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Climate tipping points are now imminent, scientists warn
- olivermarks 5y agoSome interesting history of climate anxiety with a zenith in 1975 https://t.co/oXM5Zf8V7d?amp=1 https://t.co/oXM5Zf8V7d?amp=1
- redleggedfrog 5y agoMan, if we had only taken it seriously back then...
- Sharlin 5y agoPetrochem companies did. They spent serious money in order to dissuade the public from taking it seriously. Not that the public needed much dissuading.
- olivermarks 5y agoInterested to hear more about petrochem spending 'serious money in order to dissuade the public from taking 'it' seriously'.
- bseidensticker 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MondapIjAAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MondapIjAAM all the videos the Climate Town guy puts out are great, but this one is highly pertinent.
- olivermarks 5y agoFamiliar with these. Did you watch the video I posted about climate anxiety fashions?
- bseidensticker 5y agoJust did, I see your question was coming from the other direction. lol
- UncleOxidant 5y agoJimmy Carter was a prophet and they ran him out of town.
- polotics 5y agoHow is beef from 1975 relevant for my 2021 California fried chickens ?
- rad_gruchalski 5y agoDo you mean 2021 California almonds, pistachios, strawberries, grapes and cattle?
- olivermarks 5y agoCal Almond business water usage is an outrage, agree there!
- alanbernstein 5y agoVery interesting! What conclusion should I draw from this, that unlimited growth and pollution are fine?
- olivermarks 5y agoI can't speak for Simon, but I'd suggest commonsense stewardship of the planet is paramount and that the endless gloomy earth weather hysteria (particularly from academics) is very unhealthy and negative for humanity.
- tshaddox 5y agoThe problem with the argument is that it assumes the only thing we can do to determine the validity of a claim is to evaluate how convinced certain other people are that the claim is true. He argues that, because scientists in 1975 were (supposedly) as convinced that global cooling was real as scientists today are convinced that global warming is real, we have no other means of determining whether either of these claims are true. Presumably he would also say that, because people before the Copernican Revolution were equally convinced of the heliocentric model as people after the Copernican Revolution were convinced of the geocentric model, we have no means whatsoever of determining whether either claim is true.
- t235211 5y agoThere was no scientific consensus of global cooling. [1] Cherry picked bad evidence from 4 decades ago is not a rational basis to ignore the scientific consensus that the entire Earth faces enormous challenges. That video validates climate anxiety because it shows how scientifically-unsupported ideas can propagate and lead the public to false conclusions with potentially dire consequences. [1] https://skepticalscience.com/global-cooling.htm https://skepticalscience.com/global-cooling.htm
- clydethefrog 5y ago"An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, __on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales__." https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bams2370_1.xml https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bam...
- salynchnew 5y agoThe solutions mentioned: -Phasing out and eliminating fossil fuels -Implementing "a significant carbon price" -Restoring ecosystems such as carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots All policy issues. Given the amount of regulatory capture, it seems like a fourth obvious solution would require significant changes to the incentives for politicians or how lobbying is conducted by fossil fuel ecosystem companies.
- cde-v 5y agoNo, I'm sure we are just a few peaceful protests away from changing their minds.
- Sharlin 5y agoSomehow the phrase "being the first against the wall when the revolution comes" has been in my mind lately. (This is not a threat. It's just that a certain group of old mostly-men have the extremely dubious honor of being the first human beings ever to single-handedly make the entire planet a worse place to live for whole new generations of humans, and the latter may rightfully be slightly resentful about that.)
- bognition 5y agoThe devil is in the details: - How quickly do we phase out fossil fuels. Less than 5 years is un realistic but more then 20 years is probably too long to wait - How much should we charge for carbon emissions? - How do we restore ecosystems that took millions of years to form?
- JohnWhigham 5y agoTaxing negative externalities won't work here; bean counters just add that to the price of business. Only thing that will work is government subsidies to invest in cleaner technology and have them rival whatever we give oil companies. We can take the latter away, but we need a lot of baby boomers to die off first; there's too many in power that won't stand for it.
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- anoplus 5y agoMy anxiety about global warming is more intense than ever lately. I feel like most people around me don't realize it. It's a lonely feeling. And I feel uncomfortable bringing it up and ruining others' mood. My fear is that it happens much faster than everyone think it is
- pmastela 5y agoMy feelings exactly. Just know that you’re not alone.
- UncleOxidant 5y agoYou're not alone. As someone who lives in the PNW I dread fire season (summer) now because it means we could have days of smoke and dangerously high particulate levels - having your air full of smoke such that you can barely see across the street for days tends to awaken a primal fear. And there's a huge dead zone now forming off of our coast which is killing untold amounts of marine life (not to mention that marine life that died in last months heat dome event). We've trashed the place and most people don't seem to be even mildly concerned.
- vlovich123 5y agoIt will happen much more quickly than people realize since the totality of what I’ve read seems to be “our models about it are too conservative”. The big question will be whether there’s a very significant impact to this in the western world. We’ll feel secondary effects and coastline habitability will shift, but I suspect the point where we see it directly in the west is when the entire world is in turmoil. Even still, there will be people here talking about illegal immigration rather than what causing that.
- m4x 5y agoThe flooding, drought, heatwaves and wildfires in the US and Europe are significant impacts on the western world. That's happening right now. There's no question at this point about whether Western and developed countries are going to be hit hard.
- ohiovr 5y ago22 Unless those days had been shortened, no flesh would have been saved. But for the sake of the chosen ones, those days will be shortened.
- ohiovr 5y agoKoyaanisquatsi crazy life life in turmoil life out of balance life disintegrating a state of life that calls for a new way of livng "if we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster" "Near the day of purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky" "a container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans" 13 One of the elders answered, saying to me, “These who are arrayed in white robes, who are they, and from where did they come?” 14 I told him, “My lord, you know.” He said to me, “These are those who came out of the great tribulation. They washed their robes, and made them white in the Lamb’s blood. 15 Therefore they are before the throne of God, they serve him day and night in his temple. He who sits on the throne will spread his tabernacle over them. 16 They will never be hungry, neither thirsty any more; neither will the sun beat on them, nor any heat; 17 for the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne shepherds them, and leads them to springs of waters of life. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
- UncleOxidant 5y agoRev 11:18 "When the nations got angry, you became angry too! Now the time has come for the dead to be judged. It is time for you to reward your servants the prophets and all your people who honor your name, no matter who they are. It is time to destroy everyone who has destroyed the earth." (Read it in Johnny Cash's voice) The evangelicals assume God doesn't care about the earth, that he gave it to them to do with whatever they like. They might be overlooking something.
- dleslie 5y agoA seriously significant price on carbon should impact the use of jet and bunker fuel; but that would need to be applied at participating ports, and not by the countries whose flags are flown on the ships or painted on the airliner. Has there been much talk of ports applying carbon taxes in this way?
- database_lost 5y agoHonest question: Shouldn't we hedge our bets at this point and also start investing heavily in infrastructure that helps mitigate the worst of the effects? (Flood management, water desalination, cloud seeding, etc.) I feel the race to zero emissions is a trendy topic now in media, but perhaps we are past the "we can still stop bad things from happening" point.
- wsc981 5y ago> Shouldn't we hedge our bets at this point and also start investing heavily in infrastructure that helps mitigate the worst of the effects? Should have been from the start. There are so many climate change variables outside of human control (sunspots, volcanic eruptions, etc...) that it's better to just be prepared.
- UncleOxidant 5y agoEven some geoengineering like shooting a lot of reflective particulates high into the upper atmosphere - we need to start thinking pretty seriously about how to do this. It won't be without side effects, but the current side effects of continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere without restraint are going to force us to consider things like this.
- Sharlin 5y agoMitigation and adaptation are big topics within the field, and yes, we're going to need a shitload of both even in the best case scenario. Unfortunately, the hundreds of millions of people who are worst affected by climate change are also in the worst position to do anything to improve their situation.
- plutonorm 5y agoYup, smart money will move in this direction. It’s far too late to try to work against the titanic forces that are in motion. Large scale climate engineering is probably going to be needed.
- wonderwonder 5y agoThis seems to make sense. I very much doubt the US, Russia, China and a large number of emerging economies are going to make large enough changes to have an impact and they are the main drivers. Seems to make sense to just assume at this point that its coming while working to try and stop it.
- kd913 5y agoHow is Germany assessed as medium? A Country that removed more wind turbines than it put up from 2017-2019 and replaced with gas/coal.
- sveme 5y agoDo you have a source for that? All I found indicates that its share of energy production has increased considerably in those years [1]. [1]https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/239528/umfrage/anteil-der-stromerzeugung-aus-windkraft-in-deutschland/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/239528/umfrag...
- kd913 5y agoI think I was remembering this DW video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr5PEAK1t3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr5PEAK1t3U
- imtringued 5y agohttps://interestingengineering.com/german-coal-plant-closes-wind-energy https://interestingengineering.com/german-coal-plant-closes-... Yeah they replaced wind with coal with wind.
- lindseymysse 5y ago"imminent", lol
- throwaway984393 5y agoThey should just stop the warnings already. We already fell off the cliff. We are in free-fall. At this point all we can hope for is that MacGyver builds us a parachute out of a roll of toiler paper, some bubble gum, and shoelaces, before we hit the pavement.
- narrator 5y agoWho built more coal plants last year than the rest of the world shut down last year? Who benefits from the low price of coal thanks to the world cutting back their use of coal? Who grew their industrial economy dramatically last year? Who is the biggest carbon polluter out there? They are laughing all the way to being the next superpower thanks to the west's carbon austerity. How are our carbon sins magically absolved if we just transfer them to this country and shift all our industrial production there? The practical effect is the deindustrialization of the west and the building up of their industry with negligible net reduction in carbon emissions. If this was an intentional policy to impoverish the west and increase some country's economic power with little net environmental impact, it couldn't have been better designed.
- jonplackett 5y agoGovernments’ inability to deal with Covid - something that required only a few weeks to months (rather than decades) forethought based on data - is likely a harbinger of how badly we’re going to deal with climate change. For some reason we seem paralysed and unable to really act until disaster is moments away. Is it politics or just human nature?
- UncleOxidant 5y agoPolitics emerge from human behavior. At the base it's human nature. We as a species are not good at taking action to mitigate risks that aren't immediate. We had plenty of warning - the idea was beginning to emerge even back in the 50s and certainly by the 70s our leaders were quite aware.
- deltaonefour 5y agoWe are excellent at assessing risk. We developed science and statistics and we have the technology and knowledge to even be aware that this is a problem. We also have the amazing technology to spread this knowledge and make everyone aware of the issue. No other living species has the capability of doing this at all. It is an unprecedented ability. The other thing humans are really good at are lying to ourselves and procrastinating. The tragedy of the commons is a part of it. These are the main factors that contribute to our downfall. Especially the tragedy of the commons.
- jonplackett 5y ago> carbon dioxide concentration in the Earth's atmosphere was higher than at any time since measurements began. How much co2 is there in the atmosphere now that we don’t want to be there? Wondering how big a pile of dry ice that would make
- pengaru 5y agoIt's too late. This is a slow-moving population explosion with its impact only fully realized when global quality of life normalizes, not when population growth slows, stops, or even reverses. China is now emitting over double the CO2 of USA. It's no coincidence that China has over a billion people who in large part relatively recently came out of the dirt and started living first-world lifestyles. India is next in line to repeat China's pattern, another billion. Americans trying to fix the climate disaster at this point is comically futile, unless you're considering the war path to prevent literally a billion+ more people from joining the first-world. You're simply not in the driver's seat.
- narrator 5y agoThe net effect is all worldwide industry is moving to China because they can pollute. It's a humungous prisoner's dilemma and they're defecting while we're cooperating and none of the climate alarmists are calling them out on it. I'd be paying the alarmists to do this if I was working for China.
- gmuslera 5y agoEven if we full stop emitting now, the CO2 and the methane in the atmosphere will keep doing its warming work. And there are now more sources GHG, some of them are methane from melting permafrost, or CO2 from forest fires, and not sure how much the cloud cover would change with more heat. You have the exponential trend of growing global average temperature, and the exponential trends of triggered positive feedback mechanisms. If we want to revert this, we have to offset not just our emissions, but the triggered emissions too, remove the extra carbon from the atmosphere, and lower the temperature, without all four there will be no long term solution, just a continued trend towards conditions not compatible with human life or civilization as we know it now.
- betwixthewires 5y agoSo we have passed a tipping point after which future tipping points cannot be avoided? Then are they really tipping points, or is the tipping point in the past?
- ryandvm 5y agoNot a popular opinion, but I have a lot of faith in humanity's _future_ engineering ability. Yes, we are dealing with climate consequences right now. And yes, we should be trying to improve resource efficiency right now. But that said, the worst is almost certainly yet to come, and it is exceedingly difficult to solve the problems of tomorrow with the technology today. A little anecdote to illustrate this is that at the turn of the last century the streets of New York City were projected to be buried under 10 feet of horse shit. No joke. Was that a silly scenario to consider? Not really. But it turned out to be completely resolved by unforeseen technological improvements that made the entire conjecture nonsensical. Just spit-balling, but let's say we crack fusion technology in the next 50 years and unlock effectively limitless energy. With free power maybe we run massive atmospheric scrubbers and bury CO2 and methane in the earth. I'm sure there are other climate control techniques that unlimited power unlocks. My point is this: think back at any point in the last 500 years and try to imagine them solving the problems of 100 years into the future. It's a laughable thought experiment. Their solutions would have been ludicrous given the technology that future generations develop. What hubris it takes to not realize that we are _at least_ as primitive in relation to future generations.
- cogman10 5y ago50 years ago was 1970. We had solar power, nuclear energy, wind energy, and plastics. The energy landscape today looks exactly the same as it did in 1970. The only difference is renewables are significantly cheaper and batteries significantly better. Fusion looks to be just as close today as it looked to be in the 1970s.