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One of the things that is most worrying about global warming to me is what a 3C increase on a planetary scale means for the very nature of the reality we experi

One of the things that is most worrying about global warming to me is what a 3C increase on a planetary scale means for the very nature of the reality we experience. What impact will all that energy / entropy have on the probability distribution of possible events and states of our world? Will reality become less predictable?

desertraven 5y ago
Intriguing... can you elaborate or give some context to this?
- pfisherman 5y ago
  I think that global warming is generally hard for people to wrap their heads around because it is a planetary scale event, and our consciousness experiences the universe on a much smaller scale. Imo, the best way to reason about the impact in our daily lives is to think about systems that exist in much smaller spacetime scales than ourselves. So in this case statistical mechanics. What happens to the atoms or molecules of a system when you dump a bunch of heat into it? What might that look like at the scale of individual atoms and molecules?
what_is_orcas 5y ago
Isn't that sort of already happening? This year we've seen floods in Germany, huge wildfires in the US west, snow in Texas (and the Pacific Northwest), storms up the US east coast (wasn't there flooding in New England, too?), and I'm sure other stuff I've either forgotten or not heard about. I think what's going to compound that is the push for "carbon neutrality", the idea that any emissions will be offset by... offsets (carbon capture, tree-planting, whatever). That tends to only be about the period of time from achieving carbon neutrality forward, but ignores the carbon emitted leading up to that milestone. I'm guessing that reaching carbon neutrality, for many industries, is not going to be a carbon-neutral mission. For example, if we want to move to electric vehicles prior to a carbon-neutral supply chain, then every EV build can have a significant carbon-footprint.

desertraven 5y ago

Intriguing... can you elaborate or give some context to this?

pfisherman 5y ago
I think that global warming is generally hard for people to wrap their heads around because it is a planetary scale event, and our consciousness experiences the universe on a much smaller scale. Imo, the best way to reason about the impact in our daily lives is to think about systems that exist in much smaller spacetime scales than ourselves. So in this case statistical mechanics. What happens to the atoms or molecules of a system when you dump a bunch of heat into it? What might that look like at the scale of individual atoms and molecules?

what_is_orcas 5y ago

Isn't that sort of already happening? This year we've seen floods in Germany, huge wildfires in the US west, snow in Texas (and the Pacific Northwest), storms up the US east coast (wasn't there flooding in New England, too?), and I'm sure other stuff I've either forgotten or not heard about. I think what's going to compound that is the push for "carbon neutrality", the idea that any emissions will be offset by... offsets (carbon capture, tree-planting, whatever). That tends to only be about the period of time from achieving carbon neutrality forward, but ignores the carbon emitted leading up to that milestone. I'm guessing that reaching carbon neutrality, for many industries, is not going to be a carbon-neutral mission. For example, if we want to move to electric vehicles prior to a carbon-neutral supply chain, then every EV build can have a significant carbon-footprint.