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Climate change is real, we are warming up and should/can solve this, but I'm skeptical that apocalyptic narratives help the cause. "A senior U.N. environmental

Climate change is real, we are warming up and should/can solve this, but I'm skeptical that apocalyptic narratives help the cause. "A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000." https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

adventured 5y ago
> we are warming up and should/can solve this Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent. No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point. It's time for the "we can save the world" people to stop leading everyone on, unless they can present facts and real scenarios that back up their claims (hint: they can't and never do). You'll notice that technologically we didn't come remotely close to doing anything in the past decade that will enable us to move as fast as we'd have to. Where are the great energy & resource breakthroughs? They don't exist and by the numbers we needed them yesterday. The world will add 2 billion people in the next ~30 years. Nearly all of those births will be in the developing world where emissions are going to continue to skyrocket. Solar, wind and electric vehicles aren't going to solve that problem. The emissions that the US + EU cut, India will add. China will add an entire US-worth of emissions in just the next 10-15 years. If you had a magic wand and could put the US to zero emissions tomorrow morning it wouldn't make a bit of lasting difference to the situation. This single fact of reality makes all the "we can save the world" arguments false. And that's merely two countries. Then you have parts of Latin America, Africa and developing Asia, where emissions and population are going to continue to rise substantially. It seems increasingly clear that the so called experts claiming this can be stopped know they're lying, and they keep lying anyway. What's their plan for immediately stopping all emissions increases across all of the developing world? There is no such plan, they have no intention of implementing or calling for such a plan. Thus, they're lying. There is no scenario where anybody can get the math to work out on what's happening. And you'll find that nobody even attempts to, they just issue empty statements about how we need to take urgent action and then we can save the world. They'll never present you the real scenarios for the actions necessary to immediately turn back all emissions increases. It's fraudulent intellectually, it takes a small amount of time to analyze the context and know that.
- adrianN 5y ago
  It's really just a matter of money. Wind and solar are enough to produce energy; add in nuclear if you like. We also know how to make Hydrogen and Methane to store large amounts of energy over long time periods, so storage is not a technical problem either. It's just very expensive right now. WW2 was a bigger manufacturing challenge that what we would need to do to become carbon neutral. There are several studies with roadmaps to net zero emissions published. They tend to be very long and technical, so they don't get much media attention.
- gmadsen 5y ago
  you aren't presenting any data. I don't have the faintest idea what you mean by "thats just math". You say so confidently it can't be solved, which I'm going to infer you mean impossible and not just hard. We could without a doubt drastically reduce co2 emmissions to near zero by switching to nuclear, and paying for nuclear plants in developing countries, banning gas vehicles. Require any current and needed hydro carbon power plants to implement carbon capture. That is hard, very hard. Might start a war. But it is not impossible like you are stating.
- omegaworks 5y ago
  Climate nihilism is the next stage of climate denial. We CAN do much to manage growth and encourage sustainable development. Wealthy western nations need to concretely embrace technology transfer and infrastructure investment. As nations develop their infant mortality decreases, people naturally invest in the children that they have and their birthrates decline to replacement level. Already we're seeing a difference in how technology infrastructure has been distributed in developing countries. People are coming to depend upon their cellular phone and wireless data connections to be more reliable than their electricity infrastructure.
- CuriousSkeptic 5y ago
  Here is a plan from The International Energy Agency https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050 https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050 Edit: One interesting facet is that it’s adding an extra 0.4 percentage point a year to annual global GDP growth, which is encouraging On the other hand annual per capita income from oil and natural gas in producer economies falls by about 75%, which sounds like something that can cause political issues
the8472 5y ago
Consider island nations.
kzrdude 5y ago
What's wrong with that statement? It's very likely to come true. What I don't understand about your link is how AP can serve a new story without a timestamp.
- fotta 5y ago
  I don't even see a headline....weird.
- lwb 5y ago
  The year 2000 has already past.
  - NLips 5y ago
    The statement isn’t that countries will go by 2000; it’s that we have until 2000 to do something about temperature rises which will eventually lead to countries going.
    - lwb 5y ago
      Then the statement is worthless! If any country is every covered in water at any point in the earth's future then it can be proved "correct". The negative is not even true -- no one can guarantee that no countries will ever be covered in water at any point in the future, even if we had presumably gotten the rising temperatures "under control" twenty years ago.
  - foota 5y ago
    It didn't say in the year 2000 islands would be covered, but that if the trend weren't reversed by then that they would be.
  - Mc_Big_G 5y ago
    You're misunderstanding the quote. It doesn't say "...entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth BY THE YEAR 2000" It says "...if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."
deleted 5y ago
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nradov 5y ago
That could be true for a few small Pacific island nations like Vanuatu. At the high end of predicted sea level rise they would be left with very little habitable land. Even if the land is above mean high tide, every little storm will wash over everything.
deleted 5y ago
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ridicter 5y ago
The highest point of the maldives is 7ft above sea level. They are migrating en masse to neighboring countries. Bangladesh, similarly, is a very low lying nation without the capital to build seawalls and other protections (as the Netherlands can).
- flavius29663 5y ago
  so far the coral atols are growing in tandem with the sea level, so sea level rise cannot be the reason for people there leaving. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/how-to-face-a-rising-sea-maldives-bets-on-artificial-islands-76501 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/how-to-fa...
  - monocasa 5y ago
    The existing infrastructure doesn't grow higher, and the increased climate variability means much more floods.
    - flavius29663 5y ago
      infrastructure doesn't grow higher, but the islands grow larger, so existing infrastructure shouldn't have that much risk
      - monocasa 5y ago
        That's not how sea levels work.
- yorwba 5y ago
  Bangladesh had a GDP per capita of $1855 in 2019, higher than the Netherlands' $1835 in 1966 (measured in current US dollars) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=NL-BD https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... Naively using GDP per capita as a measure of the average level of technology people can afford, this suggests that Bangladesh should be able to employ land reclamation measures similar to the Netherlands in the 1960s, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevopolder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevopolder There might be other considerations (such as differing geography) that make this impracticable, however.
notJim 5y ago
It kind of seems like this article is saying that if we (in 1989) slow global warming by the year 2000, the worst effects of sea level rise will not happen. It's not saying that those effects will happen in the year 2000. My understanding in 2021 is that much of that stuff is already happening, since we obviously didn't halt warming. And that it's also too late to prevent more of it from happening, because there is a lag time between prevention measures happening, and having an effect. We are past the point where just reducing emissions will be enough, and instead will need to also harden the world against inevitable effects of climate change. This is even harder and more expensive than it would have been if we had stopped emitting earlier.
- Retric 5y ago
  We greatly slowed down CO2 emissions growth from worst case predictions. Both from alternative energy and vastly increased efficiency. Net emissions just keep stacking, but if you compare total emissions today with past predictions they simply don’t line up with 2021.
  - bosie 5y ago
    Worldwide? What I found googling now indicates the US has been stable and worldwide we went up by a factor of 7 since 1950. Also, efficiency doesn't matter if it gets outweighed by consumption/usage.
    - TchoBeer 5y ago
      It does if we're talking about how we've managed to stay below predicted levels.
    - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
      Surely partially due to outsourcing manufacturing to outside the US/western world, and partially due to the rising living standards of the rest of the world. Yeah consumption needs to be slowed down. Even dumb things like those Bird scooters littering cities...
supercanuck 5y ago
Who cares whether you are skeptical? It is happening. "How it started" (From your Article) Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. : "How it's Going" A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/climate/bangladesh-floods.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/climate/bangladesh-floods...
FooHentai 5y ago
No, probably not. But then what's the alternative? The prediction is/was accurate, the error is in the kind of apocalyptic outcome it brings to mind. Reality is almost always far more boring. Silence doesn't seem helpful either, nor does being more vague about consequences. Sea level rise looks more like king tides periodically destroying coastal occupations until it's uninsurable and everyone moves away. Poisioned aquifers resulting in no viable drinking water source and again, everyone leaves. Coastal erosion intensified means small islands with rich histories become nothing more than a sandbar over the course of decades, and sustains no population as it did before. Chaotic weather looks like wildfires, tornados, and droughts 10, 20, 50% more frequent in their occurrence. But not a new phenomenon. Shit years for various crops become more common than good years because you're not getting enough sun, false springs and shock frosts destroy fruitings, yields are lower across the board. Prices go up. Buying tomatos peak season costs as much as is once did off-season. Probably the biggest driver of inaction here is that what comes to mind is sudden shocks, yet the truth is more like a slow strangle. The urgency is just as valid if you take the long view, but it's easier to stick with the status quo when it's just the gradual discomfort of a belt tightening and not a gun pointed at your head. Boiled frogs and all that.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  There's another important aspect to chaos. As you increase the energy in the system, which this is, you're also increasing the range over which phenomena can happen. You cite 'tornadoes 10, 20, 50% more frequent' and you're not wrong, but it's very important to understand we're also looking at tornadoes and droughts and hurricanes (events tied to the behavior of the chaotic system of the climate) two, five, ten times more INTENSE than we're used to. Chaos does this. The wildest outliers are tied to how much energy is in the system. They may be no more common than before, but the increased energy and increased chaos can produce wilder variances from the norm. With regard to specifically destructive events like tornadoes, hurricanes, storm flooding and so on, this is way more dramatic than sea level rise. Nothing we can do, even with nuclear weapons, is as powerful as what weather can do with the energy in that chaotic system… because it's way, way bigger than anything we have at our command. The truth also brings sudden shocks. We've just not quite wrapped our head around where those are coming from, and the frequency of 'em is probably no more common than usual, but the potential intensity of these events is ramping up with the same slow build you mention. We just don't see it until it hits. One example: I think it's very likely there are industrialized cities that would not stand against hyper-weather of this nature. We're not used to the idea of tornadoes and hurricanes ripping down tall buildings, but we will live to see the theoretical peak energy (the ten or hundred-year storm) go beyond what our cities are designed to withstand. When that happens, we suddenly have areas where ALL the skyscrapers were toppled, on a weather-event scale rather than a terrorist-act scale.
jonplackett 5y ago
What is the definition of ‘watershed’ in this report?
ARandomerDude 5y ago
(June 29, 1989)
3131529 5y ago
But that's what's happening. We take people space away. And primarily people who did not produce the co2 Globalization brought us also much closer over all. I saw a view documentary about it and those people are aware why it happens. While we did a lot of fixing medicine and food for them, climate change is what they are paying for and they didn't knew but we did for a long time now.
e17 5y ago
2/3rds of Bangladesh is <5m above sea level. If that much of the country disappeared, including Dhaka and Chittagong, you could well say they don't have a country any more.
deleted 5y ago
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blacksmith_tb 5y ago
Well, that could be true of the Maldives[1] (which would be tragic, don't get me wrong) but clearly even flooding lots of major coastal cities wouldn't wipe most countries off the map - but it'd still be huge problem. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change_on_island_nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change_on_i...
kyleblarson 5y ago
Well this is the same UN that elected Saudia Arabia to the Womens' Rights Council.
JoshTko 5y ago
It's an accurate narrative. The problem is that not enough people understand how dire the situation is.
- jfengel 5y ago
  It's such a heads-I-lose tails-you-win situation. If I talk about extreme cases I'm accused of alarmism. If I talk about nearly-certain cases that fall short of extinction, I'm told it's not important.
- throwkeep 5y ago
  I'd say the problem is not enough people understand what the solutions are. Those who push the apocalyptic narrative included, as they tend to be against nuclear energy (a clean, safe, compact, 24/7 source) and even shut down existing plants. Which have been getting replaced by coal!!
missedthecue 5y ago
It reminds me of the over-population warnings of the 1970s, where prominent scientists and politicians warned that mass starvation was right around the corner. This constant doom and gloom at an extreme level seems to cause fatigue and apathy.
- willmadden 5y ago
  That's exactly what it is. The "science" behind the climate change narrative is sponsored by groups that want to implement a global carbon tax, or any other justification they can think of to create a one-world government. It's exactly the same BS as the COVID manipulation we've endured since 2020. Water vapor is a bigger contributor to the greenhouse effect than CO2 by three orders of magnitude. The current "models" do not accurately reflect the sun or water on earth. The fatigue and apathy is because the predictions has been serially wrong. So much so they had to rebrand "global warming" to "climate change". Normally intelligent people have let their hubris make them victims to globalist propaganda. It's disturbing to see how many people not only fall for it but parrot their programming ad nauseam and attack dissenters pointing out raw fact (like that unadulterated satellite temperate data shows the earth's temperature as relatively flat for the last 20 years, or that the 1930's were warmer than temperatures today). The earth will be cooler in 10 years, not warmer. We're heading into a grand solar minimum. Wait and see.
  - gspr 5y ago
    Shh. Show the calculations that back this insane theory up, or put a sock in it.
    - willmadden 5y ago
      https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/13/6/849/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/13/6/849/htm https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2020.1796243 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2020.1... There you go.
      - markc 5y ago
trothamel 5y ago
I'd say that this article doesn't really show even that much. According to the article itself, "This is mainly due to using an improved temperature dataset to estimate the baseline rather than sudden changes in climate indicators." This is an example of the past changing, rather than the present. I'm not sure how to react when the only change was the past got cooler - I wouldn't think that would change anything in the present or future.
- willmadden 5y ago
  I have an alternate hypothesis: the past didn't magically become cooler. The propagandists changed the historical temperature data (yet again) to sustain their narrative because it supports unrelated agendas.
  - gspr 5y ago
    Mods: I think this claim is so far from reality, and pure misinformation, that it should be deleted. Let's not pollute HN with garbage.
    - willmadden 5y ago
      Wait, so suggesting that temperature data recorded in the past was in fact accurate and shouldn't be altered to suit political narratives is far from reality? You are demanding censorship of this idea? Wow, just wow.
      - gspr 5y ago
        > Wait, so suggesting that temperature data recorded in the past was in fact accurate and shouldn't be altered to suit political narratives is far from reality? Yes. Because it didn't happen. > You are demanding censorship of this idea? No. In the same way that it's cool to hear dissenting political views at the local pub, but if a guy stands up and starts raving about the children trapped by the pedophile lizard people, I kinda want him to get kicked out so that I don't have to be associated with society-destroying lunatics like that. You're that guy. That guy isn't being subjected to "censorship of his idea". He's being kicked out of the establishment for being a moron and ruining the mood. Go write a book about your crazy ideas. Now if the government makes it illegal to publish, you can decry censorship.
fiftyfifty 5y ago
The mistake they keep making is focusing on sea level rise, as if that's the only real problem global warming could cause. Even at 1.5 degrees C higher than normal it will take years for enough ice to melt to cause significant sea level rise. Meanwhile we are already seeing apocalyptic like effects of global warming: the worst droughts and fires across multiple continents as we've seen in modern history, significant increases and severity of tropical storms, increase and severity in seasonal flooding etc. In 2020 alone both Australia and the Western US saw their worst wild fire seasons in modern history. 2020 also saw the worse Atlantic hurricane season in history: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/record-breaking-atlantic-hurricane-season-draws-to-end https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/record-breaking-atlantic-... 2020 also saw the Philippines get hit with the most powerful Cyclone at landfall in history (175 mph winds at landfall): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Goni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Goni And that was no outlier, in the last 5-6 years we've seen multiple Cyclones with winds over 175 mph, with several over 200 mph. This is definitely new territory for storms like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tropical_cyclone_records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tropical_cyclone_recor... With Covid-19 a lot of this stuff fell out of the news cycle rapidly last year, but 2020 surely marks one of the worst years in history for climate related disasters.
gmuslera 5y ago
Sea rise is not the only effect of climate change, and the gradual rise won't be as urgent as extreme weather floods and storms episodes. You will have also wet bulb temperature episodes, not all time, but more frequently and in bigger areas as time advances. And won't matter if the average temperature is not so high yet, once you get such peaks people (and maybe crops->famines) die. And last but not least, this fuels positive feedback mechanisms, like less ice reflecting sunlight, more methane released in northern regions, more frequent forest fires and so on that accelerate an already pretty bad trend. If you think it will cost a lot to try to do something about this, think how costly will be doing nothing.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Absolutely. Wet-bulb temperature episodes are exactly the sort of thing where increasing energy in the chaotic system will lead to previously unreachable spikes in the system: by increasing the ambient energy of the system X degrees, thus increasing its chaotic energy, you produce a maximum peak excursion of X*Y degrees (also accompanied by unexpectedly COLD extremes in a more irregular pattern). Even in the absence of other weather events these exaggerated peaks and dips are dangerous to life.
BLanen 5y ago
No, people like you are what prevents correct action. And the guy you're citing is still correct. We didn't reverse it before 2000. Nations will dissapear under water and general turmoil. He never said it would happen in 2000. Only that the reversal had to happen before 2000 to prevent it from happening.
blablabla123 5y ago
I think without concerted citizen backed action many people won't do anything. IMHO it's not about whether climate change is real or not but whether appropriate action is taken when it counts. And when only few people do anything that is not fair. Therefore I think the message has to be repeated over and over again in increasing volume. That said, the magnitude of climate change is probably underestimated and talking about average temperatures might also contribute to that.
DennisP 5y ago
Ok but I hope you're not saying OP's article is an apocalyptic narrative. It's a pretty mild projection given that we've already hit +1.2 degrees, and are already seeing effects from that.
willmadden 5y ago
I'll just leave this here: https://notrickszone.com/2021/05/24/paradigm-busting-new-study-affirms-co2-doesnt-drive-climate-water-clouds-do/ https://notrickszone.com/2021/05/24/paradigm-busting-new-stu...

adventured 5y ago

> we are warming up and should/can solve this Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent. No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point. It's time for the "we can save the world" people to stop leading everyone on, unless they can present facts and real scenarios that back up their claims (hint: they can't and never do). You'll notice that technologically we didn't come remotely close to doing anything in the past decade that will enable us to move as fast as we'd have to. Where are the great energy & resource breakthroughs? They don't exist and by the numbers we needed them yesterday. The world will add 2 billion people in the next ~30 years. Nearly all of those births will be in the developing world where emissions are going to continue to skyrocket. Solar, wind and electric vehicles aren't going to solve that problem. The emissions that the US + EU cut, India will add. China will add an entire US-worth of emissions in just the next 10-15 years. If you had a magic wand and could put the US to zero emissions tomorrow morning it wouldn't make a bit of lasting difference to the situation. This single fact of reality makes all the "we can save the world" arguments false. And that's merely two countries. Then you have parts of Latin America, Africa and developing Asia, where emissions and population are going to continue to rise substantially. It seems increasingly clear that the so called experts claiming this can be stopped know they're lying, and they keep lying anyway. What's their plan for immediately stopping all emissions increases across all of the developing world? There is no such plan, they have no intention of implementing or calling for such a plan. Thus, they're lying. There is no scenario where anybody can get the math to work out on what's happening. And you'll find that nobody even attempts to, they just issue empty statements about how we need to take urgent action and then we can save the world. They'll never present you the real scenarios for the actions necessary to immediately turn back all emissions increases. It's fraudulent intellectually, it takes a small amount of time to analyze the context and know that.

adrianN 5y ago
It's really just a matter of money. Wind and solar are enough to produce energy; add in nuclear if you like. We also know how to make Hydrogen and Methane to store large amounts of energy over long time periods, so storage is not a technical problem either. It's just very expensive right now. WW2 was a bigger manufacturing challenge that what we would need to do to become carbon neutral. There are several studies with roadmaps to net zero emissions published. They tend to be very long and technical, so they don't get much media attention.
gmadsen 5y ago
you aren't presenting any data. I don't have the faintest idea what you mean by "thats just math". You say so confidently it can't be solved, which I'm going to infer you mean impossible and not just hard. We could without a doubt drastically reduce co2 emmissions to near zero by switching to nuclear, and paying for nuclear plants in developing countries, banning gas vehicles. Require any current and needed hydro carbon power plants to implement carbon capture. That is hard, very hard. Might start a war. But it is not impossible like you are stating.
omegaworks 5y ago
Climate nihilism is the next stage of climate denial. We CAN do much to manage growth and encourage sustainable development. Wealthy western nations need to concretely embrace technology transfer and infrastructure investment. As nations develop their infant mortality decreases, people naturally invest in the children that they have and their birthrates decline to replacement level. Already we're seeing a difference in how technology infrastructure has been distributed in developing countries. People are coming to depend upon their cellular phone and wireless data connections to be more reliable than their electricity infrastructure.
CuriousSkeptic 5y ago
Here is a plan from The International Energy Agency https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050 https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050 Edit: One interesting facet is that it’s adding an extra 0.4 percentage point a year to annual global GDP growth, which is encouraging On the other hand annual per capita income from oil and natural gas in producer economies falls by about 75%, which sounds like something that can cause political issues

the8472 5y ago

Consider island nations.

kzrdude 5y ago

What's wrong with that statement? It's very likely to come true. What I don't understand about your link is how AP can serve a new story without a timestamp.

fotta 5y ago
I don't even see a headline....weird.
lwb 5y ago
The year 2000 has already past.
- NLips 5y ago
  The statement isn’t that countries will go by 2000; it’s that we have until 2000 to do something about temperature rises which will eventually lead to countries going.
  - lwb 5y ago
    Then the statement is worthless! If any country is every covered in water at any point in the earth's future then it can be proved "correct". The negative is not even true -- no one can guarantee that no countries will ever be covered in water at any point in the future, even if we had presumably gotten the rising temperatures "under control" twenty years ago.
- foota 5y ago
  It didn't say in the year 2000 islands would be covered, but that if the trend weren't reversed by then that they would be.
- Mc_Big_G 5y ago
  You're misunderstanding the quote. It doesn't say "...entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth BY THE YEAR 2000" It says "...if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nradov 5y ago

That could be true for a few small Pacific island nations like Vanuatu. At the high end of predicted sea level rise they would be left with very little habitable land. Even if the land is above mean high tide, every little storm will wash over everything.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ridicter 5y ago

The highest point of the maldives is 7ft above sea level. They are migrating en masse to neighboring countries. Bangladesh, similarly, is a very low lying nation without the capital to build seawalls and other protections (as the Netherlands can).

flavius29663 5y ago
so far the coral atols are growing in tandem with the sea level, so sea level rise cannot be the reason for people there leaving. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/how-to-face-a-rising-sea-maldives-bets-on-artificial-islands-76501 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/how-to-fa...
- monocasa 5y ago
  The existing infrastructure doesn't grow higher, and the increased climate variability means much more floods.
  - flavius29663 5y ago
    infrastructure doesn't grow higher, but the islands grow larger, so existing infrastructure shouldn't have that much risk
    - monocasa 5y ago
      That's not how sea levels work.
yorwba 5y ago
Bangladesh had a GDP per capita of $1855 in 2019, higher than the Netherlands' $1835 in 1966 (measured in current US dollars) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=NL-BD https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... Naively using GDP per capita as a measure of the average level of technology people can afford, this suggests that Bangladesh should be able to employ land reclamation measures similar to the Netherlands in the 1960s, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevopolder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevopolder There might be other considerations (such as differing geography) that make this impracticable, however.

notJim 5y ago

It kind of seems like this article is saying that if we (in 1989) slow global warming by the year 2000, the worst effects of sea level rise will not happen. It's not saying that those effects will happen in the year 2000. My understanding in 2021 is that much of that stuff is already happening, since we obviously didn't halt warming. And that it's also too late to prevent more of it from happening, because there is a lag time between prevention measures happening, and having an effect. We are past the point where just reducing emissions will be enough, and instead will need to also harden the world against inevitable effects of climate change. This is even harder and more expensive than it would have been if we had stopped emitting earlier.

Retric 5y ago
We greatly slowed down CO2 emissions growth from worst case predictions. Both from alternative energy and vastly increased efficiency. Net emissions just keep stacking, but if you compare total emissions today with past predictions they simply don’t line up with 2021.
- bosie 5y ago
  Worldwide? What I found googling now indicates the US has been stable and worldwide we went up by a factor of 7 since 1950. Also, efficiency doesn't matter if it gets outweighed by consumption/usage.
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    It does if we're talking about how we've managed to stay below predicted levels.
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    Surely partially due to outsourcing manufacturing to outside the US/western world, and partially due to the rising living standards of the rest of the world. Yeah consumption needs to be slowed down. Even dumb things like those Bird scooters littering cities...

supercanuck 5y ago

Who cares whether you are skeptical? It is happening. "How it started" (From your Article) Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. : "How it's Going" A Quarter of Bangladesh Is Flooded. Millions Have Lost Everything. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/climate/bangladesh-floods.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/climate/bangladesh-floods...

FooHentai 5y ago

No, probably not. But then what's the alternative? The prediction is/was accurate, the error is in the kind of apocalyptic outcome it brings to mind. Reality is almost always far more boring. Silence doesn't seem helpful either, nor does being more vague about consequences. Sea level rise looks more like king tides periodically destroying coastal occupations until it's uninsurable and everyone moves away. Poisioned aquifers resulting in no viable drinking water source and again, everyone leaves. Coastal erosion intensified means small islands with rich histories become nothing more than a sandbar over the course of decades, and sustains no population as it did before. Chaotic weather looks like wildfires, tornados, and droughts 10, 20, 50% more frequent in their occurrence. But not a new phenomenon. Shit years for various crops become more common than good years because you're not getting enough sun, false springs and shock frosts destroy fruitings, yields are lower across the board. Prices go up. Buying tomatos peak season costs as much as is once did off-season. Probably the biggest driver of inaction here is that what comes to mind is sudden shocks, yet the truth is more like a slow strangle. The urgency is just as valid if you take the long view, but it's easier to stick with the status quo when it's just the gradual discomfort of a belt tightening and not a gun pointed at your head. Boiled frogs and all that.

Applejinx 5y ago
There's another important aspect to chaos. As you increase the energy in the system, which this is, you're also increasing the range over which phenomena can happen. You cite 'tornadoes 10, 20, 50% more frequent' and you're not wrong, but it's very important to understand we're also looking at tornadoes and droughts and hurricanes (events tied to the behavior of the chaotic system of the climate) two, five, ten times more INTENSE than we're used to. Chaos does this. The wildest outliers are tied to how much energy is in the system. They may be no more common than before, but the increased energy and increased chaos can produce wilder variances from the norm. With regard to specifically destructive events like tornadoes, hurricanes, storm flooding and so on, this is way more dramatic than sea level rise. Nothing we can do, even with nuclear weapons, is as powerful as what weather can do with the energy in that chaotic system… because it's way, way bigger than anything we have at our command. The truth also brings sudden shocks. We've just not quite wrapped our head around where those are coming from, and the frequency of 'em is probably no more common than usual, but the potential intensity of these events is ramping up with the same slow build you mention. We just don't see it until it hits. One example: I think it's very likely there are industrialized cities that would not stand against hyper-weather of this nature. We're not used to the idea of tornadoes and hurricanes ripping down tall buildings, but we will live to see the theoretical peak energy (the ten or hundred-year storm) go beyond what our cities are designed to withstand. When that happens, we suddenly have areas where ALL the skyscrapers were toppled, on a weather-event scale rather than a terrorist-act scale.

jonplackett 5y ago

What is the definition of ‘watershed’ in this report?

ARandomerDude 5y ago

(June 29, 1989)

3131529 5y ago

But that's what's happening. We take people space away. And primarily people who did not produce the co2 Globalization brought us also much closer over all. I saw a view documentary about it and those people are aware why it happens. While we did a lot of fixing medicine and food for them, climate change is what they are paying for and they didn't knew but we did for a long time now.

e17 5y ago

2/3rds of Bangladesh is <5m above sea level. If that much of the country disappeared, including Dhaka and Chittagong, you could well say they don't have a country any more.

deleted 5y ago

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blacksmith_tb 5y ago

Well, that could be true of the Maldives[1] (which would be tragic, don't get me wrong) but clearly even flooding lots of major coastal cities wouldn't wipe most countries off the map - but it'd still be huge problem. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change_on_island_nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change_on_i...

kyleblarson 5y ago

Well this is the same UN that elected Saudia Arabia to the Womens' Rights Council.

JoshTko 5y ago

It's an accurate narrative. The problem is that not enough people understand how dire the situation is.

jfengel 5y ago
It's such a heads-I-lose tails-you-win situation. If I talk about extreme cases I'm accused of alarmism. If I talk about nearly-certain cases that fall short of extinction, I'm told it's not important.
throwkeep 5y ago
I'd say the problem is not enough people understand what the solutions are. Those who push the apocalyptic narrative included, as they tend to be against nuclear energy (a clean, safe, compact, 24/7 source) and even shut down existing plants. Which have been getting replaced by coal!!

missedthecue 5y ago

It reminds me of the over-population warnings of the 1970s, where prominent scientists and politicians warned that mass starvation was right around the corner. This constant doom and gloom at an extreme level seems to cause fatigue and apathy.

willmadden 5y ago
That's exactly what it is. The "science" behind the climate change narrative is sponsored by groups that want to implement a global carbon tax, or any other justification they can think of to create a one-world government. It's exactly the same BS as the COVID manipulation we've endured since 2020. Water vapor is a bigger contributor to the greenhouse effect than CO2 by three orders of magnitude. The current "models" do not accurately reflect the sun or water on earth. The fatigue and apathy is because the predictions has been serially wrong. So much so they had to rebrand "global warming" to "climate change". Normally intelligent people have let their hubris make them victims to globalist propaganda. It's disturbing to see how many people not only fall for it but parrot their programming ad nauseam and attack dissenters pointing out raw fact (like that unadulterated satellite temperate data shows the earth's temperature as relatively flat for the last 20 years, or that the 1930's were warmer than temperatures today). The earth will be cooler in 10 years, not warmer. We're heading into a grand solar minimum. Wait and see.
- gspr 5y ago
  Shh. Show the calculations that back this insane theory up, or put a sock in it.
  - willmadden 5y ago
    https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/13/6/849/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/13/6/849/htm https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2020.1796243 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2020.1... There you go.
    - markc 5y ago

trothamel 5y ago

I'd say that this article doesn't really show even that much. According to the article itself, "This is mainly due to using an improved temperature dataset to estimate the baseline rather than sudden changes in climate indicators." This is an example of the past changing, rather than the present. I'm not sure how to react when the only change was the past got cooler - I wouldn't think that would change anything in the present or future.

willmadden 5y ago
I have an alternate hypothesis: the past didn't magically become cooler. The propagandists changed the historical temperature data (yet again) to sustain their narrative because it supports unrelated agendas.
- gspr 5y ago
  Mods: I think this claim is so far from reality, and pure misinformation, that it should be deleted. Let's not pollute HN with garbage.
  - willmadden 5y ago
    Wait, so suggesting that temperature data recorded in the past was in fact accurate and shouldn't be altered to suit political narratives is far from reality? You are demanding censorship of this idea? Wow, just wow.
    - gspr 5y ago
      > Wait, so suggesting that temperature data recorded in the past was in fact accurate and shouldn't be altered to suit political narratives is far from reality? Yes. Because it didn't happen. > You are demanding censorship of this idea? No. In the same way that it's cool to hear dissenting political views at the local pub, but if a guy stands up and starts raving about the children trapped by the pedophile lizard people, I kinda want him to get kicked out so that I don't have to be associated with society-destroying lunatics like that. You're that guy. That guy isn't being subjected to "censorship of his idea". He's being kicked out of the establishment for being a moron and ruining the mood. Go write a book about your crazy ideas. Now if the government makes it illegal to publish, you can decry censorship.

fiftyfifty 5y ago

The mistake they keep making is focusing on sea level rise, as if that's the only real problem global warming could cause. Even at 1.5 degrees C higher than normal it will take years for enough ice to melt to cause significant sea level rise. Meanwhile we are already seeing apocalyptic like effects of global warming: the worst droughts and fires across multiple continents as we've seen in modern history, significant increases and severity of tropical storms, increase and severity in seasonal flooding etc. In 2020 alone both Australia and the Western US saw their worst wild fire seasons in modern history. 2020 also saw the worse Atlantic hurricane season in history: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/record-breaking-atlantic-hurricane-season-draws-to-end https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/record-breaking-atlantic-... 2020 also saw the Philippines get hit with the most powerful Cyclone at landfall in history (175 mph winds at landfall): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Goni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Goni And that was no outlier, in the last 5-6 years we've seen multiple Cyclones with winds over 175 mph, with several over 200 mph. This is definitely new territory for storms like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tropical_cyclone_records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tropical_cyclone_recor... With Covid-19 a lot of this stuff fell out of the news cycle rapidly last year, but 2020 surely marks one of the worst years in history for climate related disasters.

gmuslera 5y ago

Sea rise is not the only effect of climate change, and the gradual rise won't be as urgent as extreme weather floods and storms episodes. You will have also wet bulb temperature episodes, not all time, but more frequently and in bigger areas as time advances. And won't matter if the average temperature is not so high yet, once you get such peaks people (and maybe crops->famines) die. And last but not least, this fuels positive feedback mechanisms, like less ice reflecting sunlight, more methane released in northern regions, more frequent forest fires and so on that accelerate an already pretty bad trend. If you think it will cost a lot to try to do something about this, think how costly will be doing nothing.

Applejinx 5y ago
Absolutely. Wet-bulb temperature episodes are exactly the sort of thing where increasing energy in the chaotic system will lead to previously unreachable spikes in the system: by increasing the ambient energy of the system X degrees, thus increasing its chaotic energy, you produce a maximum peak excursion of X*Y degrees (also accompanied by unexpectedly COLD extremes in a more irregular pattern). Even in the absence of other weather events these exaggerated peaks and dips are dangerous to life.

BLanen 5y ago

No, people like you are what prevents correct action. And the guy you're citing is still correct. We didn't reverse it before 2000. Nations will dissapear under water and general turmoil. He never said it would happen in 2000. Only that the reversal had to happen before 2000 to prevent it from happening.

blablabla123 5y ago

I think without concerted citizen backed action many people won't do anything. IMHO it's not about whether climate change is real or not but whether appropriate action is taken when it counts. And when only few people do anything that is not fair. Therefore I think the message has to be repeated over and over again in increasing volume. That said, the magnitude of climate change is probably underestimated and talking about average temperatures might also contribute to that.

DennisP 5y ago

Ok but I hope you're not saying OP's article is an apocalyptic narrative. It's a pretty mild projection given that we've already hit +1.2 degrees, and are already seeing effects from that.

willmadden 5y ago

I'll just leave this here: https://notrickszone.com/2021/05/24/paradigm-busting-new-study-affirms-co2-doesnt-drive-climate-water-clouds-do/ https://notrickszone.com/2021/05/24/paradigm-busting-new-stu...