The focus in climate change discourse seems to be all about prevention when we've clearly been headed on course for worst case scenario several degree rise the whole time. Emissions have not even peaked yet with China, India and the rest of the third world essentially outdoing all the progress the first world has made over the past decades. Not to mention the coming surge in population of Africa in the coming decades who will all want material lifestyles for themselves.
In Germany, the richest 10% of the population is producing 50% of the CO2.
At the world level, the richest 1% is producing double of the poorest 50%.
We should not talk about the increase coming from other countries, we should already start with us reducing our impact and adapt. The problem is that we all have/find good excuses not to change our behavior.
>> We should not talk about the increase coming from other countries, we should already start with us reducing our impact and adapt.
[China and India CO2 impact is less than their population's share]
> because vast swaths of these countries live in extreme poverty, not because of environmental consciousness.
This injects a judgement that I think is irrelevant. The impact on the environment does not depend on the REASON. It depends only on the ACTION.
Frankly, with that lead in, I am surprised the above poster did not go on to say: "We should focus on preparing to survive a massive climate change." That was certainly my take-away from the argument.
Also china produces goods for consumption of west so there is a majority of emissions just exported to china but really should be in developed nation's bucket.
> - Sudden thawing of permafrost in the Northern regions
It seems like I was reading a lot of articles about the Permafrost in Siberia hitting temperature records as well as suffering from massive wildfires. Now it seems like there is less news from that region.
Now it seems like there is less news from that region.
The news industry is a business like any other. Journalists don't stop reporting on things when the things stop happening; they stop reporting when they feel the reports aren't driving engagement with the audience, eg revenue.
There is only a loose correlation between what's happening in the world and what's being reported in newspapers and journals when it comes to long term trends.
> ournalists don't stop reporting on things when the things stop happening; they stop reporting when they feel the reports aren't driving engagement with the audience, eg revenue.
Also when something is getting worse at the same rate it was getting worse previously, engagement drops in favour of stories where change is new or accelerating: over the last while has been Covid then Ukraine then inflation all blowing up surprisingly and rapidly while the permafrost situation is quietly getting worse as expected.
If you are in the UK right now you'd be forgiven for asking “whatever happened to news about inflation and Ukraine” because they fell off the news cycle for a while unless you took efforts to look beyond the daily headlines & front-pages, as they were progressing just as bad as before but something else (the health of ol' Liz and related constitutional matters) had a sudden bump in its rate of change. Even the 9/11 anniversary didn't get a look-in.
Ukraine is creeping back into the news cycle, as monarch related matters are settling into their final pattern (everyone who needs/wants to know has a clue how the next week or few are going to pan out in that regard) but there has been a sudden change in the Ukraine/Russia situation in the form of the recent surprise counter offensive (surprise both in that such an effort was not sign-posted, for the obvious reason that being unexpected was part of the plan, and in how effectively it has worked).
They report only what is novel and salient for the target audience. If something is on-going but not novel it won’t be reported on until something novel happens (e.g. climate change only gets reported on when there’s some kind of study, report, natural disaster or climate conference), and they will only report what they consider salient facts (e.g. general news will not report on the actual science, because that’s too technical and boring, only on controversy around the science or controversial conclusions drawn from the science).
What is novel and salient is only a tiny fraction of what is relevant to come to an informed opinion. That’s why news is set up for failure if its role is seen as informing the public. I see more potential for documentaries when it comes to informing the public, but the news controversies around past climate documentaries have made the category somewhat burnt.
There is a correlation and in this case it is more or less the entire story.
>7 times less area was affected by forest fires in the region this year compared to 2021. This is inside scoop but you can easily verify it by checking particulates/CO data using nullschool's earth. Last year smoke covered area the size of Oregon or something and persisted for weeks.
"There had been very few fires" is just not catchy news, who would like or comment?
Permafrost thawing is a separate issue but may be a bit harder to obtain realtime data until buildings crumble
The weather across the globe will get more chaotic. All across the globe we will start seeing weird weather, including both unusually cold seasons and unusually hot and wetter and drier years. This might seem counter intuitive but if you imagine a pot very slowly heating up, you'd get different regions of cold and hot until the pot reaches equalibrium.
Will there be a particular region where the higher average warming is concentrated? Or will all regions tend to be, on average, warmer (ignoring the higher variation)?
Landmass especially. The increase in average temperature will concentrate over landmasses.
Depending on how fast the artic ice cap melt, we could see the average temperature over a year in western europe drop, while increasing over the summer months.
But climate is weird, that's why the less we perturb it, the better we get.
I'm not an expert, i merely did a lot of research during Covid (nothing better to do tbh), and since i've never asked myself the question, i never researched islands specifically.
I think you might be able to find NASA maps and compare the average temperature in 1991 and today, you'll have your response.
It is not fear mongering. The costs of climate change are going to run into the trillions and the people most affected will be the poor and the disadvantaged.
And any positives e.g. better shipping from APAC to Europe (relatively useless) pale in comparison to the negatives e.g. all of the Pacific islands disappearing.
> And any positives e.g. better shipping from APAC to Europe (relatively useless)
Shipping volumes say otherwise!
> pale in comparison to the negatives e.g. all of the Pacific islands disappearing.
That's a postulate that remains to be proven. If we are talking about usable landmasses, a few islands disappearing is dwarfed by the unthawing of Siberia + if you prefer islands, the new islands that will be made from Antarctica.
There will be costs, and there will be gains.
> the people most affected will be the poor and the disadvantaged.
The opportunity of a mass migration from poor and mismanaged countries to better run countries or mostly empty places is a once-in-a-millenium event - last seen with Christopher Columbus in America.
Wouldn't crossing these tipping points also accelerate toward more warming? Like the thawing of permafrost in the northern regions would possibly release a huge amount of methane, creating a greater greenhouse gas effect.
I guess "moderately" because it's a climate change outcome that's actually debated by climate scientists, and not regarded as particular likely to happen.
If it does happen it shifts man-made climate change from an unprecedented humanitarian disaster to a possible global extinction event. The last time it happened it may have wiped out 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates.
But, there are so many terrible consequences of climate change that are near certainties for us to waste valuable focus and mental energy being terrified of the merely hypothetical.
The big problem with Global warming is that it's a feedback loop. The main cause of warming is warming, despite the massive human CO2 production. Even stopping human CO2 production all together would slow global warming, bringing it back to 2 degrees over 1000 years or so, instead of 100. Even that would be a lot faster than the natural rate. Earth heats up, then you get an ice age, then it heats up again, that's the natural cycle.
The point of climate policy is not to stop global warming, in the sense of cooling the planet in an absolute sense. It's to slow it down, cooling it in a relative sense.
There's an interesting graphic in this Guardian story a few days ago showing graphically how dangerously close we are to a lot of these tipping points.
("The risk of climate tipping points is rising rapidly as the world heats up"/
"Estimated range of global heating needed to pass tipping point temperature").
The IPCC et al was intentionally conservative in its predictions because even the conservative estimates suggested it made economic sense to fix the problem.
Like getting shot is bad. If a scientific and economic consensus tells you to put on a Kevlar vest, you do it.
They shouldn't really need to detail all the other things that could go wrong if you get shot, because the conversation should already be over and you should have the vest on, which means even if you do get shot things will probably go better for you and you now have the mental energy to work towards not getting shot.
I think you are mis-reading your parent comment. They are saying we should be humble when it comes to predicting all the things that could happen when manipulating such a complex system as the climate. If our best science is saying there are at least 6 different ways in which we are already causing harm, then it stands to reason there are probably more dangers than that that our science can't yet predict. I think they are saying, let's always assume there are details that we won't understand and act on that basis, i.e. put on the kevlar vest and work towards removing carbon gases from the atmosphere.
I was agreeing with them, just with some more details of why we (sensibly) haven't spent even more effort on cataloging all the terrible impacts of climate change in extreme detail. What we know is bad and convincingly supported enough and bad political actors will seize on anything they can portray as an overreaction.
Because there's no objective, empirically based criteria for a tipping point; all such things are hypotheses which are falsified by the passage of time. I can think of a few in the past 40 years.
That's not to say there aren't 'tipping points' (you certainly can't prove they don't exist.)
They are just making them up. At the end of the day there are way to many variables to accurately predict the climate. It's been a lot hotter in the past and a lot colder. I see no reason for the panic.
Some of this is extremely basic physics. Like, white ice reflects solar energy and dark ocean absorbs it. If you don't have faith in science to get that right, you really shouldn't use any tech at all for fear it's too complex for humans to understand.
Science can't get a weather forecast accurate for more than a few days.
What chance have they got about being right about the climate hysteria on a longer term?
Why will a longer term prediction be be more accurate? They have had less chances to go back and amend the models than the short term forecasters.
> If you don't have faith in science to get that right
That's the fundamental point, it's a faith based argument. I want some real world evidence that these absurd predictions are likely to be accurate. That won't happen as it's all based on "models" that have no history of being accurate.
The climate change predictions dating back to the 70s have been remarkably accurate. This has been studied - you are not the first person to ask how accurate these models are.
Just to add that the majority of geoengineering methods currently proposed - particularly those that reduce absorbed solar radiation (such as stratospheric sulfate and marine cloud brightening) come with some significant side-effects.
Many proposed geoeningeering methods don't treat the problem but just mask the symptoms. For starters, CO2 heats the surface and the atmosphere, but solar radiation primarily heats the surface.
This means you cannot use a reduction in incoming sunlight to fully offset CO2 warming - if you get the surface temperature correct, the atmosphere is still warmer and so you get less rain. For many regions, a reduction on rain might be more important - we wouldn't want to end up killing the Amazon rainforest by accident!
> I’m imagining sulphates being something to do with it
In a roundabout way they do. Back in the 70s-90s, sulphates were being pumped into the atmosphere in huge amounts due to fossil fuel combustion and other industrial processes. This was reacting with atmospheric water to produce hydrogen sulphate, otherwise known as sulphuric acid, which caused acid rain.
The fix was not some grand geoengineering scheme, rather it was to implement a cap and trade system, much like what has been proposed for CO2. The result is that SOx emissions dropped precipitously, thus acid rain in the United States is a thing of the past.
That's the real solution. To limit CO2 emissions. We know this, the world knows this, the people making money off the fossil fuel industry know this, the politicians they own know this. Yet here we are talking about spraying more shit into the air we breath because that's the easiest option that doesn't disrupt profit or inconvenience anyone.
Except of course that things are becoming ever more problematic in the natural cycle as well. The water supply in the Indus Valley, for example, does not support even 10% of the people living there. This issue will turn critical (ironically it will turn critical faster if global warming stops) in the next 100 years, maybe faster. They'll run out of water to grow crops, and they're sure as hell not going to be importing much food.
Oh and if you're hoping for a political solution. 95% or so of Bangladesh lies in the Indus valley. You'll have to explain to 150 million people, first, that they'll all have to move and that they'll no longer have any political power at all, anywhere. The country will, essentially, die. Oh and the only places they can move are India, hostile to muslims and muslim immigration, and perhaps Myanmar, who let armies massacring and raping muslims run wild for a few years ...
Good luck convincing them not having global warming is a good idea. Once the issue moves toward criticality, Good luck convincing them not to start a war ... WITH global warming, it's ~70 years before the issue becomes critical, without, perhaps 15.
We need to take active control of the climate. It's not a choice, it's a necessity. One thing I find funny is that when you look at the issue globally, I think the best solution is, well definitely not cooling (and just as warming is totally unavoidable now, a cooling cycle will start perhaps as early as 2200. That will rapidly become a lot worse than global warming is now). Perhaps something like 0.5 degrees per century from this point forward. What we actually want is to slow and extend global warming for at least a few hundred more years.
The ipcc reports cover solar-radiation-modification/management and geoengineering generally along with mitigation and adaptation.
Currently they say if we don't move to renewables, carbon fees etc. faster then we'll need to do some of this. But it would be cheaper to avoid it as much as we can:
> Uncertainties surrounding solar radiation modification (SRM) measures constrain their potential deployment. These uncertainties include: technological immaturity; limited physical understanding about their effectiveness to limit global warming; and a weak capacity to govern, legitimize, and scale such measures. Some recent model-based analysis suggests SRM would be effective but that it is too early to evaluate its feasibility. Even in the uncertain case that the most adverse side-effects of SRM can be avoided, public resistance, ethical concerns and potential impacts on sustainable development could render SRM economically, socially and institutionally undesirable (low agreement, medium evidence)
Switch to renewables and storage for energy production, switch over everything to electric, making it more efficient. Then let the natural systems deal with the remaining excess carbon how they deal with volcanic co2.
Sequestering carbon using current methods requires too much energy. In order for CCS to work out we need a surplus of green energy, and we have a deficit.
Geo-engineering could be done by changing the planet’s albedo, for example by seeding the upper atmosphere with certain chemicals, but on the one hand we don’t understand the earth’s climate system well enough to do this safely, and on the other hand it’s like having a foot on the gas and a foot on the brake at the same time, intuitively you can tell this isn’t a good solution.
Since the current answers only consider albedo-tuning and mechanical CCS: Ocean fertilization[0] may be another solution to carbon capture.
The idea is that iron is the main limiting factor to algae growth, so that adding iron to currently barren areas in the oceans would allow algae growth on a very large scale.
No, not made up extremism. It is a risk which becomes more likely.
Just for kicks, what happens if the existing, current drought in the US (worst in 1200 years) continues and/or worsens over the next two years, cutting agricultural production and raising the cost of food (disclaimer: long CORN).
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
Ok, since we are explicitly discussing floods, and you explicity say "cycle that has happened before",
Define flooding as California megaflood puts LA/Orange county underwater.
TL/DR, risk is now 2x historic and is expected to rise to 4-7x historic.
Historical: floods equal to or greater in magnitude to those in 1862 occur five to seven times per millennium [i.e., a 1.0 to 0.5% annual likelihood or 100- to 200-year recurrence interval (RI)]
...
We find that climate change to date (as of 2022) has already increased the annual likelihood of an ARkHist event by ~105% relative to 1920 in the CESM1-LENS ensemble and of an even higher magnitude (200-year RI) event by ~234%. This finding is consistent with prior work reporting progressively larger increases in projected extreme precipitation events for increasing event magnitudes [e.g., (42)]. We further find that by ~2060, on a high emissions trajectory, the annual likelihood of an ARkHist level event increases by ~374% and by ~683% for a formerly 200-year RI event.
Any science behind your implied claim that port cities will stop operating because of sea level rise, rather than adapting or migrating?
It's incredible how widespread misinformation about climate change is. All these replies from people who support the OP's claim but have no idea why and are just taking random stabs at imagined reasons.
Here in the UK I still hear many climate sceptics. Also arguments from developing countries that they're less responsible due to them being industralised for much less of a time. Would argue on the last point that the last quarter millenia of tech and social advance mitigates their effects.
The UK's "overshoot day" is in May. This is the point I try make to people who are sceptical about making personal decisions in their life to reduce consumption and demand because they feel other countries aren't pulling their weight.
My favorite argument is that China - a very populous country - pollutes more and therefore it's out of our hands. Nevermind North America's disastrous per capita emissions, despite not being the world's factory.
It seems like everyone will point fingers right until collapse.
These people never heard of cumulative emissions. China isn't responsible for most of the CO2 that is in the atmosphere. If you want to talk about fairness then the west already blew their CO2 budget.
Decades of actively fighting things getting done has led to very little getting done.
It's an interesting question as to whether the human race has collectively spent more time and energy trying to solve climate change or more time and energy pretending it wasn't happening.
Perhaps we should spent more money trying to mitigate the outcomes rather than have those few regions that do limit their co2 output become entirely dependent for industrial goods(steel, concrete etc) on those that don't? It seems so obvious that it begs the question if all the officials that made for example EU's industry so dependent on Russian hydrocarbons in the past, and East Asian steel/other goods going forward do this because of stupidity or are they serving self interests? I propose the latter.
As an example, take one decision to shut down all of Germany's nuclear power plants in absence of carbon neutral alternatives. In short term it benefited Russian regime and allowed it to conduct its barbaric war on Ukraine in full knowledge the most powerful country of EU is in their pocket. In long term destroying EU's industry serves Chinese interests.
You mean those things that most people now consider cheaper than both nuclear and fossil fuels despite the billions of dollars spent creating conspiracy theories to undermine them? By people with a vested interest in gas prices being high? Their absence seems more political than technical, an argument that is often used for nuclear.
Fossil fuel producers on the other hand really don't like those things.
China for example rolled out nuclear but also more wind, more solar, more EVs, more Hydro and so on. Seems like a sensible thing to do if you dont want to be beholden to fossil fuel suppliers.
While their coal usage is still growing, their use of renewables is also growing rapidly. They will probably overtake the US and EU eventually. They are heavily investing in wind. Most of the solar panel manufacturers are Chinese as well.
Malthus was wrong in 1798 when he failed to predict the industrial revolution. He is long dead but still wrong since Malthusians fail to take solutions to the envisioned problems into account. Had Malthusians been in charge when the Netherlands was populated they'd have moved all people above sea level to keep their feet dry. Fortunately for the Dutch they ignored the Malthusians and built a system of dikes, channels and pumps to keep the sea at bay and on that small patch of land they built the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world.
That is the model to follow, not a Malthusian 'run to the hills'.
And yet all our technological innovations have incurred a huge amount of technical debt in the form of carbon emissions. The result of that debt is fast approaching and I'm not seeing how we're going to science ourselves out of this one without incurring more debt.
First of all: to prove Hansen wrong in the articles you picked you would need to prove that we haven't already reached the tipping points he describes. Climate change is not a nuclear explosion, you can't see it explode but it might have done so with the effects being 50 or 100 years in the future.
Secondly, the temperature is actually rising steadily, which is very different from Zeno's thought experiments.
And thirdly you are not actually making an argument at all. People being wrong about tipping points might be the one's who cried wolf but in the end the wolf will still be there according to the best science available – even if there are not tipping points at all! Climate change alone is set to harm us and especially the poorest people on the planet, even if there are no additional tipping point effects.
The claim is basically that hundreds of thousands of people, in thousands of research facilities, in more than a 100 countries are colluding to lie us about the climate. And I presume the governments who are making themselves very unpopular by trying to pass laws to reduce emissions are in on it, too, for some unfathomable reason? And the media! Thousands and thousands of publications are colluding to lie about climate research because it benefits them — how exactly?
The popular mantra is that some some mythical elite is making a lot of money by trying to make the world consume less. Could someone please explain this ingenious mechanism?
Most of the researchers are university students and professors with very small incomes. Research grants? In most cases you barely scrape by even if they get a grant for a year or two. A lot of them have side jobs because otherwise they couldn't pay their bills. Sh*t, I could probably come up with a 100 easier ways to make money than climate research in about 3 minutes.
It's kind of funny that in this day and age the researchers are considered the elite, and not the oil barons in their ivory towers or the politicians they have bought.
But what would be the motive? As Jon Stewart said: If this was about funding for scientists, the oil and gas companies would have already made it rain in nerd-town.
What exactly is your point, that these tipping points don't exist and we will never reach them? This is an extremely complex system and it's hard to predict. The fact is we're trending towards these things, not away from them. That's undebatable. So what message are you trying to convey exactly, that everything is fine and this is just scaremongering nonsense?
So you admit these things are hard to predict, yet we are running with the wild predictions anyway? Models are just a hypothesis and in no way proven. There were plenty of predictions to date that haven't come true. I see these as none other than wild speculation.
What?! No, we're absolutely not running with these wild predictions and I've got no idea what's making you think we are. If we were taking those predictions seriously then far more drastic action would be underway.
On net, yes things are fine. Look up Alex Epstein, he makes the point that the benefits humans gain from fossil fuels far outweigh the cons.
What is it we are trending towards? That we will make the sky gods really angry and the earth will go up in a blazing inferno? I don’t think that will happen anytime soon.
Ice sheets collapse raising sea levels and flooding the coastal cities in which a significant proportion of the world's population lives causing massive economic and human displacement and suffering. Warming makes the current world breadbaskets (e.g. Russia, Ukraine, USA mid-west) unsuitable for grain with no replacement available causing world famine. That's just a start. It's a long list.
Different people can come to different conclusions.
And maybe, in 50 years, we will know that the tipping point was well before 2008 even.
The earth is a complex system and surely you don't want to deny the massive changes that human activities do to its ecosystems. It's better to be careful than continuing the careless exploitation.
The earth is a complex system that is true, and if you know what that means, it means it is impossible to accurately predict with any consistency what will happen in the future.
I don’t think it is “being careful” to promulgate relentless doomerism with no self reflection as to whether or not your predictions panned out in the past.
I do think we should be mindful of earth ecosystems. I think it would be better to do that in ways that are concretely addressable and quantifiable. Not the climate doom religion fear mongering , buy my carbon offset, or pat me on the back for my corporate green washing.
There is no path forward for human civilization as we know it without fossil fuels any time soon.
I don’t understand this drive people have to induce this sense of anxiety and foreboding in themselves and others.
The drive is fueled by more than a century of hard science. Imagine being convinced by countless, well proven and reproducible facts, that e. g. our CO2 emissions create a greenhouse effect but seeing little effort to mitigate that. Of course the voices get more loud and panicked. Especially when you see clear patterns of drastic, fatal and irreversible changes like permafrost melting or species after species vanishing.
I don't understand how people can put up blinders and pretend there is no actual and horrific danger.
If we hit one of these tipping points and Obama could have changed that via some action in those 4 years then he did have 4 years to save the planet. Possibly he did, we just don't know it.
Generally the positive action towards climate change has delayed and minimised the predicted impacts. So Obama's administration probably gets some credit for that.
Nope. We've already passed a number of climate change milestones and then some. We are literally living the disaster: multiple once-in-a-hundred year floods and heatwaves within a decade, food shortages, global instability, entire settlemtns wiped off the map (Lytton)
>Obama had 4 years to save the planet. So I guess he figured that out, so that’s good.
I have trouble interpreting this comment. I feel that it is very disingenuous and ignores the changes and improvements humans have done.
For example, in 1989 there was a treaty banning the usage of chlorofluorocarbons CFCs which were the main culprit of ozone-layer degradation.
Since the publication of said articles, we have only seen an increase in weather variance. As weather variance increases, extreme events become more frequent. In fact, we saw this a few months ago with Texas freezing, and last summer with Toronto being under a heat dome. We saw precipitation that caused massive destruction in Europe, and a few months later we saw horrific draughts that resulted in historic lows. Similar events were seen in China as well.
Furthermore, one of the main culprits of such events is the far more frequent split of the jetstream above Europe which is one of the best predictors for extreme weather events.
A tipping point does not imply immediate destruction, but it means most likely irreversible changes. Accumulate enough such changes, and the extreme events that cost billions in damage, and cost human lives will be more frequent and costly.
Denial of this is akin to ostrichism, shows the inability of the human brain to think long term, and its tendency to fall for into cognitive biases.
In a sense every change is irreversible, you can’t change the past.
I know about the CFC thing I’m not well versed on the mechanisms of what was actually going on, but if it is as commonly understood, I’m for that stuff. Clearly identified problems and clearly identified solutions.
With the climate doomerism, what exactly is the problem? What are the alternatives?
I just hear people repeating these things they’ve been conditioned to fear and no sense of the extent to which the thing they attribute all the problems of the world, fossil fuels, has in fact created nearly the entirety of the world around them.
If you think the sky gods are going to get really angry if the “greenhouse effect“ is a real thing, then what do you propose to do? “Cut emissions”? Then what aspects of modern civilization undergirded by those emissions do you propose to do without? Heating, cooling, food production, weather forecasting?
Given how irresponsibly wasteful the US is in emissions on a per capita basis, with imports adding around 8% IIRC, there's obviously a lot that can be done.
> With the climate doomerism, what exactly is the problem? What are the alternatives?
The problem that we are trying to solve is climate stability, namely decrease variance and prevent the change of the average / expected behaviour.
When climate researchers say carbon in the atmosphere, they mean carbon and the equivalent carbon required to achieve the same effect / similar behaviour. So methane is a significantly more potent green house gas than carbon (80x).
Suppose for a moment that we do nothing, and keep going on the same track. Then we can expect a severe increase in global temperature. The consequences of that are for example a more frequent split of the jetstream [1]. Normally the jetstream prevents Europe from heating up, and manages the weather. Now, a split of the jetstream is not good because it can enable bubbles of very warm saharan air getting trapped over Europe, creating a heat dome. A heat dome causes damage to local crops, is responsible for loss of life, and dries up the land. This is a major issue for Europe because most houses are not built to sustain such weather, and lots of infrastructure can collapse or endure severe damage [3].
If we do nothing with respect to methane then we will see an increase in troposphere level ozone. Ozone in the stratosphere is a good thing, protects us from UV radiation. In contrast, Ozone in troposphere (0-15km) is absolutely horrible. It causes over 1M premature deaths, is a major component of smog, is highly reactive and causes damage to crops [2].
> Tropospheric ozone is a major component of smog, which can worsen bronchitis and emphysema, trigger asthma, and permanently damage lung tissue. Tropospheric ozone exposure is responsible for an estimated one million premature deaths each year. Children, the elderly, and people with lung or cardiovascular diseases are particularly at risk of the adverse health impacts of ozone.
> Tropospheric ozone is a highly reactive oxidant that significantly reduces crop productivity as well as the uptake of atmospheric carbon by vegetation. Its effects on plants include impeded growth and seed production, reduced functional leaf area and accelerated ageing.
> Studies have shown that many species of plants are sensitive to ozone, including agricultural crops, grassland species and tree species. These effects impact on the important ecosystem services provided by plants, including food security, carbon sequestration, timber production, and protection against soil erosion, avalanches and flooding.
Furthermore, climate change will also result in 1.2 billion or so refugees which will cause further conflict in continents and further reduce our capacity to improve our societies.
I can keep going but it will probably make this reply too long, so I suggest reading up on it. If you are like me, and don't believe that overpopulation is actually an issue and believe it is better to have more humans to educate them, have more doctors and improve the living conditions of other countries, then you will see that climate change causes an enormous amount of premature deaths, lung cancer, and whatever else, effectively reducing the rate of humanity's improvement.
> has in fact created nearly the entirety of the world around them.
This is a good point, and a major point of friction with developing countries, namely, why should they not use fossil fuels when all developed countries did. The emissions of different countries follow an arch they start low, rise up as the society improves, and then start falling down while continuing the improvement. A good way to reduce expected emissions is to accelerate the growth of developing countries so that they spend less time in the developing phase, and more in the developed one. For this to be done however, it has to be done in ways that do not actually cause harm to the country as that will prolong the development period. This is supported by studies on different approaches to helping developing countries, most of which ultimately failed because there are too many things that need to be done simultaneously.
So how does one do that? By investing in better alternatives and improving efficiency of course. The developed world exploited fossil fuels, and now it's the perfect time for us to be "early adopters" of tech that will help us build a greener future. I put "early adopters" in quotes, because even with current tech we can solve the problems, it just costs a lot of money, but living in a cleaner, more stable environment is worth it for everyone.
We do not have to give up heating/cooling/food production/ etc. We need to reduce subsidies for fossil fuels wherever they exist, improve infrastructure to reduce reliance on internal combustion engines, use scale, invest in research, and start applying what we know. All it takes is legislation change.
[1] NB, we know that this is a consequence of human behaviour, this is supported by thoroughly tested and investigated causal models. See here, talk by Dr Simon Clark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5FmFuPPvdE
We were talking about CFCs and how supposedly eliminating them (despite not actually eliminating them) fixed the supposed problem. It's a bit like claiming lockdowns flattened the covid curves, when the exact same flattening happened everywhere that did without lockdowns.
I have learned a long time ago to look for words like 'likely', 'might', 'could' 'potentially' to differentiate between pure speculation and sensationalization and then actual scientific evidence.
This is no different.
These things might happen, but so does an astroid hitting earth in an hour.
That's not science. Science doesn't deal in probability but rather in explanations. And you can either explain exactly how it will happen or you can't.
The rest is catastrophizing.
Yes the climate is changing, yes it will have an impact. But there are currently no scientifically demonstrated (not just speculated) consequences of climate change, we don't know how to deal with.
While I would absolutely agree that journalists engage in catastrophism…
> Science doesn't deal in probability but rather in explanations. And you can either explain exactly how it will happen or you can't.
Science absolutely does deal with probabilities. It's much easier to find correlations than causations, but even with causation, there are unknowns. In the case of the global climate, while we can say CO2 raises the global temperature, we don't know what specific temperature will break any specific system on lists like this, the best we can do is give a graph of probability against temperature; while the article linked to does not have such a graph, that says more about the BBC than about the actual science.
Science is about creating explanations. The laws of nature is not probabilistic. Probabilities are used when we have a limited set like a deck of cards. But it's not used to create scientific explanations.
Today's your lucky day, you're one of the 10,000 who learn about quantum mechanics (fundamentally random) and chaos theory (sensitivity to initial conditions such that even classical mechanics might as well be fundamentally random) for the first time today:
It's important to remember that the IPCC, the UNs group of scientists who study climate change say that the worst case scenario is that growth in GDP will be 4% less by 2050 due to climate change.
Growth. Not actual GDP. Over the next 28 years that means if the world GDP expands 100%, so doubles, unchecked climate change will mean that is only 96%.
That is not the apocalyptic situation that is constantly in the media. The world won't die in a fireball. It's a problem, that needs to be dealt with, but we need to keep context. Covid and the Ukraine war have already had a worse impact on humans worldwide that climate change.
And there are a million other black swan events we could be afraid of that are just as likely as climate change, yet we don't care about them because it's not on the BBC. Supervolcanoes, asteroids, tsunamis, more deadly viruses, etc etc.
Edit: to be clear, that's not the only thing dubious about your comment. The IPCC does not study climate change but aggregates climate change studies. Asteroids are obviously less "likely" than climate change which shouldn't even be a category because climate change is already happening and already has a real impact. "The world won't die in a fireball" is a red herring, the world will be fine but people will be far worse off, especially poor substance farmers in sub-saharan Africa, who also – to come back to you original point – don't contribute a lot to global GDP but are still humans that matter and shouldn't starve to death.
A few extracts (I got the date wrong its 2100 not 2050):
Because of economic development, the UN estimates that the average person in the world will become 450 per cent as well-off by 2100 as they are today. But climate change will have a cost, in that adaptation and challenges become somewhat harder. Because of climate change, the average person in 2100 will “only” be 436 per cent as well off as today.
Also:
This matters, because globally, many more people die from cold than from heat. A new study in the highly respected journal Lancet shows that about half a million people die annually from heat, but 4.5 million people die from cold. As temperatures have increased over the past two decades, that has caused an extra 116,000 heat deaths each year. This fits the narrative, of course, and is what we have heard over and over again.
You don’t hear this, but so far climate change saves 166,000 lives each year.
But it turns out that because global warming has also reduced cold waves, we now see 283,000 fewer cold deaths. You don’t hear this, but so far climate change saves 166,000 lives each year.
But his interpretation is dubious at best because the study is not about climate change! The reduction in deaths attributed to cold or heat might not be connected to climate change at all, the study doesn't say anything about it. That's solely the author's interpretation. From the actual study (which is also pure speculation because their method doesn't provide this causality): "The results indicate that global warming might slightly reduce the net temperature-related deaths, although, in the long run, climate change is expected to increase mortality burden."
He also doesn't provide a clear source for his claims on economic development, so I'm still sceptical.
We talk about a world with more human losses, dry spills interrupting businesses. Spending much more money on rebuilding destroyed infrastructure.
The heat wave in Germany threatened plenty of critical water ways.
Mass live amount of animals just died.
Do you wanna live on an empty planet?
And we don't know yet how bad it can get.
Take a really bad long heat wave in a big city (we have a lot of them) and guess how many could just die in a mass city death event based on cascading issues like to hot for streets, no longer enough water etc.
So, if we in 2012 had known 100% that Covid would hit in 2020, the correct course of action would have been to do nothing, since maybe an asteroid would hit us in the meantime?
Also, global GDP is $80,934,771,028,340[1]. So, if that doubles to 160 in 2050, that means that we’d burned $3,200,000,000,000[2] in vain in just 2050. That’s not chump change.
The point is, don't panic, and also assess with numbers and data whether the best course of action is to do what we are doing. Many (especially in europe) are on a course to remove way more than 4% of GDP in the name of global warming. So they are destroying way more value than they are saving.
You know there are more important things in this world than the economy? I'd argue everything is more important than a man-made system that solely revolves around money and commerce, especially nature and bio-diversity
> It's important to remember that the IPCC, the UNs group of scientists who study climate change say that the worst case scenario is that growth in GDP will be 4% less by 2050 due to climate change.
How many lives could be saved using 4% of global GDP?
How much would it cost to avert climate change? Several studies have shown that the cost to avoid the damage of climate change is much cheaper than dealing with the outcomes. If you think 4% is nothing to be concerned about, why don't we spend 4% of global GDP fixing the problem?
> The six tipping points "likely" to be crossed, according to the research, published in Science, are:
- Greenland Ice Sheet collapse
- West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse
- Collapse of ocean circulation in the polar region of the North Atlantic
- Coral reef die off in the low latitudes
- Sudden thawing of permafrost in the Northern regions
- Abrupt sea ice loss in the Barents Sea.
The Science research article:
Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950