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Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

• moffkalast 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • totetsu 3y ago
    Dont let global warming get you down, civilizations die all the time, just like that, why ours could wake up dead tomorrow.
    • enraged_camel 3y ago
      Part of me feels sad, part of me feels dread, and part of me says, "well, we're just reaping what we have been (and still are) sowing, and we collectively deserve all that is coming." All the suffering sucks though.
      • scioto 3y ago
        This is natural progression. The apex predator takes over and over-grazes the land, so to speak, to the point where it no longer supports the apex, so eventually the apex predator dies off, and the other species that are left can flourish.
        • moffkalast 3y ago
          The trick is to brake just early enough to hit the apex of the proverbial civilizational corner and come out accelerating until we straighten ourselves out.
      • nprateem 3y ago
        Only some are more culpable than others. The climate crisis represents the single biggest failure of humanity. How stupid do our leaders need to be to know about an extinction level event (or at least one that threatens the breakdown of civilisation) with > 50 years notice and take no substantive action? They should be charged for crimes against humanity.
        • totetsu 3y ago
          Some people just want power and ego and status, some people just want things to be simple and not change from what they know, and a significantly smaller number of people just want to be chill and sensible.
        • mistermann 3y ago
          Some conspiracy theorists warned people about the design of your political systems but no one seemed to think it's a legitimate concern. Time will tell I suppose.
        • enraged_camel 3y ago
          The blame doesn’t lie just with leaders though. It comes all the way from the bottom. Everyone wants their standard of life to improve, they want conveniences, luxuries, socioeconomic status… and they vote for policies that’ll give them those things. It’s a collective problem at a global scale.
      • wolverine876 3y ago
        How about another response: Do something about it. You're not a spectator; it's in your hands.
    • jfengel 3y ago
      I just wish we didn't go down so stupidly. I could understand mere greed. I could even understand ordinary ignorance. Instead, we chose stupidity. The answers were right there. It wasn't a secret and it wasn't all that difficult. Instead people pretended it was a vast conspiracy against them, denying both basic physics and the data. We still debate why and how Rome fell, but they'll look back at us and say, "yeah, they were just a bunch of dumbfucks."
• thatwasunusual 3y ago
  I'm getting 503, so: https://archive.ph/FdOZJ https://archive.ph/FdOZJ
• echelon 3y ago
  We're technically still in an ice age [1]. How far does this need to go to reach the end of that ice age [2]? The Cretaceous period was over ten degrees warmer than our current period [3,4,5]. It supported a lot (though much different) biodiversity. How long would it take us to push into these temperature ranges? And how long to exceed them? How much species diversity will we lose at each half degree increment from this point forward? Will we see some species better equipped (increased as opposed to decreased fitness) by temperature increases? Will we see any quick evolution to support climage changes? When will temperatures be incompatible with ranges necessary to sustain society? When will they be incompatible with human life? And all terrestrial and aquatic animal life? Will runaway heating (clatrate gun [6], etc.) be capable of achieving any of these? -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age "Earth is currently in the ice age called Quaternary glaciation." [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation "To geologists, an ice age is defined by the presence of large amounts of land-based ice." (So my question in terms of heating and time - how long until we exit the ice age?) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous "Mean annual temperatures at the poles during the MKH exceeded 14 °C.", "deep ocean temperatures were as much as 15 to 20 °C (27 to 36 °F) warmer than today's" [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous_Thermal_Maximum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous_Thermal_Maximum "Late Cenomanian sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean were substantially warmer than today (~27-29°C). Turonian equatorial SSTs are conservatively estimated based on δ18O and high pCO2 estimates to have been ~32°C, but may have been as high as 36°C." [5] https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1081 https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1081 "During this period, we find sea-surface temperatures exceeding 32 °C at 15°–20° N and averaging 26 °C at ∼53° S. These temperatures substantially exceed modern temperatures at equivalent latitudes," [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis (truly horrifying)
  • taneq 3y ago
    I think it’s an ice age while any point on earth (not counting mountains etc.) has year-round ice. We’ll be in serious trouble long before that changes.
• NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  >If the C3S dataset only currently starts in 1979, how can you then provide temperatures relating to the pre-industrial era? >In order to relate global mean temperature derived from the C3S dataset (ERA5) to the pre-industrial era, we use the estimate that the 1981-2010 reference period is approximately 0.69°C and that the 1991-2020 reference period is approximately 0.88°C warmer than the period 1850-1900, the time period typically referred to as the pre-industrial level for temperatures by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). >Note that these estimates were updated during Autumn 2021, due to new findings published in AR6 WGI report “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis”. See more here under “Reference periods and anomalies”. I’m sure this is all fine and valid, but they really need to work on their messaging. To a skeptic, this is gonna sound a lot like “oh yeah we pretty much just made the numbers up.”
  • ForestCritter 3y ago
    I can't back it up because it was a televised congressional committee hearing and I don't remember the name of the scientist but he said that his data he had been studying and working with that was published in the 1940's was different from the data that is now published for that same time period. He made no accusations he just said his data showed no signs of global warming. So, I guess as a skeptic, yes this does make me think they are making it all up.
    • hotpotamus 3y ago
      As someone who has lived in South Texas my whole life and seen summers go from uncomfortably hot when I was a child to now dangerous to life, I have to say that my data leads me to believe that we're doomed. I do wish I could believe what you believe though; much like I wish there was a god in heaven who loves and protects me - it seems to really help people get through the day, but I seem to be incapable of believing it myself.
    • multiplegeorges 3y ago
      You don't think techniques have improved since the 1940s? Of course the data would be different with 60-70 years of improved collection techniques, analysis tools, and theoretical knowledge about the climate.
• badtension 3y ago
  > It was the hottest August on record – by a large margin – and the second hottest ever month after July 2023, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service ERA 5 dataset. August as a whole is estimated to have been around 1.5°C warmer than the preindustrial average for 1850-1900, according to the C3S monthly climate bulletin. Thinking about getting to 1.5 C averaged over the planet is surreal and we are still 30 years out from the promised "net zero". We have some tough times ahead of us.
  • melling 3y ago
    Yes, and there’s a lag effect so the temperature will still increase for years after that. However, to be clear, it’s unlikely we get to net zero in 27 years. We haven’t reached any of our goals so far and the goals only get more difficult
    • rc_mob 3y ago
      Yes. Humanity we are not in good shape.
      • giardini 3y ago
        [flagged]
    • GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
      I seem to recall that the first and second IPCC reports (I haven't read the newer ones) indicated that increases would continue for about 200 years, even if emissions went to zero.
      • wcoenen 3y ago
        The earth is indeed not in thermal equilibrium due to the speed of the recent CO2 increase, so warming would continue if atmospheric CO2 concentration would be held constant. However, atmospheric CO2 concentration would not stay constant after emissions stop. It would go down slowly, mainly because it would continue to dissolve into the oceans. This effect cancels out the above point. Which is why the IPCC says that "The global temperature will stabilise when carbon dioxide emissions reach net zero."[1] Unfortunately, stabilizing temperature does not mean that nothing else changes. The stable higher temperature will still mean that glaciers will continue to melt. Sea levels will continue to rise. Oceans will still acidify further. [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/04/04/ipcc-ar6-wgiii-pressrelease/ https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/04/04/ipcc-ar6-wgiii-pressrelease/
• rtpg 3y ago
  The conspiracy-minded part of me really wants to link this year to the sulfur reductions in ship emissions kicking in this year. The fact that there's basically only one person really trumpeting this in a way kind of indistinguishable from things I know are false is hard though. Hank Green pointing out that we could just spray water into the air to get the same effect (and avoid the whole "sulfur" thing in general) gives me a modicum of hope. But If it's all true I just have so many doubts in being able to act on this nicely. How would you even police giant ships to make sure they keep the "water spraying gun" running all the time?
  • myshpa 3y ago
    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/30/radical-ways-to-fix-the-earth-are-they-magic-bullets-or-just-band-aids https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/30/radical-... Dismissing SRM technology, Prof Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College, London, called it “irresponsible, dangerous and a threat to the manageability” of our survival, saying: “It is not a solution but an extremely dangerous band-aid that covers up the global warming problem without healing it, creating a false and unwarranted sense of climate safety while the core of the problem continues to fester.” https://phys.org/news/2023-08-viewpoint-guardrails-geoengineering-gamble-potentially.html https://phys.org/news/2023-08-viewpoint-guardrails-geoengine... While theoretically capable of cooling the planet, solar radiation management could have drastic side effects by shifting patterns of global atmospheric circulation that can lead to more extreme weather events. It also does nothing to reduce harms of excess greenhouse gases, including ocean acidification.
    • mistrial9 3y ago
      the ordinary human ego has adopted itself to larger-than-large for survival. I claim that ordinary humans will use their ordinary ego to invent ways to "manage" the changes that are occurring.. and that will happen repeatedly, despite all reason or science. It is important not to start direct confrontation when someone is showing signs of listening at all.. simple minded responses are ordinary. That is exactly why nation-level Science is being applied, right?. It should not be shocking that ordinary people reply with simplistic responses. The situation is too extreme for the pleasures of ordinary quarralling -- disciplined discourse is called for, even if most people are not willing or able.
• deleted 3y ago
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• ipnon 3y ago
  I use Wren to take some personal responsibility, and I am looking for more ways to take action.
  • giardini 3y ago
    I suggest you give up all non-human powered transportation for starters and follow that with a reduction in you electrical footprint: no more batteries - use hand- or foot-crank generation instead. Once we haven't heard from you for an extended period we'll assume you were successful. Best of luck.
    • mattnewton 3y ago
      Switching to biking and paying for renewable electricity is quite practical in many parts of the world, so I think your “concern” that this isn’t doable while remaining on the internet isn’t productive.
• audessuscest 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • polotics 3y ago
    What do you mean exactly?
    • frob 3y ago
      Let's not beat around the bush. This is standard climate change denialism. It's the trope that there is nothing here to worry about because, who knows, the earth COULD have been warmer in the past and it still exists now. It's the same logic that would say that you've decelerated from 60 mph to 0 before without an issue, so you should be just fine after slamming your car into a brick wall.
      • audessuscest 3y ago
        • frob 3y ago
          About 0%. Looking at historical timelines, the rapid change we are seeing now is unprecedented. The forced heating lines up exactly with the additional C02 and methane we have pumped into the atmosphere. We are causing this, full stop. (No need to reply; you've already shown yourself to be a sarcastic asshole who sucks down a big glass oil company propaganda for breakfast. [Insert sarcastic winking emoji here])
          • audessuscest 3y ago
            • VerminOctopus1 3y ago
              Why is your life a nightmare? I’d love to hear more
• suction 3y ago
  [dead]
• rc_mob 3y ago
  Apparently still not hot enough that anyone is power is doing any large changes
  • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    Elections are every roughly every half decade in most of the world, right? I think the leaders know that we won't panic about our climate changing over that time span. What do we call the climate change equivalent of an Overton window?
    • brucethemoose2 3y ago
      I posit that the Overton Window is increasingly less relevant in highly polarized political environments. Taking climate change as an example, a large fraction of the population in some countries is growing more skeptical of aggressive climate change policy, not less. Thats not going to shift policy acceptability even if the public's opinion shifts the opposite direction on average.
    • randomdata 3y ago
      In most of the world we are the leaders.
  • mgfist 3y ago
    That's not true, it just takes a lot of time and money.
  • wolverine876 3y ago
    We are in power. What are you doing?
• markus_zhang 3y ago
  How is the metric measured? I read https://climate.copernicus.eu/summer-2023-hottest-record https://climate.copernicus.eu/summer-2023-hottest-record but didn't get a good idea. Maybe I missed something. Reason I ask is because strangely we got a very cool summer for the previous 3 months in Eastern Canada. But that's part of earth so I'm asking about the method, how the weight is distributed, etc.
  • Projectiboga 3y ago
    Our region still has cooling from Greenland glacial melting. The catches are that the reflectiveness is going down and worse ice takes lots of heat to melt but way way less for that melted water to heat further. The previous climate shifts including 5 major extinction event major climate shifts happened over maybe a dozen years. El Nino is just starting now in September the records of the last three months were just when the cool phase La Nina was over before the coming few super heated years. And the civilization collapse tipping point from massive Arctic methane release may happen in the next few years. This climate scientist has been warning of mass human extinction by about the year 2026 for awhile now! https://arctic-news.blogspot.com https://arctic-news.blogspot.com
  • zetsurin 3y ago
    I'm in eastern Canada, with the exception of August, it was unseasonably hot in Ontario and Nova Scotia.
    • markus_zhang 3y ago
      Interesting, guess it's just a southern Quebec thing then. August is particularly...cold.
      • gdilla 3y ago
        Saint John NB was cold, Moncton NB was hot. it's like that a lot.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• gmuslera 3y ago
  Seasons, global climate related cycles like El Niño, unpredictable weather and so on push temperatures up and down, eventually it will get colder next winter. But the complex system that is the planet have a lot of tipping points, that once reached things will go increasingly worse with no turning back. I'm not sure if we didn't reach that stage already, or if this kind of events will give us the extra push to cross the border. That is why is dangerous to keep emitting even if they are not predicted to reach some milestone for some years still, the system becomes fragile and ready to break down with small changes.
  • highwaylights 3y ago
    This is the part of the problem it’s almost impossible to get people to accept and understand. The wilful ignorance, even among some of my own relatives, is legitimately terrifying. I tried to explain the concept of a tipping point and got chastised for buying into fake news. For a while I thought maybe a lot of people just think it’s exaggerated or something. Nope. They fully think the entire concept is a work of fiction, despite the overwhelming (and increasing) mountain of evidence. It’s legitimately crazy out there. Climate tipping points are poorly understood and are cumulative. We really don’t know if melting the glaciers is going to be enough by itself to raise the temperature enough to trigger the next domino to fall without further emissions which are also still increasing. It’s not been over-dramatised. If anything, I believe the consensus view is too reserved in how it views the limits of impacts at 1.5 degrees.
    • irrational 3y ago
      Yes, I have relatives that are medical doctors, physic professors, have doctorates in statistics, are engineers (real engineers and not software engineers), etc. and yet, because of the lies of conservative politics, are convinced that at best there is climate change, but it is from natural fluctuations and not human caused, and at worst that it is a hoax. Either way, there is nothing we can or should do.
      • badtension 3y ago
• refurb 3y ago
  The chart is from 1991 to 2023 by the looks of the article?
  • pc86 3y ago
    There are three charts in the article. Two are 1979-2023 and the other appears to just be the top 30 hottest months from the same time period.
    • swader999 3y ago
      This is a ridiculously short period for these sorts of claims.
      • pc86 3y ago
        I mean they are pretty solidly up and to the right. Are there charts with data from the 60s/50s/40s that drastically change the trend?
        • swader999 3y ago
          30s were significantly hotter.
• af3d 3y ago
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  • deleted 3y ago
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• peoplefromibiza 3y ago
  could this be relevant in this context? https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2023GB007875 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
• hypertele-Xii 3y ago
  *) based on a computer model.
  • bandyaboot 3y ago
    Where are you getting this? I don’t see anything in the article to suggest it’s based on anything but actual observation data.
    • piuantiderp 3y ago
      Because it's always a model, and has plenty of parameters to tweak, there is no "measuring the temperature of the earth at all points at the same time." There's always assumptions and interpolation
      • bandyaboot 3y ago
        Yeah, that makes sense—I thought op was suggesting it wasn’t primarily from observed data. Still, it seems clear that it should be possible to make conclusions about average temperature and trends from a large set of collected data, if it the statistical methodology is rigorous. Simply casting doubt (as it seems like the op is doing) without offering anything to question those methodologies adds nothing of value to the discussion.
• bandyaboot 3y ago
  I can’t wait for 5-10 years from now when the climate change deniers have a resurgence armed with graphs using now as the starting point. /s
• cmews 3y ago
  My prediction is that geo-engineering will be done when a certain death/disturbance threshold will have been reached (too many climate refugees for example and western world can't achieve a closed border, or too many weather disasters that hit the western world and populations are convinced it is because of global warming). However I don't think we will reach it in the next 5-10 years, but maybe after that period. Also curious if the earth maybe has some tricks (last one I can recall was more clouds were causing more cooling than expected in the climate models) that will invalidate the current climate change models.
  • pier25 3y ago
    The 2030s is when I think things are going to start getting serious.
    • netsharc 3y ago
      I think 2-3 years, tbh.. it's a doom spiral.
  • ethanbond 3y ago
    Why would you think we have tricks up our sleeves? What’s that mean “geo-engineering will be done when…” The whole problem is we aren’t capable of doing what we know needs to be done.
    • cmews 3y ago
      When we can burn fossil fuels to impact the atmosphere that cause climate change then we can also pump other gasses that will have a cooling effect. We aren’t doing much at the moment because there aren’t economic incentives to do so, but that can change if we have policy changes.
      • jfengel 3y ago
        We aren't doing it because pumping gases into the atmosphere does more than just reduce temperature. Sulfur compounds, for example, dissolve in the clouds and make them acidic. So does the CO2 itself. The oceans are getting more acidic already, killing shellfish and throwing off food webs. Throwing additional geoengineering on top of the geoengineering we're already doing will almost certainly cause as many problems as it solves. It would be so much simpler, cheaper, and more effective to just stop digging carbon out of the ground and putting it in the sky.
• jokoon 3y ago
  It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Same for red meat or cheap air travel. Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers. It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem. And yes, I don't believe it's only rich people, it's also middle class people who generate a lot of emissions, and I'm a leftist.
  • jmondi 3y ago
    And what about all the countries that won’t do anything regardless? So we should just tank our own economy while being unable to do anything about our neighbors? It won’t take tanking the economy, it would take world war 3.
    • micromacrofoot 3y ago
      “I won’t stop because they won’t stop” is going to destroy the planet
      • jmondi 3y ago
        It is a collective effort. If you don’t realize that, you will not get anywhere in your goals of reducing climate change.
        • verisimi 3y ago
          Isn't it funny that the only option is going to be greater government, that forces its citizens to act against their own interests? The real winner in this situation is government! (Exclamation mark, but I'm not actually surprised.) You have to wonder whether this is a self-serving agenda for those who run it.
          • verisimi 3y ago
• perihelions 3y ago
  One more example occurred in the four days since this post was published: - "By 06:00 UTC on September 8, Lee's maximum sustained winds reached 165 mph (270 km/h), an increase of 85 mph (140 km/h) in 24 hours, making it the third‑fastest intensifying Atlantic hurricane on record, behind only Felix and Wilma.[12]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Lee_(2023) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Lee_(2023)
• isthispermanent 3y ago
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• ryan93 3y ago
  For a fraction of the US federal debt we could have gone full nuclear.
  • wolverine876 3y ago
    We have a very hard time building nuclear power stations. This claim, which seems to absolve energy consumption, is easy to say but very hard to do in practice.
    • ryan93 3y ago
      1st world inhabitants will NEVER stop consuming energy until they literally cant get it.
• verisimi 3y ago
  We've had a warm few days but overall its been a pretty wet summer in the UK. Last year was warmer. Re the chart - did temperature recording start in 1980? Can't we have the temperature that is on record (ie back to 1880 or whatever), if you are going to claim this is the hottest on record... Stuff like that is suspicious.
  • dazc 3y ago
    1976 anyone?
    • timrichard 3y ago
      1976 is famous for being a scorching summer (at least with Brits over a certain age), but it's not in the top ten of our temperature records. Seven of those ten are from this century :-( At the other poster mentioned, records began around 1880.
• marginallen 3y ago
  [flagged]
• gls2ro 3y ago
  What a great coincidence: today Youtube recommended me to watch The Problem with Jon Steward: The World is ending ... So Recyle? I strongly recommend it to watch and then think about what solutions we can have.
• gonzo41 3y ago
  Just for fun everyone. This year there were like 2000 private jet flights to get rich people to burning man. Apologize to your children. They will be rightly angry.
• thunkle 3y ago
  I'm discouraged that politics ever even comes into this. It makes as much sense as the left likes masks and the right doesn't like masks. I wish everyone could admit this is an issue and move forward.
  • mort96 3y ago
    Of course it's a political issue. Politics is fundamentally about a struggle for which interests should be given priority over other interests. There are lots of people with a whooooole lot of power who have a lot to lose from taking climate change seriously, how could it not become political?
  • acdha 3y ago
    I’d remember that this didn’t happen by accident. The fossil fuel companies knew this was coming in the 1970s and poured billions of dollars into delaying action and securing their political power. You used to be able to find Republicans opposed to pollution and Democrats who were in the pocket of fossil fuel companies - Manchin is a relic of that era – but the fossil fuel companies managed to get enough control of the Republican Party to make it difficult for anyone opposed to pollution to remain a member. By the time Bush ran against Gore the contrast was stark: someone saying urgent action was needed and an oilman saying the scientists were all wrong and we needed more cheap oil. What really sealed our fate was electing Obama. I know a Republican lobbyist who used to work on various environmental issues, which wasn’t as oxymoronic as it sounds: he used to get the coalitions of hunting and fishing groups and sometimes farmers who were in favor of things like clean water and air, and ecosystems which were healthy enough to support game. As he describes it, once Obama was elected the Republican leadership were bitterly determined not to give him any wins and told their members that those old deals were off-limits. Their successors don’t even have a tradition of collaborating like that.
  • Slava_Propanei 3y ago
    [dead]
• blumomo 3y ago
  [flagged]
• more_corn 3y ago
  Hottest so far.
  • jfengel 3y ago
    Coolest for the rest of your life. (Alas, that's not true. Next summer will likely be cooler, and the usual suspects will claim that proves climate change is a hoax.)
• svtxvt 3y ago
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  • throwaway290 3y ago
    To save someone a click, it's this sort of drivel with no citations: > Furthermore, we have recently detected a number of alarming anomalies in all the layers of the Earth system. There is an extraordinary displacement and destabilization of the Earth’s core, a sporadic and chaotic acceleration of the planet’s rotation, and a shift in its rotational axis. This scenario is compounded by a critical weakening and emergence of atypical anomalies of the magnetic field, and a change in the composition of the upper layers of the atmosphere. These events have culminated in an extreme activation of magmatic foci, and an accompanying increase in deep mantle earthquakes - bringing about a decrease in the thermal conductivity of the ocean. As a consequential result, our oceans have lost their ability to function as a compensatory and cooling mechanism. All these alarming factors indicate only one thing - To Wit, Our planet is on the verge of self-destruction, and humanity has only a few years remaining to avert this impending catastrophe.
• LispSporks22 3y ago
  > red meat I've been vegan for decades, and I would love to see humanity move on from meat, but the idea is so incredibly offensive to people that I find it far easier to imagine the the Amazon razed and replaced with cattle feeding lots before that will happen.
  • renegade-otter 3y ago
    We are supposed to stop eating meat while our governments cut taxes for corporations as their management buys that third infinity pool. Corporations are "people", my friend - while being absolved from any social responsibility.
    • mort96 3y ago
      Yes. We can do a good thing even if other people are doing a bad thing.
      • justnotworthit 3y ago
        [flagged]
      • rux 3y ago
        It very much won't matter in the grand scheme of things though
  • ska123 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • wolverine876 3y ago
    It's not incredibly offensive; those are rhetorical tactics and you are falling for them: Act crazy and the other side will give up; it's a simple as that. They don't care about meat; they care about defeating liberalism. They will shift their belief in a moment.
    • Slava_Propanei 3y ago
• 29athrowaway 3y ago
  It's the arctic methane that is now melting. We need a constellation of methane tracking satellites.
• renegade-otter 3y ago
  It seems to me that the "alarmist" scientists have been erring on the side of caution so much that the events have been unfolding faster than even some of their most conservative predictions.
  • jlnho 3y ago
    Well, yeah, otherwise those predictions likely wouldn't have been labelled conservative.
• vixen99 3y ago
  "China, the United States and India — contribute 42.6% total emissions, while the bottom 100 countries only account for only 2.9%.". Asia is the largest emitter with China at 27%". While selling renewables to the rest of the world, China seems reluctant to reduce its reliance on coal-fired power stations. 'Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021.' Chinese scientists are hardly backward in understanding climate science. So what's the logic here? Presumably if they could maintain energy supplies without coal, they would. https://ourworldindata.org/annual-co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/annual-co2-emissions https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-new-coal-power-plants-per-week-in-2022/ https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-...
  • tock 3y ago
    China, the United States and India also make up 40% of the world population.
    • wolverine876 3y ago
      Do you believe that the US, at least, doesn't emit more per capita than most less-developed countries?
      • tock 3y ago
        Developed countries definitely emit more per capita than less developed countries.
• mikewarot 3y ago
  Clearly we need to solve this problem, climate change is real, and it's here. However, we can't just stop using oil. It would lead to the death (by starvation) of most of humanity, mostly in the poorer parts of the world. We need a well managed transition away from fossil fuel inputs. One of the first things that should be shifted, as much as is possible, is from Industrial Farming which uses massive chemical inputs, and burns up the soil. Regenerative agriculture can eliminate the need for tilling, capture carbon into the soil, which both then improve water retention, and decrease soil temperatures. These reduce the need for irrigation, increase the ability to absorb rainfall without run-off. The addition of ruminants to the mix produces fertilizer and meat at the same time. About 20% of the carbon we've dumped into the atmosphere could be recaptured if widespread adoption of regenerative farming were to happen. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a lot cheaper than trying to use machines to do it.
  • acdha 3y ago
    > However, we can't just stop using oil The single best move we could make would be progressively taxing it: tell everyone that today is the cheapest a gallon of gas will ever be, with guaranteed 20% annual price increases with the tax revenue devoted to assisting low-income households decarbonize. That would tell every business to start investing in alternatives or efficiency improvements, homeowners would shift towards things like heat pumps to save money, and you wouldn’t have as many auto buyers locking in 15-20 years of pollution buying a heavy industrial truck so they can cosplay as a rancher on the way into cubicle land. Toss in credits for carbon sinks and you’d have a good way to support the kind of farming you mention without constantly being underpriced by farmers relying on subsidized cheap oil. Around the turn of the century, that was a Republican idea but since the fossil fuel industry successfully managed an ideological purge that’s now too politically incorrect to even mention in those circles.
    • mikewarot 3y ago
      Gasoline use is just a small fraction of the demand for oil, most of it has other uses, and those aren't as flexible on demand as fuel for cars. I'd be willing to bet that they'd start flaring it off if demand collapsed, just to keep the refineries going. Fertilizer is a major sink of petrochemicals, and there really aren't any substitutes available on a large enough scale.
• FrankyHollywood 3y ago
  All these comments mentioning cutting down on energy. It will help a bit, but the real problem is there are just to many people on earth. A world wide one-child policy like it used to exist in China [1] would be a real solution in keeping earth a pleasant place to live. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
  • spicyramen_ 3y ago
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  • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Obviously putting humanity below replacement reproduction eventually causes it to disappear, then the planet will recover from whatever we did after a few million years. But I don’t see how that will make it a better place to live for us. We know that birth rates already fall with higher standards of living, so if you want fewer kids just develop those countries where the birth rate is still high.
  • Sargos 3y ago
    First world countries already have 1 child per family with the rest of the world also moving that direction as they grow wealthier. This policy wouldn't actually do much to help and would likely cause massive unintended consequences like China is dealing with right now.
    • FrankyHollywood 3y ago
      Yes I know putting it into practice by law is not practical or even wanted. I just don't believe climate changes significantly improves by having electric cars and replacing old light bulbs with led. We need more deepcutting measures. Either have less kids or power the world nuclear and all eat vegan (no methane producing animals), or accept the new climate reality and deal with the heat or whatever. Just don't pretend we are doing a good job at the moment because we don't.
  • __pache__ 3y ago
• aov22 3y ago
  I'm wondering, what's the projected circuit breaker that causes the system to collapse and people to change something if we don't do anything before? Crop yields falling? Starvation? Extreme events? Mass migration?
  • notacoward 3y ago
    Could be starvation. Even though we're capable of producing more than enough food for everyone, the combination of sub-optimal eating habits, sub-optimal farming techniques, and comically inefficient/unfair distribution means that we don't. Between those factors and increasing population, even a small decrease in crop yields could cause unprecedented levels of famine. Could be war. War over food, war over water, war over water for growing food, war over living space as coasts get flooded or obliterated by storms, etc. Could be disease. There's plenty of evidence that climate change is causing diseases to spread (along with their animal hosts) where they hadn't before. If anyone thinks COVID was the last or worst pandemic we'll have to endure this century, they're fooling themselves. The true worst might not cause civilization to collapse entirely, but it sure will increase a lot of the tension already present. Most likely, it will be a combination of all of these. The four horsemen are all enjoying the race.
• lsh123 3y ago
  And this is a good thing! For the most of its history, Earth was much (>5F) warmer than today: http://www.climate.gov/media/11332 http://www.climate.gov/media/11332 https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte... We are still technically getting out of the last ice age. Warmer climates mean more places are warm enough to grow food. More CO2 means plants grow faster (also more food). Yea, some low lands might get flooded - either build protections or don’t buy / build houses there. But overall for humanity warmer Earth temperatures are good thing. Much better than another ice age.
  • rux 3y ago
    Nothing about the warming climates makes food easier to farm, hotter temperatures just mess every established system we have. It's catastrophically destructive and everyone/humanity starves.
  • acdha 3y ago
    This is like saying losing weight is good so you should contract cholera. The times where the climate was warmer in the past took much longer to get that way, giving ecosystems time to adapt.
  • wolverine876 3y ago
    So how do you think we should avoid all the costs and realize the benefits? The costs are enormous. How do we handle massive food production loss, migrations, flooding, etc.? Our civilization was built for the climate as it has been for 10,000 years. Do we just toss out much of that capital? Who will pay for it?
• someonehere 3y ago
  Nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room? China and India causing the dramatic increase in CO2 levels? https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
  • SpacePortKnight 3y ago
    Only emissions per capita counts. Just because those countries have more population than entire continents of Africa and Europe, does not mean it's their fault. USA emits almost 8 times more emission per capita when compared to India. Rather India is so poor, that it must increase it's energy generation by any means possible. So an Indian on average consumes just 1/8 of a USA citizen. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
    • notacoward 3y ago
      This is, unfortunately, a case where fairness and feasibility don't align well. Is it fair to expect Indians to rein in their emissions when those are already lower (per capita) than the US? Hell no. Asked and answered. Is it feasible? That's a trickier question, and it won't be possible to answer it without addressing loss aversion. "we feel the pain from losses about twice as much as we feel the joy of equivalent gains" https://insidebe.com/articles/loss-aversion/ https://insidebe.com/articles/loss-aversion/ (link to original "prospect theory" paper - the most cited in economics by some measures - where that text appears) Loss aversion is usually discussed as part of behavioral economics, but it appears all over the place. For example, many casual games have a "start paying real money or you'll start losing" dark pattern that's based on loss aversion. With respect to the current question, it's clearly very hard to make people give up a high-emissions lifestyle once they've experienced it. Getting people to maintain a lower-emissions lifestyle is much easier. Again, it's not fair. Absolutely not, and I'm not really suggesting it as The Solution. However, understanding loss aversion might help to understand why people keep bringing it up.
• sktrdie 3y ago
  Since it's a race with time do you guys think burning more energy irresponsibly could lead us to faster innovation in geoengineering advances that would help us fix the problem before it's too late?
• sumek83 3y ago
  And tech carries out churning out artificial intelligence systems that consumes way more energy than genuine human intelligence while being worse off at the same tasks most of the time
  • somsak2 3y ago
    Tech isn't even close to being among the top sectors contributing to energy consumption
  • bufferoverflow 3y ago
    I'd like to see that energy calculation. AI could write a whole book in hours or a beautiful image in seconds consuming a few hundred watts of the TPU. It would take a human weeks/months to write a book and days/week to paint a beautiful images. Also consuming at least ~100 watts idle.
    • gremlinsinc 3y ago
      also ai agent scientists in a simulated lab could solve big problems like climate change. AI might be the only thing that can save us, if it don't kill us.
      • badtension 3y ago
        Climate change is not a technological problem at this point. We know how to solve it, we just don't do it.
        • deleted 3y ago
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        • bufferoverflow 3y ago
          It is a technological problem, and will be solved as such. We "don't do it", because the currently offered solutions are insane. Expecting people to reduce their consumption will just not work. It's an uphill battle against human nature. The solutions to global warming will likely look like a bunch of mirrors in the deserts or in space.
• bioinformatics 3y ago
  When are you shutting down this high brow Reddit clone to help save the planet? That would be a great start for the planet.
• Spk--17 3y ago
  One solution is easy, it is to reduce deforestation. These can grow faster with more CO2 and store them in their wood. But humanity's real problem is not carbon dioxide and methane. The worst are the industrial chemicals and toxic agents that are impregnated in our bodies and brains.
  • whazor 3y ago
    I recently learnt that chopping trees is not particularly a bad thing. The CO2 is already stored inside the tree. The most important thing is to ensure new trees will be growing.
• deleted 3y ago
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• ska123 3y ago
  [flagged]
• somsak2 3y ago
  So funny to constantly see these kinds of adjectives in titles about this topic. I thought that we had models that showed us just how shitty things are going to be, no? It can't be "unprecedented" decade after decade, either we have models we can rely on and we predicted it or we don't and need to accept that this whole idea of "tipping points" and climate change irreversibility is just a guess. If we used this language with any other subject, HN would be up in arms about how sensationalist the headline is.
  • greycol 3y ago
    While unprecedented can mean unexpected or out of the norm it can also mean never before seen/done. So technically yes every point on the predictable upwards trendline is an unprecedented amount when we reach it in actuality. Even assuming that HN readers may feel the word is emotive it's pointless to quibble about it when realistically any discussion about the details of climate change are going to be more emotive with such clinically correct terms as "climate refugees", "ocean acidification", "deadly heatwaves", "longest cyclone season", "3rd once in a century storm in the last decade".
• scrumlord 3y ago
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