How long will it take to build all those nuclear plants? Not sure there’s enough time. It seems rapid deployment of solar where its most effective would be the quickest route to effect change.
It is encouraging that this sort of article is upvoted on HN. Probably worth coming to terms with the fact that COVID19, GPT-3 and one's favourite flavour of Lisp maybe don't matter quite as much as the fact that much of the planet will likely be uninhabitable before many on HN reach middle age.
HN is a place for tech and computer science. I think most of the HN crowd will agree that the climate change situation is more important, as is the coming US election, racism, inequality, certain geopolitical developments, and so on. But I also think that if the front page and discussion panels of HN would be dominated by these issues, then most of the current HN audience would stop coming here. I know I would.
Global warming it's, not doubt, a serious problem, but I don't think it will be a direct extinction thread to humanity.
On the other hand, global warming, probably will have second order effects that make humanity extinction more probably. For example: it would make nuclear war more probable or investment in space more difficult.
- "On-Topic: [...] anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
- "Off-topic: [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
- "If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did."
Though I appreciate that I'm not paying much attention to the last point.
There is plenty of evidence of global warming without making it seem mainly about the wildfires. Because certainly record temperatures and wildfires are evidence of global warming, but also a policy of fire supression has contributed. The fact that they didn't mention that and also didn't get into other evidence of global warming in much detail makes me feel that the article might have mainly been designed to manipulate Californians rather than make an honest and comprehensive argument for everyone.
At this point the greatest hurdle to action on climate change is Republican obstruction backed by the apathy of the conservative base. I regularly see conservatives on /r/conservative use the lack of burn control and a rise in arson cases as talking points to dismiss these wildfires entirely. If an article like this is going to present a strong argument for climate action that can win over conservatives it will need to be scientifically precise and grapple specifically with conservative talking points.
This NYT article did not even come close to meeting that bar, it confidently attributed complex multi factor phenomenon entirely to climate change without creating the groundwork of data & evidence needed to authoritatively establish those claims. When actors, politicians, and NYT journalists make dramatic claims and fail to meet that bar, then the intent backfires and only serves to entrench the common conservative belief that climate change is a product of liberal fear mongering.
For an absolute masterclass on how to properly communicate about the science of climate change, and how to slowly win over moderate conservatives, I know of no better source than Potholer54. We can only hope that one day New York Times journalists will regularly exercise the scientific and journalistic diligence of this retired youtuber.
Judging by covid I wonder if climate change will have to begin to affect every state, not just the coastal ones, before the U.S. has the political capital to take true action.
Not just the US. There's currently only a single country that seems serious about reducing climate change, which is China (based purely on what they're saying). And looking at history, we always tend to only react when things impact all of us, or at least many of us. Some examples:
- Vehicle safety
- Smoking
- Asbestos
- Lead
All of this stuff only got limited when it killed many people and even then a lot of proof was necessary to convince countries to do something.
Some pop up appears after scrolling down the first few lines of the article. Ctrl+a, ctrl+c:
---
America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.
This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action.
“I’ve been labeled an alarmist,” said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist in Los Angeles, where he and millions of others have inhaled dangerously high levels of smoke for weeks. “And I think it’s a lot harder for people to say that I’m being alarmist now.”
Last month, before the skies over San Francisco turned a surreal orange, Death Valley reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature ever measured on the planet. Dozens of people have perished from the heat in Phoenix, which in July suffered its hottest month on record, only to surpass that milestone in August.
Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign. The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?
The Times spoke with two dozen climate experts, including scientists, economists, sociologists and policymakers, and their answers were by turns alarming, cynical and hopeful.
“It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects, said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”
Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.
The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.
That price — more vicious heat waves, longer wildfire seasons, rising sea levels — is now irretrievably baked in. Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.
‘Twice as Bad’
“What we’re seeing today, this year, is just a small harbinger of what we are likely to get,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan. Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”
Earth has already warmed roughly 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century. The most optimistic proposals made by world governments to zero out emissions envision holding warming to below 2 degrees Celsius. Nations remain far from achieving those goals.
Usually, each passing year’s records are framed by the past — the hottest temperatures ever observed, the biggest wildfires in decades. However, as Cristian Proistosescu, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, noted on Twitter, it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.
“Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”
Climate change is more a slope than a cliff, experts agreed. We’re still far from any sort of “game over” moment where it’s too late to act. There remains much that can be done to limit the damage to come, to brace against the coming megafires and superstorms and save lives and hold onto a thriving civilization.
“We can certainly move in a direction that serves us a lot better,” said Stephen Pyne, an environmental historian and professor emeritus at Arizona State University. “It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”
It won’t be easy, particularly if past is prologue.
Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life: how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind. It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change.
One hope raised by some experts is that the current onslaught of fires and storms — the death, the destruction, the apocalyptic skies — might motivate people to unite behind calls for action. “Those orange skies — I mean, that was scary,” said Kris May, a climate scientist and coastal engineer in San Francisco, referring to the midday tangerine glow over Northern California this month, a consequence of smoke from wildfires.
Yet she wondered if they would have been even more powerful had they had struck places like Washington, D.C. Perhaps there, she said, “they’d bring about more change.”
When Lightning Strikes
The issue of climate change might have been back of mind for most Americans when a dramatic, rain-free lightning storm swept across Northern California in August. In a region that gets little rain in summer or early fall, the most destructive fires, like those that swept through Wine Country in 2017 and the town of Paradise in 2018, have come in October and November.
But one August night’s spectacular lightning show became the next day’s emerging disaster, as hundreds of fires were sparked, mostly in hard-to-reach terrain. Three of those blazes now rank among the four biggest California fires since record-keeping began in 1932 — part of the 3.6 million acres that have burned in the state so far.
And the traditional fire season is just beginning.
The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.
There was no place to escape. Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.
For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,” said Katharine Mach, an associate professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”
Recent events, she said, are a vivid reminder that “we’re all in this together.”
That notion raises a counterintuitive bit of hope: The more people who are affected, particularly the affluent and influential, the more seriously the issue gets addressed.
First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. That means cleaning up every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.
It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels. So far, the world has made only halting progress.
But experts also made a point they say is often underappreciated: Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.
“In terms of being reversible, I can only think of things in sci-fi films — Superman trying to spin the earth in the other direction so Lois Lane doesn’t die,” said Juan Declet-Barreto, a social scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Seriously, it is not reversible.”
Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.
If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years. Failure to do so doubles or triples that number. If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century. If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.
The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.
“In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or two-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt,” said Dr. Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. “But in a four-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”
So, even as nations cut emissions, they will need to accelerate efforts to adapt to the climate change they can no longer avoid. “We need to figure out how to put ourselves less in harm’s way,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University.
Humans are remarkably resilient. Civilizations thrive in climates as different as Saudi Arabia and Alaska.
When disaster strikes, we’ve demonstrated an ability to unite and respond. In 1970 and 1991, two major tropical cyclones hit Bangladesh, killing a half-million people. The country then built an extensive network of early-warning systems and shelters, and strengthened building codes. When another major cyclone struck in 2019, just five people died.
At this point the greatest hurdle to action on climate change is Republican obstruction backed by the apathy of the conservative base. I regularly see conservatives on /r/conservative use the lack of burn control and a rise in arson cases as talking points to dismiss these wildfires entirely. If an article like this is going to present a strong argument for climate action that can win over conservatives it will need to be scientifically precise and grapple specifically with conservative talking points.
This NYT article did not even come close to meeting that bar, it confidently attributed complex multi factor phenomenon entirely to climate change without creating the groundwork of data & evidence needed to authoritatively establish those claims. When actors, politicians, and NYT journalists make dramatic claims and fail to meet that bar, then the intent backfires and only serves to entrench the common conservative belief that climate change is a product of liberal fear mongering.
For an absolute masterclass on how to properly communicate about the science of climate change, and how to slowly win over moderate conservatives, I know of no better source than Potholer54. We can only hope that one day New York Times journalists will regularly exercise the scientific and journalistic diligence of this retired youtuber.
Just to counter some of your claims with publicly available sources:
- We do control clouds and cloud cover albedo [1].
- Human-induced changes to composition of earth's athmosphere result in about 3 Watts of additional heating per square meter of earth's surface [2]. That's almost 1% of the normal solar heating, or > 2K of (eventual) equalibrium temperature increase, so maybe we should call that "climate control" after all?
The earth is a self stabilizing system over long time frames. If you disrupt that balance in the short term expect to wait a long time for things to get better on their own.
How convenient this “climate change” thing excuses so many state government failures of land management. Climate change didnt stop anyone from clearing forests around LA or Sacramento, the Sierra Club did. Climate change didn’t cut CalFire’s budget or replace 90% of its trained firefighters with prison labor, CA’s state government did.
I see the solution to Californians fires is upvoting stories about Climate Change, no need to even read it!
Not like the old days when you had to work hard towards fixes to hard problems. Thank god for the internet.
I also see California burning "Locked in" "Climate Disruption". A cynic might say that's a little coincidental it wasn't in Africa or somewhere boring, it's always the USA.
[+] [-] swebs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabeards|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antocv|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ToJoh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tr352|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zpeti|5 years ago|reply
That is hardly an uninhabitable world. It might be a very different world, with all sorts of new issues to deal with. But not uninhabitable.
[+] [-] RobertoG|5 years ago|reply
On the other hand, global warming, probably will have second order effects that make humanity extinction more probably. For example: it would make nuclear war more probable or investment in space more difficult.
[+] [-] vaccinator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fizzizist1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway9d0291|5 years ago|reply
- "On-Topic: [...] anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
- "Off-topic: [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
- "If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did."
Though I appreciate that I'm not paying much attention to the last point.
[+] [-] adrianN|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|5 years ago|reply
There is plenty of evidence of global warming without making it seem mainly about the wildfires. Because certainly record temperatures and wildfires are evidence of global warming, but also a policy of fire supression has contributed. The fact that they didn't mention that and also didn't get into other evidence of global warming in much detail makes me feel that the article might have mainly been designed to manipulate Californians rather than make an honest and comprehensive argument for everyone.
[+] [-] simion314|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hammershaft|5 years ago|reply
This NYT article did not even come close to meeting that bar, it confidently attributed complex multi factor phenomenon entirely to climate change without creating the groundwork of data & evidence needed to authoritatively establish those claims. When actors, politicians, and NYT journalists make dramatic claims and fail to meet that bar, then the intent backfires and only serves to entrench the common conservative belief that climate change is a product of liberal fear mongering.
For an absolute masterclass on how to properly communicate about the science of climate change, and how to slowly win over moderate conservatives, I know of no better source than Potholer54. We can only hope that one day New York Times journalists will regularly exercise the scientific and journalistic diligence of this retired youtuber.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0x46-enxsA - The cause of Australia’s bushfires – what the science says
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D99qI42KGB0 - A conservative solution to global warming (Part 1)
[+] [-] jcroll|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donkeyd|5 years ago|reply
- Vehicle safety
- Smoking
- Asbestos
- Lead
All of this stuff only got limited when it killed many people and even then a lot of proof was necessary to convince countries to do something.
[+] [-] throwaway230920|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aachen|5 years ago|reply
---
America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.
This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action.
“I’ve been labeled an alarmist,” said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist in Los Angeles, where he and millions of others have inhaled dangerously high levels of smoke for weeks. “And I think it’s a lot harder for people to say that I’m being alarmist now.”
Last month, before the skies over San Francisco turned a surreal orange, Death Valley reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature ever measured on the planet. Dozens of people have perished from the heat in Phoenix, which in July suffered its hottest month on record, only to surpass that milestone in August.
Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign. The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?
The Times spoke with two dozen climate experts, including scientists, economists, sociologists and policymakers, and their answers were by turns alarming, cynical and hopeful.
“It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects, said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”
Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.
The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.
That price — more vicious heat waves, longer wildfire seasons, rising sea levels — is now irretrievably baked in. Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.
‘Twice as Bad’ “What we’re seeing today, this year, is just a small harbinger of what we are likely to get,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan. Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”
Earth has already warmed roughly 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century. The most optimistic proposals made by world governments to zero out emissions envision holding warming to below 2 degrees Celsius. Nations remain far from achieving those goals.
Usually, each passing year’s records are framed by the past — the hottest temperatures ever observed, the biggest wildfires in decades. However, as Cristian Proistosescu, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, noted on Twitter, it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.
“Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”
Climate change is more a slope than a cliff, experts agreed. We’re still far from any sort of “game over” moment where it’s too late to act. There remains much that can be done to limit the damage to come, to brace against the coming megafires and superstorms and save lives and hold onto a thriving civilization.
“We can certainly move in a direction that serves us a lot better,” said Stephen Pyne, an environmental historian and professor emeritus at Arizona State University. “It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”
It won’t be easy, particularly if past is prologue.
...
[+] [-] Aachen|5 years ago|reply
Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life: how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind. It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change.
One hope raised by some experts is that the current onslaught of fires and storms — the death, the destruction, the apocalyptic skies — might motivate people to unite behind calls for action. “Those orange skies — I mean, that was scary,” said Kris May, a climate scientist and coastal engineer in San Francisco, referring to the midday tangerine glow over Northern California this month, a consequence of smoke from wildfires.
Yet she wondered if they would have been even more powerful had they had struck places like Washington, D.C. Perhaps there, she said, “they’d bring about more change.”
When Lightning Strikes The issue of climate change might have been back of mind for most Americans when a dramatic, rain-free lightning storm swept across Northern California in August. In a region that gets little rain in summer or early fall, the most destructive fires, like those that swept through Wine Country in 2017 and the town of Paradise in 2018, have come in October and November.
But one August night’s spectacular lightning show became the next day’s emerging disaster, as hundreds of fires were sparked, mostly in hard-to-reach terrain. Three of those blazes now rank among the four biggest California fires since record-keeping began in 1932 — part of the 3.6 million acres that have burned in the state so far.
And the traditional fire season is just beginning.
The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.
There was no place to escape. Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.
For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,” said Katharine Mach, an associate professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”
Recent events, she said, are a vivid reminder that “we’re all in this together.”
That notion raises a counterintuitive bit of hope: The more people who are affected, particularly the affluent and influential, the more seriously the issue gets addressed.
First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. That means cleaning up every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.
It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels. So far, the world has made only halting progress.
But experts also made a point they say is often underappreciated: Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.
“In terms of being reversible, I can only think of things in sci-fi films — Superman trying to spin the earth in the other direction so Lois Lane doesn’t die,” said Juan Declet-Barreto, a social scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Seriously, it is not reversible.”
Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.
If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years. Failure to do so doubles or triples that number. If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century. If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.
The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.
“In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or two-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt,” said Dr. Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. “But in a four-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”
So, even as nations cut emissions, they will need to accelerate efforts to adapt to the climate change they can no longer avoid. “We need to figure out how to put ourselves less in harm’s way,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University.
Humans are remarkably resilient. Civilizations thrive in climates as different as Saudi Arabia and Alaska.
When disaster strikes, we’ve demonstrated an ability to unite and respond. In 1970 and 1991, two major tropical cyclones hit Bangladesh, killing a half-million people. The country then built an extensive network of early-warning systems and shelters, and strengthened building codes. When another major cyclone struck in 2019, just five people died.
...
[+] [-] Hammershaft|5 years ago|reply
This NYT article did not even come close to meeting that bar, it confidently attributed complex multi factor phenomenon entirely to climate change without creating the groundwork of data & evidence needed to authoritatively establish those claims. When actors, politicians, and NYT journalists make dramatic claims and fail to meet that bar, then the intent backfires and only serves to entrench the common conservative belief that climate change is a product of liberal fear mongering.
For an absolute masterclass on how to properly communicate about the science of climate change, and how to slowly win over moderate conservatives, I know of no better source than Potholer54. We can only hope that one day New York Times journalists will regularly exercise the scientific and journalistic diligence of this retired youtuber.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0x46-enxsA - The cause of Australia’s bushfires – what the science says
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D99qI42KGB0 - A conservative solution to global warming (Part 1)
[+] [-] darepublic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lightgreen|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] you_racist_fool|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throwaway230920|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chrisco255|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dvdkhlng|5 years ago|reply
- We do control clouds and cloud cover albedo [1].
- Human-induced changes to composition of earth's athmosphere result in about 3 Watts of additional heating per square meter of earth's surface [2]. That's almost 1% of the normal solar heating, or > 2K of (eventual) equalibrium temperature increase, so maybe we should call that "climate control" after all?
[1] https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ap...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing
[+] [-] esarbe|5 years ago|reply
You don't have to have full control over a complex dynamic system to wreak it.
Can you rephrase your argument?
[+] [-] imtringued|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoblePublius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|5 years ago|reply
Not like the old days when you had to work hard towards fixes to hard problems. Thank god for the internet.
I also see California burning "Locked in" "Climate Disruption". A cynic might say that's a little coincidental it wasn't in Africa or somewhere boring, it's always the USA.