were (recent) laws where this is is a punishable offence. Or people dumping their garbage on the street. Or medicine companies cornering the market, filing a patent, and then rising prices.
That's why we have laws and taxes; so people can't be too much of d*ks towards one another. If even a minority of people can't be decent human beings on their own will and still behave like in the middle ages, punitive coercion in form of taxes or incarceration has been known to do the trick.
Well the original formatting of having taxes and freedoms as different items in a list, separate by a comma indicated to me that there are freedoms restricted other than just being taxed. I agree with you but also, what other freedoms?
In that story the wolves ultimately did come, and the sheep were lost (along with the boy). Maybe if the town had invested in having two watchers, or in fences and barns, they never would have lost their herd.
Yes, which is precisely why I made the comment! The wolves are coming, but this person has seen "crisis" and "emergency" called for every little thing and now they just don't believe it anymore.
What is it the fault of this crisis that we have been ignoring it for 50 years?
Climate scientists have for years warned that we were running into a catastrophe and now you blame them for... trying warn us?
What other strategy for publicizing would you have preferred? That climate scientists sit on this knowledge until the problem is a crisis right here and now, so that we would take it really, really serious?
That doesn't seem like a rational strategy. But that's just my understanding of your argument.
> But we’ve been hearing “just x years left until catastrophe” for decades now. It always results in higher taxes, fewer freedoms, and the crisis never abates.
Not as "[creating policies to address climate change] always results in higher taxes...", but as "[creating policies to address whatever hyped up crisis] always results in higher taxes...".
In other words, a history of alarmism and bullshit has this person jaded and eroded their trust in policymakers. I'm probably wrong. Anyway...
For climate change specifically, I see lots of people crying about alarmism, and I've made basically the exact same comment you're making now. What are you supposed to do if there really is something alarming goin g on, meekly suggest a diet and hope people realize it's existential? I personally think governments aren't doing enough and we are totally fucked despite ample warning from scientists (doing the right thing) because we'd rather die than lose some modern conveniences.
Not sure why I can't edit my comment to say this, but yes I do understand the moral of the story, though I also see in hindsight how this was confusing.
The wolves are coming, but this person has seen "crisis" and "emergency" called for every little thing and now they just don't believe it anymore. And we get to be eaten by wolves now!
This should come as no surprise; for fifty years we have been ignoring climate scientists warning about the dangers of global warming and climate change.
That these tepid admonitions of yesteryear have turned into dire warnings should come at the surprise of no one.
The time to take this serious was 20 years ago. Now it _is_ an emergency.
Where are all the people who are talking about how to prepare for the future? There are couple of billion people living near shores in very crowded areas, is there nothing planned or are we still hoping that if we do something the emergency will just fade away? Also, why are very smart people buying islands and land near the beach if there is an emergency, are they also hoping that we will fix this in time and their expensive investments are going to be ok?
I'm in the camp of what ever it is that we can sufficiently predict, we should also prepare for it, like it isn't likely that some space rock is going to hit earth in the next yew years, but it's a sufficient enough probability that there is work being done to track them and at least have plants on what to do if it comes to that, but this is not the case with climate change.
It is a very common error of thinking, especially in people obsessed with what Douglas Adams called "the movements of small green pieces of paper", to think that people with lots of money are very smart.
This is mediaeval superstitious thinking: "he is better off than me, therefore he is more fortunate. He has been given good fortune by god. He must be holier than me, and if I become more holy, I will receive god's favour too."
A lot of rich people are of above average intelligence though and they're definitely "smart", particularly if they didn't just get their money entirely from their parents.
Stockton Rush was a rich CEO and clearly smart enough to found a company that could build submersibles.
He decided he knew better than everyone else in the world and built a submersible out of composites.
Turned him into a physics jelly sandwich over the wreck of the Titanic.
Being smart and rich doesn't mean that every idea you have is always right.
More or less the same thing applies to the chemists who thought they discovered a room temperature superconductor or Musk buying Twitter. They're all definitely smart, but they make mistakes just like everyone else. When all is at stake is money they often have enough money that they can make a lot of mistakes and lose a lot of money and people only remember the ones that succeeded.
And A lot of what separates smart rich people from smart not-rich people is that rich people can try 20 different stupid ideas before finding a good one, without going completely bankrupt.
There are thousands of genuinely genius level people buying beach front properties, and climate change isn't that hard of a concept to grasp, even school children get it. And that is exactly the reason why I'm asking what I'm asking, are we all just living in a delusion, waiting and hoping for something to fix stuff and we avoid catastrophe? Nobody is asking how are we going to evacuate the entire population of Bangladesh because that might become a reality in a lifetime, nor are they asking what will happen to my ten million beach front property if the sea level and weather patterns actually get so bad that it's either washed away or just basically worthless because nobody will buy a property in a disaster zone.
> There are thousands of genuinely genius level people buying beach front properties
1. [[citation needed]]
2. There are billions of christians and muslims. Both are foolish superstitions with no evidential support whatsoever. Lots of people believe foolish lies; number of believers is not even loosely correlated with truth.
> Nobody is asking how are we going to evacuate the entire population of Bangladesh
Yes they are, and the real answer is "you don't, and they die."
> what will happen to my ten million beach front property
Yes they are, and the answer is it will be destroyed. But millions play the lottery, although only the companies running lottery always make a profit. Millions commit petty crimes, because everyone tends to think the bad stuff (getting caught) won't happen to them, but the good stuff (winning the lottery) will. Millions smoke, although once addicted it's not very pleasurable any more but it is expensive.
People like and choose to believe comforting lies, but they hate facing uncomfortable truths.
This is not a big revelation. It is not a profound insight and it doesn't prove anything much.
> But looks like everybody hates this question.
A lot of people hate foolish, pointless questions. Perhaps that is what you're missing here.
We have a climate activist who is also a weather woman in my country and now she is flying to Antarctica. Need I say more? So excuse me then if I don't give a **t
I have a hard time caring about this. Okay, maybe climate change was obscured from laymen 50 years ago(despite Sagan, the most famous science communicator, talking about it in the 80s), but everyone has surely known about it for the past 20 years, and our collective take has been "meh".
Responses like this and how we handled the pandemic are why I think billions of people are going to die and some folks will still insist it’s just El Niño.
I'm only replying in kind to an equally irrelevant take. "Billions will die" is a truism unless you want to qualify that somehow. (Which you don't, because you're after cheap emotional rhetoric, not facts.)
Is nitpicking a statistic the strongest argument you can muster against climate change, or is there a good argument that the planet is not heating up more rapidly than we have been able to observe in human history and with ice core samples?
This is not a topic where bias is possible. There are people like you advancing known false narratives from con artists and regurgitating workshopped slanders in an attempt to muddy the waters. And then there is an overwhelming majority of subject matter experts.
I've often considered starting a "think tank" in order to scrounge money off of unscrupulous corporations who need an "independent" advocate. you could probably write a lot of it with an LLM. the issue would be looking my family and friends in the eye
That does not look like the most journalistically rigorous site the mentioned article is from "Energy Talking Points", I suspect it's a shill for the "energy" (read fossil fuel) industry, based on a random selection of their other article titles:
- How today's global anti-fossil-fuel agenda is crippling American small businesses
- An open letter to Elizabeth Warren on natural gas prices
- Talking Points on the dangerous falsehood that "Climate change is a public health issue"
I'm open to examining the science, but I don't appreciate equating the views of an industry insider or someone with an axe to grind with what a much more broad consensus of scientists have to say about climate change.
Especially when there's a _very_ clear financial incentive for the "energy" industry to continue business as usual. Qui bono?
Hacker News routinely allows shill pieces written by guys sponsored by people advocating the climate catastrophe narrative. I haven't seen those getting flagged.
How can you disagree with him when he doesn't even define what "rapid elimination" entails? It's not even a strawman. He has completely failed to define what he is arguing against.
Just FYI, but that "about 1.0o F" that Google pulls is from an archived website from the Clinton white house. No Clinton has been President for over 20 years.
The 1°C increase that your link says has happened would indicate an approximately 0.8°F increase since those Clinton years. Nearly a doubling in 20-30 years from the baseline increase over the previous 100 years.
We already have a solution though, its about 139 billion gallons of white pain ($16-32 trillion). Instead we get really overly complicated solutions like cow genocide, sterilization, "destruction of capitalism", degrowth, and more.
Supporters of climate change have the worst messaging discipline possible. I can't think of a less persuasive message than "impoverishment" (degrowth) or "abort your children".
You appear to be making up your own narrative here.
In reality, climate science has gone from somewhat uncertain (around 1995: Kyoto) to progressively more certain as measurements have confirmed modellable outcomes.
Our need to change our behaviors has been increasingly important for the past few decades, it's only become an all-out emergency more recently as it's become painfully more obvious that large amounts of humanity are unwilling to change our economic preferences even when faced with obliberation.
1969: We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.
1970s: ICE AGE coming!
1988: NASA said, A gradual rise in average sea level is threatening to completely cover all Indian ocean nations in the next 30 years. The maldives will have its drinking water supplies dry up by 1992.
1989: UN said rising seas could obliteration nations.
1989: NASA said, NYC's west side highway will be under water by 2019
>You appear to be making up your own narrative here.
I'm not making up anything.
Climate change proponents sure do seem to lie in their predictions though and boy do people get upset when you call it out.
> 1988: NASA said, A gradual rise in average sea level is threatening to completely cover all Indian ocean nations in the next 30 years. The maldives will have its drinking water supplies dry up by 1992.
When I search this I don't get a link to a prediction by NASA. Can you please cite your sources? And preferably their sources? I can see a possibility of cherry-picked quotes from the most pessimistic end of a range of scenarios and predictions. I can also see the possibility of someone maliciously attributing the prediction of another to NASA in order to smear NASA.
As an aside, I'll remind you that in the story the wolf ultimately did come, and the herd and boy were both lost.
I agree, it feels like NASA has been thrown in to create a veneer of respectability for these conclusions. NASA does publish regular sea level assessments (https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/) so perhaps that's where this has come from. Nothing in their current reporting suggests that they would have jumped in the 90's from "sea levels are rising" to "countries are going to be wiped off the map tomorrow". It is still fair to say, however, that there are countries that are going to be significantly/existentially impact if the current trend of sea rise continues.
Within any scientific discipline there is a broader consensus and there are more bold exceptional claims on both the high and low points. One could safely argue the consensus view on this topic has been moving too slowly.
Kyoto was in 1995 and predicted 1.5-4.5 degrees of change in the mid-21st century. Hardly "12 years out" mate.
What has become more serious is that the incoming data and predictive models are starting to line up with greater accuracy and those forecasts are very worthy of concern. In the face of warnings that drawing down our bank account is going to leave us broke, is the answer "oh, I've been hearing that for a long time now, what's the worst that can happen"?
> Since this article was last updated, the slowdown in the rate of average global surface warming that took place from 1998–2012 (relative to the preceding 30 years) has unequivocally ended.
This is basically correct, and it is the thing that every climate activist does not seem to understand.
When you start treating your favored issue in moralistic terms, and insisting that it's an emergency that must be acted upon now, then you have entered into the realm of political economy. You're now making a statement that the issue you're advocating for is more important than other issues, and people take umbrage with that.
It may seem obvious at first glance that if we're careening towards 1.5C with myriad and unknown feedback loops that might lead to ecological disaster, we should stop emitting carbon, and pretty quickly. We only have six years.
Except to do that, we have to end almost all transportation, reduce electricity usage substantially, stop using all concrete, stop flying airplanes, stop eating beef, stop using petrochemical fertilizers, etc. It is not an exaggeration to say that billions of people would die within 12 months.
You might complain and say, my goodness, we've had fifty years to be reducing these things, of course we can switch to sustainable energy and materials. But we didn't. So now we have to decide what's most important, and if it's your position that the most important thing right now is to stop emitting carbon -- or even by half, within six years -- then your position is utterly insane and divorced from reality, because yes, many people will die as a direct result.
And if you associate yourself with the position that "we have to take immediate and drastic cuts that will cause huge numbers of people to quickly die," then people might get upset with you.