A 3°C world has no safe place
economist.com
economist.com
I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished and more cynical.
I honestly don't know how to deal with the level nihilism and genuine bitterness I feel toward my fellow man regarding climate change. This was never a political divide. The american culture was full of anti-scientific absurdity on the the right, and complete symbolism without substance on the left.
We don't even have serious bicycle or transit prioritization in our major urban areas. We don't have any concern for reducing our meat consumption. We don't have any concern for alternatives to airlines. We're to the point where only geoengineering can help, which is honestly nuts. I just, I mean, I know where I'm planning on settling down literally based on real estate in relation to climate change. It's surreal.
Not true [1]. This is true across economic strata, with real stagnation being the plague of our most destitute.
The absurdities of what's happening is literally the Sierra Club opposing density in San Francisco. The environmentalist are literally opposing density across California. Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to Marin County, under the banner of "preservation," we're going to destroy the climate.
I just, i cannot believe this is happening. They same people who would hand wash a peanut butter jar, to recycle it, are the exact same people who are literally creating suburban cities designed for burning carbon.
This isn't hard to understand. The Sierra Club is made up of legitimate environmentalists, but they also care about their organization and their livelihoods, and many of the major donors to the Sierra Club are property owners in San Francisco (or Marin, or LA).
Property values are obviously negatively impacted by development / densification, and so to avoid alienating donors, for whom opposing development is the single most important economic issue, the Sierra Club is dutifully NIMBYist.
I can assure you the Sierra Club would be fine with densification in Africa or whatever.
There isn't any cause for shock. Given the incentives at play this is expected. How much financial suffering would you accept to put a dent in global warming? For most people it's not much.
The good news is, it's easy to predict that the Sierra Club is going to eventually lose on this issue. Property values are so high that many people are totally shut out of the property market and a political storm is gathering. Hopefully, by the time the dam breaks and real urbanization finally arrives on the West Coast, it's not too late to matter.
They are all driven by parking spaces and reducing peak traffic. It's absurd to see the very same people who lose their mind at the idea of America dropping out of the Paris Climate Accord, are exactly the same people who think we should impose minimum parking requirements on new buildings, block a bike share and safe bike infrastructure because the bike are ugly and take parking space away, and argue that BRT is terrible and will never work, because they won't use it.
Scoofy, I cannot overstate how much pure, cynical joy I feel after reading your rants here. Thank you for cutting through the bullshit; you're doing God's work.
I would imagine they are creating suburban cities designed for alternative means of transportation.
My guess is no matter what we do we're over the limit, a reduction in one thing leads to an increase in another, and probably population reduction is the only solution.
Pretending that urbanism is somehow remotely equivalent is naive at best.
What's more, is that we've forgotten that you don't need to build suburbs around cars. You can have pleasant suburbs with offices, shops, schools, and other non-residential buildings mixed into the neighborhood. Where people actually walk and cycle because the streets feel like they were made for it.
There's a massive gap between the population density of 60000 people per square mile you might find in an urban center, and the approximately 1,500 people per square mile you get in a typical suburb.
As a species, our median per-capita pollution is okay. It's the mean per-capita pollution that's the issue.
How did you model it? I'm curious about the assumptions you made and how you came up with your conclusion.
I assumed all in-city transport was manual or electric (and hence covered by the solar panels), all trains and food transport was diesel (even though electric trains are realistic), that the roofs of the city were covered in 20% efficiency solar panels (at 0% loss, due to proximity), that all long-distance transport was done with cargo ships (no aeroplanes) and there was a tenth the shipping of what we've actually got.
The vast majority of the planet was completely untouched by my hypothetical civilisation. I know I missed out a lot of stuff (e.g. how goods get from ports to people and back), but I don't think my conclusion was that far out – especially since “tile the world with solar panels” isn't an efficient renewables strategy.
I would say it’s human nature. We, humans, learn by making mistakes. There may be small differences among countries in the way we address, let’s say, climate change (e.g., Amsterdam is full of people riding bikes while Madrid is not), but at the end we all behave the same, whether in NY, Athens, or Santiago: we, as a world-wide society, only care about our immediate future, about our needs right now. The future? Well, let’s talk about that tomorrow. Countless of civilizations have disappeared (or transformed) due to this very short-term thinking way of doing things. We may disappear (or transform) as well.
I don’t think that’s true, although you address a similar point of mine later. We often make the same mistakes over and over again. There’s a reason why we say history repeats itself.
What humans really do is react to mistakes and other events based on consequences of our actions. This reactiveness has gotten us into this mess. We often view intelligence as being able to predict things, but as a society and species, we’re absolutely awful at prevention and conservation. We’re excellent at consumption.
We build social infrastructure that is incredibly resistant to change by design to protect ourselves and provide stability - but climate change is demanding massive changes which we are ill equipped to deal with politically.
Traditionally we solve these moments in history with revolution to demand change - but climate change is happening too slowly for complacent human mindsets to react that way at a scale that it requires as a crisis.
It is quite horrifying watching it play out in slow motion. This will not end well.
Consumers do care, but their choices are between bad and awful because the economics (structured by the extraction companies) stacks the deck against solutions.
Who is really to blame for the emissions for my flight to Turkey to sit on a beach even though I live 4 blocks from another (worse) beach. Under your view it would be Lufthansa or whoever sold them the fuel.
If some laypeople have not received a basic high school education and have trouble understanding variance, uncertainty, and the difference between short-term fluctuations and long-term trends, that really isn’t the fault of climate scientists.
Sorry, but this stuff is a joke. Population control and non carbon based energy sources are the only things that can really make an impact.
Why would we waste time on population control, much less prioritize it?
What we need is a drastic reduction in emissions FAST. X0% less now buys a lot more time and has a much bigger effect than X0% in say 50 years when most of the damage is done.
Any means of population control that is not straight up genocide will take decades if not generations to make a real impact.
Long term planning should of course be a core part of our strategy, and whether population control is part of that or not is not my call to make. That being said, the next five to ten years are much, much more important, and my experience in these contexts has been that the population control argument tends to interfere with this more important conversation about actions to take right now.
What would help most in a shorter time frame is economic incentives to move away from fossil fuels. Carbon taxes, and most importantly changing where subsidies go in the first place would go a long way. More funding for research in relevant areas would, as well.
Before those and other things aren't well underway, there is really nothing to gain from bringing up population control every time the climate change comes up, in my opinion.
And while I do think habits both have to change and will be forced to change — I do think it's useful to accept that we have to build our world and our environment to our behavioral tendencies. It's easy to look back cynically and say, I wish we'd never done X, or Y, or Z. The reality now though is this massive economic engine, which has lifted people out of poverty and created opportunity -- polluting in its current form though it may be -- might be the thing that saves us and helps us escape velocity. Technology can help us adapt and solve this. I know it's easy to live the cynicism but I promise you, challenging though it may be, we need each other and to believe in possibility more than ever if we're going to pull this off.
Well, yes! I agree. However, when I look around at the movers and shakers capable of the big decisions that lead to big efforts, I do not get the sense I am needed as much as I could potentially be used.
It cost a ton to bootstrap us onto our current technology.
It will cost a ton more to transition to other energy.
For the most part, we have the tech we need. Better will come too, but big costs are not sexy, though the labor to accomplish these things would and could elevate many into a better life. Ordinary people, when presented with a plan, like build this stuff so we can live better this way, leave something livable for our kids... would be in. Large numbers of people need better jobs, and a future that one can look forward to.
What I don't see is the kind of thinking that gets us there. That kicks off the work we could have been doing for years.
The simplest answer is that we just need to prepare for a hotter world. This article points out that there will be "no safe place". Okay, we won't have a safe place. We will need to do the best we can to minimize natural disasters and at the same time try to figure out political and technological solutions to limiting climate change.
There never was a safe place.
Nothing much may be happening around Yellowstone, but people speculate it might some day pretty much trash the whole continent if not the world.
People in the midwest don't worry about earthquakes much but New Madrid showed it is possible and could be really bad.
In the northeast, we're a long way from where most tornadoes are, but it can happen here, I've seen evidence.
Nobody's particularly worried about something like Fukushima in the US, but there are quite a few nuclear reactors all over the place. We tend to assume the Atlantic isn't going to have a tsunami, I guess. Is that certain?
In Europe, they assume there's not going to be a devastating volcano eruption, but you know, there's the historical records of Pompeii and so on.
Nobody saw Tunguska and Chelyabinsk coming, something like that could happen at any moment over a major city.
Preparing for a hotter world is nice, but what I am hoping is that nations (and the green movement) will realize that all strategies need to be deployed and it doesn't matter if one strategy feels like it is being counter productive to the values of an other. Some people can focus on replacing meat with vegetarian options, other on ecological meat, some on reducing factory farming in favor of local small scale production, and some on low carbon meat like shell fish. Let some build nuclear power plants, other renewable energy and battery. Focus on building bike infrastructure, rail system and electrify all parts of the transport system.
And frankly lining things up so my fam and I can live really lean. Tough times ahead.
Might be 5 years, decade, maybe two, but tough times are coming.
The scale and latency in all this point to us having past the time when we could really mitigate, amd the scale means humans taking it hard a few times before realizing a big effort makes sense.
I don't think you're wrong to be cynical about tackling this problem but you should be honest about what reducing emissions means to billions of people that are just now coming into the industrial age.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide...
[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
I'm personally completely in favor of import tariffs on goods manufactured abroad with dirty energy and immigration quotas on nationals from countries that have decided not to control their emissions.
Take a look at "China: Consumption-based accounting: how do emissions compare when we adjust for trade?"
> Annual consumption-based emissions are domestic emissions adjusted for trade. If a country imports goods the CO₂ emissions needed to produce such goods are added to its domestic emissions; if it exports goods then this is subtracted.
2018 had 8.96 bn carbon tons in consumption out of a totla of 9.96 bn total tons (~90% consumption)
The biggest amount of greenhouse gasses that china emits is from coal power plants. Naturally, figuring out what amount of electricity was used in the production of the exported goods is basically impossible, which is why its considered consumption in their data.
I'm sure the spirit of it is still correct (that most of their co2 emissions are for internal products/usage), but its hard to take that conclusion at face value when they didn't even mention the caveat that they ignore the by far biggest contributor of their emissions and consider it consumption by default.
We have moved the problem around, but we are not actually getting around to living differently.
Isn't that part of the point? If the US has maintained per capita emission levels that would be ruinous if the rest of the world joined us at, can you really say "we" are done with anything?
OP listed a bunch of specific things, moderate efficiencies and switching to natural gas are great but not nearly sufficient.
I don't see your point refereeing the past emissions of the US as some kind of moral victory against the west, but regardless of what the west does, the math does not work without those countries taking action. We can cut emissions to 0 and that'll likely buy a decade or so with the current growth rate of China. So you're focusing your energy in the wrong place
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emis...
In fact, the EU is in the process of doing this right now, and China is definitely reacting to it (not happy, but it seems like the Chinese government is looking toward expanding their existing policies to cover more industries in an attempt to avoid the EU border adjustment).
Another way to look at it is that given how much the USA has already contributed to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, China would need to continue at their current levels for another 30 or so years before they catch up with us -- and that's with about 4x the population.
I understand that that argument may not be persuasive to some, though, because a lot of the manufacturing and technological development that took place in the USA over that time benefited many countries. And a lot of those emissions took place prior to the wide knowledge of how serious climate change is.
So I'd really say that we should aim for net zero emissions because it's the right thing to do. Everyone has to do it, and it's not going to happen if we all stand around waiting for someone else to go first. There is a pretty massive amount of emissions cutting we could do without much effort at all, and if the rest is spread out over a number of years, the cost will be very small, and will have a lot of benefits to people's health. (Climate change is not the only negative externality of burning fossil fuels by a long shot.)
The place to start is a carbon tax. I highly recommend that everyone who cares about climate change call congress (https://citizensclimatelobby.org/call-your-representative-ab...) and ask them to support a carbon tax.
We need to articulate the future, not wax poetically toward some vague economic abstractions. Unless we can articulate some hopeful answer to this question, nothing consequential will change. People really do not want to live as subsistence farmers.
For one, net zero houses look pretty comfortable:
* https://www.chba.ca/CHBA/BuyingNew/Net-Zero-Homes.aspx
If you go further toward "passive house" you can have 5000 sq. ft. (500 sq. m.) of living area and only need 1500W (a hairdryer) to heat it:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vul4vMFdkA
Residential energy use accounts for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States:
* https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/19122
IMHO there's still plenty of low-hanging fruit in just efficiencies that can be plucked before lifestyle sacrifices would need to be made.
The number of Passivhauser in the US is apparently in the thousands. What would it take to scale this up to 100-1000 times? What would it take to change the status from luxury good to mass adoption?
If it was all upside, the established players, in this case home builders, would have already incorporated it to gain a competitive advantage.
I am guessing there are downsides such as cost of materials, expertise, mold, or something that keeps this from being an economical solution.
Aiming for something that can be net zero is probably more practical: building stringently up to a certain point, and then throw some PV panels to offset whatever expected energy use is remaining.
Per capita emissions for the US: 15.52 tons
Per capita emissions for India: 1.91
US has about eight times the per capita emission of India, double that of China(which makes a lot of things for the US) and somehow India and China are to blame and the US deserves no blame, even given all its riches and having the means to reduce emissions?
The US's emissions per capita is more than 3 times the worldwide average. So we still need to cut our emissions by a factor of 3 just to be average. But considering we are the richest country in the world, I think it's reasonable we attempt to display some leadership by having below average emissions. And that's not even mentioning that the fact that of course current worldwide emissions per capita are far too high, so we really need to cut even more.
Meanwhile, China's emission per capita are roughly half that of the US.
Even considering the the meager progress made by the US in the past decades to reduce emissions, we are still the 4th most emitting nation per capita.
This is the whole pitch of the green movement. Reduce emissions at whatever cost, they completely miss the point that we (the humans on this planet) dont know how to do this. Its not about what we should do its about figuring out how and until we know how there is not much point in making peoples life harder and make them feel bad for doing what they have to do. Or make placebo progress like biofuel and other nonsense.
The earth overshoot day in 2021 is on July 29. Its not hard to figure out that we are nowhere near sustainable and all the proposed cuts and implemented policies did so far is insignificantly reduce the GROWTH of global emissions.
We need real solutions, technological progress of the magnitude of the last 100 years or something like that to make any relevant difference. Not telling people how bad they are for the environment and how they can feel better by doing mostly useless stuff like carefully separating trash for the recycling-fraud industry.
It doesn't take ground breaking technology for Americans to stop driving Hummers on their office commute. Nor would it take a tech breakthrough for the US government to stop giving fossil fuel companies $20b/year in tax credits and subsidies. Nor any new tech for sunny regions to cover building roofs with solar panels. If we can spend $2 trillion plus in middle eastern wars of dubious value, surely we buy a some solar panels and batteries.
No new tech is needed. A modicum of will is all that is required.
So what? Emissions are global and rising especially in the places where most people live (Asia). If emission of the whole USA would be zero from today on, global emission would keep growing. At the current rate it would only take a few years for the rest of the world additional emission to replace the whole USA. Needless to to say that zero emission is only a thought experiment. But if this better-than-best-case-scenario can only buy us 10 years or so maybe we should not focus on this?
If the average human causes half the emission of the US people then that is still more than the planet can sustain so why do we focus on the small portion of people who use the most? We should focus on finding a solutions that cuts emission for all. Its not hard to figure out that cutting emissions from all people in halve would have far more benefit than bring the US peoples emission down to the world average or even lower. It intuitively makes sense to reduce emission where it seems the highest but if you look a the whole picture it will not have the desired effect.
>It doesn't take ground breaking technology for Americans to stop driving Hummers on their office commute.
This is exactly what I meant in my original post. The whole green movement is about cutting emission at all cost. Regardless of the fact that removing hummers from Americans or even all cars that use above average fuel would do absolutely nothing on a global scale. Especially not if they have to be replaced by newly build cars.
The whole ideas that us middle-class and rich people who could afford to reduce their emissions should be the once who take the cut is completely absurd. Yes they probably could but would probably crash the global economy if they did and beside that it would not matter at all. The global emissions are not cased by luxury products and people with high emission hobbies like driving a sport car.
> Nor any new tech for sunny regions to cover building roofs with solar panels.....surely we buy a some solar panels and batteries.
It would takes 20-30 years and it would cause and insane amount of emissions to produce solar panels and batteries in these quantities that it would reduce significant emissions. In the same time the rest of the worlds additional emissions would at least double what the USA would reduce. especially if most of the electronics that the USA would need is produces somewhere else and the processing steps that case the most emissions would likely be done outside of the USA.
The reality is we dont know how to reduce global emissions in a significant way (unless you include "solutions" that would directly or indirectly cause the death of millions of people or otherwise would be ethically not okay). We waste time by doing green placebo-solutions rather than putting all the resources we still have into finding real solutions.
And you think that’s OK?
Americans use 2 trillion gallons of water per year ... for lawns. Nice green lawns. In the desert, in the south, in the north, between highways, friggen' lawns everywhere. No consideration for grasses that naturally enjoy the local environment. Only a perfect British green lawn will do. Nature be damned!
By comparison, America uses only 3 trillion gallons of water for all of agriculture.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-stupid-obsession-lawns/
A friend of mine did that sometime back. He just did a stone and ground cover, low maintenance yard. Was kind of awesome. City went full bat shit. Circle the yard that is different and excise the cancer! Needs to be grass, not a garden, not stones, just grass.
It is crazy.
The Mississippi River discharges 16800 cubic meters per second of water, which is 530 billion cubic meters per year. In medieval units, that's 140 trillion gallons of water per year.
You're too easily impressed and have no sense of proportion, making it easy for dishonest people to manipulate your emotions. Humans are doing massive environmental damage, but human water use for lawns is insignificant.
Now get the hell off my friggen lawn.
The context for the comment was that lawns consume water on a scale comparable to all domestic agricultural irrigation, or half of all the domestic reticulated water supply, and it’s not doing much beyond aesthetics. That is significant use of a precious resource by any measure, and a wasteful one by most people’s. If the amount of water in Lake Superior or the Mississippi were relevant to the relatively small water consumption for domestic use and agriculture, why would anyone be bothered about droughts? Just send in the barges!
Whether lawns are environmentally ruinous by dint of sucking up that much drinking water is a different argument. New builds clearing woodlands in order to have more acreage and monoculture lawns displacing native species / food webs are problems, but there’s certainly worse things you could do with an existing yard.
No, these three numbers are related in that they express volumes of fresh water consumed per year for particular uses in the United States. The Mississippi River is dumping 16.8 megaliters per second of freshwater into the ocean. In that context, it's totally inconsequential if people in the US spray 0.2 megaliters per second of freshwater onto their lawns.
> That is significant use of a precious resource by any measure
No, it is not.
> aesthetics. ... a wasteful [use] by most people’s [measure].
Beautifying our surroundings is not a wasteful use of resources by most people's measure; if it were, the mandatory lawn ordinances people are (rightly) decrying in this thread wouldn't have been voted in. We have seen what the results look like when people consider aesthetics "wasteful": Pruitt-Igoe, prisons, concentration camps, Soviet housing blocks, American high schools, battleships, the Pentagon, the bulldozing of forests and mountains to build parking lots. Humans do not flourish in these environments.
Instead, let us aspire to consider things wasteful that cannot be aesthetically justified!
The broader cultural context is, I think, that this lamentation of other people watering their lawns stems from the same misguided Judeo-Christian asceticism that led medieval hermits to never bathe and wear hairshirts, equating happiness, enjoyment, and comfort with sin, self-indulgence, and dissolution. Sometimes you see people from Judeo-Christian traditions attempting to justify such concepts by appropriating Buddhism, apparently unaware of the profound attention to aesthetics easily observable in any Buddhist temple or monastery.
This ascetisism has been twisted into a simplistic zero-sum pseudo-environmentalism—sometimes coupled with a feigned charity toward the poor—that equates material wealth with environmental destruction and impoverishment of others, and so seeks to ameliorate California's periodic droughts with showerhead flow restrictors and more restrictive central lawn planning.
> If the amount of water in Lake Superior or the Mississippi were relevant to the relatively small water consumption for domestic use and agriculture, why would anyone be bothered about droughts?
Probably because you're not building enough canals and pipelines to transport freshwater from the Mississippi (and other rivers) to US agricultural lands. Get on it! A lot of those rivers are already full of fertilizer! Also, it's a problem when half of California catches on fire, even if nobody's almonds burn.
If you want to make a difference, clean energy is the path to follow. That, and carbon capture so we don't spend the rest of our lives in a worsening situation.
Literally, not worth it.
The attitude has been around since before tobacco and is commonly ascribed to Boomers. With justification. (Disclosure: I am one.)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apr%C3%A8s_moi,_le_d%C3%A9luge
Alas, let's not pat ourselves on the back just yet. USA accounts for 15% of global emissions. Agriculture and transportation make 14% and 24%, together 48%. Half of that is 24%. 24% of 15% is 3.6% of global emissions. On the flip side:
* 96.4 of the emissions continue.
* Global emissions increased 10% since 2010, 3x more than what we saved with great (relative) sacrifice.
We may push the looming horizon a decade or two, but we won't stop the process, forget about reverting it. As the so called third world countries are moving out of poverty, aka undergoing a rapid industrialization process, emissions are bound to raise irrespective of what the so called first world countries do, due to sheer population mass. Consider the fundamental emissions equation:
TotalEmissions = WorldArea * PopulationDensity * PerCapitaEmissions
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
Edit: The estimated range for global emissions to maintain only a 1.5C growth has a range of 22-31 GtCO2e. Assuming emissions at the rate of France of about 5tCO2 / capita, the globally industrialized world of 2050 with 10B people will have global emissions of 50GtCO2, or 75GtCO2e. That is 3x more than Earth can sustain. Going down the list of emissions per capita by country, we find Albania, Morocco or Colombia. What we need to make the numbers is a 10x decrease in income/wealth of US residents, not minor lifestyle adjustments.
https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/30798/...
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...
B. The level of cuts required to bring the world to sustainable emissions level, combined with global population growth and global equity, would require that everybody to live with under 1.7t/year CO2 emissions by 2050. This is the level of Albania, Colombia or Morocco, complete political dead end on both left and right.
The crux of the problem is that there are no solutions. Even the 'we should do something about it' crowd is utterly incapable in articulating the depth of the cuts needed avert disaster, or articulate the life of the average American after such cuts. Hint: the Great Depression would be 'the good times' in comparison.
I'm not saying we can fix it, I'm a nihilist at this point, I'm saying we could have fixed it 15 years ago.
A. That will not fix the global problem, as US population is too small. Even if we were to completely shut down energy production in the US, the rest of the world would build enough power plants to cover for it and then some in less than 20 years. Industrialization of 10 billion people (3% in the US) is not pretty.
B. It is unclear what to concretely do in the US to significantly cut emissions. To simplify, the right doesn't want to hear about it, and the left is content with promoting minor inconsequential Potemkiniads.
We never had a chance to fix the problem, not with 10 billion people yearning an escape from poverty.
We have two major technologies that allow for producing useful energy without producing much or any greenhouse gases: nuclear and solar. Wind and hydro are also on the table, but are more constrained by the environment.
We also have reasonably well developing technologies for meat-like protein production from plants (see e.g. the "impossible burger") and lab-grown meat. They are currently a bit expensive, but it's mostly the matter of investment.
Sadly, all that massive construction requires steel and concrete, which emit CO2 during production. Here comes carbon sequestration: we absolutely have technologies to quickly grow massive amounts of trees, cut them, and put them to use either as a long-term construction material, or just burn the hydrogen out of them to produce energy, and bury the carbon in the empty coal mines, playing back the carboniferous epoch process.
This all does not require colossal amounts of novel science or sci-fi technological breakthroughs. It does require though that petrol cars and trucks get steadily replaced with electric, coal mining all but stopped (we need carbon for steel production), oil pumping severely limited (we still need jet fuel until we can synthesize enough), coal-fired plants demolished or turned into nuclear plants. It requires massive construction of solar, wind, and nuclear (gasp!) electric generation, and massive construction of battery capacity to make solar practical for base load. It requires shutting off most of beef production, and replacing it with fish and shrimp farming, lab-grown meat, and plant-based pseudo-meat; red meat should become a luxury like salmon roe or caviar.
The obvious problem is that most people would totally not cooperate if they'd have to quickly and radically change their way of life, their idea of what prosperity looks like (bye grilling beef over coals!), and their jobs (coal industry? oil industry? bad luck!). Can this be overcome? Either most of the Earth's population, across national, political, and religious divisions would willingly make such a change, or an planet-scale dictatorship would emerge and consistently and efficiently pursue the goals of climate change reversal, while not severely affecting productivity. I see both scenarios utterly unrealistic :(
So, buy that realty next to a major northern river 1000ft above sea level. In a century it will have the best climate Earth can offer.
loads of resources available
loads of brains
manpower
when people realize and decide, you can flip a lot in few time
it's just the usual society blur and inertia that made people like you unable to do more.. many people tried but you can't carry the world on your shoulder so most people resign
get ready
ps: in dense cities, whenever possible, use your bike; we should make viral vids for bike rallies or bike days, it's 100+ % benefits for everybody in a week
I look at what I can do about this. I can turn up the temp in my room, and the house. Meager difference. I can use less water - I already am, with getting showers every other day on average. I can eat less meat - which I do with purchase of the beef CSA. I'm big into the repair movement, and repair household equipment and electronics with my knowledge of circuitry and 3d printing. I recycle, but that's if its not repairable or reusable/repurposable.
I look at what I'm actually doing, and I'm at my limit. There isn't anything else I can add on to reduce footprint. And in reality, the same goes for many people.
These global climate change issues are the sum of all the work in this world, but the bulk of it is emitted by companies who do the cheapest thing. And if dumping gigatons of CO2 or methane in the air makes more sense, that's done. I can petition my congresscritters, but it's well known they do not listen to the little guy (https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-... ). Your party is irrelevant here.
So what do I do? know what we're doing is what we can and hope some rich people pull up the cause, and not try to escape the atmosphere in a penis-shaped rocket.
I've given up hope that this will be solved.
Perhaps ironically, the actual adolescents are (among) the ones who aren't.
Smaller house, solar panels, don't drive, don't eat meat, and don't have kids. And don't vote for politicians who are busy spreading nonsense.
> I've given up hope that this will be solved.
Oh, me too. Now it is about managing your personal guilt, which you realize at some level, judging from your comments. For me, I am likely past my lifetime CO2 budget, due to just 5 years of transatlantic flights for work (plus 15 years of driving in the US). I can't undo the damage that I have done, and now I have both eyes open staring into the abyss.
I guess you gotta find low-impact ways of enjoying life. I can recommend slacklining.
I already live in a trailer. Solar wouldn't make sense since we have 2 big trees over our trailer providing us shade. Cuts down on AC in the hotter months (now veering on March).
Not driving has been easy with WfH since last early March. I'm happy with that. I don't like driving anyways.
My SO and I are a DINK - double income no kids. This is one of the largest climate change decisions that can be made at a human level.
> And don't vote for politicians who are busy spreading nonsense.
Oh, I don't. Nor do I have any preconceived notions that my opinion does matter either. I'll do my civic part, and vote when its due, do jury duty, etc. But my opinions do not matter at any scale other than household.
I guess for me, it's not as much guilt, but foreboding. I know what the science says, and it'll be worse than what they say. I know I've done my share of pollution of many sorts, simply by using a vehicle, or flying.
But this problem isn't solvable by me. Or my politicians.. Or even by the USA. This needs a worldwide drastic response at every level. And do I see that happening? Not in a hundred years - until it's catastrophically too late.
Obviously the answer is for me to care about society (on a global level), but it's hard to do so without skin in the game. And considering it feels like others don't care or are still very wasteful... why should I be pious?
I find the whole "don't have kids" thing sad and short-sighted. Having kids was the single greatest thing that's ever happened to me, and yes there's a CO2 footprint as a result but ultimately humans need kids to have a future. Please have children, and teach them the importance of the planet.
[0] https://phys.org/news/2009-11-dogs-larger-carbon-footprint-s...
Who you are giving money to.
Do you own a car?? Then you are destroying the planet.
You won’t, (and I won’t either) but if it comes down to human survival, forces will find a way to make you do it.
Not with regard to density, which has been going up, not down.
This idea of consumer fault is deplorable, its not lile i gey accurate information about carbon footprint when i shop
The house is already a sunk cost, so I am not sure how much point there is
What we do is unionize, and in a way where we can then withdraw our industrial contributions to climate change.
> I look at what I'm actually doing, and I'm at my limit.
I am willing to bet you've not yet tried to "manage up."
It's not our fellow consumers who are causing climate change, it is supply-side; it is management. Only industrial and trade unions have the leverage "stop the line," and demand a less-profitable, albeit life-saving economy.
But ... 5.3T pp/yr of that amount is caused by the existing coal fired power plants in the USA.
So one thing you could do is to write to your elected representatives to specifically petition for the abandonment of this form of power generation and its replacement with renewable systems.
Guaranteed to work? Nope. But if we do get rid of those plants, it will make a HUGE difference at the national and international scale.
[ EDIT: missed the 1 in front of the 7 for the average US CO2 output ... 17 not 7 ]
Their figures also suggest CO2 emissions were 20T pp in the US in 2019! (6558MT of CO2, 328.2M population)
1: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
My source was
http://www.ecocivilization.info/three-tons-carbon-dioxide-pe...
which I think is from about 2017 (and has several citations at the end).
The reason I'm so struck by the coal-fired electricity production numbers are that this seems VASTLY easier to fix than the transportation numbers. Even if the latter would have more impact, I think we're still a long way from being able to dramatically affect that, whereas ramping up renewable electricity generation and ramping down fossil fuels seems like a (relatively) simple challenge.
So we decided a significantly warmer climate was better than dealing with radioactive waste. Now it looks like we made the wrong risk assessment.
It would mean different jobs, and it means valuing work differently right along with things.
Could happen via government action, literally start paying for work and pay at a rate that seeds a market.
Could happen with individuals too. Think gig work without a company making billions at the top. While that is super attractive for some, it is entirely unnecessary, and in my view, a leaner overall model paying more to labor will prove a worthy device to move these sorts of ideas along. A variation on all this could be collectives. Companies owned by everyone in them, lean at the top, robust otherwise.
As for things, maybe we see a return to longevity in service life being more highly valued. I harbor this value now. Absolutely hate things that I know I cannot use for a decade or more. We can do so much better than the current churn of devices and software. A bit different priority and we could see more things as robust as say, Google maps still able to operate with devices made a long time ago.
The practical difficulty with using renewables effectively is that you need to be able to either store large amounts of energy for later use, or trade power across long distances. We (by which I mean "in the U.S." but for other developed countries it's pretty much the same) could buy solar power from Kenya, Australia, Algeria, or similar places to get us through the night if we had high-capacity transcontinental HVDC lines running to those places. That's a major infrastructure project that would cost a lot of money, but I expect it's probably worth it.
(We can even mitigate the risk of the power lines being temporarily disabled by keeping the fossil fuel plants on standby and just not using them except as an emergency backup.)
Another option is to just build batteries on an unheard-of scale. Lithium iron phosphate cells might do the job -- being free of cobalt an nickel, the only other major bottleneck resource would be lithium. I'm not sure how practical it is to build the kinds of gigantic battery packs that would be needed to provide, say, an 18-hour backup power supply for the entire U.S., but it's probably less cells in total than we'd need to electrify our current fleet of gas-powered cars.
edit: to clarify, I'm not particularly opposed to nuclear. I just don't think it's the only option at this point.
So, we'll just keep burning coal.
> I just don't think it's the only option at this point.
It needs to be viable economically and politically, which could be years from now.
It has a long half life, but a deep shaft filled with cement in a remote area does the trick.
There’s no kicking the can down the road.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-radioactive-problem-...
We should also at least have a carbon tax for things like normalizing beef as an alternative rather than a primary food source.
I mean, if the answer is world war, I’ll at least give you credit for an honest answer. I just rarely see that come up. The truth is yes we can and should do better, but also realize that other nations will take any advantage they can, including ignoring climate concerns.
So if it’s a global problem, it needs a global solution, so what is that mechanism to apply one?
Of course if things are truly implemented fairly, the US will also likely be subject to such taxes due to our own apparent inability to reduce our per capita carbon emissions...
But what happens when you need something more than they need to sell it? As in the case of China… steel, aluminum, titanium, food, machinery, computers, plastics, vehicles, or clothing… you know… those “couple of things” that we have collectively allowed China to make for us while pretending we’re all so green and the slave labor isn’t a problem.
India, maybe you can tax into compliance. Third world, maybe, but someone will scream it isn’t “fair”. But China? I’m skeptical we tax ourselves greatly and them effectively without them becoming the number one superpower and then doing as they please anyhow.
The CCP's entire domestic legitimacy comes from the economic growth that has come about since Deng took over. They need to keep the wheels spinning as much as the West does.
The world needs more Elon Musk types to think big and bring a lower carbon footprint to modern living. Thinking people will voluntarily put themselves at a disadvantage for the greater good goes against much of what we know of human nature.
The energy sources for these items are at the discretion of the large buyers. A steel plant can absolutely make the switch from coal to solar/wind at its own discretion.
Yes, green transportation (or just less) is good. But if I sit at home and order goods to be delivered to me, it's actually quite difficult to pick which have the smallest footprints.
We had the technology to solve these problems years ago. This isn’t a technological problem, this is a problem about values. Do we value money or our environment more?
The climate catastrophe unfolding will be the biggest wake up humanity has ever had. That is the only silver lining to this existential predicament
> So what do I do? know what we're doing is what we can
Everything you do is inconsequential in the face of living in a detached single family home on a quarter acre lot.
That very simple fact has exponential knock on effects requiring so much more mass to move so much further and hence consuming so much more energy, that everything else you do is meaningless.
The only solution was reducing total consumption, either per capita or capitas itself, but the former is not going to happen if people live in insufficiently dense manners that preclude public transport or walking and bicycling, and necessitate large roads, parking lots, and personal vehicles.
And of course, once you own or benefit from detached single family house lifestyles, you are not going to vote for anything that inconveniences you or causes you to reduce consumption, such as increased taxes on fossil fuels.
I'm naturally inclined towards austerity, but this problem cannot be fixed with cutbacks & efficiency alone.
Similarly, there is a huge market-driven surge in renewables: https://coloradosun.com/2021/01/25/solar-energy-colorado-uni...
A key part of this viewpoint is that strong demand in the market can actually be an accelerator.
Turning back to austerity - even if a 50% drop in demand could save us, it's just never going to happen. Even the global COVID lockdowns made less than a 10% cut in energy consumption. You'd be stunningly successful if you cut even 1% through austerity campaign.
Dense living is associated with poorer mental health and a variety of diseases, and that not taking into account people with autism, introversion etc, some of whom find urban density neurologically intolerable.
Humans didn’t evolve to live densely.
* Switch to using 100% renewable energy from your electric company.
* Live in an apartment where shared walls, floors and ceilings means lower energy usage
* Move to a city where you can walk, bicycle or transit (or at least have a short drive to most things).
But the most important is to become involved in climate politics, especially state and local politics. Even in California (the largest state in the union) all you need is a dozen or so people to get a meeting with a state representative.
And hey we got the PRC military adding the equivalent of the German Navy, every year, in ships to their roster. No they don't run on solar panels in case you were wondering.
So take your three showers a day. Keep your car idling at stop lights. Burn your garbage. I'm not trolling. Your 'foot print' is a drop in the ocean compared to the real behemoths out there.
And I haven't even started on the companies that PRODUCE equipment for these large forces.
Source?
> So take your three showers a day. Keep your car idling at stop lights. Burn your garbage. I'm not trolling. Your 'foot print' is a drop in the ocean compared to the real behemoths out there.
Your footprint is a drop in the ocean because you're one of 8 billion people on earth. Just from that figure alone it's obvious that a you can't do much by regulating your own consumption. However, telling people to do whatever they want and it doesn't matter because they're 1 in 8 billion is the wrong message to send, because if all 8 billion people follow your example that would lead to a massive increase in pollution.
The headline does not seem to be supported by the article, which mainly consists of various pollution figures for the US military but lacks comparison to other entities. The closest it gets to that is saying the US military produces "more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined". Overall it makes a convincing case that the US military is a large polluter, but not that it's "World’s Biggest Polluter".
>https://weaversway.coop/shuttle-online/2020/04/us-military-w...
It's a blog for a coop chain. A skim of the article reveals the same problem as the previous: lots of facts and figures about how much the US military pollutes, but not many comparisons required to make the claim that they're the largest.
>https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190620100005.h...
>https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report...
Both seem to focus on the US military producing more co2 than many countries. I'm not sure how this is supposed to support the claim that they're the biggest polluter. The bay area probably produces more co2 than "many countries" (eg. Liechtenstein and Tonga), but that doesn't mean they're the biggest polluter in the world.
"...the DOD is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world. From FY1975 to FY2018, total DOD greenhouse gas emissions were more than 3,685 Million Metric Tons of CO2 equivalent."
"World's largest institutional user of petroleum" is both more precise and pretty damning.
holding individuals accountable for ignored environmental externaities of producers is a dead end. people will buy/consume the cheapest thing made available to them.
Most people don't follow GP's example because they can't, not because "they're getting the right message". And you bet that as soon as they can, they will. Why? Because most people don't care about the "message", whatever you believe it is. The ones who actually do something about it are the ones who would regardless of any mass-targeted "message". Going one step further, I'd say that it would be better if everyone realized that they can't do anything on their own because that might actually get people to work together, and that's the very reason why the common message is that "everyone should do their part": because that's how you keep people from working together.
Do people actually believe this? ie. "everyone will just buy a tesla on their own, so we don't need government intervention"?
>that's the very reason why the common message is that "everyone should do their part": because that's how you keep people from working together.
That's awfully cynical. During the pandemic there were multiple PSAs telling people to "do their part" by staying home, wearing masks, etc. Was that also some sort of conspiracy to keep people from working together?
I think we just have to keep pushing the society (and each other) in the right direction. Hang on, I believe it will eventually get better, though it will get a lot worse before it starts to get better.
The buried lede is that, if the prophets of climate doom are correct, you need to substantially reduce your standard of living. And all those third-worlders that are trying to improve their standard of living? They need to stop doing so, yesterday, and learn to accept their impoverished standard of living. But do it cleaner!
But they won't want to do that, predictably. And to get them to do so will require enforcement. And enforcement will require coercive power - so violence. And that will result in war that has the potential to be more destructive than the doom being predicted.
If the problem is as significant as alarmists predict, the only palatable solution is technological. So if you feel so motivated, concentrate your effort there. Because the data says everything else you can do is inconsequential and is mostly virtue signaling.
I'm not making any claim about the legitimacy or seriousness of global climate change. Just pointing out that the medicine we choose can destroy as much or more than the disease.
No scientist is arguing that we need to live in poverty, please keep the straw man arguments out of this.
Really though, "alarmists?" You might have been able to accuse scientists of being alarmist 30 years ago, but they predicted increasingly frequent extreme weather events, and for the past decade we have watched the trend do exactly what was predicted. Now instead of talking about how we can avoid this outcome we are sitting here talking about how to not make things worse while we learn to live with floods, hurricanes, heat domes, and polar vortexes.
We have technology, we can work on reducing carbon output without sending ourselves back to the Stone Age. We just need the political will to actually drive it.
California's per capita electricity consumption has stayed flat since 1970. That's in part due to strict energy efficiency standards. By contrast, per capita electricity consumption in the rest of the country has increased 50%, and that's despite California's standards indirectly improving efficiency elsewhere.
Today per capita consumption in California is nearly half that of the rest of the country, but the standard of living (modern conveniences, etc) is hardly less than elsewhere. Note that California's temperate climate does not explain this away. Home heating is still largely fossil fuel based in most of the U.S., including in California. And most of the population growth in California since the 1970s has been in the Central Valley and Southern California, places where air conditioning is as ubiquitous as anywhere else. Shifts in industrial makeup helped some, but the same industrial sectors also became more energy efficient. In general, most of the relative improvements are a product of better energy efficiency. And that was accomplished primarily through non-politicized regulators quietly and steadily mandating marginal efficiency improvements over the decades.
See https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ca-success-story-FS... and https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/5/31/1864690...
Suffice it to say that there's alot of pandering to the environmental lobby among Californian politicians. And lots of tension about the cost and viability of various environmental efforts. But as with politics anywhere, the importance of the objects of these fights is usually blown way out of proportion. The most consequential and productive regulations were quietly working in the background for decades, and didn't come with huge price tags.
EDIT: Apropos HN, one of the key personalities working behind the scenes to improve energy efficiency standards was physicist Arthur Rosenfeld. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_H._Rosenfeld and https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/10/the-cal.... His research work gave rise to the eponymous Rosenfeld Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenfeld_Effect) and Rosenfeld's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenfeld%27s_law). The latter states that "From 1845 to the present, the amount of energy required to produce the same amount of gross national product has steadily decreased at the rate of about 1 percent per year".
Depending where you live, it might not even make a difference.
I'd say the biggest contribution one can make is to aggressively vote for parties that support green power generation. Project like these [0] are stalled by lobbyist but offer a real chance to curb emissions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_%E2%80%93_New_England_T...
It's something I keep quiet about in day-to-day life since it seems to invite reprisal, but if we're soul-searching for what we as individuals can do, I beg you to try eating no meat at all. There seems to be an increasing awareness that animal farming as currently practised is an environmental catastrophe on many levels, including emissions[1]—I dimly recall the IPCC report being quite clear that it's incompatible with a world that isn't ever-worsening, and suspect the obvious conclusion of "stop entirely" has been watered down to "try to eat less" because they fear people will just assume the former is too onerous and not bother.
I have found it to be the opposite—simple steps, fun, healthy—and sort of want to launch into a full tale, but it has been a long week and I was just heading to bed. Still, I'm more than happy later to suggest recommendations and recipes and/or generally chat if you (or anyone) would like.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha...
I think 90% is better than 0%.
At the state and national level, though, a lot more could be done. Ground transportation could be fully electrified. (I think the quickest way to get there is not to wait for battery technology to get better but rather just electrify the major freeways so that cars and trucks can charge while they're moving, and people won't need huge, heavy, expensive batteries to get anywhere.)
We could also expand solar and wind investments. To even out power production and consumption, we could finance the construction of intercontinental high-voltage DC lines, so we can buy solar power from the Sahara in the middle of the night and sell to Europe or wherever in the daytime.
We could invest in battery manufacturing. Most U.S. made electric vehicles are basically luxury supercars that use expensive batteries that require large amounts of nickel and cobalt. What we need to get away from burning gas is mass-production of lithium iron phosphate cells (or whatever technology that replaces it) which have somewhat lower energy density but use cheaper, more readily available raw materials and are much safer and much more durable. This is the kind of technology we need to make cheap cars for ordinary middle-class people with low environmental footprint.
For that matter, it would be great if EV tax credits applied to conversions as well as new vehicles. Hardly anyone converts vehicles now because it's expensive and high-effort, but if there was a simple kit to convert, say, a semi-recent Honda Civic to electric that can be installed easily by a mechanic and doesn't require any custom fabrication, maybe we'd have a lot more people going that route. Especially if it was subsidized to the point where the out-of-pocket expense is low.
More nuclear plants might be a good thing too, but it's not absolutely essential.
The Effective Altruism movement has found some charities that either have proven advocacy records or offer legitimate carbon offsets, and which have a need for more funding.
The Clean Air Task Force seems widely approved of by a variety of EA researcher organizations, with one estimating that they prevent a ton of emissions for less than a dollar.
The offset programs are probably less effective in EV, but more certain. $10 per ton, I believe? Still highly affordable.
A warmer winter can be catastrophic for forests in cold climates that depend on freezing temperatures to kill off invasive bugs. So an entire forest can be absolutely ruined by a damn beetle.
EDIT: From what I remember as well, every tree comes with defenses to keep beetles away. This is why trees are sappy. In order to produce sap the trees need water, and they produce their own sugars through photosynthesis (sap being a mix of water and sugar). Trees in certain areas are adapted to the length of their winters. A longer winter means more time without dealing with beetles but might also mean less time spent in dry soil.
https://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/fo...
> For example, an under-bark temperature of –37°C will kill 50 per cent of a mountain pine beetle population, even in mid-winter; however, a low temperature of –20°C in the fall, be- fore the beetles are prepared for winter, or in the spring, when beetles are start- ing to become more active, will also kill beetles if it is preceded by temperatures above 0°C. The relatively warmer temper- ature causes the larvae to start to lose its natural antifreeze.
In a democratic country, how will a leader convince the population to care about this if the country is rich and currently is unaffected? Well, we're about to see how successful or unsuccessful they might be- so far, it's not looking great.
Furthermore - in the classic phrase: reduce, reuse and recycle. The most important of the three is reduction - how can we reduce consumption in a capitalist world that values mindless consumption and advertising to promote more mindless consumption?
How many of us work for companies that directly or indirectly promote mindless waste of resources and endless consumption?
This is not a TV show - a happy ending is not guaranteed.
Depends on the definition of "unaffected". I'm not sure that the Pacific Northwest, nor the Southwest nor the West would necessarily accept the "unaffected" label. Can they afford to smooth over the impact by using more energy & money? To some extent, certainly, but not entirely.
Just like humans would try to save themselves first, even countries in unions like the EU shut down borders between each other when the virus first came there.
On the topic of waste, I had a realization that even as developers we're contributing to a lot of waste. We want conveniences, like inefficient frameworks so you can just write HTML and CSS instead of native UI, and we get to have these conveniences because processors are getting faster, but on the consumer side, it means top of the line hardware from 10 years ago might now be too slow to render a webpage, and is ending up as e-waste...
free workout, free health, gas savings, pollution free .. it's really something to push
The southern part is toast, both from water level rises, and lack of fresh water.
In this country, the ones that are going to be the most affected by global warming, seem like to care the less.
PS: Canada has a target goal to reach 100mil by 2100. They know they are going to be a more milder place to live overall (with the crazy swing), and there will be much more areas open for human habitation. That's why they are increasing their immigration quotas.
The notion that there's a climate change safe zone is an optimistic one, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of supporting evidence.
This is ignoring the fact that if the southern coastal US is toast the northern areas are going to have a climate refugee crisis on their hands.
Dealing with it is still easier than having your place underwater like 1/3 of Florida might be one day. Places like NYC have to shore up low land areas, but it is still in much better shape than either Florida, Arizona, Southern CA (lack of fresh water, and fires).
Global warming is really going to hit places differently. There is a huge difference between having to deal with the occasional heat wave, or flood, and with having to deal with your whole area being permanently under-water, or complete lack of drinking water.
It's questionable whether it will even be possible to bail them out - either literally or financially.
This may have been true a few hundred years ago, but not now. Where do their families live? What do they they do for work, food, resources and recreation? Who will they trade with? Where will they get consumer goods?
I'm IN the Northeast, not far from Albany. The crazy swings are less and less occasional and that's a trend that continues to escalate. I consider the location pretty much optimal. That's a far cry from 'fine', and the distinction is important.
Our reaction as a city: air conditioning installation is booked out for months.
The reaction from Seattle isn't terribly illogical.
EDIT: Should mention the city is NOT carbon neutral by any means. We still have buses running on gas.
Read up on what chaos theory and chaotic behavior of systems is. Investigate the principle of 'period three implies chaos' and observe what happens when you have stably chaotic behaviors, with known excursions, and then you slightly increase the energy in the system.
What WE are saying (which in no way contradicts what Cliff Mass is also saying) is that the increase of energy, even by seemingly little amounts, radically increases the possible range of outcomes… and the 'black swan' events become commonplace, and then you get NEW 'black swan' events that are truly the exception rather than the new norm.
And that is what we are concerned about, and why 'A 3°C world has no safe place'. Cliff is not necessarily wrong that black swan events happen. He may be fatally wrong about recent behavior constituting a 'black swan'. This is more like the new normal: not sustained heat domes in a predictable way, but this type of event.
You'll know the real black swan when it comes, because it will be demonstrating the impossible and unsurvivable. We just don't know the exact form of it, or where it'll be, but there will be no mistaking it. I don't believe the heat dome was the real black swan.
Katrina displaced 1-1.5m immediately and about 200k never returned.
The upper estimates for 2050 is 1.2 billion displaced world wide.
Also, 2010 Russian forest fires[1] -> grain prices went up -> food prices went up -> hunger for the poor in Middle East -> Arab Spring (ah, remember when Twitter was saving the world?) -> European refugee crisis
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/world/europe/06russia.htm...
Global food prices are spiking now and we're also seeing protests around the globe. The quote is "Society sits 2 meals and 24 hours from anarchy." So any place there's drought or crop failure we'll see a lot of choas.
A lot of Covid skeptics call it a plandemic, i.e. manufactured crisis, I don't believe it myself, but if I were running a government I would be asking if we should have a permanent state of emergency (like in the book 1984) to prevent societal collapse...
Cologne Germany is about 50 degrees north and the surrounding areas were hit hard. Zhengzhou China is about 34 degrees north and was also hit hard by flooding. That further south than the Mason Dixon line... more like the latitude of Raleigh, North Carolina.
So sure, lovely to live if you guard against constant potential storms and floods, omni-present ground water, the possibility of several days in a row of 100+ F temps, etc.
BTW, this issue is solvable if everyone agree that meat should be rationned: no corn and some GMO wheat to produce carbs for human consumption only, a lot more vegetables and more forestry could do the trick.
That's ~724MM/day in water costs or 264B/year for water. US GDP is 21 Trillion.
As cost of water increases, conservation becomes more economical. Say all agriculture switches to hydroponics as a result. Hydroponics uses 1/10th the water of traditional methods...so we're talking now just 26B/year of water costs.
In 2017 US farms spent 359B on operations.
Food will become more expensive, but overall we'll be fine.
The north will see big changes from permafrost melting, the west will see more smoke, more floods, and water shortages as the glacier melt is replaced by rain.
BC will be on fire more, and the forests will die off / need to be replanted with different species of trees
Alaska, at least, is allegedly one of the most rapidly warming places on the planet.
Much more realistically, just like COVID-19 made mRNA commercially viable, actual decrease in quality of life from the climate change will pave the road to engineered carbon-capturing plants, or some smart sun-reflecting particles, or something else.
So if you want to help solve climate change, go study biotechnology and get serious about it. Making your own life arbitrarily uncomfortable and finding a meaning of life in pressuring peers to follow suit won't move the needle in a statistically significant way.
I highly doubt that, given the heat we saw in the PNW and Canada this past month, but even if true, the 3C is average over the planet. So other places in the world will have to be even more than 3C for that to be the average. They aren't gonna like that one bit.
Source: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/prelimin...
If we were going for emotional effect shouldn't it be expressed in Kelvin, or a temperature scale that is designed specifically to scare the public? Something where 3°C is 20°Scare?
E: Kelvin doesn't work for scaring the public unless it is reported as an absolute temperature. TIL.
A difference in 1K is equivalent to 1C difference. The thing is, when Celsius scale was invented, they didn't have a concept of "absolute zero" yet.
Once "absolute zero" was known, then Kelvin units were invented, which were equivalent to C except that 0 means absolute zero.
They have this at the St. Gellert baths in Budapest:
https://afar-production.imgix.net/uploads/images/post_images...
(And btw, not everyone lives in 36°C. Try to get those who live in a 20°C weather to care about a 2°C change even without air conditioning.)
I don’t think that’s the straw that would’ve broken the climate change camel’s back in America.
As an aside, most professional oceanographers or climate scientists I know are depressed, furious, or grant writing -- or a linear superposition of all three.
Huh, I live in the US and I've only ever heard that called a thou but wikipedia backs you up. I'd think a mil would be a millionth of an inch.
I use mm, but it’s often a pain when premade parts and libraries are in mils.
What happens when millions are displaced because India, Pakistan and much of Africa can no longer support human life? What happens when food and water output is reduced? What happens when droughts stops being weather events, but become permanent? What happens if ocean accidification gets to levels where a sudden massive extinction happens? People are greatly underestimating the dangers of climate change. If what is described in the IPCC reports comes to pass and if we really are already at 2C as some reports indicate https://www.ecowatch.com/greenhouse-gases-paris-agreement-26.... Then we will see massive destabilization of global society. Most current societies are simply not equipped to deal with all the problems that will happen at the same time.
I do hope we can still do something to prevent this. But at this point we really need to go to negative emissions and fast, yet the best we can muster is 10 years of increasing emissions followed by another 20-30 of decreasing, and this is assuming the governments can stick to those targets. Assuming we are at 2C, then 4C by 2100 seems probable. Interesting times ahead.
I'm Canadian, and I joined a year ago. Since then I've been able to join several lobby meetings with politicians and gotten involved in many other local issues that I never would have learned about otherwise. It's quite organized, I get to see the impacts of lobbying, and I meet many other groups that I could choose to join if I am so inclined.
I've found it to be productive. If you feel helpless and are thrashing when it comes to figuring out how to make a difference, I think this is a great first step.
I found out about the Citizen's Climate Lobby two weeks ago. I jumped into a few zoom calls with members of the organization and they immediately came up with various ways I could help with. For a person who has been extremely worried about climate change for years, it felt good to feel that I could do something about it and meet people sharing the same goal.
Pricing carbon in a revenu neutral way is probably the most impactful thing we can push for. There is more and more political will to implement or double down on it depending on the country. Grass-root lobbying might be the nudge those policies needs to become a reality.
Try spreading the word, educate your friends and family about it. Like many legislations, implementing it the right way will be difficult but the more people are informed about it, the more chances we have.
What does this pandora's box prospect really mean for the future? If not handled carefully then we may face even more serious ecological collapse (a la Snowpiercer). I don't think that's very likely. I think we'll see a more tempered implementation that will take a while to cool the planet. That meets the political demands of the desperate people while trying to appease the angry neighbors. The ice caps will still melt, the sea level will still rise 10 feet, and we'll still likely face ecological collapse from half a dozen different directions.
Which directions we care about most will start to matter. Should we not even bother talking about them today since us, as rich air conditioned folks wouldn't even consider the option of reflective particles in the atmosphere? Or should we face the real possibility and begin planning contingencies for it?
This means that there are two ways to deal with it:
1. Force all countries to reduce use. To make this really worldwide, this can only worked by force, economical or military (i.e. a world cop). Unfortunately, even if we had that, it is not a stable solution since the short term benefits of using these fuels create constant political pressure.
2. Mitigate the emissions, for example by carbon sequestration. I'm a strong believer in technological progress and our ability to reduce the cost exponentially, the tricky part is to make profitable at any cost.
3. Direct the limited fossil fuel supplies towards economical uses that do not have the same negative impact. For example, by encouraging consumption of more plastics. Plastics essentially trap the carbon in the oil into a very stable form, essentially sequestering the carbon in the oil without first going into the atmosphere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfE8wBReIxw
Circa 1989.
It's also most certainly not the only example of such behaviour.
My personal favourite to use on people with an IT background is IPv4 exhaustion.
Global warming is related to the finite capacity of the atmosphere to absorb an excess pollutant, which is growing exponentially thanks to a burgeoning human population. Address exhaustion is due to a finite resource being exhausted due to an increasing population of people with networked devices.
Both are slow-motion, global-scale disasters.
Both have no clear deadline or dramatic event.
Neither has any immediacy, it's all just graphs trending the wrong way.
Just like how no individual or enterprise profits from fixing global warming, nobody profits from fixing IPv4. If you make a personal sacrifice to give up IPv4, nobody will reward you.
In both cases, the incumbents are hoarding resources, and trying to stave of the inevitable change that will devalue their accumulated capital. IPv4 has become a commodity resource traded on markets, to be hoovered up by mega-corporations to fend off smaller players from competing head to head with them. Do you think Saudi Aramco will just let go of their trillion dollars of unexploited oil fields? Do you think Azure or AWS will just give up on their millions of accumulated addresses?
There is one key difference however:
Global warming has some legitimate debate about its exact course: what specific path the curve will follow, and which model is accurate.
IPv4 exhaustion had no debate whatsoever. The exhaustion of each regional pool was predicted to the week, years ahead. Each one occurred exactly on schedule.
What have YOU done to "save the world"? What have you sacrificed, personally to enable IPv6-only networking?
You have no excuses, you can't even say you didn't see it coming!
So:
Have you forced your company to upgrade to IPv6?
Have you written your software to work flawlessly in an IPv6-only network?
Have you made it a hard requirement for all networked products you purchase or use to be IPv6 native?
No, no you haven't.
Azure doesn't support IPv6 in any meaningful way. Neither does any other major cloud provider. It's an add on. An optional extra, that may or may not work.
Kubernetes, the "future", does not support IPv6 right now, 21 years after it became widely available, and years after several regions dropped below their last /8 of available address space.
"It would be a lot of work to add IPv6 support" I hear people complaining.
Oh... oh wow. Gee. Golly. I didn't know! I take it all back. Let's just stay on IPv4 forever and use NAT five layers deep. I hear Global Warming is going to take a lot of work to fix also. Let's just all buy air conditioners and never venture outside again.
This doesn't change the underlying reality, and I have a strong suspicion there is no means of discussing this issue that would meet with your approval, or your recognition that this is a crisis requiring significant action.
I don't like the crisis framing because I think it leads people to hyperfocus on stopping climate change - on cutting emissions - to the exclusion of the rest. If I proposed a huge subsidy to put HVAC systems in more homes, that would be a huge help in fighting the actual human impact of climate change, but quite a lot of people would see it as irrelevant to climate change because it doesn't reduce emissions.
The whole green move is a lie. There is no evidence that any of that has any relevant positive effect. And no, "we tried" or "a little bit is better than nothing", is not a valid argument all the efforts combined effects are within the margin of error for our predictions so we dont even know if or how much it makes a different.
The only way forward that makes sense is the one humans always did - technological progress. fusion reactors for example. Imagine what we could have by now if all that effort (financial) would have been used to actually find better ways to do the things that cause the pollution rather than making people feel bad for doing what they have to do survive.
But instead our politics puts money into nonsensical "progress" like for example replacing a certain % or fuel with biofuel which is know to be energy-negative. It needs more energy to produce than it gives back (not true if made form waste biomass but true if its made from crops planted for this.)
In the US this will mean more rain in many regions and longer growing seasons. A lot of plants will quickly adapt.
Historically, our planet for most of its history was warmer. It’s all going to be fine, while we will need to adjust the world will continue on.
Note: I’m not saying it won’t be hard, but this will be a gradual change and will actually assist some places, while others get more harsh. I’m just so tired of the negativity.
There’s also a lot of common errors people make. For instance, is this avg temp? Where are we taking measurements? Everyone realizes year to year there’s average drifts that are pretty substantial around the earth... etc etc
Except people can adapt to living in very warm areas and will adapt even more by using science. e.g. better (GMO) crop, bioreactors, solar powered desalinators, huge water pipes (why not? when we can have huge oil pipes) and so on
Also, gradual changes are definitely not guaranteed. Weather and chaos theory have a lot in common; Small perturbations can cause massively different outcomes. Adding 3°C to the entire planet is not a small perturbation.
1) how quickly agriculture can adapt to large shifts in rain and wind patterns -- for instance, what if "more rain" includes torrential downpours with massive flooding, at unpredictable intervals? 2) how quickly the world economy can adapt to most of its major cities becoming uninhabitable (even where temps stay reasonable, sea levels won't) 3) how adaptable political systems will be to unprecedented climate-driven mass migrations, both within and between states, and in the face of collapsing states?
I don't think it'll be a gradual change at all -- more a series of rolling crises, where places spared a particular crisis either are at risk of being hit directly by the next one, or have to deal with the social, political, and economic upheaval as people die or flee areas directly impacted.
But maybe we can assist finding survivors, I remember reading an article a while ago about assisted coral evolution found a bunch of google scholar on it.
https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=climate+change+coral+evo...