Always focusing on the negative and problems has many thinking there has not been positive movement, has left people with more anxiety and depressions, and causes hordes of other problems.
Celebrating and talking about positives is important. It doesn't mean all things are hunky dory. But, it's healthy to do.
In particular, what parts were ranty? I didn't see anything that would rise to the level of a rant. It's remarkably good natured given the invectives routinely dished out by those who would disagree.
It seems to depend very much on where you are:
Countries with an aggregate population today of roughly six billion will suffer for it, though.
I often wonder about that. It could also be that our collective attention can only handle one big emergency at the time, and we make that our sole focus.
I would not be surprised if in some years another emergency will dominate the news. Maybe its about ecocide then, large-scale collapse of ecosystems due to a combination of overfishing, poaching, natural habitat destruction and pollution. And man-made climate change only an additional factor in that.
Where exactly are you getting this from? It's certainly not from the science.
If you're going to argue this pedantically, perhaps don't start by claiming you know the opinions of every scientist, because if we're being pedantic, that's obviously not true.
Less pedantically, I think we agree that probably humans will survive global warming. But I think that we can agree that there's a temperature that's not survivable, even if we don't know what temperature that is. There's no long-term upper bound on how hot earth can get, and we're modeling uncharted territory: earth has never been as hot as it's going to get, while life has been on earth. So we really don't know how bad it will get. There is some chance that global warming will literally wipe out humanity, and given the stakes, I think that's a significant risk we need to be addressing.
Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum [0]
The associated period of massive carbon release into the atmosphere has been estimated to have lasted from 20,000 to 50,000 years. The entire warm period lasted for about 200,000 years. Global temperatures increased by 5–8 °C. Paired δ13C, δ11B, and δ18O data suggest that ~12000 Gt of carbon (at least 44000 Gt CO 2e) were released over 50,000 years, averaging 0.24 Gt per year.
Since at least 1997, the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum has been investigated in geoscience as an analog to understand the effects of global warming and of massive carbon inputs to the ocean and atmosphere, including ocean acidification. Humans today emit about 10 Gt of carbon per year, and will have released a comparable amount in about 1,000 years at that rate.
Take a look also at "Abrupt climate change" article [1]:
Timescales of events described as 'abrupt' may vary dramatically. Changes recorded in the climate of Greenland at the end of the Younger Dryas, as measured by ice-cores, imply a sudden warming of +10 °C (+18 °F) within a timescale of a few years. Other abrupt changes are the +4 °C (+7.2 °F) on Greenland 11,270 years ago or the abrupt +6 °C (11 °F) warming 22,000 years ago on Antarctica.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrupt_climate_change
I mean that's even less scientific than what climate deniers say.
Is this what the world has come to? You have two camps: climate deniers, and climate alarmists, neither party caring in the slightest about science?
By that reasoning, literally everything is an existential threat to humanity.
It was alluded to in this section (ctrl-f "emissions"):
>> A wind farm requires far more concrete and steel than an equivalent system based on gas. Environmental opposition to nuclear power has hindered the generating system that needs the least land, least fuel and least steel or concrete per megawatt. Burning wood instead of coal in power stations means the exploitation of more land, the eviction of more woodpeckers — and even higher emissions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellet_fuel?wprov=sfla1
Interesting. I wonder how much power is available from that.
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
I'm not convinced it's all waste product.
> Europe imported more than 4 million tons of wood pellets from US forests last year and wrote it all off as renewable energy.
https://www.businessinsider.com/europe-imports-wood-biomass-...
Coal is very energy dense. Imports and other automated machinery like wood-cutting machines, planes for seed planting all burn oil. If you import coal and import wood, you could end up burning a lot more fuel with the wood option.
Now, that's kind of a tricky form of accounting because it would make wood burning worse from the perspective of the importing country only. But the carbon was still pulled out of the atmosphere in the exporting country.
The real reason wood burning/planting doesn't make much sense for reducing emissions is just one of scale. You end up needing to plant billions of trees to balance even just airline travel, let alone everything else. There isn't enough space short of terraforming deserts and other very energy intensive activities that probably wouldn't balance.
What I think the author misses is the interplay between pessimists identifying problems and innovators creating solutions. A voice identifying a severe problem is important, but do is the own saying “we got this, let’s fix it.”
1. We know is that there's a range of temperatures where humans have thrived for hundreds of thousands of years, and life has thrived for millions of years.
2. We also know that there's a range of temperatures where it will be too hot for humans to survive.
3. We also know that global temperature is changing from the former to the latter.
Given these three facts I don't think we need to know what the ideal temperature of the earth is to be concerned.
The issue is the effects of moderate temperature increases, rising sea levels, changing farming, etc. so it’s a mass disruption to our civilization (migration, resource wars, etc.) Not that we’ll literally be too hot and can’t somehow survive that as a species.
Humans live in Australian Outback and Alaska. We are adaptable, but the growing pains are not pleasant, hence the problem to civilization.
Really, when? How much hotter was it in the past?
I’m not saying we shouldn’t fix the issue. I’m saying the argument that the average temperature will be unlivable is bad. It’s like saying bullets kill people because of the lead content, not the process of getting injected. The process of climate change will impact us most, not the impact of the temperature on our biology.
We do have to be careful playing with the chemistry of the atmosphere of the only habitable planet we have.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Sa...
The argument that extra CO2 or a few degrees C will be unlivable for humans is laughable. The changes to our civilization from this is not (farming, weather patterns, mass migrations).
Just saying, it's not like there's a law of nature that keeps Earth habitable for humans. We should be aware of that. I think you're shifting the goalposts -- earlier you seemed quite confident that there wasn't a period within hundreds of millions of years that wouldn't have been habitable by humans. Have I changed your mind about that?
I don't think anyone who worries about climate change as an existential threat is thinking of sea level rise, a few degrees C and a few hundred ppm of carbon doing us in. Those could make life quote difficult at most. But it's the feedbacks that might run away from there, which are very hard to bound. How quickly might a few hundred ppm become a few thousand, if methane hydrates start to off-gas? Etc.
How confident can you be that it won't happen, when the Earth has carried itself away before?
Earlier posters made it seem like the problem with climate change was that earth was moving out of a narrow temperature band that supported human life. We live in the arctic, jungles, deserts, ice ages, mountaintops. We will be fine. The problem is the transition’s impact on our existing civilization (sea level change, new weather patterns), not the final temperature.
Let me put it this way: if we discovered earth 100 years in the future, even with our current climate change rate, we would rejoice about how easily it could be colonized (vs Mars, the moon, etc).
The climate will get hotter, and it’ll still be quite livable in places. This is the equivalent of people who think earth is in the “just right” orbit, if it were 10 feet off in either direction the planet would freeze or burn. And yet the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun varies by millions of miles, and we don’t light on fire when climbing a ladder. We don’t die because someone left the AC 5 degrees too hot or cold.
http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/impactfromthedeep.pd...
If you can, please let me know what you think of the image on page 6. Mind you this is an unproven theory about the end permian mass extinction. But it's an interesting perspective on what could cause the whole planet to become uninhabitable, rather than just shifting the comfortable zone farther to the poles. I'm curious about your thoughts on, if it did happen that way, how long humans would last in such conditions.
Humans are hardy and adaptable, but so are insects, birds, rats, and many other species. Somehow the end permian extinction killed up to 96% of all species, including even insects and the formerly ubiquitous trilobite, and apparently nowhere on Earth was spared. Land vertebrates were almost wiped out.
I also appreciate the optimism about mars colonies, but we actually haven't demonstrated the technology or robustness to even sustain a colony on Antarctica without outside support. If we did set up a mars colony, I'm skeptical that it could last even a hundred years on its own. Technology is a powerful tool but supporting cement factories, steel mills, silicon fabs, power plants, farms, and everything else, in a self-sustaining way, really requires a habitable planet. I don't think it would be possible to sustain in an underground bunker for very long.
I hardly know enough to comment on whether that is likely. But I think it's a much better argument about why the Earth will be uninhabitable for us specifically.
(That said, it doesn't really matter if the earth eventually becomes uninhabitable or not, we want to avoid the cost of having to move everyone for even minor sea level rises.)
You're asking leading questions which contain a lot of presuppositions, and you're ignoring my post in which I specifically reject those presuppositions, which makes it hard for me to believe that you're just trying to learn.
Before a region get's there consistently, it'll be that way intermittently and many people who can leave probably will because even in the high 20's and low 30's it'll significantly impact humans ability to do things.
Let’s assume that’s the number.
What I, as an individual, can do to help?
This serves for all the other commenters complaining about my responses.
If you can’t provide something that I can do as an individual I can’t help you.
It doesn’t matter how much we complain about how governments are not doing what they are supposed to if we can’t start with the smallest organizational unit of our planet which is the individual.
2. Consume less.
3. When you must consume, buy used (much of the carbon footprint of many products comes from producing the item).
4. Buy more local goods (much of the carbon footprint of many products comes from transporting them long distances).
5. Travel less, and more carbon-efficiently. Live closer to where you work. Walk > bike > public transit > cars.
6. Stop arguing that climate change doesn't exist.
7. Spend a few minutes researching the answers to your own questions before going on the internet and arguing that environmentalists don't have any answers. There's a wealth of information out there, and lots of people who are trying very hard to educate people, who would be happy to educate you if you asked questions in good faith, or typed your questions into a search engine.
In reality it's of course a bit more complicated since earth is complicated. Another good proxy for "fixed" would be "glaciers and permafrost exist and are not decreasing" while broken would be "large areas in the third world have become uninhabitable to humans"
Haven't gone out and done my own validation, or checked other sources, but it'll give you somewhere to start
I'm not arguing that there's some "ideal Earth temperature": that's your straw man argument that you're making and has nothing to do with anything I've said. I don't need to provide data to prove a claim I never made. I've made three points, numbered in my previous post. Two have data behind them, and the other is fairly self-evident. If you'd like to share which of the claims I've actually made that you disagree with, I'd be happy to engage you in a discussion where we present evidence for our respective positions, but I'm not going to answer you if you continue asking me questions of the form, "Why can't you provide evidence for this claim you never made?"
Clearly you haven't even had the time to read any of the references that you were specifically given that answer many (if not all) of your questions - yet here you are, continuing the climate-denial fight.
Do the honorable thing and stop phrasing your statements as questions - it is a waste of peoples time answering them.
Just to make it explicit for the audience: before he was claiming just to be an honest truth seeker looking for references to learn about the topic, and now he acknowledged he's just a troll. Which was obvious from the start, but worth pointing out.
You do realize the plastic waste issue is separate from climate change?
I'm afraid that, since you seem to be reasonably intelligent and informed, I have to assume your replies are not made in good faith.
That's because you aren't asking questions, you're making vague points with question marks at the end.
> If these people were actually worried about climate and all related subjects they would be working on providing actual things reasonable people could do to help as oppose to calling other names and demanding they stop using plastic straws by showing pictures of turtles.
One thing actual reasonable people can do is stop pretending climate change doesn't exist and isn't a problem.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-th...
I'm not here to argue with you. I am just pointing out that people are linking you to references, and you clearly aren't even reading them before you post your follow-up "questions".
If you want to argue, argue with evidence - don't dress it up as a question.
The point is that current levels of climate emissions are much costlier and deadlier than a world where (good) policies have been enacted to decrease the flow of carbon into the atmosphere.
Just to throw it out there, though, I'd suggest a guaranteed change of 2F/century would be greeted with an instant acceptance and sigh of relief by everyone.
Ideal for what goal?
If you're going to say that all green types are nuts because everything is hunky dory, you have to at least put in some claim that the Earth isn't even really warming, or isn't warming as much as we thought, or that rapid warming is good. Any of them would be false, but you've at least got to try.