Whenever you hear a politician say "carbon neutral by 2050", interrupt them. The real goal is to avoid getting too far over 1.5 degrees warming. We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system. The year 2050 is meaningless. Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
2050 is not meaningless. Its close enough to feel like its achievable but far enough away that you can put off immediate action and still feel there is time to get it done. Reminds of the lyrics of the spirit of the west song:
Berkeley Earth berkeleyearth.org › home › global temperature report for 2023
Global Temperature Report for 2023 - Berkeley Earth
February 29, 2024 - 2023 was the warmest year on Earth since direct observations began, and the first year to exceed 1.5 °C above our 1850-1900 average. ...
I’m amused that the argument is that we are in a Mr Burns position where different kinds of pollution we were emitting was balancing out and somehow fighting pollution is the reason global warming is worse? While I’m sure it has some effect, the amount of co2 we pump out every year as a species is insane. The effect of ship pollution mitigating that is marginal at best
Some systems pulling the average up and some pulling down but the average of them is net up. I wonder though if it would have been better or worse for us if the net change ended up negative (dropping temps every year) instead. Probably worse, right?
Stratospheric aerosol injection is the leading geoengineering proposal for a reason. If you have well-supported reasons to be skeptical, you should share it, but just saying "idk doesn't sound right to me" isn't convincing.
Is there a real practical solution to this? It seems like all proposed solutions in last 40 years are a drop in the ocean, or just a money grab scams. Only thing that really worked for such global scale is the ozone layer repair. Global warming/climate change I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
Yes, we got to adapt, we won't cool it down and "repair" what is broken.
However we can slow down the effects and try to stop the effects. So it's "only" 1.5° or whatever, not 3°, 5° or 10°. And if we raise average by 10° at least not by the years 2100, but 2200 to give time to adapt.
"Adapting" means resettling people, restructuring agriculture and food production, etc.
(All numbers are quite arbitrary picks, just as any goal one tried to set before)
Before areas become completely uninhabitable, we will see areas become increasingly stressed: heat waves, more extreme weather events, poorer crop yields, depleting aquifers.
Stress increases conflict risk. Fights for essential resources (land, water, food, shelter) will break out long before those essential resources are completely gone.
If we skip past the immense suffering and death part, we will probably end up on a planet where national borders have been redrawn by war and desperation, and a smaller population that lives in more northerly climes.
Nobody has to "like" them. The centralized command and control structure is mostly in place to just force them down everyone's throats. Once we have centralized digital currency it will be a foregone conclusion
As with most difficult problems, this is a messy political problem, not a technical one. There is zero chance we avoid 1.5C gain. The best you can do is make life decisions for yourself to make your lifetime as comfortable for you as you can, assuming it will happen. I started doing that 5 years ago.
Technologically practical? Certainly. Kick renewables and electrification into high gear. Treat it like the emergency that it is.
Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.
Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.
I'm not sure what we should do, it's very hard to determine what minimizes harm and maximizes benefits at a global scale. It's certainly not as simple as extremists would like to believe. Certainly it would be much (MUCH) less risky to slow warming as much as possible and maintain constant or slowly reducing CO2 levels.
I think from the standpoint of predicting what will happen, my best guess is that people will use fossil fuels until it is economically not viable to do so. If you want hasten it at an individual level, buy solar panels and have your house disconnected from the grid until fees you pay no longer subsidize fossil fuels. Frown at people and refuse to give them positive social cues when they buy a car that isn't electric. Instead of "oh nice car" just say "it would be so cool if they had a plugin version!". Support electrification of things like heat and water heating so long as it can be powered by non-fossil sources.
In the long run I think solar power, effective battery technology, and the peaking of the global population combine to cause fossil fuel usage to reduce over the next 100 years or so until CO2 levels stabilize. Lots of large CO2 emitters are already leveling off - the output is too high to sustain but at least it's no longer increasing year over year - such as from cement production.
Honestly it's not much but that's what you can do, larger social movements and political action do not work when someone's decision is whether to spend $800 a month or $100 a month to heat their house. Anyone who says it does should buy a thermometer, but instead they will get a plane ticket to the next big city to run around in the street yelling at police (literally the only people paid to not care about your slogans) while nobody really notices.
If we are in overshoot scenario even reducing emissions may not be enough. There are warming gases currently trapped in permafrost, the natural carbon storage capacity is very dynamic, so global warming may target new (worse) equilibrium beyond what we think we can achieve in best case scenario.
Were you aware that the last time the planet was estimated to have co2 levels over 420ppm the global temperature was 10 degrees Celsius warmer overall? This is the global equilvant of being locked in a car in a sunlit parking lot.
Electric cars are the savior of the auto industry, not of the climate. It needs to become viable for most people to get around without cars at all. The intensity of their resource consumption, both for manufacture and for infrastructure, independent of their fuel source, cannot scale up for the world population.
A change in attitudes is not enough. Structural change is needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, the population is unable to achieve results.
The population is achieving results. Most of these results are occurring in China, which has begun an unimaginably huge deployment of renewables and nuclear. Europe is also making progress. The rest of Asia will go next, and then (as it develops industrially) so will Africa. Even parts of North America will quickly electrify: for example, Canada just agreed to reduce tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6% from 100%.
Our ecological goals are to make biosphere damage scarce, but our economic practices aim to make scarce things plentiful. We need something to balance out the effects of scarcity-based economics.
In the very fun board game ‘Evolution : Climate’ you “breed” animals designed to survive the climate conditions on the board. One strategy is to switch to breeding ‘carnivores’ that then can feast on the creations of other players. They downside tho is that once other players evolve their animals to have carnivore protections (fight back, scales, protective shells etc) the carnivores start to quickly starve and that player must quickly change out of this eat everything strategy back to a more sustainable strategy.
In a similar way I think what works is to push back against growth only and growth at all costs approaches and back practises and models and communities that are working in other ways.
The trouble is, when I receive my paycheck, it just comes as "dollars". I don't know whether my employer got them by providing services to communities which are working in other ways, or whether they come from more nefarious behavior--and I have no way to refuse one sort but accept the other.
The kind of community action you're describing happens, but we need to find ways to help it scale.
I can't think of a single time in history that humanity responded to a threat in a fully coordinated manner. Maybe this is the first time, but the incentive stack from the individual voter all the way up to geopolitical grand strategy argues against it.
Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.
We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.
If you initially make factually wrong comment then you should at least apologize and say that you are sorry for being wrong, not keep pushing your agenda further.
Ok, so why not just be specific? “On record” usually means since we started recording history , at least 5k years ago.
And have you looked into the records? satellite surface temps and high resolution recording have not been around for very long. 1880 methods were very crude and narrowly scoped.
That’s not the raw data. The original recordings were made by merchants on parchment. They measured the volume of water in a wooden box, to set the buoyancy for their loads
Hah. Shall I present it to you on a silver platter then?
If you read the NASA page, they explicitly cite GHCNd, a raw surface temperature and precipitation dataset that goes back quite far. There's many other similar datasets you can find if you're willing to look.
Check out the readme for the csv format description, and /by-year for the raw rows:
There are tons of raw data available freely and publicly. In my estimation, there is no comparable scientific discipline with a better curated data environment.
What exact raw data would you want? I am sure ChatGPT can throw together some python that will download the relevant data.
Whenever you hear a politician say "carbon neutral by 2050", interrupt them. The real goal is to avoid getting too far over 1.5 degrees warming. We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system. The year 2050 is meaningless. Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
2050 is not meaningless. Its close enough to feel like its achievable but far enough away that you can put off immediate action and still feel there is time to get it done. Reminds of the lyrics of the spirit of the west song:
It's a ways outside of town
But the distance has its uses
Close enough to make the effort
Far enough to make excuses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZXgl5KxUQY
Even if we stop all emissions right now, we'll exceed the 1.5C target, so...
A couple years back I saw articles about how we're basically less than a year from the tipping point.
Then nothing.
My guess is we passed the tipping point. It's inevitable by now.
Berkeley Earth berkeleyearth.org › home › global temperature report for 2023 Global Temperature Report for 2023 - Berkeley Earth
February 29, 2024 - 2023 was the warmest year on Earth since direct observations began, and the first year to exceed 1.5 °C above our 1850-1900 average. ...
Related: Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why (https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/12/16/...)
I’m amused that the argument is that we are in a Mr Burns position where different kinds of pollution we were emitting was balancing out and somehow fighting pollution is the reason global warming is worse? While I’m sure it has some effect, the amount of co2 we pump out every year as a species is insane. The effect of ship pollution mitigating that is marginal at best
Are you sure? There is a lot of it https://www.shipmap.org
Some systems pulling the average up and some pulling down but the average of them is net up. I wonder though if it would have been better or worse for us if the net change ended up negative (dropping temps every year) instead. Probably worse, right?
Stratospheric aerosol injection is the leading geoengineering proposal for a reason. If you have well-supported reasons to be skeptical, you should share it, but just saying "idk doesn't sound right to me" isn't convincing.
https://archive.ph/jXcuJ
Why: reduced albedo (less reflective clouds) because ships don't have so much sulphur in their fuel any more.
Is there a real practical solution to this? It seems like all proposed solutions in last 40 years are a drop in the ocean, or just a money grab scams. Only thing that really worked for such global scale is the ozone layer repair. Global warming/climate change I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
The real practical solutions are trivial, the politics are not. It's a collective action problem, where the US is one of the actors.
Yes, we got to adapt, we won't cool it down and "repair" what is broken.
However we can slow down the effects and try to stop the effects. So it's "only" 1.5° or whatever, not 3°, 5° or 10°. And if we raise average by 10° at least not by the years 2100, but 2200 to give time to adapt.
"Adapting" means resettling people, restructuring agriculture and food production, etc.
(All numbers are quite arbitrary picks, just as any goal one tried to set before)
What about poor people that live in areas in the world that will become completely uninhabitable?
Before areas become completely uninhabitable, we will see areas become increasingly stressed: heat waves, more extreme weather events, poorer crop yields, depleting aquifers.
Stress increases conflict risk. Fights for essential resources (land, water, food, shelter) will break out long before those essential resources are completely gone.
If we skip past the immense suffering and death part, we will probably end up on a planet where national borders have been redrawn by war and desperation, and a smaller population that lives in more northerly climes.
Perhaps they are part of the depopulation agenda.
It's going to happen, so that's exactly what we should be prepared for.
I'm sad all ocean megafauna are going to be extinct.
Look at the degrowth movement. There are solutions but nobody, especially the leadership, are going to like them.
Nobody has to "like" them. The centralized command and control structure is mostly in place to just force them down everyone's throats. Once we have centralized digital currency it will be a foregone conclusion
As with most difficult problems, this is a messy political problem, not a technical one. There is zero chance we avoid 1.5C gain. The best you can do is make life decisions for yourself to make your lifetime as comfortable for you as you can, assuming it will happen. I started doing that 5 years ago.
Technologically practical? Certainly. Kick renewables and electrification into high gear. Treat it like the emergency that it is.
Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.
Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.
I'm not sure what we should do, it's very hard to determine what minimizes harm and maximizes benefits at a global scale. It's certainly not as simple as extremists would like to believe. Certainly it would be much (MUCH) less risky to slow warming as much as possible and maintain constant or slowly reducing CO2 levels.
I think from the standpoint of predicting what will happen, my best guess is that people will use fossil fuels until it is economically not viable to do so. If you want hasten it at an individual level, buy solar panels and have your house disconnected from the grid until fees you pay no longer subsidize fossil fuels. Frown at people and refuse to give them positive social cues when they buy a car that isn't electric. Instead of "oh nice car" just say "it would be so cool if they had a plugin version!". Support electrification of things like heat and water heating so long as it can be powered by non-fossil sources.
In the long run I think solar power, effective battery technology, and the peaking of the global population combine to cause fossil fuel usage to reduce over the next 100 years or so until CO2 levels stabilize. Lots of large CO2 emitters are already leveling off - the output is too high to sustain but at least it's no longer increasing year over year - such as from cement production.
Honestly it's not much but that's what you can do, larger social movements and political action do not work when someone's decision is whether to spend $800 a month or $100 a month to heat their house. Anyone who says it does should buy a thermometer, but instead they will get a plane ticket to the next big city to run around in the street yelling at police (literally the only people paid to not care about your slogans) while nobody really notices.
If we are in overshoot scenario even reducing emissions may not be enough. There are warming gases currently trapped in permafrost, the natural carbon storage capacity is very dynamic, so global warming may target new (worse) equilibrium beyond what we think we can achieve in best case scenario.
Were you aware that the last time the planet was estimated to have co2 levels over 420ppm the global temperature was 10 degrees Celsius warmer overall? This is the global equilvant of being locked in a car in a sunlit parking lot.
Electric cars are the savior of the auto industry, not of the climate. It needs to become viable for most people to get around without cars at all. The intensity of their resource consumption, both for manufacture and for infrastructure, independent of their fuel source, cannot scale up for the world population.
https://archive.ph/KVTqO
A change in attitudes is not enough. Structural change is needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, the population is unable to achieve results.
The population is achieving results. Most of these results are occurring in China, which has begun an unimaginably huge deployment of renewables and nuclear. Europe is also making progress. The rest of Asia will go next, and then (as it develops industrially) so will Africa. Even parts of North America will quickly electrify: for example, Canada just agreed to reduce tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6% from 100%.
Agreed.
Our ecological goals are to make biosphere damage scarce, but our economic practices aim to make scarce things plentiful. We need something to balance out the effects of scarcity-based economics.
In the very fun board game ‘Evolution : Climate’ you “breed” animals designed to survive the climate conditions on the board. One strategy is to switch to breeding ‘carnivores’ that then can feast on the creations of other players. They downside tho is that once other players evolve their animals to have carnivore protections (fight back, scales, protective shells etc) the carnivores start to quickly starve and that player must quickly change out of this eat everything strategy back to a more sustainable strategy.
In a similar way I think what works is to push back against growth only and growth at all costs approaches and back practises and models and communities that are working in other ways.
The trouble is, when I receive my paycheck, it just comes as "dollars". I don't know whether my employer got them by providing services to communities which are working in other ways, or whether they come from more nefarious behavior--and I have no way to refuse one sort but accept the other.
The kind of community action you're describing happens, but we need to find ways to help it scale.
I can't think of a single time in history that humanity responded to a threat in a fully coordinated manner. Maybe this is the first time, but the incentive stack from the individual voter all the way up to geopolitical grand strategy argues against it.
Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.
We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.
Banning CFCs. But that didn't require giving anything up really so it was an easier sell.
Because “3rd hottest year since the 1970s” didn’t get as many clicks.
Uh, no, it’s the 3rd hottest year since 1880. You can click “Download Data” and look the table yourself.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/glob...
Funny they don’t mention it. And how many satellites were making observations in 1880?
If you initially make factually wrong comment then you should at least apologize and say that you are sorry for being wrong, not keep pushing your agenda further.
it’s right about the article.
Third hottest year on record, so far.
Uhm obviously. It would be difficult to have a year from the future on record wouldn't it?
the article is particularly dodgy. “On record” is a crime. They hint at it being satellite recordings since the 1970s.
The Economist used to be a good publication until McElthwaite left for Bloomberg about 10-12 years ago.
This isn't some big conspiracy. "On record" is since recordkeeping began in 1880.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/glob...
Ok, so why not just be specific? “On record” usually means since we started recording history , at least 5k years ago.
And have you looked into the records? satellite surface temps and high resolution recording have not been around for very long. 1880 methods were very crude and narrowly scoped.
I’d love to see the raw data.
Here's a raw table in .txt format from NASA
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/graph_data/Global_...
That’s not the raw data. The original recordings were made by merchants on parchment. They measured the volume of water in a wooden box, to set the buoyancy for their loads
That’s useless.
Hah. Shall I present it to you on a silver platter then?
If you read the NASA page, they explicitly cite GHCNd, a raw surface temperature and precipitation dataset that goes back quite far. There's many other similar datasets you can find if you're willing to look.
Check out the readme for the csv format description, and /by-year for the raw rows:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/
There are tons of raw data available freely and publicly. In my estimation, there is no comparable scientific discipline with a better curated data environment.
What exact raw data would you want? I am sure ChatGPT can throw together some python that will download the relevant data.
https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets
No raw data there just post processed data. Give me the raw data.
Petabytes of it around. Here's a small sunset: https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/
Would you like more, or do you plan on analyzing the first few petabytes first?
And what will you do with the raw data? Are you trained in processing and interpreting it? How good is your math?
You are capable of operating Google, right?