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Why North America's killer heat scares me
- savant_penguin 5y ago"What if the 'safe' carbon budget is zero. We can't sugar-coat the potential realities of this." Compared to what? Living without electricity? Paying 10x for energy? The lack of a real comparison with the real life consequences of a zero carbon budget seems a bit too convenient
- throwaway5752 5y agoSolar works very well and is cheaper than coal. I have it on my roof right now, producing megawatt hours of energy per year. Millions of cars on the road today run on it. Don't be hysterical with statements like, "living without electricity".
- user-the-name 5y ago> seems a bit too convenient What does this mean?
- savant_penguin 5y agoIt means that when you don't compare it with anything, most people will intuitively compare it with perfection, as if by quickly zeroing out carbon emissions there would be no negative consequences. It seems as "if we just did X everything would be better", when actually there are mostly trade-offs
- user-the-name 5y agoThat statement isn't a comparison. And not part of it even remotely implies that "quickly zeroing out carbon emissions there would be no negative consequences". What that statement is doing is communicating a real sense of dread that maybe we have to do it even though it would be incredibly difficult and costly.
- ocschwar 5y agoThere is no need to compare. The issue is that there is no safe anything.
- starlust2 5y agoCompared to the expense of failed crops? Mass migration of all humans to the northern most reaches of Canada? I really don't think you get it. If temperatures rise enough, most of Central and North America won't be uninhabitable. The parts that aren't underwater will be too hot and parched. We won't be able to grow crops or desalinate enough water when the clouds and rain disappear (yes that will happen). The 3 days of intense heat here in Portland left plants all around my yard scorched and half dead. Just 3 days. Imagine that happening regularly around the world.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago> won't be uninhabitable I think you have a typo.
- kyteland 5y agoClimate change doesn't necessarily mean everything will get hotter and scorched and we all have to move to northern Canada. It means things will be different than they were historically in ways we don't necessarily understand that well. There's plenty of evidence that past warming periods caused the Sahara to green by shifting the African monsoon patterns farther north on the continent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period Current climate change seems to be messing with the jet stream in North America in ways that diverge from historical data. Then you get things like your yard scorching in Portland this summer and my hedges freezing and dying in Austin this winter. We've built a huge amount of infrastructure on assumptions about local weather patterns that may now be invalid.
- bingidingi 5y agocompared to the inevitable drought and famine
- hpoe 5y agoSo one question I've had for a while is if we are currently facing such a catastrophe with increased global heat why don't we go ahead and start conducting massive explosions to kick dust up into the air. When Krakatoa went off it caused global cooling throughout the entire world because of the amount of matter it introduced into the air so why don't we do the same right now at least as a stopgap measure if things are looking so dire? I'm not trying to be argumentative I just don't understand why this is a bad idea?
- wizzwizz4 5y agoSignificantly reducing the sunlight that reaches the surface also has the tiny issue of killing all the plants. Most grasses will survive, but crops?
- seattle_spring 5y agoI would think that would make the air dangerous to breath, among a host of other downsides.
- powderpig 5y agoI think all geo-engineering is a bad idea. The least worse idea is sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere. The consequences of any geo-engineering ideas are not well understood.
- zbrozek 5y agoI could imagine something a bit better controlled could be ok. Large areas of solar panels, engineered to reflect as much as they can't use, would be a good double benefit. Excess electricity could be opportunistically used for GHG capture or the panels could maybe flip over and become mirrors. An orbital umbrella that we could modulate such that we can deal with unanticipated consequences could also be ok. I'm sure there are tons of other approaches that give control in both directions on reasonable time scales. Obviously cutting emissions Right Now is super important, and megaprojects shouldn't distract from that.
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- throwaway284534 5y agoRespectfully, I’m getting fatigued from hearing about climate changes. Not because I don’t care, but because I feel powerless to do anything major about it. For all the recycling I’ve done, a single factory can undo in just a day. Being defeatist isn’t exactly productive, but hearing that calamities are happening on a daily basis doesn’t help much either. I really do think the only way this’ll get better is after some additional damage is seen and felt by policy makers. Until then, I’ll use my resources wisely and encourage others to do the same.
- baby 5y agoThere’s the idea that any significant change starts with yourself. Ghandi and stuff. Yet, I can’t stop thinking that as humans our role is to multiply and exploit our habitat, and that trying to fight this is meaningless. In the end we’re doomed anyway, so is accelerating the inevitable that bad? Especially if it’s making the lives of people better right now?
- liotier 5y agoYou feel powerless to do anything about climate change ? You feel your individual actions such as recycling are meaningless in the face of the incoming tsunami ? That is because they are. If you want meaningful, get into political action ! "For consumers in the industrialized world to signal virtue with their individual actions is irrelevant at best. Countries like Sweden that have had success in decarbonizing, didn’t reach their accomplishment with individual sacrifices, but by generating energy cleanly (with nuclear power instead of fossil fuel). In my opinion, the individual action that matters most is voting. Climate change is a problem governments will solve, not individuals. It is strange that people think the world’s most challenging problem can be solved by voluntary actions from billions of people — this is why we have representative governments" - https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/individual-actions-cant-solve-climate-change/ https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/individual-actions...
- dragontamer 5y agoIt was extremely difficult getting my knowledgeable and smart sister to vaccinate for COVID19, an eminent disease that we both agreed was killing hundreds-of-thousands of Americans. Fortunately, I pushed her hard enough with a little bit of help from the Demon Slayer: Mugen Train movie (we will go to theaters if you vaccinate). Honestly: I don't know how I would have done it without that movie, lol. Now my sister's sister-in-law also is an anti-vaxxer. Lets call her "C". ------------ Frankly, my political capital is still 100% on COVID19. I don't have enough political capital left to spend on climate change. If I can't convince these people of the eminent dangers of COVID19, and the incredible relative safety of the vaccines... then climate change is hopeless. C isn't dumb. But she's part of a family of conservatives. "Conservatism" is part of their identity, and right now, that means that they want to believe that the virus will go away on its own, that masks are stupid, the vaccine is made by Bill Gates (wtf??) etc. etc. etc. And climate change is fake is part of that identity they hold. Pushing this part of their identity away from them is extremely difficult. Just pushing one concept onto them (ex: get the freaking vaccine) is hard enough.
- jjcon 5y agoA few years ago we would make fun of people who questioned global warming when it snowed… now we claim it is in fact global warming when it’s hot out? Edit: Politicization of individual weather events makes way for bad science no matter how extreme. In general, individual extreme weather events are not evidence of climate change and it is my opinion that everyone sounds stupid when they politicize them. Instead we should be looking at the aggregate historical trends and their weather modeling but that certainly isn’t as sexy.
- war1025 5y agoModern news is all propaganda, all the time. Start with the narrative and shoehorn the events until they fit the narrative. Depending on the company, you get a different starting narrative, but the playbook is the same.
- hooplah 5y agoAnd everyone stopped trying to link events through any sort of rationale. Hurricane? Climate change. Wild fire? Not forest management. Climate change. 100 year freeze? It's only happened once in our lifetime, and once in the early 1900s, but climate change! Heat wave. Climate change. Basically just replace climate change with "God is angry" because science has nothing to do with it, otherwise you'd hear attempts to link the freak weather events with climate patterns. Pro tip. the more sporadic the weather event, the less likely it has to do with climate.
- throwawaysea 5y agoCliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington and chief scientist of the Northwest Modeling Consortium mentioned in his recent blog posts that the heat wave was a perfect storm of factors like compression from sinking air coming off the West slopes of the Cascades. He also said (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatures-are-being.html https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...): > Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well. He also said in the same article: > Let me end with the golden rule of temperature extremes: the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming. Think about that. Even the Associated Press has fallen to this tendency to attribute everything solely to climate change. They wrote an article (https://apnews.com/article/climate-climate-change-science-environment-and-nature-935be069af34aad472074d42097af85e https://apnews.com/article/climate-climate-change-science-en...) about a new study that came with a sensationalist headline, even though the actual contents of the study (https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/wp-content/uploads/NW-US-extreme-heat-2021-scientific-report-WWA.pdf https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/wp-content/uploads/N...) show this was a rare event (1 in 1000 years) with only a few degrees of contribution to temperature from climate change.
- ex3ndr 5y agoIt is super hot in north russia too.
- fogihujy 5y agoFinland had record-setting heat in June. This is global.
- hacknat 5y agoThe only thing that can save us from the cataclysm of climate change is technology. It's too late for social engineering and politics.
- hooplah 5y agoFracking did manage to drop our emissions phasing out coal. But politics gets in the way of natural gas all the time. Politics got in the way of nuclear as well. Also, if you truly want to cut emissions, stop caring about "per capita" and force your politicians to start holding the biggest polluters accountable and the countries not decreasing their emissions.
- adamcstephens 5y agoWho is to blame for outsourced manufacturing then? If one country consumes a vast amount of goods from another, are they not also accountable for that other country’s emissions?
- hooplah 5y agoIf you truly believe it's this dire, does it matter? It's up to that country to cut emissions even if they accept that job on behalf of other countries. But first, lets start on just not dumping plastic into oceans, building more coal plants, and generally not cutting emissions at all (China) Then we can worry on the manufacturing like cement and steel (I believe we should make our own steel anyway) The more stuff we make, the more control we have over the emissions during the process. Because apparently, other countries don't give a shit. Go look at the countries that have cut emissions. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/climate-change-co2-emissions-fall-in-18-countries-with-strong-policies-study-finds-1.5032468 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/climate-change-co2-emissions... That's the only metric that matters, anything else is propaganda for those who aren't.
- pastage 5y agoThis is an global issue it's up to everyone to lower emissions, exporting all your factories to China has been the solution for all of those countries. We can not blame China for that.
- taylorlapeyre 5y agoI recommend the book “Unsettled” by Steven Koonan for a more empirical look at how these computer models work, and the deficiencies of trying to predict catastrophe with them. For instance, every climate model is wildly off when it tries to predict the climate changes starting in 1950. This article reads like a typical scare piece. The truth is, there’s just so many feedback loops in climate that we just don’t know what’s “responsible” for any particular event. It may not even be a reasonable question to ask. There are things we know: greenhouse gases are rising because of human activity, and their presence will cause an increase in global average temperature at equilibrium. Beyond that, there is so much we can’t predict. For instance, higher temps will cause more water vapor in the air, and therefore more cloud cover. That increases the earth’s albedo by some percentage, which is a powerful effect. Enough to hold off further warming for a while? We don’t know. No climate models agree.
- jeffbee 5y agoKoonin's book is highly misleading. You'd be better off spending your time reading IPCC reports, or, frankly, staring at a wall and picking your nose, than reading that contrarian drivel. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/that-obama-scientist-climate-skeptic-youve-been-hearing-about/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/that-obama-scient...
- taylorlapeyre 5y agoMost of Koonin’s sources are directly from the IPCC reports, in fact they are what the book is based around.
- jeffbee 5y agoYes, but they are often taken out of context in a misleading way. His statements about melting in Greenland being slower than 80 years ago, for example, are highly misleading, presented in a way to lead the reader to believe that melting in Greenland is decelerating when in fact it is accelerating, it just happened to be exceptionally high for a single year, 80 years ago. Other misleading techniques are the straw-man, there he says something like tornados are not increasing in frequency, leaving the reader to assume that climate models predict increasing tornado frequency when in fact they do not predict that.
- throwawaysea 5y agoClimate journalism is often unscientific and this heat wave seems to have triggered numerous alarmist headlines from journalists, who are falsely drawing strong causation between climate change and this event despite a lack of evidence. In this article it seems the author is alarmed due to the temperatures reached, even though climate change likely contributed only a few degrees to the peak temperature. Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington and chief scientist of the Northwest Modeling Consortium analyzed this West coast heatwave event from a global warming perspective, in a post titled "Was Global Warming The Cause of the Great Northwest Heatwave? Science Says No." (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/was-global-warming-cause-of-great.html https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/was-global-warming-ca...): > The evidence for a predominantly natural origin of the high temperatures records of last week is compelling, with global warming marginally increasing the peak temperatures by perhaps a few degrees. Without global warming, we still would have experienced the most severe heatwave of the past century.
- rglover 5y agoFearmongering and gaslighting. https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1410961875899146249 https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1410961875899146249 Edit. Please read this and factor it into your understanding: https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Christy%20Testimony_1.pdf?1 https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Christy%20Testimony_... Edit 2. For the people downvoting me (certainly without considering what I've presented) and others, consider the phrasing here... "killer" heat, "scares" me. It's intentionally emotionally manipulative.
- myWindoonn 5y agoA downvote is too polite. The Pacific Northwest heatwave literally killed dozens of people (https://www.oregonlive.com/data/2021/07/oregons-heat-wave-death-toll-grows-to-116.html https://www.oregonlive.com/data/2021/07/oregons-heat-wave-de...). Pick a less stupid hill to die on; preferably one with trees and shade, and remember to drink water.
- firestarter223 5y agoIf you point out recent coldness records, you will be lectured about the difference between weather and climate. I think the real issue may be the human delusion that things staying the same is normal (perhaps because of the short life span of humans), and more recently in scientific terms, that averages are normal. About this article I find it odd that it cites Thatcher, of all people. Surely the information she used in the 80ies is outdated by now, and she presumably never was a climate researcher.
- throwaway5752 5y agoLocalized coldness records that are the result of the polar vortex breaking apart over the arctic and sending masses of cold air south. They are accompanied by heat waves and records in the arctic. The 80s information and forecasts were actually pretty decent in terms of the observed warming levels so far. What is a shame is that they were not pessimistic enough regarding the feedback loops we are now aware of.
- firestarter223 5y agoEspecially if you can pick just the forecasts that are not already wrong, and forget about the rest. According to this article in nature, there is rather a tendency to use worst case scenarios that are no longer probable. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00177-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00177-3
- ZoomerCretin 5y agoBoth events are caused by the jet stream changing its usual patterns due to climate change. Your strawman is a poor one.
- firestarter223 5y agoI guess no matter what happens, it is always due to climate change. In general I think local records are to be expected, because of variance. Maybe they become more frequent because of changing jet streams or whatever, but you can not go in the other direction and claim every record is because of climate change.
- petermcneeley 5y agoYou say the ocean's rising like I give a shit You say the whole world's ending, honey, it already did You're not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried Got it? Good, now get inside
- jude- 5y agoIt's all well and good for us folks in the West to talk about reducing consumption, but the reality check we need to hear is that the "West" is no more than 20% of humanity (give or take, depending on how you count). Like it or not, the remainder of humanity is rapidly industrializing. First, no amount of lifestyle changes in the West is going to offset the pollution and environmental degradation this could cause. Second, neither you nor me are in a position to tell them that they can't also have the trappings of a Western-level middle-class lifestyle once they can afford it. If humanity wants to get serious about climate change, we need to think big. Really big. Global-scale big. First: energy. How can we get the whole world converted to 100% solar and geothermal in the next 10 years? No more oil, no more gas, no more coal, no more ICEs -- there needs to be a global moratorium on fossil fuel tech to stop CO2 emissions. We should be mass-producing and deploying solar panels like there's no tomorrow. We should be giving them away to people (and countries) who will install and use them. Let's help industrializing countries leap-frog fossil fuels and go straight to renewables. Second: water. Once we solve the energy problem, we're gonna need large-scale desalinization plants. We'll want to make so much green energy that desalinizing and pumping ocean water will be cheaper than pumping it from aquifers and rivers. Third: food. Forget about "organic" food -- we need GMOs that resist pests, take less water to grow, and can put up with higher heat and lower quality soil. We'll need either a green way of producing meats, or a really high quality meat substitute, because humanity's appetite for it isn't gonna decrease anytime soon. At the same time, it needs to become "cool" to be vegetarian or vegan, in the way that Teslas made EVs "cool." Fourth: shelter. Find your local NIMBYs and run them out of town. We're gonna need lots of high quality and high density housing to reduce the carbon footprint required to keep modern civilization running. It's cheaper and greener to supply water, air conditioning, electricity and sewage to 100 people in 1 building than 100 people in 100 houses. We should be building every single human being a condo in a high rise for free. Fifth: manufacturing. Power all factories with renewable energy. If it can't be plugged in, make it battery-powered. If it produces waste, find a way to throw green energy at the waste to render it inert (or recycle it). We can achieve all of the above today. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, and you don't need that much of the earth's surface area to supply electricity for the whole of humanity. Once you have basically limitless solar energy, you can get cheap desalinization and cheap water pumping, which unlocks mass irrigation and with it, farming capacity. Housing sounds like a tough political problem at first, but few people will say no to a policy of "everyone -- rich or poor -- gets a free condo." Even existing homeowners would take a second home in a big city, even if all they do is use it for storage or weekend visits. Manufacturing can be made greener and greener as more and more energy becomes available. If energy isn't your limiting factor, then you can divert energy towards safe waste disposal -- for example, you could convert carbon dioxide back molecular oxygen and carbon with enough energy. This I think will be key to manufacturing the goods and services that 7+ billion people will want in a sustainable way.
- lcall 5y agoWhile it is important to be good stewards and not pollute etc, I don't think we are competent to solve climate issues as a whole, when we can't trust each other to keep our word (so much of the time), and especially when we have rejected much specific advice of the planet's Creator. At the same time, things can be OK for us in the long run, if we really try to learn what we should do, and do that. I would include praying, honesty, kindness and humility (willingness to learn) among those things. Really there is good reason for hope for the best; these problems are expected now.