7 ms·

Why Half a Degree of Global Warming Is a Big Deal

46 points by murph37 8y ago

at-fates-hands 8y ago
Dire consequences of Global Warming have been forecast since the first earth day in 1970: "Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s." — Paul Ehrlich "The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age." — Kenneth Watt The fact is, we've had 70+ temperature swings in the last 4,500 years, including 2 since 1970. It's odd we talk about catastrophic things happening when the earth warms, but what about the dire consequences when it starts to cool again? A Swelling Volume Of Scientific Papers Now Forecasting Global Cooling In The Coming Decades: http://notrickszone.com/2017/04/10/a-swelling-volume-of-scientific-papers-now-forecasting-global-cooling-in-the-coming-decades/ http://notrickszone.com/2017/04/10/a-swelling-volume-of-scie...
- skh 8y ago
  The evidence is that the Earth is warming so it's not odd that there aren't any dire warnings about it cooling. When it cools suddenly then I'm certain there would be dire warnings. It seems to me that the dire consequences are about the ability of nations to deal with relatively sudden changes. We are no longer at the point where populations can shift easily on a grand scale. Four thousand years ago it was much easier for humanity to shift production of food and seek out new places to live. Today not so much. This is especially so since almost no one knows how to live off the land anymore and the even if we did know this it isn't possible due to the massive decline in animal populations and habitat.
  - njarboe 8y ago
    "We are no longer at the point where populations can shift easily on a grand scale." We can more easily now than ever before and don't need to be near food. We have trucks for that. Four thousand years ago, just a two year drought and 1/3 of your village would die of starvation. Few people could move anywhere. Pastoral peoples moved around but during times of scare resources, like a drought, multiple groups moving to the last remaining pasture would result in a battle with mass killing.
    - stephengillie 8y ago
      Are you saying that when the going got tough, the tough got going?
    - skh 8y ago
      If Bangladesh becomes uninhabitable those 150 million or so people will need to move. Four thousand years ago there weren't anywhere near that number of people in the area that is now called Bangladesh. The scale has drastically changed. It's easier for an individual to move now than in the past. This is clear. But if an entire high population region becomes uninhabitable in a short period of time then it's difficult for that population to shift. The neighboring countries generally won't want to accept the incoming people and often times can't sustain the incoming population. Look at the problems with a few million people suddenly going to Europe has caused. Imagine if it were 150 million people trying to get into Europe.
      - njarboe 8y ago
        Like you mentioned, the thing that causes millions of people needing to move in a short timescale these days is caused by humans, ie. wars. Even if sea-level rise is as bad as the most dire predictions and the Bangladeshis can't find a way to build some dikes, it will still take many multiple decades for parts of Bangladesh to become "uninhabitable".
        skh 8y ago
        I mentioned relatively short time scales. I'm thinking multi decade time scales and not something like wars. If the predictions of sea level rise are correct then the problem won't be to just one region. It will be world wide and the resulting migrations/chaos will be catastrophic for nations and people. I was just giving an example of how the scale has changed now versus 5000 years ago.
- good_gnu 8y ago
  What you see here is a common argumentative tactic by climate change deniers: "Scientists have been hysterical about global cooling in the past and that has not happened. Therefore claims about climate change in general are not to be believed." I refer you to the wikipedia article on global cooling for reference. Especially take into consideration the line chart at the very top. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling With regards to the Paul Ehrlich quote I would add that he is not actually talking about climate change at all but overpopulation.
  - blancheneige 8y ago
    so what you are saying is that in hindsight it's easier to see which side was making exaggerated claims?
    - wlll 8y ago
      That's not what I read into the response at all. What good_gnu did was point out the logical fallacy commonly used by climate change deniers: "something is false simply because a proof or argument that someone has offered for it is invalid" (a full description http://www.csun.edu/%7Edgw61315/fallacies.html#Argumentum%20ad%20logicam http://www.csun.edu/%7Edgw61315/fallacies.html#Argumentum%20...). The number of warming and cooling studies over time would suggest to me (and this is my interpretation) that climate was a (relatively) new field back in 1970ish, people were still working out what was going on, how to study it, and what the data meant, and over time as these things have become clearer the trend towards warming has become the most arrived at interpretation. Though I'm sure there have been exaggerated claims in the past, nothing that good_gnu said leads to "what you are saying is that in hindsight it's easier to see which side was making exaggerated claims?" being an accurate summary.
  - at-fates-hands 8y ago
    > "Scientists have been hysterical about global cooling in the past and that has not happened. Therefore claims about climate change in general are not to be believed." a. Not a climate denier b. I never said anything like you are referring to. I never inferred that since its cooling, climate change shouldn't be believed. c. What I AM saying is the earth's temperature has swung in both directions in a fairly cyclical manner for thousands of years before heavy industry. The earth's temperature warmed when there weren't ANY humans on the planet. Even going back some 1.2 milion years, scientists still are not sure what caused the change: "The Mid Pleistocene Transition is a most important and enigmatic time interval in the more recent climate history of our planet," says Fischer. Earth's climate naturally varies between times of warming and periods of extreme cooling (ice ages) over thousands of years. Before the transition, the period of variation was about 41 thousand years while afterwards it became 100 thousand years. "The reason for this change is not known." https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105081228.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105081228.h... I would also add the Clean Air Act has done a ton to improve the US and the amount of pollution they contribute. https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/progress-cleaning-air-and-improving-peoples-health#pollution https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/progress-cleaning... We as a country can do a lot, but what about other developing countries? What are they doing to help reduce pollution and greehouse gases? If we're doing all we can, and other countries aren't following suit, then our gains become minimal and the march towards this catastrophe will continue, unabated.
- blancheneige 8y ago
  it's about preemptively conditioning the west into accepting the mass arrival of "climate refugees" that's going to happen no matter what.
  - wlll 8y ago
    > it's about preemptively conditioning the west Who is doing this pre-conditioning? > into accepting the mass arrival of "climate refugees" that's going to happen no matter what. So, either climate change exists, and this will cause refugees (as will anything that causes a place to become unsupporting of human life, war, famine etc. etc.) Or, climate change doesn't exist, or does but is exaggerated, and the "climate refugees" are going to be forced on us by some unmentioned power with climate change being used as the excuse. If do belive in climate change but don't particularly like immigrants then your only real option is to prevent climate change. People will leave their homes when the place they live becomes unlivable (for instance, in the case of Bangladesh, underwater). This is a hard fact, it's not something unique to these people, it's what everyone would do. Only the insane would stay behind railing against the encroaching ocean. If you don't believe in climate change (despite the overwhelming evidence that it exists) then you're left with some sort of conspiracy theory that refugees are somehow being sent to punish you and climate change is being used as an excuse. This is fantasy, and there's not much that can be done to help you in this situation because what you're taking part in at this point is a religious belief (the evidence points to X but you're going to believe Y).
    - candiodari 8y ago
      As pointed out before, there is no way to stop catastrophic climate change, so no action there will be effective. That's ... bullshit, according to these reports. I don't know how you can even suggest such a thing. So, same question: what about the people that realize that mass immigration will destroy the labour markets that are their livelihoods ? > conspiracy theory that refugees are somehow being sent to punish you As pointed out above, any of the many "precariously employed" people in the west are under the very real threat of their jobs getting destroyed by mass immigration. Add to that people dependent on the social support systems in their respective countries. Also it is pretty obvious that any job that will at some point come under threat from AI already is under threat from mass immigration. That's ~80% of all jobs according to some studies. We need to find ways to fix the situation everywhere in the world, preventing immigration in the first place, if we want to have decent labour conditions. "Preventing climate change" is not that. Closing borders, while unpopular, is a solution, in that it incentivizes the problematic countries' populations to fix their governments.
- wlll 8y ago
  As someone else pointed out, "the evidence is that the earth is warming": https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/monitoring/climate/surface-temperature https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/monitoring/climate/sur... That scientists predict and mispredict is nothing new, but the overwhelming evidence now is that climate change is here, and it's damaging. If almost all climate change scientists are in fact wrong, but we decide that's a (slim) risk we can't afford to take and we do something about it then the worst that can happen is we perhaps slow down the economy of the world (which given that the economy, at least to my reading, is a self-referential pyramid scheme, doesn't really matter that much). There's even the possibility later if we discover that climate change is just a natural fluctuation that we don't have any impact on of just reverting to our old behaviour. If we decide that climate scientists are wrong, and do nothing about it, but it turns out they were right, then the worst that can happen is that there is a huge amount of suffering, strife, and ultimately death. Also, as far as I can tell from some limited research, "no tricks zone" seems to be pretty biased, and fairly easily debunked.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  > Paul Ehrlich My understanding is that Ehrlich's prediction had little or nothing to do with climate change. He was making his statements based primarily on population growth. > Kenneth Watt I can't find any evidence, outside of highly-biased sites, that this was anything more than an isolated case of one ecologist postulating on the possible forms of climate change.
cal97g 8y ago
There is no proof of carbon dioxide causing warming - only a correlation which could very easily be linked with other factors. For example, we're currently leaving an ice age - could this be the reason the ice is melting?
hakcermani 8y ago
IMHO its high time for a Global Warming temp scale (Dear Al Gore, I said it first !) People don't get it when the degree shift needed is so tiny for such catastrophic effects. We need to magnify it by 100 or maybe even a 1000! So 2 degrees temp change is like GW200. Maybe the message will hit home better ?
- drewrv 8y ago
  A metric I've thought about is, how much extra energy is circulating in earths systems per degree of temp change? 2 degrees does not sound like a lot but when you think of how vast the earth is that's a lot of extra energy in the oceans and atmosphere. It would be an interesting metric to track.
  - lozenge 8y ago
    One website tracked Hiroshima bombs worth of heat (4 per second). It was perhaps tasteless.
- mettamage 8y ago
  I would say it does. Research shows that people are better able to do statistical calculations with whole numbers. So instead of 10.453% it should be 10453 people (can't find the source unfortunately). If that's a thing, then I think your comment is also a thing.
douglaswlance 8y ago
Ok. The Earth is warming and all this bad stuff will happen. Why is government the solution? The USA withdrew from the Paris Accord and also had the biggest diminishment of greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 of all Accord members. We did so by market forces which push for efficiency. The way to solve global warming is to support market forces pushing for efficiency, not government force that supports inefficiency.
- m_eiman 8y ago
  So a global, high carbon dioxide tax would be a perfect way to solve this, you say? That’d give markets incentive to do their thing.
  - douglaswlance 8y ago
    It'd be impossible to implement and verify. Countries would cheat. It'd be better to take all associated costs with implementing and verifying such a scheme, and give them out as grants to entrepreneurs creating electric vehicles, clean energy, greenhouse-neutral farming, etc.
- saudioger 8y ago
  Individuals don't care about efficiency, they care about price. This is partially why the government had to step in to create labor laws. Unless they're directly impacted by it right now, the average consumer does not care. The American meat industry is downright terrible in some cases, and people are buying more meat than ever. If you halved the price of the iPhone by introducing slave labor in some faraway land, you would still sell a boatload of iPhones. This is one of the ways that I believe government should intervene because individuals are very bad at deciding based on long-term impacts.
  - douglaswlance 8y ago
    Individuals do care about efficiency, because they care about paying less in their electric bill. How did the USA lower emissions the most in 2017 while also withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord? Because efficiency is increasing across the board and people are buying more efficient devices. If you produced lab-grown meat that was undistinguishable and utilized energy more efficiently, then it would be less expensive and people would buy it.
calebh 8y ago
News agencies need to stop reporting global warming temperatures in Celsius for US audiences. A single Fahrenheit degree is 5/9 of a Celsius degree! US audiences do not have an intuition about Celsius, so giving changes in that unit of measurement is worthless.
- singularity2001 8y ago
  they should use Kelvin, it's neutral
  - QML 8y ago
    But Celsius and Kelvin have the same unit of measure; they’re only offsetted by 273 degrees.
    - singularity2001 8y ago
      yes I tried to sneak in °C via °K :)

46 points by murph37 8y ago

Dire consequences of Global Warming have been forecast since the first earth day in 1970: "Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s." — Paul Ehrlich "The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age." — Kenneth Watt The fact is, we've had 70+ temperature swings in the last 4,500 years, including 2 since 1970. It's odd we talk about catastrophic things happening when the earth warms, but what about the dire consequences when it starts to cool again? A Swelling Volume Of Scientific Papers Now Forecasting Global Cooling In The Coming Decades: http://notrickszone.com/2017/04/10/a-swelling-volume-of-scientific-papers-now-forecasting-global-cooling-in-the-coming-decades/ http://notrickszone.com/2017/04/10/a-swelling-volume-of-scie...

skh 8y ago
The evidence is that the Earth is warming so it's not odd that there aren't any dire warnings about it cooling. When it cools suddenly then I'm certain there would be dire warnings. It seems to me that the dire consequences are about the ability of nations to deal with relatively sudden changes. We are no longer at the point where populations can shift easily on a grand scale. Four thousand years ago it was much easier for humanity to shift production of food and seek out new places to live. Today not so much. This is especially so since almost no one knows how to live off the land anymore and the even if we did know this it isn't possible due to the massive decline in animal populations and habitat.
- njarboe 8y ago
  "We are no longer at the point where populations can shift easily on a grand scale." We can more easily now than ever before and don't need to be near food. We have trucks for that. Four thousand years ago, just a two year drought and 1/3 of your village would die of starvation. Few people could move anywhere. Pastoral peoples moved around but during times of scare resources, like a drought, multiple groups moving to the last remaining pasture would result in a battle with mass killing.
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    Are you saying that when the going got tough, the tough got going?
  - skh 8y ago
    If Bangladesh becomes uninhabitable those 150 million or so people will need to move. Four thousand years ago there weren't anywhere near that number of people in the area that is now called Bangladesh. The scale has drastically changed. It's easier for an individual to move now than in the past. This is clear. But if an entire high population region becomes uninhabitable in a short period of time then it's difficult for that population to shift. The neighboring countries generally won't want to accept the incoming people and often times can't sustain the incoming population. Look at the problems with a few million people suddenly going to Europe has caused. Imagine if it were 150 million people trying to get into Europe.
    - njarboe 8y ago
      Like you mentioned, the thing that causes millions of people needing to move in a short timescale these days is caused by humans, ie. wars. Even if sea-level rise is as bad as the most dire predictions and the Bangladeshis can't find a way to build some dikes, it will still take many multiple decades for parts of Bangladesh to become "uninhabitable".
      - skh 8y ago
        I mentioned relatively short time scales. I'm thinking multi decade time scales and not something like wars. If the predictions of sea level rise are correct then the problem won't be to just one region. It will be world wide and the resulting migrations/chaos will be catastrophic for nations and people. I was just giving an example of how the scale has changed now versus 5000 years ago.
good_gnu 8y ago
What you see here is a common argumentative tactic by climate change deniers: "Scientists have been hysterical about global cooling in the past and that has not happened. Therefore claims about climate change in general are not to be believed." I refer you to the wikipedia article on global cooling for reference. Especially take into consideration the line chart at the very top. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling With regards to the Paul Ehrlich quote I would add that he is not actually talking about climate change at all but overpopulation.
- blancheneige 8y ago
  so what you are saying is that in hindsight it's easier to see which side was making exaggerated claims?
  - wlll 8y ago
    That's not what I read into the response at all. What good_gnu did was point out the logical fallacy commonly used by climate change deniers: "something is false simply because a proof or argument that someone has offered for it is invalid" (a full description http://www.csun.edu/%7Edgw61315/fallacies.html#Argumentum%20ad%20logicam http://www.csun.edu/%7Edgw61315/fallacies.html#Argumentum%20...). The number of warming and cooling studies over time would suggest to me (and this is my interpretation) that climate was a (relatively) new field back in 1970ish, people were still working out what was going on, how to study it, and what the data meant, and over time as these things have become clearer the trend towards warming has become the most arrived at interpretation. Though I'm sure there have been exaggerated claims in the past, nothing that good_gnu said leads to "what you are saying is that in hindsight it's easier to see which side was making exaggerated claims?" being an accurate summary.
- at-fates-hands 8y ago
  > "Scientists have been hysterical about global cooling in the past and that has not happened. Therefore claims about climate change in general are not to be believed." a. Not a climate denier b. I never said anything like you are referring to. I never inferred that since its cooling, climate change shouldn't be believed. c. What I AM saying is the earth's temperature has swung in both directions in a fairly cyclical manner for thousands of years before heavy industry. The earth's temperature warmed when there weren't ANY humans on the planet. Even going back some 1.2 milion years, scientists still are not sure what caused the change: "The Mid Pleistocene Transition is a most important and enigmatic time interval in the more recent climate history of our planet," says Fischer. Earth's climate naturally varies between times of warming and periods of extreme cooling (ice ages) over thousands of years. Before the transition, the period of variation was about 41 thousand years while afterwards it became 100 thousand years. "The reason for this change is not known." https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105081228.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105081228.h... I would also add the Clean Air Act has done a ton to improve the US and the amount of pollution they contribute. https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/progress-cleaning-air-and-improving-peoples-health#pollution https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/progress-cleaning... We as a country can do a lot, but what about other developing countries? What are they doing to help reduce pollution and greehouse gases? If we're doing all we can, and other countries aren't following suit, then our gains become minimal and the march towards this catastrophe will continue, unabated.
blancheneige 8y ago
it's about preemptively conditioning the west into accepting the mass arrival of "climate refugees" that's going to happen no matter what.
- wlll 8y ago
  > it's about preemptively conditioning the west Who is doing this pre-conditioning? > into accepting the mass arrival of "climate refugees" that's going to happen no matter what. So, either climate change exists, and this will cause refugees (as will anything that causes a place to become unsupporting of human life, war, famine etc. etc.) Or, climate change doesn't exist, or does but is exaggerated, and the "climate refugees" are going to be forced on us by some unmentioned power with climate change being used as the excuse. If do belive in climate change but don't particularly like immigrants then your only real option is to prevent climate change. People will leave their homes when the place they live becomes unlivable (for instance, in the case of Bangladesh, underwater). This is a hard fact, it's not something unique to these people, it's what everyone would do. Only the insane would stay behind railing against the encroaching ocean. If you don't believe in climate change (despite the overwhelming evidence that it exists) then you're left with some sort of conspiracy theory that refugees are somehow being sent to punish you and climate change is being used as an excuse. This is fantasy, and there's not much that can be done to help you in this situation because what you're taking part in at this point is a religious belief (the evidence points to X but you're going to believe Y).
  - candiodari 8y ago
    As pointed out before, there is no way to stop catastrophic climate change, so no action there will be effective. That's ... bullshit, according to these reports. I don't know how you can even suggest such a thing. So, same question: what about the people that realize that mass immigration will destroy the labour markets that are their livelihoods ? > conspiracy theory that refugees are somehow being sent to punish you As pointed out above, any of the many "precariously employed" people in the west are under the very real threat of their jobs getting destroyed by mass immigration. Add to that people dependent on the social support systems in their respective countries. Also it is pretty obvious that any job that will at some point come under threat from AI already is under threat from mass immigration. That's ~80% of all jobs according to some studies. We need to find ways to fix the situation everywhere in the world, preventing immigration in the first place, if we want to have decent labour conditions. "Preventing climate change" is not that. Closing borders, while unpopular, is a solution, in that it incentivizes the problematic countries' populations to fix their governments.
wlll 8y ago
As someone else pointed out, "the evidence is that the earth is warming": https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/monitoring/climate/surface-temperature https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/monitoring/climate/sur... That scientists predict and mispredict is nothing new, but the overwhelming evidence now is that climate change is here, and it's damaging. If almost all climate change scientists are in fact wrong, but we decide that's a (slim) risk we can't afford to take and we do something about it then the worst that can happen is we perhaps slow down the economy of the world (which given that the economy, at least to my reading, is a self-referential pyramid scheme, doesn't really matter that much). There's even the possibility later if we discover that climate change is just a natural fluctuation that we don't have any impact on of just reverting to our old behaviour. If we decide that climate scientists are wrong, and do nothing about it, but it turns out they were right, then the worst that can happen is that there is a huge amount of suffering, strife, and ultimately death. Also, as far as I can tell from some limited research, "no tricks zone" seems to be pretty biased, and fairly easily debunked.
vonmoltke 8y ago
> Paul Ehrlich My understanding is that Ehrlich's prediction had little or nothing to do with climate change. He was making his statements based primarily on population growth. > Kenneth Watt I can't find any evidence, outside of highly-biased sites, that this was anything more than an isolated case of one ecologist postulating on the possible forms of climate change.

cal97g 8y ago

There is no proof of carbon dioxide causing warming - only a correlation which could very easily be linked with other factors. For example, we're currently leaving an ice age - could this be the reason the ice is melting?

hakcermani 8y ago

IMHO its high time for a Global Warming temp scale (Dear Al Gore, I said it first !) People don't get it when the degree shift needed is so tiny for such catastrophic effects. We need to magnify it by 100 or maybe even a 1000! So 2 degrees temp change is like GW200. Maybe the message will hit home better ?

drewrv 8y ago
A metric I've thought about is, how much extra energy is circulating in earths systems per degree of temp change? 2 degrees does not sound like a lot but when you think of how vast the earth is that's a lot of extra energy in the oceans and atmosphere. It would be an interesting metric to track.
- lozenge 8y ago
  One website tracked Hiroshima bombs worth of heat (4 per second). It was perhaps tasteless.
mettamage 8y ago
I would say it does. Research shows that people are better able to do statistical calculations with whole numbers. So instead of 10.453% it should be 10453 people (can't find the source unfortunately). If that's a thing, then I think your comment is also a thing.

douglaswlance 8y ago

Ok. The Earth is warming and all this bad stuff will happen. Why is government the solution? The USA withdrew from the Paris Accord and also had the biggest diminishment of greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 of all Accord members. We did so by market forces which push for efficiency. The way to solve global warming is to support market forces pushing for efficiency, not government force that supports inefficiency.

m_eiman 8y ago
So a global, high carbon dioxide tax would be a perfect way to solve this, you say? That’d give markets incentive to do their thing.
- douglaswlance 8y ago
  It'd be impossible to implement and verify. Countries would cheat. It'd be better to take all associated costs with implementing and verifying such a scheme, and give them out as grants to entrepreneurs creating electric vehicles, clean energy, greenhouse-neutral farming, etc.
saudioger 8y ago
Individuals don't care about efficiency, they care about price. This is partially why the government had to step in to create labor laws. Unless they're directly impacted by it right now, the average consumer does not care. The American meat industry is downright terrible in some cases, and people are buying more meat than ever. If you halved the price of the iPhone by introducing slave labor in some faraway land, you would still sell a boatload of iPhones. This is one of the ways that I believe government should intervene because individuals are very bad at deciding based on long-term impacts.
- douglaswlance 8y ago
  Individuals do care about efficiency, because they care about paying less in their electric bill. How did the USA lower emissions the most in 2017 while also withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord? Because efficiency is increasing across the board and people are buying more efficient devices. If you produced lab-grown meat that was undistinguishable and utilized energy more efficiently, then it would be less expensive and people would buy it.

calebh 8y ago

News agencies need to stop reporting global warming temperatures in Celsius for US audiences. A single Fahrenheit degree is 5/9 of a Celsius degree! US audiences do not have an intuition about Celsius, so giving changes in that unit of measurement is worthless.

singularity2001 8y ago
they should use Kelvin, it's neutral
- QML 8y ago
  But Celsius and Kelvin have the same unit of measure; they’re only offsetted by 273 degrees.
  - singularity2001 8y ago
    yes I tried to sneak in °C via °K :)