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Earth at risk of becoming 'hothouse' if tipping point reached, report warns
- akuji1993 8y agoI'm absolutely certain with governments moving this slow right now, making small goals for 2050, getting courted by lobbies to not push through massive restrictions, probably most of these very dark predictions will come true. I, as a concerned citizen can do nothing against the corporations ruling our society, overruling politicians or outright controlling them directly. We are probably beyond any point of return. The people that yearn for the next payday will get their money and probably will be able to save themselves in an underground bunker or a suite in the mountains, while the rest of the poor and middle class burn in the ashes they leave behind.
- Shoh3pif 8y ago> I, as a concerned citizen can do nothing against the corporations ruling our society Defenestrations, torches and pitchforks have been traditional solutions to rulers not acting in the interest of the populace. Of course more peaceful means are preferable but the option needs to be kept on the table to remember why we have and want democratic solutions in the first place.
- _oeas 8y agoCurrent leading governments are too corrupt to be able to change anything by peaceful talks
- Shoh3pif 8y agoEven the chinese government recognized that at least doing something about the coal smog is something in their own interest. My understanding is that the risk of civil unrest is what drives them.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoThe driver seems to be the economic incentive of becoming the world leader in renewables by getting a head start while the rest of the world drags its feet. Say what you will about authoritarian governments but they can certainly get shit done.
- sk5t 8y agoIt seems unlikely that the proletariat will overthrow the government because that government has not curtailed their own ability to buy plastic goods, drive a car, or set the air conditioning at 65F.
- akuji1993 8y agoAt least for my country, you can scream as loud as you want, people just complain about you being louder than the Television. Nothing will happen, because governments have kept the majority of the people at a low enough education that they either don't understand or don't care about these things at all. I can always see people zoning out when I talk to them about this topic. Nobody cares, because they know they won't make a difference if they do anyway.
- Buldak 8y ago>Defenestrations, torches and pitchforks have been traditional solutions to rulers not acting in the interest of the populace. I'd guess the people involved in those rebellions felt the effects of bad governance much more acutely and directly than people do (currently ...) vis-à-vis climate change.
- mywittyname 8y agoThis will happen. It's actually already happening in developing countries. The disruption of food supplies has been causing annual riots all over the world. The US has remained insulated from these effects by virtue of being relatively rich and relying on over-priced, highly processed foods that have enough margin to buffer against price shocks. But this is clearly an untenable situation. Shit goes south really fast when people can't afford to eat. And the difference between Mexican or Middle Eastern food riots and American ones is that Americans will come with lots of guns.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoTrouble is the government will make sure that the police and military remain well fed, and they have even bigger guns.
- ripsawridge 8y agoI actually think this huge block of gun owners in America share a particular mindset with each other that means they'll become the local arm of the government in the hinterland. Just as you always see affinity between police forces and right-wing activists, you'll see the government put on a face friendly to rural gun culture, and that group will be installed as enforcers. So I don't buy this argument that the wide availability of guns in America in any way ensures a "Freedman's Paradise." It ensures more oppression, as the (expensive) arm of Federal power recedes.
- mywittyname 8y agoI'm hardly an advocate of the typical right-wing position that guns keep the government in check. But I do foresee a situation where there's a clash between the well-fed police (who want to keep it that way) and the starving poor in the US. The inner city riots will not be an issue, most metro PDs have experienced and well equipped riot control departments. It's the armed, rural uprisings that pose a threat. Think Cliven Bundy-types leading a group of protestors in sieges of government or office buildings.
- avar 8y agoYou as a concerned citizen can do plenty on your own. Most people could cut down their emissions and other environmental impacts by 50% easily if they really cared. The problem is that most people don't really care that much when push comes to shove, and in aggregate this is the reason for why we're moving so slowly on climate change.
- ajmurmann 8y agoIt's the tragedy of the commons though. If I stop driving my car and go vegan, we won't see any measurable difference in climate change. The only measurable thing that happens is my quality of life going down. If enough people do it and we actually get a benefit I could even see Republicans arguing for more deregulation and balancing out all the sacrifice we made. The only practical solution is collective action. In fact I'd argue that non action of countries should be the number one reason for sanctions and if necessary military force. Our entire future is at risk here.
- skywhopper 8y agoThere are limits to what individuals can do. Take automobile fuel efficiency. Cars these days are way more efficient and cleaner than they were fifty years ago, and they perform far better. Consumer choice would never have made this happen in response to market forces. You couldn't buy an efficient, high-performance car in the late 60s even if you wanted to. Companies needed an incentive to invest for the long-long term in technologies to improve the efficiency of their products. Short term price shocks weren't going to make that happen. Only multi-decade, ratcheting fuel-efficiency regulations that applied across the board and eliminated the risk to automakers for pursuing efficiency achieved our current state where we even _have_ the choice of buying cars that can achieve 50mpg or more with adequate performance.
- martythemaniak 8y agoPeople blaming governments and corporations are merely using faceless scapegoats because the truth is too terrible to behold. Normal every day people don't really believe in climate change, don't really want to do anything and in fact don't have the dimmest clue as to what needs to be done, nor how to do that. I think dealing with the above fact is too much for people, so instead we simplify using familiar models and tropes.
- _juu5 8y agoEducation would be a good start. Guess who can decide about what we are taught? Governments.
- _Codemonkeyism 8y agoPeople know their personal largest impact is cars and meat. But personal convenience has always beaten doing the right thing.
- glhaynes 8y agoThe vast majority of people I know (Texas) couldn't live a productive life without a car. Some people certainly could but not most. Meat, though, they could definitely do without—and for most of them it'd be healthier.
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- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoStrange, I'd heard it was refined carbs and sugar giving America diabetes and heart disease. Are you saying it's meat now?
- ajmurmann 8y agoRed meat is known to increase risk of heart diseases.
- rwallace 8y agoIt's about economics. Climate change keeps being presented as something we need to make huge sacrifices to do something about, and this does not work. The unwillingness to make such sacrifices, we may find reprehensible when it comes from the rich who could easily afford it, and more sympathetic when it comes from people who are barely keeping their heads above water as it stands, and reasonably suspect they would end up in a pauper's grave and never see the future they were supposed to be defending, but whether we agree with it or not, that is people's revealed preference. So the narrative needs to stop being about sacrifice, and start being about jobs. The immense task of converting the world to renewable energy, has the potential to create millions upon millions of badly-needed jobs. It needs to start being sold that way.
- thegrasshopper 8y ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17705018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17705018
- i6mi6 8y agoI don't know, I've seen what temperatures have been in the past decade in Europe and I can tell that it doesn't get any hotter, in fact, it could be getting colder. Can anyone show some statistics supporting the global warming? Edit: I know how to google myself but I am asking people to get a little more involved and not lay out facts out of memory. I thought I could make a good discussion on the topic but kept getting hostility for some reason.
- mapleoin 8y agohttps://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/global-and-european-temperature-8/assessment https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/global-an... > According to different observational records of global average annual near-surface (land and ocean) temperature, the last decade (2008–2017) was 0.89 °C to 0.93 °C warmer than the pre-industrial average, which makes it the warmest decade on record. Of the 17 warmest years on record, 16 have occurred since 2000. The year 2017 was one of the world’s three warmest years on record together with the years 2016 and 2015. > The average annual temperature for the European land area for the last decade (2008–2017) was between 1.6 °C and 1.7 °C above the pre-industrial level, which makes it the warmest decade on record. In Europe, 2017 was colder than the previous 3 years.
- i6mi6 8y agoBut 100-200 years is very little time for comparison isn't it? Is there any presumed data on what it was before that?
- rntz 8y ago> "hothouse" temperatures could stabilize 4°C to 5°C (39 to 41 Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial levels. A change of 4-5°C is a change of 7-9 degrees Fahrenheit, not 39-41.
- 0xfaded 8y agoLol, looks like the Google result of "convert 4C to Fahrenheit". In the authors defence, it isn't their fault the Americans still use Fahrenheit.
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- _Codemonkeyism 8y agoWasn't 100 Fahrenheit the temperature of a chicken on tuesday in the sunshine? Can't quite remember how that scale was created.
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoI always heard it was the rectal temperature of a cow, but that's not what wikipedia tells me, so someone probably made that up. One advantage of the Fahrenheit scale is that the range from 0 to 100 roughly corresponds to temperatures people normally deal with.
- 0xfaded 8y agoThe second point is 96, human body temperature.
- Eurongreyjoy 8y agoAfter moving to Europe I am completely on board with the simplicity of the metric system, however I do prefer the Fahrenheit scale for exactly the reason you described above. A human will face winter weather conditions from 0-32F which converts to negative values on the Celsius scale (not practical). On the other end of the spectrum for summer time conditions, there is a wider range of values to ascribe to changes in temperature from 60F-100F or approx 16-38C.
- m_mueller 8y agoI'm worried that this could be just 'the tip of the iceberg' [1]. I have a suspicion that even J. Hansen is still underestimating the issue. Just looking at [2] the variability of current estimates of stored methane is enormous - going from 10E2 to 5x10E4 Gigatonnes! Methane does greenhouse forcing 20-25x as strong as CO2 over 100 years, or as much as ~160x if you only count 10 years. Depending on how fast methane gets released this really matters - if the released methane triggers more methane to come out through warming we may be in big trouble, even without burning all coal, oil and gas reserves currently known. Further reading concerning methane: [3], [4]. Reason why dismissing this using PETM boundary is probably invalid: There was with high certainty less methane around since PETM didn't immediately follow a cold high-storage period, solar energy was also weaker, and most importantly, PETM was caused by methane alone, not a combination of fossil fuel burning in addition to methane [5]. Just to clarify: If we get the effects of PETM alone, this means around +8C global average on top of what we're doing. But from what I'm reading, PETM effects are not the whole story as pointed out above. Not that it really matters, +10-12C global average is almost certainly a global killer alone (except bacteria), it's just that I don't think it would stabilise there, it would go on to pressure cook earth's surface until absolutely nothing is left. This stuff has me worried by far the most, especially for my now 2yo son. [1] https://www.kairoscanada.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/PBP29-ArcticIce.pdf https://www.kairoscanada.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/PBP2... [2] http://oceanrep.geomar.de/30683/1/GasHydrates_Vol1_screen.pdf http://oceanrep.geomar.de/30683/1/GasHydrates_Vol1_screen.pd... [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021830136X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021... [4] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/327/5970/1246 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/327/5970/1246 [5] http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exaggerations.pdf http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exagger...
- fallingfrog 8y agoThis is indeed worrisome, but the evidence I've heard suggests that it won't be as bad as +12C. Also the Earth was at +14C with respect to today at it's hottest point during the PETM, which was very bad for the earth, but life survived. The earth will one day reach a true runaway greenhouse when the sun brightens by 10% in about 1.1 billion years. But according to J. Hansen in 2013 a complete greenhouse runaway can't happen unless the high temperatures are maintained for several million years, long enough for all the oceans to evaporate, and our own forcing will only(!) last a few tens of thousands. So my understanding is that we won't cause all life to go extinct, if that makes you feel any better.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoI have been hearing this since the mid 1980s. I wouldn't have heard of it before, because before then scientists were telling us that the climate was going to get a lot cooler...
- fallingfrog 8y agoThe "global cooling" thing is just throwing sand in our eyes- and you know it. Everything you've heard about global warming has been true the whole time, and you haven't been listening. I keep trying to wrap my head around the worldview of someone whose commitment to ideology is so powerful that they are willing to condemn their grandchildren to such suffering. It has to be some kind of religious thing.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoEveryone who said during the 1970s that we should be afraid of global cooling are the same people who now demand that we believe them on global warming. Oceanic thermocline: explain the data we have and the mathematical model we have to cover this phenomenon. You can't, because you don't actually know. You just blindly believe it, don't you?
- fallingfrog 8y agoThere is a gigantic mountain of evidence in favor of climate change, and you're listening to industry propaganda produced by the very people who have a clear monetary interest in doing nothing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#/media/File:PeerReviewedPapersComparingGlobalWarmingAndCoolingIn1970s.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#/media/File:Pee... https://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm https://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970...
- patrickg_zill 8y ago"Oceanic thermocline" never fails to trigger people. As soon as they actually do in fact research it, they realize that: a) we don't have the data b) we don't have an accurate/sane mathematical model for it. We can't use satellites to measure anything other than surface temperature of the ocean; it would require an actual, physically located sensor network spread throughout the oceans of the world to get this information. Which we don't have now and never had in the past...
- jihadjihad 8y agoI really wish the more popular phrase were "global climate change" rather than "global warming." The delta in the mean might not appear to be huge (a few degrees C over a span of a century or two, perhaps), but the key concept is the variance or volatility of climate patterns. As man-made climate change progresses, the average recorded temperature will likely continue to climb, sure--but the change in variance is far more significant in terms of the extreme events that will occur with increasing regularity.
- gonzo41 8y agoYou make a really good point. I keep seeing once in a hundred year weather events happening every other year now.
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- blondie9x 8y agoWe all know by now CO2 and CH4 leads to a warmer planet. We also know what's driving greenhouse gas levels to rise across Earth. Contributors are deforestation, intensive animal farming, and primarily the combustion of carbon fossil fuels like coal, tar sands, oil, natural gas etc. But here is the underlying problem, despite us knowing how bad things are, (97+% of scientists who study this field agree we are causing the planet's climate to shift away from the temperate climate we thrived in) not enough is being done at present to truly solve the problem. What really is disheartening and what no one in the media and government is talking about is how in 2015 CO2 levels rose by the largest amount in human recorded history. 3.05 PPM http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html We are being lied to and mislead by our governments that uniform actions are being performed to save the planet for the future of man. Vested interests in the fossil fuel industry continue to drive climate change. Yes, solar energy is starting to become incredibly efficient but not enough of it is coming online in proportion to fossil fuel burning that persists and is also installed annually. If we do not rally against it, our ability to live on this planet is at stake. The lives of our posterity are also at risk because of the burning. It will not be until we take extreme actions not on a country level but as humanity together that we will slow the burning and save ourselves. What are these actions you might ask that will actually be effective? These can range from banning fossil fuels entirely, global carbon pricing system, banning deforestation, changing human diets, extreme uniform investment in renewable energy and potentially fourth generation nuclear reactors, more funding for developing nations to install alternative energy sources, and to shift the transportation grid towards sustainability.
- spuz 8y agoWhat lies do you think we're being told exactly? The talks of solutions have been going on for decades it's just very hard to get different governments to agree to anything even if it's non binding. Have a look at the Paris agreement and the history of failed agreements that preceded it for more information.
- WhompingWindows 8y agoI believe the parent comment is referring to the lip service that politicians and business-people pay to decarbonizing, while they do very little in actuality to achieve those goals. For instance, the USA talked of the clean power plan and used it as leverage for the Paris Accords. And yet, that policy never went into effect: it was blocked by the courts and then abandoned by the current administration.
- chatnati 8y agoHeat isn't high enough yet. Average global temperature is 14C degrees. Cambrian Expansion data shows it was 22C degrees. There is now sufficient data to show concrete as being the #1 CO2 producer, much greater than manufacturing, or the meat industry. As shown by the rock mark on the Isle of the Dead and sea data, the ocean level rose during a period of sustained cooling (doesn't make logical sense, does it?). We are very far away from actually predicting weather. If Goldman Sachs cannot predict winners of the 2018 FIFA World Cup and they have the best statisticians and modelers that money can buy, why can't we have accurate weather reports?