> The IPCC suggests that current sulfur aerosol levels are contributing in the neighborhood of 0.5° C to total global cooling, offsetting warming that would otherwise rapidly occur.
> By cleaning up shipping fuels, massive regions of the world’s oceans that were protected from heating by shipping sulfate aerosols are now experiencing rapid warming. This includes the main shipping routes between Asia and the Western US as well as the major routes from the Easter US to Europe and the Middle East. And that’s where the warming is happening. This rapid heating is known as “termination shock,” and it appears to be what’s happening right now.
It's frustrating that we've argued a lot about the hazards of intentional geoengineering responses without reaching a consensus that we should do it, and meanwhile the shipping industry was cavalierly doing it along-side their other emissions. Yes, we need to rapidly cut emissions. Yes, we need to in parallel invest in carbon capture. But if every fraction of a degree matters, shouldn't we also be at least continuing if not scaling up these these albedo-increasing changes?
> But if every fraction of a degree matters, shouldn't we also be at least continuing if not scaling up these these albedo-increasing changes?
Acid Rain is also a bad thing with bad consequences.
While I'm not necessarily that opposed to cautious attempts at some geoengineering, I don't think "scale up the sulfate emissions" is a viable solution.
Acid rain _was_ bad, and I'm not trying to ignore it. However, my understanding is that we've already brought down sulfur emissions by an enormous amount over the past 30 years, and the 2020 value was a very small fraction of our peak sulfur emissions [1]. The IMO change took place in 2020, and it's my understanding that the IPCC statement about 0.5C of cooling coming from sulfur emissions is relatively recent. I think our current level of sulfur emissions is closer to being acceptable than our current warming trend.
I'm not pretending that cooling via sulfur emissions is without costs -- but e.g. if living at 2018 levels of sulfur emissions (which were already 90% down from peak) can give us 0.5C of cooling, that's a deal I'm willing to take, especially in light of how hard it is proving to reduce carbon emissions. It especially seems like we're hitting a number of tipping points with warming, and if sulfur emissions (or any other albedo-increasing intervention) can keep us from crossing those lines, we should, in my view. Would we be better off with 2014-level sulfur emissions? 2008? At _some_ point, trading sulfur emissions for cooling becomes a bad deal, and we shouldn't scale up without limit. But is it a good direction to move from where we are now? I think so.
I don't think it's that simple. Sulpher, causing acid rain, was a big deal and caused a lot of damage. Whole forrests died, public structures and art was damaged, etc... Also, sulpher contributes to ocean acidification.
The point is that the earth is a really complex systems, and it's not always clear what technical fixes to use, Let alone getting the political will to implement them.
The macro challenge is that we have already overshot and the IPCC appears to be massively understating the current state. According to Hansen et. al.'s Global warming in the pipeline [under peer review], "Equilibrium global warming including slow feedbacks for today’s human-made greenhouse gas (GHG) climate forcing (4.1 W/m2) is 10°C, reduced to 8°C by today’s aerosols. Decline of aerosol emissions since 2010 should increase the 1970-2010 global warming rate of 0.18°C per decade to a post-2010 rate of at least 0.27°C per decade." For context, this 10°C is over the next 1500 years, but it does imply at least 4.3°C of warming by 2100.
> But if every fraction of a degree matters, shouldn't we also be at least continuing if not scaling up these albedo-increasing changes?
Humanity is running the experiment in real time with a sample size of one. Aerosol dimming is good but acid rain is bad: we have a bad vs a worse choice so someone will be harmed, thus any project has liability and the default of doing nothing happens.
I completely agree with this sentiment. We should either remove the sulfur scrubbers from ships, start solar dimming around the poles, or both. It's an emergency and we're feeling the shocks right now.
Another example, the war in Ukraine is accelerating the clean energy revolution in Europe, cutting down on air pollution. How's that going to help their drought? Will the EU act on national interests?
"Another example, the war in Ukraine is accelerating the clean energy revolution in Europe, cutting down on air pollution."
Maybe in the long run it helps, but right now, not really:
"European coal-fuelled power generation climbed last year as countries scrambled to replace Russian gas, but the increase was smaller than feared as renewable energy helped to plug the gap, ...Outright coal generation in the EU increased by 7%, or 28 terawatt hours (TWh), in 2022, pushing up power sector CO2 emissions by nearly 4%."
But the Ukrainians seem to have a lot of fight in them, and we are willing and able to support them solo from the US. So, I suspect the fastest path, of the options that the EU can actually pick from, is: maximum support, get it over with.
It's pretty easy to predict how and how quickly "reduce emissions and begin effective-but-insufficient-on-its-own geoengineering" becomes "only do geoengineering."
It's relatively much easier, especially politically. And the entities most poised to begin it are exactly the behemoths who benefit from fossil fuel use in the first place. It'll rapidly become another money-and-PR funnel for the same couple hundred individuals who got us here in the first place.
This baffles me too but it is the way of things. Smart people refuse to support action unless they're 100% sure no one will dislike it. Meanwhile morons wreck things without pause or consequence. I don't know what it is but I think it will doom our species. You see the same thing from climate change to deficits to wars.
This isn't really the case. The people who study climate are having to censor themselves from the loud idiots who took the bait and turned a scientific concern into a creed.
In the 21st century if you have to frame your solution as a fight against something, you're part of the problem not part of the solution. "Fighting" is now a bigger problem than the contested topic. Idiots fight and the bigger the idiot, the bigger the fight. So the contest is over two extremes that have nothing to do with reality and whomever is doing the real discussion gets labelled as the enemy by both camps because they don't belong to the extreme.
Right now, the discussion is all fake. One side insist it is not real, the other that it is and that we will do something then don't. The science is in, and we are basically entering the "find out" stage of "fuck around and find out". I wonder what will happen then? We've had the same basic problem (extreme polarisation) for 100 similar issues in the english speaking world (I'd list housing, inequality, lack of opportunity, over regulation for a start). Maybe we will enter a generation of renewal, or maybe we will sink into obscurity...
Climate change is just one of the things that will get us if we don't find a way to live in our environment. We can't just fuck every other issue to solve that one problem, and hope everything will be fine.
Solving climate change doesn’t require dramatic long term changes to the cost of energy. Economically it’s mostly a question of sunk costs as our infrastructure is built around fossil fuels. However, infrastructure has a finite lifespan meaning gradually changing things is vastly less expensive, though you do need to actually start changing things.
Thus ideas like increasing carbon taxation so economies optimize for efficient transitions.
Carbon taxes are unpopular because you are literally pulling future damage done to the economy, which cannot be observed, only predicted, and making people pay for it today, when the harm hasn't arrived yet. People think that this is pointless or even harmful because they don't like paying for things and expect others to bear the costs.
I have no idea how to fix it. Even when you tell people about it, they will disagree with the concept of a carbon tax plus dividend.
That’s why you want escalation in carbon taxation. The ideal situation is nobody is paying the tax because they have swapped to something else.
The point is to convince people building infrastructure to build something else because their giant fossil fuel investments wouldn’t be economically viable where green solutions would be.
> It's frustrating that we've argued a lot about the hazards of intentional geoengineering responses without reaching a consensus that we should do it, and meanwhile the shipping industry was cavalierly doing it along-side their other emissions.
Was there a debate about this that the IMO ignored? As a layman, I have heard before that cutting emissions of certain particulates could increase global warming in the short term but I don't recall seeing any real discussion of its dangers or strong calls against it. I mean at a societal level - I'm sure there has been discussion of it within the scientific community, but what were the conclusions of that discussion and how were they communicated to the IMO and the rest of society?
I worry that this could further undermine public support for climate change initiatives. The skeptics will spin this as "they said we should cut emissions, then we did and now they are saying that cutting emissions led to climate change". You and I both know that's a flawed message but that's the story they will tell and a lot of people will probably buy it.
It was hilariously and recklessly irresponsible for these guys to basically use a regulation to put a geoengineering experiment into play that is the exact opposite of what we want to be doing right now.
A lot of comments deriding this article as alarmist. Excuse me if I'm incorrect in saying so, but even the data seems to tell me that alarmism is where we are at:
This articles data.
Incredible floods in Pakistan.
Heat domes over the PNW.
Fires in Australia, Canada, California.
And now a warming event in the North Atlantic unlike any other.
All of that and this is likely to be one of the coolest summers for the remainder of our lives. Its only getting warmer from here (barring geoengineering).
What about this is not alarming? As disheartening as it is, this is what is needed for action at this point.
Please don't use California as an example here. It's supposed to be on fire. Several species of trees and plants here cannot germinate without fire. The loooong known problem [1] is mismanagement, building houses where places burn, and blaming the wrong people, which leads to overgrowth from lack of fire. Fires aren't, by any measure, optional. If you impede them, they will come back harsher the next time around, which has very recently been addressed with laws to help increase the frequency of fires [2][3].
I don't see how it's possible to even measure global warming impact with the mismanagement that has accumulated.
Same with Australia. There’s so many pyrophytes that the Eucalyptus tree adapted to produce an oil that burns especially hot in order to wipe out competitors and prevent them from sprouting after the fire.
Canada, on the other hand, is a powder keg waiting to blow. The ecosystem is too wet to have any fire adaptations and as the peatlands dry, they expose meters thick layers of undecomposed plant matter that are dense enough to be used as a cheap and dirty fuel in some parts of world. It’s one of the largest carbon stores on the planet and we’ll soon have months long fires a the peat burns.
Fires in CA are normal, but not all fires are equal, and the fires that have been in CA recently are worse than they would have been even with the excess ground litter.
The fire season is longer, the droughts are worse, the fires are more intense, fires are happening outside of their historic range, and trees are not surviving the fire assuming they weren't dead already due to drought.
With the nearly 30 years of mismanagement, I'm having trouble understanding how that conclusion can be so easily made. From your link:
> While an increase in temperatures and dryness has been identified to be one of the major drivers of increased summer forest burned area (BA), the extent to which such changes are due to natural variability or anthropogenic climate change remains unresolved
You are cherry picking quotes. This is from the abstract:
"Our results indicate that nearly all the observed increase in BA is due to anthropogenic climate change as historical model simulations accounting for anthropogenic forcing yield 172% (range 84 to 310%) more area burned than simulations with natural forcing only. We detect the signal of combined historical forcing on the observed BA emerging in 2001 with no detectable influence of the natural forcing alone. In addition, even when considering fuel limitations from fire-fuel feedbacks, a 3 to 52% increase in BA relative to the last decades is expected in the next decades (2031 to 2050), highlighting the need for proactive adaptations." - "BA" is "burned area"
This is from the conclusion:
"These findings strongly indicate that the observed increase in BA was primarily due to increased fuel aridity and not due to simultaneous variations in nonclimate factors such as human effects on ignitions, fire suppression, or by altering land cover (similarly to the conclusions by refs. 1 and 42). Our results suggest that changes in human environmental factors, including changes in biomass and fire management practices during the period of record, did not significantly affect the stability of the climate-fire relationship at the scales analyzed here."
I'm not saying fire suppression policies had no impact. I'm saying that they are not the only cause of the fires. Furthermore, I am saying they aren't even the primary cause, and it's not close.
Climate Change is a real threat, but listing individual weather perturbations as data points is like giving personal anecdotes as evidence of societal changes.
The strongest and most accurate evidence for global climate change are GLOBAL indicators, such as sea level rise, global average temperatures, etc...
Every weather event you list, can probably be countered with a mild weather event somewhere else. It's mock science, and it's the most obvious sign of hyperbole.
This post is wrong as it downplays the severity of individual events and only focusses on global ones.
Last year's floods in Pakistan that displaced millions (barely reported on in the west) were such a local event.
Saying "oh, this is fine, because somewhere else the weather was mild" is disturbing.
The whole reason why climate change is so problematic is that the change in the global indicators will cause many many "individual weather perturbations", as you call them, which will displaced millions and disrupt supply chains.
The fact that there is some mild weather event somewhere else doesn't offset these negative effects in any way!
It's about 5⁰C cooler here today than yesterday. Crisis averted .
What I am trying to say is you cannot use specific weather events to talk about climate. And of course once you go into statistics, you will lose 55.3% of your persuasiveness.
Weather events, by themselves, are just individual data points. But once you start looking at the big picture, it's difficult to not notice patterns. And said patterns are extremely alarming.
> There is another possible input to this heating worthy of note. Dust from the Sahara typically blows west this time of year, blocking incoming radiation while trapping existing heat. So far this year the dust has not come. The lack of dust is notable and could also be a direct cause of some of the North Atlantic heating.
This caught my eye as a potentially much worse catastrophe in the short term than the extreme temperatures. That Saharan dust feeds several ecosystems like the Mediterranean and the Amazon with crucial micronutrients like iron and phosphorus. If that transfer stops for very long, they could start to collapse
This was the only part of the post that I wasn’t relating to.
I’m just coming back from a trip to the Caribbean where during my trip the sky was hazy for some days and all of the locals were claiming the weather effect to be the Sahara dust.
I’m not a local so I don’t know if it is more or less than usual, but my personal experience makes me take issue with the “never come” part.
Fair point, but what if the desert starts greening again? I don't expect it to, but having what nutrients there are NOT blow away would be a start right?
The issue is water and sand. While it's currently supplementing other ecosystems with nutritions, these by themselves won't magically become greenery.
It would definitely have an incredible effect on the climate if you could magically make Africa into a Forest again though. Might even make some parts of Europe uninhabitable with that cooling alone. Not gonna happen though.
> The issue is water and sand. While it's currently supplementing other ecosystems with nutritions, these by themselves won't magically become greenery.
photosynthesis efficiency goes up as CO2 increases, and plants need way less water.
This leads to greening of the entire planet and reversing desertification.
But at the same time, heat reduces photosynthesis efficiency, and even if it didn't, photosynthesis alone doesn't lead to healthy plants. You can't take one element in isolation.
Climate change is terrifying, but I also have a hard time taking self titled Doomers totally seriously. It makes sense to consider all of the worst case scenarios for any event, and to prepare for them. But Doomers seem to have an obsession with it, and a need to convince others that the worst will happen.
I noticed this a lot in 2020. COVID was (and is) awful, but there was so much shit that Doomers claimed would happen that year that just didn't. They seem to have a bias towards always considering the worst case scenario the most likely.
My take on it is that "well presented doomers"[0], if you will, serve to balance the "well presented optimists"[1] in that they are needed in society so we can have some take on how things could actually go wrong and sound warnings for potentially catastrophic failures. Its important though, that I think it needs moderating, like not everything "Doomers" say needs to be taken at face value, its important that others can come up and really either shore up their case or make a case for different more likely outcomes, for instance. I feel the same way about overly optimistic takes as well.
They serve an important function in society to keep us aware of just how fragile things can be and that we need to be vigilant about understanding the second order affects of our actions as a society.
[0]: Ones that generally rely on nonpartisan facts / science / evidence for making their claims, without resorting to debunked information to further their claims and/or not relying on conspiracy theories, for instance.
[1]: I'd put alot of technologists in this group, for an example. People who constantly hype real breakthroughs and advancements as proof that we will always be trending upward as a species
"Everything will go wrong whether we do anything or not!!"
No, it won't. Because we will act.
"Everything will turn out fine, we don't need to worry about anything!!"
No, it won't. We need to act.
Honestly, both extreme reactions paralyze humans and nations into inactivity. We fixed the hole in the Ozone. We fixed Acid Rain. We stopped the whales from going extinct. We did this through concerted human and governmental actions together with pressure and regulations on corporations.
We can do it again. Not without some consequences. Significant human populations will become climate refugees. Significant species will go extinct. But we can offset the worst effects, but not if doomerism or "climate change is inevitable, humans have survived worse" optimism cause us to stop trying.
I truthfully don’t get climate doomerism at all. Does the whole climate picture seem decidedly not great? It does. Seem not great.
But hectoring and chiding and unhealthy amounts of stress aren’t going to muster sufficient resources and capabilities to put a handle on this problem.
You know what will? Good old fashioned human ingenuity and optimism. This isn’t to lessen the inevitable losses. Humans will die. Species will be lost forever. Island nations will sink beneath the waves (and not just the UK this time).
Things are gonna get worse before they get better, but like the apocryphal Americans, you can always trust humanity to do the right thing after they’ve exhausted every other option.
We’ve got this. Shaming someone for throwing out a USB mini cable ain’t gonna get us there.
There is some dissonance in your comment. On the one hand you acknowledge that things will get bad, but you don't want people to dread how abd it will get, because some will survive?
Reminds me of this quote: "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make"
You speak with certainty that is not possible. Those were all tiny hobby projects in comparison. You don't have to overhaul all of modern civilization to save whales or the ozone layer.
And... will act? The time to act already has come and passed, probably during the Bush years. We did not act. This is no longer about making it to the runway, this is about deciding which patch of rocks will kill the fewest passengers.
In the Bush years climate scientists told people that change is coming, and nobody paid attention.
In the Biden years climate scientists are telling people that change is here, and it IS here.
And more people are at least talking about the change, and asking what are we going to do about it.
And the worst thing to tell someone who is motivated and curious (and an entire Generation Z is) is to say "It's too late. You had your chance and you blew it. There's nothing to do now"
Your first sentence betrays a horrific misunderstanding: "I don't care if it's possible or not". It should not change my certainty in my ability to try. Even if it's not possible, it's still worth trying. What else are we supposed to do?
One downside though is that people generally love an excuse to avoid change or avoid additional effort. “It’s not real, so we don’t have to do anything” is functionally equivalent to “it’s already too late, so why bother doing anything”
I disagree, learned helpless is an easy attack on realists who tell it as it is.
We consistently fall in the worst case scenario of most climate models so much so that "faster than expected" is now a meme.
It is indeed too late to avoid famine and water wars but it is not too late to keep large parts of the world still livable. I would very much like my children and my children's children to have a fighting chance.
This is true even with positive things. I wish I had a good answer for human nature and resistance to change, as that would be game changing generally speaking
There will always be people fixated on The End, some because they think we all deserve it, others because they can't seperate their own existential crisis from potential global crises
And still others because they've started looking at the pieces of how our global society functions as a system and realized that it's very possible we have pushed our environment beyond it's ability to support us. Leading ultimately to overshoot which leads to collapse.
Maybe, but they never seem to weigh any of the challenges against humanity's staggering ability to adapt and overcome. Doomerism has planet-sized infomercial hands.
There is a long and embarassing trail of false apocalypses predicted from extrapolations + assumptions of helplessness, often made by otherwise intelligent and scientifically inclined people. We were all going to starve, but then Haber figured out how to chemically fix Nitrogen. Nuclear war was going to end the world, but then MAD actually worked. The ozone hole was going to cook the plant life, but then we cleaned up our refrigerants. We were going to run out of oil by 2010, but then we found more.
Betting against humanity isn't a historically wise move. You don't have a choice in the matter, and it's easy to fixate on this and imagine yourself trapped, but you are "trapped" with one hell of a fighting chance so the truth is you just don't know.
Hm, I do get why people trying to be optimistic always bring up examples from the past to extrapolate that "humanity will always find solutions".
What I don't get is that the same people simply overlook that we're not talking about single symptoms with a simple cause but about a root cause (emitting co2) which is deeply integrated into all our actions and economies and humanity is struggling dealing with that for at least a couple of decades.
We're talking about bringing half a dozen to multiple dozens of networks out of balance that we only halfway understand.
Consuming food wasn't deeply integrated into all our actions and economies? Oil?
> extrapolate that "humanity will always find solutions"
Good thing I didn't do that! Doomers, however, do extrapolate failure. They walk far out on a branch and forget they are carrying the burden of proof. That's my entire point.
Well climate scientists have collected more proof than ever in the last 2 decades to back the models and predictions. What we see is _measured_, not just opinion.
And if you happen to read a bit about how biological systems, the weather systems, our economical systems, food supply et al. work together while keeping in mind that IPCC reports are _conservative_ about their predictions (meaning they rather underestimate than overestimate), you should really deeply be worried about the near-future outcome of the ongoings.
Just because we successfully hacked our nutrition system a 100ys ago does not mean that we'll be able to cope with how consumerism and agricultural intensification afterwards affects us with dozens of new problems. At some point it just gets too expensive and/or too complex for humans to solve.
> they never seem to weigh any of the challenges against humanity's staggering ability to adapt and overcome.
I'm not sure who the "they" you're referring to is, but the fast majority of authors/researchers I've read on these topics are quite well aware.
The problem is the vast majority of this "adapt and overcome" has been based on two major things:
- Historically: a geologically remarkable period of climate stability
- More recent: abundant fossil fuels
Malthus was wrong because he failed to predict the Haber process. But currently the Haber process relies heavily on fossil fuels. We didn't produce astoundingly more food per acre then ever before in history because we are incredibly smart, but because we had ready access to hydrocarbons. The same logic follows for nearly all great inventions of recent eras
> Betting against humanity isn't a historically wise move.
I see this comment all the time but it's a very odd one. As far as species go humans are very, very young and survived very little, just about 300,000 years. Additionally, like I said, we've only existed as a species during one of the most stable climates in the history of the planet.
One final point on the "people always think the world is ending!" rhetoric. We've only really started seeing strong apocalyptic thinking in the last several hundred years. Let's say, for argument, that humans were wiped out in the next 100 years. Alien scientists visiting would see people thinking about the end times in the last 1/300,000 of the species' existence to be fairly prescient, even if they were off by several of their own species lifetimes.
On top of that the writing on this topic is not without merit historically. Revelations was written during the Siege of Jerusalem, when things were collapsing for the world of the author. Most medieval apocalyptic literature was written or based on the black death which wiped out between 30-50 percent of Europe. Hardly irrational beliefs that the world is ending based solely on existential anxiety.
There's also an obvious logical fallacy in all this thinking. Most of the time when people look up webMD they think they have cancer, and they don't most of the time. But it doesn't logically follow that they can't have cancer no matter how strong the evidence.
We've only really started seeing strong apocalyptic thinking in the last several hundred years.
Humans have been contemplating the end of the world and the promise of a subsequent paradise or judgement for thousands of years, evidenced by ancient religious and cultural texts. The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament, Zoroastrian eschatology, etc.
I may be misremembering my ancient history here but didn’t Homo Sapiens arguably almost go extinct during the last ice age?
As a related digression I think what people just keep forgetting about here isn’t like, we’ll survive. It’s we have all this nice stuff like avocados, grapes, heart surgery, and MacBook Pros, elephants, winter sports, houses, etc. and it sure would be nice to not lose that stuff for no good reason only to say “we’ll see we didn’t go extinct it wasn’t that bad”.
The apparently abrupt changes the unnecessary lives lost, and what could be damaged or lost forever are what’s of concern. Less so just survivability.
I agree 100% that we should do everything in our power to save as many people and as much technology as we can as we go through climate change.
My point was just that claims that the entire species is going to go extinct are unlikely and, worse, counter-productive. The last thing we need is fatalism and people giving up hope.
Not an expert, but my understanding is that the end of the last ice age led to an overall global average temperature change of +10°C.
For the current climate change, we've been calling +2°C catastrophic.
It is catastrophic: millions will die, species will go extinct, trillions will be spent updating infrastructure and rebuilding. But I believe that it's survivable.
> Not an expert, but my understanding is that the end of the last ice age led to an overall global average temperature change of +10°C.
Over what time period? 10°C in 10 million years is fine. In 10 years it would kill almost all life. The amount of change is inconsequential as long as the rate of change is small enough.
So let's go with 5°C over 2000 years, or 1°C over 400 years. Do you see the difference between that, and our current change of 1°C over 100 years (and accelerating)?
Yes, I do. But I also see significant differences in our level of technological sophistication and adaptability compared to Homo sapiens during the last ice age.
So our technology and so on will magically ensure our ecosystem doesn't die? We will find ways not only to adapt ourselves, but also to keep plants from dying due to sudden changes in climate, to keep animals from dying whose food sources have died out? We'll find magical solutions for all of these problems, whose complexity we still aren't close to fully understanding?
> it doesn't logically follow that they can't have cancer
Good job, you really pwned that straw man.
Also, I want to preserve this one for posterity, because I'm pretty sure it's hilariously wrong but I have better things to do than dig through the literature right now:
> We've only really started seeing strong apocalyptic thinking in the last several hundred years.
You can't reason how the end of humanity is going to happen based on priors, because it's never happened. Whenever it happens, (and it will definitely happen,) it will be unprecedented. It also won't matter how many times the (doomer) boy has cried wolf and been wrong.
I guess the problem I run into is that "the worst" as proposed by Doomers is usually so bad that there's no way for me to prepare for it except by becoming a full time prepper. And that just becomes exhausting to even consider, so it's easier to fall into the trap of either depression or complete inaction instead.
"Eliot Jacobson, Ph.D.
Retired professor of mathematics and computer science, retired casino consultant, now a full time volunteer, husband and grandfather. Know-it-all doomer. Born in the year 316 ppm CO2."
>> Is this his schtick? Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true?
I didn't get any "alarmist" signals from this post of his until near the end. If all the data is as it suggests there really does seem to be something going on this year in particular in addition to a trend. But then he said "Infrastructure will break beyond repair." which jumped out as alarmist to me. Like we can't fix or build more infrastructure? I wish people wouldn't do that, as it makes me react with "dude calm down" when they otherwise seem to have a point.
I think the point here is the metaphore. When you say "infrastructure" you think of bridges, roads etc. And for those you have a notion of possibility and difficulty of repairing them.
When he says "infrastructure" he means the nature that we draw on (to build our infrastructure) i.e. the weather, the trophic chains etc.
I would doubt that everything from one type of infra can be translated to the other.
E.g. when it comes to nature some things are simply almost irreversible, whereas there is no such thing for man-made infra.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “beyond repair”, I.e. how many pieces of a bridge can you replace before you’re replacing the bridge rather than repairing it?
I am definitely not an expert on infrastructure or civil engineering in general, but I’ve heard lots of stories about heat being bad for our infra, e.g. warped rail lines in the UK. “Beyond repair” seems within the bound of reason
EDIT: also, obligatory dont-look-up-ication:
"I didn't sense any 'alarmist' undertones from this post of his until almost the end. If all the data is as it suggests, there genuinely seems to be an extraordinary astronomical event headed our way this year on top of other celestial trends. But then he said, 'Civilization will crumble beyond repair,' which struck me as alarmist. Like we can't rebuild or adapt our society? I wish people wouldn't resort to such extreme statements, as it prompts me to respond with 'dude, calm down,' even when they otherwise seem to have a valid concern."
As I understand it there is a scientific consensus about both the causes and the potential effects of global climate change. Scientists say that we are headed for 2C degrees of warming in the next years. Scientists say that 2C degrees of warming would be disastrous for millions of people. Any random dude can put two and two together.
Perhaps. I never know what to believe. I've heard smart, knowledgeable people like Bill Gates state that he thinks we won't experience a scorched Earth ending, but that we will solve this crisis. I'd like to believe him, but then I see an article like this and I don't know who to believe, the graphs are pretty damning if only to say "that line is way above the other lines, and that is bad."
For what it’s worth, the average interpretation I’ve seen from climate scientists is:
- No, we won’t hit scorched earth Venus-like runaway warming.
- If we don’t reduce emissions drastically, greenhouse gas warming plus various feedbacks will cause extreme weather, render some parts of the world unlivable due to wet bulb temperature, and overwhelm unprepared infrastructure, costing huge amounts of money and creating millions of migrants.
So, not the end times, but definitely dark times.
If you sprinkle a bit of pessimism about current politics it’s not a stretch to assume we probably won’t handle those impacts gracefully, or achieve the drastic emissions cuts required to avoid them.
What's your citation for suspecting that more than 1 in 8 living people will be a migrant? That seems pretty alarmist, and well over any number I've seen suggested elsewhere.
- 19 countries with the highest number of ecological threats are among the world’s 40 least peaceful countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Chad, India and Pakistan.
- Over one billion people live in 31 countries where the country’s resilience is unlikely to sufficiently withstand the impact of ecological events by 2050, contributing to mass population displacement.
- Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa are the regions facing the largest number of ecological threats.
- 3.5 billion people could suffer from food insecurity by 2050; which is an increase of 1.5 billion people from today.
- The lack of resilience in countries covered in the ETR will lead to worsening food insecurity and competition over resources, increasing civil unrest and mass displacement, exposing developed countries to increased influxes of refugees.
Well if current temperatures and predictions are anything to go by, big chunks of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh will become uninhabitable, wet bulb temperatures wise. Just from that area you can easily get to 1 billion; there's also Africa and the Americas that could experience droughts, destruction of wildlife habitats relied upon for sustenance (mostly fishing), unviable temperatures, floodings, etc.
Just look at the population figures for the areas of the globe that are projected to become uninhabitable. That's your baseline number and it by itself is over a billion people. Any additional extrapolation for political and social upheavals related to resource conflicts (regardless of how conservative your analysis might be) only add to that baseline.
Well, this is when the military budget of many countries will be put to a test, for real this time. After all, the reason to keep investing into military force is to be able to defend sovereignty. It is a harsh thought, no question, but we have to admit that we always prepared for this case. Sure, the left is trying to make it a humanitarian thing, but in the end, available space and resources will determine how much the people of a country are willing to accept foreigners. Right now, this "game" is very much leaning in favour of the left, however, one day, it will pivot, and then there will be only tears. The real question is, will you be able to migrate before the borders are closed with military force?
> greenhouse gas warming plus various feedbacks will cause extreme weather, render some parts of the world unlivable due to wet bulb temperature, and overwhelm unprepared infrastructure, costing huge amounts of money and creating millions of migrants
This is what I've been trying to tell people for years. Climate change is everyone's concern, if only because entire nations becoming uninhabitable, wars over natural resources (not just oil - now we'll be seeing fighting over arable land and water sources), etc. will cause massive influxes of refugees. Even if many nations did not have a significant split in opinions on migrants, most are still ill-equipped to handle the many millions of climate refugees that will come.
Remember the Syrian migrant crisis? Where people were shouting about "the great replacement" (read: "white genocide") over people fleeing ISIS? That's going to seem like chump change compared to what's coming (and I'd bet good money that new extremist groups will start popping up as conditions deteriorate, governments collapse, etc. - a good chunk of the blame for climate change can be laid at the feet of developed nations, after all, so I would be shocked if no extremist groups decided to take matters into their own hands).
I could write at length about this, but I'll leave it at this: the US is not going to come out of this unscathed. Obviously, sea level rise will lead to coastal flooding, yada yada, but unless American agriculture is forced to be more conservative with its water usage, the aquifers we rely so desperately on for our farmlands will run dry due to over-pumping within this century (and with megadroughts getting worse, our aquifers are recharging far slower than before...this will only get worse as climate change worsens).
Bill Gates has been buying up water reserves, has investments in polluting industries, and he's got an interest in keeping the public thinking it's "not so bad". It is. Bill Gates is also behind the "our world in data" series on youtube, that consistently misrepresents climate science to make it seem like we can solve it with enough "green industry", when the only real solution is degrowth, we can't afford to keep siphoning the carbon out of the earth. GDP growth is correlated with --- and the main driver of --- the warming.
This message doesn't serve the interests of billionaires, and Gates is no exception.
Economists tell us that the COVID-19 pandemic triggered the sharpest downturn in the world economy since the Great Depression. Result? Well, looking at the Mauna Loa atmospheric CO2 for the last five years, it's difficult to detect any shift in its monotonic increase.
This is an emotional response and not a scientific one. The Haber–Bosch process was the biological equivalent of a deferred-interest loan. It gave us enough food to scale from 2 billion to 8, but now the planet is coming to collect its dues. We never had the natural resources to support humanity's current numbers, and by inflating our Nitrogen supply and stripping the Earth of everything else we need, we've utterly fucked it all up. Degrowth would be the worst tragedy in human history, but it would at least give future generations a chance. Geo-engineering is like paying off one credit card with another. It's a recipe for further disaster and doesn't solve the underlying issue. Humanity has to default.
Yes, but more specifically, all technological progress since the industrialized revolution. Prior to that, we at least had a reasonable credit limit in the form of a fixed Nitrogen cycle. Advancements in pre-industrial technology primarily made life easier, not more abundant.
That's an interesting question, and one I've looked at answering in part by looking at technology in terms of its mechanisms.
As I see it, it's possible to frame all technologies as being fundamentally based on one of the following mechanisms, interactions, or focus points:
- Materials: stuff, its properties, abundance, and sourcing and disposal issues. Wood, stone, ceramics, metals, fluids, chemicals, nuclear materials.
- Fuels: energy potential stored in material arrangements. Biomass, fossil fuels, nuclear fuels. This excludes energy flows such as solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal. Subject to limits in stores and creation rates. Result in waste products and phenomena.
- Power transmission and transformation: from simple machines to complex mechanisms and grid distribution. Levers, screws, pulleys, electromagnetism, beamed energy. This would include energy flows described above.
- Process knowledge: "technology" writ large. As J.S. Mill put it, the study of means, how to achieve some goal through some process or technique.
- Causal knowledge: "science" writ large. As J.S. Mill put it, the study of causes, or why the world is and acts as it does, based on empirical study.
- Networks: nodes and links. These may be physical or logical. Transportation, distribution, social, economic, commercial, political, and conceptual collections of loci and the connections and interactions between them. Famously give rise to network effects, also subject to hygiene factors (below).
- Systems: management of process with feedback and models. From basic polity to vast technological, economic, and ecological systems. "The Art of ship handling involves the effective use of forces under control to overcome the effect of forces not under control" -- Charles H. Cotter.
- Information: input, processing, storage, and output. From basic anatomical senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch) to language, maths, logic, abstract representation, manipulation, detection, transmission, reception, and retention. Capable of immense scaling itself, but often with profound limits on direct application.
- Hygiene: management of unintended and/or unanticipated consequences. All technologies achieve both desired and undesired effects, those may be manifest or latent, and may occur immediately or lagged. We tend to best cope with immediate and manifest effects, it is the lagged and latent ones that tend to cause the greatest trouble.
The technologies which seem to best fit your "credit card" model are those involving fossil fuels especially, materials resources formed very slowly or at singular points in time in Earth's history, and of hygiene impacts whose immediate and long-term consequences diverge strongly. Steve Keen (amongst others) shows that economic productivity scales near-linearly with energy consumption, yet we are using fossil fuels at rates millions of times greater than they accumulated. Virtually any mining activity represents extraction at rates greater than accumulation (the reverse is "farming", though even that can be problematic). Current industry has a strong reliance on a large number of elements and minerals, many of which are scarce or sparse. An example of the latter being "rare earths", which are not actually rare so much as they do not form ore bodies, and must be separated with high energy and waste-material costs from exceedingly low concentrations in the Earth's crust. Similarly, various emissions are often presumed or advertised as being low-consequence ... until they are not. Heavy metals, inert compounds (most notably hydrofluourocarbons), synthetic materials (e.g., plastics with bioactive and endocrinologic effects), and carbon dioxide resulting from combustion are all now major environmental concerns, initially dismissed, overlooked, or actively obscured by those with a short-term benefit from their use.
It seems that there are possibilities within process and causal knowledge, power transmission and transformation, networks, systems, and hygiene mechanisms for technologies which are far less prone to risk or debt-shifting. Though critics such as Tainter would suggest that complexity is its own inherent risk, with substantial justificiation.
Not disagreeing with your post here but curious about this point:
> Steve Keen (amongst others) shows that economic productivity scales near-linearly with energy consumption, yet we are using fossil fuels at rates millions of times greater than they accumulated.
The only way I can see (without spending more than just a few minutes thinking about this comment) this being true is with 100% efficiency and I wonder if that's the underlying assumption here. I'd hazard a guess that we're using fossil fuels at low single digit percentage efficiency if that and perhaps even putting more in than we're getting out. To your point though, since we're using fossil fuels way faster than they accumulated there's just no way to escape "running out" [1]. Just a matter of when.
[1] I don't think we'll ever run out of course, it'll just be more and more expensive. When I think about running out I think about not having society able to adapt to the cost because of how we've built and designed our infrastructure. The US is particularly screwed here since we rely on them so much.
Steve Keen, Robert U. Ayres, Russell Standish, "A Note on the Role of Energy in Production" (March 2019):
Energy plays no role in the standard Cobb-Douglas Production Function (CDPF), and a trivial role in a three-factor CDPF where it is treated as a third input, independent of labour and capital. Starting from an epistemological perspective, we treat energy as an input to both labour and capital, without which production is impossible. We then derive an energy-based CPDF (EBCDPF) in which energy plays a critical role. We argue for the redefinition and measurement of real GDP in terms of exergy. We conclude that the “Solow Residual” measures the contribution of exergy to growth, and that the exponents in the EBCDPF should be based on cross-country comparative data as suggested by Mankiw (1995) rather than the “cost-share theorem”.
For an excellent discussion of efficiency of energy use over time, see Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization (2017), which shows the actual attained efficiencies of various fuels usage.
Note that due to conversion efficiency limits, most generally those of Carnot engines, achieved efficiency in converting thermal to mechanical energy trends around 30%. That can go higher in some applications (e.g., dual-cycle steam turbines combined with usage of residual thermal heat in cogeneration plants). But for the most part large-scale modeling relies on the 30% figure. See for example the Lawrence Livermore Labs energy-flow Sankey charts, in which ~30% efficiency simply assumed for the model, rather than explicitly measured, based on modeling:
End-use efficiency is estimated at 65% for the residential sector, 65% for the commercial sector, 21% for the transportation sector, and 49% for the industrial sector, which was updated in 2017 to reflect DOE's analysis of manufacturing.
It is the only practical solution. The only way to get humanity's energy equation to balance is to dramatically reduce the population or dramatically reduce energy use per capita or invent and deploy a mythical free energy source within the next 30 years. And this just covers replacing black energy with green energy -- even more energy will be needed to address the climate problem.
You underestimate the threat of eco-fascism. By that I don't mean green party politicians, no, I mean literal facists who blame climate change on overpopulation and who believe that the population has to be cut drastically. In the most basic form this would mean closing our borders and making sure nobody can cross illegally by using lethal force, if necessary.
Climate change is a result of overpopulation and overconsumption, though. It's right there in the name. The climate is changing as a result of anthropogenic activity. I fail to see how eco-fascism affects the outcome here, if we do not cut our population and consumption the planet will do it for us.
I'm not certain I do. I feel like we may be arguing the same side here? What I'm hinting at is that unless concrete results don't begin to materialize and that right soon the resulting climate driven geopolitical upheaval, and knock-on effects to global logistics, is quite likely to result in a significant downsizing of both global GDP and the world population. Perversely both of these obviously bad outcomes will very likely improve global carbon emissions. Here's a really shitty joke for you: How do you reduce your carbon footprint by 100% overnight? Shoot yourself in the head. How do you reduce your carbon footprint by 900% overnight? Go shoot your neighbors in the head. :/
pedantic "secrete" means to emit fluids or odor.. if you say so! ; "clandestine" means secret or secretive "especially if illegal" .. not illegal per se..
"so what" is up to you.. maybe it means nothing to you, "so what"
a public figure like Bill Gates who is trying to provide solutions (or whatever he is doing, I see some other posts pointing to other less noble agendas he might have) can't exactly come out and say "well, this will probably all not work, most of the observations point to collapse of most farming and mass die-offs due to heat / starvation within ten years", that would work against his goal of getting people motivated and interested in working / voting towards a solution.
From what I can tell, they'll all be riding it out in New Zealand, to minimize the climate effects they personally experience and keep themselves nice and far away from any political instability (or consequences...) It's the goldilocks-zone country for avoiding climate chaos, if you also need to minimize chances that the government will seize all your stuff (as less-liberal states might).
Why do you think these things are in tension? If the world has been on a decades-long trajectory careening towards disaster with little indication that we can coordinate to respond appropriately, someone _should_ be saying it all the time _because_ it's true.
- Influenced by human activity, both positively and negatively.
- Difficult to study, because we only have decades of hard data for what is a phenomenon spanning eons.
- A narrative pushed by Western economies to discourage economic development of the Global South and maintain hegemony. If the former were actually serious about mitigating it, it would harshly regulate planned obsolescence which causes astronomical amounts of waste and pollution. Instead, they browbeat poor countries for building durable infrastructure.
- Classic fear-mongering as a means of maintaining control ("follow me or everyone will die").
- An expression of aging "hippy" eschatology; we have one of the most individualistic generations in human history reaching old age and projecting its death onto the world as a coping mechanism.
- A polarizing topic that lures engagement.
I think blogs like this are a manifestation of the latter two or three.
As opposed to the narrative pushed by Western economies to encourage limited forms of economic development in the Global South, by facilitating the creation of captive markets and dependent client states? You know, the normal day-to-day economic orthodoxy the world's been running under for two hundred years?
Which one do you think is winning?
(Also, when you say the Global South, do you mean the Global South that tends to be exempt from, or subjected to less stringent carbon limitations than the developed world? Or do you mean the Global South that everyone starts complaining about as soon as I mention that maybe we should reduce our emissions...)
The sea surface temperature data is from NOAA and the sea ice extent data is from JAXA. His claims are not difficult to verify, if you follow the citations.
We should do both. Gates has outsized personal influence and resources, he's not some quirky hermit that publishes startling pamphlets but is otherwise separate from the world. It's rational to consider whether and where his personal interests coincide with his policy proposals.
As this post hints at in the discussion of sulfur emissions at sea, all it takes to significantly slow global warming is one country or sufficiently motivated non-state actor deciding to go all-in on geoengineering (like seeding the stratosphere with sulfur dioxides).
Compare this to the collective action problem of everyone, including rapidly industrializing poorer countries, spending trillions to decarbonize their economy and it's pretty clear which outcome is more likely. The only question is which country (or countries) will be first to attempt it, and what will trigger them to act.
That's not the point of the comment you're responding to.
Climate-driven austerity isn't going to happen, because it's an intractable global-scale collective action problem.
If you believe that anthropogenic climate change is going to be a global disaster, you should probably reasonably assume that some country in the world is going to allocate serious resources to mitigating it.
There are 50 countries in the world with resources exceeding that of Portugal or New Zealand. Any of those countries could fund and implement a large-scale geoengineering project. No mechanism exists to ensure that any of those countries get permission to do so.
So it doesn't much matter whether we think it's a good idea. Either:
(1) Anthropogenic climate change isn't going to impose unacceptable costs on the industrialized world, and we'll just blow it off, or
(2) Some country is going to intervene directly in the climate.
What sort of geoengineering project could a country the size of NZ undertake on its own though? Certainly nothing that will make any difference to global climate - at best they might find ways to control cloud-cover and/or rainfall over its own territory. And "legal permission" mightn't be an issue, but if one country decides to undertake a geoengineering project that's fully expected to have a significant negative impact on other ones, they can certainly expect military retaliation.
Those are two coherent rebuttals. "But it will do harm than good" or "it will have unintended consequences", on the other hand, aren't.
But in the thought exercise here, consider that military retaliation just pushes the moment that a climate-threatened country will respond with geoengineering into the future --- to the point where the cost of military intervention is lower than that of climate change.
"If you believe that anthropogenic climate change is going to be a global disaster, you should probably reasonably assume that some country in the world is going to allocate serious resources to mitigating it."
Not when mitigating it requires ending and reversing economic growth. You're assuming there's a single nation on Earth run by good-faith actors. Furthermore, if climate-drive austerity doesn't occur, the Earth will kill billions of people until it reaches a new equilibrium.
My understanding of the point being made is, if anthropogenic climate change is a global catastrophe threatening countries around the world, each of those threatened countries will, at some point, have no choice but to invest in the implementation of geoengineering projects. There won't be a choice.
So the only real question is, when the moment comes that the first sufficiently industrialized country is pushed to the edge by climate catastrophe, what options will they have available to them? If the only options are bad things that are likely to cause more harm than good, that won't matter --- it'll still happen, because what else could happen?
I don't know, the rural poor in America used to all get malaria and intestinal parasites, and now they don't anymore. And it's rare now to lose a child to disease, where it used to be normal. Our current rosy view of nature is skewed by the fact that so many generations of people worked to rid ourselves of its worst shortcomings, and largely succeeded.
Do we though? Up until very recent history, we thought of nature as deadly, and unforgiving. The wilderness would mean almost certain death. We did not master the environment, we were afraid of it.
I wouldn't say we make things worse, I think we make things our own. Is that worse? I'd tend to disagree. I prefer human environments over the deep wilderness. Most of us love nature, but we love the human version of that.. groomed trails, modest temperatures, light breezes, and having all the human comforts within reach. Humanity does certainly do things wrong, but we also do things right.
But this is fluids, we don't have science to know how it will actually perform.
Gosh, I'm so afraid of problems with fluids.
My worst case dooms:
>The change in energy causes extreme weather
>The energy change causes some electrons to leave their orbitals temporarily, causing compounds in the atmosphere that typically never occur(creating cancer air).
>Long term effects are not known, causing cancer air.
A novel novel, got it. I actually thought it was a pretty straightforward read, but to each their own. According to the novel Termination Shock it could just take an eccentric billionaire to launch a geoengineering effort like that (though with some blowback from state actors) - of course there aren't any of those around, so that's clearly fiction...
>The only question is which country (or countries) will be first to attempt it, and what will trigger them to act.
The capability + motivation factors certainly point to India as the most likely candidate, since they're among the closest to disastrous wet-bulb temperatures and have a domestic nuclear umbrella that allows them to say "and what are you going to do about that?". If a heat wave makes it impossible or deadly to harvest crops at a critical moment, panic is a possible outcome.
I didn't hate it, even though it played out more like a REAMDE type thriller than some of his earlier stuff (Anathem, Baroque, etc). I liked Seveneves, though.
You do realize that even if it might work, and even if there weren't any other side effects like acid rain, this would essentially make every piece of sky on every day hazy. We'd essentially trade the very concept of "blue sky" for a livable temperature. Kinda hard to put a price on that for me. Maybe I'd prefer living with genuinely less comfort but blue skies.
You can get a lot of darkening without perceptible effect on the sky, and as a bonus you get amazing sunsets. This happens naturally every time there's a major volcanic eruption; this would just be hurrying the process along a bit.
> Kinda hard to put a price on that for me. Maybe I'd prefer living with genuinely less comfort but blue skies.
If all you have to trade off is comfort, maybe you can't.
If you were one of the literal HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of people who are living in parts of the world that could become unsurvivable in the next few decades, or get flooded by rising sea levels, you'd have a different perspective.
For what it's worth, I agree with you that reckless geoengineering could easily cause more harm than good. But aesthetically desiring a blue sky is a bit silly when up to a billion human lives are on the line (and that's a low estimate)
I think there's also a balance here to make where we don't even know the effects on non-blue skies on animals, who perhaps depend on the sky being as it is for things like orientation?
Would a billion+ animals deserve to die (that did not contribute to climate change), to save millions of other animals, called human (who actually contributed to this situation)?
It's an impossible question, but still needs to be posed.
Thr fact of the matter remains - we humans seem to try to be doing anything (geo-engineering, clever carbon offsetting schemes, etc) than the only reasonable thing: cutting down on consumption, de-growth.
Somehow the human mind seems completely incapable of accepting this fact (let alone acting on it) that for once we need to be humble and self-limit ourselves.
Seems to go against the grain of the credo of most societies on earth (in particular the western one).
Let's see how many people prove me right by downvoting ...
No world leader is going to stick their neck out and spend billions to rain acid (even if thats exactly what the country needs), especially if their country is in a climate crisis. They mind as well hand in their resignation.
One thing that playing with GNU Units has taught me is useful equivalences between various energy measures.
1 Hiroshima ~= 15.5 kiloton TNT ~= 18 GWh.
A large powerplant generates roughly 1 GW of electricity, so running for 18 hours is the equivalent of 1 Hiroshima.
(GNU units ... seems to have this predefined, along with 'davycrocket", "nagasaki", "fatman", "littleboy", "ivyking", "castlebravo", "tsarbomba", "b53bomb", "trinity", and "gadget".)
This also makes clear that it's not merely the amount of energy released, but the rate which matters. A powerplant running for three quarters of a day isn't tremendously destructive. A Little Boy type fission bomb exploding in a few microseconds ... is. Slowing your car from 100 kph to 0 over 10 seconds is a strong stop, doing that in 0.1 seconds is a fatal accident.
Typically, a 10x increase or decrease in scale or magnitude is transformative. By very rough averages, a human walks at ~5 kph, an automobile travels at 50 kph, a commercial airliner at 500 kph, a fighter aircraft at 5,000 kph, and a spacecraft at 50,000 kph.
What would you rather have us measure a mass-extinction event in, "sad puppies per second?" This shit is life-and-death. I'm sorry that reality offends you.
I don't think it is a bad measurement of energy for transmitting a scale. It was an actually used nuclear bomb and with enough understanding of its power and consequences in our current culture. Your message have a target public, and that target must understand it properly.
A Tsar bomb or a long number with an unit attached won't be as graphically understood as this one. Scientists may grasp those numbers, but they already know how bad this is, you must reach everyone else.
It's been suggested to state things in terms of 9/11/2001 for Americans who don't understand the distaste in such discussions. E.g. each "Hiroshima" would be worth 65 "9/11/2001"s. The scale of the graph's Y-axis would run from 195 to 585 "9/11/2001"s.
The author is using this as a unit of thermal energy being absorbed, not as a measure of deaths:
> As of March, 2023, on an annualized basis, the EEI was 1.61 Watts per square meter. That might not sound like a lot, but on a global basis it is about equal to the energy released from 13 Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs exploding every second.
That "1.61 Watts per square meter" figure does sound low to someone who thinks in terms of 60 Watt light bulbs. Thinking of it on the scale of nuclear bombs being dropped may give people pause to reflect on the magnitude of the rate of energy being absorbed.
Neither is particularly helpful, though I should point out that American trauma from 9/11 wasn't based on the number of people who died but rather the symbol of how the attack was executed, and the fact that it happened on US soil.
If the WTC towers were somehow successfully evacuated before collapse, and only 200 people died instead of 3000 (or however there were on the 2 planes), the cultural effect on the country would've been the same.
There's this paradox where, on the one hand humanity is convinced it can overcome any problem nature throws at us, and can completely subjugate nature; and on the other hand, human beings are tragically grossly understimating the impact of their actions on their environment.
This is really what stands out to me when people on HN suggest that global warming is totally solvable with just enough technological innovation. The sad truth, and what this article is really driving home, is that while we're waiting for a deus ex machina, we continue to trash our planet, as if we can just move to Mars or something when earth is done.
I'm quite skeptical about the whole "collapse of industrial civilisation" schtick, but I am worried, most of all for my children and their generation.
> The first WTF is in the Antarctic, where sea-ice extent is setting record lows daily, now fully over 2 million kilometers below the 1991-2020 mean. This is not some one-off event. A decline like this has long been predicted. The impact is that there is a lot more open ocean than normal for this time of year. Open ocean means the ability to absorb incoming solar radiation, and that means further heating in a well-known feedback loop.
We already knew that it would get this bad, but then some other curveball came and made it worse.
I fear that this is the year "wet-bulb temperature" becomes a term regular households across the world become deeply familiar with. It may be as ubiquitous as the term "social distancing" became.
I've always naively thought that climate disaster was still 10-20 years out, but it seems like it's going to begin in earnest now and instead be completely catastrophic after these next 10 years.
What can I as an individual do? Move to Saskatchewan or Alaska? I already know from a friend in Alaska that the melting permafrost is causing many native villages to sink and collapse, and it's only gotten worse in the past few years. Check out this article on Newtok, AK by National Geographic from 2019: http://archive.today/1enHh
I am very familiar with how a wet-bulb thermometer works and some of the ways it's useful (like at altitude for weather forecasts, and as one of the ways to build a hygrometer) but I'm struggling to make the connection that you've made as to why it'll be a household term. Mind explaining?
Because a wet-bulb temperature of 35C is generally considered deadly, perhaps as low as 31C. Global warming that kills large swathes of Burma or India would be a household term I'd think.
But "heat index" is already a household term, and essentially has the same purpose [0]. It's like saying the Kelvin scale will end up in household use: I would disagree because while Kelvin is useful, it's not sufficiently more useful than C/F for most household usage.
> people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (130 °F) [0]
At a certain wet bulb temp humans cannot cool themselves off - they die without access to some other means to get cool (like cold water, air conditioning, etc).
> extreme wet-bulb temperatures are relatively rare in most parts of the world
The concern the top-level comment has is that sooner rather than later these cases will not be as rare and so more people will become familiar with this concept.
“The [wet-bulb] temperature reading you get will actually change depending on how humid it is,” says Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “That’s the real purpose, to measure how well we’ll be able to cool ourselves by sweating.”
As far as global warming goes, study results indicate that limiting global warming to 1.5 °C would prevent most of the tropics from reaching the wet-bulb temperature of the human physiological limit of 35 °C. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00695-3
Just to be clear, studies also indicate that we will not realistically limit global heating to anything close to 1.5C, unless very drastic actions are taken immediately (actions on a level that would be seen as extremely radical by most people)
I dount it'll help you much to move. We've got drought and fire here in Sweden already. Never rains anymore. Slaugherhouses fullbooked already becauae the probability of being able to keep the livestock fed and watered looks pretty bad already...
Keep in mind that "drought" can be highly relative and short-term.
For regions which have historically experienced frequent (e.g., daily or weekly) rainfall, even a few days or weeks with no or limited precipitation can induce stress on ecological communities. Deluge / drought patterns (see California's long-term drought and this past rain season's endless atmospheric river storms) actually compound the problem.
Looking at long-term averages alone may well mask this effect and its significance.
Well it mostly rains during winter in Sweden and for half the country that means snow, so mo chance of forest fires then. The past 10 years there have been more dry years during summer than the past. Also it's usually dry in the most southern parts of sweden, which also accounts for a majority of the food production.
Your averages are meaningless if not intentionally misleading. The country is huge ranging from 55°N to 69°N and having four distinct and relatively extreme seasons. It's ridiculous to assert that the droughts down here in the south aren't new, drastic and caused by climate change. The sea water here is virtually room temperature. Don't try to tell me that's normal. Cherry picking through your confirmation bias is no substitute for being here and being able to read our news with access to experts studying and working with exactly this.
Unless you live in the select few poor equatorial countries with high humidity and heat you have little to worry about personally.
Climate change is a long term problem. We're going to see hundreds of millions of climate refugees before the end of the century, but the bulk will be after most of us are dead.
Slow-moving crises are not crises, they're problems, not emergencies.
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Here, have some literature, down-voters!
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[1] Nine long and nearly continuous sea level records were chosen from around the world to explore rates of change in sea level for 1904–2003. These records were found to capture the variability found in a larger number of stations over the last half century studied previously. Extending the sea level record back over the entire century suggests that the high variability in the rates of sea level change observed over the past 20 years were not particularly unusual. The rate of sea level change was found to be larger in the early part of last century (2.03 ± 0.35 mm/yr 1904–1953), in comparison with the latter part (1.45 ± 0.34 mm/yr 1954–2003). The highest decadal rate of rise occurred in the decade centred on 1980 (5.31 mm/yr) with the lowest rate of rise occurring in the decade centred on 1964 (−1.49 mm/yr). Over the entire century the mean rate of change was 1.74 ± 0.16 mm/yr. [0]
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We compare estimates of coastal and global averaged sea level for 1950 to 2000. During the 1990s and around 1970, we find coastal sea level is rising faster than the global average but that it rises slower than the global average during the late 1970s and late 1980s. The differences are largely a result of sampling the time-varying geographical distribution of sea level rise along a coastline which is more convoluted in some regions than others. More rapid coastal rise corresponds to La Niña–like conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean and a slower rate corresponds to El Niño–like conditions. Over the 51 year period, there is no significant difference in the rates of coastal and global averaged sea level rise, as found in climate model simulations of the 20th century. The best estimate of both global average and coastal sea level rise remains 1.8 ± 0.3 mm yr−1, as found in earlier studies. [1]
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Kemp et al. (1) note that recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports emphasize sub-2 °C scenarios. Simultaneously, IPCC reports also overemphasize catastrophic scenarios, as does broader discourse. For example, the cataclysmic Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) and Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 5-8.5 (SSP5-8.5) scenarios—now widely considered implausible (2)—account for roughly half of the scenario mentions in recent IPCC Assessment Reports’ impacts (Working Group II) sections (Fig. 1A), similar to underlying scientific literature (3). The SSP3-7.0 emissions pathway, which Kemp et al. (1) use in their analyses, assumes a world in 2100 heavily reliant on coal and with no climate policy—an implausible future (3, 4). It projects vastly higher emissions than the International Energy Agency (IEA) stated policies scenario, which has continually been revised downward in recent years (4) (Fig. 1B). [2]
Given that such rapid and severe deviations as shown in the charts are unheard of at this scale, perhaps a little panic is justified. It’s certainly worrying.
I agree it's worrying. Panic to me, though, indicates a loss of your faculties. You still have to be able to assess the situation objectively and adapt accordingly. I guess my point is that hyperbole about climate change (alarmism) is just as unhelpful as climate change denial.
Except that in context nobody, not even the self-proclaimed doomer who wrote the post, is suggesting we all go running around in blind panic with our hair on fire over this. Rather, that it’s severe enough and so far out beyond recorded temperatures that it should be an urgent priority that’s taken extremely seriously.
Claiming this is just panic is devaluing the data and an argument in favour of yet more inaction or slow and ineffective action.
To be fair, this particular deviation we are seeing in the ocean temps was knowingly and intentionally caused by changing the environmental regulations around sulfur content.
So it’s a weird state to be in where the environmentalists are pushing dramatic warming policies.
If living in poverty, without access to various types of medication because our fragile supply chains broke is "slightly worse off", then sure, yeah, it's just going to be slight change
Bankers are known to be responsible and have a fantastic history of being responsible with others money. There are no reasons why a collection of individuals would make a bad decision which would impact other people 10, 20, or 30 years in the future for an immediate gain.
Bankers aren't in the business of underwriting risk, other than credit risk. However, mortgages typically require having property insurance as a condition for issuing the mortgage, so de facto, if the property is uninsurable, the bank isn't issuing a loan. The expert insurance and reinsurance underwriters have started raising rates or exiting some markets altogether, as well.
In Belgium, if you buy an appartment at the coastline using a business, the fiscal authorities dispute the tax deductability and depreciation (33y by default) if it is not at least on the second floor.
> I've always naively thought that climate disaster was still 10-20 years out
You can hardly be blamed for that, they've been saying it was one way or another since at least the 1970's.
Literally none of their doomsday scenarios have occurred as stated yet.
My bet is, rather than bovine farts and air for plant-life,
the major climate driver will turn out to be what it always has been... 1 million earths-worth chaotic searing nuclear eruption, boiling atop hidden internal processes 4b+ years.
And if there is a human aspect to it, I'd first investigate the large-scale weather-modifying experiments creating and directing precipitation in arbitrary and unaccountable ways over large landmasses for decades. Eg, look at China's.
(Cue the brigade claiming sensible observations are madness because there's a "consensus"... among only scientists that agree...)
I've observed that for the past 4.5+ billion years, the sole principle driver of the climate on our planet has been the million-earth sized nuclear reaction it's in orbit around.
That the past 100 years of cows farting would suddenly have infinitely greater impact strikes me as absurd, and meshes well with the decades of failed predictions I've observed its purveyors making.
That they will casually disregard, as entirely irrelevant, large-scale human deployments specifically targeted at changing the climate - that have succeeded in doing so - only supports this assessment.
Finally, asserting a "consensus" only by ignoring or mocking any and all dissenting views is utterly pathetic and not indicative of science. It's more indicative of field capture by industry, politics and profits.
Even the most cursory analysis of investment flows, or the personal investments of people promoting it and what they stand to personally gain from it (while taking private actions contradicting public claims) confirms this also.
That everything the field claims about the future is based on "modelling" (which is another word for "imagining"), really just cements the level of "science" we're dealing with here. No wonder their "models" always fail.
I'm not saying the climate isn't changing, and I'm not even saying we couldn't be causing it. I'm saying the current investigation into it is off-track, compromised, and historically incapable of coming up with any accuracy.
Ie, if China can successfully, and continually, modify the climate across their entire continent using a large-scale tech deployment, how is it reasonable to exclude it from theories on anthropogenic climate? It makes no sense.
(And if you aren't aware of China's weather modification programs, look them up. It's not "conspiracy theory", even CNN has reported on it.)
There's literally nothing a "bottom-up" approach will do to effectuate any serious change on the climate. The climate is a dynamic system, and "climate change" is a tautology. At which point, ever, is any "climate" in a static state?
Never, because systems are dynamic, and it's chaotic. Now, if anyone (the State powers and corporate interests) actually WANT to "solve" this "problem," it's, uh, very very clear where to start. Nuclear.
But like many other scissor issues, it will continue to be used as a lever to slice apart groups so's they can fight each other.
When was the last time you asked yourself "What made and or makes me confident in my belief that this is actually a crisis? Why?"
Which papers and statistical analyses have you written? Are you "trusting the science?" Are you versed enough to truly understand how we'd even be able to measure this? Or is it just esoteric enough that it can be used as an engine of disruption, corruption, etc...
Weather (short term local fluctuations) is chaotic.
Climate (long term parameters) isn't.
As an example of how this can be so, consider the classic images of spinning wingnuts in space ( Dzhanibekov effect | Tennis racket theorem ).
The tumblings of the wingnut, moment to moment, are chaotic and unpredictable.
The long term trajectory of the wingnut is clear to see, the centre of mass arcs in a smooth manner and the eventual impact point on the hull can be marked in advance.
( In answer to your question, I've spent decades in geophysics and related disciplines, I've measured gravity, ground radiation, cosmic radiation, continent scale tides to determine mean sea levels, etc. )
Double pendulums are a great example of complex, chaotic, and dynamic system. Given an initial state, I wouldn't be able to predict the outcome. However, I could easily go over and smash the toy and then have a pretty good prediction of the outcome state.
Anyone who is interested in having a deeper understanding of climate change I would recommend checking out IPCC AR6.
Interesting that removing sulphur emissions may have resulted in more solar radiation being absorbed by the oceans. Wonder if cargo ships could purposely emit some benign material that would reflect away sunlight. Although I suspect there could be unintended consequences.
This could work in combination with emission of Iron Salt Aerosols (ISAs). These would have two beneficial effects: increase of phytoplankton growth in iron-poor regions of the oceans, and increased photogeneration of OH and Cl radicals in the troposphere to increase the rate of removal of methane.
Even if scientists agreed that spraying seawater upwards from every ship would mitigate say 10 years of climate change, can you imagine world governments coming to an agreement to do it, and how to fund it?
If it helps e.g. local rainfall and other whether conditions it might be in the interests of coastal governments to invest in things like this, but if it only helps on a global scale, it's an issue.
You could maybe equate it to an equivalent amount of carbon capture and pay for it the same way. I'm not sure I'd agree with that, though, unless it was only paid at a lower rate than true carbon capture / reduction schemes.
water effects weather differently based on whether its vapor (traps infrared) or suspended droplets/crystals as a cloud (reflects infrared)
sulfur is both a greenhouse gas and a condensate for cloud formation
nature is full of examples where you can add more and more of a single factor and suddenly the effect will flip and contribute to the other direction, before reaching a further threshold and flipping the other way
it is not possible to make blanket statements like "Adding water to the atmosphere increases average temperature"
As I understand it, CO2 is one of the few factors that we can all agree is just straighforward, more CO2 more problems. But chaos is tricky, we can only simulate so much.
> As of January 1, 2020, the International Maritime Organization put a limit on the sulfur content in shipping fuels, reducing the global upper limit on sulfur content from 3.50% to 0.50%. Here is a link to an article describing this change. This reduced limit was mandatory and led to over a 75% drop in sulfur oxides. While great for the environment in many respects (e.g. less acid rain and ocean acidification), there was also a not-so-unexpected consequence.
What is actually beyond my understanding here, is that an international organization implemented a very strict environmental standard, one that probably applies to notoriously uncooperative countries (hint: China), one that applies to a notoriously uncaring industry (cue the oil-spills and dirt ships transporting crap around the world), and, _somehow_ , the standard was respected, and the restriction had the "desired" effect (less SO2 in the air.) ?
That's my WTF: since when do environment standard work ?
What did the IMO do ?
Why didn't the cargo coorporation simply bribe and cheat and lie, as usual ? Didn't using "cleaner" fuels cost _more_ money ? How did they let this kind of communist nonsense of a regulation happen ? Where are the freedom fighters ?
Why don't we have an "airpollutionskeptics.org" site that denies the link between cargo ships and SO2 level in the air, on the ground that SO2 levels have always changed in the past, and that the IMO is an evil governement body of elitists who want to take again our gunships ?
Or is it only that we're slaves to irony, that no good deed should go unpunished, and that the only way we can solve any environmental problem is by inadvertently making another one even worse ?
AFAIK in the maritime space the lever is usually seaworthiness and it's connection to insurability[1]
Your _really_ don't want your vessels to go uninsured so you better comply and the big insurers are in europe/usa (not that I don't think that there are some black sheep). That's also the mechanism by which sanctions work in regards to maritime traffic (like against russia last year [2])
Regulation of CFCs was successful at helping to recover the ozone layer. Likewise the Clean Air Act.
Regulation works remarkably well in many spaces. Skepticism is warranted as usual but the cynics that claim it almost never works usually have a hidden agenda.
My understanding of the Montreal protocol is not that corporations decided to follow regulations from their good hearts, but that they managed to play the clock long enough to have better and cheaper alternatives anyway [1].)
That being said, of course I do believe regulation help - but, slowly, reluctantly, and with every interest fighting tooth and nails.
Therefore, I'm still shocked that a regulation would be _that_ successful (75% reduction of anything in two years is unbelievable.)
However, if insurers are more powerful than activist, that should give some ideas. How can you make premiums for fossil fuels plants get so high that no insurer would touch them ?
Just curious really, but sources on China being particularly uncooperative with this kind of stuff? Totally take your word for it, of course. I'm mainly just surprised I hadn't heard this particular point before in the various and constant Bad-China discourse.
That was a bit tongue in cheek. ("Notorious" as "that's everyone is saying". Ironically, the first source of this I can find is from the US state department, but it's from the trump era so maybe to be taken with a huge grain of salt : https://2017-2021.state.gov/chinas-environmental-abuses/inde...)
"The end of global industrial civilization is where we are headed right now, not at some future dystopian moment. I wish I had a hopeful word to end with. But I don’t."
That's a pretty terrifying ending. Many of these trends (reducing sea ice causing increased ocean warming, burning of forests and permafrost) may be irreversible once things pass a certain point. At very least we may need to engage in some sort of large-scale solar radiation management project to stop them, and worryingly we may need to start that project very soon before it's too late.
IF the correlation between sulphuric oxide contents in shipping fuel and these measures changes are true then we have the solution in the article right there. The best day to start solar radiation management was yesterday, the second-best is now.
I don't actually disagree with this. My concern is that right now the public is very far from accepting the idea that we should engage in these projects, and they only exist at the research stage. Worse: convincing the world to accept near-term SRM (or even "use dirtier fuel again" SRM) may be a tough sell, since some portion of the world isn't convinced that climate change is very serious, let alone an existential threat that needs immediate action. Even if SRM works and is safe, getting from our current situation to one where we deploy SRM could take years, and I'm getting worried that we might not have those years.
Don't worry. Magically awesome, yet uninvented, or in perpetual "in the next ten years" state technology, with Star Trek scope, will save us with a technical solution. If not, we're all just going to Mars in 10-15 years, with colonies and terraformings. Even if we haven't managed to even get back to the moon for 50 years.
That's what everybody insisted for the past 20-30 years, so must be true. All we need to do is keep expanding consumption/production!
How is this on the front page? It's as poorly rooted in science as anti-global warming articles.
This level of alarmism is dangerous because thoughts of others imprison us if we’re not thinking for ourselves... why would a young person care about the climate if it's already too late.
How is it poorly rooted? They cite all of the data they used for their sources, and link to research supporting their broad claims. You can’t just call something poorly sourced and alarmist because it’s actually alarming. That’s the problem, right now. Alarming is very much the word I should hope this article is.
What we have already done is enough to keep the momentum of global warming going the next centuries. That's a very difficult political reality, it is a great challenge. How can we deal with politics and everything else when the facts look like this?
When the best we can do is to "not make it worse", then it's very hard for people to see the benefits of the changes we have to make.
The fun thing about climate change is that it is never really too late to make a difference, since every reduction in emitted CO2 results in less warming (even if not in a perfectly linear fashion due to various feedback loops). This means that even when we've already locked in 2C, it is still worth preventing it from going to 2.5C.
So alarmism is good and necessary, we just need to make sure that we also need to take action based on it.
This article and discussions here in the comments motivated me to send off 3 emails to relevant ministers of my provincial government.
When I had my first kid, the environment and what our Earth would look like when she was my age really got to me. I realized that small, individual actions aren't going to cut it (ex turning off a light). It's not to say I don't do those things, but I had to do more, things that may actually move the needle.
I pay for Bullfrog power to my house (https://bullfrogpower.com/) and I now email my local representatives to make sure they know their constituents care about this. What will you do today?
So given this context and assuming it is accurate, where do you think would be the most viable areas to live? If I were to consider for the US, I'd say inland northern states like Wisconsin and Michigan thanks to the Great Lakes...
But a few thing I'm missing are:
- second (higher) order availability: even if the hospital you need to go to is within biking distance, is the hospital itself sourcing it's materials (needles, plasters etc.) locally?
Otherwise you might end up at a hospital that can't treat you
- in your modelling you only accounted for weather effects and elsewhere assumed that, hopefully, immigration will somehow be managed well.
Suppose it will not - how will you manage that and ensure you will not loose everything, when everyone suddenly moves to where you are and all wealth is taken from people who have some?
Is Traverse city perhaps sufficiently insulated so that people won't easily reach it?
Does it have a strong police?
Lastly, I'm recommending the "nodes of persisting complexity" article, if you're interested. They carry out an analysis like you do, but at country level. Sadly, the US doesn't score too high.
> By cleaning up shipping fuels, massive regions of the world’s oceans that were protected from heating by shipping sulfate aerosols are now experiencing rapid warming. This includes the main shipping routes between Asia and the Western US as well as the major routes from the Easter US to Europe and the Middle East. And that’s where the warming is happening. This rapid heating is known as “termination shock,” and it appears to be what’s happening right now.
Certain chemicals in the atmosphere can increase the planet's albedo, meaning that less of the sun's energy is absorbed. When people speak of geoengineering, they are referring to intentionally spraying these elements (sulfur) into the atmosphere to reflect more of the sun's energy and temporarily cooling the earth.
However, the problem with this system is that the second you stop, you get a huge bump in temperature. Like a whip, you get a quick increase.
Turns out, the shipping industry may have been inadvertently geoengineering and now that there are regulations on the amount of sulfur expelled, we may be experiencing that snap to warmer temperatures.
You may think "Let's just spray some sulfur of our own," but there are unintended consequences associated with it. In my mind though, the biggest issue is that without a reduction in emissions, you'll need more and more sulfur sprayed into the atmosphere and eventually it will not be effective. Supposing you've continued to emit all that time and are still emitting, then the snap would be even greater.
Haha! It’s relieving to finally see the optimistic technologists of HN finally getting a taste of their own medicine. This is what your much-praised technology did to the world, folks, and no, this was inevitable due to the very nature of it. If you fear what lies ahead, know that it’s not a fear in vain! Collapse is finally getting mainstream.
> These next two years are a pre-amble to what it will mean for the world to pass the Paris 1.5°C barrier. The end of global industrial civilization is where we are headed right now, not at some future dystopian moment. I wish I had a hopeful word to end with. But I don’t.
I chose to live in Michigan mostly for climate crisis and natural disaster reasons. One of the largest fresh bodies of water, no earthquakes, hardly any tornadoes, no hurricanes, ocean levels won’t impact directly, forest fires aren’t common in the scale of California. Projections show it will still be farmable in 50 years. The downside is it’s a Midwest flyover sate, and the winters can be tough. The lack of sun and abundance of snow can be impactful on mood.
The wild fires represent a massive positive feedback loop. The fires are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, that I believe effectively doubled Canada’s emissions for this year.
"The end of global industrial civilization is where we are headed right now, not at some future dystopian moment. I wish I had a hopeful word to end with. But I don’t."
You realize the Sunshade is science fiction, right?
Picking two examples from the Wikipedia article you linked, the Fresnel lens is a proposed object that would float in space between the Earth and Sun, approximately 1000 km wide and only a few mm thick. The article notes "at a science fiction convention in 2004, Benford estimated that it would cost about US$10 billion up front, and another $10 billion in supportive cost during its lifespan." Lol. This idea is pretty hilarious, just in general. A lens so wide as to span the entire US state of South Dakota. Please explain how you'll launch and/or assemble that at the L1 point. (This was a subplot of a Simpsons Episode by the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Shot_Mr._Burns%3F#Part_One)
Or there's the "Lightweight solution", "a distributed sunshade with a mass on the order of 100000 tons, composed of ultra-thin polymeric films and SiO2 nanotubes", which "estimates that launching such mass would require 399 yearly launches of a vehicle such as SpaceX Starship for 10 years." Also lol!
I read the whole article. I looked at all the graphs and charts. I still don't understand the near term significance, even with the detailed explanations.
Assuming I'm exactly average, that means 50% of the population won't understand it either. Of that 50%, how many will actually care? Nothing will happen until it is too late.
His final words weren't encouraging and I can't say I feel any better either.
Third paragraph from the bottom. Seems pretty clear in layman's terms to me.
> As we enter Northern hemisphere summer, large regions of the planet will experience record heatwaves, fires, storms and flooding. These events will set records in intensity, duration and frequency. The planet’s overall temperature will spike to new highs for the modern era, with 1.5°C in sight for 2024. Antarctic polar sea-ice will continue its retreat from “normal”, exposing more open ocean to incoming solar radiation and heating. Crops will fail. Infrastructure will break beyond repair. Climate migration will spike. And all of this is already happening.
Interesting. Alberta had plenty of wildfires even before the 'regular' wildfire season even began. Before any other place in NA. Now they are starting to have crop failures and are en route to 'zero production': https://globalnews.ca/news/9761043/dry-spring-southern-alber... . Of course they also reelected their conservative pro-culture war government while in the middle of all of this, Texas of Canada indeed.
That's an accurate but misleading characterization of the data. Anyone can go eyeball the chart you linked and then read this for context to form a more complete opinion:
How is it misleading when they're talking about "exposing more open ocean to incoming solar radiation and heating" specifically? How is it misleading at all when I've literally just quoted data from a really good site?
Presenting a very slightly increasing average antarctic coverage trend over specifically 40 years as a refutation that antarctic polar ice is in retreat is misleading for a couple reasons. First, the last ten years appears to show strongly decreasing coverage trend which shows variability or a change in trend to integrate into any conclusions. Second, over that whole period the minimum coverage has a clear decreasing trend, again that should inform any expectations about where we are going.
Are you staking out a claim that antarctic ice is going to increase over the next few decades?
We've had a year with the highest extent ever recorded in the last 10 years.
It's a direct refutation of the authors point that it'll continue to decrease and expose more ocean because of compounding effects when it hasn't actually been decreasing. I make no claims that it's going to increase or decrease, I'm not even talking about the future, I'm refuting the author's bad data.
Because while the winter maximum used to increase (5y average) in the last 40 years, the summer maximum decreased (5y average) over the same period.
> How is it misleading when they're talking about "exposing more open ocean to incoming solar radiation and heating" specifically?
So, if you don't know, during winter there is almost no sun in antartica (and even in the areas you can see it 3 hours a day like in the Kerguelen, it isnt absorbed that much to to a low angle of incidence). So we clearly don't care about random averages of the sea ice over a year, but its state when the sun hit the water, in summer (because the angle of incidence is higher, and also, the sun almost never sets there).
That's why your data is correct, but misleading. What's important isn't the ice sheet surface this winter, during june-july-august-september (sorry to over-explain, but i get that this is a complex issue and this bear repeating) but how much ice was present last summer (this winter if you're in the north hemisphere). And this was the lowest we ever had.
Do you want more clarifications on specific points? I'm not an expert, and this is a complex subject
> Because while the winter maximum used to increase (5y average) in the last 40 years, the summer maximum decreased (5y average) over the same period.
March extent has neither decreased, nor increased. It hasn't been decreasing at all. The largest extent in march has occurred in the years 2008, 2013, 2014 and 2015.
> Assuming I'm exactly average, that means 50% of the population won't understand it either. Of that 50%, how many will actually care? Nothing will happen until it is too late.
That’s the crux of the dilemma. It’s too hard. Nothing in our daily experience gives us an intuition for it.
For instance, the media often says “solving climate change requires lowering emissions”. Which gives the impression that if we lower emissions we solve it.
But lowering admissions merely slows the speed at which the problem worsens. To solve the problem we would need to go to zero and then actually suck extra co2 from the atmosphere.
And total global emissions, the only number which matters, are at a record high.
I think this is precisely what is missing in so much of the climate communication from scientists in the space, the "so what" moment.
Drawing a line in the sand is useful for policy (We should target staying under 1.5C above historical records), but the other piece needs to be the why of it all.
So sure, from the figures given in this post we're seeing record antarctic sea ice anomolies, record sea surface temperature anomolies and record temperature mean anomolies.
But what does this mean for the average person?
What portion of our farmland is no longer serviceable? What places can people no longer live, what portion of our fresh water sources no longer work?
How many people will have to move, find other sources of food/water? What other severe downstream effects are coming that I'm not even aware of? Severe weather? Flooding? Ecosystem collapse?
I understand that this blog is likely more dedicated towards the science behind climate rather than communication of the consequences to the layman, but it seems that most science communication is more interested in communicating the science behind predictions (and often failing) than communicating what the outcomes are likely to be.
This might be of interest. The opinion contributors on the wraltechwire site [0] do a reasonable job at trying to express outcomes in the context of climate change science concepts.
I know that this is HN but this isn’t an IQ-guarded secret. People not “getting it” is based on denial and/or a misguided Culture War politics (those people say it is so, and therefore it is not so), not lack of smarts.
The North Atlantic heat flux of the air-ocean interface changed and some one more knowledgeable might tell how many terajoule stay in the atmosphere a little bit longer probably altering the weather pattern as we like to know them.
The page provides time series and map visualizations of daily mean Sea Surface Temperature (SST) from the NOAA Optimum Interpolation SST (OISST) dataset version 2.1. OISST is a 0.25°x0.25° gridded dataset that estimates temperatures based on a blend of satellite, ship, and buoy observations. The OISST data product includes SST anomalies based on 1971–2000 climatology from NOAA. The datset spans 1 January 1982 to present with a 1 to 2-day lag from the current day. OISST files are preliminary for about two weeks until a finalized product file is posted by NOAA. This status is identified on the maps with "[preliminary]" showing in the title, and applies to the time series as well.
thanks we’re on the right track but it’s still lacking the stats. ie what is the distribution of the instruments and how are they weighted ? are dense and sparse weighted equally? how about close and distant instruments to settlements ?
to me collapsing thousands of observations to a single average loses most of the signal
- "DOISST v2.0 and v2.1 have a resolution of daily and 0.25° × 0.25°"
- "The large-scale biases of AVHRR SSTs are corrected against the available in situ observations from ships and buoys in DOISST v2.0 (Reynolds et al. 2007) and from ships, buoys, and Argo floats in this study (v2.1; Table 1). Daily biases of AVHRR SSTs (e.g., 15 January 2020) are calculated in the following procedures: 1) daily AVHRR and in situ SSTs are bin-averaged separately to 2° × 2° grids; 2) daily AVHRR and in situ SSTs are averaged separately within a 15-day running window (e.g., 8–22 January 2020); 3) the averaged AVHRR and in situ SSTs are projected onto a common set of empirical orthogonal teleconnection (EOT) functions; 4) the difference between EOT-filtered AVHRR and in situ SSTs is defined as AVHRR biases; and 5) the daily biases on 2° × 2° grids are interpolated linearly to 0.25° × 0.25° grids and applied to AVHRR SST [see more details in Reynolds et al. (2007); Huang et al. 2015b]."
I'll trust in your competence to answer your remaining questions without my assistance.
Let’s see the last 200-400 years of climate data. Curious the fluctuations 1991-2020 has decent variance, there’s also 30 year solar cycles. We only see one cycle in this data, we need more data tip make conclusions
Skeptics have been raising questions like yours for decades. If you are truly interested in answers then it is only one or two google searches away. In short scientists have already factored those concerns into their analysis.
Oh I fully know they have a lot more data than 1991-2023 (as is this chart). But of course they have no way to factor beyond like 1900. They don’t have the data and it’s why the models are always off. It’s also why I’m asking for it. It’s obviously constructed data designed to reach a pre-determined conclusion. The 1960-1991 data and 1930-1960 data is available (though likely using different sensors, locations, etc to calculate temp)
I was skeptical, but when the author introduced "Hiroshimas per second" as a scale to measure temperature I understood that this was a truly scientific article.
Who said it was nullifying the scientific hypothesis? On the contrary, it strengthens it significantly. I suggest he further strengthens his science by converting carbon emissions to Auschwitz' per minute, so that the everyday Joe gets a better grip on the numbers.
Putin captured media headlines. Speaking of Putin, Russia is probably the only country that benefits from melting Arctic - opening Northwest Passage - figured it out after debating with a bunch of climate change deniers on Twitter.
(I enjoy debating, I had fun doing it, at some point they were quitting, if they were like me they would continue debating)
In all seriousness, I'm working on Metacrisis - a new term reaching mainstream consciousness:
— Runaway climate change + food system + global hunger
>Average Antarctic sea ice concentration in February 2023, the month when sea ice reaches its summer minimum extent. Compared to median conditions from 1981–2010 (yellow line), the most recent minimum was the lowest on record throughout the month.
>Overall, the long-term trend in Antarctic sea ice is nearly flat. (in contrast, the glaciers and ice sheets over land in Antarctica are losing mass.) The satellite record spans more than four decades, and although the ice has shown increasing and decreasing trends over portions of that record, few of those trends have been statistically significant. Year-to-year variability has dominated, especially over the last decade. Since the year 2013, Antarctic sea ice has exhibited its highest and lowest extents in the entire record—the highest-ever winter maximum occurred in September 2014, and the lowest-ever summer minimum was in February 2022. But the overall trend, as of early 2022, is close to zero.
Reading the article I see some very short timeframes being used (e.g. 1991-2020, 1979-2000) as statistically relevant. Might be enough when preaching to the choir, but irrelevant to the skeptics.
Skeptics will stay skeptics whatever we say. Last time the timeframe was too long, this time the timeframe is too short.
"we had ice age in the past", "we had warming in the past", 1990 is too close, -2m years is too far, the sun is closer (it's not), "numbers can say anything", "oooooh spooky graphs ;)" &c.
Those are standard climatological periods. You need that for data to be comparable and make sense. I would expect the skeptics to put in at least minor surface level effort in trying to understand the thing that they’re skeptical about, but yeah, maybe that’s too much to ask.
He tries a little too hard to make gradual global changes more tangible (what does 930 Hiroshimas even mean?), but in general he does a good job of stating the obvious for us lunkheads. The developed world is nearly at civil war in large part about the tiny number of refugees we have today---we will be completely unable to deal with climate refugees in the tens or hundreds of millions, and it won't be wet bulb temps that finish our society off, it will be us doing it to each other.
I will start this post saying i'm not a techno-solutionist guy, nor a denier. My last post on the subect was basically:
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This is why Co2 do not have any effect until it reaches the high troposphere. That takes 20 years. The average climate we have right now is caused by emissions from 2003.
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However: we never had this meteorology scenario before. We cannot predict what will happen this summer. Yes, if you're a public servant or work with them or whatever, prepare for the worst please. But ultimately, we cannot know. we started an experiment that will bring us fast changes, lead us to discover retroaction loops and a lot of different things. Some will help, some wont, we can't know. If it wasn't this dangerous and violent, the uncertainty would be fascinating (it still is, somehow).
Let's see, you don't want people to be alarmist on events that could remap the world as we know it? Okay, if we aren't alarmist then governments won't take action. It sounds like there is no way to win with people like you, and evidently there are enough people like you that we've done nothing.
Regarding your specific complaint, let's look at the AP article. The article is based off an interview with a director, not a scientist. I'm not sure if it's poorly written or the director poorly communicated the issue. The article implies that by 2000 we'd see all of these extreme outcomes, that wasn't what was intended to be communicated. Instead it was that we had until 2000 to stop these events from happening in the future. Which is a very different message. Regardless here we are in 2023 and we are getting ever closer to those events occurring, with some leading indicators already taking place.
"... The end of global industrial civilization is where we are headed right now, not at some future dystopian moment. I wish I had a hopeful word to end with. But I don’t."
He forgot the 4th event - Social Contagion Resulting in Climate Sensationalism.
Can we please have a realistic discussion on climate change? I'm so sick of these "scientists" acting like we're in "Day After Tomorrow" and every normal weather event is suddenly a precursor to the Armageddon that'll take us all out in the next decade or less. You scientifically cannot look at individual weather events and determine they're climate change, that's pseudoscience.
People like this author only manage to turn rational individuals into deniers due to their over the top claims that never come true.
> Can we please have a realistic discussion on climate change?
No we can't, because of the people who actually care about it, half are "everyone is going to be dead before your toddler goes to college unless we dismantle capitalism across the globe" and half are "humans haven't caused any warming at all and dumping trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere has zero measurable effect I bet you voted for Biden." Both are idiots, but the problem is if you're not in one of those camps, and you want to have a rational discussion about climate change, you're in such a small minority you look like the crazy one.
Even here where I'd like to think the users are generally intelligent, the thread is either jokes, apocalyptic predictions about billions of climate-migrants, or nonsense about communism.
It would be interesting to compare this trend in US politics as a whole and how it can also be applied to this specific issue (and other divisive issues like gun rights or abortion rights) if it wasn't so goddamn depressing.
If someone tells you that cigarettes are going to give you cancer the fact that you aren't dead yet isn't a good indication that they are wrong. Furthermore the climate is incredibly complex. Waiting until we are absolutely certain of the exact trajectory of our fuckery will surely result in us being too fucked to take much corrective action. Basically you are asking to much and you're wrong.
San Francisco and the PNW being covered by smoke every summer is not a normal weather event, and now it is starting on the East coast. The east and southeast is also being hit harder by hurricanes, and they are not stopping at the Gulf of Mexico any more. These are just the events people have been able to see in the US in past years and they're not normal and with ever-increasing carbon output it is undoubtedly going to get worse.
I'll take the entire northeast being covered in smoke as an "over the top" claim that just came true.
I feel like for US folks to take climate change seriously requires that climate change directly impact NYC and Washington DC so that the media and policy makers can have some lived experience.
Smoke in SF or Seattle doesn't seem to move the needle for whatever reason
Actually it is and because you decided to cover forested areas in homes that usually get burned out regularly and stop the natural fires occurring you made it WORSE.
California has ALWAYS been a dry fire ridden state. This idea that it shouldn't be getting wildfires is ridiculous.
> By cleaning up shipping fuels, massive regions of the world’s oceans that were protected from heating by shipping sulfate aerosols are now experiencing rapid warming. This includes the main shipping routes between Asia and the Western US as well as the major routes from the Easter US to Europe and the Middle East. And that’s where the warming is happening. This rapid heating is known as “termination shock,” and it appears to be what’s happening right now.
It's frustrating that we've argued a lot about the hazards of intentional geoengineering responses without reaching a consensus that we should do it, and meanwhile the shipping industry was cavalierly doing it along-side their other emissions. Yes, we need to rapidly cut emissions. Yes, we need to in parallel invest in carbon capture. But if every fraction of a degree matters, shouldn't we also be at least continuing if not scaling up these these albedo-increasing changes?
(edited for grammar)