Perhaps those drifting into panic and depression are doing so because we are now clearly seeing undeniable effects and yet denial persists while CO2 emissions creep up seemingly inexorably?

No, I'm drifting into panic because I've seen that rational discourse just doesn't change anything.

There's always a reason to not-do anything, to not-upset anything, because, you know, the GDP, the stock market, think of the all the people involved in oil, etc.

Meanwhile we've shifted from ridicule to denial through downplaying and the outright delusional "this could actually be good".

What is not happening are any meaningful steps towards reigning in even the worst excesses.

So, yeah. Maybe panic is not the worst state of mind regarding this challenge?

To paraphrase, dont get panicky, get even. This is a long-term marathon that will change all societies and economies one way or another. The objective is to make sure its eventually a better place. This transormation is not going to be the result of panic thinking or action. GDP, stocks etc are not eternal constructs, they were invented and adopted in a certain context. Well that context is falling apart. But the new constructs are not born yet.

There might be some easy, immediate "quick-wins" in change of behaviors or new technology, but they are not that many, or particularly impactful. Take for example coal. In various places they thought that eliminating it is a no brainer. Its dirty, lots of CO2 emissions etc. Well guess what. Many poorer countries only have access to coal and they are not particularly keen to remain energy poor to make up for the historical excesses or others.

Agreed. Panic is the rational response to a near term extinction level threat that not enough people are taking seriously.

People advocating half measures or not panicking are incredibly irrational. It's a human cognitive bias to try to arrive at intermediate outcomes between extremes (regardless of truth). Extremeness aversion.

Panic is never rational - it's an emotion. Giving into it can cloud what action should be taken, or, often, cause actions that make the situation worse.

If you do not feel panic at the state of climate change, then you are in fact not processing information correctly, ie, not rational. It is not rational to drive a car off the rim of the Grand Canyon; it is rational to jump on the brakes immediately and not fall to ones death. It is rational to feel fear when in great danger.

Fear and panic are not the same thing. If your car is rolling towards the rim of the grand canyon and isn't slowing down, you would be afraid but ideally would quickly but calmly consider and try your options (emergency brake, steer away from edge, bail before it reaches edge, etc) rather than panicking.

What if you are the passenger and the driver has their foot down on the accelerator while refusing to believe that the cliff lies ahead? What is the appropriate emotion?

Still composure, and the appropriate course of action is still to evaluate your options and choose the best one, even if that's the best option out of a list of bad options.

Unless you think that panic will induce the driver to stop accelerating, I suppose. Though I think the closer analogy would be "you're a passenger in a car with a brick on the accelerator and no driver", because I don't think there's any person or coherent group of people who actually control the global economy (in the sense of "control" where they can make sweeping changes that go against local incentive gradients, and have those changes stick).

If doom is certain, then what does your composure or anything else matter?

If nothing matters, in what sense is panic the "correct" response?

Also, it's useful to check whether you're absolutely doomed to lose everything you value, or only probably doomed to lose most of the things that you value, in situations where you appear to be doomed.

I don't think a panic response is generally helpful towards the goal of "make the best you can of a bad situation".

your chances of survival increase if you're not panicking.

This is well understood by everyone and only needs to be said because you feel the need to ask 20 questions in an attempt to imply there's a fault to the thinking (because you can't outright say it or the jig would be up).

This is a wrong take for various reasons. Panic is a response we developed for survival against predators and clear-and-present dangers. But look around, the only predator in sight is us. Can we panic against ouselves? Climate change and more general sustainability is above all a collective social/economic and political organization problem.

How we internalize and communicate about the predicament we brought ouselves into is important. You don't cry fire in the crowded room you find ways to calmly evacuate.

Which brings to the second reason panic is hopeless: It is also objectively not possible for us to "flee" in a hurry (Except for Elon and his Mars escapists - good ridance). The crowded room is our planet and there is nowhere to go. We are doomed to "work it out", put down the fire. We have no option but accept the damage that will be inflicted in the mean time. The smarter and faster we "work it out", the less damage. Thats the equation and tradeof.

But nobody ever solved a tough problem in a state of panic.

Something not being `rational` is not an argument against it. Rationality is a subjective matter, not objective.

The poster claimed panicing is rational, the other poster responded (correctly) that it's an emotion and therefore is not, definitionally, rational.

reasonable != rational.

But here's the thing.

If your house is on fire, do you want a firefighter who is panicing or one who isn't? panicing may be reasonable, but that doesn't make it the best course of action.

What I said, to be precise, is "Panic is the rational reaction [edited from "response"] to a near term extinction level threat that not enough people are taking seriously"

You want a firefighter at a house fire because they've have trained for a long time to manage the instinctual panic. Panic or fear in emotional response to extreme danger is rational. It is completely distinct from what is a good plan, which requires time to develop and practice.

My precise point is that - because the critical from global warming is longer term and more abstract - it requires a certain about of effort to understand how incredibly bad the situation is. Most people here, not even the general public, have dangerously stupid and shallow understanding of the issue. The are frequently off by many orders of magnitude, or mistake hypothetical technologies that do not exist as actual solutions.

That is here. The general public is much worse.

You had a front row seat to how non-resilient society is to even small perturbations. Covid and a supply shortage in toilet paper caused actual panic in the general population. Wait until we have our first large North American crop shortfalls this decade. The more you learn about this topic, the more dead you feel inside to how intractable it is. Good luck.

No more half measures, Walter.

Honestly I’m getting tired of the “thinkers” who are just _don’t panic_. That statement just comes across as so disconnected and also doesn’t actually accomplish something.

If someone is panicking, the correct solution here is to show that there’s a realistic attempt at solving the problem. Not dismissing their valid feelings of dread and panic.

Well the main issue is that no realistic attempt exists that would be able to solve the problem(s). Thus all that anyone can do inscribe "DON'T PANIC" in large friendly letters per HHGTTG's example, so society can continue to run normally for as long as it can while our planet gets demolished. Welcome to the decline, easiest thing to do is to accept it and have fun while we drive off the proverbial cliff.

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. Yes, there are some realistic choices that could be made, or could have been made to seriously mitigate the issues. But so far we haven't pursued those, so there are not realistic attempts so far. We're pretending pouring money into renewables is enough, and it isn't. We're pretending that made up carbon credits will help, and they won't because people just use them to lie and steal. Some people pretend consumers aren't the problem, that it is "corporations". Well, those corporations exist only to funnel goods and services into the gaping maws of consumers. You can regulate corporations, and we must, but the idea that change will happen without our own personal sacrifices is foolish. You need to allow a nuclear plant to be built in your backyard, and then another one. You need to start taking the bus to work. You need to stop eating meat. These would be the beginnings of "realistic attempts" if all of society committed to such ideas and changed our collective ideas about what quality of life is.

Yes, the people in the back of the bus are exactly as equally to blame as the bus driver.

> It would be quite educational to attribute in more detail the impact of these two factors. The degree of "El Nino" influence is presumably known, and if its strength is not related with global warming in complicated and unknown ways it would be good to overlay it as a distinct effect.

I've seen some attempts to quantify the difference. E.g. this article tries to illustrate it: https://theconversation.com/july-was-earths-hottest-month-on...

The debate over exact causes has always felt misguided to me. The planet is extremely complex, human impact on the planet is largely based on estimates and modeling, and at the end of the day an understanding of why it's getting hotter isn't itself a course correction.

There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil fuels if we weren't trying to balance that with an arbitrary GDP growth target. We could stop incentivizing people and companies to consume disposable products. We could stop subsidizing massive industrial farms and instead focus on eating locally and growing some of your own food.

The list goes on, but having spent decades watching people debate passionately over why the planet is warming all while going further down the same path my only conclusion is that we just don't give a damn. When push comes to shove we would rather buy new cloths imported from the other side of the world, throw resources at new construction and gut job renovations, and will happily fly around the world on vacation rather than stay home and enjoy the world around us.

Oh and don't forget about new tech. Machine learning rebranded as AI is so ground breaking that we have no choice but to produce as many GPUs as we can and throw all the power and water needed to run the damn things 24/7.

> There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared.

That's the issue, a lot of people just don't care or refuse to believe it. Questions like the one in the parent comment are starting to seriously annoy me because they're demanding an unachievable level of evidence before doing anything, a level that's never asked for in any other kind of intervention (for example, interest rate hikes).

Everyone leaves out a large cohort - people that believe it, but don't want the solutions you're selling. We typically put forth constructive solutions like nuclear, which get shouted down / laughed out of the room instantly.

Without going to specifics, a large reason for that may be that among those who say this are a large number who loudly push for unrealistic ideas masquerading them as constructive. Some may be honestly ignorant about it, but it is also unfortunately quite an effective way to derail any discussion and delay progress. See for example any suggestion about real world hyperloops.

Unfortunately it's hard to tell the difference between people suggesting expensive and slow solutions because they're ill informed about the alternatives and the people suggesting expensive and slow solutions because they don't want to solve the problem.

And practically there's little difference, especially if the former are getting their information from the latter.

I think people are fine about solving the problem, positive even (right wingers love solar panels, after all). They're just not fine about being forced to sacrifice to solve the problem.

An easier first step before nuclear is reducing our power requirements. This one gets laughed out of the room both because we don't think purple will accept it and because there's a direct correlation between GDP growth and energy consumption, we don't care enough about energy use to give up GDP.

This will achieve the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

If you make something less critical, cheaper, it will be used for more and more ridiculous things.

Jevon's Paradox is a thought experiment focused on increased efficiency not decreased demand. History is full of examples where a decrease on demand didn't lead to an increase in ridiculous uses for the technology.

Not really, I don't distinguish between the different ways to solve it. I wish that was the discussion, but I feel like any solution that has any costs of any kind is just ignored because a lot of people don't feel like this is serious enough to do anything serious about it, doesn't matter whether it's reducing consumption, massive switch to nuclear, or whatever.

Most green parties, and greenpeace in particular grew up around opposing nuclear power as unnatural. I think that's where it comes from.

https://www.greenpeace.org/international/tag/nuclear/

So naturally, people assume anyone fighting against global warming is against nuclear. As far as I can tell, it's also true.

Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win.

The winning argument is to show how you can consume more energy for less money by using sustainable technology. Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win.

In essence I believe the only politically viable way to reduce carbon is to engineer and tech our way to systems that reliably do more for less and increase the amount of energy people can consume.

> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win.

Yes and no. I agree that if your approach is to ask people to do this, you aren't going to win the argument.

But instead you can reframe the argument.

Does that $70,000 truck that you have to make payments on while you do back-breaking or soul-crushing work to afford it really make you happy? Do you really get use out of that or are people scamming you with clever marketing?

Do you really enjoy glamping or do you just like the idea and you sit around on your phone posting pictures about how much you like it while not really doing much. Are you honest with yourself?

Etc.

> Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win.

We don't even have trains, let alone cramped trains. This one is funny though because everyone "loves how walkable XYZ area is" but then they get their mind completely wiped once they leave not realizing they can live like that too if they demanded it or if we had a good market mechanic in place that allows for choice.

For some bewildering reason we don't build more of the most loved homes and neighborhoods and transit experience like we do for every single other product.

> are people scamming you with clever marketing? … Are you honest with yourself?

This is still an adversarial tone which is more likely to create resistance. It comes across as insulting their intelligence.

Convincing people to change is really hard!

> Convincing people to change is really hard!

It’s hard when you’re trying to trick them. But show someone a genuinely better product and you don’t need to convince them of anything.

>> Does that $70,000 truck that you have to make payments on while you do back-breaking or soul-crushing work to afford it really make you happy?

Cars, apart from their direct purpose, also serve as status symbol. This might justify the investment.

You can justify anything. I need a new iPhone every year. Why? Direct purpose and status symbol. I also need my home heated and cooled to exactly 70 degrees each year because it helps me be more comfortable while working from home. I also need to drive a new electric truck for common errands like going to the store to buy a bottle of wine from California or my asparagus from Argentina. All justifiable investments in my eyes.

The people that I know with those $70K trucks seem to really enjoy them and get a lot of use out of them. Especially for towing trailers they work really well.

If they didn't buy those trucks I don't think they would work any less. They would just spend the money on something else.

Yea same with private planes and stuff like that.

> But instead you can reframe the argument.

Why would someone argue with you about what they like? You’re assuming that they are dumb and that you are smart. That’s a bad way to approach persuading people.

What you're describing is the path to inevitable collapse. If people will never be able to give up convenience or growth then we really are doomed, tech advantages only slow down that runaway train.

I don't actually think it's a fundamental blocker though. People sacraficed quite a bit at home during WWII to support the war effort, we could make similar sacrifices now if we saw our impact on the planet as a similarly existential threat.

To me it seems like the failure is in trying to analyze the problem so specifically that we can define the "right" path then logic people onto it. That will never work, mainly because the problem is so complex that there won't be a complete understanding to share. There will always be assumptions used in modeling and holes in the data allowing for alternative explanations that are then argued over even further.

We all know that using oil at this scale isn't a great idea. And we all know that we could actually use less oil without giving up much at all. If we spent less time arguing over how we got here we could find reasonable next steps that are hard to argue with when it isn't all backed by "science" and "fact" that can be debated endlessly.

Young men have a genetic proclivity for getting their asses handed to them in war. It's surprisingly easy to order men to their deaths when they're convinced it's to protect their tribe from some other tribal threat. We've been doing it for longer than we've been human.

Nothing in our evolutionary history has prepared us for climate change. We have more trivial things to worry about.

That's the thing. No one can actually comprehend such things like geopolicits, global/national economy, climate change etc. The world is too big for our brains to understand.

Reason is slave to the passions. If it doesn't resonate at an emotional level we don't care. It doesn't matter if we understand. We also have to give a fuck, and clearly we don't.

People by and large understand and ask for and vote for solutions to this.

The various comments here blaming "people" are a mix of victim blaming and cover-up for the well organized forces that have held the democratic will back for decades and despite (or because of?) this, the agents of this tragedy are very popular around these parts.

>People by and large understand and ask for and vote for solutions to this.

They really haven't, no. Corporations don't want to take responsibility for their actions, governments don't want to, and big surprise: individuals don't want to either.

USA:

Polling shows that US voters favor climate bills – yet assume fellow Americans don’t

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/01/us-vot...

UK:

> The UK has some of the highest levels of concern regarding the climate emergency in the world with 81 per cent of people ‘believing’ in the climate emergency, with over three-quarters (77 per cent) saying we must do ‘everything necessary, urgently as a response’.

https://www.ippr.org/blog/as-some-politicians-seek-to-divide...

I've read those numbers, and my anecdotal experience more or less corresponds to them. I know plenty of people who acknowledge climate change and think it is serious.

They've all had their whole lives to make climate conscious lifestyle decisions, they could all stop eating meat tomorrow, but they ain't done squat. Not as individuals nor as a group. The few who have are weirdos who live at the margins.

Putting the burden on invididuals for averting the climate crisis is a form victim-blaming. It’s long been clear that only concerted collective action will be effective in producing real change.

This is why so many free-market, minimal-state absolutists are so prone to putting their fingers in their ears and pretending climate change is not a problem, or if it is, that individuals as free agents are responsible for creating it and therefore fixing it. They cannot accept the logical conclusion of the necessity of state action, as it contradicts their core beliefs.

For even longer it's been clear that any collective (or state for that matter) is made up entirely of individuals. In this case millions of individuals who can't help but give tens of thousands of dollars to the fossil fuel industry each year. You don't get to dedicate your life to that kind of wanton destruction and then turn around and claim that you're some kind of a victim.

Not acknowledging that the current predicament is caused by every single human being except maybe native tribes in remote islands is blindness. Saying that the vast majority (%99.9) of human beings is responsible and to be blamed for it is not victim-blaming, but not right either. The thing to blame is our beloved technology. Technology is the main force which shapes human society. We do things and don't do things because of our technology. It defines societies and the entire human civilization. The only choice there was was to oppose all technological progress, but that ship has sailed long ago, in 15th century or so. Back then, few people understood what technological progress will inevitably bring, no one had a time machine to see 21th and 22th centuries. We tout these people as religious backward luddites today, though the sentiment is changing.

The whole situation is as deterministic as two celestal bodies moving according to Newtonian physics. Technological progress was inevitable, and so was the resulting population bomb in the last century, and so is the nearing Collapse of the civilization in the coming decades, due to ecological overshoot. Read the Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski.

I disagree. There is more untapped energy and resources in this world than we could ever hope for, We just need to develop the tech to access it. Climate change too could be solved with tech. Theres no other choice.

>We just need to develop the tech to access it

What energy

What "tech"?

Tech isn't magic. We can't just magically stop the greenhouse effect.

Solar, wind and nuclear (theoretically) are limitless.

> We can't just magically stop the greenhouse effect.

You're absolutely right, that's why tech is the only non-magical solution.

Anyone thinking they can change the behavior of 8 billion people is engaging in magical thinking.

Solar and wind are absolutely limited, both by environmental conditions that change the energy potential and by our ability to store energy. Neither can handle surge use as well either, we can't make more wind or sunshine when everyone turns on their suit conditioner.

Nuclear is at least a viable shirt term solution. Combine that with reducing our total energy demand and we're at least buying ourselves more time to figure things out, that's a much better sort term path for sure.

You're not saying anything I disagree with. Technology will improve those limitations.

How do we know these exist of we don't know how to access our use them? Without access we can only estimate the reserves, and without a way to use it we can't calculate the potential energy creation or storage.

We really are screwed off our only hope is blind faith that tech can save us. Technology can help, but we can't abandon the option of decisions that can already be made today.

WW2 only lasted 4-7 years depending on which country you were in. There was direct, visible progress along the way. As soon as the war was over, everything could go back to "normal" (at least for the winners).

What you're asking for is a permanent reduction in standards of living. While that might be the right thing to do, it's going to be difficult to convince average people to vote for that. Many of them are barely getting by as it is and don't think they are able to sacrifice more.

I was listening to "The Regrettable Century" podcast's episode on degrowth recently, and they made a couple of good points here. The first point is that degrowth as reduction-in-consumption only is really going to affect the global rich; everyone else can afford to come up a bit to a new lower average. The second point is that there's more to quality of life than quantity of consumption. Nobody is talking about, e.g., making modern medicine go away. It means more trains and fewer cars, fewer Funko Pops and more live music. It means shorter working hours and no commutes. Fewer treats but more leisure. It's only a permanent reduction in "standards of living" if by that you mean "amount of consumption" rather than "quality of life".

Defining standards of living in this way is very short term focused. If we reduce energy demand now but avoid a power grid collapse a decade down the road, is that better or worse for standard of living? And if we really are meant to believe that climate change is irreversible if we don't change course before 2030, who gives a damn about stander of lining for the next few years?

Sure, that's the logical analysis. But many people do give a damn about their short-term standard of living and vote on that basis.

> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win.

Asking people to eat less might never win... But when there is a famine, people have no choice but to eat less. It's not that there is no food available in a famine - it's just that prices go sky high.

Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 emitted.".

The population may revolt, like they do during famines. But with those oil wells blocked up, they probably wouldn't get what they were looking for.

- which government?

- did I emit a ton of CO2 when I cut down a tree?

- what happens to the cost of medical plastics, etc? Did you just kill millions in poor countries because the cost of care went up so much?

This stuff is hard. Pretending it is simple stops us from working on the hard parts.

>what happens to the cost of medical plastics,

Plastic production is an insanely small part of oil and gas usage, 4%. Anyone bringing up plastic as a reason to not stop using oil isn't being intellectually honest. We could literally decimate the oil industry and still produce way more oil than the plastic industry needs. It's just not a concern.

The proposal was to crank up the price of oil directly. You couldnt price-curve your way past a $1,000 per CO2 ton tax. While plastic does not drive oil production, it is definitely the case that oil prices determine plastic production costs.

Recycling can absorb much of that, but medical plastics cannot be made through recycling today.

$1000/ton is $1/kg. Most medical plastic items are tens of grams - so 1 cent.

Considering the price of medical devices in the US, there is certainly room for a few extra cents.

You are taxing co2, not oil. A barrel of oil is about 400kg of carbon. That makes the price go up by at least $400 per barrel. It’s at about $80 right now. So the cost of materials for petroleum prodycts would go up by something like 6x.

In the US, this cost will get absorbed. But if you are in subsaharan Africa, 6x more expensive IV tubes and syringes is extremely consequential.

So a government that violently suppresses dissent and only wealthy people can emit CO2? Yeah, sounds great! I don’t think eco-fascism is going to get broad support…

Not sure about that. Announce a climate emergency with huge implications I don't need to detail and you might get away with anything irrespective of support.

A government foolish enough to abuse emergency powers that way would be voted out in the next election.

Abuse emergency powers sufficiently, and there is no next election, at least not on terms where it is possible for you to lose.

It doesn't necessarily have to be done through further government intervention. Simply removing government protections and subsidies for industry would go a long way.

That's definitely not a complete solution (if one exists), but that could be implemented over night if we wanted to do it.

>Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 emitted.".

And it would not change anything at planet scale, because on the other side of the world China is going to "pick up any slack" of CO2 generation we may not do.

It shouldn't stop us from trying to increase efficiency, but panic and insane ideas of the sort of "no one can emit a ton of CO2 without paying $1k" are not the way to improve things. The biggest fight in the world today is not for "the climate", but for the freedom to live in a non-autocratic country. We would have to win the second to have the slightest shot at cooperating well enough to have a shot at mitigating the first for those of us in places that will be hit the worst.

Do you think a communist-by-name party of China (or Russian mafia-state) gives a damn about the climate and how it affects people in places like subsaharan Africa, Bangladesh etc? Not in the slightest, but they'll gladly use every bit of it to promote panic and industry killing policies in places like the US, EU while pretending to "be green". If we win the fight not to be ruled by corrupt dictators we can have a shot of improving the lives of people who will suffer due to climate change.

> And it would not change anything at planet scale, because on the other side of the world China is going to "pick up any slack" of CO2 generation we may not do.

Even if that was true in the short term (and reducing global supply by shutting down oil wells makes ir unlikely) the relative incentive for alternatives created here would lead to global improvements over the medium and longer term.

(That said, the time to apply solutions with medium-to-longer term payoff was 50 years ago.)

> And it would not change anything at planet scale, because on the other side of the world China is going to "pick up any slack" of CO2 generation we may not do.

We're still far better off decarbonising because (rest of the world CO2 + China CO2) > China CO2.

China's per capita carbon emissions are half those of the US (8 metric tons vs 16 metric tons, 2018 figures). Mote, beam, etc.

And you believe any numbers that come out of China? If they are reporting half they are probably emitting 3x in reality. China has been approving a new coal fired power plant every 2 weeks for years.

I may have posted this several times before, but China is not the problem. We know how to deal with that: international trade agreements.

The problem is that it requires the US to be on board with it. Each one alone couldn't, but the EU and US together would have the economic force required to solve this problem, if they acted with decisiveness.

What does the USA get out of it? The USA is the #1 producer of oil and the commodity is traded in her currency globally. This makes the USA energy independent and keeps demand for dollars extremely high.

The EU on the other hand has virtually no ability to produce oil and gas and is dependent on outside suppliers. So of course they have a lot of incentive to move off of it and that’s much easier if everyone else does too.

American hegemony is at stake if oil demand is dramatically reduced quickly. Where as the EU stands to gain influence. So again, why would the USA weaken herself to the benefit of the EU?

There's no way to know if this question is sarcasm or not; but it's a good one. The EU is not uniform in this. Some countries face the same question, the UK and Norway comes to mind. Our history era is pretty much defined by oil, both directly and indirectly, but we don't know how long this era is.

Perhaps it would make economic sense to squeeze the market to the last drop? This is also why peak oil is an important concept. The price will certainly increase over the long term and this is a tempting opportunity.

However, this is also how empires fall. There will be technological change, and it will decrease our dependency on oil, not increase it. The economic impetus for this change is clear. Companies resisting change will be irrelevant in the future and the same is true for whole countries. Economies which isn't dominated by oil will be the first to change and master the next economic era. Countries like Russia are not likely to keep up with the technological change, they are much too invested in the old system.

So the answer is that given a long enough outlook, economies gain from this transformation. The US specifically also should have every incentive to keep trade with China under control, given that geopolitical situation. Aligning with the EU would be a strategical move against China, while keeping the European trade partners close. It's a move that would make both economic and political sense.

That's separate from the moral reasons. We know what carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere leads to. Over geological time scales it is abundantly clear. We may not want that for our children, but that's unfortunately too late to change now. Economic and political reasons are what remains.

You're probably right but I fear the end of that road is a completely "re-terraformed" Earth we create to adapt to support our industrial society.

So we take the notion of national parks to the extreme, and carve out parts of the planet dedicated to preservation, and dedicate other parts to supporting humans and their needs, and we learn the science we need to artificially protect against ecological collapse. Maybe the solution to our expanding technology is technological.

So because the fix is mildly inconvenient, better to just do nothing, keep making the problem worse, keep letting people die, and just hope that magic fixes everything?

Tech can't undo the physics of the greenhouse effect. You want a cooler earth, you have to reduce the radiation we receive or increase the radiation that leaves through the atmosphere. For hundreds of years we have been participating in a geoengineering experiment.

> mildly inconvenient

Wildly disruptive.

There are billions of people living in just such a "disrupted" state today. Says more about your attachment to convenience than about what humans can handle.

If your income directly depends on BAU, sure. But while there are those that would lose out initially to a rapid transition away from burning fossil fuels, including some that live at best a modest existence, I'm confident it'd be vastly cheaper to pay them to retrain etc. than to pay the costs of allowing the global temperature to keep climbing. Unfortunately there are also those whose personal fortunes are directly dependent on our addiction to fossil fuels, and they're not willing to risk jeopardising their wealth and status, so it's pretty much guaranteed we'll keep on burning them for a long while yet. At this stage the best we can hope for is that thousands of climate scientists have somehow got it wrong and we'll be fine in planet that's 3 or 4 degrees warmer.

> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win.

I think that's setting the bar very low, and I don't think it's necessarily true.

Most of us learn how to manage a finite resource (our own income) and how to maximize results within those constraints. This is not some sort of alien situation that humans can't identify with. We face questions like "Do we really need this?" and "Can we afford it right now?" all the time.

We need to get better at organizing ourselves in large groups/structures to do this at the global level, and make people feel equity in the decision-making and that they can afford this equity, and I'm quite optimistic we can in principle get there.

Whether we can do it fast enough is the worrying bit.

> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win.

What needs to be done is cost the damage from unrestricted emissions. You can't just look at the benefits.

Consider the original Clean Air Act. Economists estimate the value of reducing harmful pollution due to that act exceeded the cost of implementing the reductions by a factor of 40. FORTY! It's like picking up free money. And the same is going to be true of CO2 emissions reduction.

Now, it's not true for those personally benefiting, like oil companies. Well, screw them.

This whole "experience" thing is overrated. Tens of millions of people go to see Mona Lisa, what do they get out of it? Absolutely nothing IMO. Their travel created an awful amount of CO2. Had they sat at home and read about Renaissance art and history, they and the world would be much better off.

The vast majority of people disagree with your subjective opinion. Most people dont want to sit in front of their computer their entire lives.

They can go and take a stroll in a park. There is more beauty in that than jostling in a crowd of tourists in front of the Mona Lisa.

Or play softball. Or listen to some live local music.

Again, the vast majority of people disagree with you. Stop pushing your values onto others.

I don't care what majority of people agree with. If majority of people don't change their ways, we all gonna die.

This sounds like the argument someone in massive credit card debt would give when told to cut their spending. Sure I hope there are ways to solve climate change without lowering standard of living, but if there aren't we still have to do it or our standard of living is going to get lowered from the consequences of our civilizations actions.

I think the point is that we are not that civilized. If the stakes are as high as many claim, we would be waging war to stop climate emissions. Of course, we won't do that. And if we did, many more would wage war to continue emitting (and emit in the process). This is a one-way train unless and until there's a lower-cost, low emissions solution. Humans are humans, and politics are politics. The stakes are too high to "altruism" our way out.

> Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win.

That's unfortunate, since trains would surely be the more efficient form of transportation, at least when dealing with regular commute, like going to work and back. Over here, a train ticket costs a few Euros, you don't have to worry about driving or traffic jams, gas/charging, or parking. Of course, if you need to go to a specific rural area or transport some heavy items, then the equation changes, but that's not the majority of the cases.

I'm actually rather sad that they closed down a train route to a city next to my countryside residence, since buses aren't as comfortable in most cases. Either way, public transportation feels like an obvious necessity to me, though many might disagree.

> We could easily cut our use of fossil fuels if we weren't trying to balance that with an arbitrary GDP growth target. We could stop incentivizing people and companies to consume disposable products. We could stop subsidizing massive industrial farms and instead focus on eating locally and growing some of your own food.

Then it's the small task of changing the economic model of the entire developed (and less developed, and exploited) world. The model that all of the richest and most powerful people depend on.

The economic model is going to change one way or another. A model designed around perpetual growth will always fail, and there are already plenty of cracks showing.

A major economic change sounds impossible, but we've done it in the US at least three times in the last century.

That was true 200 years ago and maybe even 200.000 years ago. Some day there will be no more growth - but it could be another 200.000 years.

That's the value of space colonization, or the hope and promise of space colonization -- Preservation on of the economy

> A major economic change sounds impossible, but we've done it in the US at least three times in the last century.

No.

Creating the Federal Reserve was a fundamental change. Confiscating gold then pegging the US dollar to a gold-backed value was a fundamental change. Getting rid of the gold standard and going full fiat sad a fundamental change.

The economic model, monetary policy, and incentives of each system were completely different. We may not have renamed the currency or the country, but that doesn't change the fact that those were major economic shifts.

And just on cue there it is: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of Capitalism”, variously attributed to Frederic Jameson and Mark Fisher (amongst others).

Ok?

Because communist countries don’t pollute?

There are issues with the quote, and Communist countries do pollute, but if the argument is (as avgcorrection stated):

> Then it's the small task of changing the economic model of the entire developed (and less developed, and exploited) world. The model that all of the richest and most powerful people depend on.

Then yes, you're talking specifically about Capitalism at this point; avgcorrection is saying that we can't make this change because it conflicts with Capitalism.

;) Unless you're trying to imply that Communism is the driving economic force behind the entire developed world, which I'm going to guess is not something you believe.

I do think it's reasonable to ask whether the problem of human exploitation and the tendency for entrenched powers to cement their own power at the expense of the world is perhaps broader than one economic system and whether that harmful instinct might show up in multiple places and systems beyond only Capitalism. One could very reasonably argue (and I would argue) that Capitalism showcases just one manifestation of a human instinct that corrupts multiple economic systems including Communism.

But avgcorrection's criticism (as far as I can tell) was that we can't shift off of fossil fuels because that shift is incompatible with the driving economic model of our time: Capitalism. So I don't think the quote is inappropriate. It's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the system avgcorrection is referencing (Capitalism) bending in order to prevent that end.

It's got nothing to do with imagination or ideology and everything to do with the material reality that the the most powerful forces that the world has ever seen will crush you if you try to change the existing system.

Sure, but that just sounds like you're agreeing with qubex?

Not sure if there's something I'm missing here, but I don't see a contradiction between "the most powerful forces the world has ever seen will crush you if you change the current system" and "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism." It sounds like you're both saying the same thing.

Again, I think it's reasonable to ask whether other economic systems if they were dominant would act the same way -- but... I mean, we are talking about Capitalism, that is the most dominant and most powerful economic system in the entire world and the status quo that the most powerful forces in the world see as the default system to preserve. And both you and qubex are saying that changing that system appears to be impossible even when faced with a global human catastrophe.

Maybe I read too much into “imagine”.

It’s not an observation about communism-vs-capitalism (or at least that’s not how I understand it): it’s about how we’re collectively as a society so fixated upon the inevitability of property rights and capitalism and return on investment and the primacy of profit that we cannot contemplate that we may need to abandon all these precepts in order to avert climatic disaster (or some other existential threat).

What exactly are you proposing as an alternative? So far everything else that we have tried has quickly devolved into famine and genocide.

Was the invasion of Vietnam by the US a genocide?

No.

And how exactly would introducing communism avert climate disaster? How did the environment fare in Soviet. Which country is the largest CO2 emitter in the world? Do you even consider what you're writing before you post it?

The person that you replied to already wrote that “It’s not an observation about communism-vs-capitalism”.

Yes, of course. Abolishing property rights is not communism this time around.

Have fun living on your property when it's underwater.

If someone says "end of capitalism" and this is assumed to be "about communist countries", because it's binary, what else is there? Then this is precisely the dangerous failure of imagination being pointed to.

I’m quite stunned by the virulence of the responses and how strong the (false) dichotomy between ‘communism’ and ‘capitalism’ is.

The knee is jerking for sure. The virulence suggests insecurity.

The planet is complex but not complex at the same time.

It's easy enough to break the natural environment by very primitive means.

So I agree with your point, it's just not that complex that we can't totally ruin it quite easily.

That opens up a whole apndoras box of whether a reduction is approach can lead to a complete understanding of complex systems. I'll leave that for another thread, that's a deep rabbit whole full of mostly theoretical debate (though an interesting one IMO!)

Some of your proposed first steps are hardly obvious. Food transport is highly efficient and constitutes only a tiny fraction of CO2 emissions. Eating locally isn't going to help; it might even have the opposite effect in some places. Same for clothing.

In urban or suburban housing people don't have enough space or direct sunlight to grow a useful amount of food.

> We could easily cut our use of fossil fuels if we weren't trying to balance that with an arbitrary GDP growth target

Believe it or not, only a handful of people genuinely care about "GDP growth targets" and they have very little influence on environmental policy. The reason why politicians oppose sweeping regulation to stop climate change is because they'd lose their jobs if they intentionally caused gas prices to rise or cause a recession.

> Believe it or not, only a handful of people genuinely care about “GDP growth targets” and they have very little influence on environmental policy

A large number of people with vast influence on all government policy care about the returns of their investments in existing incumbent industries, which in aggregate correlate very strongly with GDP growth, though.

I would argue most people care about GDP growth targets but they just don't understand them that way. GDP growth is what leads to improvements in real human quality of life. It is your ability to get healthcare, housing, food and all the other things that make life a lot less painful.

I would rather live in a society with a higher GDP than less (all things considered) and so would most people (as evidenced by population shifts across the world). If the GDP does not grow to at least match the population changes, the society would be poorer and have worse outcomes overall.

No idea why your getting downvoted for such an obvious statement, there is very strong (But not perfect) correlation between GDP and standard of living.

almost everybody living in a democratic capitalist economy is influence by and takes decisions that have as the foundation the GDP growth.

that is the foundation of the way economy works. It propagates down to interests and credits and investments and jobs.

Obviously IMO.

Or entire system is based on predictable GDP growth. It impacts nearly every part of your life in some way.

Do you have any debt? Or use money? Or pay taxes?do you have a job? Did you know that oil consumption grows at the same rate as GDP? Do you save for retirement, or hold any investments? Do you have a bank account?

It's all directly connected to the economic system, which is driven by the goal of having steady and predictable rate of growth in GDP.

I think the second half of your comment argues against the first.

You're right that people are unwilling to make the basic changes that are obviously needed. But we only know precisely that those changes would work to fight against climate change because we are able to say with certainty that those behaviors are contributing factors.

Any suggested actions have to have some level of scientific credibility to be taken seriously. Without it, they are easily dismissed by claiming that the planet is too complex to know if our actions will make a difference.

That, purely by coincidence, I'm sure, has been the exact argument used against making any changes, and against the fact that warming was happening in the first place, and against tobaccos cancer risk, and any other public policy proposal that goes against the interest of those profiting from the status quo.

If the "basic changes" are more extreme than the COVID lockdowns, which made the entire world miserable, brought unprecedented economic destruction we'll be dealing with forever, and which also didn't cool the planet at all despite massive decreases in CO2 emissions... no thanks.

I'll keep voting against anything that makes me poorer and more miserable.

Well, you'll end up even poorer and more miserable in the end if you have it your way. But at least you get your treats for a few more years.

I sincerely hope that we aren't at a point where most people's guiding principles are minimizing their own poorness or misery. Those should be a given and self interest is backed into us, but we're in for a world of hurt if those are the only deciding factors take into account.

Some things are in fact worth dying for.

Bullshit. Nobody can factually, concretely state that climate change will go a specific, certain way to cause a specific certain amount of misery over the next century. There are too many technological, social, economic, and extremely complex climate variables at play for that to be a concrete assertion.

This isn't to say that measures to reduce carbon emissions can't or shouldn't be taken, they can and they should, but with a mind towards exactly what you deride, preventing as many people as possible from falling into draconian economic and social misery. That at least is something we concretely know to be possible if governments adopt the wrong control measures in a heavy handed way. The pandemic showed it clearly and concretely in many forms.

We're not talking here about the impending, concrete impact of a large asteroid, or a super volcano eruption that's definitely imminent, where mass economic sacrifice for the sake of saving humanity would be understandable. Climate change is, despite all the political fanfare, something that has too many variables to clearly define as a cataclysm.

Given that, there is nothing selfish about wanting to avoid misery and "dying" for yourself and your children in the face of ambiguous predictions about future events. If you're so convinced that "some things are worth dying for", what stops you from applying your own advice instead of preaching sanctimoniously to others?

That and those that dominate the narrative around climate change are the ones who sabotaged nuclear power in the first place. We don't understand the problem/solution space enough so the most sensible is to invest in climate research and monitoring.

To what end? What will more data do when it's inevitably going to be incomplete and largely based on modeling?

We won't ever understand the problem space of the entire ecosystem well enough to make a complete solution. But there are easy things that can be done if we actually cared to, and we certainly don't need to keep piling on more things that almost certainly make things worse.

> But there are easy things that can be done.

Sure, like stopping subsidies to fossil fuel industry but I don't think cutting CO2 emissions is easy as you paint. How would we do that in a short notice? Through government? I'm extremely pessimistic towards "solutions" that require bigger government or new taxes as politicians almost always follow perverse incentives and don't care about long term consequences. My government subsidizes the coal industry using taxpayer money while making it hard for citizens to generate their own clean energy through laws and taxes. Government isn't the savior.

> We won't ever understand the problem space of the entire ecosystem well enough to make a complete solution.

More data and better models does nothing to prevent the planet from warming but help us plan mitigation strategies ahead and give us more confidence towards the efficacy/consequences of interventions. Right now we clearly understand that the planet is warming and that we are somewhat close to a cascading failure but what else? I don't like the prospects of downing living standards to the stone age so we may delay global warming. This isn't a solution and is a big sacrifice.

I think we may have a difference in degree when it comes to what we think may be coming. I don't expect the planet to burst into flames over night, but we have already done unimaginable damage to soil, water, and life on this planet. It can probably bounce back and maybe humans will even be here to see it, but in the nearer term I don't see it as a question of mitigating pain while the systems we have today continue to chug along.

I could very well be wrong, and if core systems don't break then I do understand the goal of just being less miserable today.

I'm actually arguing the opposite. We don't know precisely that any of the suggested changes I listed would make a clear impact on climate change. My point is that, regardless of what happens with climate change, we could cut oil use with little to no impact on our daily lives.

We don't actually know the extent of impacts from either our oil use or potential cuts. We have modeling data that we extrapolate out, the issue I'm raising is that we get stuck in a loop of people debating whether the modeling data is accurate, complete, or predictive.

There are changes we can easily make without knowing those answers. If we can make simple changes that at a minimum wouldn't hurt the planet and almost certainly would help it, why don't we? My read is that we simply must not care. We don't need to buy as many things as we do, or to expert those costs overseas. We don't need to travel the world by plane. We don't need the latest iPhone made on the other side of the planet. We don't need LLMs. We do it because we like convenience and novelty more that we actually care about our impact on the planet. And we avoid implementing real solutions by first demanding that we have a complete understanding of the cause and blame.

> There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared.

Have you tried arguing people against eating meat? If we can't even talk them out of the main individual contributor to climate change, I don't think we have a good chance to make a positive impact on other areas that depend on conscious effort.

This doesn't seem to match the data I've seen.

Yes, food is a significant portion of energy consumption, but typical transportation and housing (including heat/cool) easily dominate. Going from a daily mixed meat (chicken/fish/beef/eggs) eating diet to a vegan diet saves ~1 ton CO2 per year. Average is about 4-5 tons per year for a person living in a small apartment in temperate climate, who only uses public transportation, doesn't go on vacation, or buy any unnecessary consumer items. A more typical westerner who can afford meat every meal is about 10-20 tons per year.

Now, if you're eating 150g of beef every meal 3x every day, you could double your footprint (+20tons CO2). Eating only chicken, fish, and eggs gets you below 1ton/year for meat in meals. Vegan is about a third of that.

https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-ecol...

Food corresponds to 10~30% of individual carbon footprint. Dairy + meat amount to 3/4 of total emissions from food production. So going vegan should theoretically reduce from 7.5% to 22.5% total individual emissions[1]. It may not be the largest factor in every situation, but it is still a very important one.

[1]https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability...

It's basically impossible to convince someone to do all those things when they're fighting to stay alive, working terrible conditions and generally being fucked by society as a whole. Fixing economic inequalities and improving overall quality of life for everyone in the planet should be top of that list. Telling rich people to grow their own food won't make any difference.

I'd argue that an economy and society built on the framework of terrible economic inequality is fundamentally unable to fix said problems.

I expect we would have a lot of agreement related to fixing that system to better serve the average person. Even if we have different opinions on exact details, that core principle can go very, very far.

> We could easily cut our use of fossil fuels

Given our economic dependence, the economic efficiency, and interested resistance, what concrete course of action would achieve this transition?

> We could stop incentivizing people and companies to consume disposable products.

How? Concretely.

I always figured that if more liberal politicians enact all at once the grueling regime required for current climate deadlines that it might work for a while but then the citizenry will then just revolt and vote right wing and it will set back all progress that has been made the past couple of decades. I already see it in American politics.

> The list goes on, but having spent decades watching people debate passionately over why the planet is warming all while going further down the same path my only conclusion is that we just don't give a damn. When push comes to shove we would rather buy new cloths imported from the other side of the world, throw resources at new construction and gut job renovations, and will happily fly around the world on vacation rather than stay home and enjoy the world around us.

Yes exactly.

You hit on something that I often say, though we come at "solutioning" from opposite angles and, from the sounds of your comment, will find little agreement. What we agree on is that understanding anthropogenic global warming and its causes is important and can inform solutions, but it does not tell us what the "right" solutions are since we have other complicating factors to consider. Such as things like human rights, standards of living, morality and the role+purpose and limitations of government.

For some of us the debate is not over whether AGW is a scientifically understood phenomenon that represents a problem (even a critical problem at that). The debate is over what the solutions ought to be, what tools are the right tools for the job and what course corrections are considerable given factors that we must also contend with that lie outside of our scientific understanding of the problem.

> Such as things like human rights, standards of living, morality and the role+purpose and limitations of government.

Unfortunately, the dustbins of history are full of civilizations that took disruptive events carefully and with grave dignity and solemnity and respected the rights of powerful stake-holders within their society.

That the people who make such arguments generally live in the places best positioned to weather out the situation, is also unfortunate. While people in well-pr tut about whether it's really proper for a government to take action to avoid calamity from befalling its citizens, other people will be literally dying.

It's a rather crass and callous/indifferent position you've staked out, you're kind of not coming off like a very good person here.

It is, as someone notes upthread, basically the same as masks during COVID. Some people will stroke their chin and pontificate about utilitarianism and the greater good, but that's not really comfort to anyone whose loved one dies from excess pollution.

You should run for politics. The level of strawmanning and platitudes that your reply just levied is something typically only seen from politicians.

It's pretty objectively crass to ask people to die so that you can continue your consumption unabated. Just as it was with COVID.

Pretty much anyone who opens up with "the proper role of government" is guaranteed to using some self-insert version of the founding fathers as a debate-terminating cliche, and it's usually followed by some incredibly crass take like "you're going to have to die so that GDP and consumption can continue growing". Like, it's all just numbers, and it turns out the numbers are a lot more important than the lives of the affected individuals.

Does "I will never mask up, I don't care if a million front-line workers die, reopen the economy and let's get GDP back on track" make you a bad person? Well, it doesn't make you a good one. At best it makes you the edgy kid in your college debate club, but people tend not to like that "abstract, formal" argumentation when it's their lives you're debating.

It's not polite to say it here, of course. But treating a practical issue with real-world consequences as a boring dry debate club to score points over is kind of a shitty approach in general. And nobody else is obligated to play along with that and treat every possible position you might take as having inherent and equal merit, which is really the point of the tone-policing thing.

Taking a position that we should just let climate change happen (TFA announcing yet another "hottest month on record" and "hottest year on record", let's remember) because otherwise it would make your imaginary version of the founding fathers sad is not a position that deserves a whole lot of rhetorical merit or gravity. Of course it is "the role of government" to take action to mitigate dangers to its citizens - whether that's indian attack, or a socialized healthcare system for merchant sailors, or controlling an outbreak of smallpox, or climate change. And it's objectively silly to get hung up on what some 16th-century document thinks about it.

Again, I'm sure you're a great coder, but you certainly are coming off as lacking empathy, and favoring rigid procedure-following over action to control an extigent and escalating situation. The debate-club stuff doesn't really matter, and actually probably is offensive to the people whose lives you are debating. And again, that's an observation you are not really allowed to make here, that maybe this faux-debate-club schtick and enforced politeness around deadly issues isn't really healthy.

Actually your content-free ad-hominem retort is more typical of politician-speak.

There is a lot of things that seems easy, but in fact are impossible.

Sure, we could just stop using fossil fuels. But something like 50% of the global population would then be starving.

The cure that so often is prescribed is worse than the disease. And people don't seem to realize.

There's a big gap between the amount of oilwwe use today and zero oil, we can reduce without stopping.

I think your point leads down the path of arguing that we have too many people on the planet though. If we can sustainably feed everyone without causing unknown amounts of damage to the environment, we will eventually hit a wall and run out of ways to dodge that fact.

well there are easier solutions than "blaming consumers". stop it at the supply. Enforce regulations and demands of the companies importing those "new cloths" and make them responsible for the damage caused.

America loves to gaslit consumers but companies never EVER get the blame, even worse is the CEOs of the companies who make these decisions always get scot free.

Oh companies are absolutely to blame, but so are the politicians we'd need to actually regulate them.

Enforcing regulations requires quite a few steps first, from defining the scope and likely granting new authority to regulators to actually drafting regulations that are complete and not full of loop holes.

Your argument is also based on the premise that consumers aren't able to make the best choices for themselves and must be forced into it by regulators. I simply refuse to believe this, what are we even doing here if we think real reform can only come from all powerful authorities forcing it upon us?

> The degree of "El Nino" influence is presumably known, and if its strength is not related with global warming in complicated and unknown ways it would be good to overlay it as a distinct effect.

A brief web search suggests this presumption is incorrect and that climate change is having an effect on the cycle, rendering this division somewhat meaningless - the old El Nino is "gone," in a sense, and only the climate change effected one remains.

from: https://research.noaa.gov/2020/11/09/new-research-volume-exp...

“No two El Niños or La Niñas are perfectly alike,” Capotondi said. “We’ve seen how diverse ENSO events can be. This diversity adds another degree of complexity for understanding how climate change will influence future ENSO events.”

So how are ENSO impacts likely to evolve in the coming decades?

“Extreme El Niño and La Niña events may increase in frequency from about one every 20 years to one every 10 years by the end of the 21st century under aggressive greenhouse gas emission scenarios,” McPhaden said. “The strongest events may also become even stronger than they are today.”

and here is the full book: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/978...

The chapter on "ENSO Diversity" seems the most relevant for this discussion but it is alas behind a paywall.

The available summary does not hint there is something conclusive yet on these interactions: "Current research seeks to determine whether such changes in ENSO characteristics were the result of anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing or just a manifestation of natural variability, and whether and how climate change may affect ENSO diversity in the future."

One theory is that it's too early in the cycle to attribute the warming to El Nino (which will make things even worse), but that it's due to a reduction in SO2 in shipping fuels causing lower solar reflection and heating up the oceans faster.

However, it's hard to be sure. A discussion: https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/aerosols-are-so2-emissions-...

Americans wear ignorance as a badge of honor, specifically, ignorance of math.

"Let's not get lost in the details", "Let's take a 30,000 foot view of the problem", etc. are common sayings in corporate America that boil down to "I'm not that confident in math, so can we stick to hard-to-prove-false qualitative claims only, please?"

I love this sentiment, I hope it takes off, but I gave up trying years ago.

> The other segment of the population that can be affected by a clear and well founded explanation of what is happening are those sitting on the fence about climate change or feeling skeptical for legitimate reasons.

I simply no longer believe these people really exist, that information has been around, it has been around for decades, and yet this argument comes up time and time again, I'm a reasonable person, persuade me. Nah.... it's been done time and time again.

> It would be quite educational to attribute in more detail the impact of these two factors. The degree of "El Nino" influence is presumably known

Unfortunately, they aren't independent variables. The climate change effects of global warming have also altered the function of El Nino. You can't entirely subtract one variable out because they're interlinked.

If you really wanted to, you could squint and look at the trend lines of previous months and years and try to extrapolate a trajectory. It would still be going up.

If there is a potion of the population that is "sitting on the fence about climate change", it is highly unlikely that they "can be convinced by a clear and well founded explanation of what is happening"

Anybody capable of that, would either no longer be sitting on the fence, or are highly unlikely to be reading this article.

Also, the basic premise of your comment assumes that the effects on the monthly temperature can be cleanly broken down categorically into "fossil fuel related" and "El Nino related", which presupposes that a stronger and more frequent El Nino events are unrelated to the burning of fossil fuels.

The facts the human impact on climate change are overwhelming, both in their abundance and scope of impact. Pretending that they don't exist, or treating them as a tangential issue to be put aside so as to appeal to a skeptical and/or ignorant minority, serves no purpose other than to undercut the facts.

There are people who are "in principle" accepting climate change but skeptical about the urgency and magnitude of adaptation that is required. This includes critical segments of the business and political worlds who weigh any action against their vested interests. These people will never panic. But they may plot a "changing of stripes" strategy if the signals from experts and society are strong and persistent.

This is discussion is really about how the experts (and, subsequently, mass and social media) popularize the explanations of weather events and what effect this might have on various segments of the population.

> which presupposes that a stronger and more frequent El Nino events are unrelated to the burning of fossil fuels.

I didn't pressupose anything, I qualified my statement. In fact people posted various interesting recent pieces of research in the thread and I learned that there are both additional potential factors that may be currenty overlapping and that understanding of a potential climate change / El Nino link is still elusive.

But that is beside the point. Even if there was a known link it doesn't change my remark that better framing is required. You would simply condition on the dependence, show the growing El Nino "diversity" against the underlying trend and indicate how this may have created an outlier realization.

It's not beside the point, it IS the point.

There's too much currently unknown for any honest person to speak with the confidence the other poster is and that makes many people (myself included) distrustful.

Or maybe they don't trust people like you, who can say things with so much confidence despite the scientific consensus not being _nearly_ as clear as you claim.

Analysis done back in 2016, back when 2015 shattered records due to El Nino (and completely shattered the argument around a "pause" in global warming due to the El Nino spike back in 1998):

https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/el-nino-and-the-2015...

https://tamino.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/correcting-for-more-...

Seems wortwhile to update this. Maybe even have a running calculation that is updated on each data release? It provides an intersting context for understanding monthly and annual temperature anomalies.

I think most people consider it settled science/argument at this point. As a veteran of the 2005-2015 internet flamewars on climate science it definitely just bores the living shit out of me to even think about it again. And all the climate science sources from that period (Skeptical Science, Real Climate, Tamino's blog) also don't publish anywhere near the amount they used to.

If you disagree, then be the change you want to see in the world... Setup a website, pull the data, build your own model and publish it. Once you've got it going, I'd guess that Tamino would be more than willing to correct all your mistakes in your model.

I would like to see solar activity included in the discussion as well. But anytime I bring it up I'm called a climate denialist. But we're seeing auroras very far south and those days it's no issue mentioning the sun is currently in an active phase. Why is that detail always omitted when it comes to global warming, sorry climate change?

I don't understand. Do you think there is scientific doubt about the greenhouse effect, or that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, or that for hundreds of thousands of years CO2 concentrations have correlated with average temperature? There isn't any doubt about the problems of greenhouse gases, and there isn't anything we can do about the sun's activity other than use it as an excuse to do nothing "until we understand".

This is the kind of responses I'm referring to. I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything as you assume, I'm wondering why solar activity isn't accounted for in the models. Maybe it can explain something? Trust the science and all that you know, being thorough.

I'm curious if the changes we see can be explained by the sun activity yes. I'm not qualified to assess which of the scientists are right and which aren't, and to what extent CO2 gases cause global warming. Instead of just asking me to take it for a fact when asking a question please use your expertise and explain it in a sense that I can understand and verify.

I'm asking out of curiosity and because I want to understand, to me this could all be because of the sun and an elaborate cash-grab, just as plausible. Because it's not about stopping it at all costs, some people can apparently buy the right to produce more? With these kind of hand-wavy responses from those who claim to have the knowledge where do you think me and other like me are turning for information?

I don't know if it's easier to build a giant sunscreen than to get the worlds population eating bugs because apparently cows fart too much? But we still keep exploiting the amazon, and doing everything we can to keep the endless growth economy we've built going. So how pressing can it really be? We're fighting wars over more resources, when maybe we should be fighting to stop consumerism?

I don't know. But I'm not taking anyones word for it, help me understand or move on. Don't tell me what to think.

> I'm wondering why solar activity isn't accounted for in the models

why do you work from the assumption that it's not? a trivial search turned up this article from 2011 which says that models already do include approximations of solar activity even at that time.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/grantham-i...

obviously it is something that is constantly being improved, like everything else in the model. but there aren't good direct historical proxies for solar output - you can't take a "core sample" and go back 1000 years of solar activity, so the datasets really only go back 60 or 70 years there, and even rough measurements of sunspot activity/etc will only probably go back less than 200 years. but over the last 15 years this is something that's been actively studied and addressed and they're trying to incorporate more detailed modeling.

https://eos.org/science-updates/better-data-for-modeling-the...

again, this only affects between 7-30% of the total picture, according to most studies. so it's not like this is where global warming is coming from. contributing factor? sure, a small one.

but like, I don't know why everyone works from the assumption that they thought of one thing that all the scientists forgot about completely. One clever trick to explain global warming, climate scientists hate him.

which is why stuff like this is not really constructive or helpful. like if you don't know, why are you so sure about what is being incorporated or not? why isn't the question "how is this being incorporated"? Because it probably is.

> I don't know. But I'm not taking anyones word for it, help me understand or move on. Don't tell me what to think.

Much more constructive thank you. To be honest I haven't looked into it much in the last decade just going from the news and general discourse. I've noticed that we've been going into an active phase and it's mentioned a lot in other situations but never when it comes to the reasons behind climate change. Especially since it could make it worse I'd assume they'd push harder on it being more of a problem now. Feels like they're hiding something.

According to your second link we can track solar activity:

> Evidence of variations in solar activity on millennial timescales can be found in the records of cosmogenic radionuclides in such long-lived natural features as ice cores from large ice sheets, tree rings and ocean sediments. Using careful statistical analysis it is now possible to identify decadal and centennial signals of solar variability in climate data.

7% sounds low yes, but 30% is absolutely not a "small" factor. I'd think the direct effect of solar activity would be much easier to measure even on a micro level than CO2. A decade back a graph was popular where temperature and solar activity correlated almost 1:1.

I'm not trying to argue for emissions, I'd prefer no cars, fresh air and banned plastics. But an honest debate where I'm not a conspiracy nut for asking completely valid questions is not much to ask for (not directed at you just the general discourse).

If it really is serious then don't tell me we need to keep the economy going, that we have a demographic problem or try to sell me emission rights. We do or we don't, the next iphone or the next generation, that's the solution I expect to the level of threat they're telling me it is. Meanwhile they fly in private jets from summit to summit.

I'm not even trying to keep my way of living I'm already a hermit with a broken screen on my 4 year old phone, and rarely eat red meat. What they say and what they do doesn't seem to match.

I appreciate your tolerance and generous reading, it's just a frustration of mine. There are invariably a lot of smart people looking at any problem that is receiving widespread funding etc, and it's dismissive to be like "but what about !?!?" and like yeah they probably know. Usually it's more instructive to invert this and try to figure out what the open questions or the hot new approaches (and why they do it better) in an area is.

And yes, lowest emissions is the guy with a mattress on the floor and xbox who doesn't go anywhere but nobody's ready for that talk yet.

> population that drifts into panic and depression

vs

> feeling skeptical for legitimate reasons

I think it's just your bias showing. This is 2023, people who are "skeptical" of the climate change aren't there for legitimate reasons. And frankly I'm less and less convinced that we need to engage these people.

I think might be your bias showing...

IMO there's an awful lot of necessary debate around climate policy. Skeptical can mean anything from thinking:

1) Battery storage for intermittent renewables is unsolved and therefore nuclear is a better solution (I think this is actually correct, if we could emulate France's historic budgets, timelines and safety)

2) The earth isn't warming at all and it's a Chinese conspiracy.

There's a lot of room between those two points, even thing's as basic as what's our current level of warming are harder to pin down than you would expect.