I'm not necessarily worried about climate change per se. It will result in hardship for many, for sure. Temperature changes will render some areas uninhabitable, it will cause mass migration, and probably destabilize the world politically.
What am more worried about is the direct wholesale destruction of the biosphere. There are absolutely bonkers numbers about extinction, ocean acidification, runaway permafrost melt that actually could choke out a majority of people.
Worse still, these effects aren't easily solvable by stopping emissions, or blocking out the sun with mylar sheets, or any of the "low hanging" technological fruit -- the stuff that could be solved with today's space technology or electric car tech.
In order to actually solve these "deeper" problems, we will need an absolutely massive bio-engineering effort that is probably only possible with some kind of entropic breakthrough.
Evolution is basically hyper-organization, a point of locally super low entropy that only happens by hundreds of millions of years of energy expenditure. When a species dies, it's not those individuals, it's every one of those individuals that ever lived that dies. All that concentration of local entropy, destroyed forever. It's like using every GPU on planet earth to train a hyper-smart GPT-4, for many human lifetimes -- and then hitting rm -rf on the weights.
You mean the Holocene extinction event which is directly tied to climate change? It's one big connected system.
Also the low hanging tech you talk about is a compete cluster bomb of terrible ripple effects. They don't solve the issue only kick the can down the road while causing massive other problems.
We don't talk about birth control enough. Some parts of the world have exploding populations, and while they don't consume much CO2 at the moment, they will - either as a result of the migrations they do, or through development.
Its not just a matter of birth control. In many of these countries, there are ingrained patriarchal practices which lead to men pushing for their family unit (which sometimes includes multiple wives) to simply have as many children as possible.
In other cases, its a ponzi scheme, where people have an excessive number of children in order to ensure their own livelihood in old age.
The solution is probably to stop sending all forms of food aid, to stop interfering in local and regional conflicts, and to replace all aid with education, abortion and contraception for women.
For example, in countries like Somalia, about half of the population rely on food aid for survival [1], but the fertility rate is 6.07 children per woman. The population is forecast to double in the next 25 years [2].
It would seem reasonable to me that if we are offering food aid, that we also require all recipients to undertake long-term contraception.
>Some parts of the world have exploding populations, and while they don't consume much CO2 at the moment, they will
A, the "kicking the ladder" argument. We had a good run in the West over-consuming and producting Co2, and we continue to be at the top (including the Co2 we outsource to our global outsourced factories for our consumption), but others shouldn't.
Before we talk about over-population in e.g. Africa and India, why not talk about cutting down on consumption in the US (#2 co2 global producer with just 5% of the global population - and that's even not including the co2 produced in China for products the US companies ordered/will consume/sell).
Giving a good example how more people can live with less?
Else it's "let us keep our mega-polluting way of life and you better stop having kids so we are not inconvenienced".
(It's also often accompanied with quotes from westerners not having children "for the planet", when they just do it for their career, or to avoid any obstacles like kids on their personal "journey" to consumption and fun).
(2) Birth control is already being tackled with in developing countries. It's just not being talked much in the context of global warming, because (1).
(3) Talking about population when the majority of CO2 is emitted by a small number of wealthy countries (with low birthrate) seems like focusing on the wrong thing. Especially since almost all arguing about it online are living in one of those wealthy countries. Yes, it would be really convenient for me if climate problem could be solved by telling Africans to get their shit together, but it's not happening that way.
So we need to "limit population growth" among "some parts of the world" - is it fair to guess that you mean here subsaharan Africa and south Asia? - because they don't consume much CO2 but will? No mention of the parts of the world that, uh, do consume much CO2, and will continue to do so?
> We need to reduce the number of humans on Earth.
I'm happy to point out that this is not the case.
We're already peak child and the next two billion will not come from population growth but from population replacement[0] (Thanks, Hans. RIP, I loved you), where children replace the people in previous cohorts that never made it to reproductive age.
The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years. Many countries on earth already and most countries on earth in about twenty years will have problems maintaining their population as it is. Fertility has been dropping all over the globe, with a few exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa.
No, really. There's nothing we can do about the people we already have and there are barely any new babies arriving.
What we do need to worry about is population migrations. We need to make it easier for people to migrate. We need to set up political and social infrastructure to welcome people from places that climate change has made inhospitable.
Since most of the world will be suffering from over aging and from a lack of births, these migrants will be dearly needed.
So, no need to talk about birth control, let's talk about immigration reform instead!
I live in India, even after working hard and making good money it's not possible to live a comfortable live here. There's no space for you, everything is packed up in tiny spaces.
Yet some people keep reproducing here, it's true birth rate has fallen in educated people but there are simply too many people at the bottom here in India so our population isn't going to come done anytime soon
Agreed. Yet the term should be foster a sustainable birth rate. A country like Japan is doing this right. Importing migrants from overcrowded countries will only increase the overall number of people reproducing.
There's definitely a sweet spot the world should hit.
i don't why this is being downvoted. He's abosultely right, if you want to reduce CO2, you need to reduce the number things that cause it: Humans.
The alternative: Asking each human to reduce their C02 output won't get you very, especially since most of our individual output is more influence by govt policy rather than our own actions, for instance: commute distances, etc.
Microplastics and other chemicals infiltrating our food and water supply has had a negative effect on male sperm efficacy. We also see population replacement weening in highly developed nations such as the US and Japan. Perhaps there are systems at play beyond our ken. We are merely part of the ecosystem, not its master.
I think you'll find that most of the organizations promoting climate apocalypse agree with your ideas about population control.
Interestingly, they proposed population control before promoting the climate agenda. Many view fear of a climate apocalypse as a vehicle to advance the preexisting agenda.
The 'good' news is that nature is mostly self-regulating. It will be more than happy to cull our numbers until we reach something approaching sustainability (or much lower than that). Climate change per se won't kill you, but other humans competing for the same space or resource most certainly will and that's how it has been since forever.
The last couple of hundred years are an anomaly but this exponential increase simply can not go on without running headlong into some kind of wall, be it our effect on the environment, resource starvation, lack of space (in a way also a resource) and so on.
The problem with this is that the nature can stay hostile for much longer than humans can stay alive. We literally built a civilisation on top of the corpses of creatures that survived much longer than we ever walked on the earth upright.
I am sure that in some very distant feature the archaeologist and biologist of some species will have a boon on our remains, I don't really doubt that, but the problem is that we are facing huge opportunity for de dinosaur experience.
Indeed “global warning” is not much of a concern. CO2 levels aren’t even that concerning, both levels have been significantly higher in the past (and supported life), and pose minimal risk. We can adapt to it, but would cause some hardship. We are also exiting an ice age, who knows what’s really earths “norm” over hundreds of thousands of years.
My real concern are things like man made chemicals, pesticides. Which have made it into every component of our food and water supply. To put it in perspective, I have a very rural farm - no row crops for tens of miles. There are so few bugs it’s spooky. There are significantly fewer birds. My Bees die most years, even in warmer weather.
There’s also estrogen in our water ways, micro plastics, etc
The reason that’s the “real concern” is it can take out all humans very very quickly. Like a generation, where as global warming is survivable.
While the co2 levels and temps have been higher in the past, rate of change is the most important factor here. You incorrectly assess the risk by ignoring the fact that it took tens of thousands of years to move those numbers.
The problem is that most of our food chain is going to have major issues adapting at a speed that matches the rate of change. Pesticides and chemicals are certainly problematic as well, but moving the global needle so much over a 100-250 year timeline is a huge issue.
>CO2 levels aren’t even that concerning, both levels have been significantly higher
The sun grows stronger over millions of years (and it got colder over the last 200 years), however that doesn't matter because the earth is a balanced system where an equal amount of energy enters and leaves the system. The CO2 concentration will automatically adjust so that temperatures can fall within a narrow band.
Therefore it is completely unsurprising that CO2 levels have been higher in the past, they had to be higher to reach the same temperatures. If we reach historic CO2 levels today then we will also reach higher temperatures than in the past.
I've recently read that the word "pesticide" is a weaponized term, in that you wouldn't label human medicine that way, but for ideological reasons this reframing is done to a plant's medicine.
OTH nobody would use medicine daily and call that a natural state of being (unless you're acutally or chronically sick).
Our food supply depends on these plant-medicines becuase without our cultivated crops aren't strong enough to survive or yield significantly less.
> When a species dies, it's not those individuals, it's every one of those individuals that ever lived that dies.
It is tragic that species go extinct. I believe 99.99% of all species in earth's 4 billion years has gone extinct. I forget who said it but like individual creatures live and die, species also have to live and die. But it also opens the door for new species. Without mass die offs, we don't have dinosaurs. Without mass die offs, we don't have mammals and humans.
> All that concentration of local entropy, destroyed forever
And look at what the previous destructions created. The beauty of today's nature stands on the graveyards of the natural world that came before it. Those species you mourn today only existed because previous species went extinct and open up the space for other species.
Not saying we should welcome species extinction, especially the ones human cause. But we should be mindful of the fact that past species extinctions is why the current species exist. It's not all one sided. There is "life after death".
Nature is an amazing library of knowledge (pharmaceutical, materials sciences, etc.) for problems we face. Driving species to extinction is the equivalent of burning the reference books.
>I'm not necessarily worried about climate change per se. It will result in hardship for many, for sure. Temperature changes will render some areas uninhabitable, it will cause mass migration, and probably destabilize the world politically. What am more worried about is the direct wholesale destruction of the biosphere.
How is the latter not just a byproduct of the former?
If the world was just warming, it wouldn't be nearly so much of an issue, I don't think. We could just put a big mylar sheet and block part of the sun.
We could do that, I think, in about 20 years, if we really wanted to just get rid of this 1.5degC rise. But we can't, we have the ocean acidification, the desertification, the pollution, the acid rain, the plastic pollution. My point is that it's not really the temperature I'm worried about, it's the everything else.
Because we are ravaging the biosphere in countless other ways than just altering the temperature and climate. "Just" would imply that those are the only causes of biosphere destruction.
Great comment. If layered and localized counter-entropy is, philosohically, the highest attainment of a mainly entropic universe, hitting rm -fr on a species is pretty much the only universal example of evil. The destruction of complexity is the undermining of the universe's attempt to observe itself through forms of processing that arise after billions of years. But of course, their destruction is probably an expected outcome. That doesn't make it any less evil from our puny perspective.
Climate change is real, we are warming up and should/can solve this, but I'm skeptical that apocalyptic narratives help the cause.
"A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."
It kind of seems like this article is saying that if we (in 1989) slow global warming by the year 2000, the worst effects of sea level rise will not happen. It's not saying that those effects will happen in the year 2000.
My understanding in 2021 is that much of that stuff is already happening, since we obviously didn't halt warming. And that it's also too late to prevent more of it from happening, because there is a lag time between prevention measures happening, and having an effect.
We are past the point where just reducing emissions will be enough, and instead will need to also harden the world against inevitable effects of climate change. This is even harder and more expensive than it would have been if we had stopped emitting earlier.
No, probably not. But then what's the alternative? The prediction is/was accurate, the error is in the kind of apocalyptic outcome it brings to mind. Reality is almost always far more boring. Silence doesn't seem helpful either, nor does being more vague about consequences.
Sea level rise looks more like king tides periodically destroying coastal occupations until it's uninsurable and everyone moves away. Poisioned aquifers resulting in no viable drinking water source and again, everyone leaves. Coastal erosion intensified means small islands with rich histories become nothing more than a sandbar over the course of decades, and sustains no population as it did before.
Chaotic weather looks like wildfires, tornados, and droughts 10, 20, 50% more frequent in their occurrence. But not a new phenomenon. Shit years for various crops become more common than good years because you're not getting enough sun, false springs and shock frosts destroy fruitings, yields are lower across the board. Prices go up. Buying tomatos peak season costs as much as is once did off-season.
Probably the biggest driver of inaction here is that what comes to mind is sudden shocks, yet the truth is more like a slow strangle. The urgency is just as valid if you take the long view, but it's easier to stick with the status quo when it's just the gradual discomfort of a belt tightening and not a gun pointed at your head. Boiled frogs and all that.
There's another important aspect to chaos. As you increase the energy in the system, which this is, you're also increasing the range over which phenomena can happen.
You cite 'tornadoes 10, 20, 50% more frequent' and you're not wrong, but it's very important to understand we're also looking at tornadoes and droughts and hurricanes (events tied to the behavior of the chaotic system of the climate) two, five, ten times more INTENSE than we're used to.
Chaos does this. The wildest outliers are tied to how much energy is in the system. They may be no more common than before, but the increased energy and increased chaos can produce wilder variances from the norm.
With regard to specifically destructive events like tornadoes, hurricanes, storm flooding and so on, this is way more dramatic than sea level rise. Nothing we can do, even with nuclear weapons, is as powerful as what weather can do with the energy in that chaotic system… because it's way, way bigger than anything we have at our command.
The truth also brings sudden shocks. We've just not quite wrapped our head around where those are coming from, and the frequency of 'em is probably no more common than usual, but the potential intensity of these events is ramping up with the same slow build you mention. We just don't see it until it hits.
One example: I think it's very likely there are industrialized cities that would not stand against hyper-weather of this nature. We're not used to the idea of tornadoes and hurricanes ripping down tall buildings, but we will live to see the theoretical peak energy (the ten or hundred-year storm) go beyond what our cities are designed to withstand. When that happens, we suddenly have areas where ALL the skyscrapers were toppled, on a weather-event scale rather than a terrorist-act scale.
The mistake they keep making is focusing on sea level rise, as if that's the only real problem global warming could cause. Even at 1.5 degrees C higher than normal it will take years for enough ice to melt to cause significant sea level rise.
Meanwhile we are already seeing apocalyptic like effects of global warming: the worst droughts and fires across multiple continents as we've seen in modern history, significant increases and severity of tropical storms, increase and severity in seasonal flooding etc.
With Covid-19 a lot of this stuff fell out of the news cycle rapidly last year, but 2020 surely marks one of the worst years in history for climate related disasters.
Yeah the lack of a timestamp is definitely confusing. The page source lists a definitely incorrect timestamp, I guess the time the article was digitized.
That could be true for a few small Pacific island nations like Vanuatu. At the high end of predicted sea level rise they would be left with very little habitable land. Even if the land is above mean high tide, every little storm will wash over everything.
Naively using GDP per capita as a measure of the average level of technology people can afford, this suggests that Bangladesh should be able to employ land reclamation measures similar to the Netherlands in the 1960s, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevopolder
There might be other considerations (such as differing geography) that make this impracticable, however.
2/3rds of Bangladesh is <5m above sea level. If that much of the country disappeared, including Dhaka and Chittagong, you could well say they don't have a country any more.
I think without concerted citizen backed action many people won't do anything. IMHO it's not about whether climate change is real or not but whether appropriate action is taken when it counts. And when only few people do anything that is not fair. Therefore I think the message has to be repeated over and over again in increasing volume.
That said, the magnitude of climate change is probably underestimated and talking about average temperatures might also contribute to that.
Sea rise is not the only effect of climate change, and the gradual rise won't be as urgent as extreme weather floods and storms episodes.
You will have also wet bulb temperature episodes, not all time, but more frequently and in bigger areas as time advances. And won't matter if the average temperature is not so high yet, once you get such peaks people (and maybe crops->famines) die.
And last but not least, this fuels positive feedback mechanisms, like less ice reflecting sunlight, more methane released in northern regions, more frequent forest fires and so on that accelerate an already pretty bad trend.
If you think it will cost a lot to try to do something about this, think how costly will be doing nothing.
Absolutely. Wet-bulb temperature episodes are exactly the sort of thing where increasing energy in the chaotic system will lead to previously unreachable spikes in the system: by increasing the ambient energy of the system X degrees, thus increasing its chaotic energy, you produce a maximum peak excursion of X*Y degrees (also accompanied by unexpectedly COLD extremes in a more irregular pattern).
Even in the absence of other weather events these exaggerated peaks and dips are dangerous to life.
It reminds me of the over-population warnings of the 1970s, where prominent scientists and politicians warned that mass starvation was right around the corner. This constant doom and gloom at an extreme level seems to cause fatigue and apathy.
That's exactly what it is. The "science" behind the climate change narrative is sponsored by groups that want to implement a global carbon tax, or any other justification they can think of to create a one-world government. It's exactly the same BS as the COVID manipulation we've endured since 2020.
Water vapor is a bigger contributor to the greenhouse effect than CO2 by three orders of magnitude. The current "models" do not accurately reflect the sun or water on earth.
The fatigue and apathy is because the predictions has been serially wrong. So much so they had to rebrand "global warming" to "climate change".
Normally intelligent people have let their hubris make them victims to globalist propaganda. It's disturbing to see how many people not only fall for it but parrot their programming ad nauseam and attack dissenters pointing out raw fact (like that unadulterated satellite temperate data shows the earth's temperature as relatively flat for the last 20 years, or that the 1930's were warmer than temperatures today).
The earth will be cooler in 10 years, not warmer. We're heading into a grand solar minimum. Wait and see.
I'd say that this article doesn't really show even that much.
According to the article itself, "This is mainly due to using an improved temperature dataset to estimate the baseline rather than sudden changes in climate indicators."
This is an example of the past changing, rather than the present. I'm not sure how to react when the only change was the past got cooler - I wouldn't think that would change anything in the present or future.
I have an alternate hypothesis: the past didn't magically become cooler. The propagandists changed the historical temperature data (yet again) to sustain their narrative because it supports unrelated agendas.
Well, that could be true of the Maldives[1] (which would be tragic, don't get me wrong) but clearly even flooding lots of major coastal cities wouldn't wipe most countries off the map - but it'd still be huge problem.
But that's what's happening. We take people space away.
And primarily people who did not produce the co2
Globalization brought us also much closer over all.
I saw a view documentary about it and those people are aware why it happens.
While we did a lot of fixing medicine and food for them, climate change is what they are paying for and they didn't knew but we did for a long time now.
Ok but I hope you're not saying OP's article is an apocalyptic narrative. It's a pretty mild projection given that we've already hit +1.2 degrees, and are already seeing effects from that.
I'd say the problem is not enough people understand what the solutions are. Those who push the apocalyptic narrative included, as they tend to be against nuclear energy (a clean, safe, compact, 24/7 source) and even shut down existing plants. Which have been getting replaced by coal!!
It's such a heads-I-lose tails-you-win situation. If I talk about extreme cases I'm accused of alarmism. If I talk about nearly-certain cases that fall short of extinction, I'm told it's not important.
Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent.
No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point. It's time for the "we can save the world" people to stop leading everyone on, unless they can present facts and real scenarios that back up their claims (hint: they can't and never do).
You'll notice that technologically we didn't come remotely close to doing anything in the past decade that will enable us to move as fast as we'd have to. Where are the great energy & resource breakthroughs? They don't exist and by the numbers we needed them yesterday.
The world will add 2 billion people in the next ~30 years. Nearly all of those births will be in the developing world where emissions are going to continue to skyrocket. Solar, wind and electric vehicles aren't going to solve that problem.
The emissions that the US + EU cut, India will add.
China will add an entire US-worth of emissions in just the next 10-15 years. If you had a magic wand and could put the US to zero emissions tomorrow morning it wouldn't make a bit of lasting difference to the situation. This single fact of reality makes all the "we can save the world" arguments false.
And that's merely two countries. Then you have parts of Latin America, Africa and developing Asia, where emissions and population are going to continue to rise substantially.
It seems increasingly clear that the so called experts claiming this can be stopped know they're lying, and they keep lying anyway. What's their plan for immediately stopping all emissions increases across all of the developing world? There is no such plan, they have no intention of implementing or calling for such a plan. Thus, they're lying.
There is no scenario where anybody can get the math to work out on what's happening. And you'll find that nobody even attempts to, they just issue empty statements about how we need to take urgent action and then we can save the world. They'll never present you the real scenarios for the actions necessary to immediately turn back all emissions increases. It's fraudulent intellectually, it takes a small amount of time to analyze the context and know that.
Climate nihilism is the next stage of climate denial. We CAN do much to manage growth and encourage sustainable development. Wealthy western nations need to concretely embrace technology transfer and infrastructure investment. As nations develop their infant mortality decreases, people naturally invest in the children that they have and their birthrates decline to replacement level.
Already we're seeing a difference in how technology infrastructure has been distributed in developing countries. People are coming to depend upon their cellular phone and wireless data connections to be more reliable than their electricity infrastructure.
> Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent.
> No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point.
So, I am seeing this set of ideas getting pushed a lot more these days, which means that a lot of the effort being put into climate change denial has started shifting to climate delay and outright fatalism (which used to mostly be a feature of evangelical "who are we to question God's plan for us?" arguments).
The fact of the matter is that there is a lot we can do in terms of slowing the growth and even reducing global CO2 (and CH4, methane) output, and a lot more we can do in terms of carbon capture, and a lot we can do in terms of mitigation and adaptation (which we will have to do regardless of how successful we are at reduction and capture) that is only going to get more expensive the longer we put it off.
This isn't a case of "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it". Every proposal is competing with every other in terms of cost, feasibility, externalities, and impact, it isn't the case that committing to spending money on the problem results in checks being handed out indiscriminately.
If you have a criticism of some specific intervention, please make it, but it isn't feasible to throw up our hands and do nothing. Because even if the cost/benefit analyses are so incredibly bad that just means that ultimately we only do things in the mitigation and adaptation buckets.
It's really just a matter of money. Wind and solar are enough to produce energy; add in nuclear if you like. We also know how to make Hydrogen and Methane to store large amounts of energy over long time periods, so storage is not a technical problem either. It's just very expensive right now. WW2 was a bigger manufacturing challenge that what we would need to do to become carbon neutral. There are several studies with roadmaps to net zero emissions published. They tend to be very long and technical, so they don't get much media attention.
One interesting facet is that it’s adding an extra 0.4 percentage point a year to annual global GDP growth, which is encouraging
On the other hand annual per capita income from oil and natural gas in producer economies falls by about 75%, which sounds like something that can cause political issues
you aren't presenting any data. I don't have the faintest idea what you mean by "thats just math".
You say so confidently it can't be solved, which I'm going to infer you mean impossible and not just hard.
We could without a doubt drastically reduce co2 emmissions to near zero by switching to nuclear, and paying for nuclear plants in developing countries, banning gas vehicles. Require any current and needed hydro carbon power plants to implement carbon capture.
That is hard, very hard. Might start a war. But it is not impossible like you are stating.
We're definitely going to go beyond 2ºC in the coming decades.
Even if a miracle happened and we stopped all human emissions today, current GHGs in the atmosphere will keep trapping more heat for some decades. This is known as climate inertia or climate lag.
Another aspect I don't see frequently mentioned are feedbacks. Again, even if we stopped all emissions today, self sustaining climatic systems will keep adding more heat to the atmosphere (methane, etc) or the sea (Arctic ice melting).
We're currently at aprox 36 billion tonnes of carbon emissions per year [1] only counting fuel burning. It would be a miracle if we could even reach 50% of that in our lifetime, which was aprox the emissions from the 70s.
And a quick reminder that the IPCC reports/estimates excluded arctic methane emissions...which we a) now know are definitely happening and b) are just catastrophic positive feedback loops.
Can you link to some sources on point B? From what I've read you'll find broad scientific consensus on your point A but your point B is not even close to widely accepted among climate scientists.
That said I've learned the science can change rapidly, so I'm all ears if the position of the majority of climate scientists has shifted.
It looks bleak. There are fewer and fewer options remaining. Carbon sequestration at the source of emissions could reduce some CO2 from big fossil fuel power stations, but won't fix vehicles. We need a miracle technology that can actually extract CO2 from the air. Planting 1 trillion trees might help, but we won't do it.
There is also the negative feedback of plants growing faster due to increased available CO2 for them to use.
It would be interesting to see the list of all feedbacks and estimated significance.
There's also the wildcard of algae evolution. Since there are quadrillions of them, evolution happens very quickly so changes in ocean acidification and temperature could substantially change how efficiently they work. They could get better or worse.
Do you have and references on your last point about algae? I have this (totally unsubstantiated) idea that plundering the oceans of fish along with rising temperatures will result in the oceans sequestering incredible amounts of CO2 via algae blooms. Never found much to read on the topic though - in what ways could this be negative feedback loop?
yeah, the n-th order effects like the siberian ice melting away into methane emissions equivalent to 100 years of 2020 CO2 output will just completely obliterate any efforts at mitigating new emissions.
Buried in the last paragraph: “The chance of temporarily reaching 1.5°C has roughly doubled compared to last year’s predictions, said WMO. This is mainly due to using an improved temperature dataset to estimate the baseline rather than sudden changes in climate indicators.”
Knowing that a probability has doubled doesn't strike me as particularly useful here. If it doubled from 1e-6 to 2e-6, then it's still almost certain that it won't happen. If it went from 0.5 to 1.0, well, that's a different matter entirely....
I live in a state (California) that prides itself for its environmentalism, and has been vocal for many years regarding climate change. But...that very same state is doing nothing to prepare for it aside from lecturing others and virtue-signalling: there are no new reservoirs being built, despite sustained droughts already happening, the forests are mis-managed and overgrown due to misguided "let's never cut down anything, ever" thinking, with massive fires every year, the electric grid is unable to keep up with demand...
I don't doubt that climate change is happening, but with such ostensibly smart and aware people making such poor policy, and for so long -- I have little confidence in the government's willingness or ability to do any good.
> : there are no new reservoirs being built, despite sustained droughts already happening, the forests are mis-managed and overgrown due to misguided "let's never cut down anything, ever" thinking, with massive fires every year, the electric grid is unable to keep up with demand...
And very unsustainable agriculture which is highly contributing to the droughts additionally to climate change itself. Using high demand water crops in a place like California just wasn't a great idea to start with.
you are under-informed - in research, policy, and budget, the State of California is a recognized world-class.. (long lists of references left as an exercise to the reader)
First, forests manage themselves. There are wildfires because of the drought that you mentioned and higher temperatures.
Second, the first order problem is too many people. The warming/drought is a second order hysteresis effect. Creating more reservoirs exacerbates the first order problem.
Question: How do you folks deal with the hopelessness of it all?
It's pretty obvious that emissions are not going to drop to zero, that the positive feedback loops due to arctic methane emissions have kicked off, and that runaway warming has begun. Best-case equilibrium now looks like 3C by 2100.
Basically, the situation is bleak and in all likelihood irreversible. There will me massive changes in my lifetime and the world we've left our children will be drastically different and obviously worse.
Stop listening to people who have no idea what they're talking about, have an agenda, or are otherwise compromised in their rational position.
If you do that, this entire idea that all is lost will become much more tempered - we have a major challenge ahead of us. Which can be said of any age (ask your older relatives what the age of nuclear weapons felt like).
In short, I deal with the hopelessness by being reasonable, and it thereby vanishes.
It's absolutely no more difficult than colonizing Mars along a similar timeline.
Everything that we face here, in the most extreme possible interpretations, can be survived by humanity with effort and ingenuity, and we even get to build our hardened shelters etc. on nice sunny days with oxygen to breathe and water to drink. Mars is MUCH harder and may also be possible.
If we're really, really ambitious and lucky we may also be able to sustain the global population we've currently got: that's a nice broad gene pool that can absorb a lot of evolutionary shocks, I think. I doubt we can expand global population much, but that won't be happening: weather alone is going to wipe a hell of a lot of people out.
It's going to start to feel a bit like bracing ourselves to live on Mars (except for on our home planet), as climate events ramp up, but humanity is definitely going to get through it. There will probably end up being a backlash against those who got us into this, as well as a predictable backlash against climate refugees that will cause a huge amount of basically genocide. It will be like 'stay where you are!' under conditions not conducive to human life. Even then technology might be able to shelter people to some extent.
> How do you folks deal with the hopelessness of it all?
Don't have kids.
I know this is a very unpopular point of view on HN and this response will probably be downvoted into oblivion, but the fact of the matter is that if enough people adopt this strategy it will actually solve the problem eventually. Yes, the odds of this happening are vanishingly small, but population control is ultimately the only long-term solution.
Of course... it is more complicated than that. This is a classic tragedy of the commons scenario (or Idiocracy for that matter). The people that don't care will continue on, and the people that do care won't be able to influence the next generation nearly as much.
Western nations are financing 3rd world birth rates at the expense of our own citizens well being. I imagine we should address that first before we even consider asking our own to stop reproducing.
and find a way to work towards something of a solution in your daily life. The work may not go anywhere and the problem may be intractable, but by not having kids and doing some work towards a solution, its at least a local anesthetic for hopelessness.
I'm skeptical that making an argument that will probably only convince exceptionally altruistic people (at least among those who wanted to have kids to begin with) to not reproduce is good for future generations.
Population control is one of the most antihuman positions you can have IMO. The likes of Paul Erlich and anti-human philosophies who sees humans as a cancer and who sterilized millions of Indians and south americans is one of the biggest atrocities ever done.
We had population control 300 years ago before we had the knowledge to create machine and feed them.
Less than 1billion people on the planet and most people starved.
I don't feel hopeless because I understand that we are being manipulated by these apocalyptic predictions. They will not pan out. Really diving into the projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, RCP4.5 and RCP6.0 are the most likely of the scenarios. This news headline isn't really "news." We basically knew we had already reached this point. Everyone keeps focuses on the high-emissions scenario, which is unlikely.
Yes it's telling that the people who are spreading all the worst of the climate FUD are the same people who want to provide the solutions or be in power. Fear is always an effective strategy to push political change. That's a big part of what is going on here.
99.9% of all species ever existed are extinct today.
The world have been through 5 mass extinctions.
In other world, nature doesn't care about us what so ever.
Humans are the only species who have ever had a chance to be the exception to this trend by using the same ingenuity that lead us from less than 1billion mostly starving people who on average died at 40 to now 8 billion people and with plenty of food and resources and we keep getting better and better at it. Dead from drought have gone down 98% the last 100 years.
There are no scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate change that we can't deal with today, let alone tomorrow. And we will do that through using more energy, cause at the end of the day, there is not shortage of resources only knowledge. We will find the solutions to the issues that arise over time.
Remind yourself that humans have adapted to quite literally ever problem in front of us. We will have no choice but to adapt to a changing world. It is vastly more practical to mobilize people to engineer and deploy solutions to problems they immediately face.
Humanity as a species will not collapse, we will adapt and press on.
Do things in your regular life that help the planet:
Don't drive; bike.
Don't eat meat.
Stop buying products you don't need.
Plant trees in your city.
Donate to climate action foundations.
You left out the most important action: vote for people who want to deal with the problem. Individual action is nice and all, but this is a problem that is caused collectively and needs to be dealt with collectively.
It's not hopeless! People have overdosed on fear porn. Meanwhile, renewables are getting cheaper, modern nuclear energy technology is clean and safe, and carbon capture is getting more promising by the day.
Things are looking bleak even if we are able to get to complete zero emissions, let alone 50%. Sure, first world countries have chucked a few solar panels and windmills around, but that's a drop in the bucket.
Small changes to personal consumption are not the best way to contribute to fighting climate change. A significantly more effective actionstep would be to donate a small portion of your income to highly effective climate charities [1].
I'm not against changing personal consumption - for example, I went vegan. But this is not where the majority of my impact on the world lies, as even a small donation vastly outweighs the effect that my veganism has.
I think that after the consequences of climate change have finally been realized only a few short decades from now, many people will come out of the woodwork to say that they really did believe it was hopeless the whole time, but that declaring it was hopeless before the consequences happened would have been labeled counterproductive for the people that did not believe so. It would have been declared as giving up hope too soon. Irrationality in the face of obstacles that are actually impossible to overcome stems from the same mechanism which has caused those same people to accomplish goals that are reasonable, like getting better at drawing or running a marathon. There's no sense in denying one if it's inseparable from the other.
My opinion is that there is no solution. It's frequently said in the context of relationships that you can't change everyone. Forcing everyone to align with your worldview is the only real hope we have to prevent the continued destruction of the environment, and yet in the context of human friendships it's considered misanthropic. People still want their power, and their identity, and their freedom, and we are collectively powerless against that instinct.
I do not think we're ignoring the problems on purpose. We're just so bad at taking into consideration the consequences that might not take place in our lifetimes. It's a limitation of our human imaginations.
Our innovations in technology have raised our expectations, and with those expectations comes a baseline of additional carbon emissions. We're not going to go back to the industrial revolution for the planet's sake.
I choose not to put my limited time and energy into worrying about a lost cause, and will have to try to continue to do the things I want to. That battle in itself is already all-consuming for me.
Will we see a world reshaped by climate change? Almost certainly. Is it completely futile to keep fighting to stop it? Absolutely not.
All the projections go to 2100, but do you think this magically stops there? Our actions today are going to determine the extent of the damage to the future. We've already baked in serious changes, but we can avoid a hellscape in 2150, 2200, etc. If we don't our descendents, what are left of them, will curse our memory.
The more damage we do to the earth, the harder we're going to make it for us to even develop the solutions to solve it. Lets be real, carbon capture on the scale to reverse global warming is going to require an advanced civilization, and that won't happen if we've regressed back to some sort of mad max hellscape.
> many people will come out of the woodwork to say that they really did believe it was hopeless the whole time, but that declaring it was hopeless before the consequences happened would have been labeled counterproductive for the people that did not believe so
I believe this is the case, although it's becoming an increasingly indefensible position. The writing has been on the wall for a decade, and the false-hope strategy is clearly not working.
I'd think this site would be full of nerds ;) Think about the experience of being a nerd in HS. If pop culture is to be believed, I only got the extra-lite version of that in Russia compared to the US; on the other hand, I grew up surrounded by Russia, it's like the same thing on larger scale.
The experience is that you are constantly surrounded by people doing stupid, harmful crap in part because some of them are actually idiots, but mostly because of group/tribal/social pressures you don't care and can do nothing about.
What do you do? You do your thing, take care of yourself (broadly, i.e. your family, etc.) and minimize the damage others' ...unwise actions cause you. If you are so inclined you can also laugh when chickens come home to roost for someone due to their willful stupidity.
This approach works well for climate change, too :)
I agree that it’s hopeless and it doesn’t bother me at all. I can’t do anything about it so I might as well enjoy the ride while it lasts. Makes it easy to laugh about the really stupid day to day stuff.
I subscribe to this view as well (no kids to worry about), but the people busy wanting to save the world don't like it, because now they have to deal with denialists and surrenderists.
I feel half bad about it, but the whole pandemic has shown how odd this capitalistic world is. People need to work to earn money, but a lot of work generates CO2, directly or indirectly. There was an interesting article last year about how the flower industry in Europe basically shut down (no weddings and no restaurants needing decorations meant no flying in fresh flowers from Africa, and no employment for the flower growers). Or how some countries need jet loads of tourists to survive...
Predicting the future is the hardest job in the world. Given that, my standards to be anxious about the future based on predictions are very high. Climate scientists are also heavily incentivized to be apocalyptic, since the more dire the climate situation is, the more funding people want to give scientists to study the climate!
I haven't seen evidence presented that climate scientists can accurately predict future climate given correct inputs. (E.g. if you give scientists the correct information on the activity of the sun and amount of greenhouse gasses emitted for the years 2010-2020, and plug that into a climate model from the year 2010, it is unlikely to give you correct temperature for the years 2010-2020).
If they can't predict it that means they don't really understand it.
I would happy to be shown the evidence of climate predictions that are more accurate than would be expected. (E.g. I could draw a trendline from the years 1900-2000 out through 2020 and be mostly right. I would expect climate scientists to be substantially more accurate).
It's chaos math. Chaos is a nonperiodic system that operates within predictable limits that are a function of how much energy is within the system, and something we can study in detail.
Consider the concept of 'period three implies chaos': we do indeed understand chaos, but its sensitivity to initial conditions means we can't make deterministic projections of its future state, only projections of the range of possible future states (and a good solid notion of how deterministic it's gonna be based on how much energy is in the system: period three is arrived at from deterministic oscillations through INCREASING energy, and we know exactly what happens to the unpredictability as we continue to add energy)
Climate is a giant chaotic system of atmosphere energy.
We absolutely understand what, in a general sense, happens when we alter the amount of energy in the system.
Am I the only one around here who is old enough to remember this exact prediction from 30 years ago? Florida should have become the next Atlantis 20 years ago. I understand it's a worrisome issue, but like religious predictions of the end of the world, failures work against credibility.
People always say this kind of thing. You're probably mis-remembering a headline of an article you barely read and are suggesting that was the global scientific consensus at the time. If you actually look at the real predictions about the climate, which always come packaged with the level of certainty, worst case, best case etc, then predictions have been remarkably accurate for decades. By comparing this to doomsday religious predictions that of course are nonsense you just add to the widespread public denial.
Well, it's a little tough to find a source for a televised news segment from 30+ years ago, before the rise of the modern internet, but you're just as free to claim my memory is faulty as I am to state my recollection.
My understanding is that in many places in FL places that were dry are now soaking wet. Saw an article about a development where there are puddles everywhere (lawns, sidewalks, etc) because the water table is rising.
If I owned property in FL, I wouldn't be looking at the long term right now.
I lived in Miami for much of the 80s. The King Tides they encounter regularly, now, were unknown then. I can point you at a few dozen houses I know of, that are no longer on the coast, because the ocean is there now.
Former neighbors tell me these days they've never seen the water so high; it's not just me.
It's actually illegal in some states to acknowledge the land lost to climate change [0]. Part of the reasoning behind this is to sew doubt in the veracity of the climate predictions of the 80s and 90s.
As some people have said, a large amount of coastal land has already been lost to the sea, especially in Florida. This situation is going to take years/decades to really unfold, because, for the most part, it's not like houses will be above ground one day, then under water the next. Instead this will be a gradual process whereby flooding becomes more severe and frequent, yet the ground will be ostensibly "dry" 99% of the time (or underwater only 3 days a year). Then it will be 98% of the time, 97% of the time, etc.
[1] is a link to a McKinsey report on climate change and how it will effect Florida and how lenders should prepare.
I'd be very surprised if that exact prediction was made by peer-reviewed climate models 30 years ago, or if a scientific paper from that time suggested that Florida would become "the next Atlantis" by 2020.
It's quite easy to find flooding maps that show the effects of various sea level changes. It's not so easy to find concrete predictions about when those changes are due.
Perhaps we should stick to the science instead of imagining hypothetical news stories from decades ago and complaining they were silly.
Yes, let's stick to the science. Which says we have problems, yes, but the narrative so many on here are parroting (all is lost, the gun has already gone off, the world will be uninhabitable) is not remotely close to the predictions even the IPCC has reached.
A reminder that predictions of the end of the world are, so far, never true, is welcome.
Edit: At my location in southern Sweden it seems like this expected land rise compensates for ~70% of the expected sea level rise, but the data seems a bit sketchy. I think more research is needed.
Besides, sea-level rise is not uniformly distributed, same as temperature variation due to climate change. But overall, yes, the sea level is rising, and it is accelerating globally.
Florida is porous limestone. Even the most sophisticated seawalls wouldn’t prevent water from coming in through the sides and up, unless you drilled those walls very deep...and even then you’d have to get water from somewhere once you’ve pumped it all out of the state (an issue already happening regardless of carbon output - look up lateral saltwater intrusion)
This reminds me of a fearmongering TV "documentary" narrated by Leonard Nimoy about 40 years ago I saw that warned that a new ice age was coming and that the evidence was that snow storms were becoming more frequent.
Yeah, I left this part out of my comment. My 4th grade science textbook said we were headed for a new ice age by the 90's, and that we'd be completely out of oil by 2000.
Can you find any sources of such predictions from 30 years ago? It sounds plausible to me that you're remembering criticism of climate warnings from 30 years ago that described their warnings as hyperbolically apocalyptic.
The rise of technocracy and scientism seems more concerning from where I stand. Oh I know, these experts happen to be infallible. I wouldn't dare dispute their gospel or speak any heresies on this esteemed discussion board.
Just the same the trend is concerning. Especially if we are willing to consider the hypothetical world where experts planning the world's energy consumption might possibly have ulterior motives. Of course that isn't the case. It isn't even possible. I'm reliably informed that all skeptic views are paid stooges of the oil companies.
Scientism is infallible. Sure, private researchers funded by the tobacco companies might have fibbed here and there, but that's only because they're greedy capitalists. Government funded research explaining the dangers of cannabis has been 100% accurate. Mass incarceration is a wonderful policy. Scientific experts are qualified not only in their fields of research, but to make wide sweeping social dictates as well.
The rockefeller foundation is the 39th biggest foundation. Any search term and it will show something. I tried random terms such as "animal conservation" and "Sydney" and there were a dozen results.
Science is about building knowledge, so if climate change against all odds turns out to be false, it will be abandoned and the mechanism that is really behind the data will be the focus of further studies. There is no such thing as scientism but a bunch of different people who are competing for the best explanation of reality. The ability to predict is a very handy thing. Newtonian physics might not be 100% correct, but it makes damn good predictions that made our lives so much better.
I did the math, and my child has officially spent more of his summers inside than out because of the constant wildfires.
I maintain that most of the worst predictions assume an inability for people to adapt. Still, it amazes me to no end how many people are willing to barrel head first into an avoidable fate without taking their foot off the throttle. I wonder to what extent people will deny the reality around them.
Based on what people have already been accepting as normal, it does feel like we will get to the point of knife fighting over a cup of water before someone admits that we've had an awful lot of El Nino years in a row.
Last year, the county forester came around and explained to my uncle that the reason so many of his 100+ year old trees were dying was a lack of water, and he needed to thin them out on his property to keep the rest alive. It feels like he finally turned a corner and accepted that something is wrong (he still doesn't believe it's man made, but you know, tiny victories).
Note that climate migration is one of the bad things that are commonly predicted by climate change models. And yes, undoubtedly there are indeed some people who move from wildfire-affected areas to protect their children, either temporarily or permanently. (I know of a few affluent families with children who did so last summer during the California wildfires). The point is that this "solution" will instead be a very large problem when, for example, significant portions of the West Coast of the United States is fleeing.
Or to put this more simply: I'm glad you live in an area that isn't affected by wildfires, but what portion of the California population (almost 40 million people) is that area prepared to permanently house in the next 5 or 10 years?
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What am more worried about is the direct wholesale destruction of the biosphere. There are absolutely bonkers numbers about extinction, ocean acidification, runaway permafrost melt that actually could choke out a majority of people.
Worse still, these effects aren't easily solvable by stopping emissions, or blocking out the sun with mylar sheets, or any of the "low hanging" technological fruit -- the stuff that could be solved with today's space technology or electric car tech.
In order to actually solve these "deeper" problems, we will need an absolutely massive bio-engineering effort that is probably only possible with some kind of entropic breakthrough.
Evolution is basically hyper-organization, a point of locally super low entropy that only happens by hundreds of millions of years of energy expenditure. When a species dies, it's not those individuals, it's every one of those individuals that ever lived that dies. All that concentration of local entropy, destroyed forever. It's like using every GPU on planet earth to train a hyper-smart GPT-4, for many human lifetimes -- and then hitting rm -rf on the weights.
Also the low hanging tech you talk about is a compete cluster bomb of terrible ripple effects. They don't solve the issue only kick the can down the road while causing massive other problems.
We need to reduce the number of humans on Earth.
In other cases, its a ponzi scheme, where people have an excessive number of children in order to ensure their own livelihood in old age.
The solution is probably to stop sending all forms of food aid, to stop interfering in local and regional conflicts, and to replace all aid with education, abortion and contraception for women.
For example, in countries like Somalia, about half of the population rely on food aid for survival [1], but the fertility rate is 6.07 children per woman. The population is forecast to double in the next 25 years [2].
It would seem reasonable to me that if we are offering food aid, that we also require all recipients to undertake long-term contraception.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/somalia-people-depend-on-food-aid-to-p...
[2] https://www.populationpyramid.net/somalia/2021/
A, the "kicking the ladder" argument. We had a good run in the West over-consuming and producting Co2, and we continue to be at the top (including the Co2 we outsource to our global outsourced factories for our consumption), but others shouldn't.
Before we talk about over-population in e.g. Africa and India, why not talk about cutting down on consumption in the US (#2 co2 global producer with just 5% of the global population - and that's even not including the co2 produced in China for products the US companies ordered/will consume/sell).
Giving a good example how more people can live with less?
Else it's "let us keep our mega-polluting way of life and you better stop having kids so we are not inconvenienced".
(It's also often accompanied with quotes from westerners not having children "for the planet", when they just do it for their career, or to avoid any obstacles like kids on their personal "journey" to consumption and fun).
(1) the majority of CO2 emission is happening in North America, China, Europe, and industrial part of Asia, none of which exhibits high birth rate.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...
(2) Birth control is already being tackled with in developing countries. It's just not being talked much in the context of global warming, because (1).
(3) Talking about population when the majority of CO2 is emitted by a small number of wealthy countries (with low birthrate) seems like focusing on the wrong thing. Especially since almost all arguing about it online are living in one of those wealthy countries. Yes, it would be really convenient for me if climate problem could be solved by telling Africans to get their shit together, but it's not happening that way.
> We need to reduce the number of humans on Earth.
I'm happy to point out that this is not the case.
We're already peak child and the next two billion will not come from population growth but from population replacement[0] (Thanks, Hans. RIP, I loved you), where children replace the people in previous cohorts that never made it to reproductive age.
The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years. Many countries on earth already and most countries on earth in about twenty years will have problems maintaining their population as it is. Fertility has been dropping all over the globe, with a few exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa.
No, really. There's nothing we can do about the people we already have and there are barely any new babies arriving.
What we do need to worry about is population migrations. We need to make it easier for people to migrate. We need to set up political and social infrastructure to welcome people from places that climate change has made inhospitable.
Since most of the world will be suffering from over aging and from a lack of births, these migrants will be dearly needed.
So, no need to talk about birth control, let's talk about immigration reform instead!
[0] https://www.gapminder.org/
Yet some people keep reproducing here, it's true birth rate has fallen in educated people but there are simply too many people at the bottom here in India so our population isn't going to come done anytime soon
There's definitely a sweet spot the world should hit.
The Bomb That Didn't Explode: Why Our Fears About Population Growth Didn't Come True
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/09/813801640/the-bomb-that-didnt...
And a debate :
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/docum...
The alternative: Asking each human to reduce their C02 output won't get you very, especially since most of our individual output is more influence by govt policy rather than our own actions, for instance: commute distances, etc.
Interestingly, they proposed population control before promoting the climate agenda. Many view fear of a climate apocalypse as a vehicle to advance the preexisting agenda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_Council
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Biodemography_and_...
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-forgotten-le...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation#Eugenic...
The last couple of hundred years are an anomaly but this exponential increase simply can not go on without running headlong into some kind of wall, be it our effect on the environment, resource starvation, lack of space (in a way also a resource) and so on.
The problem with this is that the nature can stay hostile for much longer than humans can stay alive. We literally built a civilisation on top of the corpses of creatures that survived much longer than we ever walked on the earth upright.
I am sure that in some very distant feature the archaeologist and biologist of some species will have a boon on our remains, I don't really doubt that, but the problem is that we are facing huge opportunity for de dinosaur experience.
My real concern are things like man made chemicals, pesticides. Which have made it into every component of our food and water supply. To put it in perspective, I have a very rural farm - no row crops for tens of miles. There are so few bugs it’s spooky. There are significantly fewer birds. My Bees die most years, even in warmer weather.
There’s also estrogen in our water ways, micro plastics, etc
The reason that’s the “real concern” is it can take out all humans very very quickly. Like a generation, where as global warming is survivable.
The problem is that most of our food chain is going to have major issues adapting at a speed that matches the rate of change. Pesticides and chemicals are certainly problematic as well, but moving the global needle so much over a 100-250 year timeline is a huge issue.
The sun grows stronger over millions of years (and it got colder over the last 200 years), however that doesn't matter because the earth is a balanced system where an equal amount of energy enters and leaves the system. The CO2 concentration will automatically adjust so that temperatures can fall within a narrow band.
Therefore it is completely unsurprising that CO2 levels have been higher in the past, they had to be higher to reach the same temperatures. If we reach historic CO2 levels today then we will also reach higher temperatures than in the past.
OTH nobody would use medicine daily and call that a natural state of being (unless you're acutally or chronically sick).
Our food supply depends on these plant-medicines becuase without our cultivated crops aren't strong enough to survive or yield significantly less.
It is tragic that species go extinct. I believe 99.99% of all species in earth's 4 billion years has gone extinct. I forget who said it but like individual creatures live and die, species also have to live and die. But it also opens the door for new species. Without mass die offs, we don't have dinosaurs. Without mass die offs, we don't have mammals and humans.
> All that concentration of local entropy, destroyed forever
And look at what the previous destructions created. The beauty of today's nature stands on the graveyards of the natural world that came before it. Those species you mourn today only existed because previous species went extinct and open up the space for other species.
Not saying we should welcome species extinction, especially the ones human cause. But we should be mindful of the fact that past species extinctions is why the current species exist. It's not all one sided. There is "life after death".
How is the latter not just a byproduct of the former?
We could do that, I think, in about 20 years, if we really wanted to just get rid of this 1.5degC rise. But we can't, we have the ocean acidification, the desertification, the pollution, the acid rain, the plastic pollution. My point is that it's not really the temperature I'm worried about, it's the everything else.
But yes, biosphere collapse is a far more frightening scenario than humans having to rebuild for a few centuries...
"A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
My understanding in 2021 is that much of that stuff is already happening, since we obviously didn't halt warming. And that it's also too late to prevent more of it from happening, because there is a lag time between prevention measures happening, and having an effect.
We are past the point where just reducing emissions will be enough, and instead will need to also harden the world against inevitable effects of climate change. This is even harder and more expensive than it would have been if we had stopped emitting earlier.
Net emissions just keep stacking, but if you compare total emissions today with past predictions they simply don’t line up with 2021.
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Sea level rise looks more like king tides periodically destroying coastal occupations until it's uninsurable and everyone moves away. Poisioned aquifers resulting in no viable drinking water source and again, everyone leaves. Coastal erosion intensified means small islands with rich histories become nothing more than a sandbar over the course of decades, and sustains no population as it did before.
Chaotic weather looks like wildfires, tornados, and droughts 10, 20, 50% more frequent in their occurrence. But not a new phenomenon. Shit years for various crops become more common than good years because you're not getting enough sun, false springs and shock frosts destroy fruitings, yields are lower across the board. Prices go up. Buying tomatos peak season costs as much as is once did off-season.
Probably the biggest driver of inaction here is that what comes to mind is sudden shocks, yet the truth is more like a slow strangle. The urgency is just as valid if you take the long view, but it's easier to stick with the status quo when it's just the gradual discomfort of a belt tightening and not a gun pointed at your head. Boiled frogs and all that.
You cite 'tornadoes 10, 20, 50% more frequent' and you're not wrong, but it's very important to understand we're also looking at tornadoes and droughts and hurricanes (events tied to the behavior of the chaotic system of the climate) two, five, ten times more INTENSE than we're used to.
Chaos does this. The wildest outliers are tied to how much energy is in the system. They may be no more common than before, but the increased energy and increased chaos can produce wilder variances from the norm.
With regard to specifically destructive events like tornadoes, hurricanes, storm flooding and so on, this is way more dramatic than sea level rise. Nothing we can do, even with nuclear weapons, is as powerful as what weather can do with the energy in that chaotic system… because it's way, way bigger than anything we have at our command.
The truth also brings sudden shocks. We've just not quite wrapped our head around where those are coming from, and the frequency of 'em is probably no more common than usual, but the potential intensity of these events is ramping up with the same slow build you mention. We just don't see it until it hits.
One example: I think it's very likely there are industrialized cities that would not stand against hyper-weather of this nature. We're not used to the idea of tornadoes and hurricanes ripping down tall buildings, but we will live to see the theoretical peak energy (the ten or hundred-year storm) go beyond what our cities are designed to withstand. When that happens, we suddenly have areas where ALL the skyscrapers were toppled, on a weather-event scale rather than a terrorist-act scale.
Meanwhile we are already seeing apocalyptic like effects of global warming: the worst droughts and fires across multiple continents as we've seen in modern history, significant increases and severity of tropical storms, increase and severity in seasonal flooding etc.
In 2020 alone both Australia and the Western US saw their worst wild fire seasons in modern history. 2020 also saw the worse Atlantic hurricane season in history: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/record-breaking-atlantic-...
2020 also saw the Philippines get hit with the most powerful Cyclone at landfall in history (175 mph winds at landfall): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Goni
And that was no outlier, in the last 5-6 years we've seen multiple Cyclones with winds over 175 mph, with several over 200 mph. This is definitely new territory for storms like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tropical_cyclone_recor...
With Covid-19 a lot of this stuff fell out of the news cycle rapidly last year, but 2020 surely marks one of the worst years in history for climate related disasters.
What I don't understand about your link is how AP can serve a new story without a timestamp.
As an aside, I'm not sure why they call it an AP "dispatch" in this case. Does anyone know the definition of the term dispatch in this context?
[0] https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/notable-quotable-the-art-of...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nations-vanish-global-warm...
Bangladesh, similarly, is a very low lying nation without the capital to build seawalls and other protections (as the Netherlands can).
Naively using GDP per capita as a measure of the average level of technology people can afford, this suggests that Bangladesh should be able to employ land reclamation measures similar to the Netherlands in the 1960s, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevopolder
There might be other considerations (such as differing geography) that make this impracticable, however.
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And the guy you're citing is still correct.
We didn't reverse it before 2000. Nations will dissapear under water and general turmoil.
He never said it would happen in 2000. Only that the reversal had to happen before 2000 to prevent it from happening.
That said, the magnitude of climate change is probably underestimated and talking about average temperatures might also contribute to that.
You will have also wet bulb temperature episodes, not all time, but more frequently and in bigger areas as time advances. And won't matter if the average temperature is not so high yet, once you get such peaks people (and maybe crops->famines) die.
And last but not least, this fuels positive feedback mechanisms, like less ice reflecting sunlight, more methane released in northern regions, more frequent forest fires and so on that accelerate an already pretty bad trend.
If you think it will cost a lot to try to do something about this, think how costly will be doing nothing.
Even in the absence of other weather events these exaggerated peaks and dips are dangerous to life.
Water vapor is a bigger contributor to the greenhouse effect than CO2 by three orders of magnitude. The current "models" do not accurately reflect the sun or water on earth.
The fatigue and apathy is because the predictions has been serially wrong. So much so they had to rebrand "global warming" to "climate change".
Normally intelligent people have let their hubris make them victims to globalist propaganda. It's disturbing to see how many people not only fall for it but parrot their programming ad nauseam and attack dissenters pointing out raw fact (like that unadulterated satellite temperate data shows the earth's temperature as relatively flat for the last 20 years, or that the 1930's were warmer than temperatures today).
The earth will be cooler in 10 years, not warmer. We're heading into a grand solar minimum. Wait and see.
According to the article itself, "This is mainly due to using an improved temperature dataset to estimate the baseline rather than sudden changes in climate indicators."
This is an example of the past changing, rather than the present. I'm not sure how to react when the only change was the past got cooler - I wouldn't think that would change anything in the present or future.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change_on_i...
And primarily people who did not produce the co2
Globalization brought us also much closer over all.
I saw a view documentary about it and those people are aware why it happens.
While we did a lot of fixing medicine and food for them, climate change is what they are paying for and they didn't knew but we did for a long time now.
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"How it started" (From your Article)
Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. :
"How it's Going"
A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/climate/bangladesh-floods...
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Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent.
No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point. It's time for the "we can save the world" people to stop leading everyone on, unless they can present facts and real scenarios that back up their claims (hint: they can't and never do).
You'll notice that technologically we didn't come remotely close to doing anything in the past decade that will enable us to move as fast as we'd have to. Where are the great energy & resource breakthroughs? They don't exist and by the numbers we needed them yesterday.
The world will add 2 billion people in the next ~30 years. Nearly all of those births will be in the developing world where emissions are going to continue to skyrocket. Solar, wind and electric vehicles aren't going to solve that problem.
The emissions that the US + EU cut, India will add.
China will add an entire US-worth of emissions in just the next 10-15 years. If you had a magic wand and could put the US to zero emissions tomorrow morning it wouldn't make a bit of lasting difference to the situation. This single fact of reality makes all the "we can save the world" arguments false.
And that's merely two countries. Then you have parts of Latin America, Africa and developing Asia, where emissions and population are going to continue to rise substantially.
It seems increasingly clear that the so called experts claiming this can be stopped know they're lying, and they keep lying anyway. What's their plan for immediately stopping all emissions increases across all of the developing world? There is no such plan, they have no intention of implementing or calling for such a plan. Thus, they're lying.
There is no scenario where anybody can get the math to work out on what's happening. And you'll find that nobody even attempts to, they just issue empty statements about how we need to take urgent action and then we can save the world. They'll never present you the real scenarios for the actions necessary to immediately turn back all emissions increases. It's fraudulent intellectually, it takes a small amount of time to analyze the context and know that.
Already we're seeing a difference in how technology infrastructure has been distributed in developing countries. People are coming to depend upon their cellular phone and wireless data connections to be more reliable than their electricity infrastructure.
> No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point.
So, I am seeing this set of ideas getting pushed a lot more these days, which means that a lot of the effort being put into climate change denial has started shifting to climate delay and outright fatalism (which used to mostly be a feature of evangelical "who are we to question God's plan for us?" arguments).
The fact of the matter is that there is a lot we can do in terms of slowing the growth and even reducing global CO2 (and CH4, methane) output, and a lot more we can do in terms of carbon capture, and a lot we can do in terms of mitigation and adaptation (which we will have to do regardless of how successful we are at reduction and capture) that is only going to get more expensive the longer we put it off.
This isn't a case of "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it". Every proposal is competing with every other in terms of cost, feasibility, externalities, and impact, it isn't the case that committing to spending money on the problem results in checks being handed out indiscriminately.
If you have a criticism of some specific intervention, please make it, but it isn't feasible to throw up our hands and do nothing. Because even if the cost/benefit analyses are so incredibly bad that just means that ultimately we only do things in the mitigation and adaptation buckets.
https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050
Edit:
One interesting facet is that it’s adding an extra 0.4 percentage point a year to annual global GDP growth, which is encouraging
On the other hand annual per capita income from oil and natural gas in producer economies falls by about 75%, which sounds like something that can cause political issues
You say so confidently it can't be solved, which I'm going to infer you mean impossible and not just hard.
We could without a doubt drastically reduce co2 emmissions to near zero by switching to nuclear, and paying for nuclear plants in developing countries, banning gas vehicles. Require any current and needed hydro carbon power plants to implement carbon capture.
That is hard, very hard. Might start a war. But it is not impossible like you are stating.
Even if a miracle happened and we stopped all human emissions today, current GHGs in the atmosphere will keep trapping more heat for some decades. This is known as climate inertia or climate lag.
Another aspect I don't see frequently mentioned are feedbacks. Again, even if we stopped all emissions today, self sustaining climatic systems will keep adding more heat to the atmosphere (methane, etc) or the sea (Arctic ice melting).
We're currently at aprox 36 billion tonnes of carbon emissions per year [1] only counting fuel burning. It would be a miracle if we could even reach 50% of that in our lifetime, which was aprox the emissions from the 70s.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
The gun seems to have been fired.
That said I've learned the science can change rapidly, so I'm all ears if the position of the majority of climate scientists has shifted.
I wrote a blog about it a couple years ago. Basically, we needed to stop using coal years ago
http://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal-with-c...
Google tried to make renewable land cheaper than coal in 2007
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2014/11/30/why-...
We could have bought ourselves another decade by dealing with coal sooner
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It would be interesting to see the list of all feedbacks and estimated significance.
There's also the wildcard of algae evolution. Since there are quadrillions of them, evolution happens very quickly so changes in ocean acidification and temperature could substantially change how efficiently they work. They could get better or worse.
I don't doubt that climate change is happening, but with such ostensibly smart and aware people making such poor policy, and for so long -- I have little confidence in the government's willingness or ability to do any good.
And very unsustainable agriculture which is highly contributing to the droughts additionally to climate change itself. Using high demand water crops in a place like California just wasn't a great idea to start with.
You can pump water over the same thing you can oil. You cant pump sunshine that way
First, forests manage themselves. There are wildfires because of the drought that you mentioned and higher temperatures.
Second, the first order problem is too many people. The warming/drought is a second order hysteresis effect. Creating more reservoirs exacerbates the first order problem.
It's pretty obvious that emissions are not going to drop to zero, that the positive feedback loops due to arctic methane emissions have kicked off, and that runaway warming has begun. Best-case equilibrium now looks like 3C by 2100.
Basically, the situation is bleak and in all likelihood irreversible. There will me massive changes in my lifetime and the world we've left our children will be drastically different and obviously worse.
If you do that, this entire idea that all is lost will become much more tempered - we have a major challenge ahead of us. Which can be said of any age (ask your older relatives what the age of nuclear weapons felt like).
In short, I deal with the hopelessness by being reasonable, and it thereby vanishes.
Everything that we face here, in the most extreme possible interpretations, can be survived by humanity with effort and ingenuity, and we even get to build our hardened shelters etc. on nice sunny days with oxygen to breathe and water to drink. Mars is MUCH harder and may also be possible.
If we're really, really ambitious and lucky we may also be able to sustain the global population we've currently got: that's a nice broad gene pool that can absorb a lot of evolutionary shocks, I think. I doubt we can expand global population much, but that won't be happening: weather alone is going to wipe a hell of a lot of people out.
It's going to start to feel a bit like bracing ourselves to live on Mars (except for on our home planet), as climate events ramp up, but humanity is definitely going to get through it. There will probably end up being a backlash against those who got us into this, as well as a predictable backlash against climate refugees that will cause a huge amount of basically genocide. It will be like 'stay where you are!' under conditions not conducive to human life. Even then technology might be able to shelter people to some extent.
Don't have kids.
I know this is a very unpopular point of view on HN and this response will probably be downvoted into oblivion, but the fact of the matter is that if enough people adopt this strategy it will actually solve the problem eventually. Yes, the odds of this happening are vanishingly small, but population control is ultimately the only long-term solution.
Of course... it is more complicated than that. This is a classic tragedy of the commons scenario (or Idiocracy for that matter). The people that don't care will continue on, and the people that do care won't be able to influence the next generation nearly as much.
IDIOCRACY Opening Scene (2006) Mike Judge
and find a way to work towards something of a solution in your daily life. The work may not go anywhere and the problem may be intractable, but by not having kids and doing some work towards a solution, its at least a local anesthetic for hopelessness.
We had population control 300 years ago before we had the knowledge to create machine and feed them.
Less than 1billion people on the planet and most people starved.
The arctic methane emission doomsday has already been debunked. https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063719007
Climate change caused by co2 is an important problem to solve, but it is not the end of civilization.
Have you looked at the history of the climate on this planet? - It will wipe us out by a fluke.
We need to control the climate for our own survival and we better start sooner than later.
The world have been through 5 mass extinctions.
In other world, nature doesn't care about us what so ever.
Humans are the only species who have ever had a chance to be the exception to this trend by using the same ingenuity that lead us from less than 1billion mostly starving people who on average died at 40 to now 8 billion people and with plenty of food and resources and we keep getting better and better at it. Dead from drought have gone down 98% the last 100 years.
There are no scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate change that we can't deal with today, let alone tomorrow. And we will do that through using more energy, cause at the end of the day, there is not shortage of resources only knowledge. We will find the solutions to the issues that arise over time.
Being human should make you hopeful.
Humanity as a species will not collapse, we will adapt and press on.
https://youtu.be/sGG-A80Tl5g
I'm not against changing personal consumption - for example, I went vegan. But this is not where the majority of my impact on the world lies, as even a small donation vastly outweighs the effect that my veganism has.
[1] https://founderspledge.com/stories/climate-and-lifestyle-rep...
My opinion is that there is no solution. It's frequently said in the context of relationships that you can't change everyone. Forcing everyone to align with your worldview is the only real hope we have to prevent the continued destruction of the environment, and yet in the context of human friendships it's considered misanthropic. People still want their power, and their identity, and their freedom, and we are collectively powerless against that instinct.
I do not think we're ignoring the problems on purpose. We're just so bad at taking into consideration the consequences that might not take place in our lifetimes. It's a limitation of our human imaginations.
Our innovations in technology have raised our expectations, and with those expectations comes a baseline of additional carbon emissions. We're not going to go back to the industrial revolution for the planet's sake.
I choose not to put my limited time and energy into worrying about a lost cause, and will have to try to continue to do the things I want to. That battle in itself is already all-consuming for me.
All the projections go to 2100, but do you think this magically stops there? Our actions today are going to determine the extent of the damage to the future. We've already baked in serious changes, but we can avoid a hellscape in 2150, 2200, etc. If we don't our descendents, what are left of them, will curse our memory.
The more damage we do to the earth, the harder we're going to make it for us to even develop the solutions to solve it. Lets be real, carbon capture on the scale to reverse global warming is going to require an advanced civilization, and that won't happen if we've regressed back to some sort of mad max hellscape.
I believe this is the case, although it's becoming an increasingly indefensible position. The writing has been on the wall for a decade, and the false-hope strategy is clearly not working.
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The experience is that you are constantly surrounded by people doing stupid, harmful crap in part because some of them are actually idiots, but mostly because of group/tribal/social pressures you don't care and can do nothing about.
What do you do? You do your thing, take care of yourself (broadly, i.e. your family, etc.) and minimize the damage others' ...unwise actions cause you. If you are so inclined you can also laugh when chickens come home to roost for someone due to their willful stupidity.
This approach works well for climate change, too :)
I feel half bad about it, but the whole pandemic has shown how odd this capitalistic world is. People need to work to earn money, but a lot of work generates CO2, directly or indirectly. There was an interesting article last year about how the flower industry in Europe basically shut down (no weddings and no restaurants needing decorations meant no flying in fresh flowers from Africa, and no employment for the flower growers). Or how some countries need jet loads of tourists to survive...
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I haven't seen evidence presented that climate scientists can accurately predict future climate given correct inputs. (E.g. if you give scientists the correct information on the activity of the sun and amount of greenhouse gasses emitted for the years 2010-2020, and plug that into a climate model from the year 2010, it is unlikely to give you correct temperature for the years 2010-2020).
If they can't predict it that means they don't really understand it.
I would happy to be shown the evidence of climate predictions that are more accurate than would be expected. (E.g. I could draw a trendline from the years 1900-2000 out through 2020 and be mostly right. I would expect climate scientists to be substantially more accurate).
Consider the concept of 'period three implies chaos': we do indeed understand chaos, but its sensitivity to initial conditions means we can't make deterministic projections of its future state, only projections of the range of possible future states (and a good solid notion of how deterministic it's gonna be based on how much energy is in the system: period three is arrived at from deterministic oscillations through INCREASING energy, and we know exactly what happens to the unpredictability as we continue to add energy)
Climate is a giant chaotic system of atmosphere energy.
We absolutely understand what, in a general sense, happens when we alter the amount of energy in the system.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27305500 " "How it started" (From your Article)
Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. :
"How it's Going"
A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/climate/bangladesh-floods... "
If I owned property in FL, I wouldn't be looking at the long term right now.
Former neighbors tell me these days they've never seen the water so high; it's not just me.
As some people have said, a large amount of coastal land has already been lost to the sea, especially in Florida. This situation is going to take years/decades to really unfold, because, for the most part, it's not like houses will be above ground one day, then under water the next. Instead this will be a gradual process whereby flooding becomes more severe and frequent, yet the ground will be ostensibly "dry" 99% of the time (or underwater only 3 days a year). Then it will be 98% of the time, 97% of the time, etc.
[1] is a link to a McKinsey report on climate change and how it will effect Florida and how lenders should prepare.
[0] https://skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1518
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functio...
It's quite easy to find flooding maps that show the effects of various sea level changes. It's not so easy to find concrete predictions about when those changes are due.
Perhaps we should stick to the science instead of imagining hypothetical news stories from decades ago and complaining they were silly.
A reminder that predictions of the end of the world are, so far, never true, is welcome.
Turns out we didn't act, the scales did tip, and it may actually be too late to do anything about it now.
Edit: At my location in southern Sweden it seems like this expected land rise compensates for ~70% of the expected sea level rise, but the data seems a bit sketchy. I think more research is needed.
Besides, sea-level rise is not uniformly distributed, same as temperature variation due to climate change. But overall, yes, the sea level is rising, and it is accelerating globally.
All of that is explained here [1].
[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
Anybody with a brain knows how dumb this is.
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Just the same the trend is concerning. Especially if we are willing to consider the hypothetical world where experts planning the world's energy consumption might possibly have ulterior motives. Of course that isn't the case. It isn't even possible. I'm reliably informed that all skeptic views are paid stooges of the oil companies.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Rockefeller+Foundation+clima...
Scientism is infallible. Sure, private researchers funded by the tobacco companies might have fibbed here and there, but that's only because they're greedy capitalists. Government funded research explaining the dangers of cannabis has been 100% accurate. Mass incarceration is a wonderful policy. Scientific experts are qualified not only in their fields of research, but to make wide sweeping social dictates as well.
Why? Who is this for?
I maintain that most of the worst predictions assume an inability for people to adapt. Still, it amazes me to no end how many people are willing to barrel head first into an avoidable fate without taking their foot off the throttle. I wonder to what extent people will deny the reality around them.
Based on what people have already been accepting as normal, it does feel like we will get to the point of knife fighting over a cup of water before someone admits that we've had an awful lot of El Nino years in a row.
Last year, the county forester came around and explained to my uncle that the reason so many of his 100+ year old trees were dying was a lack of water, and he needed to thin them out on his property to keep the rest alive. It feels like he finally turned a corner and accepted that something is wrong (he still doesn't believe it's man made, but you know, tiny victories).
Where do you live? Would moving make sense for your kids sake?
Or to put this more simply: I'm glad you live in an area that isn't affected by wildfires, but what portion of the California population (almost 40 million people) is that area prepared to permanently house in the next 5 or 10 years?
I am not young and the last year has still been an eye opener for me. I haven't been cynical enough.