If they had taken enough math to understand chaotic dynamic systems, they would need be as anxious as I am. It's less that I can tell you exactly what's going to happen, although there are definitely things that we are certain of, like riskier hurricanes.
What keeps me up at night is that farmers have no idea what the next season will look like because we have altered the conditions of the function of climate, and therefore will enter a new state. We do not know where it will land and what it will look like getting there, and that very likely means reduction in food production.
Sometimes fear is justified.
I tried drinking copiously but eventually my insides started hurting. So I don't know either.
Not just accepting that it's 72 out and that it's nice, nothing to see here, move along.
Like you said, people aren't stupid and should be a bit more conscious of the actual implications of this.
I think what you're describing is actually denial because facing the reality is scary at first.
Also 40 Celsius is the new 30 in the past 15 years. This didn’t happen since we measure temperature. And 10 degrees are a lot, and the change happened in a decade.
Also summer wind patterns completely changed in the past 5 years, due to the weakening currents in Atlantic Ocean. This is something which is also highly unusual the past millennia. We know this for sure, because all of our towns were built wind from West in mind. We have wind from that direction less and less.
This is way over normal variation.
But looking at other examples, for example Norway. Thawing permafrost bogs are not something which can be explained by normal variation.
To me personally the loss of the seasons is one of the most tragic things I've witnessed.We've had 1/10th of the snow we usually have, it's almost all melted already and everything looks kind of depressing. But I know the lack of snow melt will have an impact on farming too, all this for for what? So resources companies were able to profit a bit more?
In Kyoto, Japan last year year, which is famous for the "red leaves" in Autumn which attracts huge swathes of tourists, had no red leaves. To me the loss of the beautiful spectacle is one thing, like, but also concerning as you said, we've tipped some type of scales but who knows how far...maybe it will be ok, maybe it won't.
I'm working out how to grow food hydroponically because I'm concerned food prices will just keep getting more expensive as this worsens and don't want to be left relying on "global trade" for my sustenance.
Must an observation have an easily digestible value judgement and tell you how you should think about it, or can it just be allowed to present the facts and list the pros and cons.
which one do you think leads to a healthier media environment
Did you yourself not also include a portion of your comment to respond to article based on its data with your own "it depends" based on other data?
> The tone suggests they're afraid of the change
What do you think they lay person would immediately think about 'the earth is greening' and would it be appropriate to address those initial perceptions.
the article offers multiple possible explanations for this and what their effects might be. it acknowledges those derivative outcomes are speculative.
Not once is a greening planet painted in a positive light in this article. Its as if the writer is afraid to say something positive about CO2 emissions.
This was done by the natural processes of the Earth, so recently even humans were alive during the Ice Age. Some scientists even say that we are due for another ice age, that we may be otherwise avoiding due to climate change.
Which is a quantitative statement. Altered conditions will not benefit every local species equally.
> Context matters
Hmm, apparently the answer depends!!!
What I believe is "healthier", e.g., for (1) my being informed or (2) click-bait headlines, eyeballs, ad revenue????
But, now, for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
there is a possibility, that is, from some changes from the Internet:
First, the basic ideas of click-bait, etc. go way back in the history of many decades of journalism publishers. They needed a lot of revenue: Printing plants, trucks to deliver literally tons of news print or magazines, ..., radio and TV studios, etc. were expensive. The number of publishers was constrained: Each major city had just two main newspapers, morning and evening. There were a few national magazines. Then, the number of large radio stations, TV stations, were similarly limited. Un, click-bait that works in one major city stands to work everywhere which creates the constraints on the number of national click-bait publishers.
> easily digestible value judgment and tell you how you should think
Well put. For the big publishers, that is what dominated.
For a good review and explanation going way back, see the ~1941 movie Meet John Doe.
Second, now the decades, 100+ years, of such journalism is also being attempted on the Web sites of the Internet -- thus, your well put objection.
BUT ...!!!! For an audience and a publisher for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
they no longer need be so expensive. A single tower case computer can send, what, 100+ Web pages a second?
Sooo, now the mass audience can have subsets.
Some simple arithmetic:
Assume 1 ad per Web page sent, revenue of $1 per 1000 ads displayed, sending a 24 x 7 average of 50 Web pages a second. Assume pre-tax earnings are 50% of revenue.
Then annual earnings would be
50 * 3600 * 24 * 265 / ( 1000 * 2 ) = 572,400
dollars.
Assume the business is worth 100 times annual earnings, and get
100 * 50 * 3600 * 24 * 265 / ( 1000 * 2 ) = 57,240,000
dollars.
A possibility for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
is the economy: A lot of data is available. Could present it in largely some simple X-Y graphs can do routinely with, say, Excel in Microsoft's Office.
Another possibility: For COVID, start with the crucial data in the report of the Phase III trials in
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2035389
COVID and medicine more generally are good subjects for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
Follow, say, common high school standards for term papers, e.g., careful references, hopefully to credible primary sources.
Get an audience that values credibility.
Then get a brand, a growing audience, and a successful business.
Hmm, yup, I have a related startup -- Web site code running as intended. Should go live this year.
I'm no scientist, but I believe the current ecological disaster effecting the UK's largest lake may be an example of the type of bad outcome we could expect to see more of.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/19/like-the...
It appears that a large algal bloom might be the immediate cause. Apparently algal blooms benefit from higher CO2 levels.
https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/climate-change-and-har...
I can't find it now, but I do remember reading some theory that previous extinction events on earth were driven by large amounts of organic matter breaking down anaerobically (i.e. underwater) which leads to a huge increase in some pretty nasty gases in the atmosphere. There have (apparently) even been times when some of the world's oceans were effectively large swamps.
Edit: My mistake, I didn't read about what I mentioned in that last paragraph - I heard it on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eM1aakTzMw
To give the general gist of what's covered in the above video/interview with paleobiologist Peter Ward:
03:00 - We need a little bit of CO2, but it’s easy to have too much CO2
04:20 - Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe (co-written with Dan Brownlee)
04:40 - Excessive heat and mortality
05:12 - Volcanic activity responsible for past CO2 spikes
05:40 - Previous mass extinctions
05:57 - Non-animal mass extinctions
07:18 - Uneven atmospheric heating
and much more...
Well worth a listen if you have the time.
> So, yes, greening is complicated. It’s not inherently good. Sometimes it’s very bad. Context, it turns out, matters a lot.
The tone suggests they're afraid of the change, but the article can't articulate why since the reason for the change and result are both possibly good and bad, but we don't really know yet.
The NASA MODIS project is ongoing and produces data that people are using to measure "greenness" (which the article indirectly cites) and has been going for 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderate_Resolution_Imaging_Sp... - it's definitely an interesting dataset.
Didan seems to be leading the vegetation research for MODIS and the data set has been cited thousands of times (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TxQK6U8AAAAJ&hl=en...)