And yet, we still have actual supposedly rational people being paid to say "global warming is a myth" or "we are just in another cycle of ice ages". It boggles the mind.
From this chart, I'm still amazed that the massive behavioral changes in 2020 due to pandemic had seemingly no impact on CO2. Makes me think personal transportation in the US is not worth bothering about if we care about global CO2.
The orange part in the long term chart confused me, it looks like as if that's not real. But it looks scary. Do we know what caused co2 dropping from 300ppm to 200ppm previously? There seems to be a pattern where it goes up and then back down...
I’m not an expert of anything, but I’m pretty sure you can’t pick one monitoring station on one island in the Pacific and extrapolate that to the entire planet. Especially on an island of active volcanos that spew CO2.
And not surprisingly there is a disclaimer “ The Mauna Loa data are being obtained at an altitude of 3400 m in the northern subtropics, and may not be the same as the globally averaged CO2 concentration at the surface.”
That chart switched from ice core to volcano data in 1958 which is why there is the sudden huge shift. Also, an active volcano is an interesting place to do CO2 observations given that volcanoes may well be the largest natural CO2 emitters on the planet. In any event I virtually never see any intelligent discussion of the subject, just cherry-picked data followed by disparaging anyone who might merely express doubt, let alone disagreement. That may well be effective for establishing partial consensus, but it’s not a particularly good way to increase knowledge and understanding.
Edit: Responses like child’s being a case in point. Anyone that opens with “So…” and follows up with a straw man or even a complete non sequitur such as in this case is not contributing to the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity.
Edit: As for CO2 sensors mine has been sitting in the mid 300s for the decade I’ve had it.
I am so angry about this. We had the solution for climate change. We had it for dozens of years now.
It's called nuclear. It has its downsides, but they are significantly smaller than downsides of fossil. Even with a few more meltdowns here and there it'd have done much less damage. And if we'd have used it by now we'd have learned to control it better and safer.
But we didn't use it. And there is just one guilty party for that: the green activists. They opposed Nuclear rabidly while never proposing any practical solution instead. We should talk about this. We should point our collective fingers at them.
Because today, the same luddite, anti-tech activists are busy delaying evolution and progress in other areas as well. Their dream of an egalitarian, resource-constrained, pseudo-agrarian society is a nightmare of stagnation and regress. They must be confronted and stopped. If it's not already too late...
It's a war, a culture war. A war between dreams and nightmares, a war between tradition and innovation, a war between progress and stagnation, a war for the future. And it's our only hope.
> But we didn't use it. And there is just one guilty party for that: the green activists. They opposed Nuclear rabidly while never proposing any practical solution instead.
Say what you will about the values or reasoning of "green activists," the idea that they have wielded enough influence to sway energy policy is risible. Market forces, NIMBYism and fossil fuel lobbying dollars were sufficient to spike nuclear power.
> I am so angry about this.
> It's a war, a culture war.
Greens are a right-wing bogeyman. You're meant to be angry at them.
Nuclear is dead. Back when it was new, it still had something to offer, but today it's a complete dead end, for practical and economical reasons.
It's not getting built because it's hard to make money from it anymore. If it was a solid money making proposition you'd see lots of resources being thrown into overcoming any activist resistance, and shoring up any concerns. Compare this with oil. Ecologically awful, but it makes lots and lots of money and as a result it's not having the same issues.
People will say “but what about the third world???” and feel very comfortable with their position in a socially conscious first-world country. Yeah, well, where do you think those poor people in the third world are getting the money for their evil coal power plants? Countries like Japan and Australia.[1][2]
We have to reform our investment laws and hold first-world multinationals and governments accountable. They’re the ones funding all of this trash.
From a quick google scholar search, it seems that there is a trade-off between heating/cooling costs between summer and winter:
> The results indicate that the energy savings ratios of the rooms with the sedum-tray garden roof and with the white roof were 25.0% and 20.5%, respectively, as compared with the black-roofed room, in the summer; by contrast, the energy savings ratios were −9.9% and −2.7%, respectively, in the winter.
It seems that covering the building with a green garden is better than painting the roof white, but the heating costs were higher in the winter for both designs.
I guess that changing the roof could work in climates where the winter is not too cold.
On a side note, I wonder if it would be better to work on better insulation (both roof and sidings) rather than re-roofing a house.
Note: I am not a civil engineer so I have no clue if the paper is good or not.
It has been a requirement in Montreal for all new roofing for a few years now. Either green (vegetated) or light (with a solar reflection material). So most people have white elastomer roofs installed.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I believe it’s the only Canadian city with that requirement.
It is not one country to be blamed, we all have to reduce and cut the Carbon footprints before it is too late. I am not scientist but Nuclear plants though are better option but it still poses threat to environment extraction of resources leads to threat and then we have seen fukushima nuclear disaster after Chernobyl disaster which was classified level 7 on scale [Read : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...] and disposal of radioactive materials. There is a recent article i came across which shows how testing nuclear bomb, even after decades posing a serious threat [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/nuclear-fallout-show...]
So i agree totally agree that now is the time and we have to be quick investing, installing renewable energy and encourage our coming generation to participate in it, otherwise we are screwed.
Also, i would really encourage everyone to save and conserve energy. Doing our small bit makes a big difference
Now. We need to build a collective fund to buy out all fossil fuels, and to put them in an unusable form (e.g. by mixing them with other fluids or with sand).
It's similar to what is done with biochar after it is produced: the biochar is ground to powder and mixed with compost before being sold to farms.
> Yet China and India continue to build new coal-fired power stations. And the G7 - Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US - won't give a date to phase them out.
The rich don't want to give up coal because they have gotten too comfortable with their overconsumption lifestyle, and the poor can't afford to not use coal because life in poverty is worse than life with climate change consequences.
Now is the time to invest big in renewable energy research and encourage our children to participate in it, otherwise we are screwed.
We need nuclear to bridge the gap, and actually let us phase out coal. Yet there's so much fearmongering over it. It's killed far fewer people than coal per energy unit, but people still freak out about it. I'm Canadian, and the people I know who are the most anti-nuclear are the ones from the main fossil fuel province. Even if they don't live there anymore, are against fossil fuels, and have an engineering degree, they've had the fear of nuclear ingrained into them.
The current behaviour about climate change looks a lot like the behaviour we have seen about Covid-19 a year and a half ago: the changes today are not seen everywhere nor often, as was covid in the first months, only local in China, and everyone was like "it's gonna be ok". Then everyone started to panic when it got to their door. So when heatwaves, sea risings, ... will hit hard those big actors like China, US, Brazil, ... things may change. In the meantime, why would they care, it's somewhere else, someone else's problem. Why would they break their economy?
You're definitely right about the overconsumption lifestyle. This is a quote from a Bill Bryson book I was just reading called Notes from a Big country:
What is saddest about all this is that a good part of these goals to cut greenhouse emissions could be met without any cost at all if we merely modified our extravagance. It has been estimated that the nation as a whole wastes about $300 billion of energy a year. We are not talking here about energy that could be saved by investing in new technologies. We are talking about energy that could be saved just by switching things off or turning things down.
Take hot water. Nearly every household in Europe has a timer device on its hot water system. Since people clearly don't need hot water when they are at work or fast asleep, there isn't any need to keep the tank heated, so the system shuts down. Here in America I don't know how to switch off my hot water tank. I don't know that it is possible. There is piping hot water in our house twenty-four hours a day, even when we are far away on vacation. Doesn't seem to make much sense.
According to U. S. News World Report, the United States must maintain the equivalent of five nuclear power plants just to power equipment and appliances that are on but not being used-lights burning in rooms that are unoccupied, computers left on when people go to lunch or home for the night, all those mute, wall-mounted TVs that flicker unwatched in the corners of bars.
> Now is the time to invest big in renewable energy research and encourage our children to participate in it, otherwise we are screwed.
We need to look at getting our environmental footprint under control. Renewable energy may help with that in the short term, but switching to renewables at scale will also have a significant environmental footprint. Remember, climate change is the environmental issue of our generation. Prior generations had their environmental issues (ozone hole, acid rain, deforestation). Future generations will have their environmental issues, for as long as we don't take responsibility and curb our resource use.
The US has been reducing its use of coal power pretty significantly. In 2016 Coal accounted for 30% of all power generation. This has now been reduced to 19%. It’s been replaced by renewables and natural gas plants.
It’s not rich nations that are the problem. They have and continue to drastically reduce their CO2 output (China not withstanding). The problem is poorer countries that are just now coming online with electricity. Coal is the cheapest way to do that.
The uncomfortable truth here is that if we want to stop this, we need to stop these undeveloped countries from…well…developing. Which we aren’t going to do because we aren’t monsters. So what now?
This is one of the reasons it's such a big problem that the US government is a gerontocracy. Old people don't care about climate change because it won't affect them.
To some seeing records such as these fall is heartbreaking. It’s agonizing and vexing when you wonder what can you do to help slow down climate change? The reality is we aren’t doing nearly enough to slow it down and the Earth is gradually destabilizing. We see insane cold snaps such as those that impacted Texas this winter, and at the opposite end of the spectrum heat waves unlike anything humans have ever experienced before. The worst part is these will continue to get worse year after year while greenhouse gas emissions rise. Imagine the record high temperatures falling this week and year. In 5 years or 10 years they might even distant memories as we continue to see records broken and the planet become less livable.
The worst part of this is Earth is all there is for us. There is no where else to go. We are this tightly interconnected ecosystem where all beings are completely bound to one another. Our home is surrounded by darkness for millions of miles. There is no option B. There won’t be, that’s just the way it is. Mars won’t be option B. Don’t kid yourself. If we don’t right the course on greenhouse gas emissions with urgent changes to limit emissions now, then we will have lost the habitability of Earth. I can envision us having to live inside year round without being able to go outside. Does this feel so much like a remote possibility now? It seems year over year temperate days become more elusive. Fires. Droughts. Extreme weather events. Floods.
The destruction and extinction of entire ecosystems hangs in the balance of our climate. The crazy thing is we can stop this. But only with urgent individual and society actions and sacrifices now.
Climate change is only going to make weather more erratic and our political systems won't be able to cope with the necessity of changing national borders as climate change shifts what areas are arable and inhabitable. I'm not very optimistic about the future.
In our podcast, we had professor of climate law (he is JD/PhD) talk to us about climate change. One of the irrefutable signs of climate change is that our weather is getting hotter... more record-setting years than the past. Yet, this alarming evidence doesn't concern most conservatives, who simply refuse to accept the science. Aren't they afraid of what's going to happen to us humans?
I thought we went from global warming (hotter) to climate change (not hotter everywhere).
And based on what I’ve read, we’re WAY past fixing this problem. Even if CO2 emissions went to zero tomorrow, the earth will continue to warm and make vast swathes uninhabitable.
The article points out that we cannot attribute this event to climate change. Fair point. It also points out that these heat waves are more likely given climate change. Fair point.
Unfortunately, there is no depth to the article. What would I like to see? First, describe what caused the heatwave. Second, describe how much more likely these heatwaves are with climate change. Third, describe how climate change will impact the severity of these heatwaves.
Even though climate models are different from weather models, I am guessing they provide enough information to provide estimates. These estimates would provide people with more concrete examples of what we can expect if we don't alter our behaviour.
If you go longer form, then you are basically asking for the slide show that Al Gore was presenting 20 years ago and was later turned into An Inconvenient Truth.
Get used to it. There are places in the world where it's that temperature at night plus high humidity and no one has air conditioning. Eventually people might only be able to live in Antarctica excepting of course it will have melted done to the actual ground.
I really hope it's not too late to prevent that, but if we wanted to colonize Antarctica, we'd pretty much have to get rid of the ice anyway so we can grow plants there and access the natural resources laying underground.
Otherwise, we'd be stuck eating krill and penguins, and I don't know how I'd feel about that. Vegetarians surely would not like that.
Interesting that your reading is “get used to it you lazy, weak Canadians” and not “a country that is seldom in the news except when you want to make a joke about the cold is now in the news because of the heat”. It makes for a striking argument to illustrate global warming and climate change.
Even if Antarctica becomes temperate and eventually pleasant to live on, climate change doesn't change the number of sunlight hours you get in the winter
[+] [-] walrus01|4 years ago|reply
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
long term co2: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
And yet, we still have actual supposedly rational people being paid to say "global warming is a myth" or "we are just in another cycle of ice ages". It boggles the mind.
[+] [-] gedy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egman_ekki|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|4 years ago|reply
And not surprisingly there is a disclaimer “ The Mauna Loa data are being obtained at an altitude of 3400 m in the northern subtropics, and may not be the same as the globally averaged CO2 concentration at the surface.”
[+] [-] User23|4 years ago|reply
Edit: Responses like child’s being a case in point. Anyone that opens with “So…” and follows up with a straw man or even a complete non sequitur such as in this case is not contributing to the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity.
Edit: As for CO2 sensors mine has been sitting in the mid 300s for the decade I’ve had it.
[+] [-] DrSiemer|4 years ago|reply
High grass used to be green in the summer, now most of it is dead and yellow.
Driving an entire day for vacation and finding just a few dead bugs on the flat places that used to be caked with their corpses.
Actually cold winters and fresh snow that stays on the ground. Ice skating for miles and miles during the day and huddling by the fire at night.
All gone, except for a few snippets here and there, barely enough to scratch the surface of the nostalgia. My kids will never know these things.
My dad once drove his car over the frozen river near our hometown. I've never even seen ice on it.
Hey, what can you say, we were overdue.
[+] [-] bobbean|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thehappypm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickpp|4 years ago|reply
It's called nuclear. It has its downsides, but they are significantly smaller than downsides of fossil. Even with a few more meltdowns here and there it'd have done much less damage. And if we'd have used it by now we'd have learned to control it better and safer.
But we didn't use it. And there is just one guilty party for that: the green activists. They opposed Nuclear rabidly while never proposing any practical solution instead. We should talk about this. We should point our collective fingers at them.
Because today, the same luddite, anti-tech activists are busy delaying evolution and progress in other areas as well. Their dream of an egalitarian, resource-constrained, pseudo-agrarian society is a nightmare of stagnation and regress. They must be confronted and stopped. If it's not already too late...
It's a war, a culture war. A war between dreams and nightmares, a war between tradition and innovation, a war between progress and stagnation, a war for the future. And it's our only hope.
[+] [-] justin66|4 years ago|reply
Say what you will about the values or reasoning of "green activists," the idea that they have wielded enough influence to sway energy policy is risible. Market forces, NIMBYism and fossil fuel lobbying dollars were sufficient to spike nuclear power.
> I am so angry about this.
> It's a war, a culture war.
Greens are a right-wing bogeyman. You're meant to be angry at them.
[+] [-] dale_glass|4 years ago|reply
It's not getting built because it's hard to make money from it anymore. If it was a solid money making proposition you'd see lots of resources being thrown into overcoming any activist resistance, and shoring up any concerns. Compare this with oil. Ecologically awful, but it makes lots and lots of money and as a result it's not having the same issues.
[+] [-] numair|4 years ago|reply
We have to reform our investment laws and hold first-world multinationals and governments accountable. They’re the ones funding all of this trash.
1: http://www.nocoaljapan.org
2: https://reneweconomy.com.au/palaszczuks-secret-royalties-dea...
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pacbard|4 years ago|reply
> The results indicate that the energy savings ratios of the rooms with the sedum-tray garden roof and with the white roof were 25.0% and 20.5%, respectively, as compared with the black-roofed room, in the summer; by contrast, the energy savings ratios were −9.9% and −2.7%, respectively, in the winter.
It seems that covering the building with a green garden is better than painting the roof white, but the heating costs were higher in the winter for both designs.
I guess that changing the roof could work in climates where the winter is not too cold.
On a side note, I wonder if it would be better to work on better insulation (both roof and sidings) rather than re-roofing a house.
Note: I am not a civil engineer so I have no clue if the paper is good or not.
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2017.09.091
[+] [-] arboghast|4 years ago|reply
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I believe it’s the only Canadian city with that requirement.
[+] [-] BelenusMordred|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b112|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mabub24|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christophilus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cglace|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matwood|4 years ago|reply
Understanding how climate change impacts weather is still very complex.
[+] [-] b112|4 years ago|reply
From article:
That was set in two towns in Saskatchewan - Yellow Grass and Midale - back in July 1937 at a balmy 45C (113F)
Weather moves in cycles longer than human lives. You cannot rely upon personal experience, to know of local weather is truely unusual.
We are like mayflies, not realizing that winter ever exists, or even times longer than a day.
[+] [-] sbehlasp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] henearkr|4 years ago|reply
It's similar to what is done with biochar after it is produced: the biochar is ground to powder and mixed with compost before being sold to farms.
[+] [-] rocknor|4 years ago|reply
The rich don't want to give up coal because they have gotten too comfortable with their overconsumption lifestyle, and the poor can't afford to not use coal because life in poverty is worse than life with climate change consequences.
Now is the time to invest big in renewable energy research and encourage our children to participate in it, otherwise we are screwed.
[+] [-] 0xTJ|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregoriol|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superasn|4 years ago|reply
What is saddest about all this is that a good part of these goals to cut greenhouse emissions could be met without any cost at all if we merely modified our extravagance. It has been estimated that the nation as a whole wastes about $300 billion of energy a year. We are not talking here about energy that could be saved by investing in new technologies. We are talking about energy that could be saved just by switching things off or turning things down.
Take hot water. Nearly every household in Europe has a timer device on its hot water system. Since people clearly don't need hot water when they are at work or fast asleep, there isn't any need to keep the tank heated, so the system shuts down. Here in America I don't know how to switch off my hot water tank. I don't know that it is possible. There is piping hot water in our house twenty-four hours a day, even when we are far away on vacation. Doesn't seem to make much sense.
According to U. S. News World Report, the United States must maintain the equivalent of five nuclear power plants just to power equipment and appliances that are on but not being used-lights burning in rooms that are unoccupied, computers left on when people go to lunch or home for the night, all those mute, wall-mounted TVs that flicker unwatched in the corners of bars.
[+] [-] 88840-8855|4 years ago|reply
>life in poverty is worse than life with climate change consequences
Nevertheless, let us not ignore that China is doing significant steps already. It is not enough, but it is a trend into the right direction:
- world-leading production of renewable energy with twice the output from solar, wind and water compared to the number 2, the US
- renewable sector is growing significantly faster than the fossil and nuclear sector combined
- largest manufacturer of solar/photovoltaic tech
- almost 50% of global investments into renewables are made in China
- largest electric-car market in the world
- Green Wall of China has created 4.000.000.000 tons of sustainable biomass since 2003 (increased tree cover rate in China by 15%)
Those are significant steps and must be further followed and even accelerated.
[+] [-] II2II|4 years ago|reply
We need to look at getting our environmental footprint under control. Renewable energy may help with that in the short term, but switching to renewables at scale will also have a significant environmental footprint. Remember, climate change is the environmental issue of our generation. Prior generations had their environmental issues (ozone hole, acid rain, deforestation). Future generations will have their environmental issues, for as long as we don't take responsibility and curb our resource use.
[+] [-] wolfretcrap|4 years ago|reply
Otherwise north India has severe heatwaves
[+] [-] vondur|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] listless|4 years ago|reply
The uncomfortable truth here is that if we want to stop this, we need to stop these undeveloped countries from…well…developing. Which we aren’t going to do because we aren’t monsters. So what now?
[+] [-] Leader2light|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nxm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minikites|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blondie9x|4 years ago|reply
The worst part of this is Earth is all there is for us. There is no where else to go. We are this tightly interconnected ecosystem where all beings are completely bound to one another. Our home is surrounded by darkness for millions of miles. There is no option B. There won’t be, that’s just the way it is. Mars won’t be option B. Don’t kid yourself. If we don’t right the course on greenhouse gas emissions with urgent changes to limit emissions now, then we will have lost the habitability of Earth. I can envision us having to live inside year round without being able to go outside. Does this feel so much like a remote possibility now? It seems year over year temperate days become more elusive. Fires. Droughts. Extreme weather events. Floods.
The destruction and extinction of entire ecosystems hangs in the balance of our climate. The crazy thing is we can stop this. But only with urgent individual and society actions and sacrifices now.
[+] [-] minikites|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onethought|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adelHBN|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|4 years ago|reply
And based on what I’ve read, we’re WAY past fixing this problem. Even if CO2 emissions went to zero tomorrow, the earth will continue to warm and make vast swathes uninhabitable.
[+] [-] moneywoes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] II2II|4 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, there is no depth to the article. What would I like to see? First, describe what caused the heatwave. Second, describe how much more likely these heatwaves are with climate change. Third, describe how climate change will impact the severity of these heatwaves.
Even though climate models are different from weather models, I am guessing they provide enough information to provide estimates. These estimates would provide people with more concrete examples of what we can expect if we don't alter our behaviour.
[+] [-] criddell|4 years ago|reply
If you go longer form, then you are basically asking for the slide show that Al Gore was presenting 20 years ago and was later turned into An Inconvenient Truth.
[+] [-] coldcode|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krylon|4 years ago|reply
Otherwise, we'd be stuck eating krill and penguins, and I don't know how I'd feel about that. Vegetarians surely would not like that.
[+] [-] loloquwowndueo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ithkuil|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peteretep|4 years ago|reply