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Earth likely briefly passed critical warming threshold on Friday and Saturday
- smegsicle 3y agowelp i guess its over then
- gloyoyo 3y agoWarmer to read more hacker news.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoMaybe we can get off our but(t)s and start restoring wetlands like our lives depend upon it. (Ah, hark, I hear crickets chirping.)
- devjab 3y agoIn some areas the climate change is creating too much “wetland” which poses a different set of issues. We’ve had record amounts of rain here in Denmark, and the local farmers should probably look into farming rice, or maybe seaweed, if it continues. Which it probably will since the records we broke were set in 2019, which in term broke records set one of the years before that and so on. Looking at the graphs, however, we should go back to covid society, well, without all the dying. That basically put us on a better track than what we need for almost two years. I’m optimistic though. This year alone has been a massive impact on the global economy in terms of climate costs. Which in term have our local politicians actually talking about solutions. Many of them are focused on being better prepared, but some of them are also waking up to the fact that large parts of our country will be basically inhabitable unless something is done. Not sure why it took them 50 years to get there, but it is what it is.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoFYI Bali Rice Experiment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140831
- roschdal 3y ago> we should go back to covid society Yes, covid society was better for the environment and humans.
- vasco 3y ago> Looking at the graphs, however, we should go back to covid society, well, without all the dying. With the dying you save the environment way faster. "We should go back to covid society" just means let's all be ascetic monks. There's too many people in the world. We don't need more wetlands or this or that, we just need to understand that a population that grows without limits always destroys itself, that's all. What's the point of a planet with billions of people if their lives suck and they have to stay home using their CO2 quotas? Much better to have less people living normally.
- mantas 3y agoWe'd need a human beings cap in millions to have a lavish lifestyle with managable consequences to environment. And probably in low hundrends. And even then if everybody lived like a king we'd be fucked. I'd also say that more asceticism would produce a healthier society. Current western consumerist society isn't healthy for anybody. Neither the planet, nor humans.
- thworp 3y agoSince I rarely get to talk to Malthusians: Do you have a preferred approach for population reduction? Tangential point: You severely underestimate the impact of scale and specialization on our standard of living. There is no way we could the same variety of nice things at 500million people
- defrost 3y ago> Do you have a preferred approach for population reduction? Streaming TV and Education. Educating women, in particular, is strongly correlated with population reduction across the globe. Two generations of that and the world could be stabilising a billion and half below where we are today.
- vasco 3y agoIt's happening already, I'd just not create incentive programs to boost birthrates. I don't like to take a very heavy handed way to "control" society, think it's better to just let some things happen the way they happen, because if I'm wrong at least I didn't go full on. But the most developed / educated countries are already going down fast except for immigration. Once the countries immigrants come from rise to the same economic levels, I would predict their birth rates would also go down. To your tangential point: I think technological development will allow less and less people needed on the supply chain to sustain the same quality of life for society. I think this is clear from history and it only goes in one direction. I'm aware there's people that defend more extreme views like boosting abortions or other dystopian measures. I don't believe in any of those, I think everyone should have the right to reproduce if they feel like it, I'd just rather it be an informed decision, but I wouldn't add any control measures for fear of abusive mis-use by the government later on.
- MrVandemar 3y agoFarmer here. Planted about 1,000 native trees this year in our home-grown revegetation project, and going to spend the next 2 years making sure as many of them as possible don't die. No govt subsidies or anything. Our own $ and our own work. Nobody will do it, nobody will pay to do it, so we do.
- haizhung 3y agoYou would think that this is exactly the kind of project that carbon offsets should fund…
- DoreenMichele 3y agoThank you, "God bless you" as they say in the Deep South where I grew up. Please consider making part of it a wetlands. Forests cover about 10 percent of the planet and store about 15 percent of stored carbon. Peatlands cover about 3 percent of the planet and store an estimated 25 or 30 percent of carbon. We've lost 85 of global wetlands since the 1700s. Restoring them could dramatically increase the amount of stored carbon.
- oliwarner 3y agoPeatland takes centuries to develop and store that carbon though. If we want to achieve this sort of thing, we'd need to manufacture peat and store that underwater. Possible but when we make more, we usually destroy the planet more too. I'm not sure we'd offset it.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago"The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best is today." For the short-term, planting rice differently can reduce methane emissions substantially. In the short-term, methane is much worse. In the long run, methane breaks down to carbon which persists. If we want to reverse climate change, we need to restore nature's ability to sink that carbon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140831 (My previous comment should say "85 percent". Oops.)
- mips_r4300i 3y agoBeen donating to Ducks Unlimited here in the US for years. Their angle is to protect the hunting pastime, but to that end involves getting involved with many states' local issues to keep the wetlands protected. Just a drop in the bucket, but hey.
- Aachen 3y agoWeather != climate. The climate is clearly changing as well but this "news" is weather.
- roschdal 3y ago[flagged]
- ranguna 3y agoYour point being? It's close to 20C here when it should be 10.
- 2muchcoffeeman 3y agoIt’s like how people can’t fathom large numbers. People can’t understand large systems or how small changes can build up over time. They probably know full well that the equator is tropical all year round. But “it’s -1 here!”
- jug 3y agowhat does that have to do with anything
- Dban1 3y agothat's warmer than it should be for you. Do you get it yet?
- benjijay 3y agoAnd what would the 'normal' temp be there at this time of year?
- WD40ForRust2 3y ago[flagged]
- techbro92 3y agoBased
- karmakurtisaani 3y agoGuy, there's this wonderful website called Reddit that would just love to have you both. Perhaps put more effort to your HN posts in the future, to keep things nice.
- snehk 3y agoWelp. Time for a conference we all fly to using private jets to tell the plebs how it's their doing that's destroying the planet. Maybe agree on a tax or something that screws over the little guy while having absolutely no effect on the global climate.
- renegat0x0 3y agoIt's also time to greenwash some money to warm up our image.... I mean... it's time to invest in some corporations that promise to fix climate through elaborate yet ineffective means. ... or if that not helps maybe it is time to destroy some more Van Gogh paintings or something.
- psychoslave 3y ago>... or if that not helps maybe it is time to destroy some more Van Gogh paintings or something. I wish that this kind of symbolic transgression could really be the most tragic consequences of the situation. I could come with a digression of my own, but probably you’ll be better serve with a document like https://phys.org/news/2021-10-climate-contributes-global-violence.html https://phys.org/news/2021-10-climate-contributes-global-vio...
- gala8y 3y agoLet us do not forget about plastic straws. Let's ban plastic straws.
- psychoslave 3y agoOh, I thought that was already the case everywhere as I live in France and basically didn’t travel much over the last years. The trend is probably too slow but it’s there: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/plastic-bans-around-the-world/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/plastic-bans-around...
- gala8y 3y agoYeah, I was referring to this past move of EU as being particularly effective one to combat plastic pollution. EDIT: But you are right, banning single-use plastic bags is a first step. Let's keep walking.
- colechristensen 3y agoIt’s not critical, it’s arbitrary. The earth is warming, it’s going to keep warming. What we should do is focus on practical responses to both limit future warming and handle the consequences of where we’re heading. The moralizing and doom don’t really help anybody.
- ranguna 3y agoWhat? It's critical, so let's focus on practical responses to both limit future warming and handle the consequences of where we’re heading. A lot of people over-dramatise the situation, but we should be afraid to use words like "critical" when they make sense.
- colechristensen 3y agoWhat I mean is the number isn’t critical. 1.9 degrees or 2.1 degrees aren’t substantially different, 2.0 degrees is an arbitrary milestone not a critical threshold. There is nothing particularly special about 2 with regards to outcomes.
- ranguna 3y agoThere's nothing particularly special about any number, because by each 0.1 increase more species go extinct on average. We have to pick a point where we say "that's enough species gone", and 2 is bad enough. 1.9,1.8 etc is already critical imo
- senectus1 3y agowell... it does help to motivate the lazy. sometimes.
- colechristensen 3y agoQuite the opposite. The doom attitude demotivates many people who don’t believe it. It’s easy to disprove or disbelieve exaggeration and emotional appeals and as a result the things which do need to be believed are thrown out with the exaggerations. The primary thing exaggeration does is convince a small number of people that they also need to loudly exaggerate adding more noise drowning out the folks who aren’t exaggerating and need to be heard.
- karmakurtisaani 3y agoIn the mean time, China is adding more and more solar, and is ahead of schedule in decarbonizing. Maybe there is still some hope.
- tjpnz 3y agoWhile adding more coal power plants in the process. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/29/china-coal-plants-climate-goals-carbon https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/29/china-coal-pla...
- timbit42 3y agoThey can't switch to renewable energy fast enough to keep up with their energy needs. Those coal plants will be shut down as soon as possible. It would help if other countries moved more production out of China.
- konstantinua00 3y agois it ahead? last I heard the set goal became too optimistic
- pelagicAustral 3y agoI took it it was sarcasm...
- karmakurtisaani 3y agoIt actually was not sarcasm, check this out https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-set-to-fall-in-2024-after-record-growth-in-clean-energy/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-set-to... Sorry, should have linked this in the original comment.
- ChatGTP 3y agoHate to be critical but I just find the CCP hard to trust.
- InCityDreams 3y agoAnd the ice-age ended on Tuesday the 19th.
- CalRobert 3y agoNo, Dougal.
- eltrabuco 3y ago[flagged]
- Geisterde 3y ago2 degrees is fine I guess, but id prefer if it were at least up in the 60's every day, I wouldnt complain about still being able to feel my hands after taking the dogs for a walk.
- matteoraso 3y agoKey line: >Yes, but: Breaching the 2-degree threshold for two days does not mean that the Paris Agreement's target of holding global warming to "well below" such a mark has been exceeded. Definitely cause for concern, but not panic.
- jfengel 3y agoIf we wait for panic, it's gonna be really, really bad. We've been "concerned" for a long time. We've done very little about it. The entire point is that they're trying to get people to take it seriously before it's time to panic. When there's cause to panic, it's much, much too late. I'd say it's already too late, because we can't even get people to "concerned". There are too many people ideologically or financially insistent that it's all a hoax, and that there's nothing to be concerned about. I'd say that the fact that so many people aren't even concerned is cause for panic. Panic of the form: "This is all so obvious that one of us must be incredibly stupid, and increasing levels of evidence points to you."
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoThe head of one of the world's biggest oil companies has been named to lead the COP28 global climate talks in Dubai, later this year. [0] Hydrocarbon fuels will continue to lead the agenda and pace, read stiffle action, for climate emergency mitigation through lobbying and media narrative. The end game is obvious but there is still a long runway of profit that can be extracted until it is no longer palitable for public opinion. I see three possible tipping points: - Climate change erodes US hegemony to a point that is no longer palitable to US national interests [1] - People mass suing companies for climate damage in a magnitude that impacts the bottom line or charges C-levels criminally. - Environmental groups start taking out Oil & Gas Board members and lobbyists, subsequent 'terror' precipitates an actual sunsetting. At least the geometric shape building in America seems to be ahead of this in contingency plans for some tipping points. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64240206 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64240206 [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/intelligence-pentagon-climate-change-warnings/2021/10/21/ea3a2c84-31d3-11ec-a1e5-07223c50280a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/intelligenc...
- t0bia_s 3y agoWhy is it a problem? Article is not answer this question. I see benefits. Less burned wood and gas for warming indoors and less frozen people.
- _spduchamp 3y agoYou cannot hold governments accountable with first-past-the-post elections or any type of electoral system that give 100% power to one party. Fix this, and then maybe we have a chance of reining in unchecked power of corporate influence.
- legb 3y agoIf Americans doesn’t act as the biggest consumer per person, there will not be a future for coming generations,regardless of what the Asians do. Europeans has come much further in the transition.