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The scariest thing to me about climate change is the rate at which it is happening. We bought a house in the Bay Area 11 years ago. It didn't have air conditi

by lisper 5y ago

The scariest thing to me about climate change is the rate at which it is happening. We bought a house in the Bay Area 11 years ago. It didn't have air conditioning. The builder said we wouldn't need it. We added a unit anyway and for the first few years we barely used it, maybe one or two weeks out of the year to cool the top floor on exceptionally hot days, which back then was the low 90s. Since then, 100-plus-degree days have been happening more and more regularly. We're adding a second AC unit because there have been days that the first one just can't keep up. All this in 11 years. This keeps me up at night too: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/17/us/earth-trapped-heat-doubled/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/17/us/earth-trapped-heat-doubled... There was a time when I was fairly sure that climate change would lead to the collapse of civilization, but there was no way I'd live to see it. Now I'm not so sure about the latter. [UPDATE] There is also the sobering realization that even if we brought carbon emissions to zero tomorrow (which is obviously not going to happen) even that would not actually solve the problem. We're at 50% over pre-industrial CO2 with no viable way of getting rid of it, so at best it's going to stay that way for a long, long time.

darkerside 5y ago
CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time, but things like methane break down much more quickly. In the short term, we'll have better luck by reducing methane as well. Of course we'll still need to cut carbon over the longer term, but it's not as dire as you think.
- lisper 5y ago
  > it's not as dire as you think. I would like nothing more than for you to be right about this. But I don't think you are. We're at 420PPM CO2 right now. Even if we cut CO2 emissions to zero and eliminated all methane emissions, we'd still be retaining heat at a rate that is more than enough to produce a blue-ocean event [1] in the next decade or two, after which we're probably screwed. [1] https://glennfay.medium.com/the-blue-ocean-event-will-be-a-tipping-point-for-our-climate-42c05898862c https://glennfay.medium.com/the-blue-ocean-event-will-be-a-t...
  - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    Active carbon removal and other geo-engineering actions are the inevitable path we'll have to go down. The only question from my viewpoint is how much we're going to suffer before we accept that.
    - lisper 5y ago
      > how much we're going to suffer before we accept that And whether it will even be possible by then to remove enough carbon to make a difference. It's far from clear that it's even possible now. It took several hundred million years for nature to sequester all that carbon in the first place. It has taken us a mere 300 years to release it, but releasing carbon is one hell of a lot easier than sequestering it. And we're staring down the barrel of a blue ocean event in the next few decades, possibly even the next few years.
      - specialist 5y ago
        I have to believe it's fixable within our lifetimes. Otherwise why get out of bed. We have multiple viable tools. Oviline, some kind of atmospheric dimming, rewilding, industrial carbon capture. And I'm sure we'll try 100s of other ideas and strategies. My current grumpiness is that we're not already dual track. Yes, we have to get humanity to carbon zero. Urgently. We also need to remove carbon. By whatever means possible. We just can't wait for carbon zero before we start carbon negative efforts. -- I haven't heard or seen any efforts about securing current carbon sinks. Like maybe replant the tundras with stuff that will delay the thawing. Or precapturing submerged methane and flaring it. Or...?
        lisper 5y ago
        > I have to believe it's fixable within our lifetimes It might be technologically possible. But right now the limiting factor is people's complacency. Only a very tiny minority seems to be taking the problem as seriously as it should be taken. Everyone still seems to think that we're looking at the odd anomalous heat wave here and there, and that real catastrophe is still several generations away. It isn't. The first thing that needs to change is for everyone, and our political leaders in particular, to accept that. Because by the time it becomes obvious to everyone that we have been staring down the barrel of a gun for the last 300 years it really will be too late.
djinnd 5y ago
There are quite a few highly populated areas in the world where the Air conditioner is on the whole year round.
- lisper 5y ago
  You have missed the point. The problem is not that we have to run the AC more than we used to. The problem is that our situation changed from one where we barely needed AC to one where we now need it regularly in a mere 10 years.
  - pengaru 5y ago
    There's some interesting classes by Al Bartlett on youtube where he discusses population growth and the exponential function in general, he was a professor at Boulder, CO. One of his salient points IIRC was when you're living through an exponential curve that's approaching some crisis threshold, be it population growth leading to civilization collapse, or some resource consumption exhausting its supply, it happens very abruptly because you jump from just halfway to the end, which through a linear lens appears very distant, to at the critical end, in just a single doubling period.
Proven 5y ago
> [UPDATE] There is also the sobering realization that even if we brought carbon emissions to zero tomorrow (which is obviously not going to happen) even that would not actually solve the problem. Why are you concerned about doing something about it, then? > All this in 11 years. Climate doesn't change in 11 years. More likely you've added 20-30 lbs and a pair of 300W GPUs since then.
slibhb 5y ago
> There was a time when I was fairly sure that climate change would lead to the collapse of civilization, but there was no way I'd live to see it. Now I'm not so sure about the latter. Even if climate change significantly affects our lives, why would it cause civilization to collapse? It seems just as plausible that adverse conditions will increase the necessity of civilization, of strong social bonds and mutal reliance. It's very interesting to me that, when talking about climate change, we tend to assume everything is negative. Surely there are some upsides (the only one I ever hear about is Arctic shipping routes). But I think we have no good reason to be making claims like "civilization will collapse". This seems like millenarian thinking, people like the idea of living in the end times.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Crop failures, extreme climate changes we cannot mitigate the effects of cost effectively (coastal infra and housing). We depend on things that grow (both plants and animals) to survive ourselves. I would not bet on this bringing people together, unless it’s the very well off (“the haves”) against those without who will be exposed to more suffering.
  - slibhb 5y ago
    How about huge swathes of land opening up in Canada, Greenland, and Siberia that have massive quantities of untapped natural resources? I'm telling you, we're going to roll with this thing. Bump in the road. But there's no point in arguing about it. When we all die and civilization hasn't collapsed, we'll all know I'm right.
    - lisper 5y ago
      For Greenland to become fertile its ice sheet would have to melt, and that will leave major cities underwater. And climate change is not going to magically stop once that happens. Greenland might be fertile for a little while, a few decades maybe. Then what?
      - 5y ago
elbasti 5y ago
> We're at 50% over pre-industrial CO2 with no viable way of getting rid of it, so at best it's going to stay that way for a long, long time. It's much worse than this. For a long time the "worst case scenario" was the possibility that we'd unlock positive feedback loops that release methane (80x as "warming" as CO2) that had been long locked in arctic permafrost. Remember the phrase "runaway climate change"? Yeah. It happened. Even if bring human carbon emissions to zero, the world will continue to warm. This is why of the utmost importance to stop fossil fuel emissions NOW... so we can win ourselves some time to maybe, just maybe, figure out clean carbon removal.
- revscat 5y ago
  Won’t happen under our current socioeconomic regime. If there is profit to be made, fossil fuels will be sold unless there are drastic changes made to the systems which allow it.
  - specialist 5y ago
    > Won’t happen under our current socioeconomic regime. I'm not so sure. One thing Trump got absolutely right (intentionally or not) was borrowing money when interest rates are low. There's really no reason not to. If we spend $10T kick starting a carbon capture industry, at near zero interest rates, surely those enterprises will at least break even. Even Big Oil would want some of that sweet, juicy pork.
- Sharlin 5y ago
  Note though that the warming was always going to continue even after reducing emissions to zero, because it takes time for a complex system to settle into a new stable state. This is only one of the many effects that make highly nonlinear systems difficult to intuitively understand. The math is clear, though (although many of the myriad feedback loops involved are still poorly understood).
  - specialist 5y ago
    Sure. Inertia. Understood. u/elbasti is referring to the now active positive feedback loops as separate additional sources GHG and warming. Apologies if that's the distinction you were trying to make.
Tiktaalik 5y ago
The place that has seen this biggest, most obvious to human eyes delta is up North. In Canada's arctic, the Inuit are having to adapt rapidly as things that used to be predictable, like when the sea ice is going to melt, are now no longer predictable. They've apparently seen startling changes within just a generation. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/30/canada-inuits-climate-change-impact-global-warming-melting-ice https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/30/canada-inuits-...
mhfhncx 5y ago
I'm not surprised you're so afraid if you trust CNN to tell you the truth about this. They have admitted that fear sells and they're keeping you up at night on purpose. They've demonstrated, repeatedly[0], their willingness to completely fabricate information in order to draw views and that climate change is the next big thing after COVID to help them recover ratings [1] Sorry, but you might as well be getting science info from Weekly World News. CNN is projecting a nightmarish fantasy for clicks and views, full stop. [0] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20 https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20 [1] https://youtu.be/Dv8Zy-JwXr4 https://youtu.be/Dv8Zy-JwXr4

by lisper 5y ago

darkerside 5y ago

CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time, but things like methane break down much more quickly. In the short term, we'll have better luck by reducing methane as well. Of course we'll still need to cut carbon over the longer term, but it's not as dire as you think.

lisper 5y ago
> it's not as dire as you think. I would like nothing more than for you to be right about this. But I don't think you are. We're at 420PPM CO2 right now. Even if we cut CO2 emissions to zero and eliminated all methane emissions, we'd still be retaining heat at a rate that is more than enough to produce a blue-ocean event [1] in the next decade or two, after which we're probably screwed. [1] https://glennfay.medium.com/the-blue-ocean-event-will-be-a-tipping-point-for-our-climate-42c05898862c https://glennfay.medium.com/the-blue-ocean-event-will-be-a-t...
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  Active carbon removal and other geo-engineering actions are the inevitable path we'll have to go down. The only question from my viewpoint is how much we're going to suffer before we accept that.
  - lisper 5y ago
    > how much we're going to suffer before we accept that And whether it will even be possible by then to remove enough carbon to make a difference. It's far from clear that it's even possible now. It took several hundred million years for nature to sequester all that carbon in the first place. It has taken us a mere 300 years to release it, but releasing carbon is one hell of a lot easier than sequestering it. And we're staring down the barrel of a blue ocean event in the next few decades, possibly even the next few years.
    - specialist 5y ago
      I have to believe it's fixable within our lifetimes. Otherwise why get out of bed. We have multiple viable tools. Oviline, some kind of atmospheric dimming, rewilding, industrial carbon capture. And I'm sure we'll try 100s of other ideas and strategies. My current grumpiness is that we're not already dual track. Yes, we have to get humanity to carbon zero. Urgently. We also need to remove carbon. By whatever means possible. We just can't wait for carbon zero before we start carbon negative efforts. -- I haven't heard or seen any efforts about securing current carbon sinks. Like maybe replant the tundras with stuff that will delay the thawing. Or precapturing submerged methane and flaring it. Or...?
      - lisper 5y ago
        > I have to believe it's fixable within our lifetimes It might be technologically possible. But right now the limiting factor is people's complacency. Only a very tiny minority seems to be taking the problem as seriously as it should be taken. Everyone still seems to think that we're looking at the odd anomalous heat wave here and there, and that real catastrophe is still several generations away. It isn't. The first thing that needs to change is for everyone, and our political leaders in particular, to accept that. Because by the time it becomes obvious to everyone that we have been staring down the barrel of a gun for the last 300 years it really will be too late.

djinnd 5y ago

There are quite a few highly populated areas in the world where the Air conditioner is on the whole year round.

lisper 5y ago
You have missed the point. The problem is not that we have to run the AC more than we used to. The problem is that our situation changed from one where we barely needed AC to one where we now need it regularly in a mere 10 years.
- pengaru 5y ago
  There's some interesting classes by Al Bartlett on youtube where he discusses population growth and the exponential function in general, he was a professor at Boulder, CO. One of his salient points IIRC was when you're living through an exponential curve that's approaching some crisis threshold, be it population growth leading to civilization collapse, or some resource consumption exhausting its supply, it happens very abruptly because you jump from just halfway to the end, which through a linear lens appears very distant, to at the critical end, in just a single doubling period.

Proven 5y ago

> [UPDATE] There is also the sobering realization that even if we brought carbon emissions to zero tomorrow (which is obviously not going to happen) even that would not actually solve the problem. Why are you concerned about doing something about it, then? > All this in 11 years. Climate doesn't change in 11 years. More likely you've added 20-30 lbs and a pair of 300W GPUs since then.

slibhb 5y ago

> There was a time when I was fairly sure that climate change would lead to the collapse of civilization, but there was no way I'd live to see it. Now I'm not so sure about the latter. Even if climate change significantly affects our lives, why would it cause civilization to collapse? It seems just as plausible that adverse conditions will increase the necessity of civilization, of strong social bonds and mutal reliance. It's very interesting to me that, when talking about climate change, we tend to assume everything is negative. Surely there are some upsides (the only one I ever hear about is Arctic shipping routes). But I think we have no good reason to be making claims like "civilization will collapse". This seems like millenarian thinking, people like the idea of living in the end times.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Crop failures, extreme climate changes we cannot mitigate the effects of cost effectively (coastal infra and housing). We depend on things that grow (both plants and animals) to survive ourselves. I would not bet on this bringing people together, unless it’s the very well off (“the haves”) against those without who will be exposed to more suffering.
- slibhb 5y ago
  How about huge swathes of land opening up in Canada, Greenland, and Siberia that have massive quantities of untapped natural resources? I'm telling you, we're going to roll with this thing. Bump in the road. But there's no point in arguing about it. When we all die and civilization hasn't collapsed, we'll all know I'm right.
  - lisper 5y ago
    For Greenland to become fertile its ice sheet would have to melt, and that will leave major cities underwater. And climate change is not going to magically stop once that happens. Greenland might be fertile for a little while, a few decades maybe. Then what?
    - 5y ago

elbasti 5y ago

> We're at 50% over pre-industrial CO2 with no viable way of getting rid of it, so at best it's going to stay that way for a long, long time. It's much worse than this. For a long time the "worst case scenario" was the possibility that we'd unlock positive feedback loops that release methane (80x as "warming" as CO2) that had been long locked in arctic permafrost. Remember the phrase "runaway climate change"? Yeah. It happened. Even if bring human carbon emissions to zero, the world will continue to warm. This is why of the utmost importance to stop fossil fuel emissions NOW... so we can win ourselves some time to maybe, just maybe, figure out clean carbon removal.

revscat 5y ago
Won’t happen under our current socioeconomic regime. If there is profit to be made, fossil fuels will be sold unless there are drastic changes made to the systems which allow it.
- specialist 5y ago
  > Won’t happen under our current socioeconomic regime. I'm not so sure. One thing Trump got absolutely right (intentionally or not) was borrowing money when interest rates are low. There's really no reason not to. If we spend $10T kick starting a carbon capture industry, at near zero interest rates, surely those enterprises will at least break even. Even Big Oil would want some of that sweet, juicy pork.
Sharlin 5y ago
Note though that the warming was always going to continue even after reducing emissions to zero, because it takes time for a complex system to settle into a new stable state. This is only one of the many effects that make highly nonlinear systems difficult to intuitively understand. The math is clear, though (although many of the myriad feedback loops involved are still poorly understood).
- specialist 5y ago
  Sure. Inertia. Understood. u/elbasti is referring to the now active positive feedback loops as separate additional sources GHG and warming. Apologies if that's the distinction you were trying to make.

Tiktaalik 5y ago

The place that has seen this biggest, most obvious to human eyes delta is up North. In Canada's arctic, the Inuit are having to adapt rapidly as things that used to be predictable, like when the sea ice is going to melt, are now no longer predictable. They've apparently seen startling changes within just a generation. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/30/canada-inuits-climate-change-impact-global-warming-melting-ice https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/30/canada-inuits-...

mhfhncx 5y ago

I'm not surprised you're so afraid if you trust CNN to tell you the truth about this. They have admitted that fear sells and they're keeping you up at night on purpose. They've demonstrated, repeatedly[0], their willingness to completely fabricate information in order to draw views and that climate change is the next big thing after COVID to help them recover ratings [1] Sorry, but you might as well be getting science info from Weekly World News. CNN is projecting a nightmarish fantasy for clicks and views, full stop. [0] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20 https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20 [1] https://youtu.be/Dv8Zy-JwXr4 https://youtu.be/Dv8Zy-JwXr4