September was the most anomalously hot month ever
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
It would be quite educational to attribute in more detail the impact of these two factors. The degree of "El Nino" influence is presumably known, and if its strength is not related with global warming in complicated and unknown ways it would be good to overlay it as a distinct effect.
Being clear about what is happening and why (to the extend that it is known and understood) is important, on at least two counts:
There is already a segment of the population that drifts into panic and depression as a result of all the viral social media climate change echo chambers. Panic is not the way to address our sustainability challenges that are deep-seated and systemic. The flip side of short-term focused panic is switching off into apathy, or even cry-wolf type incredulity - if a few years down the line these extremes are temporarily subdued.
The other segment of the population that can be affected by a clear and well founded explanation of what is happening are those sitting on the fence about climate change or feeling skeptical for legitimate reasons. Obviously nothing will convince nut-cases or deeply compromised individuals that have large personal stake in the status-quo (and they are many).
There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil fuels if we weren't trying to balance that with an arbitrary GDP growth target. We could stop incentivizing people and companies to consume disposable products. We could stop subsidizing massive industrial farms and instead focus on eating locally and growing some of your own food.
The list goes on, but having spent decades watching people debate passionately over why the planet is warming all while going further down the same path my only conclusion is that we just don't give a damn. When push comes to shove we would rather buy new cloths imported from the other side of the world, throw resources at new construction and gut job renovations, and will happily fly around the world on vacation rather than stay home and enjoy the world around us.
Oh and don't forget about new tech. Machine learning rebranded as AI is so ground breaking that we have no choice but to produce as many GPUs as we can and throw all the power and water needed to run the damn things 24/7.
That's the issue, a lot of people just don't care or refuse to believe it. Questions like the one in the parent comment are starting to seriously annoy me because they're demanding an unachievable level of evidence before doing anything, a level that's never asked for in any other kind of intervention (for example, interest rate hikes).
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/tag/nuclear/
So naturally, people assume anyone fighting against global warming is against nuclear. As far as I can tell, it's also true.
If you make something less critical, cheaper, it will be used for more and more ridiculous things.
And practically there's little difference, especially if the former are getting their information from the latter.
Yes exactly.
You hit on something that I often say, though we come at "solutioning" from opposite angles and, from the sounds of your comment, will find little agreement. What we agree on is that understanding anthropogenic global warming and its causes is important and can inform solutions, but it does not tell us what the "right" solutions are since we have other complicating factors to consider. Such as things like human rights, standards of living, morality and the role+purpose and limitations of government.
For some of us the debate is not over whether AGW is a scientifically understood phenomenon that represents a problem (even a critical problem at that). The debate is over what the solutions ought to be, what tools are the right tools for the job and what course corrections are considerable given factors that we must also contend with that lie outside of our scientific understanding of the problem.
Unfortunately, the dustbins of history are full of civilizations that took disruptive events carefully and with grave dignity and solemnity and respected the rights of powerful stake-holders within their society.
That the people who make such arguments generally live in the places best positioned to weather out the situation, is also unfortunate. While people in well-pr tut about whether it's really proper for a government to take action to avoid calamity from befalling its citizens, other people will be literally dying.
It's a rather crass and callous/indifferent position you've staked out, you're kind of not coming off like a very good person here. Like it's literally "I guess you'll have to die, then, not like we're going to unwind the economy just for you" once again.
It is, as someone notes upthread, basically the same as masks during COVID. Some people will stroke their chin and pontificate about utilitarianism and the greater good, but that's not really comfort to anyone whose loved one dies from excess pollution or a transmissible disease. And of course the people taking this position are usually the most protected themselves - we all can WFH here if circumstances dictate, it's different if it's your wife stocking a grocery store, they care a lot less about the GDP impact and more about the direct personal impact than you do.
And the existence of this subgroup - such as yourself - fundamentally forestalls the ability of the other 70% of the society from being able to protect itself. Kind of a problem in general - the american system (and the EU and UN as well, but particularly the US) provides too many brakes on action and biases to inaction (via checks-and-balances) such that even supermajority level political control often is not enough unless it is single-party control of every single branch of government and lever of power.
You don't just need 50%, you don't just need 70%, you need 70% across every possible dimensionality that the US distributes political power over - essentially single-party control is the only way to rule if the minority does not consent, and we are talking about people who openly state that they will never consent.
It'll end in deaths sooner or later, whether that's from inaction, or from those whose deaths would be caused by inaction taking action themselves (which is why almost everyone is forecasting conflict and political instability from climate change to kick up majorly in the second half of the century). Again, the only disappointing part is that this too will be visited on the least-fortunate instead of the responsible parties (who will largely be fine, and we will probably even bail out florida and other affected areas anyway).
What happens when the unstoppable force of climate change meets the immovable object of modern political system's bias-to-inaction? Fireworks, basically - because unlike HN you can't just tone-police the discussion away in the real world, people won't just take "I guess you'll have to die so I can have the new xbox this year" lying down.
The winning argument is to show how you can consume more energy for less money by using sustainable technology. Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win.
In essence I believe the only politically viable way to reduce carbon is to engineer and tech our way to systems that reliably do more for less and increase the amount of energy people can consume.
I don't actually think it's a fundamental blocker though. People sacraficed quite a bit at home during WWII to support the war effort, we could make similar sacrifices now if we saw our impact on the planet as a similarly existential threat.
To me it seems like the failure is in trying to analyze the problem so specifically that we can define the "right" path then logic people onto it. That will never work, mainly because the problem is so complex that there won't be a complete understanding to share. There will always be assumptions used in modeling and holes in the data allowing for alternative explanations that are then argued over even further.
We all know that using oil at this scale isn't a great idea. And we all know that we could actually use less oil without giving up much at all. If we spent less time arguing over how we got here we could find reasonable next steps that are hard to argue with when it isn't all backed by "science" and "fact" that can be debated endlessly.
What you're asking for is a permanent reduction in standards of living. While that might be the right thing to do, it's going to be difficult to convince average people to vote for that. Many of them are barely getting by as it is and don't think they are able to sacrifice more.
Nothing in our evolutionary history has prepared us for climate change. We have more trivial things to worry about.
What needs to be done is cost the damage from unrestricted emissions. You can't just look at the benefits.
Consider the original Clean Air Act. Economists estimate the value of reducing harmful pollution due to that act exceeded the cost of implementing the reductions by a factor of 40. FORTY! It's like picking up free money. And the same is going to be true of CO2 emissions reduction.
Now, it's not true for those personally benefiting, like oil companies. Well, screw them.
Yes and no. I agree that if your approach is to ask people to do this, you aren't going to win the argument.
But instead you can reframe the argument.
Does that $70,000 truck that you have to make payments on while you do back-breaking or soul-crushing work to afford it really make you happy? Do you really get use out of that or are people scamming you with clever marketing?
Do you really enjoy glamping or do you just like the idea and you sit around on your phone posting pictures about how much you like it while not really doing much. Are you honest with yourself?
Etc.
> Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win.
We don't even have trains, let alone cramped trains. This one is funny though because everyone "loves how walkable XYZ area is" but then they get their mind completely wiped once they leave not realizing they can live like that too if they demanded it or if we had a good market mechanic in place that allows for choice.
For some bewildering reason we don't build more of the most loved homes and neighborhoods and transit experience like we do for every single other product.
This is still an adversarial tone which is more likely to create resistance. It comes across as insulting their intelligence.
Convincing people to change is really hard!
If they didn't buy those trucks I don't think they would work any less. They would just spend the money on something else.
Cars, apart from their direct purpose, also serve as status symbol. This might justify the investment.
Why would someone argue with you about what they like? You’re assuming that they are dumb and that you are smart. That’s a bad way to approach persuading people.
That's unfortunate, since trains would surely be the more efficient form of transportation, at least when dealing with regular commute, like going to work and back. Over here, a train ticket costs a few Euros, you don't have to worry about driving or traffic jams, gas/charging, or parking. Of course, if you need to go to a specific rural area or transport some heavy items, then the equation changes, but that's not the majority of the cases.
I'm actually rather sad that they closed down a train route to a city next to my countryside residence, since buses aren't as comfortable in most cases. Either way, public transportation feels like an obvious necessity to me, though many might disagree.
I think that's setting the bar very low, and I don't think it's necessarily true.
Most of us learn how to manage a finite resource (our own income) and how to maximize results within those constraints. This is not some sort of alien situation that humans can't identify with. We face questions like "Do we really need this?" and "Can we afford it right now?" all the time.
We need to get better at organizing ourselves in large groups/structures to do this at the global level, and make people feel equity in the decision-making and that they can afford this equity, and I'm quite optimistic we can in principle get there.
Whether we can do it fast enough is the worrying bit.
Asking people to eat less might never win... But when there is a famine, people have no choice but to eat less. It's not that there is no food available in a famine - it's just that prices go sky high.
Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 emitted.".
The population may revolt, like they do during famines. But with those oil wells blocked up, they probably wouldn't get what they were looking for.
- did I emit a ton of CO2 when I cut down a tree?
- what happens to the cost of medical plastics, etc? Did you just kill millions in poor countries because the cost of care went up so much?
This stuff is hard. Pretending it is simple stops us from working on the hard parts.
That's definitely not a complete solution (if one exists), but that could be implemented over night if we wanted to do it.
And it would not change anything at planet scale, because on the other side of the world China is going to "pick up any slack" of CO2 generation we may not do.
It shouldn't stop us from trying to increase efficiency, but panic and insane ideas of the sort of "no one can emit a ton of CO2 without paying $1k" are not the way to improve things. The biggest fight in the world today is not for "the climate", but for the freedom to live in a non-autocratic country. We would have to win the second to have the slightest shot at cooperating well enough to have a shot at mitigating the first for those of us in places that will be hit the worst.
Do you think a communist-by-name party of China (or Russian mafia-state) gives a damn about the climate and how it affects people in places like subsaharan Africa, Bangladesh etc? Not in the slightest, but they'll gladly use every bit of it to promote panic and industry killing policies in places like the US, EU while pretending to "be green". If we win the fight not to be ruled by corrupt dictators we can have a shot of improving the lives of people who will suffer due to climate change.
You're right that people are unwilling to make the basic changes that are obviously needed. But we only know precisely that those changes would work to fight against climate change because we are able to say with certainty that those behaviors are contributing factors.
Any suggested actions have to have some level of scientific credibility to be taken seriously. Without it, they are easily dismissed by claiming that the planet is too complex to know if our actions will make a difference.
That, purely by coincidence, I'm sure, has been the exact argument used against making any changes, and against the fact that warming was happening in the first place, and against tobaccos cancer risk, and any other public policy proposal that goes against the interest of those profiting from the status quo.
We don't actually know the extent of impacts from either our oil use or potential cuts. We have modeling data that we extrapolate out, the issue I'm raising is that we get stuck in a loop of people debating whether the modeling data is accurate, complete, or predictive.
There are changes we can easily make without knowing those answers. If we can make simple changes that at a minimum wouldn't hurt the planet and almost certainly would help it, why don't we? My read is that we simply must not care. We don't need to buy as many things as we do, or to expert those costs overseas. We don't need to travel the world by plane. We don't need the latest iPhone made on the other side of the planet. We don't need LLMs. We do it because we like convenience and novelty more that we actually care about our impact on the planet. And we avoid implementing real solutions by first demanding that we have a complete understanding of the cause and blame.
I'll keep voting against anything that makes me poorer and more miserable.
Some things are in fact worth dying for.
Sure, we could just stop using fossil fuels. But something like 50% of the global population would then be starving.
The cure that so often is prescribed is worse than the disease. And people don't seem to realize.
I think your point leads down the path of arguing that we have too many people on the planet though. If we can sustainably feed everyone without causing unknown amounts of damage to the environment, we will eventually hit a wall and run out of ways to dodge that fact.
I expect we would have a lot of agreement related to fixing that system to better serve the average person. Even if we have different opinions on exact details, that core principle can go very, very far.
Then it's the small task of changing the economic model of the entire developed (and less developed, and exploited) world. The model that all of the richest and most powerful people depend on.
A major economic change sounds impossible, but we've done it in the US at least three times in the last century.
No.
The economic model, monetary policy, and incentives of each system were completely different. We may not have renamed the currency or the country, but that doesn't change the fact that those were major economic shifts.
Believe it or not, only a handful of people genuinely care about "GDP growth targets" and they have very little influence on environmental policy. The reason why politicians oppose sweeping regulation to stop climate change is because they'd lose their jobs if they intentionally caused gas prices to rise or cause a recession.
A large number of people with vast influence on all government policy care about the returns of their investments in existing incumbent industries, which in aggregate correlate very strongly with GDP growth, though.
I would rather live in a society with a higher GDP than less (all things considered) and so would most people (as evidenced by population shifts across the world). If the GDP does not grow to at least match the population changes, the society would be poorer and have worse outcomes overall.
Do you have any debt? Or use money? Or pay taxes?do you have a job? Did you know that oil consumption grows at the same rate as GDP? Do you save for retirement, or hold any investments? Do you have a bank account?
It's all directly connected to the economic system, which is driven by the goal of having steady and predictable rate of growth in GDP.
that is the foundation of the way economy works. It propagates down to interests and credits and investments and jobs.
Obviously IMO.
America loves to gaslit consumers but companies never EVER get the blame, even worse is the CEOs of the companies who make these decisions always get scot free.
Enforcing regulations requires quite a few steps first, from defining the scope and likely granting new authority to regulators to actually drafting regulations that are complete and not full of loop holes.
Your argument is also based on the premise that consumers aren't able to make the best choices for themselves and must be forced into it by regulators. I simply refuse to believe this, what are we even doing here if we think real reform can only come from all powerful authorities forcing it upon us?
Given our economic dependence, the economic efficiency, and interested resistance, what concrete course of action would achieve this transition?
> We could stop incentivizing people and companies to consume disposable products.
How? Concretely.
It's easy enough to break the natural environment by very primitive means.
So I agree with your point, it's just not that complex that we can't totally ruin it quite easily.
In urban or suburban housing people don't have enough space or direct sunlight to grow a useful amount of food.
Have you tried arguing people against eating meat? If we can't even talk them out of the main individual contributor to climate change, I don't think we have a good chance to make a positive impact on other areas that depend on conscious effort.
Yes, food is a significant portion of energy consumption, but typical transportation and housing (including heat/cool) easily dominate. Going from a daily mixed meat (chicken/fish/beef/eggs) eating diet to a vegan diet saves ~1 ton CO2 per year. Average is about 4-5 tons per year for a person living in a small apartment in temperate climate, who only uses public transportation, doesn't go on vacation, or buy any unnecessary consumer items. A more typical westerner who can afford meat every meal is about 10-20 tons per year.
Now, if you're eating 150g of beef every meal 3x every day, you could double your footprint (+20tons CO2). Eating only chicken, fish, and eggs gets you below 1ton/year for meat in meals. Vegan is about a third of that.
https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-ecol...
[1]https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability...
A brief web search suggests this presumption is incorrect and that climate change is having an effect on the cycle, rendering this division somewhat meaningless - the old El Nino is "gone," in a sense, and only the climate change effected one remains.
from: https://research.noaa.gov/2020/11/09/new-research-volume-exp...
“No two El Niños or La Niñas are perfectly alike,” Capotondi said. “We’ve seen how diverse ENSO events can be. This diversity adds another degree of complexity for understanding how climate change will influence future ENSO events.”
So how are ENSO impacts likely to evolve in the coming decades?
“Extreme El Niño and La Niña events may increase in frequency from about one every 20 years to one every 10 years by the end of the 21st century under aggressive greenhouse gas emission scenarios,” McPhaden said. “The strongest events may also become even stronger than they are today.”
and here is the full book: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/978...
The available summary does not hint there is something conclusive yet on these interactions: "Current research seeks to determine whether such changes in ENSO characteristics were the result of anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing or just a manifestation of natural variability, and whether and how climate change may affect ENSO diversity in the future."
I simply no longer believe these people really exist, that information has been around, it has been around for decades, and yet this argument comes up time and time again, I'm a reasonable person, persuade me. Nah.... it's been done time and time again.
However, it's hard to be sure. A discussion: https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/aerosols-are-so2-emissions-...
"Let's not get lost in the details", "Let's take a 30,000 foot view of the problem", etc. are common sayings in corporate America that boil down to "I'm not that confident in math, so can we stick to hard-to-prove-false qualitative claims only, please?"
I love this sentiment, I hope it takes off, but I gave up trying years ago.
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/el-nino-and-the-2015...
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/correcting-for-more-...
If you disagree, then be the change you want to see in the world... Setup a website, pull the data, build your own model and publish it. Once you've got it going, I'd guess that Tamino would be more than willing to correct all your mistakes in your model.
I've seen some attempts to quantify the difference. E.g. this article tries to illustrate it: https://theconversation.com/july-was-earths-hottest-month-on...
Unfortunately, they aren't independent variables. The climate change effects of global warming have also altered the function of El Nino. You can't entirely subtract one variable out because they're interlinked.
If you really wanted to, you could squint and look at the trend lines of previous months and years and try to extrapolate a trajectory. It would still be going up.
There's always a reason to not-do anything, to not-upset anything, because, you know, the GDP, the stock market, think of the all the people involved in oil, etc.
Meanwhile we've shifted from ridicule to denial through downplaying and the outright delusional "this could actually be good".
What is not happening are any meaningful steps towards reigning in even the worst excesses.
So, yeah. Maybe panic is not the worst state of mind regarding this challenge?
There might be some easy, immediate "quick-wins" in change of behaviors or new technology, but they are not that many, or particularly impactful. Take for example coal. In various places they thought that eliminating it is a no brainer. Its dirty, lots of CO2 emissions etc. Well guess what. Many poorer countries only have access to coal and they are not particularly keen to remain energy poor to make up for the historical excesses or others.
People advocating half measures or not panicking are incredibly irrational. It's a human cognitive bias to try to arrive at intermediate outcomes between extremes (regardless of truth). Extremeness aversion.
edit: for instance, IPCC/NCA5 author Zeke Hausfather said, "This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist – absolutely gobsmackingly bananas" (https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1709217151452954998)
Everyone should be rioting in the streets. If you are not scared for the lives of your children then you simply don't realize the severity of this problem.
If someone is panicking, the correct solution here is to show that there’s a realistic attempt at solving the problem. Not dismissing their valid feelings of dread and panic.
Very concerned people who do not take action are equally to blame as those who don't care
Anybody capable of that, would either no longer be sitting on the fence, or are highly unlikely to be reading this article.
Also, the basic premise of your comment assumes that the effects on the monthly temperature can be cleanly broken down categorically into "fossil fuel related" and "El Nino related", which presupposes that a stronger and more frequent El Nino events are unrelated to the burning of fossil fuels.
The facts the human impact on climate change are overwhelming, both in their abundance and scope of impact. Pretending that they don't exist, or treating them as a tangential issue to be put aside so as to appeal to a skeptical and/or ignorant minority, serves no purpose other than to undercut the facts.
This is discussion is really about how the experts (and, subsequently, mass and social media) popularize the explanations of weather events and what effect this might have on various segments of the population.
> which presupposes that a stronger and more frequent El Nino events are unrelated to the burning of fossil fuels.
I didn't pressupose anything, I qualified my statement. In fact people posted various interesting recent pieces of research in the thread and I learned that there are both additional potential factors that may be currenty overlapping and that understanding of a potential climate change / El Nino link is still elusive.
But that is beside the point. Even if there was a known link it doesn't change my remark that better framing is required. You would simply condition on the dependence, show the growing El Nino "diversity" against the underlying trend and indicate how this may have created an outlier realization.
There's too much currently unknown for any honest person to speak with the confidence the other poster is and that makes many people (myself included) distrustful.
vs
> feeling skeptical for legitimate reasons
I think it's just your bias showing. This is 2023, people who are "skeptical" of the climate change aren't there for legitimate reasons. And frankly I'm less and less convinced that we need to engage these people.
IMO there's an awful lot of necessary debate around climate policy. Skeptical can mean anything from thinking:
1) Battery storage for intermittent renewables is unsolved and therefore nuclear is a better solution (I think this is actually correct, if we could emulate France's historic budgets, timelines and safety)
2) The earth isn't warming at all and it's a Chinese conspiracy.
There's a lot of room between those two points, even thing's as basic as what's our current level of warming are harder to pin down than you would expect.
I'm curious if the changes we see can be explained by the sun activity yes. I'm not qualified to assess which of the scientists are right and which aren't, and to what extent CO2 gases cause global warming. Instead of just asking me to take it for a fact when asking a question please use your expertise and explain it in a sense that I can understand and verify.
I'm asking out of curiosity and because I want to understand, to me this could all be because of the sun and an elaborate cash-grab, just as plausible. Because it's not about stopping it at all costs, some people can apparently buy the right to produce more? With these kind of hand-wavy responses from those who claim to have the knowledge where do you think me and other like me are turning for information?
I don't know if it's easier to build a giant sunscreen than to get the worlds population eating bugs because apparently cows fart too much? But we still keep exploiting the amazon, and doing everything we can to keep the endless growth economy we've built going. So how pressing can it really be? We're fighting wars over more resources, when maybe we should be fighting to stop consumerism?
I don't know. But I'm not taking anyones word for it, help me understand or move on. Don't tell me what to think.
I think the Overton window needs to shift soon to include the idea that widespread government intervention will be required to avoid 800 million climate refugees
Millions of people may have to adapt. Fortunately, people are good at that.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jul/31/why-you-need...
People can survive amazingly hot temperatures, as long as they can sweat - once the wet bulb temp gets far above 31c people are in trouble - the theoretical maximum is 35c.
We won't hit these wet bulb temps in places like the US or even much of Europe, but built up China, India etc are at risk of approaching these in our lifetimes, potentially far sooner.
> Concern often centres on the “threshold” or “critical” WBT for humans, the point at which a healthy person could survive for only six hours. This is usually considered to be 35C, approximately equivalent to an air temperature of 40C with a relative humidity of 75%. (At the UK’s 19 July peak temperature, relative humidity was approximately 25% and the wet-bulb temperature about 25C.)
(WBT is Wet Bulb Temperature)
Yes, I read that people have been living for 100s of years (pre-AC) through temps regularly hitting 46 degrees, but see also the response on wet-bulb temps and survivability. 46 degrees for 5 days straight without AC (as in, backup power is gone...) and I think we'll see some losses.
Europe regularly sees large deaths due to heat during summers already today, true mostly in elderly.
Make it a hundred, though, so I can defend it to my dependants better and you're on.
(I realize that even if I win, I lose, but whatever, I'm more interested in talking with someone who has significant hope, enough to put money on the line.)
In my opinion, this reduction in deaths is mostly due to the increasing ability of the developing world to better master their environment, enabled by technological advances powered largely by cheap energy from fossil fuels. If you have alternative explanations, I'm happy to hear it. But as the evidence stands, it would be more delusional to think climate change will cause rampant mass deaths.
[0]: https://library.wmo.int/viewer/57564/download?file=1267_Atla...
"to handle" or "to mitigate" it's way to late for "to avoid"
The ideologically-driven people are a minority. A very vocal minority, but a minority.
Most people just choose what's cheap, convenient, and gets the job done. We can put our fingers on the scale by shifting subsidies and taxes around.
There are alternatives, there have always been alternatives. Better ones, cheaper ones.
0 - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
If there are "better and cheaper" alternatives available right now, market forces will assure their dominance. The oil and gas lobby is not so omnipotent that millions of people looking out for their own best interests, despite the imperfection of their knowledge, will stick to an obviously inferior means of achieving their goals.
In other words, very few people will actually "maintain/increase fossil fuel usage just to stick it to their perceived enemies", as the GP said, if it hurts their pocketbooks to do so.
If we can maintain the status quo with better technology, it will be adopted. It's just not there yet. Hence, we stick to what we have.
The liberal position on these societal problems is "take things away until the problem is fixed" which I find incredibly ironic, while the other's is "free market drives innovation when it's overwhelmingly necessary."
Why spend a penny on fission nuclear when renewables are cheaper, have shorter lead times by decades, and are vastly less financially risky?
Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive, there are many historic examples of safe reactors built for very reasonable costs. (French and earlier American reactors especially.)
Unfortunately there seems to be zero appetite to discuss let alone fix the killing of nuclear power though an absolutely crazy regulatory framework.
High soil occupancy in competition with food crops and human activities
Cannot provide guaranteed baseline of supply without storage (more minerals)
I'm a global warming believer, but I'm starting to question whether the planet warming won't actually be posivite for a lot of first world economies. More solar power, less money spent on heating, less dependent on foreign resources etc etc etc. Meanwhile, poor countries will take the brunt of the disasters due to geography and lack of own resources.
If the rich turn out richer and the poor poorer due to man-made global warming, I do believe we owe them help as a restitutive obligation.
Well this is a fun new twist on climate denial.
I have a hard time understanding how you can believe this when we've already seen incredible and costly damage in the US caused by climate change in just the last few years. Insurers are pulling out of Florida because they can't afford the increased risk and the entire insurance industry is at risk of catastrophic failure if extreme events keep getting more extreme [0].
> More solar power, less money spent on heating, less dependent on foreign resources etc etc etc.
What? Climate change means less predictable weather, not more sunny days; I think people in Texas would have a hard time buying your argument for "less spent on heating"; less dependent on foreign resources is another way of say "reduced global trade" which has been and continues to be a major part of our economy.
0. https://www.wsj.com/finance/insurance-catastrophe-reinsuranc...
TBF I'm growing more and more apathetic to this whole "economy" thing. Unbounded growth is what led us to the present problem in the first place. What about we try to optimize for quality of life instead of quantity of made-up number?
Like, increased heat is already causing rails to heat up, forcing railroad delays[1], which will eventually translate into more expensive shipping for everything. And if we start getting Wet Bulb 95 conditions[2] then an afternoon power outage in any American city will lead to a million dead (the homeless will die either way in these conditions).
[1] https://ggwash.org/view/90938/summer-heat-means-longer-amtra...
[2] https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/3151/too-h....
This is complete speculation. And the annual variation in temperature of ~50 degrees C many places on earth, does not really support it.
It's not about whether it will be good or bad to live in a warmer climate. Maybe it would be better. But the rate of change is the danger. If we were slowly warming over the course of millenia, it'd be a different story. But 2C of warming over less than 100 years is something the planet has never seen before, and that we are ill equipped to deal with.
Anyway, it's very likely that the younger dryas had a much sharper shift in temperature.
Aren't solar cells led efficient at higher temperatures?
But the rest of your point does stand. Europe is pretty far north, as is Russia and Canada and even the northern parts of the US.
Solar systems are not an exception.
Global warming does not mean we get more solar power. It means we trap more of the Sun's energy in our atmosphere. Solar panels are not going to be getting more light.
If you care more about the price of energy than the price of bread, sure.
I also worry that hardening the infrastructure in first world countries is going to be very expensive. Especially if the developing countries are so badly affected that they can't provide the normal supplies of food, minerals, ores, etc.
It’s funny how something considered racist is now considered necessary now that the migrants are being dumped in their front yards.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/politics/biden-administration...
> non-believer: “see global warming doesn’t exist” > believer: “you can’t measure this on a monthly scale, it’s too slow of a process”
But often when the case is reversed, it’s used as evidence of global warming? I know global warming is real and I am a firm believer in it but this duality seems to cause a lot of issues when discussing global warming.
In terms of localized cold records, they are becoming astonishingly rare to the point that they really don't even deserve mention.[1]
[0] https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/2023-01/ClimateD... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#/med...
Similarly, an individual fossil might be called evidence of evolution, but nobody thinks you should take this one fossil as a knockdown argument that evolution is real. On the other hand, when a strange fossil that's anomalous with the rest of the record is uncovered, a creationist might call this "evidence that evolution is false", but just as in the record cold month case, it's correct to point out that you shouldn't be looking at individual fossils.
So what's happening here is that people are using the word "evidence" in a rather casual manner. Properly, what we're talking about here is an example, and in this case it's a very pertinent example because people have been given a concrete picture of what the world might look like on a regular basis in the near future.
(Obviously there are some members of the public who really do think a single month is proof of global warming, or vice versa, but I'm trying not to strawman anyone here.)
You can somewhat measure global warming on a monthly scale. Just graph the last 100 years in average monthly temperatures and you will see a graph going steadily up. So it will be with a longer scale. In that sense, global warming is a longer process, yes. The problem with that is not that "you can't measure it". It's that explaining it to a non-believer does not fit on a tweet, and it counterdicts everything that they have been told from the media they consume.
A metaphor that can help is talking about overwheight.
If you have been gaining weight for years and then you do one of those "detox diets" and lose 2 kilograms in one month, but then you gain them back the next week, and another one the week after, you are not "losing weight". The curve went slightly downwards and then continued going up.
Similarly, if you have been steadily losing weight for years and then have some friends visit and you eat out a lot during that week and you gain some weight but you lose it again in the following weeks, you are still "losing weight". The curve went up a little bit but then it went down.
So the thing you are missing is the context we can talk about individual ups and downs, but they are meaningless without being put in the bigger context.
The metaphor illustrates how what you're saying might be true and helps understand what you mean. Somebody who disagrees usually understands what you mean by "it's getting warmer". They just don't believe it. At least that's my experience.
Convincing someone in such matters is completely impossible unless there is a prior personal relationship of trust and respect. Even then it's very hard.
It's way more difficult to convince someone of something if they already see you as "their ideological opposite". It's a chasm too wide to cross for most of us humans.
The "gaining weight" conversation is something that they understand, probably have experienced themselves, or have seen their spouse try. It's not something that can be perceived as coming from the "scientist caste" (this is a real term I have heard used). You are less of an opponent and more of a next-door-guy trying to explain something.
It's a bridge that you lay over the chasm. They still need to walk over it, though.
I'm sure there's some sports argument that can be laid out in a similar fashion.
What you're talking about is people discussing local weather.
Take a look at this NOAA report for August 2023 [1], and scroll down to the chart showing August temperature anomalies going back to 1850.
The last record low August was in 1911. We've had 45 consecutive Augusts that were above the 20th century average.
That's how it is for all months. E.g. for January the last record low was around 1895, and we've had 47 consecutive Januaries above the 20th century average.
We are currently up to 534 consecutive months above 20th century average.
The pattern is similar for years. The last global record cold year was 1904.
[1] https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/g...
My understanding is that globally, we keep seeing record warm months. Perhaps locally there are some record cold months but that's much less _news_ than the entre global average.
There hasn't been a "coldest global average" set since 1917, which was the coldest March.
On the other hand, "hottest month ever" is not uncommon to hear. That plus the fact that we are trending in the wrong direction might be cause for alarm.
Edit: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/great-texas-freeze-february-2...
2. it is a trend and usually never one example put up as evidence, but the trend/frequency is unfortunateley clear?
That may have been record cold in Texas, but it was caused by record heat on the north pole. But people experience local extremes much more than global extremes, which are generally just statistics. And more people live in Texas than on the North Pole.
When you do that, BOTH extremes become more extreme, not just 'warm' ones. Though hot temperatures are dangerous, it's not just about heat spikes, it's about the consequences of the increased energy available to the chaotic system.
This energy can just as easily be expressed in a brutal, dangerous cold snap, or an unreasonably huge storm. The 'non-believer' is so fundamentally wrong that it's impossible to discuss with them, and the global climate is not subject to their primitive understanding of what 'warm' is.
Just look at the chart at the top of the article. The world isn't cooling down, and one slightly cooler month isn't any evidence that the trend will reverse itself, it just demonstrates that the trend isn't monotonic.
In June 2023, none of the Earth’s surface had record cold, year-to-date.
Tangent: I have a very good source for this fact, however searching will not reveal it. The current state of search is horrible. I'm interested if anyone can find it. I'll link to it later this evening.
1. "In June" or "As of June" really makes a difference. I wouldn't expect record breaking lows northern hemisphere summer, where 2/3rds of the land is.
2. Is it typical to have a record-breaking cold every year? Why is this even notable?
I didn't find your source, but NOAA's June '23 climate report says "No state experienced a top-10 coldest June on record for this six-month period," so that's something, but it's just for the US. But it also says it was a pretty mixed bag: "Above-average temperatures were observed across much of the eastern contiguous U.S. and in parts of the Northwest. Near- to below-average temperatures were observed from the northern Plains to the West Coast."
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/n...
1. Jan 1 - June 1, 2023
2. Yes.
How do we fix the communications?
and
b. The only way for X to reach his workplace is to consume a more and more expensive resource.
"Change job", " work more", "live somewhere else" are not good advices because X is often unqualified, works already a lot and cannot afford a place inside the town where he works.
What should X do ?
The necessity of consumption is a bigger problem than "we consume to much hydrocarbon energy". People don't value cheap hydrocarbon energy over the future of earth, but they value their own life, and no solution exists, for a lot of regions in france, to allow you to cease using your car.
In some places solutions are implemented in a weird manner, I personally had to take the bus at 5 am to go to " Lycée", where most of my courses began around 9-10am (if there were courses the morning) and then at 8pm to go back home (I was home at 9h30pm approximately, depending on the traffic). Lycée was great, now if I had to do this before and after a day of work, it would highly resemble what I call "a boring life". But still, while 3 hours or more in my life were dedicated to " transit" and a lot of time in the morning was dedicated to "wait", other people living in the city were just sleeping in the morning and probably reading their lessons or socializing.
Bus was taking a lot more time than cars to commute is these regions because there's a lot of villages to connect to the town. (My village was the last of the line). As of today, there is still only two bus that connects the village to the town, one in the morning at 5am, and one in the night, at 8pm.
Daily (or even monthly) temperature variance doesn't allow you to see the slow but steady increase in the global average. People aware of the impact of the climate crisis probably tend to notice the above-average warm days more than they notice the below-average cold days.
Humans are not thinking machines. We're feeling machines. That's why we need hard data to make good decisions.
Isn't this analysis going back to 1991? How is that "ever"?
Record on both sides of the spectrum are symptoms of the same cause
Bad news sells. Mostly it's totally made up BS. Global warming is another made up tragedy to distract us from real issues like wars, poverty, wealth disparity, care for the elderly and mentally ill, etc.
Here I am contemplating whether to "waste" my time trying to tell someone on the Internet they're wrong, or just shake my head at the "deluded idiot" (my point of view, it could be wrong) and go on with my day. I wonder what the dangers are of people doing the latter and people walking around confidently with "false beliefs" (again, my point of view, could be wrong)
But you mention wars, don't you notice how weather has had a big effect? For example there was a bad Russian heatwave in 2010 which destroyed grain yields. Food prices all over the world went up, and in north African countries this contributed to the Arab Spring revolutions [1]. Is it just a freak weather event? Can we attribute it to climate change? Can't we accept digging up carbon/methane and burning it creates an atmosphere/planet that slowly becomes inhospitable to humans?
Well, I also want to talk about refugees fleeing crisis countries, but I'm too lazy to look up the citations right now. I contemplated just abandoning this reply because of that. This sounds obnoxious but consider it a gift that someone is still willing to tell you that you might be mistaken, rather than shake their head at what you wrote and walking away unnoticedly.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221209472...
I think it's all 3. The problem is that, like anything remotely political in our current environment, one side says it's 100% one source, and the other says it's 0%.
The transition is going to be very expensive, and normal people (hardly getting by) aren't willing to get even poorer when they can't be sure it will help in the grand scheme. Our leaders are doing nothing but talk, they're the worst individual offenders. And globally, there's a "tragedy of the commons issue" at the Nation level, where those who continue to burn fossil fuels are going to get ahead.
Until these things are addressed, telling us repeatedly that it's getting warmer falls on deaf ears.
People often claim this, but I don't think it's true. I think news organisations on average underplay the threat from climate change.
What actually sells is confirming people's world view. Telling people "everything's fine, look at these silly scientists panicking over nothing" seems very popular with a large segment of the population.
http://euanmearns.com/the-staircase-hypothesis-an-alternativ...
The driving mechanism for this phenomena would be release of stored heat from the oceans (which have been steadily absorbing much of the energy being trapped by increased atmospheric IR-absorbing gases like CO2 and CH4) during El Nino events.
> "The oceans can at times soak up a lot of heat. Some goes into the deep oceans where it can stay for centuries. But heat absorbed closer to the surface can easily flow back into the air. That happened in 1998, which made it one of the hottest years on record. (Trenberth 2013, see above source)"
This forms a prediction of sorts: if there is an another strong ENSO event this year, another stepwise climb of the staircase should play out over the next decade.
Note that even if we eliminated fossil fuel use and deforestation in a year, due to the long-term buffering effect of the ocean, it would take at least a century for the Earth's surface temperature to stabilize (assuming we don't trigger some 'natural' effect like massive marine sediment methane destabilization, etc.). This means as much effort will need to be devoted to adaptation to new conditions as to elimination of fossil fuels from the energy mix, assuming that we all agree that civilizational stability is a desirable goal.
Not eliminating fossil fuels and continuing with business as usual for the next few decades (*the current plan of all fossil fuel producers and affiliated nation-states from the USA to Venezuela to Saudi Arabia to Russia) means that when we do eventually stop, we're in a worse long-term prognosis.
Sadly this assumption does not seem to hold.
I need to continue buying all that useless crap to feel I have status!
And we go about our day as if nothing is happening.
Yet the people peaceful protesting against fossil fuel subsidy blocking a street (A12) are the crazy people and should be violently removed from the road.
This isn't going to end well because people will vote so they can cling to their comforts at the expense of others.
2023 on track to be the warmest year on record (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37776748)
Linking directly to the above study since the submission has no comments,
Copernicus: September 2023 – unprecedented temperature anomalies (https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-september-2023-unpr...)
Also, don't buy into hysteria. You're probably not going to die because of climate change.
if you're here on HN meaning you are not one of the poorest on Earth. I mean, that's nice, but it's worth sparing a thought of the millions that are gonna die because of climate change within the average HNer lifetime.
I agree with your comment, but this is one of the time to understand our position of privilege, not that the problem doesn't exist.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/10/02/252-...
In Stripe's case, they have a product called Climate that allows customers to redirect a portion of their revenue to fund carbon removal efforts.
If they did not have a climate scientist on staff to vet projects that would be a mistake.
(While some people will deny the problem exists until they're literally underwater)
Without any explanatory details, this seems like a non-sequitur.
Or are you making a joke? Is this like the surrealist painters and bathtub one?
For example, nuclear power plants generally take a lot of resources and time to build. Is there enough money in the world to throw at the problem to build 1,000 nuclear power plants in the next 5 years? Or what if solar panels and household batteries became free to everyone on the planet? Would that solve the problem?
I know that changing people's minds and changing laws are hard to do, but is there enough money in the world to make it happen? Money makes laws all the time and giving people free stuff generally makes them compliant.
If one wants to solve problems of the masses, find one of the masses who lives and breathes it
Perhaps now that it's actually bad something might happen.
At this point, geo engineering is probably the safer option compared to letting the planet spiral into an uninhabitable waste land. Of course, it should be combined with cheap and abundant renewable/nuclear energy.
Now that things are bad, there might actually be popular support for this, though we may still have to wait for the current political class to retire.
Jokes aside, and i know its only 1 small area, and the effect might not scale, but where I'm living the weather forecast is suggesting October is going to be worse, the next 2 weeks is expected to be 7 degrees celsius higher than average all day every day
people that point out these kind of messages are becoming the norm (hottest X ever) every month/year and are annoyed by this are _so close_ to get the problem.
September 1960: https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/new-york/historic?mo...
September 2000: https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/new-york/historic?mo...
September 2023: https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/new-york/historic?mo...
2000 was a “hot” September.
I've been thinking about whether I should try to buy some Alaskan real estate while I have the chance. Sure, I have no plans to live there right now, but it might be real handy in a few decades...
PS. September was quite warm, indeed.
Is it a conspiracy?
Headline: "September Was the Most Anomalously Hot Month Ever"
In the article: "September was the most anomalously warm month ever recorded."
So september was the most anomalously hot month ever 'recorded'? So what? The last 50 years? 100 years? Which isn't saying a lot. They always misrepresent and lie and fearmonger. But why?
Since the 90s, 'global warming' ( now climate change ) was supposed to have ended the earth and humanity a dozen times already. Yet we are all still here. Just like the same peak oil nonsense. Remember when oil was supposed to run out and civilization was supposed to collapse?
Or maybe just look up Earth Overshoot Day. The Collapse is as inevitable as it gets.