14 ms·
Global Climate Report – September 2021
- Glench 5y agoLove that NOAA is getting shit done. They just redid the climate.gov website to be more useful: https://www.climate.gov/ https://www.climate.gov/
- ahevia 5y agoI’m just hoping there’s enough momentum and support for addressing climate change that NOAA can keep getting things done. Regardless of who might be in office in the future. Last thing we need is a new administration in 2024 completely undoing all the progress we’re making again.
- perfunctory 5y agoWhat is your hope based on? Genuinely curious. All evidence shows that there is neither momentum nor support, next to nothing is being done and global emissions just keep rising.
- WorldMaker 5y agoI read "just hoping" as "wishing for" not "have hope that".
- ahevia 5y agoMy hope comes from personal experience. Not exactly empirical. I’ve been involved in the climate movement for a long time now (since before I was even a teenager) and things have improved vastly during my life alone. If you asked me this question a few years ago I would be down in the dumps, but what I see around me these days has me much more positive of how humanity makes it through this. (I’m sorry I don’t really have one specific link or citation. Yale Climate Communication is a good place to start though) There is still a lot of losses and a lot of inaction. I don’t know if humanity will have a peaceful time mid or late century, but I don’t think the situation is as dire as it used to be.
- varelse 5y agoRight before he died, David MacKay did a study indicating we needed to rely on an insane amount of nuclear to survive (but we live in a world insanely against nuclear power). Since then the price of solar energy has plummeted. Has anyone done the study to update these numbers? https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/03/idea-of-renewables-powering-uk-is-an-appalling-delusion-david-mackay https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...
- perfunctory 5y agoThanks for your answer. I, for one, am not holding my breath. Not until the global emissions chart flattens at least.
- systemvoltage 5y agoOnly if we have the tenth of competence in SSA and DMVs (state run) around the US. I want some strong leader to abolish them and start again. Fire all the useless employees that corrupt these places if they don’t improve. I’m paying for this. And so are you. And we should expect nothing but excellence. It’s harsh but this is what I feel.
- bigbillheck 5y agoI've lived in and gotten drivers licenses in several states and in none of them were there any problems with the DMVs that couldn't have been improved by hiring more people. It seems like a pretty thankless job, and I would by no means want to do it.
- systemvoltage 5y agoAt this point, your anecdote doesn't help - heck, DMV's inefficiencies are so widely known and even featured in some movies: https://www.google.com/search?q=dmv+sloth https://www.google.com/search?q=dmv+sloth
- AutumnCurtain 5y agoIt seems deeply odd to say anecdotes don't help and then talk about movies, if it doesn't help him it doesn't help you
- bigbillheck 5y agoThere are lots of things that are 'widely known and even featured in some movies' which have no basis in fact (or if they ever did, it's long gone). For an example relevant to here, consider how movies depict operating a computer and how that relates to one's own lived experiences.
- anonporridge 5y agoMake work, bullshit jobs is basically a crude mechanism for a kind of UBI for many people. Our governments are deeply disincentivized to cleanup these inefficiencies because it means higher unemployment. This is one of the reasons I'm a strong supporting of an actual UBI + universal healthcare. If people's lives aren't destroyed and driven to death by poverty if they don't have a job, then there won't be as much moral and political hazard to eliminating bullshit jobs in favor a system that works better for all of us.
- andred14 5y agoStop BSing us ALL previous climate disaster predictions DID NOT happen.
- melling 5y agoI suppose we should stop using coal to generate electricity. https://www.iea.org/fuels-and-technologies/coal https://www.iea.org/fuels-and-technologies/coal Of course we’ve known this for decades. Google even took a crack at it in 2007: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/11/google-hopes-to-undercut-coal-with-cheap-renewable-energy/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/11/google-hopes-t...
- pngai 5y agoAnd how did that work out for Google?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- superflit2 5y agoWe really should build more Nuclear. Nuclear is the real clean energy.
- mnd999 5y agoPreferably fusion, but that’s still proving super hard. But yes, any form would help a lot. If you’re suggesting hydro, wind and solar are not clean energy though I think you need to expand on that.
- anonporridge 5y agoFor all practical purposes, we need to pretend like fusion doesn't exist. Sure, we should still invest in it and do research, but we're setting ourselves up for disaster if we peg our hopes on viable fusion. Plus, fusion likely has the same kind of practical, economic limitations (huge upfront capital cost and long build time) that make fission hard to justify in an environment of small, cheap fossil fuel burners and wind/solar units.
- WorldMaker 5y agoIt does feel exciting that fusion has apparently moved from being "just 5 years away" for something like three decades to this past decade they've revised down to now perpetually "just 2 years away", at that burndown rate we can expect it in maybe three decades. That said the cheapest fusion power we'll ever have access to will always be solar power because the capital costs of building our solar system's sun are already well and easily sunk/amortized.
- tuatoru 5y agoHere's my comment from a couple of days ago. I'll add that as well as reaching Qtotal > 500, we need continuous operating life to be of the order of 10 million seconds, "only" 13 orders of magnitude away. Not going to happen in 2 years, or 5 years, or 40 years. --- The mininum viable Qplasma would be in the neighborhood of 100.[1] Fusion may get competitive for electricity generation with a Qtotal > 500.[2] 1. Sabine Hossenfelder, How Close Is Nuclear Fusion?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY&t=8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY&t=8s 2. Nicholas Hawker, A simplified economic model for inertial fusion, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33040650/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33040650/
- kaycebasques 5y agoI remember a few years back the phrase "global weirding" was circulating to indicate that weather around the world is expected to get more volatile (rather than just warmer across the board). With "global weirding" in mind are there any areas that are experiencing cooler climate than historical average?
- monkeyfacebag 5y agoAll I have is my personal experience that SF felt especially cold this summer.
- nend 5y agoHere's the map for 2020: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/global/mapping/2020 https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/global/mapping/2020 Looks like India and parts of Canada/Alaska experienced slightly cooler temps, as well as a decent area over water. For 2019, large parts of interior Canada and the US, as well as parts of Oceania. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/global/mapping/2019 https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/global/mapping/2019 One of the other noticeable things about those maps is Siberia. Affected quite a bit by warmer temps in both years.
- Diederich 5y ago"weather weirding" will tend to statistically disappear quite quickly given any kind of averaging. A better measure is the number of incidents of weather extremes: heat, cold, rain, drought, storms. I'm not going to look those up right now, but there's a ton of evidence that those incidents are going up dramatically.
- baq 5y agoThat’s the point - to highlight that weather isn’t climate. Average temp up 2 deg Celsius means 100F weird weather in the polar circle in the summer.
- DesiLurker 5y agoI started to call this 'weather randomization' because thats what it is.
- retrac98 5y agoI’m going to sell up my city house and get a little land in the country so we can be more self sufficient while shit increasingly hits the fan. We in the first world need to radically reduce our consumption and reassess our relationship with this planet, and we need to do it now.
- akudha 5y agoIf you are okay with it, could you share more details? Where are you moving to? How are you handling power, water? And internet?
- CalRobert 5y agoOf course, if you're serious about prepping isn't it generally a good idea not to tell people? Good luck - hope you find a good community.
- tjr225 5y agoI'm trying to find humor at the irony of rich tech bros moving to where poor people live and driving the poor people further away. Also; many have argued cities are more efficient than the alternative: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/environmental-advantages-cities https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/environmental-advantages-citi... Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but 8 billion people going back to a primitive way of life doesn't seem like a sustainable option either. Nice that you have the privilege to do it, though. Ironically, we are in need affordable housing where the city jobs are. That way we aren't forcing low paid workers to commute 1+ hours each way each day to put food on their families table. Here's the ironic part: depending on where you live, selling your city house in the current market only makes that problem worse!
- varelse 5y agoCities are wonderful places except that hell is other people. There's actually no need to go back to a primitive way of life but there absolutely is a need to learn more basic survival skills with respect to self-sufficiency. Or if you can't even change a tire on a car you should be afraid, very afraid.
- photochemsyn 5y agoThere's some interesting data in there. If you look at the supplemental info, note that this year is well on track to be bracketed within the top ten hottest years on record: > "This graphic compares the year-to-date temperature anomalies for 2021 (black line) to what were ultimately the ten warmest years on record: 2016 (1st), 2020 (2nd), 2019 (3rd), 2015 (4th), 2017 (5th), 2018 (6th), 2014 (7th), 2010 (8th), 2013 (9th), and 2005 (10th)." Now, consider the lag effect on climate response and atmospheric forcing (i.e. the ocean absorbs a fair amount of the extra heat, but as the ocean warms, that heat gets injected back into the atmosphere, especially polewards, so there's a lag time before current atmospheric forcings are full realized, and that's a multidecade effect, so we won't feel today's forcing completely for decades, even a century). Conclusion as I see it: every year for the next 50 years is going to be bracketed in the top ten hottest years, meaning the years 2030-2040 will all be hotter than 2010-2020 and so on. Decade by decade for the rest of the lives of people alive today, this will continue - and while getting off fossil fuels is needed, is indeed the only way to slow this trend, it's only going to slow down the year-to-year increase. Additionally, as polar melt proceeds, permafrost melt and outgassing becomes self-sustaining even if humans completely stop fossil fuel use and deforestation. Practically, this means adaptation is simply a must. People have to move out of flood plains, waste treatment plants in low-lying coastal zones needed to be moved uphill, people need to realize the global refugee crisis is going to be 10X as bad as anything seen yet at least, perhaps a steady rate of 1,000,000 per year fleeing climate disaster zones. In reality we are heading back to climate conditions last seen ~3-5 million years ago, before the ice ages set in, with sea levels dozens of meters higher than they are now. Nobody likes to hear this it seems, but the science does seem to be saying that this has already happened, sort of.
- WorldMaker 5y agoAll of that is assuming we don't make major advances in carbon/methane capture and maybe some sort of "ice capture" plan, of course. I don't know how much hope we have to actually see major advances in these areas, but given what we all expect of how much pressure we will be in collectively I can imagine a lot more money being thrown at is as people get desperate.
- 5y ago
- JoshTko 5y agoClimate collapse is probably the Great Filter.
- exporectomy 5y agoPrevious generations though it was nuclear war. I wonder what our grandkids will decide it's going to be. Probably something we couldn't even imagine being a disaster today.
- tuatoru 5y agoI still think it'll be nuclear war as the proximate cause. The US military used to call climate change a "force multiplier". It turns all the existing stresses up to 11. (Water shortage, ideological and ethnic conflict, great power dick-measuring, etc. etc.) [Sorry, I can't lay hands on the PDF right now, and I think the research unit was disbanded about 10 years ago, so the report will be difficult to find on the internet. But it was in about 2005 or 2006.]
- chess_buster 5y agoPfff, why not both.
- JoshTko 5y agoThe way I see it climate collapse is going to significantly increase the probability of nuclear war
- milesward 5y agoI wanna use cloud tech to help companies that are trying to do something about this. I'm all-in to help. Tell me how, bring me something you need help with.
- 01100011 5y agoIt's time for a national water grid(https://www.osti.gov/biblio/963122-national-smart-water-grid https://www.osti.gov/biblio/963122-national-smart-water-grid): > The National Smart Water Grid{trademark} will pay for itself in a single major flood event. Weather patterns will likely change dramatically and violently. We cannot relocate our farmland fast enough. We need a system capable of absorbing extreme precipitation and reclaiming it for food. This isn't about stealing water from the Great Lakes(that's a common worry). Yes, pumping water takes energy, but it also provides an infrastructure for gravitational storage of solar energy for night time use. We need to think big, and we need to think fast.