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I think it's worth pointing out that the impacts of climate change are often presented as singular effects: rising sea level, warmer summers, increased drought,
by time_to_smile 4y ago
I think it's worth pointing out that the impacts of climate change are often presented as singular effects: rising sea level, warmer summers, increased drought, etc. But as we can see here there is also a very strong interaction effect between all of these (and it tends to magnify the issues rather than having them cancel out).
This is also why many major climate reports tend to inherently be on the conservative side: it's really, really hard to correctly model these interactions so you can only earnestly report the predicted change in individual variables rather than the impact on the system.
And keep in mind this is not the "new normal", we're entering a period of transition that will not end within our life times. The rate of CO2 accumulating the atmosphere is accelerating and the rate of methane in the atmosphere is rapidly accelerating. We will likely see a blue ocean event in the next 20 years and it's really hard to imagine how that will even play out with the global climate, Thwaites glacier could collapse without much warning (very rapidly causing sea level rise beyond our current projections), the AMOC slow down could reach a tipping point, etc.
Everything we're witnessing now will in the future seem relatively mild.
- 88840-8855 4y ago
- jibe 4y agoHow about not shutting down German nuclear plants, and not buying "clean natural gas from mother russia".
- 88840-8855 4y agoBeep boop. Not a Russian bot, a German one who is just pissed of by the current politics and the elitist decisions. And I hate it that any alternative proposed to the current kamikaze politics is called "Russian bots". Yes, German nuclear plants was yet another trash decision and pushed again by the fear agitated by the Green Party. And yet, the majority wants nuclear, the Greens are against it. We need REALPOLITIK and not this ideological trash. And REALPOLITIK to beat the biggest thread: global warming... and not some random conflicts between random countries nobody cared about 7 months ago and some random old pseudo-dictators that will anyway not be alive in a few years anymore.
- jibe 4y agoGet natural gas from Canada and the US. North America can supply Europe. Frack in Germany, supply yourself. You have to choose, is Ukraine worth short term financial pain? The choice is to surrender Ukraine to Russia and take the gas, or suffer for a year financially while you ramp up other energy sources.
- barbazoo 4y agoIs there such a thing as "clean gas" and if so, how does Russian gas qualify here? Also, isn't it Russia that's throttling gas delivery to 20% right now?
- 88840-8855 4y ago
- barbazoo 4y agoRussia invaded Ukraine. What did the EU do to justify this? I don't mean what Russia's reasons are (NATO expansion) but what morally justifies it.
- mc32 4y agoHighlighted by the stupidity of not buying directly from Russia at normal prices but instead buying the same hydrocarbons extracted by Russia from war washing third parties like China and India who resell Russian hydrocarbons to those who for political reasons can’t buy directly but can buy indirectly at inflated prices!! It’s the height of stupidity.
- barbazoo 4y agoAs far as I can tell, e.g. (1), the EU does not get gas from China or India. (1) https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/european-energy-crisis-where-the-eu-gets-its-natural-gas-2022-8?op=1 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/europea...
- 88840-8855 4y agoThere you go https://www.ft.com/content/1e20467a-5b53-42b7-ad89-49808f7e1780 https://www.ft.com/content/1e20467a-5b53-42b7-ad89-49808f7e1...
- barbazoo 4y agoYou're right it seems. Here's a non-paywalled article https://news.yahoo.com/china-reselling-natural-gas-energy-145711758.html https://news.yahoo.com/china-reselling-natural-gas-energy-14...
- unmole 4y agohttps://www.vortexa.com/insights/products/indias-diesel-exports-set-new-record-is-this-sustainable/ https://www.vortexa.com/insights/products/indias-diesel-expo...
- bena 4y agoI had to look up what a "blue ocean event" was. So, for others, here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Impacts_on_the_physical_environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Impacts...
- barbazoo 4y agoI chuckled when I saw your username together with your probably not far fetched but damning prediction of what's to come.
- ageofwant 4y agoPretty disheartening to see the downvotes in a forum like hn which are supposed to be informed about these things. If people that are supposed to be able to critically assess data and have access to as much information they need to verify any claims come to the conclusion that you are full of shit, what hope is there to educate grandpa screaming at the wokes on the street.
- Sharlin 4y agoIt is difficult to get a man to understand something when his startup idea depends upon his not understanding it. –Upton Sinclair, paraphrased
- mempko 4y agoI love technology and have to keep telling my friends that it's possible there won't be a computer industry in 30 years. I'm not joking. Our technology requires a highly complex and organized society to continue to function and develop. Complex and highly organized societies developed under a stable climate. We created societies built on cities that don't move. If you love technology. If you love computers. Then global warming is your biggest threat and something you should care about deeply.
- notabee 4y agoIt's not surprising, actually. The problem with very smart people is that they're often very smart in their particular domains of expertise, but socially they will be treated as just very smart in general. This often leads to an emotional overconfidence in assessing fields outside their domains of expertise, and that extreme cleverness becomes more of a tool to create complex rationalizations of uninformed biases rather than being used humbly, empirically, and diligently as should be the case for a beginner in any topic. And yes, I'm aware that's essentially a paraphrase of the Dunning-Kruger concept. We're all probably making similar assumptions about domains of knowledge we don't know much about, because that's what the brain does. Just like human vision appears solid and complete but is actually a stitched together amalgamation of the small, receptor-dense fovea in the center darting around constantly, and the rest being filled in by the brain instead of direct perception, so is our impression of the world, and we won't know things for sure unless we take time to study them up close.
- eldaisfish 4y agoalso missing is yet another aspect of a very complex system - parched soil has lower ability to retain water. These floods follow an intense heatwave during which large swathes of pakistani soil dried up. Come the rains and you have a massive problem. Like you say, this is just the beginning. If floods like this happen in the Indian plains - and they will - the human and social costs will be immense.
- dylan604 4y agowe just saw this in the DFW area last week. 3 months of triple digit temps and zero precip followed by a single 24 hour period receiving 5-7" of rain. the ground was so hard, that it might as well have been concrete. that just allowed all of the water to run off into the streams that fed the lakes. fortunately, those lakes were well below normal levels, so this just helped them come back to where they were. if there were multiple days of that level of rain, a la Harvey, we'd have been really screwed.
- alexose 4y agoIt's not a foregone conclusion that we're doomed to a life of accelerating climate change. We could deploy solar geoengineering to see us through the transition to renewables. Then, as fossil sources are retired and direct air capture comes online, gradually draw down our geoengineering efforts. It may seem like a non-starter right now, but what about five years from now? What if our best climate models agree that it will do less damage to the planet than allowing the permafrost to thaw?
- AftHurrahWinch 4y agoI think it's a political problem, not a technical problem. If we can imagine that our best climate models could drive decision making to enable geoengineering... why don't our best climate models drive earlier interventions?
- alexose 4y agoGeoengineering is a unique prospect in that it's inexpensive-- Cheap enough that a couple of billionaires could pay for it if they wanted. In terms of interventions, it's a much easier pill to swallow than something in the trillions of dollars. The pushback comes from the risk. While we know that it'll cool the planet, we don't necessarily know how it'll affect weather patterns. If we can figure that out with some level of certainty, I believe there will be a point where the rewards outweigh the risks.
- AftHurrahWinch 4y agoI think there are probably several billionaires who independently have the resources the pursue significant stratospheric aerosol injection. I wonder how such an individual would imagine their liability for stochastic effects on agriculture. Those risks make me think it's most likely a government with a nuclear arsenal would pursue this... perhaps India? Mumbai could become a very difficult place to live in a few decades.
- johnchristopher 4y ago
- hotpotamus 4y ago
- polygamous_bat 4y agoI believe this is one of the largest challenges when trying to make effective changes in the system to address climate change: those whose actions can create the largest changes are not the ones who have to bear the burden first or directly. I really don't know how to appeal to a crowd denying all the evidence, so devoid in empathy for people across the world, while, as an immigrant, I can see my neighboring countries literally drowning.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago> I believe this is one of the largest challenges when trying to make effective changes in the system to address climate change: those whose actions can create the largest changes are not the ones who have to bear the burden first or directly. You mean the corporations and companies that continue to produce emissions on a massive scale while trying to constantly shame me and tell me what a bad person I am for having the audacity to drive to the grocery story once a week or so?
- hotpotamus 4y agoThat's an aspect, but the thing I find the most maddening is that people cast doubt on the science by saying that the effects of changing the mixture of gasses in our atmosphere are ultimately not completely knowable. That's obviously true, but to me that's all the more reason why we probably should avoid doing it as much as possible.
- hackerlight 4y agoI am certain that's part of the psychology. Wealthy people in the colder north know that even if shit hits the fan in poorer and hotter countries, they can pull up the draw bridge and still survive, despite being the people that caused the situation. It's like a long slow genocide perpetrated by a billion people.
- marcosdumay 4y ago> The rate of CO2 accumulating the atmosphere is accelerating It's a small point, but the ratio of CO2 on the atmosphere is definitively not accelerating. On the last couple of decades it has been growing steadily, and the noisy few months look like they have negative acceleration. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/