Even if we get to catastrophic 5 or 8 or 10 degree warming, it won’t wipe us out completely and we will still have to find a way to pay back our pollution debt.
Why is this supposed to be encouraging? Because every little bit of pollution avoided today is a little bit less pollution to clean up in the future.
Every bit does count.
Even if avoiding 2.5 degree warming seems impossible, let’s at least make it 3 instead of 5 or 8 or 10.
I use “pollution” to make it clear that this is not just about CO2 but also about every other type of trash that we dump onto this planet.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that Stratospheric aerosol injection "is the most-researched SRM method, with high agreement that it could limit warming to below 1.5°C."
> Even if we get to catastrophic 5 or 8 or 10 degree warming, it won’t wipe us out completely and we will still have to find a way to pay back our pollution debt.
8 or 10 degree warming!? It wouldn't "wipe us out completely", but mostly, and certainly civilization would not survive, so how are we going to pay back the pollution debt?
i know this is cynical but it is also the truth. if i die or my life is ruined then you can all go and fuck yourself. i don't give a flying shit about humanity surviving me.
We need to make the Government care first... planned obsolescence can easily be avoided. But of course they don't want to fix that because it hurts the economy in the short term.
Mobile phone culture is really disturbing in this regard. The amount of annual-upgrade-onto-the-next shit with devices that can last years and years. It’s not the problem in itself, but it highlights an aspect of consumer psychology that really damages the planet and probably our mental health too.
We tend to low-ball the predictions from the models for political reasons and not to sound too alarmist, but we get more and more data showing that the numbers we use are severely underestimated. 1.5°C was always a pipe dream, but it looks like even 2°C or 2.5°C are all but inevitable, just because of the stuff that’s already in the atmosphere.
This is tangential, but I don't like this word "heating" -- and not for the political reasons you think.
I know why we use it. It sounds more severe than "warming", and more active. That's not my problem with it.
My problem is that it misleads about the physical mechanism. Temperatures don't go up because of additional heat inputs to the system. They go up because of the greenhouse effect.
A better description would be something that evokes, somehow, that you are wrapping something in insulating blankets until it overheats and dies. It's less "heating", more "smothering".
"Heating" conjures this mental image of the Earth in a pot on the stove. That's dramatic but not how it works. It's more like the Earth is your beloved dog, who you've just locked in the car with the windows up on a hot day.
Additionally, a phrase like "2.7C degrees of heating" has a little of the problem that popular science-speak often does, where it insists on saying, say, "power", where "force" would have been a more accurate word, and no less communicative to those who don't know any physics anyway. Because "heat" is measured in units of energy, while "2.7C" is in units of temperature. Granted, if you multiply this temperature delta by the thermal capacity of the Earth, you do get a change to thermal energy. But again, what's misleading is the idea that humans are directly injecting that energy. They -- we -- aren't. We're shifting an equilibrium, in an energy flow -- from the Sun to the Earth, and radiated from the Earth to space.
A good thing about the focus on temperature, though, is that that's more directly relevant to the environmental issues. The thermal energy of the Earth is not really relevant. The temperature is.
Anyway, I wish that our efforts at communicating urgency could also embed some communication of the underlying scientific concepts, the causal mechanisms.
I think we are beyond semantics. Calling it smothering, greenhouse, warming, climate change, etc. doesn't make a difference. The only people who still want to believe that it isn't happening won't be convinced by names.
They'll be convinced only when it (drought, desertification, flooding, hunger, etc.) affects their own neighborhood.
I think you're making a pedantic mountain out of a molehill.
For Mr. and Ms. Average Person, what do they gain in understanding by you saying "smothering" or "warming" over "heating"? Do you think that will lead to increased activism? More efficient activism? Or is it solely to satiate the scientists who already understand the difference of heating vs. warming?
While I think precision in speech is a good thing, there is a point where it really just doesn't matter anymore - because the end result remains exactly as intended.
When I'm explaining security concepts in a security awareness presentation, for example, I sometimes make a non-perfect analogy to get my point across. Anyone who understands why the analogy isn't perfect probably doesn't need the talk. Anyone who doesn't understand why the analogy isn't perfect probably doesn't care about the nuance. The average person doesn't care if it's a gigabit or a gigabyte of data stolen, they just care about the end result - data was stolen. The same applies here.
I personally don't care whether the earth is technically "heating" or "warming" - I only care about the end result and what I can do to help.
My issue is that the problem is more about "energy" than heat. While the average over time will be a gradual warming, the impacts locally will be much different on the time scales normal people care about. We should be talking about weather extremes, not "heat." When we say the earth is going to get warmer, people think "fine, Canada is kind of nice anyways." In reality, we'll also see extreme blizzards, floods/rain, tornados, insect swarms, mass deaths of flora/fauna, and more. Pretty much all natural phenomena will be amplified both in terms of frequency as well as severity. And we may have many years before that 2.whatever C warming trend is realized, extreme weather events are increasing now. My home was almost leveled this year by an F4/5 tornado this year in an area where tornados are typical but never much more than an F2.
One pet peeve of mine with climate change articles is that in the US Celsius is often used.
A&W tried introducing a 1/3 lb burger, and it failed horribly because the average consumer couldn't understand that 1/3 is greater than 1/4.
Now with climate change, that same person is going to shrug off 2.7C because "2.7 isn't much". Re-frame that as 5-10F, and that person is suddenly going to be much more interested, because a 5-10F increase in summer temperatures anywhere in the US is meaningful.
> the average consumer couldn't understand that 1/3 is greater than 1/4.
The average reader of France 24 understands Celsius and has no clue what a Fahrenheit is. No one uses Fahrenheit apart from the US. It's like imperial units, totally irrelevant if you are addressing a global audience.
I don't think the global mean temperature change is going to come off as particularly impactful either way. 5-10°F increase is notable, but doesn't sound particularly scary or urgent. It's the catastrophic consequences that are the scary part.
Is fatalism (in an all too unfortunately literal sense) all we have left?
When an official says "unless governments credibly commit to immediate, massive decreases in emissions, we're screwed," it just amounts to "we're screwed."
Encouraging and striving for some radical new technological innovation is all we can do.
Keep in mind, it's not pass/fail. 2.7 is different from 2.8 is different from 2.9, etc. They're all bad, sure, even terrible, but limiting it _at all_ could make the difference for literal millions of people.
Fatalism leads to giving up, which leads to us hitting all those higher numbers, which leads to an unnecessary amount of extra suffering.
The problem lies much more in the realm of politics, rather than technology and science. We opted to wage pointless wars instead of modernizing the energy mix.
There are also instances when politicians do want to change something, but their cluelessness shows - solar freakin' roadways anyone?
>Is fatalism (in an all too unfortunately literal sense) all we have left?
If you wish to keep 'the world as we know it'? Yes, that ship has sailed. What we're fighting for now is the degree to which the world we know will be destroyed.
No. We just cannot sustain panic continuously. I am confident that eventually a mix of decarbonization, mitigation of climate change effects, and some sort of geoengineering will avoid any apocalypse.
I think the wording gives it away. "Unless government credibly commit to..." Not "unless governments do". Just if they "credibly commit to doing". They still aren't thinking in terms of actually doing things, just in terms of committing to do them.
Talk != action, not even if the talk is "credible". You think this is an existential problem? Great. Start doing something. Don't tell me what you're going to do, do it.
I feel like we could go a long way toward this through individual choice. You can just y'know, refuse to help ruining our planet. I bet for most people on this forum that's absolutely a practical choice but the money is too good to worry about that.
I don't think that's the best solution, but at least it's one I can personally enact, and if deontologically expanded it does lead to solving the problem. Don't play negative or zero sum games and ostracize those that do.
Every major world government, even the supposedly good/professional ones, lied about various things both big and small, and engaged in different types of ass-preserving coverups.
> With only 1.1C of warming so far, the world has seen a torrent of deadly weather disasters intensified by climate change in recent months, from asphalt-melting heatwaves to flash floods and untameable wildfires.
I'm really bothered by the recent trend in science reporting to take a carte blanche approach to attributing every natural disaster to climate change. Yes, it's indisputable that climate change is absolutely changing our weather patterns, and it's very probably causing and/or strengthening the consequences of disasters happening now, but it's just plain bad science reporting to lump up all recent natural disasters and go "see! Climate change!". And yes, I'm aware that this might be the only way to catch people's attention to the current crisis, but that doesn't excuse the disservice to bone fide science reporting.
So, how would you report it? You can't point at two hurricanes and say "this one was caused by climate change and this one wasn't", you can only say, statistically, we should be seeing one hurricane instead of two.
The lack of healthy skepticism in these comments is somewhat concerning. I guess most here haven’t lived through the last 50+ years of climate and population growth catastrophic warnings. If you are really concerned about CO2 pollution, talk to China, Brazil, and Africa. The States is a net CO2 sink. Or you could simply quit listening to politicians and bureaucrats, who at the end of the day simply want power, control, and your money.
Devil's advocate here. The article mentions imminent "massive loss of lives and livelihoods". Wouldn't that lower emissions? ie, we aren't likely to need to keep smog factories pumping out pollution 24/7 when the population is slashed in half. I realize that's not an ideal scenario, but it's a fail-safe of sorts.
IMO this is the buried lede of the whole topic, any solution we come up with is going to look like a "controlled crash" in the sense that nature will force us to crash at some point
I was helping prep my high school kid for his evolution quiz. One of the concepts was "punctured equilibrium". To get his attention, and make it relevant I used:
"global warming is puncturing the equilibrium today. What do you think that looks like?"
who here is working on planning socio-economic scenarios and responses to the plausible crisis ? (migrants, anger, poverty)
I'm a bit stumped to see nobody trying to model social dynamics in potentially catastrophic contexts. Sure, some people are doing the usual "It's gonna be war and crime and bla" but I'm talking about almost quantitative modeling. How to see society as chemical or proteic reaction bath and try to see how we can dope the material here and there to smoothen the future problems.
35%+ of the US population won't even get vaccinated to save their own lives. The majority of people aren't willing to sacrifice their own standard of living at all to help. 97.8% of cars sold in the US are gasoline-powered even though people could afford to buy EVs. Nearly every house built today is not at passivhaus standard, and probably not a single apartment building.
And even if the US completely changed... there's oil and coal distributed fairly evenly across the whole world. Even if the USA used all its power, it couldn't stop the rest of the world from exploiting every last drop of oil and last chunk of coal. Tell me where I'm wrong, what could any group do to stop every drop of oil in the middle east and Nigeria from being pulled out?
[+] [-] jl6|4 years ago|reply
Even if we get to catastrophic 5 or 8 or 10 degree warming, it won’t wipe us out completely and we will still have to find a way to pay back our pollution debt.
Why is this supposed to be encouraging? Because every little bit of pollution avoided today is a little bit less pollution to clean up in the future.
Every bit does count.
Even if avoiding 2.5 degree warming seems impossible, let’s at least make it 3 instead of 5 or 8 or 10.
I use “pollution” to make it clear that this is not just about CO2 but also about every other type of trash that we dump onto this planet.
[+] [-] arcanon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|4 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering
[+] [-] BLanen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomSwirly|4 years ago|reply
8 or 10 degree warming!? It wouldn't "wipe us out completely", but mostly, and certainly civilization would not survive, so how are we going to pay back the pollution debt?
[+] [-] t8e56vd4ih|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rastafang|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slumpt_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kergonath|4 years ago|reply
Yeah, there is little to be optimistic about.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FooBarBizBazz|4 years ago|reply
I know why we use it. It sounds more severe than "warming", and more active. That's not my problem with it.
My problem is that it misleads about the physical mechanism. Temperatures don't go up because of additional heat inputs to the system. They go up because of the greenhouse effect.
A better description would be something that evokes, somehow, that you are wrapping something in insulating blankets until it overheats and dies. It's less "heating", more "smothering".
"Heating" conjures this mental image of the Earth in a pot on the stove. That's dramatic but not how it works. It's more like the Earth is your beloved dog, who you've just locked in the car with the windows up on a hot day.
Additionally, a phrase like "2.7C degrees of heating" has a little of the problem that popular science-speak often does, where it insists on saying, say, "power", where "force" would have been a more accurate word, and no less communicative to those who don't know any physics anyway. Because "heat" is measured in units of energy, while "2.7C" is in units of temperature. Granted, if you multiply this temperature delta by the thermal capacity of the Earth, you do get a change to thermal energy. But again, what's misleading is the idea that humans are directly injecting that energy. They -- we -- aren't. We're shifting an equilibrium, in an energy flow -- from the Sun to the Earth, and radiated from the Earth to space.
A good thing about the focus on temperature, though, is that that's more directly relevant to the environmental issues. The thermal energy of the Earth is not really relevant. The temperature is.
Anyway, I wish that our efforts at communicating urgency could also embed some communication of the underlying scientific concepts, the causal mechanisms.
Maybe "smothering" does it.
[+] [-] ASalazarMX|4 years ago|reply
They'll be convinced only when it (drought, desertification, flooding, hunger, etc.) affects their own neighborhood.
[+] [-] ziddoap|4 years ago|reply
For Mr. and Ms. Average Person, what do they gain in understanding by you saying "smothering" or "warming" over "heating"? Do you think that will lead to increased activism? More efficient activism? Or is it solely to satiate the scientists who already understand the difference of heating vs. warming?
While I think precision in speech is a good thing, there is a point where it really just doesn't matter anymore - because the end result remains exactly as intended.
When I'm explaining security concepts in a security awareness presentation, for example, I sometimes make a non-perfect analogy to get my point across. Anyone who understands why the analogy isn't perfect probably doesn't need the talk. Anyone who doesn't understand why the analogy isn't perfect probably doesn't care about the nuance. The average person doesn't care if it's a gigabit or a gigabyte of data stolen, they just care about the end result - data was stolen. The same applies here.
I personally don't care whether the earth is technically "heating" or "warming" - I only care about the end result and what I can do to help.
[+] [-] deelowe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hesdeadjim|4 years ago|reply
A&W tried introducing a 1/3 lb burger, and it failed horribly because the average consumer couldn't understand that 1/3 is greater than 1/4.
Now with climate change, that same person is going to shrug off 2.7C because "2.7 isn't much". Re-frame that as 5-10F, and that person is suddenly going to be much more interested, because a 5-10F increase in summer temperatures anywhere in the US is meaningful.
[+] [-] sylvainr65|4 years ago|reply
Why then they didn't come up with a 1/5 lb burger?
[+] [-] WastingMyTime89|4 years ago|reply
The average reader of France 24 understands Celsius and has no clue what a Fahrenheit is. No one uses Fahrenheit apart from the US. It's like imperial units, totally irrelevant if you are addressing a global audience.
[+] [-] anamexis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josephcsible|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarmig|4 years ago|reply
When an official says "unless governments credibly commit to immediate, massive decreases in emissions, we're screwed," it just amounts to "we're screwed."
Encouraging and striving for some radical new technological innovation is all we can do.
[+] [-] DanHulton|4 years ago|reply
Fatalism leads to giving up, which leads to us hitting all those higher numbers, which leads to an unnecessary amount of extra suffering.
[+] [-] RicoElectrico|4 years ago|reply
There are also instances when politicians do want to change something, but their cluelessness shows - solar freakin' roadways anyone?
[+] [-] wing-_-nuts|4 years ago|reply
If you wish to keep 'the world as we know it'? Yes, that ship has sailed. What we're fighting for now is the degree to which the world we know will be destroyed.
[+] [-] RandomLensman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|4 years ago|reply
Talk != action, not even if the talk is "credible". You think this is an existential problem? Great. Start doing something. Don't tell me what you're going to do, do it.
[+] [-] errantspark|4 years ago|reply
I don't think that's the best solution, but at least it's one I can personally enact, and if deontologically expanded it does lead to solving the problem. Don't play negative or zero sum games and ostracize those that do.
[+] [-] the-dude|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api_or_ipa|4 years ago|reply
> With only 1.1C of warming so far, the world has seen a torrent of deadly weather disasters intensified by climate change in recent months, from asphalt-melting heatwaves to flash floods and untameable wildfires.
I'm really bothered by the recent trend in science reporting to take a carte blanche approach to attributing every natural disaster to climate change. Yes, it's indisputable that climate change is absolutely changing our weather patterns, and it's very probably causing and/or strengthening the consequences of disasters happening now, but it's just plain bad science reporting to lump up all recent natural disasters and go "see! Climate change!". And yes, I'm aware that this might be the only way to catch people's attention to the current crisis, but that doesn't excuse the disservice to bone fide science reporting.
/rant.
[+] [-] enkid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] effingwewt|4 years ago|reply
We are and have always been the problem. I feel like we legitimately are parasites, we even ravage/consume ourselves.
Shit like this makes me hope we never get off this planet to just infect more planets and systems.
[+] [-] Blackstrat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clipradiowallet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disambiguation|4 years ago|reply
IMO this is the buried lede of the whole topic, any solution we come up with is going to look like a "controlled crash" in the sense that nature will force us to crash at some point
[+] [-] atotic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] titzer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dr_dshiv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|4 years ago|reply
I'm a bit stumped to see nobody trying to model social dynamics in potentially catastrophic contexts. Sure, some people are doing the usual "It's gonna be war and crime and bla" but I'm talking about almost quantitative modeling. How to see society as chemical or proteic reaction bath and try to see how we can dope the material here and there to smoothen the future problems.
[+] [-] syntaxstic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coryrc|4 years ago|reply
And even if the US completely changed... there's oil and coal distributed fairly evenly across the whole world. Even if the USA used all its power, it couldn't stop the rest of the world from exploiting every last drop of oil and last chunk of coal. Tell me where I'm wrong, what could any group do to stop every drop of oil in the middle east and Nigeria from being pulled out?
[+] [-] lacrosse_tannin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Proven|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] the_third_wave|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] scarmig|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newaccount2021|4 years ago|reply
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